In Liza Minnelli’s riveting memoir, the ghost of Judy Garland is felt on every page.
On the night of November 8, 1964, five years before her death at age forty-seven from an “incautious self-overdosage” of sleeping pills, Judy Garland costarred with Liza Minnelli in a concert at the London Palladium. It had been a difficult year for Garland, to put it mildly. On January 22 The Judy Garland Show was canceled after only one season, and on February 8 she was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital after being found on the floor with cuts on her face. In March she was sued by a hotel for an unpaid bill dating back to 1959, and in April she was charged $69,000 in legal fees for renovations to her house on Rockingham Drive in Brentwood, California.
Her agent David Begelman, with whom she was having an affair, was embezzling from her, and she was divorcing her third husband, Sidney Luft, while fighting for custody of her two younger children, Lorna and Joey. “Sid Luft is an animal,” she said in tape-recorded notes toward an autobiography she did not write. “I will tell the world whenever I can that he is a thief, a blackmailer, a sadist and a man who doesn’t even care one bit one way or the other about any other living soul, let alone his nice children.” Luft’s lawyers, in turn, described Garland as “an unfit mother” with a barbiturate-related “mental illness”; his accusation that during their relationship she had tried to kill herself no fewer than twenty times became headline news.
To avoid further damaging publicity Garland went on a three-concert tour of Australia, accompanied by Mark Herron, a gay gigolo with whom she had become infatuated and whose acting career she had decided to promote. When they landed in Sydney on May 11 her barbiturates and amphetamines were confiscated by customs officers; they were later replaced, according to Garland’s biographer David Shipman, by a “Chinese backstreet abortionist” whose doses were far stronger than what she was used to. On May 20 she was booed off the stage at Melbourne’s Festival Hall after arriving over an hour late and struggling through her set in a state of disorientation.
On May 28, two days after the body of her eldest sister, Suzy, was found in her Las Vegas home, Garland took an overdose in Hong Kong’s Mandarin Oriental hotel. She was in a coma for more than fifteen hours, and the tabloids excitedly reported the star’s death. On June 12, her divorce from Luft not yet finalized, Garland married Herron in a ceremony presided over by a Buddhist priest. On July 20 she cut her wrists in London, and on July 23, only hours out of the hospital, she sang—against medical advice—at the Palladium for the charity gala Night of a Hundred Stars. The applause was rapturous. The Palladium saved her, and she was determined to return. That November, no longer able to do a show on her own, she invited her eighteen-year-old daughter to join her. “A lot of people have tried to explain the history of this concert,” Minnelli says in Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, her riveting new memoir. “Here’s what really happened.”
Two years earlier Minnelli had dropped out of school to become an actor in New York City. Her father, Vincente Minnelli, was supportive, and Garland discouraging. “You’re going to make it on your own, baby,” she warned. “There will be no money from me.” Unable to pay her hotel bills, Minnelli slept some nights in Central Park and crashed on various sofas until she was taken in by her mother’s assistant Stevie Phillips, who became her friend and agent. Modeling gigs paid for her acting classes, and in 1963 she was given the part of Ethel Hofflinger in a revival of the musical Best Foot Forward, for which she later won a Theatre World Award. On the show’s opening night, Minnelli saved front-row seats for Garland, Luft, Lorna, and Joey—who, to her devastation, did not appear. “I mixed up the dates,” her mother lied on the phone, speaking with the accompaniment of what Minnelli calls “a violin section of Judy Garland tears.” Best Foot Forward (which ran from April to October that year) was a box office hit, and later that April Minnelli made her debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show: “Millions got to see me for the first time. Life was beautiful…. Then, as I should have expected, Mama had other plans.”
