Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (40 page)

Most of the time, though, we had fun. I worked sporadically in Europe, but mostly I just parried and enjoyed my independence. So much for the new career start. Jake and I clubbed with the Rolling Stones, the Who, and other “cool” people in the world of rock, and all of this appealed to my rebellious spirit. It was the seventies, and I was in the middle of the biggest party in London. The Arrows had their own television show in England at the time, and Jake was a minor celebrity. So I played and enjoyed being what I thought was a grown-up.

Months later, when Jake said, “We’re gonna get married,” I said, “We are? Okay.” I thought, “What a perfect way to really get away from my family. It’ll be great.” I’d like to say I thought it all through, but I didn’t. I just sort of drifted into the marriage without ever fully realizing what I was doing.

I called my dad and Patti with the news. We were going to get married in London on Valentine’s Day, 1977. I flew back to L.A. in January for a wedding shower with my family and old friends, and then I went back to London to get ready for the wedding ceremony. Ceremony? Performance was more like it.

Our wedding made all the London papers. “Judy’s Little Girl Marries Rock Star.” It wasn’t exactly what my mother had envisioned for me when I was little. We got married at St. Bartholomew’s Church in London. The ceremony itself was traditionally Anglican. Reverend Peter Delaney, who had married my mother and Mickey Deans—and officiated at my mother’s funeral—years before, performed the ceremony. I wore an outfit designed by Dee Harrington, Rod Stewart’s ex-girlfriend. Made of off-white satin, it was an off-the-shoulder tunic and harem trousers, and I wore flowers in my hair. It was the ultimate rock-and-roll wedding. Everybody who was anybody came. The Stones were there, the great jazz singer Annie Ross, the Who—everybody you could think of who was a hot item at the time.

Everyone but my family. On his only daughter’s wedding day, my father was in California with Patti and Joe. None of them could afford to fly to London for the wedding. Sadly, I didn’t really miss my dad that day. I was still running away from my past, from being little Lorna, Daddy’s girl, still relishing my independence. I was also uncomfortable about having my father see for himself how I was living. I had started doing cocaine and had gone to great lengths to conceal it from him. I knew he would have had a fit if he’d known about it. From my point of view, Dad just wasn’t cool enough to understand the way I lived. It would be another twenty years before Dad got to attend my wedding to Colin Freeman in a beautiful English castle. The second time around, Dad was a guest of honor. Not the first time, though.

After the wedding we had a reception at Tramp, a hot London club owned by my friend Johnny Gold. The whole affair was a circus, with thousands of people in the street and press everywhere. It was out of control, and so was I, though I was a long way from facing that yet. I didn’t want to think about what I was doing with my life. I didn’t want to think about anything.

T
en years before, I had watched my parents’ marriage fall apart. I’d spent another five years watching my mother rush from one miserable relationship to another. Between them, my parents had ten marriages. What had I learned from all of this? Apparently, absolutely nothing. I was by-God determined to screw up my own life as thoroughly as they had ruined theirs. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and a bad marriage was only the beginning for me. Marrying Jake wasn’t the problem; it was only a symptom of something much darker and more destructive in my life.

Collection of the author

Working with Sammy Davis, Jr., at Lake Tahoe.

W
hen I was a little girl, I loved St. Joseph’s children’s aspirin—tiny orange tablets with a delicious citrus flavor. They call them Children’s Panadol in England; they taste wonderful. I had no idea they were medicine; as far as I was concerned, they were just candy, my favorite candy. I didn’t understand why I only got to have one or two at a time. After all, they were so small.

Then one summer afternoon in Hyannis Port, when I was eight years old, I found the “orange candy” in the bathroom cabinet and proceeded to take advantage of my good luck by eating the whole bottle. Fortunately, my mother found out what I’d done, or I might not be here today. Terrified, she called the doctor, who told her to induce vomiting immediately. Apparently the doctor instructed her to use milk-soaked bread for the purpose, so Mama stuffed me with the soggy mess until she succeeded in making me throw up. After I had seemingly vomited up my stomach lining, she was so relieved that she celebrated by giving me the spanking of my life. Unable to understand why she had to spank me after all that vomiting, I cried hysterically as my mother repeated, “Don’t you understand? You could have died! You could have died! Don’t you ever do that again!” That evening, as further punishment, I
had to stay home with a sitter while the rest of the family went to watch my sister perform at the Tent.

At the time I couldn’t understand why Mama was so angry at me; only years later, as a parent myself, can I understand my mother’s terror that afternoon. And only since reading piles of Al-Anon books can I understand the irony of the fact that my mother, so concerned about my first “overdose,” was hospitalized for the same problem that summer—though I seriously doubt she’d swallowed St. Joseph’s aspirin. The whole incident made a deep impression on me at the time. I was convinced that if I took a drug, someone would make me throw up, so for years I resisted taking any kind of medication. Unfortunately, however, the lesson didn’t last.

One trait of members of addictive families is we never recognize our own addictions. We may recognize everyone else’s, but never our own. My mother couldn’t acknowledge her problem; to herself she justified her use of stimulants and depressants by resolutely labeling her drugs “medication.” After all, she reasoned, they were prescribed by a doctor. It wasn’t as if she were in some back alley buying hashish. The fact that most “patients” don’t tape their medicine under carpets or sew it into the drapes completely escaped her.

