Liza Minnelli’s Uncharacteristic Pivot to Self-Disclosure
“Do you realize how many people have talked about me, written about me, imitated me?” Judy Garland grumbled into a tape recorder in the mid-nineteen-sixties. Contracted to write her memoirs for Random House, Garland got only as far as dictating a few hours of thoughts, fears, and conspiracy theories into a device that she deemed “an obvious Nazi machine.” At one point, she recalls an afternoon when her “little girl Liza” came home from school full of “a lovely kind of Italian indignation.” Evidently, the name Judy Garland had come up. “What is this nonsense that I always hear at school, that everybody knows you?” Liza Minnelli, who was then about ten, demanded. “Look, I don’t know you, Mama . . . and I never will.” It is the kind of confession that would chill the blood of a more conventional mother, but on the tape recording Garland just chuckles enigmatically. “That’s my girl,” she says. “We know each other pretty well.”
Today, few celebrities seem as knowable as Liza Minnelli. Her life has followed predictable cycles of tumult, from marriage to divorce, from rehab to razzle-dazzle comeback. As of late, Minnelli has largely been in retreat, but for more than four decades she presented an unvarying public front, wearing the same jet-black pixie cut, singing the same Kander and Ebb haymakers, and recycling the same handful of sunny platitudes about “Mama.” If Minnelli has a second voice, as Michael Jackson reportedly did—a secret self unknown to the public—few of her friends ever got to see it. “Liza is always on,” Andy Warhol observed, “and I’m always off.” The lyricist Fred Ebb felt that she had “a certain problem with reality,” and her sister, Lorna Luft, once wrote that “lying was so deeply ingrained in her that I wasn’t sure she could quit.”
All this would appear to make Minnelli—eighty years old and in precarious health—an unlikely candidate for a tell-all. A mountain of press clippings reveal her gift for evading facts, for exuding sincerity while disclosing nothing. When pressed, as in this exchange with the playwright Tony Kushner, she grew imperious:
In August, 2024, Minnelli announced that she was laboring on a memoir, but the idea that she would breach eighty years of protocol and finally respond to the sentence “Talk to me about Judy Garland” by saying “Yes” was almost beyond contemplation. In the realm of fiction, the deathbed serves as a convenient proscenium for revelations and vulnerable truths, but in life it more often prompts a doubling down on the old party line. As Saul Bellow writes in “Ravelstein,” of his protagonist’s final days, “This was not the time to be somebody else—not even Socrates. You wanted more than ever to be what you had always been.” It seemed likely that in her memoir, Minnelli would just keep singing her hits.
However, the first pages of “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” instantly make it clear that she has something new to say. For most of her life, Liza Minnelli has maintained that having Judy Garland as a mother was a madcap escapade—that practically every morning they tiptoed out of a hotel without paying, encumbered in multiple layers of clothing, while nipping sandwiches and giggling so hard they could barely breathe. In her book, she complicates the myth: if it was a madcap childhood, it was also a permanently traumatizing one. At the age of seven, she began what she calls “my first real adult job, as a caretaker for my mother.” Minnelli haggled with doctors for extra pills, was left home alone with her infant sister, and once used garden shears to slice open a screen window when Garland locked herself in a bathroom, threatening to overdose. She began lying as a survival strategy and found that she was good at it. Garland issued “stinging critiques” of Minnelli’s early performance efforts but was not completely unmotherly: she was hilarious, baked a mean shepherd’s pie, and even taught Minnelli a bit of world history. “My mother is constantly drilling it into me about the Nazis,” the fifteen-year-old Minnelli told a local paper while preparing to play the lead in her high-school production of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
In the memoir Minnelli calls herself “the ‘original nepo baby,’ ” and as with most nepo babies, success came quickly. The Scarsdale High School mounting of “Anne Frank” was so impressive that it wound up touring Israel, and by the age of twenty Minnelli had released two albums, launched a night-club act, and won a Tony Award for her Broadway début, in 1965, in “Flora the Red Menace.” Stephen Sondheim lobbied for her and Garland to do a concert version of “Gypsy,” a musical with uncanny parallels to their relationship that might have served as a form of primal-scream therapy. It never happened, and on the rare occasions that they appeared together onstage, Minnelli could feel her mother’s feral vaudeville instincts activating. “It didn’t matter that I was her daughter,” she writes. “She was protecting her turf.” Garland died in 1969, of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, but the tragedy did not hamper Minnelli’s ascent. 1972 was her imperial year: she signed with Columbia Records, made the Emmy-winning special “Liza with a Z,” and starred in Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret,” playing a charmingly self-absorbed singer living in Berlin during the death throes of the Weimar Republic.
