Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (17 page)

In December my mom left for Berlin to promote
Judgment at Nuremberg,
which had just been released, while Joey and I stayed in Scarsdale with our nanny. When Mama got to Paris, she got really sick with bronchitis. She was afraid she was going to die. In her panic she called my dad and asked him to come to Paris right away. My dad virtually commandeered the next plane and raced overseas to rescue her. When Mama recovered, my parents came back to Scarsdale together, and Dad moved in full-time. For a while everything was wonderful. It wasn’t exactly Mapleton Drive, but it was close.

They began having people come over again for small parties in the evening. One morning I went outside to find George Hamilton still asleep in a chaise by our pool, recovering from my parents’ party the night before. Dad played with Joe and me the way he had in the old days, tossing us into the air and carrying us on his shoulders. He was so relieved to be home with us again.

Christmas was wonderful. My parents got along better than they had in years. My mother staged a little holiday pageant in our living room just for the family, with Christmas songs and little parts for each of us, and tape-recorded it all. My dad still has the tape, with my nine-year-old voice saying, “Hi, I’m Lorna!” We all sound very happy. In a sense, I think my mom was playing a part that Christmas, the part of the happy suburban wife and mother. I didn’t mind; Mama was never happier than when she was performing. Her happiness was all that mattered to us.

My mother tried so hard to do the things with us that other mothers did. While we were living in Scarsdale, my teacher planned a class trip to the zoo. She asked for mothers to come on the bus to help with the children, and my mother decided to go. At first everything went fine. We looked at the animals, and my mom was treated like any other mother. Then we went for ice cream, and as we sat there eating, bees surrounded us, attracted by the sugar. A little boy in my class named Simon was allergic to bees, so he began to panic when they swarmed around. My mother had been swatting bees away from him all day, but now there was a cloud of bees, and my mother was trying to keep them from Simon. All her swatting attracted attention, and someone recognized my mom. A crowd immediately swarmed around us, asking for autographs. “Can I have your autograph, Miss Garland? Will you sign this, Miss Garland?”

My mom tried to be polite but kept saying, “Look, please, I’m just trying to help this little boy. Please, I’m here with my children’s class today. . . .” Of course, it was hopeless. In no time we
were overrun with my mother’s fans, and we had to end our day early.

It was always that way when my mother went out in public. Most of the time it didn’t bother me. As my mother always reminded me, I was a very fortunate young lady. I had beautiful clothes, and went to great restaurants, and had the best seats at plays and concerts. When fans approached our table at a restaurant, my mother always smiled pleasantly and signed whatever they held out to her. As soon as she finished, we went on eating. It was a normal part of our lives. The only time it ever bothered me was when the crowds got out of control.

I remember one time in particular. It was at the concert my mom did at Forest Hills. Joey and I were with her. As we got into the limo after the performance, hundreds of people surrounded us, pressing up against the windows, banging on the sides of the car and chanting, “Judy, Judy, Judy!” Flashbulbs were going off from every direction. The crowd was hysterical, completely out of control, and the driver couldn’t move the car. As the fans surged around us, trying to get to my mother, the car began to rock back and forth so hard I was afraid it would turn over. Joey sat next to me white as a sheet, scared to death. My mother kept shouting, “Thank you,” and waving, hoping the crowd would move back, but they didn’t. Mama seemed perfectly calm, but I was terrified. The driver kept trying to move forward through the crush of people as my mother repeated, “Be careful. Don’t hurt them. Don’t hurt anybody.” Finally the police came to escort us, but even then we had trouble moving out. It seemed like an eternity before we finally pulled free of the crowd.

The whole experience was frightening for me, and for Joey, too. I still can’t be in a crowd like that without panicking. My mother reacted with panic when it first happened to her on the MGM tour for
Wizard
twenty years earlier, but she got used to all the hysteria. I never did.

Not long after our Christmas in Scarsdale, my mom was
signed to do
A Child Is Waiting
with Burt Lancaster, and a CBS Special with her old pals Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. That meant moving back to California. Once again we all packed up and moved into a rented house in Bel Air.

