Cameron Woodhead
MEMOIR
Kids, Wait Til You Hear This
Liza Minnelli, as told to Michael Feinstein
Hodder & Stoughton, $55
You’ve probably seen the clip of showbiz legend Liza Minnelli and Lady Gaga at the 2022 Academy Awards. A visibly flustered, wheelchair-bound Minnelli fumbles for words as co-host Gaga takes her hand and comforts her, whispering: “I got you.” It was held up as a moment of touching Hollywood solidarity and, right after the lowlight of Will Smith whacking Chris Rock in the face, there was never a greater need for one. All for the cameras, says Minnelli in her new memoir.
According to her version, Gaga sabotaged her, humiliating her backstage by insisting (over Liza’s objection) that she wouldn’t go onstage unless Minnelli was in a wheelchair, asking if Liza “wouldn’t be better off going home”, and patronising her by asking questions to test her memory as if she were “an idiot” – all so she could make a shameless grab for the limelight and have a heroic moment at Liza’s expense. “Stefani Germanotta, who created the fantasy of Lady Gaga,” Liza writes, “became someone I didn’t know on Oscar night.” Ouch.
All celebrity memoirs have highs and lows, but the highs don’t get much higher, or the lows lower, than they do in the life of Liza Minnelli. The daughter of Judy Garland was “born in the mouth of the MGM lion”, as she puts it in Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, and if she seemed bound from a young age for a life in showbiz, Liza was also destined to inherit a grim legacy of addiction.
As everyone knows, her mother died by accidental overdose – at just 47, in 1969 – and Minnelli is mercilessly confessional in her memoir about her own experience of living in bondage to a gnarly and inglorious substance use disorder for decades. Who knew, right?
If you’re the kind of fan who mainlines celebrity gossip, you’ll want to hear from the horse’s mouth about the chemical treadmill of euphoria, crisis and gruelling recovery in the private life of one of the most celebrated and iconic performers alive today.
Oddly enough, like addiction itself, the most decadent and deranged backstage stories in this book harden into a vice-like cycle of titillation and tediousness. Readers will learn just how much cocaine Liza snorted with Martin Scorsese during their torrid amour fou while shooting New York, New York – a film in which Minnelli learned to improvise dialogue, as she deadpans, “line by line” – or how a lonesome Frank Sinatra used to lock Liza and Sammy Davis Jr. in his hotel room until dawn, with a bottomless glass of whisky to hand. Still, Uncle Frank (as Liza knew him) hated drugs. He might have been an enabler regarding Liza’s alcoholism, but Sinatra did loan her his private jet to fly to rehab. More than once. Not that it kept Liza off “too much pills and liquor”, as Sally Bowles sings in Cabaret, for long. Nothing could.
If you can emerge from a Betty Ford clinic with an encouraging letter from Betty Ford, and have Elizabeth Taylor staging interventions, and still nearly die from drug-induced encephalitis; if you can pass out cold on Lexington Avenue and have crowds walk oblivious past your unconscious body (as Liza did one afternoon in 2003), no amount of suffering or support can force a change. For an addict, the moment enduring sobriety arrives is always mysterious. Minnelli writes that at 80, she has been 11 years sober now, and that fact – as well as her impossibly upbeat stage persona (Minnelli vowed she’d never play for audience sympathy the way her mother did) – makes her contretemps with Lady Gaga more understandable.
Minnelli can take comfort in a stellar career. She might have been “the original nepo-baby”, but she made her own name, and the memoir lays it out with fans in mind. Liza has conquered screens big and small, from her Oscar winning performance in Cabaret to a recurring role on Arrested Development. There are poignant reflections on her lifelong collaboration with Kander and Ebb, with whom she won her first Tony for Flora the Red Menace, aged just 19. Her concerts and cabarets are incomparable, and you’ll get the inside story behind some of her more offbeat musical adventures, from breaking her foot in her stage debut (a musical called Best Foot Forward) to recordings with Pet Shop Boys and My Chemical Romance.
Minnelli’s also a bigger gay icon than Gaga and always will be. Gay fashion designer Halston shaped her look in the 1970s and beyond. Her marriage to Peter Allen (which Minnelli recalls with fondness) did vanish somewhere under the rainbow, though their love never died. And Liza remains a prominent LGBTIQ+ ally and HIV/AIDS activist, not to mention an inspiration to drag queens the world over.
Lucille Ball once said Liza was the kind of woman who could never be “domesticated”, and her romantic life vindicates that observation. Perhaps the weirdest moment was her brief engagement to comic legend Peter Sellers. It ended after they had a row and he called their mutual friend Joan Collins, storming off to her house wearing full Nazi regalia. Finding his behaviour unbearably offensive, Liza writes that Peter had “a raging case of schizophrenia… He was a genius. Big deal!”
Liza is candid about her storied four marriages. She talks about the physical pain and grief of experiencing two miscarriages, and goes to town on her toxic final husband, the money-grubbing David Gest.
Beyond the gossip, there’s a nostalgic tribute to Liza’s Hollywood childhood and a clear-eyed recollection of the dreams enlarged and the damage caused by her upbringing. Fans of the Great American Songbook will find their knowledge expanded by Minnelli’s erudition and enthusiasm – only to be expected from a woman who was named after an Ira Gershwin lyric, and whose multifaceted career has propelled her into a rarefied realm of celebrity that few survive intact.
Sure, this memoir has more than a few weirdly dubious claims – that Liza’s the one who introduced Michael Jackson to the “moonwalk” dance, for instance – but fans should lap it up. It heaves with anecdotes and revelations, delivered with Liza’s signature oddball shtick, of a full life lived in the spotlight, and the star’s struggles behind the scenes.
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