I’d just finished screaming at my secretary. I might have made her cry. I didn’t know or care. She’d lost the call I’d been waiting for all day. She left my office with a quivering lower lip like I’d just killed her puppy. I scooted back a carefully laid paper tent on my twelve-foot imported marble desk, held a rolled-up bill to my nostril, and repeated what I’d already done five times so far that day.
A studio friend called earlier that day about a woman he’d met who was convinced that she was the lost love child of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. She wanted to blow the lid off the story, he told me, and needed to contact her half sisters. I kept waiting for the part where I gave a shit. He said if I could get a book deal, he would kick out some money to develop the film.
“Have her call me,” I said, hung up, did another line of coke on the polished surface in front of me. An hour later, my “I’m not a secretary, I’m an assistant” from Wisconsin, buzzed in to explain that there was a hysterical woman on the phone. I knew who it was.
“Set a meeting,” I told her, not taking the call while using my gold card to carefully divide an anthill of white powder into four evenly spaced bars.
A few days later, a cloudburst of nervous energy swirled into my doorway nearly three beats ahead of its source. I stared at the woman, stunned by the apparent family resemblance to Liza and Lorna. I knew a white rail was waiting for me on the other side of this conversation. I wanted the meeting over before it began.
I offered the woman a seat. Her purse overflowed with papers looking as if they were trying to escape. She plopped her bag on the floor. Getting her bearings, her head swiveled around the room until she finally figured out that she should sit in the burgundy velvet chair facing me. There was a more comfortable seating area in my oversized office, but in meetings like this, with someone of dubious value, I preferred to square off across an acreage of desktop.
She took a deep breath, began to make her well-rehearsed case, and finally came up for air again after what seemed like a full workweek. I wonder if she’d notice if I left for just a second. In one endless sentence, she raced through the details and corroboration of her absolute conviction that she was, in fact, Judy and Gene’s daughter. Watching her flutter and fidget, I had to admit that she did possess the legendary twitch, or maybe she’d just watched Meet Me In St. Louis once too often, and she had photos; lots and lots of pictures that she claimed as hard evidence.
According to the woman I’d already mentally dubbed “Lizorna,” Judy had fallen in love with Gene Kelly while filming The Pirate. According to her, their torrid affair happened behind their dressing room doors.
“It wasn’t until they wrapped the movie that my mother discovered she was pregnant with me. She had to start Easter Parade right away and Louis B. Mayer ordered her to get an abortion, but my mother refused.” She shuddered as she mentioned Mayer’s name.
Immediately after shooting wrapped, she explained, Judy was hustled off in the middle of night to the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, where a discreet doctor delivered Lizorna. The doctor and his family, taken with Judy’s plight, agreed to keep the birth a secret, and adopted the baby themselves.
“Not that they didn’t take some cash, too,” she said with a sneer.
Lizorna stared at me, her voice becoming more insistent with each picture thrown down onto the desk. She’s getting too close to my stash. I was looking for an escape route. Leaping through the plate-glass of my sixteenth-floor window began to seem like a viable option.
“See? This is a baby picture of Gene Kelly and here’s one of me. Do you see the resemblance?” She was growing shrill. My ears hurt. I shrugged. Babies all looked alike. I wanted another line. “And look. Here’s a picture of my mother on the set of Easter Parade. Do you see now? Look! The costume designer had to fit all of her clothes for a woman who was five months pregnant!”
I’m sure she hadn’t taken more than three breaths since she started clomping down memory lane. Looking down at the still of Judy Garland, taken from her left side, I thought that she looked a little, just maybe, possibly expectant.
I hollered for my secretary. She slunk in, doe-eyed and meek, and when I asked what she thought from my quick synopsis of the story, she looked lost. What did I do to deserve this? She was my fifth one in nine months.
“Here’s a picture of Liza as a baby and one of Lorna as a baby and one of Judy as a baby, and look! Here is Gene Kelly from The Pirate and doesn’t he look in love?” Lizorna looked at me, her eyes pleading for some validation. I asked her a few questions about her upbringing, about her father the doctor, and how she came upon this theory.
“Theory?” she snapped, with a laugh that played to the back row. She jumped out of her chair and started to grandly collect her photos.
“Huh?”
“You mean my truth!” She flopped back into the chair. Oh, God, she’s never going to leave. “I just have to find my sisters.”
I watched her arrange her pictures again in a sort of pre-determined truth trail, and I assured her I found her life story a compelling inspiration for a book. The notion of a long-lost heir to Hollywood royalty coming to crash the party intrigued me. I thought I could potentially get her a deal. Finally, I was able to direct her through the double doors of my office, making sure she at least received parking validation.
There was one person I thought might take the bait. I can’t remember if Kitty Kelley’s tell-all on Frank Sinatra had already been published yet or not, but I was sure that if anyone could do the research and sell this project, it would have been Kitty. I tracked her down through a friend, spilling out Lizorna’s story in what I had hoped was a more coherent narrative. Kitty told me that she would dig around a little bit and call me back. A few days later, she did.
Kitty explained that she’d found no information to support Lizorna’s claims and she was starting a new project that would rule out any possibility of further investigation. She thanked me for thinking of her. Sidetracked with other projects and an endless supply of cocaine, I didn’t think of it at all until Lizorna called me a few weeks later.
“Well?”
“Kitty Kelley is working on another project right now and she has passed––” “Can I meet her?”
“I’m afraid not. I can pitch it to a few other people, but the subject seems too hot to handle,” I said, adding the last part in the hapless hope that the prospect of controversy would excite her.
“That’s been the story of my life!” Lizorna yelled at me. She was upset, but I think she was born that way. “No one wants to hear the truth! No one! And I’m real! I’m a real person!” She had just jumped over the rainbow’s edge.
“If I’m able to move this forward at all, I promise to call you,” I said with reptile calm, playing with the track of white on my dark desk, carefully arranging it, tending to it like a Zen gardener, just waiting for the end of this pointless waste of my time.
She choked out a “good-bye” and hung up. I sat for a second, wondering why this woman had concocted this odd tale. What had fed her life-long need for attention, her dogged search for her truth? Maybe she was right; she could well have been one more hushed Hollywood secret. I started to pity her, for all of about ten seconds, then took another call, did another bump, and demoted Lizorna to a party anecdote until she stopped getting an easy laugh, then I just let her fade away.