I’ve been around and seen the sights
And of this I’m sure
Yes, you’re the one
I’ve waited for.
You’ll be the one to last
I’ve had this feeling
Once on thin ice
But that’s over, the past
Then was then
And Now is now
For you’ll be the one to last
I’ve tried before
I’ll try no more
No need to try again
You were the one worth waiting for
I’ve found my where and when . ..
Unfinished lyrics
By Judy Garland
Written January 1969
38The plane nosed down through thick patches of fog, landing smoothly on a brightly lit runway at Heathrow Airport. A foggy London morning awaited them. More ominously, though, as Judy and Deans walked from the customs hall, they were greeted by Keith Cockerton, a private detective representing solicitors Lawford & Co. Mr. Cockerton handed Judy a writ claiming that Harper & Greenspan now owned exclusive use of her services and that an application for an injunction had been filed to restrain her from opening at The Talk of The Town two days later (Monday, December 30,1968).
Judy, defying Luft and disregarding any contractual agreement with Group V, had signed two contracts—one with Raymond Nesbitt of Theatre Restaurants, Ltd., for her appearances at The Talk of The Town; the other with Blue Records, Inc., for an album that was to be cut in the spring of 1969 (for this she received a $1,000 advance payable directly to her)—using John Meyer’s New York address as her mailing address. The vultures were now hovering for the feed.
The law firm of Lawford & Co., acting on behalf of Harper & Greenspan, had, in fact, delivered by hand to Nesbitt on the twenty-fourth of December a letter setting forth the legal situation between Group V and its client, closing the letter with the following paragraph:
We must ask you to undertake not to engage Miss Garland as arranged. Failing such an undertaking from you before 10 A.M., Friday, December 27th, we shall apply to the Vacation Judge for an injunction restraining you and Miss Garland in the show “Fine Feathers”, or indeed in any other show without our clients’ prior consent. To protect our clients’ position we have already taken an appointment with the Vacation Judge (Mr. Justice Magarry) for 2:15 p.m. on Friday, 27th December. For the same reason we are immediately issuing a writ which we will endeavour to serve on you later today.
Yours faithfully,
Lawford & Co.
Nesbitt and his associate Bernard Delfont, having consulted their solicitors, Paisner & Co., and believing Harper & Greenspan had no legal case to restrain Judy from working in England, elected to reject Lawford & Co/s warning and to back Judy against Harper & Greenspan in the court action—rescheduled for December 30 when it was made known that Judy would not arrive until December 28.
The writ was a shock to Judy. She should, of course, have sought out legal counsel in New York when she first found out about the Group V assignment. However, with the same kind of naivete that guided almost all her actions, she had assumed that a legal document drawn in the United States would not be binding in England. The limousine ride with Deans to the Ritz, where they were to stay was, therefore, not the joyous experience she had hoped it would be. She had been looking forward to their arrival in London, wanting to share with Deans her great love of London, wanting him to see it through her eyes and fond experiences.
As Judy was awed by authority and greatly intimidated by her own deep sense of guilt, the thought of a court appearance terrified her more than it was possible to imagine. She felt “on trial”; and the guilt she suffered from her addiction to the pills; the fact that Deans, not Joey and Lorna, sat next to her in the car; the fact that Ethel had died alone—one could travel far back into her past on her private guilts—all seemed to be evidence against her. She clung to Deans in the back seat of the luxurious car, begging him to reassure her that everything would be all right—which he attempted to do.
When they arrived at the cold, gray stone facade of the grand old Ritz Hotel, the manager stood in the lobby awaiting their arrival. When he saw her come through the revolving doors with Deans, he started down the lobby steps to greet them. For a brief moment his English reserve slipped, for he was unprepared for “the incredibly tiny, birdlike creature, huge floppy hat dwarfing her tiny face, short skirt exposing toothpick legs.” Yet as she entered, gripping her companion’s arm as though unable to navigate otherwise, he had known that it was, indeed, the legendary Garland. She had thrown her head back to glance up at him over the top of the massive staircase that rose from the entrance to the lobby. There had been a gesture, the wide eyes, a familiar laugh. He rushed to greet her and welcome her back to the Ritz. Then he led her up the staircase and across the impressive expanse of the lobby, past the spectacular circular staircase that rises above the cavernous center well, to the lifts, continuing up with them to the fourth floor, where they were to occupy one of the two best suites in the hotel.
Deans was outwardly impressed with the hotel, the suite, the personal service, but to Judy it was another suite in still another hotel, and after the manager had left, she complained that there was nothing more depressing than “old grandeur"—everything seeming shaded, tainted, much used, and almost dingy to her. To compound the nervousness caused by the impending court action, she confessed that she could not control her feeling of “shabbiness” when the manager had shown them into the suite, knowing they were unmarried and would be living there together.
However, the suite contained two bedrooms, a huge white-tiled bathroom, and a commodious sitting room. The large bedroom (Judy used the smaller one for a dressing room) overlooked Piccadilly, as did the sitting room, and all the sounds of midday London could be heard through the sealed windows. If Judy had seemed overpowered in the huge lobby of the hotel, she must have appeared to be a shrunken “Alice Through the Looking Glass” in that bedroom. The room was fourteen feet tall, painted entirely in white, with great, ceiling-high mirrors lining one entire wall; a cavernous fireplace, unused for years, along another wall, over which hung a gargantuan gilt-framed mirror. The furniture was all antique white, and on the polished wide-planked floors was an antique, but once elegant, red Persian rug.
Those beds—they were the first thing that had caught Judy’s eye as she entered the suite with the master-bedroom door standing open off the entranceway. They were the highest, largest beds she had ever seen, making it impossible for her to get into one without jumping up, as a child might do. The massive brass frames were cold to the touch, and the great faded rose satin quilt slippery.
Deans remembers Judy that day sitting rather stiffly on the sitting room’s most elegant unyielding antiquity: a rigid well-preserved Regency sofa that faced still another bank of mirrors, still another open, unused fireplace; looking around her.
“We’ll be married very soon?” he says she asked him.
“Monday, if British law permits,” he assured her.
That was December 30, the same day she was to go to court to answer the restraining writ. Deans got busy on the telephone. Plans were made first with Paisner & Co., who were representing Nesbitt, to represent her interests as well. She was asked to make a legal deposition in the presence of the Court Recorder, which she did.
His Lordship, Mr. Justice Magarry, was a well-seasoned and peppery man of few words and fast actions. As evidence he had the writ, Judy’s deposition, The Group V Ltd. contract, the Group V Ltd. assignment and the promissory note Filliberti had given Harper & Greenspan. After listening to both sides and giving long consideration to the evidence he had in hand, His Lordship glanced down from the bench and in a voice edged with both amazement and disdain declared in no uncertain terms, “This transaction is one which I would not enjoin a dog,” caustically adding, “Certainly, I would not enjoin Miss Garland.”
Then he dismissed the case, but not before publicly reprimanding all those in the action who had attempted “to use the courts to implement their own base activities” and making Harper & Greenspan responsible for the sizable court costs of about £1,000 (approximately $2,600 at that time). The plaintiffs (Harper & Greenspan) had the right to appeal against the decision and, winning that, could seek an order for a speedy trial. But as Paisner & Co. explained to Judy, it was unlikely, owing to:
1. The time factor; all that would take more than the five weeks of her engagement with The Talk of The Town, allowing her to complete the appearance without interruption.
2. The question of costs; since the plaintiffs lived outside the jurisdiction of the English courts, the Court was entitled to ask for an order that they must lodge funds or provide security for the likely costs of the action. (Paisner & Co. immediately made application for such an order.)
3. The attitude of the British court; the fact that the judgment against the plaintiffs had been a very strong one based very much on matter of law, rather than on evidence, would make it a very difficult task for the plaintiffs to persuade a court of appeal to rule in their favor.
It seemed (and was) unlikely that Harper & Greenspan would proceed any further. Ridding herself of the Group V Ltd. contractual machinations was certainly one of Judy’s most triumphant legal encounters, but the unsavory aspect of the episode, the loathing she now felt for Luft, the bitter feelings she harbored of the past were a high price for her to pay.
Before even leaving the court, Judy reminded Deans of his promise to see what he could do about obtaining a license to wed. She wanted to be married immediately; certainly she did care for Deans, but at least in her eyes, a new marriage would be closing of a door to the past. However, according to California law, where her divorce decree against Mark Herron had been filed, no divorce was absolute until the final papers had been picked up. Herron had, so far, neglected to do this. Added to this complication was an English law requiring a two-week waiting period before a foreigner could be legally wed.
Judy and Deans returned to their suite, and Deans called Herron in California. Herron promised he would pick up the papers. Still, there was little chance of their marrying for several weeks. The joyousness of the morning’s victory was somehow dimmed, even though The Evening News came out with an early headline:
JUDGE TELLS JUDY:
CARRY ON SINGING!
adding the terse subheading:
AMERICANS’ BID TO STOP SHOW
IS THROWN OUT OF COURT
and with the very conservative Financial Times commenting: “For once the law has been anything but an ass.”
Judy and Deans ate a quiet dinner in their suite, and then Judy dressed for her opening night at The Talk of The Town.
The Talk of The Town might be called London’s Copaca-bana. It is an immense restaurant-nightclub, holding well over a thousand people, serviced by massive kitchens and bars. There is a vast balcony as well as the huge main floor with its wide stage, full orchestra, and commodious dance floor. Every six weeks there is a new “spectacular,” with beautiful showgirls and elaborate costumes and sets, but, as well, impresario Del-font always manages to lure the creme de la creme of the entertainment world. Judy was following such greats as Lena Home, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Tony Bennett, and her own daughter Liza Minnelli.
The lovers were met at the stage door by Glyn Jones, who was Delfont’s “ambassador”; his task was to assist Judy for the length of her run. They made their way past the mammoth backstage area, ascending the rear stairs to the first level, where the star’s dressing room was situated to their left. On the right was a small sitting room with a bar where people could wait to see her. The two rooms formed a “star suite.”
