Liza Minnelli doesn’t need your pity
Liza Minnelli has spent 80 years performing her way through everything life threw at her – and what life threw, it turns out, was quite a lot. Her memoir Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! arrives with that show-business, conspiratorial energy already built into the title, as if someone were about to launch into a story in a speakeasy, a piano in the corner, conversations not meant for the whole room. It delivers exactly what it promises. In Minnelli’s hands, that turns out to be no small thing.
Minnelli is very easy company. She is on every page exactly what you hope she will be: committed, specific, happy to follow a memory wherever it leads. The book unfolds like an evening of stories, by turns funny and affecting. She resists the confessional mode that dominates so much contemporary celebrity writing. She doesn’t pause over wounds or decode family damage or explain what it all means. In her world, performance is not something to strip away in order to reach the truth; it is part of the truth. The story is told, the curtain rises again, life moves forward. It is a refreshingly unfashionable approach, and she wears it well.
And oh, the glamour! The famous names appear early and often: Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, David Niven. In Minnelli’s hands they feel like the natural scenery of the world she happened to grow up in. The roll call of visitors reads like the closing credits of a classic Hollywood film, and before long you half expect someone to glide through the room carrying a tray of martinis. If there was ever a book that justified mixing one, this is it.
The centre of all this, inevitably, was Judy Garland. To grow up as her daughter was to grow up in the presence of something extraordinary: watching your mother walk onstage exhausted and come back transformed, the room altered around her in a matter of moments. It was, Minnelli says, the greatest masterclass she ever received, not just in performance but in survival. In an interview I once came across, she put it with characteristic economy: “Growing up as Judy Garland’s daughter was not a lot of laughs.” And if the childhood was complicated, it was not, she is clear, without love. Her father Vincente was devoted to her, steadily and reliably, in the way that Garland, consumed by her own turbulence, could not always manage. Minnelli writes about her mother without bitterness, which is its own kind of achievement. What she cannot do, and does not try to do, is separate the gift from the cost.
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The lessons arrived without warning and without mercy. At 11 years old, watching from the wings one New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas, she heard Garland announce her name to the audience, hand her the microphone, say “take it,” and walk offstage. Liza sang. The dynamic never entirely changed. Years later, performing together at the London Palladium, she felt the room shift in her direction, felt herself becoming, in that moment, the more compelling presence, and heard her mother whisper to the producer: “Harold, get her off my fucking stage.” She kept singing, their eyes locked, and Garland walked back on to finish the song beside her. It is both a comic and a devastating image: two women who loved each other, locked in a competition neither had chosen and neither could escape.
“I don’t want to be another Judy Garland.” Minnelli and her mother Judy Garland in 1963
Garland was consumed by something nobody around her had the language to name, let alone treat. And her daughter watched, and learned what no child should have to. She learned that the temperature of a room was something a person could control, if they were quick enough and funny enough and prepared to burn through themselves doing it. She learned to keep moving, because stopping was not something she had ever been shown how to do. These were not the lessons of a happy childhood, but they were, in the end, a survival kit, one that Garland assembled and could not use herself. By 16, Minnelli had already articulated her own response to it. “Sympathy is my mother’s business,” she said. “I give people joy.” She held to that, through everything that followed. But Minnelli was never simply a product of her circumstances. She surrounded herself with the finest performers, directors and artists of her generation, absorbing everything they had to offer, opening herself to influence with a curiosity that was as much intellectual as it was personal.
That shadow, and that brilliance, found their most vivid expression in Cabaret. Minnelli had auditioned for the original Broadway production and didn’t get the part, a rejection that, by her own account, devastated her. She felt Sally Bowles was hers, and being turned away did nothing to alter that conviction. When the film came around – helmed by Bob Fosse, a director she believed could unlock something in her that nobody else had reached – she pursued it with a fervour that was equal parts passion and precision. When she appeared as Sally Bowles in Fosse’s film in 1972, you understood immediately why she had never stopped believing the part was hers.
I have watched Fosse’s 1972 film more times than I can count. Sally tears through catastrophe as if it were a party, refusing to acknowledge the darkness gathering at the edges of her world. What stops it tipping into mere bravado is the discipline underneath: there is iron in the glitter. The look, the songs, the Fosse choreography lodged itself in the culture and never left. And neither, quite, did Sally Bowles. The question of where Liza ends and Sally begins surfaces more than once in the book, as if the role got so deep under her skin that she still occasionally has to check which one turned up. As early as February 1972 she was already fighting the conflation. A headline read “Liza refuses to be shocking,” and she recalls with barely concealed indignation what was being written about her: “I was becoming Sally Bowles in real life. Decadent and outrageous as well as a mirror image of my legendary tormented mother. I was now, get ready for this, a heartless hoyden dancing atop a table, drink in hand and devil-may-care look in my brown eyes.”
Minnelli is thoughtful about what the film means. She sees in it a world too absorbed in its own pleasures to register the catastrophe assembling around it, ordinary obliviousness in the face of extraordinary evil. It is a clear-eyed reading. It is also, whether she intends it or not, a self-portrait. Sally arrives at the final reel alone and unmoored, with nothing solid to show for any of it. The difference is that Minnelli kept fighting her way back. The addiction years that run through the memoir make clear how easily her story could have ended the way Sally’s did. That it didn’t speaks to the survival instinct that Garland, for better and worse, had placed in her.
