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Little Drama. Judy had been released from her MGM contract in 1950, after her increasingly erratic emotional behavior made her a truant from work on several pictures. A year later Judy and Minnelli were amicably divorced, and although Liza continued to see a great deal of her father, her young life was becoming complicated. Judy soon married her manager Sid Luft and embarked on a nomadic life. By the time Liza was 16, she had been to a score of schools, from Chadwick School in Palos Verdes, Calif., to suburban New York's Scarsdale High, to Whittingham in London.
Her mother either had a lot of money or none at all—usually none at all. At one point she was living in a little hotel in Santa Monica. When a newspaper or magazine would ask for an interview, she would borrow a friend's house, put her own pictures on the mantel and try to be there before the reporter showed up. When Judy was on tour, the whole brood, which eventually included Liza's half-brother and half-sister Joey and Lorna Luft, had to learn to put on layers and layers of clothing and waddle out of a hotel, leaving behind their luggage and an unpaid bill. "Just remember, I'm Judy Garland," Mama would say, or, "Well, I need a new wardrobe anyway," and the episode would be laughed off. The way Liza tells it now, it was almost like a little drama Judy enacted for the amusement of her family.
Judy's emotional problems—her drinking bouts and her numerous attempts at suicide—were less easily laughed off. But again, at least according to Liza, they are worse in the telling than they were in fact. At home in Los Angeles, Judy would often take a few aspirins, lock the bedroom door and announce that she was committing suicide. On to the act after the third or fourth time, Liza would merely borrow the clippers from the gardener and snip a hole in the window screen so that she could climb in. Once inside, she would try to talk her mother out of her depression. Saving Judy became one of her chores, like washing the dishes or sweeping the kitchen floor. Once a week she and Lorna would sit down and empty out three-quarters of Judy's sleeping capsules and refill them with sugar. Later Liza did take the precaution of acquiring a stomach pump from a nearby hospital.
Reversed Roles. "I worried about Mama, but not in certain ways," she says. "I never saw her in a situation she couldn't handle, even if she was having a tantrum or hysterical crying. But when she'd get in a temper, it was frightening, because she'd yell a lot and I'd freeze. Lots of yelling. Now I avoid people who are screaming at all costs. My eyes glaze over when someone begins to yell, and my mind retreats back to someplace else so they can't get through to me."
Minnelli recalls that "Liza actually was a very calming influence on her mother. Their roles were reversed; Judy had some very childlike traits, while Liza was grown-up." Adds Liza: "Mama and I talked a lot. She'd put too much trust in somebody, then they'd do something slight, and she'd take it as a slap in the face. The thing I tried to get through to her was that none of it really mattered. Of course people were going to let her down. They couldn't help it."