'my Mother Was A Victim Of Her Talent.'
Sun Herald
Sunday February 24, 2008
Lorna Luft brings a daughter's love to the Garland legend, writes JACQUELINE MALEY. 'She was funny and warm and incredibly generous.'
We live in an age where celebrity parenting is regarded with great suspicion, where the "misery memoir" tops bestseller lists, and where it is generally accepted that, as poet Philip Larkin once wrote, your parents "f--k you up". So it comes as a surprise when Lorna Luft, daughter of the great singer and five times-married drug addict Judy Garland, describes her mother as "a great mom" and her childhood as great fun."She wasn't tragic," Luft says. "People like to play her as a tragic figure but she wasn't. She was funny and warm and incredibly generous." Luft is speaking ahead of the Sydney performance of her one-woman show, Lorna Luft - Exclusive And Intimate, which is largely based on the cabaret show Songs My Mother Taught Me. "It's to give the audience a taste of great music and anecdotes and stories about how I grew up and funny things that have happened to me," Luft says of the show.Of course, Luft's childhood stories are more interesting than the norm, because they involve her mother - a woman whose dramatic life story and drug addiction, along with her incredible talent, continues to intrigue. Luft is done with fighting her way out of her mother's shadow, content to talk about her, just as she is happy to sing songs her mother made famous in the voice she inherited from her.In 1998 Luft published Me And My Shadows: A Family Memoir, partly as a way of setting the record straight about her mother, partly to deal with her own childhood demons, but mostly as a tribute to the woman she adored."I wrote the book because there have been more than 30 books written about my mom and none of those authors were ever in my house," Luft says. "My mother has been depicted as this tragic figure. I wanted to do it for my children. I told the truth from my point of view at that time in my life."The book has become the definitive text on Garland's marvellous career and haphazard life - Luft researched her mother's beginnings in vaudeville, her rise as a movie star, and her many marriages.Luft, who has an impressive Broadway CV of her own including starring roles in Promises, Promises and Guys And Dolls, is very protective of her mother's legacy, just as she says her mother was protective of her. Researching her memoir helped the grown-up daughter to understand the trap her mother was in and how little power she had over her own life. "I began to see my mother as a victim of her talent," Luft says. Garland made her stage debut when she was just two. She was seven when she appeared in her first film and barely in her teens when signed to MGM. The studio gave the young starlet amphetamines and barbiturates to cope with her hectic film schedule, and to control her figure which it deemed too plump.This had the effect of fostering in the young Garland a lifelong drug dependency and anxieties about her looks that would never leave her."She was this tiny person. Nobody talked to her about her insecurities and when she was at MGM she didn't feel pretty, she felt awkward," her daughter says. "Her talent was too big for one little person. She didn't have anybody to talk to."What about Garland's own mother, I ask? "Puhleese!" Luft snorts. "She was a monster. She kept my mother working because she was on salary from the studio. My mother had no relationship with her later in life."Garland's early experiences as a child star and her descent into drug addiction, plus the way her reputation suffered later in life, all bring to mind a certain contemporary starlet. But Luft dismisses any parallels between her mother and Britney Spears, who is one of her neighbours at the Beverly Hills home she shares with her second husband, musician ColinR. Freeman (she has two children, Vanessa and Jesse, from her first marriage)."I've been living with paparazzi on the street and watched all this lunacy first-hand," she says of Spears. "My feeling is, if you court the press, there is no line in the sand any more. If you want to shake hands with the devil you can't undo the handshake. If you're photographed doing silly things, especially when you have two children ..."She trails off before reprising her theme. Most important, she says, is that her mother never took drugs to get high. "When she was 37 years old she'd made 39 movies. The drug-taking wasn't recreational."We've made huge strides since the death of my mom. We have facilities and education and we've come leaps and bounds in the scientific research of addiction. So now there's really no excuse. My mom had no help. They didn't know what to do back then."Luft maintains that, no matter what was going on in her love life, Garland was always a fun mum. "She would take us to Disneyland when she could do it. When she had time she would turn into a kid. She loved going on a roller-coaster and going to amusement parks and doing all the things she never got to do when she was a child."But Luft was also the child who ended up caring for her mother. Her older sister Liza Minnelli left home at 17 and brother Joey was younger. But Luft will not give in to self-pity on this topic, either."When you have a chemically-dependent parent it affects everybody in the household," she says. "I was taught by my father [Sidney Luft] how to give her all her pills and all of that. I am not going to be the last person to put a chemically-dependent parent to sleep at night. The child will grow up and learn to cope with it, if they want to."In Luft's case, she spent many years in therapy to deal with the legacy of her childhood. It helped her to forgive her mother her faults and, crucially, to understand her. "You come to terms with the fact that's the way history was going to be laid out, no matter what. You learn to embrace what time you had with them and to forgive. I don't think you know your parents until you're in your 40s, anyway." Sadly, Garland herself didn't survive her 40s, dying aged 47 in London. Her music, guts and spirit, and remnants of her voice, live on in her daughter, who brings the famous energy to classics such as Rock-A-Bye Your Baby, Come Rain Or Come Shine, Follow and Somewhere Over The Rainbow."My mother made amazing motion pictures that everyone could identify with. Whether you are eight or 80, you will know her records or The Wizard Of Oz. Her talent will go on."Lorna Luft will perform this Friday at The Factory Theatre, Enmore. Phone (02) 9550 3666 or see www.factorytheatre.com.au.
© 2008 Sun Herald