The club’s resident makeup artist, Vivian Martyne, was waiting for Judy in the flower-packed dressing room. She offered to remove some of the bouquets, but Judy insisted they all be left. As Ed Baily had known, she loved flowers, adored receiving them. They were notes of love to her. Kidding, she would say, “When I die I want my casket to look like it’s in a dressing room before an opening performance.”
With the exhaustion of the trip and the problems of the writ, Judy had only one rehearsal with Burt Rhodes, the musical director. Deans had met with him first, discussing with him the problem of the missing arrangements. Deans gave him the Carnegie Hall album, and from that, and in forty-eight hours, Rhodes had rescored eight numbers. What was never taken into consideration was that Judy’s physical condition had altered her stamina and her range since the Carnegie Hall concert. The numbers were arranged, therefore, in the keys she had sung in nearly a decade past. Some notes (especially the last in “Over the Rainbow”) were going to be almost impossible now for her to reach.
That evening (Saturday night) Rhodes went to the Ritz to meet Judy for the first time. He had seen her perform in ’54 when she had been in one of her heavy periods, and he was staggered when he was led into her sitting room, unable to believe this tiny, frail figure was Judy Garland. He had thought he had covered his surprise and that they had hit it off very well. Early Monday afternoon there was a rehearsal at the club, but Judy appeared unsteady on her feet and unable to sing at all, complaining she had a cold. Rhodes sat with her in the outer room of her suite and they talked about tempos as she watched workmen put up some red-flocked wallpaper. Judy was always putting personal touches into her dressing rooms. She loved the color red, even though she was not too fond of red roses, and often had red carpeting installed in her dressing rooms. In her Valley of the Dolls dressing room she had a pool table sent in, claiming pool was her current passion, but actually picking up a cue only once or twice.
Rhodes had been very concerned. He did not see how she could be expected to perform without benefit of rehearsal and under the conditions forced upon them (the lack of proper arrangements, etc.). But at eleven-fifteen Judy was dressed and walked onstage to an overwhelming ovation. At front tables sat Ginger Rogers (in London for Mame), Danny LaRue (England’s greatest female impersonator), David Frost, and Johnnie Ray. Greeting them happily, Judy launched into her opening number, “I Belong In London,” and proceeded to forget all the lyrics. Rhodes, believing he was helping, prompted her. As Judy preferred confessing her lack of memory to an audience rather than covering it up, it irritated her that Rhodes interfered. A difficult relationship was thereupon begun and, unfortunately, was to continue throughout the run of the show. From that opening moment Judy seemed set on creating havoc in the programming, switching her numbers around at random, and bringing LaRue onstage to sing an unrehearsed song. The audience, assuming it was all part of the show, loved it, and when at the end she sat down at the edge of the stage to sing “Over the Rainbow,” confessing to her audience, “We’ve been through a lot,” they gave her a tremendous ovation. The single spotlight was on her painfully thin and aging face. “I may croak a bit,” she told them and then with some amazement, added, “You know, they tell me this is the twelve thousand three hundred and eightieth time Fve sung this song!” Never had she sung it with more emotion, and never had it seemed to have more meaning. Derek Jewel in The Sunday Times had this to say about the performance:
Time has ravaged her singing voice. Within a certain range of scale, tone, and volume it survives—most beautifully in a downbeat arrangement of “Just In Time”; outside that range, the vibrato is wild and uncontrolled, the pitch uncertain. At times she needs to sing very artfully indeed to disguise the flaws.
But the singing is not so important as the tension and the compulsive gamble of the entertainment. For an hour she conducts a ritual whose contrasts would unhinge most performances. She moves around endlessly, with quick nervous gestures, darting uncertainly to her musical director or the glass on the piano. She bathes the ringside in schmaltz, kissing her admirers, dropping names, tempting applause to dry up. She mixes sharp cracks—“I’m going to do something extraordinary. Not only am I going to appear . . .” (uproar) “but I’m going to sing a new song”—with indistinct mumbling. Pert professionalism collides with urchin gaucherie.
That her first-night audience, even discounting its preponderantly showbiz nature, gave her so rapturous a reception is still not completely susceptible of explanation, but I will try.
She is a legend, and legends are revered. Yet her secret is partly that she makes fun of the legend, the songs, herself and her image, even the audience. Somehow, too, she has never grown up. Her body, slim and supple in a trouser suit of bronze, is frail and girlish. Yet when she sits in a spotlight to sing, “Over The Rainbow” she is not only Dorothy on the way to Oz but also a woman in her middle forties whom life has pummelled. The pathos is terrifying.
Above all, she stands for the immaculate nostalgia of a whole generation—Andy Hardy, Odeons on steamy afternoons, records of Glenn Miller and early Sinatra, girls next door. They don’t write life like that anymore, and Judy Garland evokes it for all those who wish that someone would.
How like a movie script of the Forties it is that half of her music was lost before the opening. But it was all right. Bandleader Burt Rhodes listened to her records and produced sparkling orchestrations inside forty-eight hours. They don’t make many musicians like that any more either.
She proved that she still had the star quality, the magnetism—that she could control an audience to the extent of bending all the rules to indulge herself; but in her heart she was scared. She could not be alone and insisted Deans be by her side as much as possible, bringing him onstage to introduce him (she would end the lyric of “For Once in My Life” with “For once in my life I have Mickey, who needs me"); had him tape her performances, which ensured he would be backstage when she came off; and before she would step out on stage she would say to him, "Make me laugh.” To each interviewer she loudly proclaimed her love, her happiness. One interviewer indiscreetly asked her about her health. “Listen, if my number comes up, I’ll draw another” she retorted, as she clung to Deans.
Deans liked to think of himself as a swinger, and he thought it would be distracting and good for Judy to change her image. He took her to Carnaby Street, selecting mod clothes for both of them, buying everything in sight, unable to carry all the packages back to the hotel. She listened hungrily to his plans, his promises, his quick enthusiasms. He never seemed to be intimidated by the future. She liked that. He bossed her around. She liked that, too.
But the anguish and guilt at not being able to have Lorna and Joey with her was growing, her bitterness toward Luft intensifying with the knowledge that though he was unstable, he was the more qualified of the two to be a parent at this time. And try as she might (and she did), she could not crush her dependence upon the pills. When she did cut her intake (she was then taking between twenty and thirty Ritalin a day and about eight Seconals to sleep), the withdrawal pains and the depression were unbearable.
Several nights after the Talk of The Town opening, Deans found her in a withdrawal stage, pills gone, the show only hours away. He contacted Glyn Jones, who in turn contacted a doctor who came up to the Ritz Suite believing it was Deans in need of medical attention. It took only moments for the doctor to zoom in on the true picture, though he did not see Judy at all. She was in the large bedroom, lying concealed in the dark, and Deans led him straight past the door and into the sitting room. He issued Deans a prescription for a small supply, not refillable without his knowledge, and left. Several hours later, he was called back. Deans asked him if he would accompany them to the club; the doctor this time met Judy, who had not yet overcome her unsteadiness from the withdrawal. He agreed to go with them.
This physician might be termed a specialist in show-business personalities, having treated many of them over the years. He is himself quite a theatrical personality, charming, witty, able to dispense a good joke along with his diagnosis. Having treated pill-addicted stars for years, he took the familiar course of making the pills available to Judy, but in measured amounts.
He was quite talkative as they drove in the limousine toward the club, telling her about Tony Hancock, the famous English comedian, who had also been a patient of his. “Tony was a great fan of yours,” he confided. “It seems rather ironic that less than a year ago we were riding in a car on the way to an engagement of his and he told me that of all the entertainers in the world, someday he hoped to do a show with Judy Garland. And here I am in a car with you and Tony is dead. He died in Australia, you know, only eight months ago. Suicide. Such a waste.”
“He’s not dead,” the physician says Judy replied. ”A great entertainer doesn’t really die.”
Then he reports that he stared at the figure seated in the semidark beside him, thinking “she looks like a wizened little old monkey.” She weighed under ninety pounds, her eyes were too big for her face, her bones protruded sharply wherever flesh was exposed, and though she was enveloped in perfume (she had recently switched from Joy to Ma Griff e)9 there was a strong underlying body odor. The doctor asserts that she was suffering from malnutrition and that she was having problems passing anything through her colon. He wondered about a colonic obstruction, but he didn’t press the matter. Though he did openly discuss her addiction.
“Do you understand anything about the pills you are taking, Judy?” he claims he asked, going on to explain: “Ritalin is an antidepressant, an ‘up’ as you say, but it not an amphetamine. There are many amphetamines with brand names like Dexe-drine, Benzedrine, etcetera. I will never, ever prescribe those for you and I warn you severely, never take them. They will kill you.”
“Don’t you know any good jokes?” she countered.
The doctor reached back in his repertory and found one.
It was a tragedy that Judy was always fearful that a doctor might report her to the authorities as an addict, and so did not discuss her physical problems. Still it remains a great enigma how all those close to her allowed her to ignore her appalling health problems. True, Judy was extremely strong-willed, but she could be influenced by each of the successive men she loved. Most of them encouraged her to perform, reminding her of her old nagging, childhood guilt that not to perform was the worst degree of misbehavior. There were many reasons why Judy felt she must perform: she needed her audience; she was fearful of not getting her pills if she did not perform; she felt she must be the one to pay the bills; and she desperately needed the approval and attention of those close to her, and only performing could bring her that. If it dawned on her that she had an equal right to expect a husband or lover to support her, she never gave it full consideration. That might have gone back to the relationship with her father; for Frank Gumm—though thoroughly capable of supporting his family—had not stopped Ethel from singling Judy out as the one child who was expected to work. In order to rationalize Frank Gumm’s behavior, it was not unlikely that Judy might feel she had to excuse all the other men in her life.
