Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir by Lorna Luft Page B

the original movie posters, with her grandmother’s face, hangs in Vanessa’s room. Vanessa does have a pair of “Dorothy shoes” of her own. My mother would love it.
    M y mother entered the “magic gates” of MGM when she was only a child. She was twenty-eight when she walked out of those studio gates the last time, but she’d already lived several lifetimes.
    Leaving MGM wasn’t her only parting in 1950. Although theyremained legally married for another year, my mother and Vincente were parting, too. They lived in the same house for a few more weeks that November, but they both knew the marriage was over. When she left Los Angeles to spend a few weeks in New York that fall, she already considered herself a free woman.
    It’s been forty-eight years since my mother walked out of her second marriage. She had no way of knowing when she left for New York that my dad would be there and what that would mean in her life.
    One thing is certain. The day my father met Mama, he walked into a tornado of his own. Oh, they were a pair. Not exactly Romeo and Juliet or Tracy and Hepburn, but one of the great couples nevertheless.

Collection of the author
    With my mother and father on the set of A Star Is Born.

CHAPTER 3

A Star Is Born
    M y mother’s presence fills my father’s house. Almost thirty years after her death, he still speaks of her as if she might walk into the room at any minute. His expression changes from mischievous to tender to heartbreakingly sad, for my mother was all of those things. The emotions flit across his face like a series of frames from a movie projector. Endlessly charming, occasionally belligerent, my dad, the self-styled “Hollywood tough guy,” speaks of my mother with the humor and passion of a true romantic, Bogie’s screen image come to life. In the midst of a sardonic little anecdote about Mama having “one of her fits,” he will suddenly look directly into someone’s eyes and say, “We loved each other, you know. I loved her, not the legend, the woman. Do you understand what that means?” And just as suddenly, the passion recedes, and he finishes his story. For him, the past is more a place than a time; his mind is the boundary that encloses a territory of the heart he can visit at will. For him, my mother is still alive there.
    My dad recently turned eighty-one, but he remembers the day he met my mother as if it were yesterday. Late one night she was eating dinner with a male friend in Billy Reed’s Little Club in New York when my dad walked in. She had just recently been terminated by MGM and was in New York to recover and have a goodtime. My dad knew my mom’s friend, and when he went over to the table to say hello, the friend introduced Sid to my mother. My father’s a good-looking man, and my mother was one to notice. That night she simply smiled sweetly and, a bit absentmindedly, said hello. With that one word it was all over for my father.
    He can still describe that moment with absolute clarity, as if it were frozen in time. My mother was wearing a gold coat, a black dress, and a little pillbox hat. Her hair was cut short, and her big dark eyes glowed in the dim light of the club. But it’s my mother’s voice he remembers the most. That voice, that wonderful voice of hers, so unique even in speaking. That simple “hello,” as my father tells it, wasn’t only Mama’s voice speaking. “When you met her, she’d say, ‘hello,’ and you’d fall down. The voice would kill you. In a sense, you would drop dead every time she talked to you. When she talked, the voice was Dorothy and Meet Me in St. Louis and Easter Parade and a whole string of movies going through your head. It was this mystique she had, like magic.” All these years later—after eleven years of marriage, and a messy divorce, and all the pain—he still remembers the magic.
    My mother was so beautiful, even more than you could see on the screen. She had the most incredible skin I’ve ever seen. It was