Taping for the doomed Judy Garland Show began on June 24, 1963 (prerecording was essential, owing to Garland’s volatility). She now demanded that Minnelli drop her New York commitments in order to support her: “Darling, I’m just trying to help you. This will be the biggest show in history!” Minnelli duly left Best Foot Forward in the middle of the run and flew to Los Angeles. “I loved my mother. I still do,” she reflects more than sixty years later. “Still, I could never forget the feelings of hurt—abandonment, even—when Mama made it clear that her needs were more important than my feelings…. I was wounded to the core.” The episode of The Judy Garland Show that aired on November 17 was a celebration of the bond between Garland and Minnelli. It opened with Garland, surrounded by billboard-size photographs of Liza as a child, singing the Gershwin song “Liza (All the Clouds’ll Roll Away),” and it closed with mother and daughter hugging and weeping. It’s now too mawkish to watch, but Minnelli describes her mother’s achievement as a triumph: “Surely, we told ourselves, the network would see the beauty and rich artistry she brought to her Sunday-night show.”
After The Judy Garland Show hit the skids—“destroying Mama’s last hope of security and assured stardom”—Minnelli was offered the starring role of Lili in Carnival, which meant a return to New York. “When I told Mama the news, she exploded with anger,” Minnelli writes. “She threatened me in every possible way. I had no idea how far she’d go to get me to back out.” Ten days before the musical opened in January 1964, Garland sent out a press release saying that Minnelli (who was still a minor) would not be appearing. Minnelli then told the press that she would be appearing, and Garland’s lawyers threatened to sue the producers. “As much [as] I loved her,” says Minnelli, “I would not, could not, give in again.” Garland eventually backed down, and the reviews of Carnival “were raves.”
That May, days after Garland’s disastrous Melbourne show, Minnelli recorded her first album, Liza, Liza, with Capitol Records (Garland’s own label). “Some heard echoes of Mama in my voice,” Minnelli writes. “Fair enough. Others heard something new, current, and different.” Now able to afford the rent on her own apartment, she had achieved independence. In August, when Garland phoned her from London to say that it was “time to make another comeback,” they both laughed. She was the “queen of the comeback,” Garland liked to say; she couldn’t go to the powder room without making a comeback. She then added “the killer line”: “I want you to do it with me. And Liza, you’ve accomplished so much on your own, I want you to have equal billing.” Minnelli was “confused, to say the least. Also wary.” She declined the offer, and Garland said, “Okay,” before phoning the newspapers with the news that Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli would be performing together at the London Palladium in November. “There was nothing I could do,” Minnelli says. “I was stuck.”
Garland opened the show with five songs, and then Minnelli, looking and feeling like a “scared teenager,” was introduced to “polite applause.” She began her own set with “The Travelin’ Life,” and “the audience, which had seemed mildly curious about me, woke up in a hurry. They cheered!” So did Garland. “Yeah, baby!” she shouted from the wings. “Go get ’em!” After the second song, Garland again shouted, “Yeah!”—but, Minnelli notes, “not quite as strong. By the third song, let’s just say she was losing enthusiasm.” As Minnelli exploded into her final number, Garland was “freshening her lipstick. Like she was putting on armor and getting ready for battle.” While singing through “wild applause,” Minnelli somehow heard Garland whisper to the producer, “‘Get her off my fucking stage!’ I heard it!”
Garland then joined Minnelli for a duet of “Hello, Dolly!,” retitled “Hello, Liza!,” during which she repeatedly jerked Minnelli’s mic down from her mouth, as if “showing the crowd I was still a novice.” After taking their final bows, they returned together to the dressing room, before Garland “raced back onto the stage by herself for another final bow! I turned around, saw this, and raced back to stand with her.”
The audience had been watching, as Minnelli describes it, the battle of a lifetime compressed into two hours. “A daughter says: ‘I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do, and you can’t stop me—don’t even try.’ The mother fights it at first…. Then she realizes that her little girl is now a woman.” But in a sense they’d been watching a remake of A Star Is Born (1954), one of Garland’s last successful films.
