Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (20 page)

“Do you want to be with your dad?”

“No.”

“Do you love your dad?”

“No.”

I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t tell anyone. I was too afraid.
Joey never said anything about his sessions, either, so I assumed he was all right. If I’d known then what the doctor was doing to my brother, I would have told anyone who would listen.

These “therapy sessions” went on for a couple of months, but it seemed like a lifetime. Finally, as Joe and I were climbing the stairs to the doctor’s office one afternoon, I accidentally found a way to bring it to an end. The outdoor staircase leading up to Dr. Duval’s door was very steep. Joey was in front of me, and as we climbed, Joe shouted, “Watch this!” and slid down the banister to the ground. It looked like fun, so of course, I had to do it, too. The only problem was that I shoved my arm underneath the banister as I slid and forgot to pull it out when I hit the bottom rung. My arm got caught at the bottom and took the full force of my descent. There was a loud crack as I landed, and a shattering pain shot through my forearm. The nanny was right behind me, and she took me upstairs to Dr. Duval. He put some ice on my arm and told the nanny, “I think she’s broken it. We’d better cancel this session so you can take her to the emergency room.”

I had never been in so much pain in my life, yet I had rarely been so happy. All I could think was, “I don’t have to stay with Dr. Duval.” I would gladly have broken the other arm and both legs if it meant not seeing him again.

The nanny drove me home, where my mother took one look at me, said, “Oh, my God!” and rushed me to the emergency room. When they showed me the X rays of my arm, I couldn’t believe what it looked like. I’d shattered my whole forearm. They called it a greenstick fracture because if you take green wood and bend it hard enough, it splinters. That’s exactly what had happened to my bone. It had splintered lengthwise. To this day I get a shock sometimes when I touch that arm. The doctor couldn’t set it because of the way it was shattered, so he wrapped my arm in gauze and put a cast on it.

That evening I sat out by the pool with my brother. We had a big basket chair hanging from ropes near the pool that you could
swing in. With my newly broken arm carefully propped on the edge of the chair, I was gently twirling the chair around and around, then letting it spin back. Joey had wedged into the chair next to me. At eight years old, his tiny frame didn’t take up much room. As we sat quietly together in the dusk, Joe touched my good hand.

“Lorna?”

“Yes?”

There was a small silence. “Lorna, I don’t want to go to Dr. Duval anymore. Please don’t let them make me.”

I glanced down at his sober little face and then looked at the cast on my arm. “Don’t worry, Joey. I’ve taken care of it. You don’t have to go there anymore.” Joe sighed and leaned against me in quiet contentment, safe in the knowledge that his big sister would take care of him. It was thirty years before I found out how terrifying Joe’s trips to the doctor really were. If either of my parents had known what that doctor did to Joe, they would have killed the man. I would have helped them.

Just as with my appendicitis attack, Mama took wonderful care of my arm. When it was time for me to go back to school, my mom decorated my cast with glitter and feathers and glue, just as she’d decorated my eye patches years before. She got out one of her glamorous scarves for a sling, and I thought I looked really cool. Since I couldn’t write with my broken arm, I didn’t even have to do my homework when I returned to school. All my classmates signed my cast, and I was a celebrity. Each time the doctors changed my cast, Mama decorated the new one. Finally, just as at Lady Eden, the teacher sent a note home to my mother, asking her not to decorate my cast anymore because everyone in my class now wanted a broken arm. Apparently this presented a safety hazard.

The only downside was that nobody had told me what weeks in a cast does to your muscles, so when the doctor removed the cast permanently and I saw my shriveled forearm, I was horrified. My arm had been skinny enough to begin with, but now it looked
downright withered. It didn’t help that my mom seemed equally concerned. She told me how Peter Lawford (her old friend and
Easter Parade
costar) had injured his arm when he was a kid and how, as a result, his arm had never developed properly. I was convinced that I was going to grow up with a freak arm. Fortunately, my arm was back to normal in a few weeks.

Eventually the courts awarded my mother full custody of me and Joe, with my father given visitation rights on the weekends and every other Wednesday. After the visitation issues were resolved, things calmed down between my parents. Dr. Duval testified that living with our mother would be in Joey’s and my “best interest” at the hearings. Mama never found out what he’d done to Joe and me. Another person who testified on my mother’s behalf was our nanny. Her name was Mrs. Chapman.