It is the defining performance of her career. As Sally Bowles—who lives on prairie oysters, seduces homosexuals for sport, and misses the outbreak of Nazism because she’s sleeping off a hangover—Minnelli is a mass of contradictions: sexy but ridiculous, sincere but unbearably affected. She dances with supreme precision but masks the expertise with discombobulated, almost Gumby-like movement patterns that she later attributed to her scoliosis. (She had to strike odd contortions, she said, “to get air into my ribs to sing.”) Even the greatest Fosse dancers can sometimes come off like drones, subservient to his louche prerogatives, but every gesture Minnelli makes in “Cabaret” seems like a sudden rash impulse. Fosse later said to her, of their collaboration, “You did everything I told you to do, but it looked like it was your own idea.” Minnelli won an Academy Award for “Cabaret” but her performance remains undervalued, with many assuming she was basically playing herself. In fact, she had little sympathy for the character. “Sally Bowles was played before as this little lost innocent, and what she is is a tramp, a user, a bitch,” she explained.
And yet there was a certain kinship. “Cabaret” was based on a series of autobiographical stories by Christopher Isherwood, and after attending a screening the writer complained that Minnelli was “clumsy and utterly wrong for the part.” For me, her congenital inability to acknowledge the truth makes her an unsurpassable Sally Bowles. You really believe that a Fascist regime could rise up around Liza Minnelli and she wouldn’t notice. If her “problem with reality,” as Ebb called it, was a character flaw, it was also her great subject matter. Minnelli is never more effective than when playing someone who’s happy but wrong about it, from Flora the Red Menace, who demands “a happy song about robins in spring” in the midst of a nervous breakdown, to the vertigo-prone widow Lucille Austero in “Arrested Development,” who gasps the name of her beloved, Buster, as if he were a heroic knight and not an unemployable manchild.
Just as her mother’s signature quality was yearning, Minnelli’s signature quality is delusional optimism. The best songs in her repertoire—“Maybe This Time,” “Old Friends,” “I Don’t Want to Know”—are all fuelled by the tension between Minnelli’s giddiness and the omens of doom embedded in the lyrics. Even her stint as Anne Frank falls neatly into this mode: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart” is an archetypal Minnelli line that you can almost imagine popping up in one of her wedding vows.
People who dislike Minnelli’s singing maintain that her outer bombast conceals an inner void. Writing for this magazine in 1975, Pauline Kael argued that “she doesn’t seem to know how to do anything but finales, and at her worst she’s so manic that when she does a number you think, What’s she going to do for an encore—eat the audience?” To me, her intensity always felt justified. She had to sing with such fervor because she was trying to overwrite reality. We think of singing as a direct expression of the soul, but Minnelli tended to sing defensively: to deflect, to deny, to pull focus. Her songs are “covers” in the literal sense: she ducks under them for protection. The great Broadway soprano Barbara Cook once told an interviewer, “I’m so deeply inside of the song when I’m singing it, with that last note, sometimes I don’t really want to come back, because it feels good inside there. It feels safe.” I used to wonder if Minnelli felt that way, too, but her memoir suggests that she was never really alone in the bubble of a song. Singing was a way of not being alone; at her live shows, she sometimes insisted on bumping up the lights so she could see faces in the crowd and stare them down. “I wasn’t a fragile, vulnerable creature onstage, begging the audience to protect me and envelop me,” she writes. “I wasn’t a regal queen. I was like an athlete daring anybody to get in my way.”
To see Minnelli perform at her pinnacle was to encounter a series of invincibility rituals on par with James Brown and his cape. She had a tendency to sweat onstage, so she wore sequinned Halstons to make her perspiration seem like ancillary shimmer. After her false eyelashes peeled off from the sweat (“fainting spiders,” she called them), Minnelli would mop her brow with a towel color-coördinated to match her outfit, smearing away her makeup. She fed her backup dancers bananas, as if prepping them for a decathlon, and during dance breaks her mike captured the percussive huhs! and hahs! that emanated from her like Wimbledon grunts.
This posture of strength was Minnelli’s way of distinguishing herself from her mother, and for a while it worked. Those familiar with Minnelli’s chaotic late period might be surprised to learn that she was initially perceived as a pillar of stability. In 1973, her then husband Peter Allen told Rolling Stone, “She won’t even take aspirin, luv,” and in a fascinating sociological study published that decade called “The New Couple: Women and Gay Men,” a gay fan articulated the widely held belief that while Judy was “a tragic figure . . . Liza has a straight healthy attitude and everybody wants to see her succeed.” The truth, as Minnelli writes in “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!,” was that she took her first Valium just before her mother’s funeral and was a heavy recreational drug user when “Cabaret” was released. By the time she shot her next proper movie musical, in 1976, Minnelli was snorting lines between takes.