“It’s remarkable, really,” wrote Lorna Luft in her own memoir, Me and My Shadows (1998), “how much of our life begins before we’re even born.” The history of the Palladium concert did not start with Minnelli’s rise in 1963 or Garland’s fall in 1964. It might be traced back to 1924, when Frances “Baby” Gumm, age two, performed in a vaudeville act with her older sisters in their father’s movie theater in Grand Rapids, Minnesota; or 1935, when Judy Garland, as she was now known, signed with MGM and was pumped full of uppers to keep her going for seventy-two-hour stretches, downers to knock her out at night, and Benzedrine to make her thinner; or 1939, when, already an addict, she played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz; or 1943, when she worked with Vincente Minnelli on the set of Meet Me in St. Louis (he was directing, she was starring); or March 1946, when she named their newborn daughter after the Gershwin song (“Liza Minnelli! It’ll look terrific on a movie marquee!”); or 1950, when she was fired by MGM and cut her throat with broken glass; or 1951, when she divorced Vincente Minnelli and, as Liza saw it, “destroyed the one truly stable relationship in her life”; or 1955, when the Academy Award for Best Actress went not to Judy Garland for A Star Is Born but to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl. “That still stings,” writes Minnelli. “My mother never recovered.”
In 1966 Garland met Mickey Deans when he impersonated a physician to deliver pills to her from a street dealer. Deans, says Minnelli, was “the last in a long line of men who claimed they could ‘save’ Mama from herself, revive her career, and create their own.” In 1968, to escape the IRS, Garland and Deans moved to London, where she staggered through a five-week run of slurred performances at the Talk of the Town nightclub, and in March 1969 they married. The last time Garland called Minnelli was to invite her to the wedding, but Minnelli, filming Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, couldn’t spare the time. Her mother’s death a few months later, in the bathroom of her rented house in Belgravia, takes place on page 107 of Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! Minnelli is twenty-three, and soon she will pop her first Valium; there are fifty-seven years and three hundred pages still to go: Garland’s ghost is felt on every one of them.
Minnelli, now age eighty, is eleven years sober, and Kids is presented as a recovery “journey” aimed at others afflicted with substance use disorder. More than one hundred hours of recorded conversations between her and the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein, and “decades of personal papers,” have been whittled down and whipped into shape by Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans, making the memoir a team effort not unlike the construction of a musical. At times it feels like we are in a musical, because Minnelli’s world is built from show songs and the book is filled with her favorite lyrics. “I never sing to an audience,” she says of her performances. “I’m singing to you. And as I reach out, I’m asking—have you ever been through this?”
The “shared emotional moment” she creates onstage is replicated in her intimacy with the reader: “My prayer is that my story might help you—or anyone you love—if you’re battling this insidious problem.” Minnelli even gives us a national help line number and suggests we “reach out” to her “directly at www.LizaMinnelli.com/recovery” for support and advice. But despite being loaded with gratitude and twelve-step wisdom, Kids is less about addiction than matrophobia. The term, coined by the poet Lynn Sukenick and developed by Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born (1976), describes not the fear of one’s mother but the fear of becoming her, and Minnelli’s battle against this horror results in a surprisingly complex and involving read. It is to the credit of Getlin and Evans that they have kept the contradictions in Minnelli’s character when other cowriters might have ironed them out. The woman talking to us is a living, breathing, fully dysfunctional human being.
What we learn from Kids is that Minnelli lived Garland’s life to the full. She loved and revered her, but she also loathed and resented her. She protected and continues to protect her, and she felt for many years responsible for her death. While she carved out for herself an opposing personality—Garland played the victim, Minnelli the survivor; Garland asked for sympathy, Minnelli offers empathy—she could never separate from her mother because she inherited her addictive tendencies, the “disaster burned into [my] DNA.” She also inherited Garland’s genius for live performance, blind trust in crooks, attraction to gay men, and capacity to fall in love instantly, as though hypnotized. She wants Garland to be remembered as “one of the world’s most celebrated, beloved, and iconic performers,” but she also wants to be greater than Garland, and more celebrated. She fears that her ambition reflects badly on her, so when she triumphs over Garland, she enjoys the moment only briefly before stepping back in line.
We watch this dynamic play out in the prologue, which begins with Minnelli, age nineteen, winning the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical for her Broadway debut, Flora the Red Menace. Her name is called out by Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz: “I’m Dorothy’s daughter, the youngest person ever to win this honor.” Garland, meanwhile, is hospitalized at UCLA, having had an “allergic reaction” to her pills, although she will be well enough to perform the next night at the Thunderbird Hotel in Vegas. Garland “didn’t think I had a chance to win,” Minnelli tells us, adding:
Before you judge, I understand why. This was a complicated night for her….
