JUDY GARLAND
LORNA LUFT REMEMBERS THE COMPLICATED AND TRIUMPHANT LIFE OF HER LEGENDARY MOTHER
As the 50th anniversary of the Hollywood legend’s death approaches, daughter Lorna Luft recalls favorite memories of her iconic mom in an exclusive interview.
Backed by a full orchestra, Judy Garland performed “Over the Rainbow,” “The Man That Got Away” and more of her best-loved songs in a 1961 concert at New York's Carnegie Hall, which critics hailed as “the greatest night in show business history.” The rapturous reception from the cheering and screaming audience thrilled the performer but scared her 8-year-old daughter, Lorna Luft. “Adults are supposed to sit in their chairs and politely applaud,” Lorna tells Closer. “At Carnegie Hall, they were just losing their minds. They were rushing the stage to touch her. I’d never seen adults act like this. It frightened me a little bit.”
As the 50th anniversary of Judy’s death approaches, Lorna, 66, remembers her not as an icon or a legend, but as a kindhearted person, a devoted mother and a woman who loved with passionate abandon. “She was incredibly giving and when she loved, she loved hard,”
recalls Lorna. In return, Judy received devotion from her family, her fans and the husbands who tried to save her from a vicious pattern of addiction. Even in the worst of times, “my mother knew how much she was loved,” Lorna says.
STORMY WEATHER
As a wife and mother, Judy could be selfless. Lorna remembers a time when fans surrounded their limousine and began rocking the vehicle. “She kept saying to the driver, ‘Don’t hit anybody. Please don’t hurt anybody,’ ” recalls Lorna, adding that Judy tried to calm the crowd down, too. “She said: ‘My children are with me,’ and ‘Please don’t hurt yourselves.’ ”
Even as she put others first, Judy lived with emotional wounds and physical pain caused by the prescription drugs that had been thrust upon her from her early days as a starlet at MGM. Lorna says that studio doctors prescribed stimulants to 15-yearold Judy to “cut her appetite and give her energy” and sedatives to make her sleep — thus beginning a lifelong pattern of abuse. “They started the problem, but they didn’t know how to fix it,” explains Lorna. “But I’ve never, ever been angry at the studio system because they really didn’t know
what they were doing. They didn t want to destroy her life. She was their biggest moneymaker!”
The men whom Judy fell in love with tried to help her overcome her dependencies. After a brief early marriage at age 19 to composer David Rose, Judy wed director Vincente Minnelli, who would become father to their daughter, Liza, 73. “Vincente was a lovely, lovely man,” says Lorna. “He knew that my mother was suffering, but he didn’t know how to help; nobody did. They didn’t have the education or the facilities. There was no Betty Ford clinic.” Judy’s addiction took a toll on their marriage and they divorced in 1951.
A year later, Judy wed Sid Luft, a toughtalking New Yorker. He was “the complete opposite” of the urbane Minnelli, says Lorna. Yet both men shared a desire to protect Judy. “My father tried to help. He’d go see doctors and psychiatrists, but none of them knew what to do for her,” she says.
Several times, Judy went into residential treatment to clear her system of drugs. “They would literally just dry her out. She would feel great for a while, but they never dealt with the mental issues of why this was all happening,” explains Lorna.
Again, the strain hurt her marriage. “My parents fought because my mother was incredibly headstrong,” says Lorna. “I think it was because she was never allowed to say no when she worked for the studios.”
As their marriage slowly eroded, the couple tried to hide the truth from their children, Lorna and Joey, who was born in 1955.
“My mother was a great person, but there were times when she wasn’t acting right,” Joey tells Closer candidly. Adds Lorna, “I remember my father calling it ‘a mystery illness.’ ”
The couple’s difficult marriage lasted 13 years and brought about one of Judy’s greatest screen career triumphs with A Star Is Born, a film that Sid produced. “It was almost like another child to them,” jokes Lorna, who is the author of A Star Is Born: Judy Garland and the Film That Got Away, which explores the making of the iconic movie. “With A Star Is Born, [Judy] was in control,” remembers Lorna. “It was a really, really big deal for her.”
“I’m a woman who wants to reach out and take 40 million people in my arms.”
— Judy Garland
Her innate talent made Judy a superstar and her warmth and generosity helped her become a loving parent, but growing up in Hollywood’s studio system left the performer ill-prepared for other aspects of adult life. “Everything was done for her at the studio. I’m sure when she and her first husband, David Rose, got married and bought a house, she walked into the kitchen and asked: ‘What’s this?’ ” jokes Lorna.
Although Judy thrived in the spotlight, she didn’t understand the inner workings of show business. “Money frightened her. She never knew how to handle it because she was never taught,” says Lorna. When Judy died suddenly at age 47 from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, she was virtually broke. The victim of unscrupulous business managers, she had earned and lost an estimated $10 million in her lifetime.
GET HAPPY
Since then, Judy’s story has often been cited as a cautionary tale about show business and addiction, but Lorna says it’s time to finally look at the whole of her mother’s incredible life and stop dwelling on the negative. “We all have bad incidents in our lives, but that shouldn’t define us,” says Lorna, who points out that the Grammy, Tony and Oscar winner loved her time as a performer and continues to inspire new generations. “She had an incredible ability to make people feel and bring them joy,” she says.
In her private life, Judy adored her three children, felt indebted to her fans and never closed her heart to love. Although none of her five marriages stood the test of time (she was married to her last husband, Mickey Deans, for just three months), they all brought her a degree of short-term happiness. “People don’t realize that my mother was the most positive person. She used to say, ‘Always remember that the glass is halffull,’ ” says Lorna, who inherited Judy’s optimistic nature.
She even finds a silver lining in the momentous aftermath of her mother’s untimely death. On June 28, 1969, the night of Judy’s funeral, riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York began the modern gay rights movement. It’s often been said that the death of the star, who was beloved by the gay community, helped spark the rebellion against laws that treated homosexuality as a crime. “My mother would have been so proud of the people who finally said ‘enough,’” says Lorna, who is an adviser to the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative. “She’d be the first one to say, ‘Go get ’em!’ ”
When fans remember Judy, Lorna hopes that they recall her triumphs, not her heartbreaks. “We all have tragedies, but that doesn’t define us. They’re just incidents in a whole lifetime,” she says. “My mother had tragedies in her life, but she wasn’t tragic.” —Reporting by Lexi Ciccone and Katie Bruno