November 21st – You ever been embarrassed by one
or other of your parents? I don’t mean something lightweight, something like
meeting either of them at the local supermarket only to find them wearing their
slippers, that or having your father come down the stairs, on the night when
you’d invited various work colleagues round for late supper, dressed in your
mother’s negligee because he couldn’t find his dressing gown. No, I mean
something that can scar you mentally for life. Say, having a parent arrested
for being out of their wad on smack or highlighted in the national press for
cheating on their married partner with a lithe, beautiful but very young carpet
polisher.
Both sexes are prone to these little aberrations and, when
one is young and single, these alterations to what’s accepted as socially
responsible can be glossed over as the sowing of one’s wild oats. Where it starts
to get sticky (?) is when, let’s say, fame and fortune come one’s way swiftly,
followed by an often ill-advised marriage, a short sojourn down the for better for worse, in sickness and in
health, ‘til death… road before finding one’s way to wreckage park and the
arrival at an unplanned bundle of potentially career stopping joy; and when you
see some of the choices made one is amazed that the previously labelled doting
couple make it through the ceremony. I’ve covered short-lived star couplings
before here but will just revisit a couple of last year events swiftly in order
to refocus context; Nigella and Charles. WTF? It has an air of inevitability
about, don’t you think? A sort of tailor-made-for-the-red-tops story that the
gutter-press follows and comments on with such brutal glee all for the
amusement of the masses. A big mistake, taking these sorts of things to the
press because all that happens is that instead of these sorts of secrets and
behavioural quirks remaining in the family, now everyone knows about them and
they’ll be played and replayed in full colour cinemascope every time the
protagonists name’s come up in conversation; private or public. And I’m as
guilty of this sensationalist ogling as anyone…I mean, no matter how the court
case plays out, I would like to say here and now I’m a great fan of Ms. Lawson;
I watched her for ten shows before I realised she was cooking.
Remember the only sensible piece of dialogue in the totally
predictable film, Notting Hill? That
section where, after the press find out her whereabouts from Hugh Grant’s
deranged flatmate, the Julia Roberts character, Anna Scott, talks about how it
may seem like nothing to him (Hugh Grant’s character, William Thacker) that the
mucky photos are covering that day’s tabloids and, in Thacker’s words;
They’ll be tomorrow’s
fish and chip wrappers
And she replies that, on the contrary, every time anyone has
to write up anything about Anna Scott this early indiscretion will be trawled
up and replayed. Given, then, that this was a fantasy situation and they were
in an affair and so had no others to consider, how do we think the
Lawson/Saatchi debacle will prey on the lives of the children? Not well, I’d
imagine and this is, in the annals of the lives of the children of the stars,
just a little roadside scuffle. When the mega-stars come out to fuck up their
lives, I’d not be surprised if their pets didn’t need therapy too. Thing is, in
a lot of cases, these oldies are just trying to be cool and down wi’ th’ kidz
and up to a point that’s sort of OK. I mean, kids spend an awful lot of their
former years trying to be grown up (unfortunately we’re at the point now where
parents indulge them in these follies, allowing them to dress and behave
inappropriately. But although things which involve parents old enough to know
better, and their children can seem cute and an interesting add-on to their
stardom, it’s not always suitable material as they both grow older. Comments
about your daughter’s breasts (Joe Simpson) or loudly and publicly discussing
your daughter’s amorous adventures (Monica Braithwaite) or dissing your son’s
well-publicised Liberal leanings (upon which much of his culture of cool has
been built) by demonising Barack Obama as pretty much a child of Satan (Jane
Pitt) are just a few of the Heffalump traps that await the unwary. But all this
fades into insignificance when viewed through the lens that is the parental
past of Lorna Luft, born this day in 1952.
Judy Garland, told by the studio execs oft and anon that she
was unattractive and who then proceeded to manipulate her throughout her screen
career, gave life to these demons by going through five marriages (not that
being a star puts a shelf-life on one’s ability to hold a partnership
together…someone asked the other day how long I’d been married and when I told
him he replied
Christ, you’d get less
for murder
So even in my severely un-star-crossed life it would seem the
odds of me making it through my one brief sleep-over on this planet by
remaining within the same marital arrangement are seen as limited). However,
Ms. Garland’s four divorces, fiscal difficulties that would sink lesser beings,
extended stays in sanatoriums, several breakdowns and suicide attempts and a
repeated selection of alcohol and drug addictions that would eventually do for
her really are in a different league; at just 47 years old she was discovered
dead in her hotel room and described in a funeral eulogy by her fellow
performer in The Wizard of Oz, Ray
Bolger, as;
Just plain wore out
…at 47…!
With a mother who Ms. Garland herself described as;
…no good for anything
except to create chaos and fear…
it would seem that a poor start and role model for her
formative years did nothing to provide Ms. Garland with a steady foundation on
which to build her life, and particularly a life in Hollywood
I can only say, from personal experience having had the chance
to work on a show with her a couple of years ago that Ms. Garland’s daughter,
Ms. Luft, has shown remarkable resilience and a level of integrity and courage
to become the lady she is when one considers she started her life in the centre
of the storm that was her mother’s career and difficulties. A charming,
personable, dignified and very grounded woman, the stories she tells of her
mother are touching and deeply affecting, often recounted with a naiveté
stemming from a childhood spent with what, to Ms. Luft was just her mom.
So, it would seem there are times when the sins of the
fathers (mothers) cannot only be overcome but can be used as building blocks to
produce a finished building of real strength and character and much of that
credit must go to Ms. Garland who, by all accounts and in the midst of real
life challenges still found time to be a mum to her daughter.
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