She was leaning heavily upon religion, reading the Bible whenever she was in sound mind, and in the final analysis, looked to God as one would to a husband or father. “Hasn’t He always looked after me and the kids?” she would say, and quote passages at random. The fact that she had never been married in a church caused her great concern. There was a young clergyman in London whom she had known and consulted in the past. Prevailing upon Deans, she arranged for him to meet this young man, The Reverend Peter Delaney, to see if they could be married in his church.
The minister, whose church was the same one in which Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning had been wed, felt that if all the legal problems of the divorce from Herron could be settled, there would be no reason why the two could not be married at St. Marylebone Parish.
Taking the Reverend Delaney with him, Deans went down to file a marriage application at Caxton Hall and to establish residence for the two-week waiting period required. He had already called Judy’s attorney in California, Godfrey Isaac, and knew that Herron had not picked up the final papers. He now was told Herron would sign a letter stating that he (Herron) was not responsible for any taxes accrued during their marriage, as he had, at the time, signed a joint income-tax return.
This meant more delays. Judy was frantic, apparently frightened that something would inevitably keep them from marrying. Her apprehension grew more unreasonable when Deans received a letter from Arthur informing him that he was fired. Interpreting this news as a possible impetus that might return Deans to New York to settle his affairs, Judy pressed for a blessing of their union in Peter Delaney’s church, rationalizing that vows exchanged in a church would necessarily be binding even if they were not legal marital vows. Reverend Delaney agreed to bless them.
That night Judy appeared radiant onstage. The watchman at the club had a large brown-and-white Alsatian dog that Judy had mothered each night. He could see that Judy was in love with the animal and told Deans he would like Judy to have the dog. Deans accepted the offer that night. It seemed a very special omen to Judy. She named the dog (his name had been Rags) Brandy, and brought him into her dressing room. The dog was bigger than she was. She hugged him around the neck constantly as she dressed and left him backstage as she went on.
She was ecstatic, making it difficult for Rhodes, changing the program as she went along, inviting thirty to forty members of the audience to sit on the edge of the stage as she sang. She was wearing a glittering white pants suit with a red ruff about her neck and silver slippers on her feet, and shook hands with everyone near to her like a Presidential candidate. Borrowing drinks and handkerchiefs, she exchanged witticisms with Rhodes and members of the audience. At one point, as Rhodes valiantly struggled to follow a new music cue she had just given him, she said, “Now Fd like to do Aida.” It brought down the house.
After the show, like a sixteen-year-old going out on her first date, she took tremendous pains in dressing, deciding upon a long, soft blue-gray dress, demurely high at the neck and tight at the wrists, and wearing a string of pearls and pearl earrings that Tony Bennett had given her the Christmas before—keeping on the silver slippers, and using very little makeup.
They knelt before the altar that Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning had knelt before. Judy had wanted Deans to give her a ring, but he had not brought one. Reverend Delaney gave him one that had belonged to his grandmother. It was immense for Judy, but she put it on her middle finger and held her fingers tightly together so that it would not slip off. By three A.M. the blessing had been concluded and Judy and Deans had exchanged vows.
For the next ten days the show went quite well. Judy, overflowing with happiness and yet frustrated that she had promised to keep the blessing secret to avoid getting the Reverend Delaney in trouble, gave revealing interviews about her love for Deans, wanting the world to understand how sincere their feelings were. “I love him,” she told columnist Arthur Helliwell, “and loving him means I no longer have to love the lights and the applause.”
Her health now took a dramatic turn. She contracted the flu, and her frail and undernourished body had great trouble fighting it off. Then the medication the doctor prescribed for the flu conflicted with her other pills and a near-toxic condition arose. This was Thursday, January 23, and as luck would have it, she was scheduled to appear that Sunday night as the star on the television variety series Sunday Night at the Palladium.
Her performances Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights were poor. Rhodes realized she was ill, but as he was conducting the orchestra for her for the Palladium, he still pressed her to work with him on the numbers she planned to sing (he did not even know which these were to be). She grew unreasonably angry at him. (There was a piece of business they did every night. She would come out onstage and take a drink from the piano and ask Rhodes to test it. “Oh, it’s fine,” he would reply “you can drink that. It’s Bitter Lemon.” And she would counter, “Oh no! not Bitter Lemon again!” But that Friday night she turned to him and answered sharply, “Himmler!”)
Sunday night she stepped unsteadily from the car at the Palladium stage door with Deans on one side of her and the doctor on the other. Rhodes ran out to meet her and asked her legitimately and with concern, “What numbers do you want to do?”
“Go play the overture,” Judy replied.
“You can’t put a three-and-a-half-minute overture in the middle of a television program,” he warned her.
“You’ll have to,” she told him tersely. “Then I’ll do ‘London’ and ‘For Once in My Life.’ ”
The Palladium show was live, and Judy’s appearance was only minutes away. Rhodes consulted the two men, Alex Fine and Bill Ward, who were in charge of the show and asked what he should do. It was agreed that no one had a choice. Rhodes, therefore, after the half-time break, led the orchestra in the overture.
The head cameraman was confused. Assuming Judy would be stepping out onstage right away, he held the camera on the empty stage with only a backdrop which spelled J U D Y in neon lights, giving the fourteen million people in the television audience the impression that Judy might not show. As soon as the overture ended and “London” began, Judy stumbled onto the stage, overly drugged, but appearing drunk and having trouble remembering lyrics. Somehow she got through the show.
That next afternoon, interviewer Pamela Foster-Williams came to see her at the Ritz and found her looking “pathetically tiny, vulnerable, and sick”; but she noted that Judy’s mind was sharp and her wit intact, and that there was a moment of radiance in her face when Deans entered the suite with Brandy, their dog. When Miss Foster-Williams asked about the “forgotten” lyrics, Judy replied, “Oh, that was part of the act.”
By that following Friday she was still ill but had managed (though some evenings disastrously) to get through all the performances but one—that night having to walk offstage after her fourth number. Friday night, she did not feel she could make it. She began crying when Vivian Martyne stepped in to help her dress. “I can’t go on,” she confessed miserably.
Deans insisted she go on. They had an argument about it. He forced the issue. “Please, don’t make me go on,” she begged. Deans kept insisting. Judy finally complied. She took extra medication. Tears had spoiled her makeup, and Miss Martyne repaired it. She was one hour and forty-five minutes late. The audience was hostile. She looked drunk, and they had been kept waiting a long time. She began to sing, but her voice failed her. She stood terrified not far from the piano. She began again, but halfway through the opener her voice faded. Members of the audience began to shout, and then someone at a ringside table hurled empty cigarette packets and rubbish from ashtrays at her.
Judy, in a numbed state, near tears, and unable to account for her actions, got down on her hands and knees and began to pick up the debris, muttering, “Oh dear, Oh dear,” as she did. Before she could even get to her feet, a man had jumped onto the stage, demanding an apology as he grabbed the microphone from her, almost sending her, off balance, to the floor. “If you can’t turn up on time, why turn up at all?” he sneered.
At that moment, someone from the same party threw some hard-lump sugar at her. It struck the glass of Bitter Lemon on the piano, and the glass shattered. Judy was shaking, but as she stood there facing that angry mob, no one at all coming to her assistance or stepping in to stop the show, she must have recalled the times Ethel and her sisters had suffered the same insults. She straightened, her head back, grasping the microphone tightly between both hands. “I’m at least a lady,” she said with all the power she could muster, and then, putting the microphone back, she fought her tears and stumbled off the stage.
For two days she did not leave her bed at the Ritz. Brandy stood guard, refusing to leave his post at the foot of the massive bed. The doctor fought to get her to eat, fearing her worst danger to be malnutrition. Then, miraculously, she snapped back to life.
The last week of her engagement at The Talk of The Town, Burt Rhodes was quoted as saying, “The lady was absolutely incredible.” She was in good humor, and most of the performances were excellent. One night she couldn’t quite make the end note of “Over The Rainbow,” and a young girl in the audience with a soprano voice finished it for her. Judy laughed delightedly and applauded her. Her closing performance was on a Saturday night, February 1, 1969. It was a very emotional evening, and after a particularly good show there was a queue of people both at the stage door and up the stairs, waiting to see her. At two in the morning when she left, the queue was still there, jamming the sidewalk when she got into the car. Standing for a brief moment, she smiled and waved to them.
39On February 11 shortly after her engagement at The Talk of The Town ended, Judy received the following telegram from Godfrey Isaac:
FINAL JUDGEMENT HERRON VERSUS HERRON ENTERED FEBRUARY 11, 1969, IN JUDGEMENT BOOK 6308, PAGE 11 AND SIGNED BY COURT JUDGE WILLIAM E. MACFADDEN. COURT WILL NOT SEND WIRE, BUT ENTRY MAY BE VERIFIED BY TELEPHONE DIRECTLY TO LOS ANGELES COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT CLERK.
BEST REGARDS—GODFREY ISAAC.
Judy and Deans had just moved into a small mews house in Chelsea.Like most mews houses, it was built on two floors, one partially over a garage; it was located in a short cul-de-sac backing Sloane Square. (Mews “houses” were originally built to accommodate the staffs of the mansion houses facing the main streets and were always in alleys or cul-de-sacs, where first carriages, then cars were kept. They have been especially attractive to Americans in London over the years.) It was, certainly, the most modest house Judy had lived in since childhood. Downstairs consisted of a living room that led directly off the cul-de-sac, a tiny kitchen, small dining room, and toilet. Upstairs, there were three small bedrooms and a bath. One of these Judy designated as her dressing room; one as a den for Deans to work in (having just been fired from Arthur, he was now functioning as her manager); the largest bedroom (still no more than ten by twelve feet), with the bathroom close at hand, becoming their “suite.” Brandy’s size presented something of a problem, as the staircase was so narrow that it was difficult for him to navigate. The house was furnished, but left a good deal to be desired. They had a small rehearsal piano, rented for them by The Talk of The Town when they were at the Ritz; a leased television set; and dozens of salt shakers and porcelain pieces that Judy collected.