Minnelli as Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse’s 1972 film ‘Cabaret’. Photo by Screen Archives / Getty Images
Through it all there were four marriages, to Peter Allen, Mark Gero, Jack Haley Jr, and David Gest, each one a different kind of story, and none of them simple. The most revealing, in some ways, is the first. There is a moment when Minnelli walks in on her first husband, the songwriter Peter Allen, in bed with another man. Her “centre of gravity crumbled,” she says. And yet, asked by journalists what she learned from the experience in the years that followed, she would say, breezily: “I won’t ever come home again without phoning first!” She knows now that the laugh was a shield, protective armour for Peter, for herself, for the prying world she wanted kept at a distance. There is even an apology in the book, carefully worded, for not having been more emotionally sensitive in how she discussed it publicly. It is an extraordinary piece of self-erasure, and one that makes sense if you understand that needing everyone to feel better, even at the cost of your own honest feelings, is a pattern that tends to be installed very early. The children of addicts learn young that the room’s emotional temperature is their responsibility.
Then came London, 1973, and Peter Sellers. Minnelli describes the initial encounter in dazzling terms: champagne, shared repartee, two performers delighting in each other’s company. Then the charm curdled. The man who appeared was unpredictable, shifting between voices and personas in ways that felt less like performance than compulsion, recalling, she says, the experience of growing up with a parent whose behaviour could never be anticipated. Her verdict is delivered with magnificent economy: “Yes, Peter was a genius. Big deal.”
The marriages to Allen, Gero and Haley at least had the architecture of genuine feeling around them. The same cannot be said for the chapter devoted to David Gest, which Minnelli introduces with a question she returns to more than once: what in God’s name was she thinking? “I clearly wasn’t sober when I married this clown,” she says. She is bracingly candid about the conning, the deceptions, the slow accumulation of indignities, but what finally made her end the relationship was the realisation that Gest was planning to turn her art collection, 22 Andy Warhols among them, into, as she puts it, “cash for him to burn.” You can survive a great deal in a marriage. Coming for the Warhols was a step too far.
The addiction years arrive with a disarming comic flourish. Martin Scorsese was an unlikely co-conspirator. Their relationship, she says, had more layers than a lasagna: two Italians, equally passionate, equally creative, equally devoted to cocaine. And then there was Halston, the designer who had dressed her for years, one of her closest friends, the presiding genius of a certain kind of New York excess. Remarkably, the scene she recounts came not from her own memory but from Andy Warhol’s published diary, a reminder, if one were needed, of quite how much was going on. “Halston said that his doorbell rang late one night and he found me standing outside,” she says. “‘Give me every drug you’ve got,’ I said, and he handed over some cocaine, marijuana, Valium and quaaludes. Then Marty, who had been waiting round the corner, came up to Halston and kissed him on the cheek. We thanked him and said goodbye.” The whole scene has the quality of a polite heist.
And Minnelli, it should be said, was functioning throughout, spectacularly so. She was working, performing, dazzling rooms, doing what she had always done. She had always sworn she would never take drugs. “Until I did,” she says, and moves on. The survival instinct that Garland had placed in her, the absolute compulsion to keep moving and never let the machinery show, made it almost impossible for anyone to see how the addiction was starting to take over. It was her sister Lorna Luft, who finally saw what Minnelli could not, or would not, admit to herself. Elizabeth Taylor, newly out of the Betty Ford Clinic, became an unlikely but crucial ally, helping Lorna navigate the intervention that would finally get her sister through the door. Leaving rehab, she flashes back to a night at Studio 54: a photographer caught three women sitting together on a couch, smiling – Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor, and Betty Ford, who had opened the clinic after her own very public battle with addiction. None of them could have known then that years later they would be bound together not by glamour but by struggle, their names attached to a clinic that didn’t yet exist when the shutter clicked. The road was not straight though. Minnelli would return to rehab many times over the following decades. It was her admission in 2015, she says, that finally served as her wake-up call. She has been sober ever since.
Minnelli with Elizabeth Taylor, Halston and Betty Ford at Studio 54 in NYC 1977. Photo by Vinnie Zuffante / Getty Images
The book has a striking absence of self-pity. Given the material – and the material, as this book makes plain, was considerable – she would have been wholly entitled to it. The childhood, the marriages, the addiction, the losses: any one of them might have licensed a different kind of memoir entirely. She never goes there.
Minnelli has always seemed to possess a childlike openness, a wide-eyed enthusiasm that reads as something more complicated than charm. It is what makes her unique, and what makes her, at times, extraordinarily difficult to watch. In a world where performers of her generation were trained to conceal, she concealed nothing. The wound was always visible. So was the will.
Of all the losses the book contains, the one she carries most quietly is the absence of children, after three miscarriages. No one knew better than she did what it meant to be someone’s child, how much that relationship could give and cost in equal measure, how completely it could define a life. What she might have made of motherhood, given all of that, is one of the book’s unspoken questions. The family she built instead was chosen with the same fierce devotion, and it held.
What remains, in the end, are the people who stayed. Mia Farrow, always a phone call away. Marisa Berenson, who flies in from Marrakesh and sits down to dinner as if 50 years haven’t passed since they met on the set of Cabaret. These are the people who understood, she says, how difficult and beautiful and complicated a life like hers could be. She signs off with a line that is pure Minnelli, theatrical, tender, perfectly timed: “I’ll see you at the Cabaret, old chum.” The curtain falls and you want to applaud. The Cabaret never really closes.
[Further reading: La Grazia is Paolo Sorrentino’s best film in years]
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