"When I came to in the hospital," Judy recalls, "I heard the doctor say, 'She's broken her neck.' I thought, well, that's perfect, I'm finished. But, bless them, they handled me like a precious egg." What she broke was the second, or hangman's, vertebra (around which skilled executioners knot the noose), so it took an incredibly delicate three-hour operation to repair the 39-year-old Carne. In the process she was plastered into an armpit-to-hip body cast topped by the "halo" brace secured by four screws. The whole contraption weighs 65 pounds versus her 95. She was given no anesthesia so that the surgeon could tell by her reaction whether he was drilling into her brain. "I'm hopelessly chicken-shit," Judy confesses. "I put on the old stiff upper lip and let the tears flow." Yet she was also "joking and doing material."
To recuperate, Carne was airlifted via Concorde by her father, Harold Botterill, a prosperous greengrocer, back to her girlhood home in the English village of Chapel Brampton, Northamptonshire. "My grandmother tells me I look like the Queen of the May," she says. "People keep saying, 'Chin up!' Silly sods! Where else am I going to keep it?"
With her parents fussing over her in Carne Lodge, their rose-surrounded home, Judy remains determinedly cheerful even if her head sometimes feels "like it's being squeezed in a vise." She takes codeine tablets every four hours for the pain, plus vitamin dosages in a horse-size syringe. A nurse comes in daily to help wash her and disinfect the screws ("If I get an infection it will go straight to my brain"). Every other week Carne goes to a nearby hospital for what she jokingly calls "a lube job and a tighten-up." She keeps fit by doing yoga and ballet exercises around the house and pitches in on dishwashing, her cast resting on the drainboard. Judy occasionally lumbers into the furniture, which sends the steel brace reverberating "like fingernails scraping on a blackboard." At bedtime sleeping pills and a carefully constructed "igloo" of eight pillows help her doze off, but she can't turn over ("It would be like a turtle turned upside down").
Bergmann, Judy's second husband for six months in 1970 (Burt Reynolds was first from 1963 to 1965), was unhurt in the accident and has stayed behind in New York—much to her parents' relief. He was with her for the three drug arrests (all of which Judy says were bum raps). "I'd like to cut his throat," chirps her mother, Kathleen. Even Carne admits, "It hasn't been a stable relationship, and that's what I need. I'm tired of being the den mother."
When the brace comes off in late September, Carne will wear a neck collar but will be able to work, and intends to. Flat broke and blacklisted by agents, Judy says, she nevertheless hopes to revive a career lately stalled on the dinner theater and strawhat circuits. She is already booked to emcee a jazz concert at an English estate later this month. "What I have realized is I don't have to be a star," she says. "I just want to work. Whatever turns up, that's where I'll go." The accident, she believes, "is going to do wonders for me. I lost sight of myself in the last few years. My whole life has been extremes. It took me near death to see the light at the end of the tunnel." No matter what, Judy is writing it all down in an autobiography. "It would make a super movie," she says. You bet your sweet bippy.
CELINE’S INFERTILITY STRUGGLE: MY PRIVATE HEARTBREAK
Daily injections, painful tests and four failed IVF attempts: The singer, 41, reveal her dreams for a second baby. ‘I’ll try until it works’
