Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me... Read online

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  For Nico and Dylan.

  Swing for the fences.

  Introduction

  I’m in the bedroom of Judy Garland’s suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel. It’s just past four thirty in the afternoon on a cold November day and Judy is still in bed, late for the four o’clock meeting in my office with her business manager, Charlie Renthal. That’s why my boss has sent me over: “Get her here,” David Begelman ordered.

  “What do you want to wear?” I ask Judy sweetly. She doesn’t answer me. I stand there—like the dummy I was at twenty-five—staring at her. She takes the Salems off the nightstand, removes a cigarette, and puts it in her mouth. She takes a pack of matches, strikes one, and sets her nightgown on fire. What?! A small flame appears. Oh no! Lightning explodes in my head. Please God—not now! But I have no time for this thought. For thinking at all. Time collapses. An instantaneous chill overtakes me. What if—? She could die. Every possible terror collides in me at once as I grab the blankets and smother the flame about to consume the pale-blue nylon gown. Judy offers no resistance—and no help. Done. It is over. Another catastrophe averted. Why am I still so cold and frightened? Her leg is slightly burned. She puts her hand on it, examines it, and gets out of bed. The bedding is only scorched. I shiver and stare. My hands are icicles. I am in a state of complete shock. I don’t know what I feel besides icy cold. Not a word from her about it. She heads to the bathroom. “I better wear tights,” she tells me.

  This ugly incident wasn’t the first, and it wasn’t the worst. That came when she attempted to kill me instead of herself. Drugs were responsible, and I’ll get to that. I will show you a woman whose mind was destroyed by prescription drugs and alcohol. But let me stay with the Plaza for a moment so that I can explain that while self-immolation was hardly a daily event, it did occur sometimes when she reached the depths of her despair on the emotional roller coaster she was riding, a trip that was picking up more speed all the time during the four years we spent together in the early sixties.

  When she was “up” she was totally manic, her fast-paced conversation larded with brittle laughter; when she was depressed, it was nothing like a normal depression, for she could not hear the sound of a human voice. She was in a foreign country. Deeply felt pain, however, was a constant in the daily existence of this troubled and immensely talented woman whose life was spiraling down and, at the same time, gaining momentum in helping to shape my own.

  I had recently turned twenty-five when she set her nightgown on fire at the Plaza; Judy was thirty-nine, and we had known each other slightly less than a year. Although there was only a 14-year difference between us, it might as well have been 114. I was still an innocent; she had lost her innocence before I was born.

  If timing is critical—and it has always been for me—Judy and I connected at a moment when she needed company and I needed an opportunity. That moment would forever change my life. Judy had virtually retired. She had fled the United States, where in Hollywood she’d been labeled unreliable, and she was quietly living a healthier lifestyle abroad when my first real employer pitched a comeback to her. She was bored enough doing nothing in London to jump at the chance. But while she was mentally ready for another shot at stardom on the silver screen, she still was not emotionally stable enough. The outcome was at once triumphant and tragic. The triumph was her immediate success when she reappeared on the American scene; the tragedy was the reemergence of the rampaging insecurities that fostered her reliance on drugs and alcohol. As her anxieties took over again, prescription drugs once more dominated her daily life and finally killed her.

  For a lonely, latchkey, starstruck kid from a Conservative Jewish household, being sent on the road with Judy was like being shot out of a cannon into the fast-and-furious lane. Once there, I had no choice but to grow up quickly or go away and forget about the life in show business I had dreamed about. It was with her that I discovered my staying power and the determination necessary to accept a harrowing existence. Along the way she became my greatest teacher.

  As I turned from twenty-five into thirty and from thirty into forty, Judy was by then long gone from my life, but I discovered that in fact she had never left me. I came to realize that many of the decisions I made were filtered through a brain stem overloaded with things I had learned from being with her, from my exploring and finally understanding who she was personally as well as professionally. She taught me both how to and how not to live. She was the major ingredient in the special lens through which I have seen, lived, and dealt with my life. Even today, what comes out on the other side of my filtration system is heavily influenced by that education. Given what I’ve gone through, I realize I’m still standing because of the greatest lesson Judy Garland taught me: how not to fold.

  *

  Judy Garland was hardly the only celebrity in my life whose insecurities led to the kind of abuse that destroys all happiness. My day-to-day was filled with the addictions of others, most notably Liza Minnelli, whom I represented for fifteen years at the peak of her career. Their desperate lives were not what I had grown up expecting, not what I stood in line for, but once my ticket was stamped, I entered into the theater of abuse for most of my professional career.

  I could have opted out—at great cost to myself. Instead I chose to stay in—also at great cost to myself. Eventually I discovered that there were many different kinds of addicts in the world of entertainment, no different from the universe outside its cloister. I saw the dysfunction this kind of behavior causes. I saw firsthand how alcoholism damages the families of stars and their associates, how it ends friendships and relationships. However, in spite of my disapproval and my disgust with addiction, I nonetheless managed to fall into the same dumps the addicts were in without ever taking any drugs or enjoying more than the occasional glass of wine.

