Liza Minnelli has heard your jokes. Born 80 years ago to two of Hollywood’s biggest names — the actor and singer Judy Garland and director Vincent Minnelli — she was thrust iinto the spotlight from the moment she left Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. But since her teenage years she’s forged her own path. First as a cabaret singer and Broadway star, and then, of course, asthe Oscar-winning star of the Broadway show-turned-movie Cabaret, she became one of musical theater’s most powerful stars. She’s put out both pop and standards albums and sold out more shows at Carnegie Hall than most artists could dream of. Then, after she hit 60, when many stars would be fading into the background, she captured an entire new generation with her role as Lucille Two on Arrested Development.
Throughout it all, the jokes have abounded. There were jokes about the sexuality of her four husbands. Jokes about her addictions, and her struggles to stay sober. Jokes about her standing within the LGBTQ community, and the countless drag impersonators who take up her likeness. Jokes about her looks, her hair, her homes. But Liza Minnelli is going to have the last laugh.
In her new book, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This One! the singer, dancer, and, as she writes, “original nepo baby” comes fully and brilliantly clean. With the help of her dear friend (and onetime lover, according to the book) Michael Feinstein, she lays her life out on the page, bunions and all, from her childhood in Golden Age Hollywood, through her very debaucherous 1970s, though her tormented final marriage to a man she describes as an abuser and a con man.
After all these years, Liza is still kicking. Here’s six stand-out moments — but it just scratches the surface of this life well lived.
Courtesy of Hacc
1. She spent her childhood taking care of her mom’s emotions
Judy Garland had been raised on the MGM lot, starring in films like The Wizard of Oz when she was a teenager the studio fed her various substances to pep her up, put her down, and keep her in line. By the time she had Liza at age 23, she was fully hooked on drugs. “The constant ups and downs had an impact on me,” she writes. “You never knew which Mama was going to come out of that bedroom.”
Minnelli writes about the night before her fifth birthday when, dressed in a Hopalong Cassidy outfit and joking with her parents in their living room, she accidentally kicked her mom in the head with her cowboy boot. The air in the room changed immediately, terrifying little Liza. “Suddenly she was screaming at me. She screamed and screamed, and it seemed as if the yelling went on for hours,” she writes. This was an accident! Didn’t she understand?” She eventually apologized, bursting into tears. “I was so confused. Should I be taking care of her? Or should she be taking care of me?”
The incident stuck with her, and she brings it up repeatedly throughout her memoir. The sound of screaming, of audible anger, will bring her back to that moment and make her feel like the helpless little girl again, tasked with managing her mother’s emotions.
2. Her engagement to Peter Sellers was a nightmare
Minnelli has had her share of marriages, boyfriends, and steamy affairs. Her first husband was Peter Allen, but she’d found out he was gay a few years into their marriage —by walking in on him in their bed with another man. And though they’d tried to make it work, they eventually drifted apart. After they separated, she got engaged to her childhood friend, Desi Arnaz, Jr. — Lucy’s son. But while visiting London in 1973, she ran into an old acquaintance, Pink Panther star Peter Sellers, and a potent mix of champagne and chemistry changed her course. Days later, they held a press conference to announce their engagement. “If this is confusing to you, how the hell do you think I felt!?” she writes. “I was married to a gay man at the same time I was engaged to two other men!” Arnaz found out in the papers, and was “understandably furious,” she writes, noting that the two eventually made up, at least enough to “share a warm bond today, more than half a century later.”
But life with Sellers wasn’t what she imagined. “Here’s the bottom line,” she writes. “The brilliant comedy that poured out of Peter, his ability to play so many different fictional characters at once, became the real-life problem that tore us apart…. He would scold me, taunt me, bully me in the voices of many difference characters. They weren’t fictitious or part of a script. They appeared to be coming from somewhere deep in him — and they weren’t pleasant to be around.” With the help of her godmother, Kay Thompson — a singer, actress, and choreographer who also wrote the Eloise books, possibly inspired in part by Minnelli — Liza left Sellers and headed back to New York. There she got back to her free lovin’ ways, hooking up with a who’s who of eligible men including Martin Scorsese and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
3. Gene Simmons convinced her to make a dance album in 1989 with the Pet Shop Boys — and it’s amazing
In 1989, Minnelli was posted up in London with her old friends Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. to perform a show dubbed “The Ultimate Event.” She’d known them since she was an infant — Sinatra and Garland had a deep love for each other, though Garland knew she could never actually marry him; Davis was a fixture in the Minnelli home, bouncing Liza on his knee when she was a baby. The two men had a tour planned with Dean Martin — a Rat Pack reunion — but Martin had dropped out after a few dates, and they asked Minnelli to fill in.