Now that they were at last able to legally wed, Deans decided first to go to New York on business. His plans were to keep him away two weeks. Judy finally agreed to remain in London. They set the date of their wedding as March 15, giving them a three-day honeymoon before they were to leave on a preset Scandinavian concert tour. (She was to appear in concert with Johnnie Ray in Stockholm on March 19, Goteborg March 21, Malmo March 23, and Copenhagen March 25.)
Designer Beatrice (“Bumbles”) Dawson was attentive. However, Judy had few other close friends. After Deans left, Judy would take walks with Brandy. At the corner of her cul-de-sac there was a beauty salon owned by two young men, Emil Ab-delnour and John Francis. One day Abdelnour looked up and saw this very thin, pale face in an enormous hat, peering in his front window, eyes wide trying to see inside. The wind was ready to take her hat from her grasp, and she was holding a huge dog on a leash with her other hand. Abdelnour recognized her, opened the door, and asked her inside. Pleased, she sat down, telling him they were neighbors. They talked for a long time. She asked him back to the house for dinner that night. He insisted he bring the food. From that time on, Judy would see Abdelnour daily. Generally slow in revealing herself to people (covering by superficial conversation, either witty or wry), she found a kindred soul in Abdelnour. A large, soft-spoken young man, intelligent, very well read, he would discuss history, politics, and religion with her.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked her one day.
“Of course I believe in God. I’m very, very religious,” she replied.
“Do you read the Bible?” he pressed.
A game followed. Abdelnour would name a passage in the Bible and to his amazement, Judy would repeat it from memory. (She particularly loved the Psalms and Corinthians.) They discussed the poets Shelley and Keats. Abdelnour, who had studied the poets at University, was surprised at her knowledge (which, of course, went back to her teen-age poetry writing). She had memorized many of Shelley’s poems, favored “The Skylark,” and would repeat it often. She spoke a lot about the Kennedys, being greatly attracted by dynasties and by men and women of power. She was reading a book about Hearst and asked Abdelnour if he had ever read a book by Taylor Caldwell called Dynasty of Death (he had not).
The rest after the closing of the show at The Talk of The Town seemed to have done her much good. And she loved the feeling of being a “housewife” that she had in the little mews cottage. Deans returned from New York to find her at peace with herself and very much excited about the impending marriage.
The plan was to have a civil service at the Chelsea Registry Office, then to go to the Reverend Delaney’s St. Maryle-bone Parish Church for another blessing. Deans wanted a reception, and Judy turned the arrangements over to him and to her new English public relations office, Southcombe and West; but two days before the event, when she heard Deans and West discussing the guest list, reading off names like “Diana Dors, James Mason, Ginger Rogers,” etc., she was beside herself.
“I don’t know why they’re inviting all those people,” she told Bumbles Dawson. “I’ve been through too many weddings. I don’t want a Hollywood premiere. I just want a marriage.”
Deans did not agree, feeling she should have a proper wedding befitting her “star status.” By now it was too late to backtrack, as he had released the guest list to the press and sent out invitations by telegram.
Wearing a blue chiffon dress abounding in boa—too short and too sheer—and wearing as a hat a matching blue band with a pearl from the earrings Tony Bennett had given her dangling from it onto her forehead (John Francis having made it from her own design), she was a very unusual-looking bride. With Bumbles and Ray, both West and Southcombe, the London doctor who had been treating Judy and a young invalid girl (a fan whom Judy had befriended), Deans and Judy were married by M. A. Laurence, a charming little man in Chelsea Registry. Judy seemed especially thin and frail, and the doctor was very much concerned about her; he felt she had never actually recovered from her illness during the Talk of The Town engagement. She was in a very nervous state, appearing feverish, and—unusual for Judy—she lost her temper at reporters outside the registry.
The grand ballroom at Quaglino’s, the final choice for the reception, was a bizarre sight. Only fifty of the several hundred invited guests came, and the room selected was tremendous—large enough to comfortably accommodate several hundred guests; therefore, the fifty who came seemed lost in its vastness. One side of the room was completely lined with tables bearing large ice statues, huge floral displays and laden with food for an enormous crowd, at least thirty stiffly uniformed waiters standing close by. Of the fifty guests, half were from the press, and they unmercifully shot questions at the wedding couple, photographers’ flashbulbs constantly exploding. Mounting the podium for the express purpose of giving the photographers a good shot of them, Judy and Deans posed to cut the cake.
Judy was now legally Mrs. Michael DeVinko. Clinging tightly to Deans, she beamed down at the army of press photographers. They asked her to kiss Deans. The lovers obliged. She laughed like a teen-ager when her short dress rode up a bit too indiscreetly. Deans helped her down off the bandstand. Her doctor remained close at one side of her, Johnnie Ray at the other as Deans mingled with the guests. There was a long line of reception chairs, and finally, she sat down. Having known Judy and being a neighbor, I had been invited to the reception, and Judy saw me standing a short distance from her and smiled. I went over to speak with her.
It will haunt me forever. Judy, with a desperate giggle like a distortion on a sound track of one of her old Rooney MGM films, grabbed my hand, her nails cutting into my flesh, not letting go long after she had said, “I’m so grateful you came. Please stay long.” There was no wonder left in those wide brown eyes. “Don’t leave,” she said a short time later. “Don’t leave.” Again she grasped my hand.
We talked about writing. I told her about a Hollywood book I was working on dealing with the McCarthy period and the blacklist, and how since it was so close to me, it was not an easy task. She spoke about writing the truth about herself. I advised her to do so and suggested she tape what she could if longhand was difficult.
My husband joined me then and suggested that it was time for us to leave.
“It will be different now,” Judy said as she walked my husband and me toward the doors of the huge room. Deans was back at her side. “I have Mickey now.” She leaned against him, smiling up at him. Mickey was grinning broadly. He spoke about the fantastic Scandinavian tour he had set up for her. He planned to take over her career as Ethel and Mayer and Luft had done.
40March is a melancholy month in Copenhagen. The faces of the old, grand buildings appear haggard after a winter’s long abuse. The glorious greens of summer, the burning autumn colors, the safe and sterile white of the winter snows have disappeared; the trees are bare and unprotected in the March rains, and lovers move inside for shelter. Night comes early, its dark hands violating the day before afternoon teatime. The people of Copenhagen, though, are a marvelously patient lot, secure in their knowledge that summer will eventually arrive as it always does, with weekends filled with plush green, long sunlit days, country homes, and sailing on clear blue waters. But for Judy, who slept away most of the daytime hours and had been reared in the sun, Copenhagen was like a city besieged by the Ice Age.
With Johnnie Ray and Deans she had completed the Swedish part of the tour, being well received (in spite of one cancelled concert), but nonetheless ending the week in a state of nightmarish distraction. Deans, obviously believing he had done an astute thing, had contracted with a Swedish producer, Arne Stivell of Music Artists of Europe, for a documentary film to be shot of Judy while she was in Sweden. The film was to be called A Day in the Life of Judy Garland. There had been cameras installed everywhere—the dressing rooms, hotel suites, everywhere—and at all hours of the day. At first, unaware of them, Judy had dressed and undressed in her dressing room. She then found out about the cameras, which had caught her in the nude. It would have been enough to make a perfectly well-adjusted woman upset. In Judy’s case it sent her into a state that was on the narrow edge of paranoia, taking her back all those years to when she had been a girl at Metro and believed men looked through the windows of the bathroom at her; when she thought eyes peered out at her from the doors of the closets in her home.
There was an appreciable and noticeable difference in her appearance. She was nearly skeletal, and her eyes from time to time flashed a look that made one think of inmates at Dachau. Deans tried to soothe her, assuring her he would have the film confiscated if any objectionable footage was included. Stivell promised her everything would be all right. But the damage had been done. She was beginning to doubt all those close to her, harboring some frightening suspicions that Deans might have sold her out.
When she stepped off the boat that had taken her from Sweden to Denmark, Deans, Ray, and Arne Stivell were still in her company. It was cold, raining; hotel reservations had been unsure, but a fortuitous circumstance brought them to the Kong Frederik Hotel. There had been no rooms available, the top floors, where the grand suites were located, being in the process of redecoration. But the hotel manager, Hans Jorgen Eriksen, had been a devoted Garland fan since childhood. Hearing it was his idol who was desperate for accommodations, Eriksen instantly agreed to find space and then had to move all incoming guests around to do so. He gave Judy Rooms 511 and 512—a charming suite decorated with antiques and lovely porcelain. Under the eaves, the rooms slanted and shaped themselves cosily. The bedroom was wood-paneled; the bed, an oversized old four-poster; the bathroom fully tiled, the dressing room completely mirrored. Another bathroom off the living room connected to the bedroom of Room 510. Since Judy was traveling with a great quantity of baggage and wardrobe, it was decided that she occupy both rooms. Grand theatrical history was attached to these rooms. Sammy Davis, Jr., and Marlene Dietrich had stayed in them before Judy.
The day was gray and showing very little promise as Eriksen stood waiting at the doors for Judy and Deans to arrive in their chauffeured car. He held in his arms a bright spring bouquet in the shape of a rainbow and presented it to Judy as she entered the hotel. He had written a card and read it to her: “To the only performer who can carry us all over the rainbow. Judy, we love you.” The sight of this tall, spare, handsome Dane with his blond hair graying impeccably and his finely boned face open and revealing a pair of deep blue eyes, bending over her (for she was more than a foot shorter than he), reciting a sentimental greeting and handing her a sentimental bouquet, must have been too much for Judy. She accepted the flowers with some embarrassment and mumbled an almost inaudible “Thank you.”