The fact is, Mama always wanted to play the lead in a Broadway show. But she never got the chance. So, her joy for me is clouded by her own disappointment, her own unrealized ambition. Here I am, a teenager, and I’ve done something Mama never did.
Her award speech, Minnelli continues, sent “a message to people who said I’d never sing as well as Mama. Who the hell can?”
Minnelli’s set pieces about Garland’s competitiveness assume a pattern. After presenting her mother as a monster of self-interest, she scolds us for thinking badly of her, repeats how much she loved her, and excuses her behavior. Garland’s attempts to wound and humiliate her daughter were in fact signs of respect, designed to polish her as a performer. “It took me several years…no, decades,” Minnelli says of the London Palladium fiasco, “before I understood that her competition with me was a compliment to the performer I was becoming.”
There was also the Las Vegas fiasco: “Chaos. And as usual, out of chaos I was launched.” Fed up with a drunken audience on New Year’s Eve 1957, Garland pulled her sleepy eleven-year-old daughter out from the wings, announced, “Ladies and gentlemen—Liza Minnelli,” and walked off the stage. Dressed in bathrobe and slippers, Minnelli—who “couldn’t sing worth a damn back then”—tried to imitate Garland with some half-learned numbers while the crowd continued to shout and laugh: “It was a bizarre experience…. It was also a harsh memory…. It was harrowing.” But when Garland gave her a pat on the back afterward, “that pat on the back pushed me toward a life in show business.”
Garland’s failure to turn up for the opening night of Best Foot Forward is similarly spun into “a learning experience.” However hurt she was, Minnelli now knew “to never bring anything negative onstage. It was the first time I turned my personal pain into energy and power.” Inevitably, she then wondered “if Mama wasn’t doing me a favor. Maybe she knew that her presence would suck all the oxygen away from me and our show.” Maybe.
The years before her parents’ divorce in 1951 were Paradise before the Fall. Back then Hollywood was a family: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall lived next door, Frank Sinatra (Garland’s lover) was Uncle Frank, Ira Gershwin was Uncle Ira, and Sammy Davis Jr. sat the baby Liza on his knee. Liza’s father taught her songs, made her costumes, and took her to the studios where he worked. She remembers having candlelit dinners with her parents, before Garland tucked her in and sang her to sleep.
The idyll ended the night before her fifth birthday, when they were watching The Milton Berle Show on the new television and Minnelli tried, possibly for the first time, to perform with her mother:
I was lying on the couch wearing my Hopalong Cassidy outfit and cowboy boots…. Mama was walking back and forth in front of the couch, mimicking the show and acting things out comically, the way only she could do. Daddy and I couldn’t stop laughing. Of course, I wanted to join the act and do a backflip. I was childishly awkward. I reared back and shot out my legs, and a boot accidentally smacked Mama in the head! Suddenly she was screaming at me. She screamed and screamed, and it seemed as if the yelling went on for hours.
This was the defining scene of Minnelli’s childhood. Every subsequent traumatic experience triggers her memory of when she “accidentally smacked Mama in the head,” which is referred to on five further occasions in the memoir.
Soon afterward her parents divorced, sharing custody of their daughter. Garland now began to treat her “like a psychoanalyst and made no apologies for doing it.” When Minnelli was six, Garland collapsed in her private bathroom, having slashed her throat with a razor blade; she was found by a maid, and doctors rushed to the scene. The next morning, her neck in bandages, Garland woke beside Sid “filled with laughter” and “wolfed down a lumberjack breakfast.” The small girl watched the adults around her with fascination, but “nobody fascinated me more than Mama.”