My mom was gone a lot during that time, working first on the special and then on the film. I remember very clearly her making the movie. Mama would take me to the set with her sometimes, where I promptly developed a huge crush on the boy who played the lead in the film. Mostly, though, I remember the children.

A Child Is Waiting
was about retarded children, as they called them then, and except for the boy who played the lead, most of the children in the film were mentally handicapped. Most had Down’s syndrome, which was called mongolism at the time. I remember the first time my mother took me to the set. Before we left, she sat me down and had a long talk with me about what I would see there. She explained that many of the children looked different from the children I was used to. She told me it was very important that I not point or stare at them because it might make them feel uncomfortable. I thought to myself, “I’ve been pointed at, so I know how that feels. Sometimes people stare at me and think I’m different because of my mom.” I took my mother’s advice to heart. I promised myself I wouldn’t stare at them no matter what they looked like.

When we got to the set, I was introduced to some of them as, “Judy’s daughter.” I couldn’t tell if they understood what that meant, but they tried to talk to me, and some of them hugged me the way little children would. I had trouble understanding them because they couldn’t pronounce their words clearly, and some of them looked a little odd, but I pretended not to notice. Instead I listened carefully and told myself over and over, “They just look different, but inside they’re like me. I mustn’t hurt their feelings or make them feel uncomfortable.” These children made me sad. Besides Helen, the blind girl in my class in New York, they were the only disabled children I’d ever met. The difference was that I’d
never felt sorry for Helen, but I felt sorry for them. For a while I thought about becoming a teacher so I could help children like that. Years later, when I saw the film, it made me cry. My mother gave a wonderful performance. I was proud of her.

Things were bad again between my parents by then. A few weeks after we moved back to California, my mother moved us into the Beverly Hills Hotel. Joey and I accepted it as just another move, but in reality it was the most serious separation yet. My mother filed for a legal separation for the first time, citing “extreme mental cruelty” as the grounds.

Later that spring she went back to New York to do a record album. Joe and I stayed behind in California. Not long after she arrived, she got very ill again and had to be hospitalized. My godfather, Dr. Lester Coleman, called my father from New York and said, “Judy’s really sick. She wants you to bring Lorna and Joe and come to New York immediately.”

My dad just told us, “We’re going to New York to see your mom,” packed everything up, took us to New York, and moved us into a hotel. Joe and I enrolled in another new school. We didn’t find out until much later that we’d moved there because my mother was sick.

My mother’s sicknesses were getting more and more frequent. She had been in the hospital in Hyannis Port and New York. Almost every time she was away from my father for any length of time, she got sick. It wasn’t psychosomatic; the sickness was real. When my dad wasn’t around nobody monitored her medication or made sure she got enough food and rest. She was taking 200 mg. of Ritalin a day by then, ten times the normal dose. At night she would try to counteract it with barbiturates like Seconal, Tuinal, and Valium. Her liver and kidneys were breaking down, and her health had begun to decline alarmingly. The mood swings continued to worsen, as did the other psychological symptoms of Ritalin toxicity. Like her health, her relationships, especially the one with my father, suffered under the strain.

It was at this crucial point that Fields and Begelman decided to book my mother in England again, this time for the film
I Could Go on Singing.
In an escalating crisis, my mother decided not only to go to Europe without my father, but to take Joe and me with her. It was a deliberate attempt to remove us from his reach. My parents were already separated again; Mama and Joe and I were living at the Stanhope, and my dad had taken a room on another floor. In her growing paranoia, my mom had developed a fear that my father would kidnap me and Joe. She had repeatedly hired guards since our return from England to make certain my dad didn’t take us, though Joe and I knew nothing about it. As far as we knew, the men in suits who came and went were just more of my mother’s staff.

My father had reached his limit. It was one thing for my mother to move into a neighboring hotel, but it was another to take us to a different continent. He’d already lost control of his house and his finances; he wasn’t about to give up control of his children. The result was a fight that made the headlines.

