Liza Minelli was killed by her mother. Although she had debuted as a child prodigy with Judy Garland in the movie In the Good Old Summertime (1949), and showcased her vocal talent alongside her in the 1964 concert at the London Palladium, the shadow of the MGM technicolor star cast a kind of gaslighting effect.
Painful as it may be to say, Judy's death at 47 years old from an accidental barbiturate overdose in June 1969 provided the oxygen Liza needed. She spent eight days mourning and to cope with the pain, she was prescribed her first Valium.
"What started as a one-day blessing soon turned into a habit, and then into a full-blown addiction in the following years. It was a final gift, a genetic inheritance from mom that I couldn't escape from," she confesses in a preview published by People of her memoirs Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, which will be released on March 10.
The star wants to celebrate her 80th anniversary in California this way. She wants to tell it all. It has been a decade of recorded conversations with her close friend, singer and pianist Michael Feinstein (69).
Viewing it through an Aristotelian lens, when Garland died, Liza was a blank slate. She was 23 years old. Although her father was Vincente Minnelli, one of the best musical directors, it wasn't enough.
Liza's celebrity-making process began with her godmother Kay Thompson, a singer, arranger, and vocal coach who had previously tried to shield the protagonist from her mother's studio tyranny.
It was Kay who introduced her to Halston, the architect of her iconic style. Liza couldn't be understood without sequins. Not just for an optical effect, but for something more personal. As she sweated so much on stage, it wasn't clear where the perspiration began and ended. Additionally, the actress and singer fluctuated so much in weight that the designer sewed four different sizes.
By 1965, Minnelli had already won her first Tony for the musical Flora, the Red Menace, and received her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress for The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), but she still needed to have presence. That's when one of her teenage loves, Charles Aznavour, the French Sinatra, entered the scene. They had a brief romance when she was 17 and he was 39.
"That's what I want to do!" Liza exclaimed when she saw the Armenian-born singer-songwriter on stage. Aznavour helped her learn how to perform a song with feeling. "He taught me to see that each song was like a movie," she has stated in interviews. "He changed my life, he is the great influence in my personal and professional life," she emphasized in the documentary Liza Minnelli: Simply Real (Movistar +).
It was the 1970s and the best was yet to come. In this decade, she would meet the three men who would ultimately shape her into greatness. Choreographer Bob Fosse perfected her awkward dance technique, and composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb completed the miracle. The four created the masterpiece Cabaret (1972), for which the actress received her Oscar.
Her personal life was a mess. In 1973, while still married to Australian singer Peter Allen, she got engaged to Desi Arnaz Jr. -son of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz- and Peter Sellers, but it didn't work out. Liza kicked her husband to the curb in '74 after catching him in bed with another man. Two months later, she married Jack Haley Jr. -son of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz- whom she cheated on with Martin Scorsese during the filming of New York, New York (1977). In the book, she admits that both were addicted to cocaine.
From '79 to '92, she was married to Mark Gero (73), a theater director turned sculptor, with whom she experienced several miscarriages. "One of the saddest moments; not being a mother is a tragedy that still haunts me," she wrote. Despite her successes - she is one of the few artists with EGOT status (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) - she couldn't get her personal life together. She found so much solace in alcohol that one night she ended up lying in the streets of New York while people practically stepped over her.
Just when everything seemed to be going well, Liza lost control when she married for the fourth time in 2001 to producer David Gest in a ceremony where Michael Jackson was the best man and Elizabeth Taylor was the maid of honor. The photos looked like they were taken at a funeral. "Clearly this clown wasn't sober when I married him," she said. "He wore more makeup than I did," she points out in her memoirs.
She doesn't paint a good picture of him: "Not only did he control everything she ate, from morning to night, but also the people she saw and spoke to on the phone. She was his prisoner," she laments in her memoirs. Nevertheless, they lasted seven years. He passed away from a stroke in 2016.
Until eleven years ago, alcohol was one of her major addictions. In 1984, she entered the Betty Ford Center for rehabilitation for the first time. There were several more times after her friend Elizabeth Taylor, who managed to get clean, scolded her.
Her health has been quite fragile. Viral encephalitis that left her almost wheelchair-bound, pneumonia, scoliosis, hip and knee replacements, crushed discs... "There's always a rainbow if you know where to look," she says in the pages. Who doesn't remember her tours with Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.?