Because there was no one else to protect her mother, Minnelli did it herself. By the time she was thirteen, she was Garland’s “caretaker—a nurse, doctor, pharmacologist, and psychiatrist rolled into one.” When Garland again locked herself in the bathroom threatening suicide, Minnelli wriggled through the window to save her; she replaced her mother’s pills with aspirin, got rid of the hidden booze and drugs, ordered prescriptions from the doctors, and made sure the right tablets were taken at the right times so that Garland could function. The family dramas became public knowledge. From the school bus, Minnelli saw a headline on a newsstand: “Judy Garland Runs Naked Through the House and Threatens to Kill Herself!” The other kids laughed, and Minnelli came home in tears. Garland, however, was unconcerned: “Baby, I don’t care…. That’ll sell tickets. Sympathy is part of my business.”
Her drive came from her mother, Minnelli often repeats, and her dreams from her father. “One of the kindest, most loving, elegant, diplomatic people in the world,” “Papa” would “move mountains for me.” He “understood me and had my back.” It is therefore curious that Vincente Minnelli did not fight tooth and nail for sole custody of his daughter, who went to twenty-two different schools over the course of her childhood. (Minnelli must have been aware during the custody battle over her brother and sister that there had been no such battle for her.) He indulged her but did little to protect her; instead, Minnelli protects him. “Life could be rocky with Mama,” she says in her father’s defense, “but he knew it was important for me to spend time with her.”
Minnelli says nothing about her father’s next three wives; neither is his bisexuality explicitly mentioned. According to Emanuel Levy in Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer (2009) he was openly gay when he worked as a set and costume designer in New York, before Hollywood pressured him into the closet. Levy writes that Garland caught Vincente “in compromising positions at least twice, once with a bit player and once with their gardener.” It is hard to imagine that she would not have shared these discoveries with her “psychoanalyst” daughter or that Minnelli would not have recalled them when she walked in on her first husband, Peter Allen, “having passionate sex. With a man. In our bed!”
With her marriage apparently in ruins, Minnelli wondered about Garland’s “role in all of this heartbreak.” It was she who’d introduced her daughter to Allen, and they had announced their engagement on the night of the London Palladium concert. “Did she know Peter was gay?” Minnelli asks. “I don’t know.” But Garland will have understood her misery, having “walked the same tightrope” herself in her own “marriages to men who were gay.” This, and her reference to the rumors that Garland’s father, Frank Gumm, was also gay, is the closest Minnelli comes to addressing Vincente Minnelli’s sexuality.
What destroyed her marriage to Allen was not his sexuality but her success. While Fred Ebb helped Minnelli to find her voice, Charles Aznavour taught her to perform a song, and Halston dressed her like an icon, Allen’s own career stalled. They separated in 1970, when Minnelli was discovering alcohol, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, cocaine, and amphetamines, while convincing herself that she “would never get into trouble in the way that my mother had.”
From now on we see more of Minnelli onstage than off. In 1972 she starred in Cabaret, for which she won an Oscar. It was her father who suggested that she model her hair on Louise Brooks. Then came Liza with a “Z”, a live television concert filmed at the Lyceum, which won four Emmys and a Peabody Award. (Twelve pages are given to describing the fifty-three-minute show.) That same year, before her divorce from Allen was finalized, Minnelli became engaged to Desi Arnaz Jr., who discovered the engagement was over when he read that she had also become (briefly) engaged in 1973 to Peter Sellers.
In 1974 Minnelli married Jack Haley Jr.: “I was Dorothy’s daughter, and he was the Tin Man’s son. You might say it was a match made in Oz.” Two years later, filming New York, New York, Minnelli “got swept up in a passionate romance” with Martin Scorsese. Rather than describe these years from memory, she summarizes entries from Andy Warhol’s diaries: Minnelli and Haley run into Scorsese in Greenwich Village. “How can you do this to me?” Scorsese screams at Minnelli, having discovered that she is also having an affair with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Thus ended Minnelli’s second marriage.
Husband number three, in 1979, was the stage manager and sculptor Mark Gero. Minnelli longed for motherhood, but two miscarriages followed. Because her substance abuse had now reached a crisis point, the account of this marriage and its breakdown is even vaguer than usual. In 1984 her sister Lorna sent her to the Betty Ford Center. She was clean for a while; other visits to rehab followed.