I was equally blind to my own behavior. After years of watching my mother deteriorate, I avoided “Mama’s medication” like the plague. I wouldn’t go near the pills that had killed my mother. Prescription drugs? Not me. For most of my young adult years I rarely even drank alcohol. Though I never thought of my mother as an addict—that would have been too harsh a word—I did know that prescription medication had ruined her health and eventually killed her. I was afraid to take the same pills my mother had taken. Instead, I took the “fun drugs,” the party drugs everyone else took—you know, the “harmless,” “recreational” ones that you could smoke or snort at night to enjoy yourself.

Incredible, isn’t it? My mother wasn’t the only one in denial all those years.

I
guess my first experimentation with drugs was with nicotine, the day I stole my first smoke with Katy Sagal behind the bushes in her backyard. But tobacco never really stuck with me. I thought smoking was cool at that age, but at the most, I never smoked more than a pack of cigarettes a week, and even that stopped before I was out of my twenties. My first “real” drug was marijuana. I’d gone to a party with an older friend when I was fourteen, and everyone there was smoking pot, so when they offered me a joint, I took it. I really didn’t know what the stuff was, so when I went home, I told my mother what I’d done at the party. I expected her to be as nonchalant as she’d been when the school caught me smoking in the bathroom. Wrong! Mama had hysterics, yelling at me about how I was going to become a drug addict. Smart-aleck teenager that I was, I just thought, “Yeah, right. You should talk.” By that age I’d already been educated about “Mama’s pills.”

I didn’t become a drug addict, though—not right away. I wasn’t interested in smoking another joint. The marijuana had barely affected me, and I’ve never been attracted to the sedative effect pot can offer. I like a buzz, a good high, and for that you need a stimulant. When the seventies came along, they brought the “ultimate high,” a little pile of white powder called cocaine. It was the party drug of the decade: expensive, chic, and plentiful. Everywhere you went, the A-crowd was doing cocaine. Not one to be left out of a good party, I happily joined in. After all, everyone else was doing it. What harm could it do?

I did my first line of cocaine when I was about nineteen. I was living in New York then, and I spent every spare minute in the local clubs. The club scene was full of cocaine by 1970, and one night at a restaurant called the Brasserie, a friend of mine named King Curtis offered me a line of coke. King was a brilliant musician, a saxophone player, and we’d gone to the club with friends after a late night to have “breakfast.” King offered me some coke, and I really didn’t know what it was. Somebody at the table told me how to lay out the powder, roll up a dollar bill, and snort it. I
thought, “Oh, okay. Why not? I’ll try some.” I gave it about as much thought as I would have if someone had said, “Try the curly fries.” I took it into the bathroom, laid it out on the sink the way they’d told me, rolled up the dollar bill, and snorted it. I got almost as much
on
me as
in
me that first time, so it didn’t really affect me much. It made me more dizzy than high. I thought,
“Hmmm,
this is weird,” and that was about it—kind of interesting, but not exactly a life-changing experience.

I’d do a line with friends every now and then after that, but not often in the beginning. Not long afterward I took my sister into the bathroom at the same restaurant and introduced her to this interesting new experience. Liza likes to remind me that it was her baby sister who first introduced her to coke, not the other way around. She’s right. Needless to say, I was clueless about the implications of what I was doing.

It wasn’t until I moved to California in 1975 to live with Liza and Jack Haley, Jr., that I really got involved with cocaine, though. It started shortly after I arrived, at Sammy Davis’s house. Sammy was an old family friend; he was also one of the most extraordinary performers I’ve ever known. Next to my mother, few people could match Sammy’s talent as an actor, a singer, and a dancer. He had succeeded in show business against all the odds, overcoming racism and a physical handicap to do it. I used to tell him that since he was black, Jewish, and had only one eye, he should have succumbed to the three-strikes-and-you’re-out baseball rule years before. He would laugh when I said it. Sammy’s talent and humanity were so enormous that they transcended every obstacle he encountered. He was an extraordinary man.

Sammy had coke parties at his house every night in those days; it almost seemed as if cocaine were coming out of the air conditioners. That sounds shocking now, but everybody in Hollywood was using in the seventies, and no one thought there was anything wrong with it. Sammy would never have harmed me intentionally. He was just doing what all his friends were doing. I
started going to Sammy’s house every night to party, and when Liza and Jack were in town, they’d go, too. There would always be a crowd there—Sammy, his wife, Altovise, and a whole host of managers, agents, and assorted Hollywood types. Most of us would be up all night doing cocaine and partying our brains out. I loved it.

By then I’d learned how to snort coke “properly,” and I loved the rush that came along with it. As they say: once you experience that pure, powerful rush, you spend the rest of your life trying to duplicate it. Only you never really do after the first time. But you keep trying, and after a while, I was hooked on the stuff. I couldn’t get enough of it. Sammy’s house became my home away from home. When he was working out of town, Sammy would often fly his friends down to wherever he was playing so we could party there. A sort of moveable feast. Soon my life was nothing but one long A-list drug party. Career? What career? I was having too much fun to worry about a little thing like that.

Not that I didn’t try to maintain the illusion of a career. Every now and then I’d do a club gig or audition for a part, but it’s hard to get much done when you can’t make it out of bed until two in the afternoon. I had no real incentive to work that year: living with Liza and Jack, I had no rent to pay, and even the cocaine was free at Sammy’s. At twenty-three my life was one long party. I worked once in a while, chiefly to keep my dad off my back and to convince myself I wasn’t totally wasting my time. Dad was in New York with Patti and Joe during that time, and I wasn’t about to tell him I spent all my time snorting cocaine and partying. As far as he was concerned, I was in California auditioning for parts in movies and television. I didn’t want to hear what he might say if he knew otherwise. I was an adult; why should I have to put up with my dad’s complaints about my life?