I
remember the day vividly. My parents were arguing again, so my mom had sent me and Joey to Central Park with the nanny to play. At some point my mom left the hotel for an hour or two, and someone told my dad that Joey and I were at the park. Dad came and got us and took us back to his suite. I was wearing white knee socks and black patent leather shoes, and I remember sitting down and taking one shoe off. About that time there was a knock on the door of my father’s room. It was my mother. She came into the living room and told my father, “I just want to say good-bye to the children before I leave for England.” My father told me and Joe to go in the other room. We went into the next room and turned on the TV.

As Joey and I sat there watching television, it was very quiet in the other room. Then, all of a sudden, we heard my mother yell, “He hit me! He hit me!” Joe and I nearly jumped out of our skins.

I thought, “What is going on?” I’d never seen my father hit my mother. What could have happened? I was completely confused. Joey and I crept into the other room to see what was going on.

All hell had broken loose. My mom had had bodyguards waiting just outside the door, and her yell was their entrance cue. The guards rushed in, grabbed my father, and picked up Joey and me. Some of the guards pinned my dad down by both arms as others carried me and Joe toward the door. I remember Dad struggling to get to us, screaming, “No! You can’t! I’m calling a lawyer! You’re not taking those children away from me! You’re not taking them to England!” I think he was afraid that once my mother got us to another continent, he’d never get us back.

Joey and I looked at our mother. She was perfectly calm. I remember thinking, “Mama’s not upset, so I guess everything’s all right.”

She told me, “Put your shoes on; we’re leaving now,” but I couldn’t remember where my other shoe was in all the confusion. Finally, accompanied by my mom and Joey, the guard carried me to the elevator, still wearing just one shoe.

My mom seemed completely relaxed, so I wasn’t that scared. I just asked her, “Where are we going?”

“We’re going to England now,” she replied. “Isn’t this exciting?”

It was exciting. When we got in the elevator, I remembered her yelling earlier, so I asked her, “Mama, why did you say Dad hit you?”

She said, “Oh, I was only joking. He didn’t really hit me.”

“Oh.” It never occurred to me to question her. Whatever my mother said, I accepted. As long as Mama was there, everything would be fine.

Only one thing worried me. I didn’t have my other shoe. So I said to my mother, “But I can’t go to London, Mama. I only have one shoe.” My mother told me not to worry, that she’d buy me
more shoes in London; in fact, she’d buy me all new clothes. Then we got into a cab, where Liza was waiting for us, looking as though she’d just thrown on some clothes, and we went to the airport. I still remember climbing the steps up into the airplane with one shoe on and one shoe off.

Mama, me, Joey, Liza, the nanny, my mother’s hairdresser, and all thirty-odd pieces of my mother’s luggage were off for London. I was still excited by the events of the day. When the stewardess served dinner, I tried to open the little carton of milk she gave me, but I’d never seen that kind of carton before. I lost my grip, and the carton went flying through the air. I found myself sitting in the plane seat with milk streaming down my face and clothes. My mom took one look at me and burst out laughing. My dress was soaked, but I couldn’t change because I didn’t have any clothes to change into. Everything I owned was back in New York.

The other thing I remember about that flight is turning to the stewardess and saying, “Do you know who my mom is?”

Liza overheard me and was furious. She turned around, fixed me with those dark eyes of hers, and said, “Don’t you ever say that again.”

I shut up immediately, but I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong. Other kids could brag about their mothers. Why couldn’t I?

Somewhere over the Atlantic I fell sound asleep. When I woke up, we were in London.

Once we got to England, we moved into the Savoy Hotel, and my mother hired a proper British nanny for us—Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Colledge. Mrs. Colledge was very sweet, young and attractive, with a little boy my age. I liked her immediately. I saw her son recently, and he gave me a picture of Mrs. Colledge and me together with a note I wrote at the time, saying, “To the nicest person in the world. Love, Lorna.” Mrs. Colledge took wonderful care of us, and we were perfectly content.

Joey and I had no idea that we were actually in hiding. Mama
was afraid that Dad would fly over and try to find us, which of course he did. With her usual flair for the dramatic, she had us declared wards of the High Court of Britain so that my father couldn’t take us back to America. It’s a wonder my mom didn’t have the guards from Buckingham Palace guarding our hotel.