Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me... by Stevie Phillips Page A

other person, but not Judy, who lived in a make-believe world.
    She would sometimes tell me the romantic things David told her, and I knew they were all lies. She giggled like a schoolgirl when she confided: “We’re making wonderful plans to travel.” Travel with David? He was a different kind of addict: a gambler and a workaholic who went on vacation only when forced to by his wife, and this is exactly what had happened. Lee Begelman had her social set, a finite group of wealthy couples, the wives of which performed good works mostly for themselves, and who spent hours on the phone each day discussing how to spend their husbands’ money. One day Lee announced that they were all going yachting in the Greek Islands, and off David went with a small library to forfend against the boredom he suffered around Lee’s entitled entourage. He told Judy he was going to London on business. “What plans are you and David making?” I asked Judy. “We’ll rent a marvelous big yacht just for the two of us, and we’ll cruise the Greek Islands.” There’s no other word for it. David was a cruel man.
    It hurt me to see Judy taken in by David’s outrageousness, but I could not or would not attempt to convince her that David loved no one but himself. She believed what she wanted to believe, and in spite of their fights about his prolonged absences, regardless of his limp ad-libbing about his failure to get a divorce, Judy remained a believer. And now David had come to Boston to attend her concert and was dressing in a room almost next door when she slit her wrist. Judy Garland would show him. Judy Garland would die for him. Who was Judy Garland really punishing? It wasn’t David Begelman.
    I made a tourniquet out of a towel and a hairbrush. Then I picked up the phone to call David while Judy sat docilely by. She didn’t cry or scream or have any reaction at all, for that matter. She was standing when she did it; now she sat down on the bed and, staring straight ahead, calmly waited for David to arrive. David immediately called for a doctor, and one arrived in record time; in fact he got there so fast it made my mind spin a fiction that Judy had stationed him downstairs in the bar in advance for her own nefarious purpose. That, of course, is ridiculous, but I do have a sense that she knew what she was doing, that in fact she had planned it. Could she have known that what she had done or the way she had done it was not serious enough to cause a major problem? It sounds awful to even think such a thing because the slice she made looked ghastly, but that may be the truth of this horror. Maybe this was not so much a suicide attempt as it was a scream: I hurt! Come take care of me. Come love me!
    It was a gash in a life careening out of control, a huge, ugly gash that would hopefully make David see her, and see the pain that was tearing her apart. If she did it for effect, the effect on me was shattering. I was angry that she would do such a terrible thing to herself, and, at the same time, do it to me. My anger filled a space in my being like air filling a balloon. And I didn’t know how to show it. I even felt guilty for having it. How could I be angry at someone who was so sick? Well, it is possible. The anger stayed with me for a long time, for years, until the balloon inside me got so old and weak that all the anger seeped out. Only the picture remains.
    Put her in an institution. Get her the help she needs! That’s the scream that was raging in me. It never came out of my mouth. Could anyone have institutionalized Judy without her permission? Maybe not, but it didn’t matter because there were no candidates. Everyone was too busy exploiting her. To this day I think I should have tried harder to get her the help she so obviously needed. I should have appealed to David to get her serious attention. I should at least have tried. I didn’t. I knew then as I know now that any