No one knows the truth about a show-business legend better than someone with an insider’s view, such as Lorna Luft.
She felt compelled to write a biography of her superstar mother that became a best seller, and it’s now an ABC miniseries. “Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows” airs Sunday and Monday (8 p.m.), with Judy Davis (“Husbands and Wives,” “Absolute Power”) in the title role of the child star — born Frances Gumm — whose success endured into her adult years, when her addictions to pills and alcohol took huge tolls on her personal and professional lives. (She died of a sleeping-pill overdose in 1969 at age 47.)
Those who figured into her life included her ambitious mother (played by Marsha Mason), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio mogul Louis B. Mayer (Al Waxman, who died after completing the part), singing coach Roger Edens (John Benjamin Hickey), and Garland’s husbands Vincente Minnelli (Hugh Laurie) and Sid Luft (Victor Garber). Tammy Blanchard (“Guiding Light”) portrays Garland in her younger years.
Also a co-executive producer of the drama, Lorna Luft says she has seen it so many times by now, “I could do interpretive dance to it. The first time I watched it, I just sat there and took notes. Then, I really started to think about it and realized we had made something quite unique. All of my production partners also gave their notes, and I came back from the Christmas holiday really excited to see what it looked like, knowing what had been cut and what had been put back.
“Even with that, it was a rough thing for me to watch,” Luft allows. “It takes you on a real emotional roller coaster. I told my husband (musician Colin Freeman), `I need a pair of fresh eyes on this.’ I asked him to watch it, and even though he’s a very English, stiff-upper-lip type, he was a mess at the end. I’ve also shown it to other people, and they’re stunned when it’s over. They tell me it’s like nothing they’ve ever seen on television.”
“The E! True Hollywood Story” recently did an installment on Garland’s final days, and Luft deems that yet another reason to tell the saga her way. “There’s no one else to tell it (straight) except for one of us, her children,” she reasons. “Coming from ex-husbands or anyone else, it would be a different story. I wrote my book to put to bed some rumors that have been out there forever, and to tell everyone that there was a lot more there than Dorothy (Garland’s ‘Wizard of Oz’ character).
“That was the same tone we used in the miniseries,” Luft adds. “We never tell ‘Z’ before we tell ‘A,’ so you get to know my mother as a human being and completely understand her. Your heart goes out to her, and you’re always pulling for her. I spent many hours with the miniseries’ director (Robert Allan Ackerman) discussing how she would feel at certain points, and we spoke to people like her makeup man at MGM. We went to a lot of sources who were really there.”
Luft says Judy Davis was the only choice to play Garland. Fellow producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron had worked with the actress on NBC’s “Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story,” and Luft observes, “She’s just so extraordinary, the minute you say her name to anybody in the industry, there’s this immediate ‘Wow!’ reaction. They view her as god-like and awesome, but people on the street don’t know her. Well, they will now. I always knew the person to play this part would have to be very smart and incredibly talented, but most important to me was to know my mother would have liked the person. She would have loved Judy Davis.”
Actually, Davis agreed to do the project before the script was finished. Luft reports, “We didn’t feel we could approach her before we had our final draft, but her agent called Craig and Neil and said, `Judy is looking to do something musical.’ We just about fell on the floor, then told the agent, `Boy, do we have something for you.’ Even after she signed up for this, she had a lot of apprehension about it, and I couldn’t blame her. It was a huge thing to take on.”