I never found out where my mother found Mrs. Chapman. She just showed up at our house one day. She was a short, squat southern lady with graying hair, a face that would freeze water, and two grown daughters who lived nearby. I don’t think she was a career nanny; she never wore a uniform like our other nannies, and she certainly never behaved like any of them. A workman put up a partition in the bedroom Joey and I shared, and Mrs. Chapman moved in with us. She stayed with us all day, and at night she slept just a few feet away. There was no escaping her. It was like sleeping in a cave, just a few feet away from a slumbering bear.

My mom was touring again, and Mrs. Chapman took care of me and Joey in her absence. I use the phrase “took care of” very loosely. As soon as my mother left town, Mrs. Chapman would bring over her three-year-old granddaughter and let the little monster run wild. The child’s name was Dawn, and she had every ounce of her grandmother’s charm. Dawn was a brat, running all over the house and climbing on everything. She’d even get into my mother’s belongings. If I ever said so much as “Don’t do that” to Dawn, Mrs. Chapman would punish me. She never punished Dawn, even when Dawn broke things.

Mrs. Chapman seemed to hate me almost as much as I hated her. I never understood why. Maybe it was because I’d speak up if I thought something was wrong, and Joey wouldn’t. I was older, and I thought it was my job to watch out for things. When somebody got hit, it was usually me.

Mrs. Chapman knew how to make me wish I’d kept my mouth shut. She usually hit me with a wooden ruler, sometimes raising big welts. She would always hit me on the back of my legs, the tender skin right below my bum. That way the hem of my dress covered the marks, and they didn’t show. She hit me often. My mother had spanked me with her bare hands occasionally when I deserved it, but never anything close to this.

I didn’t tell either of my parents. Every time Mrs. Chapman hit me, she threatened me with something worse if I told anyone. Sometimes she’d say, “Don’t ever tell your mother or I’ll leave, and then you’ll be all alone with her, and you know what will happen.” I was terrified of being left alone in the house, without anyone else to take care of Mama. I knew by then that something was very wrong with my mother, though I didn’t understand the nature of her illness. I was scared something bad might happen to Mama without another grown-up around. I never even told my father. Mrs. Chapman stayed, and the punishment went on.

C
hristmas that year was an appropriate ending to a turbulent year: the infamous Garland children kidnapping. The headlines read, “Luft Steals Judy’s Kids,” but it wasn’t much of a kidnapping. It was more like a dysfunctional family Christmas.

Joe and I were supposed to fly to New York that Christmas to spend the holidays with my mom (who had just returned from London) and Liza, but my dad was really upset about not getting to spend Christmas with us. He was also unhappy about Joe and me being left at the house with the bodyguard my mother had hired. The bodyguard’s name was Red. Unlike the men who had watched over us on Mapleton Drive, this guy was a real piece of
work. He moved into the pool house for a while when we first lived on Rockingham. Red was huge, tall and heavy, with bright red hair. He was also, as we found out, a flasher. Joe and I discovered this the hard way one day when Red tapped on the window as we walked by the pool house. When we turned to look, there was Red, fresh from the shower and naked. We looked away and ran into the house, giggling uncomfortably. A few days later he tried it again when some of our friends came over for the evening. Not knowing what else to do, we told my dad what was going on, and he had a fit. He couldn’t fire the guy, but he wasn’t about to leave us alone with a pervert while Mama was in New York, so he did the next best thing. He got us out of there.

A few days before Christmas, Dad showed up at our house and told me and Joey we were going to Disneyland with him later in the week. It sounded like a great idea to us. Mrs. Chapman reminded him that we had to be home in time to fly to New York. Dad said okay. A couple of days later he put us in the car, and drove down to Anaheim. On the way there he stopped to make a phone call. When he came back to the car, he seemed very upset. We asked him what was the matter, and he said he’d called a friend who lived nearby because we were going to spend Christmas there. But when he’d called his friend’s house, the man’s wife had told him that her husband had had a sudden heart attack and died an hour or two earlier.

