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

plea for saving Judy would have been gratuitous, made for wanting to hear the sound of my own voice—for all the attention such a plea would have received. But maybe had I at least given lip service to this tragedy I might have felt less guilty. Here’s my cop-out: I was only a foot soldier doing my duty. And my duty was to obey orders. There was only Do the job and shut up, or quit. I’ll say it again. Quitting wasn’t ever an option.
    When I describe what followed, you may find it despicable. I do. I was repulsed by my own behavior, but I knew I was doing what Judy wanted me to do. “Here’s a hundred,” David said, peeling a bill off a large roll and putting it into my hand. “Buy enough bracelets to cover the bandages.” Judy sat by, admiring David’s take-charge capability. There wasn’t an iota of protest from her. Under the circumstances one might think she would want to go to the hospital, or at least pull the covers up over her head. Wasn’t anyone going to cancel the concert and give her tender, loving care? Heavens no! Judy was now ready to go out onstage, and if Judy intended to perform that night knowing full well that she had slit her wrist on the way to the theater, so be it. If buying bracelets to cover her wrist was the only thing I had to do to hold on to my job this night, I would do it. “Hurry,” Judy told me. I ran out into the streets of Boston to find a store where I could buy enough cheap bangles to cover the bandages the doctor had put on her wrist. It wasn’t so easy at seven o’clock on a Saturday night, but I was on a mission and I would do whatever I had to—beg, borrow, or steal—to get her onstage. And get there she did. She did such a wonderful show no one could have suspected she wasn’t at the top of her form. On second thought, maybe she was.
    That Judy desperately needed help was clear even to a naive dummy like me. I was brought up to believe that when someone was ill, you took him or her to the doctor. But the point here is that “doctor” (as opposed to pill pusher) was not the help she wanted. It wasn’t the kind of help she felt she needed, and it wasn’t the kind of help she would have accepted. It was a hard lesson for me.

 
    CHAPTER NINE
    Reality Checks
    I was wearing chicken soup stains the day Judy called me out onstage to sing “Just in Time” with her. No, I’m not making this up. I didn’t think it would ever happen, although she had threatened to do it at the last concert, and that day was now here. It was the culmination of a tour to establish her reliability that had taken us on the road for months in 1961, against the hope that Hollywood would take another chance on her. Freddie’s strategy had proved successful. Alas, that afternoon I spilled soup down the front of my beautiful, almost-new, brown wool A-line dress when a lumpy electrician backed into me with a ladder in a place where I should never have been standing. This is what happens when you drink your lunch standing up.
    The lovely Lanz dress, soft and warm when I’d zipped it up early that morning, was now ruined and still wet around the chest area from repeated soakings in several of the Armory’s bathrooms. I hadn’t brushed my hair all day, and one heel was barely hanging on to its shoe. Judy couldn’t’ve cared less about what I looked like as I stood in the wings as usual for the encores, a towel hung over my right arm like a Victorian maitre d’, and the earphones I’d used in the light booth to call the show still hanging around my neck. She did take away the liebfraumilch in my right hand and passed it off to a stagehand paging the curtain, lest I walk out holding booze the audience might think was hers. Then she grabbed my arm and pulled, and suddenly I was out onstage, framed in the spotlight, and totally terrified that I was really going to have to sing. My