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9780671019006: Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir
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The question follows Lorna Luft to this day: "What's it like to be Dorothy's daughter?" Although by appearances glamorous and truly thrilling, growing up as the daughter of Judy Garland was anything but a journey over the rainbow.
With unsparing candor, Lorna Luft offers the first-ever insider portrait of one of Hollywood's most celebrated families: a rare story of a little girl, her half-sister Liza, and her baby brother trying desperately to hang on to the mother whose life seemed destined to burn brightly but briefly. Lorna makes an extraordinary journey back into the spiral of love, addiction, pain, and loss that lurked behind a charmed facade.
Filled with behind-the-scenes dramas, hilarious untold stories, and little-known details of Garland family life, Me and My Shadows is a tribute to Lorna's victory over her own past, a story of hope, of love and its limitations, and a deeply moving testament to the healing powers of embracing one's past and charting a course of self-love and discovery.

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About the Author:
Lorna Luft made her television debut singing "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" on her mother's 1963 Christmas special. She has appeared on and off Broadway in Lolita, Promises, Promises, and Snoopy; in national tours of Grease, They're Playing Our Song, and Guys and Dolls; at the Rainbow Room, the Hollywood Bowl, and the White House; in the television series Trapper John, M.D., and Caroline in the City; and as Paulette in the movie Grease 2. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and daughter.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter One: Born in a Blender
When people refer to my family's life as a tragedy, they completely miss the point. My life has been filled with exhilarating highs, terrifying lows, and more than its share of farce. But if I've learned anything along the way, it's that everyone's show must go on, and it's up to us to make it a good one.
Born in a trunk? No, that was my mother. I was three years old before my mother packed me up and took the family on the road.
Me? I was born in a blender.
My aunt Jimmy (my Mama's sister Virginia) used to tell a great story about my ancestors. She said that after church one day when she was about eleven, she asked my grandfather, "Dad, what are your 'forefathers'?" (That had been the topic of the sermon that day.) Before my grandfather could answer, my mother, who was only about five at the time, piped up with an answer. Interrupting her father, Mama proudly told her sister, "I know. The 'four fathers' are the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and the real one." Everyone laughed, but Mama couldn't understand why. It made perfect sense to her.
To understand how I've gotten to this place in my life, I have to go back into the past, back two generations to a couple of stagestruck kids -- my grandparents.
From the day my grandfather ran off to join the circus, my family on Mama's side has been in show business. A talent for singing and dancing ties together four generations of us, from my grandmother and grandfather Gumm to my seven-year-old daughter, Vanessa. Everyone has always said that my mother would sing if the refrigerator light came on. So will my daughter. And so would my grandparents.
I guess you could say my grandparents were destined to meet. My maternal grandfather, Frank Gumm, seems to have been born loving music. He sang everywhere -- at home, at school, as a soloist in the church choir. By the time his parents died, he already knew what he wanted to do. So when a minstrel troupe passed through his hometown near Nashville, Tennessee, Grandpa ran away with them for a while. After that he and his brother earned some money singing on the trains that ran from Murfreesboro to Chattanooga, my grandpa passing a hat among the passengers at the end of the act. There's a snapshot of Grandpa in blackface at thirteen dressed like Al Jolson, holding a ukulele and wearing a bowler hat, vest, and black string tie. In 1899 you couldn't get more dapper than that.
A summer or two later Grandpa returned home and went back to the life of a proper young southern gentleman. He enrolled as a scholarship student at Sewanee Military Academy, a private prep school near home. A rich suitor of his sister Mary (a young woman with a sweet soprano who eventually caused a family scandal by killing herself) paid for his tuition, and Grandpa's warm, mellow tenor voice made up for his mediocre grades. He led the choir as a soloist, enjoyed the leisurely southern way of life, and developed the powerful Irish charm and sense of style that stayed with him for the rest of his life. My family has sometimes survived on charm alone.
Four years later he moved on to the University of the South, where he again made a name for himself with his musical talent and his way with the ladies. He left the university two years before graduation to go back to his career in vaudeville, this time for real. He loved his school, but he loved show business more. I know how he felt. I spent most of my childhood hoping show business would get me out of school.
Several hundred miles later, he arrived in Superior, Wisconsin. It was there, on a cold winter day in 1914, that he met my grandmother Ethel.
Somehow it seems fitting that my grandparents met in a movie theater -- the Parlor Theater, as a matter of fact. Grandpa had gotten a job there as an "illustrator." Grandma was his accompanist. The rage during those years was the sing-along, where the audience would sing with the performers during the breaks between films. The lyrics were projected on the movie screen, and an "illustrator" would be hired to point at the lyrics with a long stick as he led the audience in singing. If the audience liked the song, they would buy the sheet music on the way out. It was tough to keep the audience's attention, but my grandfather, with his beautiful tenor and handsome good looks, was a natural. He also got a chance to show off his talents with a song or two of his own choice.