At first I said, “Oh, how awful.” Then I thought, “Wait a minute. Aren’t we supposed to go to New York to meet Mama for Christmas? Something’s not right here.”

So much for Disneyland. We drove over to the friend’s house and sat around the living room with his kids for what seemed like forever. It was a very strange few hours. Their father had just died, yet everyone was trying to act as though nothing were wrong. I kept thinking, “I don’t want to be here. I want to go to New York and be with my mom.” I asked my dad when we were going home.

We left then and drove to a house at the top of Tower Road,
near Sunset, where my dad dropped us off with some other friends and left again. By that time I knew something was fishy. Dad was supposed to be taking us home so we could catch our plane. Joe and I went out in the front yard to play, and when we looked down the street, I realized that I knew where we were. Mrs. Chapman’s daughter lived just a block or so away. I took Joe, and we walked down to her house and knocked on the door. I was planning to ask her to call my mom and have someone pick us up and take us to the airport, so we could catch our flight. The door opened; I started to say, “Hi, remember me? I’m Lorna,” when the woman gasped and said, “Oh, my God! They’re looking all over for you!”

She grabbed me and Joey and pulled us into the house, asking us where we’d been. We told her. Then we went back to Dad’s friend’s house. A few minutes later my dad pulled into the driveway. Just as he did, we heard the loud wailing of sirens, and police cars came racing into view and surrounded the house. The next thing we knew, someone was taking Joey and me to a car, and then to the airport to put us on a plane to New York. We later found out that all the television stations were broadcasting the news that Joe and I had been kidnapped. Kidnapped? The police were kind and reassuring, but we hadn’t been scared in the first place. We had never been in any danger. We’d had a couple of interesting days with our dad. I was actually quite pleased with myself for the way I’d handled the whole thing. Now Mama wouldn’t worry, and we could celebrate Christmas in New York with Mama and Liza the way we’d planned.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Yep, just another Christmas special at the Garland house.

B
y this time my mother had started dating the man she would marry next, Mark Herron. He was a very nice man, always very kind to Joe and me. In ways it was a relief when he came into her life. Everybody wonders if Joe and I resented Mark because of my father, but we really didn’t. The thing we wanted most at that point
was for Mama to be okay, and if Mark made her happy, then he was all right with us. Mark gave us a respite from all the chaos, and for a while life settled into something of a routine.

Meanwhile, my dad had found a girlfriend of his own. He never called her that, of course. Dad was still waiting for Mama to come back to him, so he didn’t want me and Joe to know he was dating. He certainly didn’t want my mother to know. He always introduced the woman with him as his “friend Bridget.” We liked her; she was lively and fun, and on the weekends Dad and Bridget and Joe and I would go out and do all the things my mother couldn’t do with us in public. We’d go horseback riding or to Pacific Ocean Park, and it was wonderful because we were a normal family; without Mama along, no one paid any attention to us.

There was just one catch. “Bridget” wasn’t really Bridget. As a matter of fact, the Bridget I knew didn’t exist. In our continuing family farce, my father had decided to hide Bridget’s real identity from Joe and me because he didn’t want to upset my mother. I might never have found out who she really was if I hadn’t turned on the TV one boring afternoon. There was a game show on, and the actress on the show was a woman named Mariana Hill—except that it wasn’t Mariana Hill. It was Bridget. I was dumbfounded. How could this be possible? Did Bridget have a twin sister? Why hadn’t anyone ever mentioned her? Maybe it wasn’t Bridget. I looked closer. No, it was definitely her. I couldn’t figure it out, and I didn’t dare ask.

A few weeks later I went to see
Blue Hawaii,
starring Elvis Presley, and there was this woman again! Sure enough, the credits listed her as Mariana Hill. It just wasn’t possible. Bridget wasn’t an actress; she’d told me so herself. She was just a regular person, a secretary or something. Now I was really confused. Who was this person with my father? Did Bridget have a double—you know, one of those exact duplicates they always tell children everybody has? I didn’t say a word to anyone, not even Joey. I didn’t want to upset him.

At the time, I never did figure out what was going on. I was a teenager before I finally asked my dad about Bridget. One day, years later, I said to him, “Dad, who’s Mariana Hill?”