Their Tragic Love Story

A Newly Discovered Memoir About Their 13-year Marriage Reveals Epic Triumphs and Unbearable Turmoil.

The world knows the story of Judy Garland: the child star and self-destructive showstopper who died at age 47 from an accidental barbiturate overdose. But Sid Luft, the third of her five husbands, saw it all from the inside. Married to Garland from 1952 to 1965,the combative Luft orchestrated her famous comeback concerts and fell in love with her vulnerability. After the marriage ended amid allegations of abuse, he began a memoir, which was left unfinished when he died in 2005. Found over a year ago in a box among his archives, it has been published as Judy and I, excerpted here. The book sheds new light on Garland’s triumphs and her desperate decline. “My dad loved her,” their son Joey Luft, 61, tells People’s Liz McNeil. “He wanted to protect her.” In 1950, 11 years after The Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland, 27, was out of work and had recently been hospitalized amid rumors of drug abuse. When Sid Luft, a former boxer and test pilot, met her at a Manhattan club, he sensed “an electrical force.”

She was glowing like a ripened cherry in the smoke-filled martini atmosphere. The plunging neckline on her black cocktail dress revealed alabaster white skin and she wore ruby red lipstick. Judy’s eyes darted all over me, through me. I hovered at the table locked into some sort of unexpected mutual attraction.

They began dating while she was still married to director Vincente Minnelli. Sid soon noticed scars on the inside of her wrists; she told him of the constant pressure she was under to be “camera-slim.”