Mr. Telle Saaek, the reception manager, stood behind the dark mahogany desk. He had been assigned by Eriksen the job of personally seeing to Judy’s needs while she was to be a guest of the hotel. The lobby, though quite elegant with its mahogany-paneled walls, its portraits of rather grand Danish monarchs, and its antique furnishings, is narrow and small, with only a series of glass windows dividing it from its exclusive lobby restaurant. This area was filled with press and photographers, about forty-five strong. Telle Saaek could not help noticing how “like a small broken bird” Judy looked as Eriksen and Deans guided her to the elevator, promising the press that she would greet them a short time later in her suite.
A little less than a half an hour had passed when a call came down to send the press up, along with a supply of liquor and food. The reporters were pleasantly surprised, having feared she might not meet them at all, but once they were upstairs, the suspicions gathered momentum. They had all heard rumors that her Swedish concert had been cancelled because she had been too drunk to appear. Actually she had been very ill and had appeared extremely confused, distracted because of the filming or perhaps because of the pills.
For three hours Judy remained secluded in the bedroom while the reporters packed into the living room of the suite. Deans made sure their glasses were kept full and came out from time to time to assure them that Mrs. Deans would join them as soon as possible.
When she finally appeared, she looked fresh, but incredibly fragile—thinner, weaker than anyone had expected. She hung on to Deans’s arm and sat down on the one couch in the room—Deans on one side of her, Johnnie Ray on the other. She wore a glittering black jump suit and held a vodka and pineapple juice in her hand, sipping it slowly, absently, as she smiled radiantly and answered questions. Her sense of humor and wit kept the spirits in the room high. She constantly deferred to Deans or brought him into the conversation. She referred to herself throughout as Mrs. Deans.
The newspapers were kind to her, but there was no denying her delicate appearance and the cancelled performance in Sweden just before her coming to Copenhagen, so they were also expectantly pessimistic, and feared she might not be able to carry through on her commitment to appear at the Falkoner Centret Theatre on the twenty-fifth of March. Mr. Blicher-Hansen, general manager of the theater, was equally concerned, as eleven hundred seats had been sold for a record 125 kroner (about $18) a seat—a price only one other artist, Maria Callas, commanded, although many international stars had appeared at the theater in its short ten-year history. But he was a good deal more concerned about the star herself.
Mr. Blicher-Hansen arrived at the Kong Frederik to greet Judy just before the press left. The press conference had been too great an ordeal for her and she had faded quickly, looking to Mr. Blicher-Hansen, as she had to Telle Saaek, “like a sick bird, broken and unable to fly.”
By now, Stivell had set up a film crew, which was in action photographing Judy in the suite. Deans was involved in the crew’s activities, much to Mr. Blicher-Hansen’s consternation, as he was immediately awed by the lack of protection and care being given Judy and the attention being extended to the film people.
By the next day, Judy had grown irritable and nervous. She was also more and more upset about Stivell and the filming. She was paranoid about it, certain the suite was bugged and that Stivell had installed secret cameras in the walls. Hans Eriksen had made arrangements for Telle Saaek to look after Judy and make sure she was not left alone too long, as Deans often went out with Stivell on various errands pertaining first to the concert, then to some interviews and recordings. One glance at Judy, and Eriksen knew she was in frail health. A conversation confirmed his fears that she was on a quantity of pills and at times not in control of her senses. It became a sixteen-hour-a-day job for Telle Saaek—and could have been around the clock if he could have taken the strain. Neither of the men minded ministering to Judy’s needs. Both of them agreed that “she was warm, intensely feminine, terrified of being alone and a very, very sick lady.” Neither of them felt she had long to live—in fact, could not see how she would even survive the rigors of the concert.
Telle Saaek called her room when he knew she was alone every hour or so and if she did not reply, sent a chambermaid to check the suite. Eriksen had food sent to her suite (she never ordered anything herself), but the trays were always left untouched. Twice alerted by Eriksen’s concern, the hotel doctor was called to her suite, but Judy claimed all she needed was more Ritalin. The doctor refused to give it to her.
The concert was scheduled for the evening of March 25, a Saturday night just two days after Judy’s arrival. One of Copenhagen’s leading radio personalities, Hans Vangkilde, had been trying since Judy’s arrival to obtain an interview with her for one of his programs, but had been unsuccessful. However, Hans had spent two years in New York City teaching in an American college and during that time had become friendly with Margaret Hamilton. Hans had an autographed picture of Miss Hamilton with a personal inscription that had been presented to his children; he sent this to Judy’s room. That seemed to do the trick. With Judy desperate for an ally, a friend, no matter how remote, of the “dear witch” seemed a likely candidate.
From that point in her Copenhagen stay, Judy was to turn to Hans Vangkilde whenever she was in need of friendship—or simply in need. It is not difficult to understand why, for the man has a much-lived, comfortable quality about him. He is a solidly built man, somewhat shaggy, who wears rough tweeds that have the newness off them. A broad face is lighted up by bright blue eyes. His English is fluent, but relaxed. There is a strong dash of Mr. Chips about him—but Chips when he was a young man. Judy agreed to tape the interview with Deans in their suite. She seemed happy as she asked Deans’s opinion about everything, including him in all discussions. She held his hand, leaned against him, and kept referring to him as “my man” or “my husband” as he hovered close by, making flip side remarks. There was an immediate empathy between Judy and Vangkilde, and the interview became a very personal and honest discussion between the two.
“I’ve worked very hard, you know,” she confided to him, “and I’ve planted some kind of—I’ve been lucky enough, I guess, to plant a star—and then people wanted to either get in the act or else they wanted to rob me emotionally or financially, whatever. And then walk away and it’s always lonely.”
Her voice on the existing tape has an unfamiliar sound to it. The throb is there, but it is harder, more brittle, a dried branch that could crack very easily under the slightest pressure. “You’re either freezing at the top or lonely, or you’re only surrounded by people who are not truthful and who are using you,” she continued. “And if you’re unaware as I am, and you’re a woman, it could get pretty rough sometimes....”
She was silent for a few moments,
“You don’t always keep on the top,” she began again. “My life, my career has been like a roller coaster. I’ve either been an enormous success or just a down-and-out failure, which is silly because everybody always asks me, ’How does it feel to make a comeback?’ And I don’t know where I’ve been! I haven’t been away.” She paused, and Vangkilde waited. “It’s lonely and cold on the top ... lonely and cold,” she said very quietly.
Stivell and his crew were much in evidence, and there was a constant flow of people in to and out of the suite. Judy grew increasingly paranoid about it, even though Deans assured her that it was all right and a necessary evil, and that the money they would make from the film distribution would do wonders for their empty pockets. There was a lot of noise in Suite 508509, which was on the other side of Room 510, the room Judy was using for storage. She called Hans Jorgen Eriksen and told him they were filming her from that room and that they had hidden cameras. Eriksen attempted to reason with her, even telling her the names of the hotel guests who had that suite. Finally, when nothing else worked, he agreed to leave that suite empty and in her name when the current occupants left, which they were planning to do that same day—a promise he kept.
By that night, owing to an excessively heavy intake of Ritalin, she had prematurely exhausted her supply. Deans agreed to see what he could do about obtaining some. He spoke to some of the bellboys, finally hitting on one who knew where he could get the pills at that hour. The bellboy took him to a discotheque, the kind of place where the clientele are well aware of what is going on—who smokes grass, who takes pills, who takes ups and who takes downs. The bellboy made a connection and someone came up with a hundred pills, for which Deans paid $100. But when he got back to the hotel, Judy and he had a rather violent quarrel. Angered, Deans refused to give her the pills. The night was nearly over. It was to be a cold, gray day. The radio was playing softly by her bed. The light in the hallway was on. Deans sat by her side in the unfamiliar bedroom, and finally the sleeping pills she had taken, without the ups to counteract them, took effect.
The next day she increased the intake of her pills alarmingly and was drinking heavily, something she had not done for many years. She kept insisting Deans not leave her alone, but that was impossible in view of the fact that he was acting as her manager and arrangements had to be made for the concert. The night before her concert, Deans left her in the suite for several hours. Telle Saaek was on duty and Hans Jorgen Eriksen alerted. She called down to Telle several times in the first hour to ask him where her husband had gone. Saaek told her the truth: that Deans had left the hotel with an associate with word that he would return in a matter of three or four hours. A half hour later, Judy rang again from room 511 (the sitting room) and asked Saaek to ring 512. Saaek questioned this, explaining that 512 was her own bedroom. “I just want to make sure the telephone will ring in there,” she insisted. Saaek did as she asked, and she picked up the receiver in her bedroom and began a long conversation with him. “You don’t think my husband has left me?” she asked. “You do think he’ll come back?” Saaek kept reassuring her that Deans would only be away a few hours, that he would return shortly. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” she pleaded.
A half hour later she called again and said she had to speak to Hans Vangkilde. Vangkilde could not be reached, being away in the country. Saaek rang Eriksen, and Eriksen went up immediately to Judy’s suite. He found her curled up in the corner of the settee, “looking like a frail and excessively small child and crying.” She seemed thankful to see Eriksen. He talked to her quietly, assuring her, soothing her, offering to order her some food, sitting down on the settee beside her. A family man himself, he felt as if she were a small child who had had a bad nightmare and was afraid to stay alone, afraid of the dark. “I think I’m going mad,” she cried, and put her head down on his lap, sobbing there. Eriksen was too frightened to move.
Finally, she appeared calmer, the sobs had stopped, and her body was still. She answered his questions with logic and promised to go into her bedroom and lie down. He called a chambermaid, who helped her into the bed, and then rang the doctor. Again she begged him for pills but he refused. She showed him an empty bottle of sleeping-tablets. That eased his mind, and Eriksen and the chambermaid left her alone, Eriksen remaining on duty in the lobby until Deans returned.