Since this was many years before the arrival of recorded background music, a pianist had to be hired to accompany not only the performers but also the silent films that were the main draw. As fate would have it, the accompanist the day my grandfather rolled into town was my grandmother, Ethel Marion Milne. She was twenty years old (though she later claimed, in a burst of vanity, that she was really only seventeen!). Grandma Ethel looked up from the orchestra pit with those piercing black eyes of hers, and my grandpa promptly fell head over heels in love. The song he was singing, according to family legend, was "You Made Me Love You."
Grandma Ethel came from a musical tradition of her own. One of seven children of a railroad engineer and his wife, she'd dropped out of school by the fifth grade to help the family make ends meet. Even so, she managed to get the musical education she'd always longed for. She played the piano by ear as a child and eventually took lessons, at a quarter a lesson, with money she earned herself. By the time she was a teenager, she was good enough to get a job in a five-and-dime store singing and playing sheet music for the customers, as her daughter (my mom) would someday do in In the Good Old Summertime, with Van Johnson. Grandma Ethel had only an average contralto voice, which most people described as "pleasant" but my mother described as "terrible." Her brother John also sang, in later years performing as a soloist in my grandfather Gumm's act, and her little sister Norma was a singer and dancer too. My great-grandmother Eva spent years accompanying Aunt Norma on the road, even to Hollywood, as Norma tried unsuccessfully to dance and sing her way to fame. For a while she performed in Los Angeles as part of what was nicknamed "the beef trust," a chorus line of pudgy woman dancers.
Yes, along with musical talent, a tendency to put on weight also runs in my family.
Once married, Grandma and Grandpa Gumm put together an act and called themselves Jack and Virginia Lee, Sweet Southern Singers. I'm not sure which was the biggest stretch of the truth, calling Grandma's voice "sweet" or calling her southern (fifty years later my Gumm relatives still called Grandma Ethel "that northern girl"). Anyhow, "Jack and Virginia" did pretty well. As my mother later remembered it, the act always opened the same way. When the curtain came up, Grandma would be sitting at a piano and Grandpa would be standing next to her. After introducing both of them in that southern drawl of his, he would ask Grandma to show the audience how tiny her hands were. Straightening her small body, she would hold her hands up to the audience so they could see how tiny her fingers were. Then, turning back to the piano, she would launch into "Alexander's Ragtime Band," her fingers racing over the keys. The bit always got a huge burst of applause.
A year later Grandma Ethel got sick on tour, and they had to stay over with relatives for a while. The flu turned out to be my aunt Suzy, born in September 1915. Two years later my aunt Jimmy was born. With two babies to take care of, my grandparents decided that their traveling days were over.
So they settled down. After looking around a little, they decided to work in the only thing they knew much about: a theater. To raise cash Grandpa sold his "flasher," the big diamond ring he wore on his fourth finger when he played his ukulele onstage; and they eventually invested everything they had in the New Grand, a motion picture house in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Grandpa managed the theater and Grandma played the piano for the films, and they both performed between pictures as "Jack and Virginia Lee" when Grandma wasn't too busy taking care of babies. All in all, they did well. The theater prospered along with the family, and soon they were directing the church choir (Grandma played the organ), running the local amateur show, and hosting a big percentage of the parties in town.
Loving a good party runs in my family too.
It wasn't long before "Jack and Virginia" became a family act -- the Four Gumms. As soon as my aunts were old enough, my grandmother began putting together an act for them. Suzy and Jimmy had been singing along with their parents at home for as long as they could remember, and when guests came to the house, as they frequently did, the girls would sing for them, too. So it was only natural that they soon joined their parents onstage. They'd grown up sitting in the New Grand every night while their parents performed, so the stage there was already a familiar part of their second home. By the time my aunt Suzy (Mary Jane) was five, she and Aunt Jimmy (Virginia) were practicing along with the Duncan Sisters on their wind-up Victrola. Grandma Ethel coached their singing, taught them simple dance steps, and sewed them fancy costumes. What they lacked in harmony they made up for in volume and enthusiasm, and soon they were a popular part of the Friday night entertainments at the New Grand.
The Gumm family act seemed complete. My grandparents were happy with their little family and didn't plan to have any more children. Lucky for me, though, things didn't go as planned. Four years after my aunt Jimmy was born, Grandma Ethel discovered there'd been an accident. That little accident was Mama.
Once she came along, nothing was ever the same.

Mama always loved to make an entrance. When she did arrive, at dawn on June 10, 1922, she looked like a tiny version of Grandma Ethel. They named her Frances, after her father -- Frances Ethel Gumm -- but nobody ever called her Frances. They just called her Baby. Once my grandfather got a look at her big dark eyes, be forgot that he'd been wanting a boy and fell hopelessly in love with Baby.