A few months before, she’d had dinner with her friend, Kiss’s Gene Simmons, who marveled at the fact that she’d never had a hit record. She was a live performer, she explained. “I reminded him that I had built a career singing on Broadway, holding unbroken records at Carnegie Hall, and in some of the largest venues around the world,” she writes. “He cut to the chase: I was a big star and should be making records with modern pop songs.” He linked her up with CBS Records, who then signed her to Epic and put her in the studio with one of their top electro-pop acts: The Pet Shop Boys.
Together, they made Results, with Minnelli crooning standards over Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s beats. The lead single, “Losing My Mind” — an adaptation of a show tune from Stephen Sondheim’s Follies — hit Number Six in the U.K. “We also shot a video that presented a totally new image for me,” she writes. “Instead of a bright and brassy Liza, I was dancing seductively against a dark, shadowy background. The album was called Results but it could have just as easily been titled Departures.”
4. Her role on Arrested Development gave her new hope
Minnelli first met Ron Howard when he was playing the titular Eddie in the 1962 movie The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, directed by Minnelli’s father. Liza would babysit Ron, and the two struck up a friendship. Forty years later, Howard called Minnelli to see if she would cameo in his new show, Arrested Development. “I’ve had tons of pitches over the years from people who want to cast me in movies or TV shows. Most were forgettable. But I knew and trusted Ronny,” she writes. Then she read the script. “This was a show that grabbed you by the funny bone from the opening moments and didn’t let go.”
A few weeks before she got the call, she’d relapsed, sneaking out of her Upper East Side apartment, downing some liquor at a nearby bar, and collapsing in the middle of Lexington Avenue. Now, she was suddenly a cult figure. “A month after one of the saddest days of my life, I was embraced by a generation of young fans who knew little about my life and career,” she writes. “All they knew was that I blew them away on television. I was suddenly, miraculously, reborn. Once again, a life of highs and lows.”
5. She still struggles with substance use disorder, but is 11 years sober
Minnelli grew up taking care of her mom, and helping her manage her own addictions, and it wasn’t until her mom’s death that she first tried prescription pills. “Stress and tension overwhelmed me,” she writes. “I was reeling, and a doctor prescribed Valium to help me relax just before the funeral. It was the first time I took any such drug, and I marveled at how quickly it took the edge off.”
So began her dark battle with addiction that has lasted her entire life. “For me and millions of others, addiction is a disease,” she writes. “Something in your blood that you can’t control, a disaster burned into your DNA… After all these years, I finally understand. I’ve been waging a war my whole adult life with what we now call SUD, substance use disorder … I got it from Mama and she got it from her family. Just like Mama’s sense of humor, all of us inherited it in the womb.”
Throughout the memoir, Minnelli writes openly about her struggles, and the numerous times she’s hit rock bottom. She’s been to rehab more times than a reader can keep track of, and while she offers explanations — SUD, her horrible marriage to the late producer David Gest, managing the physical pain that comes with a 60-year career as a singer and dancer — she never makes excuses.
6. She wrote the book as a way to reclaim her narrative after a disastrous appearance at the 2022 Oscars
It’s no secret that Minnelli is still mad at Lady Gaga for their appearance together at the 2022 Oscars. Things had started hopeful — for the 50th anniversary of her Oscar win for Cabaret, Minnelli was invited to the ceremony to give the Best Picture award alongside the pop superstar. She knew she wasn’t well enough to stand for the presentation, so her plan, she writes, had been to sit on a director’s chair on stage — seated and stable, with a clear eyeline to the teleprompter. Moments before she was set to go out, however, she was given an ultimatum by producers: either go out in a wheelchair, or don’t go out at all. This was for her safety, they told her. She pushed back — she was fine to walk out, and the sight of her in a wheelchair was going to spark tabloid headlines about her health. But what hurt her most was that Gaga joined in, insisting that she needed to be in a wheelchair. Minnelli eventually caved — she worried that her not going out there at all would make the headlines worse — but she flubbed the lines, she says, because she couldn’t read them from where she was.
“I feel she cast a shadow over my present career that I’m still fighting to overcome,” she writes. “I can forgive this. But I will never forget it. Nobody who was there has ever apologized to me for what happened that night.”
In the limo home, she decided the next step was to set the record straight with a memoir. Her mother had hoped to write one, to push back at the gossip that had consumed her career, but had died before she had the chance. For Liza, things would be different. On the drive home, she thought about the picture that had won — CODA — and the meaning behind its title. “The word coda means the final act, the last passage of a musical composition, or the last moments of a novel,” she writes. “As I rode home from the Oscars, I savored that thought. Writing my memoir would be my coda, my truth. “I know it’s a cliché, but there’s always a light somewhere to help you escape the darkness. There’s always a rainbow — if you know where to look for it.”