Before Deans left the hotel for a meeting the next day, he asked Saaek again to stay with Judy. According to Saaek, she was in better spirits and said she would like to go shopping for a piece of Royal Copenhagen china to give to Deans as a gift. Saaek agreed to go with her. He noticed with increasing fear that she was even weaker than the previous day, having to sit down in the lobby before being able to go out on the street (the porcelain shop was just down the road from the hotel). As she sat there, an American woman with a small child recognized Judy. “There’s Dorothy,” she announced. Judy was happy about this incident. She signed an autograph and then joined Saaek, leaning heavily on him as they left the hotel. Saaek reports she was “frighteningly fragile.”
In the porcelain shop the weakness overcame her again, and she sat down as the salesgirl brought pieces over to her. She finally selected a large plate that cost $200, charged it to her hotel bill, and left.
Saaek, Eriksen, Blicher-Hansen, Vangkilde—none of these men could see how “this weak, frail lady could appear at the concert,” much less give a professional performance. The concert was set up so that Johnnie Ray had the first half to himself. Then there would be an intermission, after which Judy was to appear, do a duet of “Am I Blue?” with Ray, and then continue alone for the last half, or about sixty minutes.
By the end of the first half, Judy had not yet appeared at the theater. Blicher-Hansen rang her suite and spoke to Deans. He promised she would be there in the time it took to drive (about ten minutes); but in his own mind, Blicher-Hansen was already planning to cancel the performance. Ten minutes later, Judy appeared in a loose red chiffon dress with ostrich feathers at its hemline. The dress was a poor choice, having a sad, limp look and falling sharply over her scarecrow body, revealing her emaciated chest and arms and shoulders.
She stood center stage in that huge auditorium, Johnnie beside her for support, and smiled fondly at the audience. “We love you, Judy,” they screamed at her. She and Johnnie sang “Am I Blue?” both embarrassingly off-key. They cheered her on. A stool was placed center stage, Ray leaving her alone as she sat down, the spotlight framing only her face. She called Deans out on the stage, introducing him and kissing him—a rather awkward moment for the reserved Danes, who found this in poor taste. “I may never go home,” she called out to the enthusiastic, loving audience, and sang her encores. People cried when she finally sat down at the edge of the stage, a small heap of bone and red chiffon, her great, warm, deep brown eyes seeing all, seeing nothing, seeming to still belong to Dorothy. If she had been off-key during her performance, her love, her personality, her very giving seemed enough to her audience. They stood up and cheered, cried, and screamed as Blicher-Hansen came onstage and presented her with a bouquet once again in the shape and hue of a rainbow. He left her standing there alone.
“Good night,” she screamed back at them. “I love you very much”—and then she was gone.
Except in one paper, the reviews were good, some of the best she had received in a long while. The Politek wrote: “When Judy sang ’Over the Rainbow/ it was as if she sang it for the first time in her life, innocent and sweet. It was so beautiful. We cried. Everybody in the theater stood up and cheered.”
There was no doubting the concert had been a great victory.
Ray left the next morning, as did Arne Stivell, but the film unit remained. There were now great problems between Stivell and Deans. Deans made arrangements that day to hear the tapes from the concert. The technicians had goofed and had brought only monaural equipment from Radio Denmark. No one knew, of course, that this would be Judy’s last concert ever, but Deans felt Judy should have been recorded in stereo.
The copy of the tape and the check from the concert had already been sent to Sweden and Stivell’s company, Music Artists of Europe AB, at his request. Enraged, Deans managed to get Radio Denmark to stop the payment on the check until he could get things straightened out. He then came to the decision that he would have to go to Stockholm himself, as Stivell had already returned.
The problem was Judy. She could not go to Stockholm, nor could she return to London by herself. In the end, Deans sent most of their baggage back to London by train with the same young man he had been friendly with at the Kong Frederik and gave him the keys to open the house and get it ready for them; he arranged for Judy to remain in Copenhagen. Not alone, of course—that was impossible—so he called upon Hans Vangkilde, who, after speaking with his wife, offered to bring Judy to their home in the country. Accepting this generous offer, Deans then departed for Stockholm.
Vangkilde had planned to take his wife and Judy out for dinner, but just a glance at Judy and he knew this was inadvisable. Judy was on the brink. He had seen her sick and disturbed, stoned and confused—all in the short time they had known each other. This was different. She looked “like a slender bough, snapped in two and ready to break,” and “she had the look of death camps, but her eyes—such beautiful eyes, warm and brown and childish, the whites clear and dazzling—almost feverish.” Hans had been a correspondent and had had to cover labor camps and concentration camps in his time, and also mental homes. He claims it was the image of these last inmates that haunted him now.
He drove Judy to his home in the country, where his wife, Grethe, their four children, and their huge collie dog, Eddie (who possessed the curiosity of one blue eye and one brown eye), waited. Grethe felt the same instinct as her husband had about Judy and before she prepared dinner called over a friend of hers to lighten the gathering and, at the same time, rang their doctor, who lived nearby, to make sure he would be home during the night in case they should need him.
Grethe’s friend arrived and entertained Judy as Grethe prepared dinner. The four children, who speak English, having spent time in the States when Hans had taught there, gathered around Judy at her request, and the dog lay down at her feet. She was filled with instant empathy for Eddie, the collie, stroking and talking to him from time to time. As the children played a game on the floor, she watched them, and after a time, without any request—as though singing to herself—she began singing “Over the Rainbow.” The voice was thin and small—the end, the very end of a distant echo.
Grethe served dinner, but Judy didn’t touch her food. She was now drinking vodka and juice. They attempted to coax her to eat, but to no avail. She sat, curled up in the large armchair in the Vangkildes’ new den, facing the fireplace, looking about ten years old.
“Everyone is trying to use me,” she told Grethe. “There’s no one I can trust. They are spying on me at the hotel. They even have a hole in the bathroom wall and have a camera in it taking pictures of me when I take a bath.”
“Oh, I’m sure that can’t be so,” Grethe assured her. “The Kong Frederik is one of our best hotels and I understand the bathrooms are fully tiled.”
“Mickey left me only fifty dollars and the hotel bill’s unpaid,” Grethe claims Judy complained.
“He’ll be back, and you don’t need any money here,” Grethe Vangkilde says she assured Judy.
“Please get Mickey for me. He’s gone off and left me. He’ll never come back. I can’t live without him.” She began to cry.
Grethe went into the master bedroom and woke up her husband. They decided to try to reach Deans, but he had not informed them which hotel he would be staying at. Vangkilde went down the list of hotels in Stockholm alphabetically, calling each one of them, finally reaching Deans at the Strand. But he was incoherent, possibly drunk, and Vangkilde was not sure he understood how serious Judy’s condition appeared.
When Vangkilde returned to Judy, she asked for sleeping pills.
“We don’t have any,” he states he told her.
“Any pills at all?” she asked him.
“Just for headaches,” he lied.
“I have one terrible headache,” Judy cried. He went to fetch her some aspirin. Grethe was alone with Judy.
“You don’t look like a spy,” she says Judy told her incoherently.
“I’m not. I’m just an ordinary housewife,” Grethe replied.
“Have you kidnapped me?”
“No, we brought you here to wait for Mickey.”
Judy began crying again, saying she wanted to talk to Deans. “I’d like to die,” she sighed, “never wake up. There’s no way out.”
Vangkilde returned with the aspirin and left the two women alone again at his wife’s request. The Danish woman sat down beside Judy. They talked through most of the night. Grethe offered her food, but Judy wouldn’t eat. She fell asleep, curled up, almost disappearing into the big chair by the fire with Eddie at her feet. Grethe went to cover her and she awoke.
“Will you stay here with me?” Judy begged.
“No, but I’11 help you into the guest room. You can take Eddie with you.”
Judy could not walk, and Grethe (Hans now in an exhausted sleep) lifted her in her arms and carried her into the guest bedroom (Grethe claims Judy’s weight was no more than that of one of her own children), helping her into one of the children’s nightdresses. Judy sat on the bed holding on to Grethe, sobbing against her body. Finally the sobs subsided.
“Oh,” Judy sighed deeply, “oh, I just want to go home.”
She rested on the bed but clung to Grethe’s hand. “Please don’t leave me alone.“
“I’ll leave the door open and the light in the hall on,” Grethe compromised.
“Just stay here until I fall asleep,” Judy asked.
Grethe stood by the side of the bed, Judy’s small hand in hers. One moment she seemed to fall asleep, and then when Grethe tried to remove her hand, she awoke.
“You’re sure this isn’t a mental home?” she asked.
“Of course not. I’m Grethe Vangkilde, remember?” She patted Judy’s hand and Judy fell back to sleep. Finally Grethe left her, the door open and a light on as she promised, Eddie remaining behind at his post. Less than an hour later, she heard sounds in the other part of the house and went to investigate. Judy was sitting by the dying fire in her small-girl’s nightdress, her arms tight around Eddie’s neck, pressing her face into his thick fur. “You understand,” she was saying; “you understand.”
“You must try to sleep,” Grethe told her, and wrapped a robe around her bare shoulders.
“You know who I am?” Judy asked.
“Yes, of course. You’re a great star—so great that in a couple of moments you can give ordinary people something they will never forget.”
“Please, say that again,” Judy begged, as a child beseeches a mother to repeat a familiar story over and over again.
Judy and Deans left Copenhagen two days later. It was four o’clock, and the city was gray. It was cold. A limousine waited for them by the front door. They came down in the elevator and Judy said a personal goodbye to everyone there—Telle Saaek, Hans Jorgen Eriksen, and the telephone operators. She was gay. She wore one of her mad, funny hats that she herself had designed, and she held a vodka and pineapple juice in one hand—Deans holding his usual Scotch and Drambuie in one of his—as they got into the back seat of the car. Saaek and Eriksen stood on the curb watching the car pull away. They hoped she might look back, because they had confessed to each other that they were sure they would never see her alive again. She was so tiny, though, that even the back of her head was not visible in the car’s rear window.
41A driving rain greeted them upon their arrival in London. A limousine met them. Judy always felt protected in the back seat of a large car. Traffic frightened and overwhelmed her. Trucks and skyscrapers loomed over her. Speed terrified her; she would nervously call out to her chauffeurs and taxi drivers to slow down. Even as a young woman in California, where driving is supposedly necessary for survival, she preferred being driven.
