Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me... Read Online Free PDF Page B

and maybe for a few days more. She had some old friends in New York to go out with whom she hadn’t seen in a long time.
    Short of a week, however, her good behavior was finished. And then the calls started to come—calls to Freddie and David in which she demanded their undivided attention. If she couldn’t reach them, she got pissed. And then she settled for me, and I became no longer available to them. She was plummeting back into what the guys would quickly learn was her normal behavior, and while the elevator was going down she would keep one of us on the telephone endlessly, making it impossible for that person to do anything else but talk to her all day.
    Freddie and David understood immediately that being with her 24/7 was not going to work for them. They couldn’t do business. They decided in the very first week that they could not endure following her around on the concert tour they were planning. Judy was needy to the point of desperation, and they had to find a way to handle it. They’d taken notice that when I was around she was always happier—or if not happier, at least satisfied. This presented them with a unique opportunity to use me, and being the good users they were, they were totally willing to sacrifice me to appease the entertainment gods who were allowing them to build a company.
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    Would Judy ever be salable again? Could she be counted on to show up on time? Would she show up at all? The game plan was to book her into large venues and prove to the Hollywood community that she still had a huge following. F&D (kindly allow me to abbreviate them) wanted to establish a reliability factor, to show the world that she could perform night after night and deal with a difficult schedule.
    Although he didn’t talk about it much, Freddie had started his career as a kid in the Borscht belt, where being a waiter gave anyone who wanted it an education in personal appearances. He learned a lot about nightclub acts, about production, about lighting and stage design. He decided to take me with him on Judy’s first few concerts in Texas to show me the light cues; he taught me how to call the show (which meant giving the light cues to the electrician backstage) and watched me do it a couple of times.
    Given that I could, I became her stage manager. Then, having discovered that I was a fast learner who could handle other road chores such as the load-in, the stage setup, and the sound check, he cut back his handholding. F&D could stay in New York while I went to such cities as Buffalo and Birmingham, Pittsburgh and Cleveland, places they had no interest in (and not exactly places I had dreamed about traveling to either).
    F&D thought they were home free, and to a large extent they were right, for they now had a wage-slave assistant for Judy who could double as a constant companion. It was my husband who suddenly, after only a year and a half of marriage, had no one. But he didn’t see it that way. Although I would sometimes be gone for a good part of every week, during which he had to fend for himself, he thought this was a groundbreaking career opportunity, and with the generosity that was so characteristic of his good nature, he was happy for me.
    I, on the other hand, was grateful for the chance to get away from the marriage. Being on the road with Judy persuaded me that I didn’t have a clue about marriage, or my role in it. More to the point, I was now swelling with hope that I was well on my way to the success I lusted after, and marriage was damn inconvenient. I was running Judy Garland’s shows. I was traveling in limousines, and talking with authority to members of the press. I was full of myself.
    When you worked with Judy, you took good care to take good care of her. It was expected that anyone in that job would want to do that, and I did. Judy Garland was, after all, a public treasure, beloved by millions for her brilliant body of work and