Directed by Martin Scorsese, “New York, New York” is a gorgeous ordeal, an epic about an impossible postwar romance between two jazzbos played by Minnelli and Robert De Niro. Scorsese and Minnelli had a messy, cocaine-fuelled affair during filming, but watching the movie today it seems obvious that Scorsese was far more enamored with De Niro, whose self-indulgent improvisations read as a diva tactic, his way of delaying Minnelli’s first song and her inevitable rise to primacy. It takes half an hour before she is permitted to sing, and her three big numbers—“Happy Endings,” “But the World Goes ’Round,” and “New York, New York”—are all backloaded in the film’s final forty minutes. Scorsese shoots them beautifully and deferentially. Minnelli is particularly sensational in “Happy Endings,” an unending Penrose staircase of a dream ballet in which she both lionizes and mocks her mother’s M-G-M œuvre. (It was the first thing scheduled in production, and you can tell that everyone’s in high spirits and nobody’s coke habit has gotten out of hand yet.)
Somehow the failure of “New York, New York” was pinned on Minnelli. “Marty and Bobby went on to have amazing film careers,” she writes. “I did not.” By the nineteen-eighties, she was basically finished as a movie star. Apart from her increasing unreliability, and the fact that musicals were outré, Minnelli had the misfortune of becoming famous in an era when versatility was the rage. Chameleonic talents like Meryl Streep and Jessica Lange were valued over more eccentric actresses who—when cast within the narrow line of their range—could go incalculably deep. We’re lucky that Minnelli had even one chance to go as deep as she does in “Cabaret,” but it’s hard not to mourn all the parts she might have played.
The composer John Kander blamed Minnelli’s fitful acting career on the appetites of her fan base. “The audience didn’t want to see her without the sequins,” he said. “There is a real actress missing that never had the chance to blossom.” Fred Ebb felt that “she should be doing projects like ‘Come Back, Little Sheba.’ ” Even roles more obviously suited to Minnelli, ones that might have weaponized her great capacity for denial—an Edith Piaf bio-pic, a movie version of “Gypsy,” a Ken Russell film of “Evita”—failed to materialize.
But to look solely at Minnelli’s acting credits may be to miss the point. She was a Jolson-esque polymath who split her energies between every existing medium, and many of her greatest triumphs were ephemeral. (Her legendary five-week run as Roxie Hart in the original Broadway production of “Chicago” exists only as a tinny bootleg, and a recording of her early performance in the musical “Carnival!” does not exist at all.) Arranging her accomplishments on a single plane of vision is almost impossible, but what emerges in the attempt is a richly ouroboric body of work in which every concert alludes to her tabloid exploits and her tabloid exploits sometimes seem like guerilla reënactments of things she’d done in her movies. As Minnelli once put it, “It’s a wacky career.”
Was she a serious artist? These days, few bother to ask the question. Last year, a sympathetic PBS documentary framed Minnelli less as an artist than as a “survivor” who was essentially just singing about herself. One doesn’t generally think of Minnelli as someone who influenced other performers—in many ways her style marks the endpoint of a certain strain of vaudevillian showmanship—but when asked about the forces that shaped her as an actor, Meryl Streep immediately mentioned two women: Liv Ullmann and Liza Minnelli. “What Liza taught me was huge,” she said. The Stanislavski method was all well and good, Streep explained, “but there is a further leap to the understanding of the importance of brilliance, sparkle, and excitement. ‘Performing’ is the final gloss. It’s a means to attract the audience to your character.”
The symbiosis between Minnelli and her audience—what Streep called “a communication that went right out to the cheapest seats”—is fundamentally uncapturable, but her live album “Liza Minnelli at Carnegie Hall” comes close. Minnelli was always better when she had something to sing against—some roadblock, some inconvenient truth—and in the spring of 1987 she had emerged from two well-publicized stints in rehab. She booked Carnegie Hall “to make it clear that I was as strong as ever.” Around this time, she began altering the lyrics to “Cabaret” to reflect her ostensible triumph over pills and liquor—so the line “When I go, I’m going like Elsie” became “When I go, I’m not going like Elsie.” In the Carnegie Hall recording, Minnelli positively spits that “not,” to the point that I wonder how much of her subsequent vocal damage can be traced to the repeated delivery of that one word. The volcanic roar from the crowd—even as Minnelli barrels through the last verse, they cannot quite bring themselves to stop cheering—feels charged with something beyond diva worship. By the late nineteen-eighties, in a city decimated by AIDS, every gay man in Carnegie Hall was a survivor: they had stuck it out long enough to see Liza one more time. Fred Ebb liked to say that Minnelli had a “rage to live,” and now her audience shared that rage. “I wasn’t singing to an audience,” she writes of the concert. “I was saying to each individual: ‘This is what I’ve gone through, has this ever happened to you?’ ”
She had hit her apotheosis as a live performer, and there was nowhere to go but down. Battling relapses, financial crises, and severe illness in the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands, Minnelli became a nomad, touring almost continuously, a situation that left her feeling “trapped. . . . I had no other way to make a steady living.” She was obligated to sing her big barnstormers on loop, which offered fans a cruel barometer by which to judge her decline. The critic Stephen Holden, reviewing Minnelli’s return to the Broadway stage in “Liza’s at the Palace,” in 2008, reported that “her voice was in tatters,” with high notes that resembled “dry, piercing caws”—but he marvelled at her insistence “on doing what she can no longer do.” “Liza’s at the Palace” was her final comeback. Having achieved lasting sobriety in 2015, Minnelli doesn’t sing much anymore, though she surfaces occasionally to announce endorsement deals: licensing her voice to an A.I. slophouse or hawking a perfume named “Judy – A Garland Fragrance.” In a quote provided to People, she gushed that “when the time came to smell the final unisex fine fragrance, it definitely smelled like Mama.”
