`Who that lady you talking to?" asked the driver, as he pulled away from Heathrow for the return journey to London. For an hour he had been party to my interview with Lorna Luft (high-heels, black leather trousers, black rollneck) in the back of the limo.
I could - should, perhaps - have told him her name. Instead, I said what everyone has said all her life: "That was Judy Garland's daughter." He beamed and mimed pigtails. "Dorothy. Yellow Brick Road." Even in Morocco she is known. Her sister, I added, is Liza Minelli. That name meant nothing. "I think she no like her sister," he said. "I think she like herself more." While Liza is clearly a chip off the old block - the way she looks, the way she sings, the body language - Lorna is less obviously her mother's daughter. "I've inherited my mother's kindness and my mother's fierce devotion to her children. And I've definitely inherited her sense of humour and I guess her dreams." Less romantically, she also inherited her mother's capacity for addiction: to drugs, alcohol and the limelight.
For the past quarter century Lorna Luft has doggedly pursued a career as a singer and actress. Her touring debut, at a seedy nightclub, proclaimed in lights the hard road she was destined to follow: "Judy Garland's Daughter. Liza Minelli's Sister." Now, in Me And My Shadows, Lorna Luft exacts her revenge. Or so it could appear. Luft, on the other hand, sees it as setting the record straight. Far from being a bad parent Judy Garland was, she says, a wonderful mother. Far from being an alcoholic who destroyed her own talent and drank herself to death, her mother was an abused child herself, a victim of prescription drugs given to her by MGM to keep her weight down. Subtitled: A Family Story, Living With The Legacy Of Judy Garland, Me And My Shadows is less celebrity autobiography than horror story. Because whatever the trigger for Judy Garland's addiction and whatever the drugs that eventually took their toll, the result is a dysfunctional family of mythic proportions.
All three children have suffered major addiction problems. Now aged 46, Lorna Luft is clean, a convert to AA and its sister organisation for the relatives of addicts, Al Anon, which she joined not because she felt she herself needed help, but because of her sister.
"I learnt that everything I had done in my life - marrying an alcoholic, my drug problem and all of that - was textbook for children of adult addiction. And when you find out that you're a textbook, instead of feeling resentful, it's a relief." Laying bare her own and her mother's problems is one thing, I suggest, but is it right to offer up such intimate details of her sister's addiction? Lorna Luft's eyes make one of their fleeting turns in my direction. "These stories have already been talked about. That's why my editor said: `You have to address this'. Because the truth had not come out about how it happened, why it happened and the result. Her getting clean and sober. And there have been some pretty horrendous stories and I had to refute a lot of them." The sisters are not in touch. Nothing to do with the book, Luft insists. Was scourging her memory in such a public way part of her own healing process? Not at all. Neither was it to make money. (Though the book is already No 12 in the New York Times bestseller list, and no wonder. It's a compelling read.) She wrote it to help people. "It's story about how you don't have to live in the shadows any more and about how you can help yourself and take responsibility for your life and for your actions. If you don't, if you just keep sitting around in life pointing fingers at people, you're going to be in quicksand and you're not going to go anywhere." Lorna Luft's way of not pointing fingers at people is first to enumerate what they did, then say it wasn't their fault. In the 1940s and 1950s, nobody knew the implications of giving benzodrine to keep her mother slim, compounded by sleeping pills to counter their effects. And because Judy Garland was a victim herself, she can't be held responsible for her consequent behaviour.
The little family lived in a fantasy world. At the age of six, Lorna had her own suite in the Beverly Hills house which needed a staff of 13 to run it. The inflated lifestyle, not matched by income, was a discrepancy blamed by Judy Garland on her then husband and manager, Lorna's father, Sid Luft. In time it destroyed their marriage. But the armslength lifestyle during those early years had at least kept the couple's two children comparatively unaffected by the highs and lows of their mother's drugdriven existence. It was while was on holiday in Hawaii after Garland had remarried that Lorna was brought face to face with the realities of life. A fight in the middle of the night brought the 12-year-old running to the door of her mother's bungalow. Both Garland and new husband were drunk and naked. Both were covered in blood, as was the room. To avoid a scandal, Lorna spent the hours till dawn on her hands and knees cleaning the room of any traces of alcohol and blood. (The next day Garland set fire to the bungalow, in order to burn her husband's clothes. When Steve McQueen rushed over from next door to put it out, Garland said: "Don't be a hero, Steve. This isn't the movies. Just sit down and wait for the fire department like everyone else.") For the next four years, until six months before Garland's death when Luft bailed out and joined brother Joey with their father back in LA, Lorna acted as her mother's keeper. Wherever the blame ultimately lay, it was an appalling legacy for a teenager. Luft bridles. Four years wasn't such a long time. "I don't think she left a legacy of addiction. I don't think that's any of the legacy whatsoever. The legacy is the films and the wonderful artistic work that she left us, which will go on through history. That's the legacy I carry with me and my children will carry with them. There was never a movie being done on the addiction that she had to go through." However, that's soon to be remedied. Me And My Shadows has just been bought by ABC for a four-part mini-series with Luft as co-producer. "ABC loved my book so much because this is a story told through a child's eyes and it's the story of a mother and daughter. This is the story of a great love and it has more depth and more everything through a child's eyes."
Me And My Shadows is published by Macmillan, price £19.55