Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (55 page)

I panicked. I began calling around, but nobody knew where he was. I was scared to death; I didn’t know if he was in a hospital, or dead, or what. He’d always come home by morning. I had to be on the set by ten A.M. to shoot a segment of
Murder, She Wrote
I was doing, but I was a wreck. I called a friend of mine, who was an Al-Anon member, and bless her, she said, “Get down on your knees right this minute and say the Serenity Prayer. You know it; I told you about it. And then you go straight to an Al-Anon meeting. There will be one on the lot somewhere. Ask around. Someone will know.” Then she asked me if I was okay to drive to work.

I said, “Yeah, I’m okay.”

Then she told me that if Jake hadn’t shown up by that afternoon, I should call the police. She reassured me once again. I hung up, told Maria, “Please, just stay with Jesse,” and went to work. When I got there, I went into the makeup trailer, and the artist said, “Are you all right?” She could see I’d been crying. I burst into tears and went into my trailer. The actor who’d been in the chair next to me followed me in and asked what was wrong. I said, “My husband’s missing. He’s an alcoholic.”

The actor just walked over to me, took my hands, and said, “So am I. I’ve been in the program for twenty-five years. Let me take you to a meeting.” I was stunned. It was like a little miracle. I’d taken my first tiny step forward, and here was this man, standing in front of me, an answer to a prayer. At the lunch break, he took me to my first Al-Anon meeting, right there on the Universal lot. That meeting changed my life. It was the first of many.

Shortly after we got back from the meeting, the phone rang. It was Jake. My dad had been calling all over looking for him, and Jake had turned out to be in jail. They’d just released him. The police had found him weaving all over Sunset Boulevard in my car and arrested him. They’d thrown him in the drunk tank with all the other drunks Jake said he wasn’t like. In Jake’s mind, he wore an Armani jacket and they didn’t. So he wasn’t like them. With my hand shaking so hard I could hardly hold the phone, I said, “You call everyone and tell them. You have to call my sister, and my dad, and all our friends. They’re worried about you. Tell them where you’ve been. I’m not doing it for you anymore.”

Jake said, “I think I have a problem. I think I’m an alcoholic.” It was the first time he’d said it. It was a beginning.

For Jake, it didn’t last. He went to meetings for a while, and he behaved himself because he wanted his driver’s license back. But I kept going to those meetings. All the things they’d told me at the Ford Center six years before were finally beginning to sink in.

H
ow do you unlearn a lifetime of responses? How do you contain all that anger, that frustration, that embarrassment? Most of all, how do you let go? How do you stop trying to save someone you love? How do you walk away and leave them with that terrible disease? Liza didn’t think I had the strength to do it. Neither did anyone else. Neither did I. But I was trying.

Before I could let go, though, there would be one last battle with an old enemy. Jake hadn’t drunk in front of me for weeks, but I knew something was wrong. I could sense it in his behavior. He wasn’t drunk, but he wasn’t sober, either. There was something familiar about it all. It was then it began to dawn on me. Of course. It was my mother all over again. And like the well-qualified little detective I was, I swung into action.

I knew exactly how to search. I began to systematically go through the house—the drawers, the closets, the hems of his pants, the seams. I knew that he wouldn’t keep it at the office, so it had to be in the house. Then I started on the bathroom, and I found his toiletry bag under the sink. I emptied out the contents; nothing; but then I noticed something on the bottom, and I turned the bag over. On the bottom, beneath the zipper compartment, I reached under and found a hidden compartment inside. I ripped it open. There it was: a whole cache of tranquilizers hidden inside.

I hit the ceiling. The minute Jake walked in the door, I confronted him. “Tell me if you’re using.” He swore he wasn’t using anything. Then I said something I now regret. Shaking with rage, I said, “Swear on Jesse’s life.” He swore on Jesse’s life. The minute he did, I pulled out the leather bag, opened it, and threw the pills at him, screaming, “Then what the fuck are these?” And I continued to scream at him. It was exactly the wrong thing to do, and I knew it, but I was out of control.

Jake, cornered, stayed relatively calm and continued to invent excuses for the pills, saying I was making something out of nothing, that the pills barely affected him. When it was all over, I’d done nothing but make things worse. As I lay in bed sleepless that night,
I kept thinking, “What am I going to do? I’ve got a baby and a seven-year-old son. What am I going to do?”

In recovery they tell you that if you stay in a relationship with an alcoholic too long, you’ll be consumed by three things: resentment, the desire for revenge, and the desire to retaliate. For years I had been consumed by all three things. Jake was so controlled by his addiction that he wasn’t able to be the husband I needed, or that he wanted to be. There was so much anger and distrust between us by then that even if Jake had been able to give up alcohol overnight, it would have been too late. I was hollow inside, beaten and bloodied by years of abusing myself and letting others abuse me.

I wanted to be happy and healthy again. I’d left both of those things behind in the house on Mapleton Drive thirty years before. I wanted healthy, happy lives for my children, free of the sickness that addiction breeds. In my heart I knew it was no longer possible to find happiness with Jake.

For every camel, there’s a last straw, and there was for me. I was doing my nightclub act in Reno, Nevada, a few weeks later, and I had to fly home at four A.M. to pack, pick up Jake and Vanessa, and catch a flight to London. I was exhausted by the time I got home, and upset because Jesse was in tears at being left behind. Jake didn’t want Jesse to miss school, but from Jesse’s point of view, his whole family was going off and leaving him with the housekeeper. As we drove back toward the airport, I couldn’t get Jesse’s tearful face at our front door out of my mind. I was still struggling with the baby and the luggage when Jake said he’d meet me at the departure gate. By the time I reached the gate, I realized that Jake had managed to stop at one of the lounges along the way and have a drink. It had only been ten minutes, but I knew immediately. I could always tell. I said to Jake, “What have you been doing?”