This sounds remarkably unlike something a real human might say, but then sounding like a human has never been Minnelli’s strength. In an early interview, she boasted about knowing the price of paper towels, and in her late fifties she was still talking of borrowing “a quarter from a chorus kid.” Grasping for a relatable metaphor, she once compared the satisfaction of performing to the act of “waxing a floor really well and looking back and knowing that the job will make people happy.” Ironically, Minnelli’s belief that she is some kind of everywoman might be her biggest pretension. It is a theme she returns to repeatedly in the book: Sure, I fell in love with multiple gay crooners, but who hasn’t? Yes, my mother almost filed a lawsuit to keep me from doing regional theatre, but aren’t all moms a little controlling?
While Garland is by far the most vivid, complex characterization in “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!,” Minnelli offers a handful of pleasing capsule portraits. Frank Sinatra was “like a mother who can’t stop hovering,” she writes, and Lucille Ball was uncomfortable with prolonged displays of affection. (“I think I was being too sentimental, because she broke the hug and lit a cigarette.”) Having underprepared for an audience with Pope John Paul II, a panicked Minnelli offered to sing. “An aide translated this for him,” she writes, “and he gave me an interesting look. As if to say, ‘Why would I be interested in that?’ ”
Unfortunately, the bulk of the memoir is about addiction. Minnelli discusses her substance use more candidly than she ever has before, even confirming a story I’d long dismissed as urban myth in which she angrily demanded a hot dog with “a lot of mustard” before she would agree to check in to Betty Ford. Somehow, though, these exploits make for dreary reading. Minnelli’s animating force was always the compulsion to lie; the joy of her performances and talk show appearances lay in watching her overcome the truth through sheer will power. To acknowledge reality is to cease to be Liza Minnelli, and the secret self revealed in these pages has disappointingly few insights to share. Again and again she poses questions like “What could I have possibly been thinking?,” sounding like a reporter with limited access.
There may be a reason she seems that way. The title page of the memoir lists three co-authors, including the entertainer Michael Feinstein, and they’ve clearly done heavy spackling to fill out Minnelli’s recollections. While celebrity memoirs are routinely ghostwritten—in 2024, Cher admitted that she hadn’t even read hers—Seth Abramovitch of The Hollywood Reporter has pointed out the disparity between the Minnelli of the book and the frail, meandering woman who participated in a March 17th book event; he suggested that her story was being “mediated, shaped and, perhaps, quietly reconstructed” by Feinstein. It’s an intriguing theory, especially in light of Minnelli’s uncharacteristic pivot to honesty.
Of the many personal disclosures in “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!”—about drugs, bad marriages, dental-bill discrepancies—only one has stuck with me. In October, 2003, Minnelli escaped her handlers and beelined to a bar; she was found some time later lying face-down on Lexington Avenue. It was a humiliation for Minnelli, and in her memoir she obsesses over what passersby must have thought. “Did anyone recognize me and shake their head in horror?” she writes. “If anyone did know who I was, it must have been disgusting for them.” Minnelli’s relationship with her audience has been the most stable, enduring relationship of her life, and even at her lowest ebb she was worried about letting them down.
Reading this passage, I was reminded, oddly enough, of Maggie Smith. A sort of anti-Minnelli, Smith avoided the public eye and loathed interviews, never quite understanding why anyone would care about her “real” life. When she was acting, Smith explained, she was in “a much better world.” “I’m never shy on stage,” she said. “Always shy off it. . . . It’s the real world that’s the illusion.” We’re so desperate to find out the truth about actors, blind to the fact that their truest selves emerge in the ecstasy of performance. We want to know about Liza Minnelli’s life, but we were there for it. We got to see the best part. ♦