The press was appalled at her appearance. Newspapers had called her “thin” and “frail” before the tour in Scandinavia; now with sickening heart they noted that “she was nearly skeletal, looked like a small animal whose bones had been picked almost clean.”
It was night, and they drove directly to their small cottage at 4 Cadogan Lane. Deans was now aware that Judy was a very sick woman. He helped her to bed and then, at her request, sat on the edge of the bed, listening to her shallow breathing, somehow managing to rationalize that what she needed was the sun, deciding to leave immediately with her for a holiday in Spain. It seems irrational that his first move was not to get sound medical advice. But Deans had been married to Judy for only one month. He had a head filled with plans. He was going to franchise a string of Judy Garland miniaturized cinemas, would produce a film of her life, supervise new recordings. Blaming her failing health on money pressures, pills, and concerts, he believed he could make them both rich, stabilize the pills (after all, he was able to take them in moderation), and cut out the concerts if they made her unhappy. In pursuit of his own dreams, possessed by his own fantasies, he refused to face the reality of his situation.
Clearly, what Judy needed was a nurse-companion. Had he persuaded her at that point to secure proper medical attention, to submit to a complete examination, he would have been told that besides being tired, worn out, Judy had chronic and critical liver, kidney, colon, and rectal problems, along with all the side effects the drugs had created. But even more pressing was her mental health. Instead of a holiday in Spain that meant planes, hotels, changes in climate, foreign food, and doctors unfamiliar with her case, he should have considered taking her to a nursing home. So powerful was his own world of fantasy, however, that he was able to convince himself “sunny” Spain would heal all wounds.
By morning, he was forced to delay the trip. The Swedish film had been sent to London for processing, since it required a special method not available in Sweden. The film was then nearly three hours running time and contained nude footage of Judy, shots of her stoned and drunk, and tracks of her singing not only badly, but embarrassingly so. Through his solicitor, George Eldridge, Deans, when notified, immediately slapped an injunction on the film.
The Swedish newspaper Ekstabladet, on April 12, 1969, carried the following article (English translation by its own offices).
JUDY GARLAND’S FILM OF HER
SCANDINAVIAN TOUR IS CONFISCATED
BECAUSE OF ITS NUDE SCENES
The showing of a Swedish documentary film of Judy Garland that would have undoubtedly caused a sensation has been prohibited by a London Court. The film is not to be delivered to its producer—Music Artists of Europef—rom the London laboratory where it was sent for processing. It was Judy Garland’s lawyer who had persuaded the court to issue the decision, which came as something of a shock to the producer.
“That is a fantastic complaint of which we are being accused,” says Arne Stivell, director of Music Artists of Europe. "One agrees that the film contains pictures of Judy Garland in the nude and that the film shows her in an intoxicated condition, but she knew all along that she was being filmed according to the terms of the contract.
“The film is undeniably revealing,” states Stivell. “It tells the story of a day in her life. It shows how she builds herself up to the time of her appearance on stage. She prepares in the same way that a boxer does before he goes into the ring. When my company organized her Scandinavian tour it received her permission to make the film. The whole thing is in the contract, and we agreed to share the world royalties fifty-fifty.”
The decision as to whether or not the film will be returned to the Swedish producer will be handed down on Wednesday by the London Court.
Even though Deans knew, therefore, that at least he would have to return to London by the following Wednesday, he still was determined to take Judy to Spain, settling on the seaside resort of Torremolinos.
Torremolinos was once a fishing village. Now, the hotels; the concessions; the encroaching army of foreign artists, expatriates, and tourists have enveloped it. The ocean, on a sunny day, is still beautiful; the town curves picturesquely and seductively around the neck of the Costa del Sol, red clay-tile roofs dot the coastline—but it has been prostituted, flagrantly abused. Elsewhere in Spain one can still hear the distinguishing sounds of the country—a howling dog, fishermen singing as they pull in their nets, the squeak of donkeys, rattles of old cars—but not in Torremolinos. When they arrived, there was no sun and the town lay before them like some jaded specter, old and bleached.
From the time of their arrival there were serious problems. Deans had not brought enough pills. The first night was spent in a desperate search for a doctor who would give him a prescription. Then the pills seemed to have a new and adverse effect. Judy found it extremely hard to coordinate. The first morning she took a very bad spill in the bathroom, gashing her lip and knocking herself unconscious. The doctor did not feel she had serious injuries (though he never took her to the hospital for x-rays), but he did not think she should be left alone. A search was then conducted for a nurse who would stay with Judy. The next day, with Judy still in an incoherent state, the doctor changed his mind and recommended the hospital. Deans, conscious now of the press and bad publicity, refused, deciding he would tend her himself.
“I held her in my arms in a chair,” Deans says, “and tried to feed her some cold grapefruit juice, which she loved—her mouth was all parched. I held her and rocked her. She was like a little child, a small baby, and she would turn, eyes like a little kid, and smile, the most innocent God-damned loving smile. And I started to cry. ’I promise I’ll be good,’ she said. Then I put her back in the bed, but I held her and rocked her and kissed her and just rocked her back and forth. She was so frightened, so God-damned scared. She didn’t want the doctor to come. She was afraid she was going crazy.”
Nonetheless, he left her in the care of the nurse in Spain while he went to London for twenty-four hours to arrange the postponement of the Swedish matter. When he returned, he found her considerably worse. Nursing her for many days himself (they were in Spain a total of ten days), he finally became frightened when she began hallucinating. He managed to get her on a plane back to London, cabling Matthew West, the public relations man, to arrange for a car to meet them. As soon as they were back at Cadogan Lane, he put in an emergency call to her doctor, who came right over. The physician wasn’t certain what the problem was, but feared possible brain damage, prescribing tranquilizers to quiet her. By the next morning, miraculously, Judy (again taking Ritalin) had snapped back. The medical diagnosis now was that she had suffered drug withdrawal. A nurse was employed to remain with her.
It was a great shock to both Judy and Deans that when the Swedish matter came up in court, they not only lost the case but had to pay court costs. Deans and Eldridge flew to Sweden in hot pursuit of Stivell and the film. On boarding, Deans says he noted a coffin being loaded into the baggage section. “You know who’s in that coffin, George?” he asked Eldridge, and then quipped, “Arne Stivell, hanging on to the film and saying, ’Mickey can’t find us inside here’!”
In Sweden, with the help of a Swedish attorney, they managed to unearth an old but valid copyright law that made it a criminal offense to show any of the film footage in Sweden. Feeling victorious, they returned, to find Judy a bit improved. Deans took her for the weekend to the country house in Hazel-mare belonging to West and Southcombe.
On April 22, the attorneys, following up the matter of the Swedish film and Arne Stivell, wrote her a letter informing her that her performances were covered by the Swedish law of copyright, and that Stivell could not legally exhibit the film or recording of her Scandinavian tour in Sweden without her consent. There were other legal complications, but it seemed fairly certain the film would not be exhibited.
42Judy’s condition appeared to improve, so by the first of June, Deans agreed that she could accompany him on a two-week trip to New York. Deans was pressing on with the idea of the Judy Garland Cinemas, and the “money people” were in New York, and Judy did not want to be left in London alone. It was a disastrous trip. The minicinema project collapsed—and they were in New York with scant funds, having to stay with friends. It was obvious something had to be done about their financial situation. Deans discussed two potentials with Judy—one, a film documentary to counteract the Scandinavian entry, to be called A Day in the Life of Judy Garland; and two, a concert.
Before the plane that brought them back from New York had landed at Heathrow, Judy had agreed to both plans and had even jotted down ideas for the concert.
The following was written on a scrap of paper by her in a difficult-to-read-scribble, her handwriting having become very childish:
Orch[estra] Arrangements
Georgia Rose
Georgia On My Mind
Second Hand Rose
San Francisco Bay
You Came A Long Way From St. Louis
Before The Parade Passes By (Segue)
Second Hand RoseInto Orchestra and
I Love A Parade
Good new songs
Open 1. Someone Needs Me
2. Who Am I?
(segue into)
At Last I Have Someone Who Needs Me
(above—definite!)Newley’s This Dream
Get Lindsey’s Orchestration] of Here’s To Us
Judy was reacting out of habit. Of course, when the chips were down, when her husband turned to her, there was no other recourse but to schedule still another concert—still another test of her endurance.
The next morning she was unable to get out of bed. The following days she was weak but managed to do household chores (which she had never done before). One evening she went to a party given by Jackie Trent and Tony Hatch (known in England as Mr. and Mrs. Music). It was a costume party, and she dressed in a brief cowgirl outfit reminiscent of her appearance with Rooney in Babes on Broadway. It proved to be too much of a strain, and Deans (also in cowboy attire) was forced to take her home early.
She was reading Nicholas and Alexandra and was caught up emotionally with it—concerned for the welfare of Anastasia if, in fact, she had been alive all those years. (“She must have been so alone. My God!” she confided her compassion to Deans). And she also was thinking seriously of becoming a Catholic like Deans and Liza.
Four days after their return from New York was the Reverend Peter Delaney’s birthday. He planned a small dinner celebration. Judy was looking forward to the evening, as she had not strayed far from the cottage except for the evening at the Hatches’. She decided to give him the Royal Copenhagen plate she had bought on the tour. Late in the day the minister called. He was concerned about her, he said, after reading the afternoon newspapers.
“Why?” Judy asked.
He read her the article stating that Luft had been arrested for passing a worthless check in the amount of approximately $3,000 (the Garden State Arts Center affair). She reacted in a very distraught manner, saying something quite harsh about Luft. Then she disconnected. Her old friend Roddy McDowall had recently given her as a gift a red leather book with gold tooling on the cover declaring it Ye Olde Bitch Book. Inside were blank pages—the idea being that when anything disturbed Judy to a rankling point, she would write it in the book in an attempt to exorcise it. Several hours later she made the entry :
Sid Luft Arrested! Hooray! Passed $3000 in bad checks, Freeport, New Jersey. Peter called to read the newspapers to me. Joe and Lorna!