Enter Minnelli’s ghoulish fourth husband, the one we have all been waiting for: “His name was David Gest. What in God’s name was I thinking? I clearly wasn’t sober when I married this clown. I’m going to invoke the title of my book now and say, ‘Kids, wait till you hear this!’” A “pasty-faced jerk with weird hair” who “wore more makeup—including mascara—than I did,” Gest was working for Michael Jackson when he “came on to me like a mad bull.” Minnelli, age fifty-five, had not worked for a year; she was “broke,” her health was in meltdown, and she was drowning in medical bills. “He offered to rescue me, and, honey, did I need to be rescued,” she writes. Hot tears coursed down his cheeks at the thought that Minnelli had not received her just measure of fame; he would manage her comeback and make her “the biggest star in the world.” Garland had been promised the same by Sid Luft and Mickey Deans.
So in 2002 Minnelli and Gest tied the knot in front of 850 guests and threw a party that cost $3.2 million. Gest afterward sold many of their wedding presents and pocketed the cash; he also plundered her memorabilia, and he would have sold the Warhol prints of Minnelli and her parents had she not put the originals in a vault and displayed the copies. He controlled her eating, screened her calls, demanded to know where she was at all times, and had a photographer follow her just in case. After sixteen months they separated; he sued her; she sued him back. She says she will never remarry but is open to dating a “filthy rich” older man, a “passionate” forty-year-old, or an “eighteen-year-old who I see twice a week and whose name I don’t know.”
In her 2015 memoir of working with Garland and Minnelli, among other celebrities, Stevie Phillips writes:
I often wondered—still do today, and will for as long as I live—if I could have sat her down in a totally sober moment—of which there were none—and asked her: Judy, what’s more important to you? Being in love? Or singing? What would her answer have been?
Minnelli does not distinguish between loving and singing: she wants love, as she puts it, “to be like the songs.” The word love (and its variations) appears 439 times in this book’s 420 pages; apart from Gest and Lady Gaga, she loves everyone to excess, even thanking in the acknowledgments “the people I love and have never met.” But the person she loves most, “the true love of my life,” is Michael Feinstein, who knows more about show songs than she does. “Hell, if he wasn’t gay and married,” she writes, “I’d marry him today. (That hasn’t stopped me before).” She first met Feinstein in the 1980s when he was playing at a restaurant in West Hollywood: “In the priceless words of Noël Coward, I was mad about the boy.” More praise is lavished on Feinstein than on any of her other friends and family; she loves him as only Minnelli can love, with a headlong devotion that includes giving him equal billing on the cover of her memoir.
The book ends with another fiasco played out in public for the world to see. On the night of March 27, 2022, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Cabaret, Liza Minnelli copresented the Academy Award for Best Picture with Lady Gaga. Viewers were touched by the frailty of Minnelli and the tenderness of Gaga, but here’s what really happened. Because of her back problems, Minnelli expected to sit in her usual director’s chair onstage, but minutes before airtime she was told that owing to her age and “for safety reasons” she would have to remain in her wheelchair. She protested on the grounds not only that it was unnecessary but that it would make her look “gravely” unwell, and she never played for sympathy.
Gaga “insisted she would not go on stage with me unless I was in a wheelchair.” Was this a ploy for her to grab the limelight? Having “mentored” Gaga, who starred in the 2018 remake of A Star Is Born, Minnelli thought she would be treated with respect. Feinstein, who was backstage with her, asked whether she wanted to go home, but she knew that her nonappearance would make headlines. There was nothing she could do: she was stuck.
Sitting in the wheelchair, I was much lower down than I would have been in the director’s chair. Now I couldn’t easily read the teleprompter above me. The small cue cards I held in my hand were worthless, because I didn’t have my reading glasses…. When I stumbled over a few words, Gaga, who was at my side, didn’t miss a beat to play the kindhearted hero for all the world to see. “I got you,” she said, holding my hand and leaning down over me.
Minnelli’s humiliation echoes the night nearly sixty years earlier when Garland jerked her mic away from her mouth, only Gaga is now the ambitious daughter and Minnelli the fragile, displaced mother. The world, in the song by John Kander and Fred Ebb that Minnelli first performed in New York, New York, “goes round and round and round and round and round.”
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