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

her problems if he just tried hard enough. As for managing her, he didn’t really have much of a choice. Mama demanded it of him. All her life people had been managing things for her. To my mom, taking care of her was part of loving her.
    Besides, nobody said no to my mother for long. What Mama wanted, Mama eventually got, especially where my dad was concerned.
    So from then on, my parents were in it together—planning, traveling together through Scotland and then Europe. It was romantic, and they had the time of their lives. When she was happy, Mama was more fun than anybody, and they had a grand time. Onstage my mother was a phenomenon, and offstage she was almost as exciting. My father had fallen for her hook, line, and sinker. After Mama, everyone else was dull by comparison.
    Once the Palladium opening was behind her, my mom knew that she’d found her place professionally once again. She loved being out under the lights, singing to all those people. At MGM she’d played to a soundstage full of crew members and recording machines. Now she was singing to a live audience once again, people who laughed and cried and were mesmerized by her presence. It was astonishing, like being two years old again and singing “Jingle Bells” to delighted applause. For my mother, it was more exciting, and more addictive, than any medicine. Mama loved her audiences; she came alive in front of them. And now, instead of her parents applauding wildly in the front row, there was my father, cheering her on from the wings.
    It was wonderful. It was magic. It was the rebirth of a legend.
    When they returned to the U.S. at the end of the tour, my dad searched for ways to keep the magic going. It was my dad whoconceived the idea of my mom opening at the Palace. A vaudeville mecca in its heyday, the old Palace Theater in New York City was the ideal venue for a former Gumm Sister. My dad found the building rundown and threadbare; he and the promoters refurbished the old landmark, restoring it once again to its former splendor. In 1951 the theater was reopened by my mother, restored, like the Palace, to her glory days. No one who was there that night has ever forgotten it. It became a part of theater history.
    From then on there was no stopping my parents professionally. My dad got my mom booked at concert halls, and that same year the two of them formed Transcona Enterprises, their own corporation. My father had begun negotiating for the film rights to A Star Is Born. He planned to produce it himself, with the backing of Jack Warner and Warner Brothers. It was a perfect vehicle for my mother. The film would play into the public’s perception of her crises, and by exploiting the rumors—the headlines about pills and suicide—put them to rest. More important, it would give my mother the great acting role she’d always longed for. Best of all, my parents would use their own production company. For the first time in her career, my mother would have control over one of her films. She was thrilled, hoping the trauma of her last years at MGM would soon be a thing of the past.
    It seemed like the perfect plan, and it almost was. My father hired Vern Alves as his production assistant, and Transcona started preproduction for the movie. Then something happened that put a kink in their perfect plan. A big kink.
    My mother discovered she was pregnant with me.
    G rowing up, I had no idea that I was already on the way when my parents got married. It was just not the kind of thing your parents told you in the 1950s. I must have been seventeen or eighteen before the truth dawned on me. I knew when my parents’ wedding anniversary was, and of course, I knew when my birthday was, but I had never done the math. It had never occurred to me.
    I found out about my own conception years later from a book about my mother. By then I knew better than to believe most of what people wrote about my mother, so I decided to ask my dad. It was a memorable conversation. It