HER LOVE LET
You said today that you’d been negligent,” Judy Garland wrote to Frank Sinatra around 1949. “But darling — that’s so unimportant compared to the great amount of happiness you’ve given me. I shan’t forget the hours we’ve spent together — ever!”
Now that handwritten, four-page missive — penned on Judy’s personal stationery — will be sold by Bostonbased RR Auction. It was supposedly composed after the entertainers had a romantic rendezvous in New York’s Hamptons while Judy was wed to director Vincente Minnelli. “Judy was definitely a great romantic, and she certainly wasn’t happy in her marriage to Minnelli,” Anne Edwards, author of Judy Garland: A Biography, tells Closer exclusively. “Frank had a masculine quality, which she liked.”
But Edwards believes Judy, who was prone to wild fantasies, may have blown her relationship with Frank out of proportion in her mind. “I spoke to Frank but he never led me to believe they had an affair,” the biographer notes. “Maybe a one-night stand.”
If so, it was a meaningful tryst for Judy. “Goodbye, my darling — I hope we see each other soon,” she concluded the intimate note. “Please don’t forget about me. Think about me because I shall be thinking of you. Always, Judy.”
The couple briefly rekindled their romance in 1955, when Judy was separated from third husband Sid Luft. But they settled into a friendship that lasted until her tragic death from an accidental overdose at 47 in 1969.
A few years later, while Edwards was researching her book, “I wrote Frank a note and told him Judy hadn’t been buried — her remains were in a drawer,” she recalls. “Within 48 hours, I got a call from the manager of the cemetery saying, ‘Mr. Sinatra sent me a full check to have Ms. Garland buried.’” In the end, the couple proved to be kindred spirits forever. “Frank felt sad that Judy was so self-destructive, as he had been himself,” Edwards says. “He fully understood her.” — Bruce Fretts, with reporting by Amanda Champagne-Meadows