Me and My Shadows by Lorna Luft

Author:Lorna Luft
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

© Turner Entertainment

My favorite picture of Mama, 1942.

CHAPTER 12

Good-bye

A few months ago in London, I took a cab across town for an appointment. Shortly after we pulled into traffic, I noticed that the cabby was looking at me carefully in the rearview mirror. “Excuse me, miss,” he said, “but aren’t you Lorna Luft?” “Yes,” I said, smiling pleasantly and thinking, “He must recognize me from one of my concerts.” But then his expression changed in the old familiar way, and I thought, “Oh, no.” His face contorted, and he actually began to cry. “Your mother, oh, your mother, miss. Such a tragedy, her death. What a tragic life she had.” And he was off. For more than twenty minutes, as we inched our way through the London traffic, I remained trapped in the backseat listening for the umpteenth time as he retold the tabloid version of my mother’s life. All I could think was, “Oh, God, get me out of here.” Several lifetimes later, when we reached my publicist’s office, I shot out of the backseat, mumbled something polite to the cabby, and tried to make my escape. No luck. He grabbed my hand, kissed it tearfully, and told me he’d wait and take me wherever I needed to go next. No amount of polite dissuasion on my part could make him leave.

I have no doubt that the poor cabby meant to be kind and sympathetic. So do the endless number of my mother’s fans who still approach me almost daily to remind me of her death. People are always telling me that I should appreciate the fans’ devotion, that I must understand how much my mother means to them even thirty years after she died. On one level, I do. But there is a special cruelty to such devotion for the survivors of that death, for Joe and Liza and I lost a mother, not a legend. We had to deal not only with the overwhelming grief, but with the public exposure of that grief and the belief of thousands that they felt the same pain we did. They did not. They certainly did feel loss, but not the loss of a beloved parent.

For years we also lived with the peculiar and fearful vulnerability that comes from learning the most heart-wrenching family news from the public media. Those who live private lives are, at the very least, given the news of a parent’s death privately by the authorities before the loved one’s name is released publicly. Celebrities’ children don’t enjoy even that basic courtesy. Tracy Nelson learned about the unexpected death of her father, former teen idol Rick Nelson, from a television broadcast while she waited at an airport. Years before, when I was eleven and we were still living on Rockingham Drive, Joey and I heard a false report of our mother’s death in Hong Kong as we were listening to music on the car radio. Our nanny, Mrs. Chapman, abruptly snapped off the radio and told us that we’d heard wrong, and fortunately, the report turned out not to be true.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.