He said, “Nothing,” and I dropped it.

A few minutes later we boarded the plane. I noticed that by
takeoff there were still two empty seats a couple of rows behind us, so I decided to take Vanessa back there so I could feed her and put her down. As soon as the plane took off, they served dinner, so I just stayed put while I ate. Two rows in front of me, Jake was eating dinner, too. I finished feeding Vanessa, and she fell asleep on the seat next to me. I looked over the heads of the people in front of me, and I could see Jake still sitting there. He had a blanket over his head, one of those little flight blankets the flight attendants give you. I got out of my seat, walked down the aisle to him, and pulled the blanket off his head. There he sat, bleary-eyed, with a full glass of red wine in his hand.

I just looked at him and said quietly, “Now tell me again that you’re not drinking. There’s nobody sitting next to you, so you can’t be holding that glass for anybody else. Just look me in the eye and tell me again that you’re not drinking.”

I was perfectly calm. Jake launched into his usual explanation, beginning with, “I can have a drink now and then if I want one. You’re being ridiculous . . .” But it didn’t matter what he said. I wasn’t listening. His words were already fading into the blue.

T
hey talk about seeing the light. That day, that moment, standing in the aisle of that 747,1 finally got it. I looked at Jake and thought, “I didn’t cause this. I can’t stop this. I can’t cure him. I never will. And that’s okay. Take your children, and walk away.”

My marriage ended in that moment. I got off the plane in London with my baby and went to an Al-Anon meeting the next day. Jake returned to Los Angeles. A few days later, I called him in California and told him that our marriage was over.

I didn’t know what would happen next, but for the first time since I was a little girl, I wasn’t afraid anymore. I would be all right. I had finally let go, and when I did, there were caring people waiting to catch me.

A few weeks later I would fall in love with the man who would become my second husband, but that’s another story. All that mattered to me now was that I had finally come home.

Collection of the author

In the recording studio, recording my duet with Mama on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

I
n 1997,1 flew to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to meet with a group of booksellers. It was a few days before Halloween, and as I got off the plane, there was a little girl standing in the concourse, waiting for another passenger. She was wearing a Dorothy outfit. I turned to the person I was traveling with and said, “See what I mean!” I was watching television with my daughter and a talk-show promo came on. The host announced that today’s topic was going to be men who dress like women. “Oh no,” I thought, “not again!” Before I could find the remote and change the channel, my daughter pointed to a man on the screen and said, “Mommy, isn’t that Grandma?” Sure enough, there sat another Dorothy, albeit a much larger one. There will always be a certain weirdness associated with being Judy Garland’s daughter, but in most respects, my life is more firmly rooted in reality than it has ever been.

I’d like to tell you that Jake and I had a very civilized divorce and went on to become best friends in later years, but it simply isn’t true. Our separation was as painful as the marriage had become. By the time our attorneys were through, we ended up with joint custody of our children and a fiercely contested financial settlement. Jake still manages performers, but except where the children are involved, I try to stay out of his life.

For the most part, my life is very happy. I got married two years ago to Colin Freeman, the young English musical director I met on tour shortly after I separated from Jake. Colin and I have been through a lot together; he has survived the assaults of the tabloid press, all of them claiming he broke up my marriage to Jake. He also endures a mother-in-law who seems to be an ongoing, if invisible, part of our home.

I have two beautiful, healthy children who have come through the rigors of divorce and custody disputes with remarkably level heads and cheerful dispositions. I am grateful for them every day of my life.

The seven of us—me and Colin, Jesse and Vanessa, two Dalmatian dogs, and one long-suffering cat—inhabit a happy, if sometimes mobile, home. The thing I hate the most about my career is the constant traveling. Somehow, though, we all manage to adapt. I share custody of the children with their father, which makes it possible for them to stay in the same school year round. Unlike me, they won’t be attending seventeen schools each by the time they graduate from high school. Instead,, they’ll settle down and lead more happy and normal lives.

Not that I count on that, of course. My family is still long on performers and short on more traditional occupations. When they grow up, they may choose to carry on the family tradition. If they do, I’ll be in the front row cheering, like my parents and grandparents before me. Meanwhile, my children’s only job is to have a happy childhood. The important thing is that they know they have choices.

My father turned eighty-one last year. His health is good for his age, and he is as irritating and charming as he ever was. His emotions about this project have run from lukewarm to ice-cold. He has always acted as if he were the sole guardian of my mother’s memory, but I hope when he reads this book he will understand how much I love them both. He still keeps a beautiful framed
portrait of two-year-old Frances “Baby” Gumm on the large glass coffee table in his living room.

Joe still lives on the other side of the Hollywood Hills from me with the Smiths, who have become his second family. Joe has found in them the stable, traditional home he needs. He never married, though he’s come close once or twice. Joe continues to battle the effects of my mother’s medication intake during her pregnancy. He has suffered some damage that makes life a little harder for him than for me, but like me, he has struggled with addiction. For some time now, however, he has been winning that struggle—one day at a time. I admire his courage and perseverance. Unlike the rest of us, Joe didn’t choose performing as a way of life, and he relishes his comparative anonymity. He has a little less hair than he used to, but he still bears the scar of my attack in his crib when he was a baby. Of the three of us, he still looks the most like my mother. Joe has her small frame and pixie face. He’s also kept the gentle nature he had as a boy. I cannot imagine my life without the brother I once wanted to send back to the stork.