  Most addicts I dealt with at arm’s length, but a few I wrapped my arms around and married. Those missteps tested the limits of my endurance. I allowed myself to be sucked into personal relationships that I failed to examine.

  I might not have finally succumbed to a breakdown had I only listened to the men who courted when they spoke, but it took me a while to learn how to listen. Addicts can be most charming and seductive. Certainly Judy was when she was in her best of all possible worlds. When it came to my personal life, I threw caution to the winds.

  So to an extent this book is also about what can happen to an enabler on the sidelines. I am that person, and only one of millions like me. I never saw myself as a victim. I was righteous, self-confident, judgmental, and imperious—until the day I wasn’t anymore.

  *

  Judy may have been my greatest teacher, but she was not the only one. I was extremely fortunate to find a wonderful mentor, Freddie Fields, one of the
all-time best agents on the planet, who—along with his partner, David Begelman, a sick puppy—played an enormous role in my career. Their arrival in my life was a matter of good timing, the result of shifting professional circumstances that opened a door for me at the right moment. Ultimately Freddie, a sport-coated, charming smart aleck, gave me the skills I required to become effective in the motion picture industry at a time when the only women in the agency business were locked in rooms reading screenplays, manuscripts, and books. He taught me what the agency business was mostly about: representing stars. He made me understand that it didn’t matter where you sat in New York, Hollywood, or anywhere else if you had the right clients. I became a client signer, and the stars I represented were the real deal, big-money talent who could make the Hollywood cameras roll.

  The remarkable lesson I learned from these egocentric stars is that they are always right. The reason I know this is that nobody in showbiz ever disagrees with them. Nor did I. Handling superstars gave me clout, and I used it to fight for the things I wanted in my career: money and position. But I was selfish. I fought entirely for myself until the time came—and for me it was late in coming—when I finally saw the light of a new day dawning, and I recognized that I might have the capacity to make a small difference in my corner of the world. And I did that too.

  Part 1

  Beginnings

  CHAPTER ONE

  Who the Hell Is Stevie Phillips?

  Okay, here’s the obligatory where-I-was-born segment. It might give you an idea about how a person could ever grow up to become a talent agent who deals with megalomaniacs and addicts.

  Was my showbiz career preordained? Here are some freaky facts. I was born on August 9, 1936, in a hospital in the middle of the Broadway theater district. Even though my parents lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, where there were plenty of hospitals. But they picked this inconvenient place on West Fiftieth Street because it was cheap and they could afford having me if I made my debut there. Alas, the broken-down Polyclinic outlived its usefulness, and the eyesore met the wrecking ball decades ago. But while it existed it was the go-to place for ailing show folk. My birthing doctor, whose name was Phillips—same as mine—was simultaneously in the room next door, giving life support to a comedian named Joe Howard who’d had a heart attack. It’s a comedy sketch: Dr. Phillips running between rooms yelling “Push!” in one room and “Don’t push!” in the other. All he needed was a red fright wig. Joe Howard must have been one helluva guy. I discovered he was not only a comedian but also a Broadway producer—which I now know (having been one) is ridiculously hard—and yet Howard additionally managed to be a director, writer, composer, and lyricist. He wrote a famous song, “Goodbye, My Lady Love.” The title of Howard’s famous song also strikes me as a little scary. I think it all means something—maybe.

  My very first childhood memory comes from the summer of 1939 when I was taken to the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. I am sitting on Edgar Bergen’s knee talking to Charlie McCarthy. I can see myself there; I remember what I was wearing and what Charlie wore.

  A year later we moved into an apartment on the top floor of a small building in Washington Heights a few blocks from the George Washington Bridge. Our apartment had bare wood floors that announced my father, whose footfalls I came to dread. He was a vain, vile-tempered man who once, in a rage, threw all my clothes out our sixth-floor window onto the street below because I hadn’t hung them up. Somehow that translated into not respecting him or the money he made selling children’s wear. What my father called “a good spanking” would now be called something else entirely. He is also the reason there are no pictures from my childhood, no picture of Charlie and me.

  Selling children’s wear was hardly comparable to designing strategies for world peace, but it took all my parents’ time and energy. They were never home. I was alone and lonely except when I was in my friends’ happier homes. I saw their parents much more than I did my own.

  At seven thirty every weekday morning a housekeeper named Evelyn arrived. Do not think “warm family retainer.” Evelyn never came close. She was black in mood as well as in color, and always gave the impression that she was not happy being there. She put the same cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwich with a banana into my lunch box every day for years. In all the time she was with us, I don’t recall so much as a hug from her. Evelyn didn’t know or care what I did or where I went as long as I showed up on time for dinner. She was discharging her obligation. That’s all I ever was to her, an obligation. Salvation for me lay in escape from home.

