Return of the Native

It will be 20 years in June since Judy Garland died in her London apartment of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. She is still, I think, the most unforgettable and poignant symbol of both the triumphs and the tragedies of the Hollywood experience, her life more dramatic than most movies.

For a few years it seemed as if she had willed her ravishing talents but also her emotional fragility to her daughters. Liza Minnelli has had her well-chronicled battles with substance abuse, except that she conquered them and has gone on to a successful one-woman show at Carnegie Hall last fall and a rousing concert tour with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

Lorna Luft, born of Judy’s third marriage to Sid Luft, was still a teen-ager when she appeared in concerts and vaudeville with her mother in the ‘60s. Her troubles have been less conspicuous but in their time not less painful.

She did a little remembering one afternoon last week as she relaxed before her Wednesday night opening at the Hollywood Roosevelt’s Cinegrill, which is virtually the last uptown nightclub venue in Los Angeles. It is her first live local appearance here since she played Studio One a decade ago. “I didn’t avoid the trauma,” she said. “I had a problem, but I beat it. It was just that there wasn’t any Betty Ford Clinic then. Nobody was going in and then coming out and talking about it. I’m proud of the people who’ve done that, come out and said, ‘I had a problem and if you can learn from me, I hope you will.’

“From the time I was 19 until I was 22, I was raving mad. I don’t know how Jake (Hooker, the rock musician-composer she later married) stayed with me.”

Luft had a friend who told her, “You’re in trouble and you need help. I don’t care if you ever talk to me again; I’m going to find you that help and see you through this.”

“If you have one friend like that in your life, you’re very, very lucky,” Luft says. A clinic in New York straightened her out. She and Hooker were married in 1976, when she was 24. She is now 36, and they have a son, Jesse, who is 4. They had met when she was 15 and he was going with Peter Allen’s sister.

Being Judy Garland’s daughter has inevitably opened some doors, but it has not necessarily opened them very wide. “I don’t think I’ve had it any easier or any harder than most performers,” she says. “Maybe a little harder, because more has been expected of me.”

A dismal low point in the early years after her mother died was a hotel engagement in Atlantic City when she was billboarded as Judy Garland’s daughter and Liza Minnelli’s sister, with her own name in a type size that needed binoculars to be seen. Not only that, she says, “I followed Wanda the Diving Horse.”

But Luft has done what you have to do, which is work to create an image and a reputation of her own. She played Peppermint Patty in “Snoopy” in New York for nine months. She appeared in “Grease 2,” her first movie. Marvin Hamlisch and others built a night-club act for her and she played the shrinking skein of venues until eight years ago. She co-starred with Farrah Fawcett in New York in “Extremities.”

“We were both trying to prove something,” Luft says of the “Extremities” experience. “Farrah wanted to prove that she was not just hair and teeth, and I wanted to prove I was not just a singer. It was a tough play to do and Farrah was always cut and bruised from being thrown around. We’d sit backstage afterward and say, ‘Isn’t this glamorous?’ She’s a wonderful actress and I’d trust her with my life onstage.” More recently, she did “Girl Crazy” for the Nederlanders in Detroit.

Four years ago, Luft and Hooker moved from New York back to Los Angeles, where she could do television work (22 episodes of “Trapper John”). She then decided to try the nightclub wars again.

“I asked myself what I would like to do, what would I be most comfortable doing. And I thought: the songs I grew up with, the movie songs. It’s tough doing clubs; you’re battling the liquor, the cigarettes, the talking. You’d better be singing something you love singing.”

She just finished an engagement with Don Rickles at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas. “It’ll ruin his image if I say so, but he’s really a very nice man,” she says. “I worked with him in 1972. My mother used to cut short her act in Vegas so she could catch him in the lounge. We fell on the floor laughing. It’s the way she and Liza and I got through things, being able to laugh.”

Laughter is a lesson learned. She communicates other lessons to the apprentices she teaches at the Burt Reynolds Theater in Florida. “I tell them two things have truly helped me. The first is to remember that it’s not brain surgery, it’s show business. There’s probably going to be another part. You can’t let yourself take it that seriously.

“The other thing is to hang on to your priorities. They’ll start to go on you. For example, I’d come home from a reading and I’d pace the floor and be wildly neurotic. But now I have a child, and you become unselfish, less self-centered. Pancakes and school are the most important things in my life and that’s important.

“Don’t let anything get in the way of relationships, I tell the kids. They’ll be there when nothing else is. You may not even be in the business tomorrow. If you start thinking it’s all real, you’re in real trouble. It can blow up any time.

“Most of the people who grew up in the industry are the nicest, because they understand this.”

On the other hand, good things happen. Liza and Lorna went to Paris for a quick, larky birthday celebration last year, and out of it came a bimonthly series of specials Lorna is doing for French television, called “Through the Eyes of Lorna.” The first, shot in Detroit, looks in on the Frank, Liza and Sammy show. “Not a bad cast,” she says. Not bad.