Mama would have that effect on people for the rest of her life.
The truth is, whatever Mama might say about it years later, everybody loved her. Even her big sisters, jealous as they were at times, found her irresistible. Every picture I have of her as a child shows this pixielike creature with big black eyes, skinny legs, a tiny body, and enough life in her face for any ten people. Even in her baby pictures, her eyes draw you. And now, except for the color of her eyes, my daughter, Vanessa, looks exactly like her.
Mama's stage debut came at the tender age of two. She had grown up watching her family sing at home and in her parents' theater, and from the time she could toddle, she was running out onstage to try to join them. At home she would stand behind her sisters when they practiced their numbers and try to imitate them. At the theater on Friday nights she'd stand backstage in the wings, peeking out at Suzy and Jimmy as they sang and danced. As soon as she could talk, she began begging to join them. When her parents said no, she'd scream and cry. Then one day, when she was just two, her father decided to teach her the words to "My Country, 'Tis of Thee", and to his amazement, she sang it right through to the end. Her father was her only audience at that first performance, and he was amazed. As Grandpa told Grandma when she got home, "Baby Gumm is good, she is." Years later Mama told me she still remembered those words of praise from Grandpa.
The time had clearly come to let Baby Gumm make her debut. As she sat in Great-grandma Eva's lap at her sisters' Christmas Eve performance that year, she did her best to sing along with her sisters. After the performance, urged on by Grandma Eva, she edged up to her mother and whispered, "Mama, can I sing, too?" Grandma Ethel told her no, not that day, but promised she could sing two days later. "Not today, Baby -- but soon."
Grandma kept her promise. Mama already knew some of the words to "Jingle Bells," so Grandma Ethel coached her until she knew it perfectly, complete with a small bell to ring at the appropriate moment. Grandma also made her a little sleeveless dress out of white netting, with a white bodice underneath and sprigs of holly pinned on by Suzy and Jimmy. With soft bangs and her hair curled into shoulder-length ringlets, Mama couldn't have looked sweeter. When her turn came and her father gently pushed her onstage, she strode confidently downstage center. She was so tiny that she looked even younger than the two-year-old she was. The audience couldn't believe she was going to sing.
If my grandparents were worried about Mama as she stood there that night, they didn't need to be. As Grandma Ethel began the first notes of "Jingle Bells" on the piano in the pit below, Mama launched into her number on perfect pitch, with astonishing volume, keeping time with her little bell. When she finished her song, to wildly enthusiastic applause, she looked down at Grandma Ethel and announced, "I wanna sing some more." And she did. Grandma hurried to catch up on the piano, doubled up with laughter the whole time, while Grandpa hissed to Mama from the wings, "Baby, come off! Come off!" Mama, of course, ignored him and kept on singing. (She'd be doing that the rest of her life!)
Each time she got to the end of the song, she'd pause, take a bow, and start all over again. By then the audience was applauding and cheering, and Grandma was too busy playing the piano to stop her. Finally, after the fifth chorus, Grandpa went onstage, picked Mama up, threw her over his shoulder, and carried her off -- still singing and ringing her little bell as he took her into the wings. Friends in the audience that night swear they could still her hear when she got backstage.
The love affair between Mama and her audience started that night.
There were now three singing Gumm Sisters. If they'd stuck to Friday night performances in my grandfather Gumm's theater, nobody but me and my family would even remember them. But they didn't stay in Grand Rapids. When my mom was four years old, the whole family went to California on vacation and then decided to move there permanently. The Grand Rapids newspaper lists at least six going-away parties in their honor, one a big banquet at the Episcopal church where my grandfather was choirmaster. That move would change our family forever.
My grandparents needed money for the long trip, so they decided to touch up their old vaudeville act and take it on the road. They must have stopped in nearly every little town from Minnesota to Los Angeles. Whenever they passed through a town with a movie theater and a stage, they stopped and made their pitch to the manager. Most of the time, the manager made a deal for a percentage of the house. The whole family would run around town putting up posters on fences and posts, then go get dressed in the restroom at the nearest gas station. "Jack and Virginia" would perform that night, with the three girls sitting in the front row, applauding as loudly as possible. If they were lucky, they got offered a second night. Sometimes, to sweeten the pot, my grandparents would offer to let the Gumm Sisters perform, too. Since it was pretty hard to resist three little girls, especially my mother with her big black eyes, the managers usually went for it. By the end of the evening the family usually had enough gas and food money to move on. It wasn't a good way to get rich, but it was a lot of fun, and it paid enough to get them the two thousand miles to California.
My mother never forgot that trip. Even though she was only four years old at the time, it remained one of her best childhood memories. And even th...

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  • PublisherGallery Books
  • Publication date1999
  • ISBN 10 0671019007
  • ISBN 13 9780671019006
  • BindingPaperback
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages432
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