  The most wonderful escape was going to the movies. On Saturdays twenty-five cents gave me a wonderland to live in for an entire day. Loew’s 175th Street with its starlit Casbah etched in bas-relief on the walls and ceilings was where I looked up, closed my eyes, and entered a different future. I yearned for a Technicolor world replete with riches, song, dance, and excitement of all kinds. I would be at the box office, my quarter in hand, as soon as the doors opened, and there I would remain until dinnertime. I loved the serials and the newsreels, but most of all I loved the musicals. Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis was the girl I longed to be, with long straight hair and soft curls and a house next door to the handsomest boy on the block.

  Nothing at home was anything like Judy’s house in St. Louis. Apartment 6H was filled with drama and dysfunction and lots of the ugly behavior that characterized my parents’ marriage. Nowadays I assume my parents’ screaming matches were part of a dynamic they depended upon because they both participated so enthusiastically. The screaming was about money, about the retail business, about family—my mother’s, mostly—but it really wasn’t about any of those things.

  Finally I understand that arguing is never what the anger is about. My father was carrying baggage that came from another place: the loveless home of his own childhood. My grandfather, I discovered, was a world-class philanderer, a stage-door Johnny who lusted after Ziegfeld chorines and bedded more than a few. When I was the tender age of ten, my father took me to a memorabilia-packed walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen to visit my grandfather for the very first time as he lay dying in the arms of a former Follies star whose faded beauty was a reminder of the knockout she must have been when she was young. I thought it strange, even at ten, that my father had brought me along to witness his father’s death, but it turned out to be the most intimate moment I ever shared with my dad. My grandfather had been the role model for my father, an excellent student.

  *

  There you have it. I’m part of a family in which not one single member had any interest or practical involvement in showbiz, and yet my early life was coincidentally touched by it time and again. As I grew older, the coincidences became a mainstream of events, until it was clear to me that showbiz was indeed where I belonged. A cliché I know, but here goes: It was all in the stars.

  CHAPTER TWO

  What Do You Do with a Jewish Princess?

  I knew that after college I’d try making a career in entertainment, so I replaced education studies (my mother thought I should be prepared to teach in case I “had to” go to work) with comparative literature: “From all your great literature will come nothing but starvation!” There were plenty of women who worked—my mother was one of them, and a role model for me—but most of them held jobs out of their need for a paycheck, and many of them were looking for husbands so that they could stop working. They were not, in the main, remotely interested in career building. They wanted out. I wanted in. My enormous ambition has been one of the few personality disorders I haven’t wanted to change. My mother was aware of this, and she decided she’d better find me a husband and put all my nonsense to rest.

  She and her best friend, her older sister, Julie, convened to figure out my future in a very organized fashion, and husband hunting morphed from merely an idea into an intense pursuit. The starting point of this organized search was the synagogue. Who in the congregation did they know had a son the right age, preferably a doctor or a l
awyer? My mother remembered a German family living in the Fourth Reich, so called because of the many German-Jewish refugees who settled there. They had a son who would be just about the right age and she phoned them. Chutzpah? (Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines the word as “gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts’; presumption plus arrogance such as no other word, and no other language, can do justice to.”)

  I told my mother what she was doing was embarrassing, but she was determined to find out the son’s marital status, and there was no other way but head-on. In the conversation with this family of German refugees, she hit pay dirt. “He’s an attorney from a good family. Now I remember the parents,” she said. “We used to say hello in the shul.” (At that point she had not attended services for more than a dozen years.) “You’ll be a mother with a baby in a carriage. You won’t need to work hard all your life like me.”

  So off we went to observe the Sabbath (which I never did, nor did she really) in a temple where we were no longer part of the congregation. I sat on a bench five rows ahead of my mother’s pick, turning every now and then in order to steal a glance without being seen. Caught in the act. He smiled at me.

  I agreed to go out with him. He was considerate and attentive, and best of all he owned an old Pontiac convertible. We drove to City Island for lobsters, to Brooklyn for dinner with his friends, to the beach for the day. We shared our love of movies and theater. No bells rang, but being with him felt good. I never for a moment thought I was in love, and no—just in case you’re wondering—we never slept together before we married. In 1957 “nice” Jewish girls didn’t do that. I expected him to ask me to marry him, and he did it charmingly on bended knee while putting a perfect two-carat diamond ring on my finger.

  Finally, one sunny April afternoon, on the day Greeks celebrate their independence, we got married at the Plaza Hotel in the “Gold and White Suite” on the second floor, overlooking the very corner where the Greek marching bands turned from Fifth Avenue into Central Park South. Given that I was also celebrating my independence, marching bands seemed entirely appropriate, even though the martial music of the parade drowned out the entire ceremony. I couldn’t hear a word the rabbi said.