Later she called Lorna in California. It seemed to make her feel much better.
They went to the dinner, but left very soon after they arrived. Judy wasn’t feeling well. That night she could not sleep even after an extremely heavy dosage of Nembutal. The next day she hardly left her bed.
For the six days since her return to London she had appeared remote, as though listening for distant drummers. Deans’s mind was spinning with plans, his hours filled with conferences with Southcombe and West and with a neighbor, Richard Harris, a businessman who was advising him on film matters. He had formed a close friendship with a young associate of Southcombe & West, Phillip Arberge, who had come over this night to watch television. Deans’s eyes were set on coming glory. Judy had said she would do a film and a concert. He went over and over the scribbled notes indicating the songs she might sing.
Upstairs, in that small bedroom—humbler than most hotel bedrooms she had lived in throughout her life—Judy took her pills and turned restlessly on her pillows, her small frame making very little impression on them at all.
Perhaps, in her drug-induced reveries, she was back in those childhood days of Ethel and herself—perhaps she was reliving the past.
Arberge left the house about midnight, and Deans went up to see how she was. That week in a last creative spurt she had begun a lyric. The verse began:
When you’ve learned and you’ve grown
Through the years of just living
Then you’ve earned every right to be
Proud of your years
Not too old, not so young
The quietness of age
Well, then the young man comes along
To smile, to take you up with him
And hold you strong along a way to love ...
When he came and sat down on the edge of the bed, Deans claims she was propped up smiling. He had a sore throat. Nodding her head, laughing, she was proud she had one too. Her floppy slippers were askew on the floor; her ratty bathrobe at the end of the bed. She had not been smoking much, had eaten nothing. She asked him to stay with her, to lie down beside her on the bed. Many nights she had asked the same of him.
Even with the lights glaring, the radio blasting, he fell asleep. On the bedside table there was an open bottle of twenty-five Nembutals and an unopened new prescription of one hundred that Deans had just filled for her that day. She took pills from the opened bottle. Sometime during the night she got up, taking a few more, and groped groggily around for her bathrobe and slippers. It was June 22 (she had celebrated her forty-seventh birthday just twelve days before in a stranger’s New York apartment), but London was damp and the house cold. She had to go out of her bedroom and into the hallway to reach the bathroom. She locked the bathroom door. It was habit—one place she felt she must have privacy.
At ten-thirty the next morning Deans awoke with the insistent ringing of the downstairs telephone. Judy was not in the bed. Friends were calling from California.
The house seeming unnaturally quiet to him, he told the callers he’d ring them back, and started by instinct immediately for the upstairs bathroom. The door was locked. He pounded on it; then, fearing the worst, went outside the house, around the rear, and climbed up and onto a section of roof that allowed him to look into the bathroom window.
She was in a sitting position, her head collapsed onto her breast, like a small brown sparrow with a broken neck. She had been dead for several hours and rigor mortis had set in. He climbed into the room and unlocked the door from the inside and went downstairs to call an ambulance.
43The plane with Judy Garland’s body in the cargo section and Mickey Deans above it, in the first-class compartment, touched down at Kennedy Airport just past midnight on the twenty-sixth of June, 1969. Deans was wearing sunglasses and a dark suit. He looked tired and pale. He stood to the side with the Reverend Peter Delaney, who had accompanied him from London, and watched the cargo handlers slide the plain brown coffin, wrapped in burlap and tied with heavy cord, onto a cargo lift and into a waiting gray hearse.
Deans turned away and the two men strode across the field, making their way through the thirty or forty newsmen who had stood vigil during the humid New York summer night. Liza greeted them, wearing a floppy dark hat, much like the hats her mother had designed and worn, looking incredibly like her in it. She was accompanied by Kay Thompson.
“I think,” Liza told the army of newsmen, "she [her mother] was just tired like a flower that blooms and gives joy to the world, then wilts away."
Plans for the funeral were immediately set in motion. Calls went out to Gene Hills, Judy’s old makeup man from MGM days, and to the young man from Kenneth’s who did her hair whenever she was in New York. But Gene Hills was currently doing Eva Gabor’s makeup for the television show Green Acres, and Eva said she could not spare his services; and the stylist from Kenneth’s refused the assignment. A white coffin had been ordered, but the funeral home said it didn’t have one.
“Well,” Kay Thompson told the funeral director, “MGM would grab a can of white paint and paint it.” The man looked at her with a bit of shock, but he agreed, and a mahogany coffin was brought in and spray-painted white.
Campbell’s Funeral Home, on Madison Avenue at Eighty-first Street, had been selected and a private one P.M. service for personal friends already arranged. The gathering would be stellar: Mickey Rooney, Ray Bolger, Lauren Bacall, Jack Benny, Sammy Davis, Jr., Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Lana Turner, Freddie Bartholomew, Alan King, Otto Preminger, Mayor Lindsay, and Spyros Skouras, among others.
The funeral accouterments were to be in yellow and white, so that everything would be as cheerful as possible, and Liza had requested that those invited for the private service not wear black. A blanket of yellow roses was ordered to drape the coffin, and there was to be a backdrop of yellow and white mums.
By the time the first mourners were allowed in, Judy was dressed in the dark gray crepe gown she had worn just six months before, at her first and secret wedding ceremony to Deans in January. Her small hands were sheathed in immaculate white gloves and rested on a white Bible. She wore silver slippers and a silver brocaded belt decorated with pearls. She rested on light blue velvet, and the sprayed-white coffin now had a glass top.
More than twenty-two thousand persons filed past her coffin. Outside, thousands more stood behind barriers, cheering each star who arrived. The fans were grouped together around portable tape recorders and phonographs. “Over the Rainbow” segued from one group to the next. As Alan King arrived, he saw an emotionally distracted Mickey Rooney running up the street, away from the funeral home. The guests had been told to be there promptly by one. At one sharp the doors closed. King leaned forward to say something to Liza, who sat two rows in front of him, wearing a blue wool suit and a black velvet cardinal’s hat in spite of the broiling heat.
“This is the first time that your mom was ever on time for a performance,” he quipped.
Liza managed a broken smile.
Loudspeakers had been set up outside the chapel, and the easily recognizable, deep-timbred voice of James Mason, who had flown in from Geneva for the funeral, filled the area from Eightieth to Eighty-second Street and from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue.
“The thing about Judy Garland was that she was so alive. You close your eyes and you see a small vivid woman, sometimes fat, sometimes thin, but vivid. Vitality . . . that’s what our Judy had.”
And then he quoted Liza: “It was her love of life that carried her through everything. The middle of the road was never for her. It bored her. She wanted the pinnacle of excitement. If she was happy, she wasn’t just happy. She was ecstatic. And when she was sad she was sadder than anyone.”
The Reverend Peter Delaney read from I Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verses 1-13, which began:
“If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and I know all mystery and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love . . .” It was, according to Deans, Judy’s favorite verse.
Then one of her former accompanists played “Here’s to Us” —an innocuous Cy Coleman-Carolyn Leigh song that Deans said had been their song.
Luft—none of the other ex-husbands attended—sat flanked by Lorna and Joey, all three joining the singing as the congregation concluded the service with a rising chorus of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
A hush fell over the thousands of fans outside as the coffin was carried to the waiting maroon hearse. A flower truck filled with more than one hundred floral remembrances idled behind it.
Judy was on her way to Ferncliff Cemetery, in Westchester County, for burial.
The previous day, Deans had gone out to Ferncliff. He had been the pivotal force in selecting a New York site. (Luft had wanted her buried on the West Coast, where he and the younger children lived.) Deans had had no sleep that night and was looking distraught. Frank Angerole, FernclifFs director, was impressed by the grief he displayed.
All of Ferncliff is dominated by a massive white building—the Mausoleum, which also houses the main offices. Entering the building is like entering a giant crypt. It has an Egyptian-tomb quality. Over the massive doors is one ugly, neorealistic pastoral scene in stained glass. The walls are white imported marble; the crypts, constructed like drawers in a police morgue, labeled like files for the dead.
The director’s office has no windows. It is wood-paneled, and the desk is very impressive. On the walls, hunting dogs are poised in stark frames and a tape of funereal music, in a constant major key, is repeated over and over again.
“Your wife,” Angerole assured Deans, “will be the star of Ferncliff. Jerome Kern rests here, and Moss Hart, Basil Rath-bone, and Elsa Maxwell; but your wife will be our only star.”
Angerole had shown Deans a special prototype niche, the most expensive accommodation at Ferncliff. Crypts were $2,500, the niche $37,500. Deans agreed to the latter. It seemed to him the only possible reservation one could make for a star.
A niche would not be ready until the new wing was completed in six months’ time. That gave Deans time to raise the money. Personally insolvent, he felt friends, family, and fans would rally to such a “cause.” In the meantime, it was agreed that Judy would be held in a temporary crypt until final arrangements—the payment of $37,500 to Ferncliff—were concluded.
Only a small group and the flower truck accompanied Judy there. They were taken directly to the Chapel of the Lilies. The room is simple and stark. A grape-carved altar in sweet-smelling wood dominates the room. There are no windows in this room either.
Judy was placed in the temporary crypt—a file drawer, really—its label not yet in place. She remained there over a year, from June 28, 1969, until November 4, 1970, when she was moved to her final resting place. The money had not been raised, nor the need for it publicized. Liza, taking over the arrangements from Deans, had seen to it that her mother was buried in dignity and without seeking aid from strangers.
The crypt selected was in the new wing, the one truly lovely section of the mausoleum building dominated by a huge glass window with trees beyond. It almost turns your heart when you come upon it, for it is like leaving a dead theater and entering a world of the light and the living.