Read Online Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me... by Stevie Phillips - Free Book Online Page A

mostly to praise of her voice, her clothes, her wit, and her last performance. Thank God she never tired of praise.
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    Away from her I tried recapturing the feelings I had had for her before we met. She was, after all, the living incarnation of my childhood dream. But it became more and more difficult even to pretend I was in awe when we were together. The dream disappeared when the real Judy Garland entered the room. Clearly I had nothing in common with her, or she with me. She was sophisticated; I only thought I was. I was totally naive. Going on her concert tour was the first time I’d been out of New York. She was worldly; I was inexperienced. My husband was the first man I’d slept with.
    When she was in her best of all possible worlds, Judy had a great imagination, and one day while on our way to somewhere, she told me she’d come up with a suggestion to relieve our limo despair. “I’m going to teach you the Mort Lindsey arrangement of “Just in Time” (a superb song written by the Broadway king Jule Styne for the show Bells Are Ringing ). Judy didn’t bother to ask if I could sing. If I couldn’t I might then become the victim of some of her outrageous nasty humor for a couple of rides. Truth is I sang in tune and played the piano a bit.
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    Let’s talk for a minute about what Judy thought was funny. She had a fine, funny, and fertile creative mind. She loved hearing a good joke; she would howl with laughter, and she was a good joke teller herself. But her best indoor sport was put-down humor, the Don Rickles variety that identified a human target and then eviscerated it with a sharp blade. It was mean humor and often dealt with one’s physical attributes. For instance, Billy Barty, the wonderful elfin actor who was featured in movies and countless TV shows once the little box became so popular in the fifties, did not fare well with her. All things small in stature got “Barterized.” She loved to toss a good “bart.” Of Debbie Reynolds’s husband, Harry Karl—whose manners she deplored—she quipped: “He eats two-minute eggs with his fingers.” Then there was also more subtly nasty humor.
    One of my favorite Judy moments happened in an elevator at the Beverly Hilton. Judy and I stepped in on the twelfth floor. Richard Nixon and another gentleman stepped in on the tenth. Nixon looked at Judy and then turned toward the front, showing her only his back. On the fourth he turned around and said, “And you must be Judy Garland.” She smiled politely and, without missing a beat, replied, “And you’re Richard Nixon.” Back to the car and “Just in Time”!
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    Mort Lindsey’s arrangement was brilliant, and difficult. It contained eleven halftone key changes: one modulation every eight bars. A whole-tone key change is hard enough to sing, but a halftone is impossible—unless, of course, you’re Judy Garland with a voice of liquid magic. When she performed the song onstage, it was nothing less than amazing. You could only listen in total awe of where that voice could go and admire the versatility of her enormous talent. She could take a melody anywhere, put it through the wringer, and squeeze tears out of the audience. On the other hand, when I attempted to make the halftone changes that came so effortlessly to her, I was lucky that Jule Styne was nowhere within earshot. But repetition, herein the substitute for talent, finally put me on the road to nine, ten, and, yes—at last—eleven key changes. I thought I was home free. Not so fast.
    Once I had mastered the key changes in the melody, she started singing the harmony along with me. The new fun was seeing how far I could now go before I crashed. The answer: not very far. “You better get it right,” she warned, “because in the last concert I’m going to