Liza Minnelli’s father, the film director Vincente Minnelli, used to joke that his daughter’s career in show business was preordained. She was certainly familiar with the dark side of the industry from a young age through her mother Judy Garland, who was on the MGM payroll aged 13, before shooting to fame as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Garland was famously depressive and addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol. When her daughter was six, she shut herself in the bathroom and made the first of many suicide attempts. Minnelli soon learned to monitor her mother and hide her pill bottles when she saw darkness descending. By 13, she was “my mother’s caretaker – a nurse, a doctor, pharmacologist and psychiatrist rolled into one … Just as the MGM studio system robbed Mama of her childhood, she robbed me of mine.”
In her memoir, Minnelli – who turns 80 this month – recounts how she broke free from her dysfunctional family at 16 and moved to New York to make it as a singer and actor. Little surprise, given her parentage, that her ascent was swift. “I was the original nepo baby,” she observes, gleefully. But if show business was in her DNA, so was addiction. In her 20s she became hooked on Valium, diet pills, cocaine and alcohol. Later, as her career faltered and her private life imploded, her sister Lorna staged an intervention and got her into the first of many rehab programmes.
The book is written with journalists Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans and drawn from extensive conversations between Minnelli and her close friend Michael Feinstein. If that sounds like too many cooks, the resulting book is surprisingly cohesive and spry. Beneath the classic arc of fame and success turned sour is a more unusual tale of a woman battling the trauma of her childhood and struggling to step out of the shadow of her unpredictable mother.
Lady Gaga and Liza Minnelli onstage during the Oscars in 2022. Photograph: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
Most importantly, it captures Minnelli’s voice, which combines showbiz luvviness with winning vitality and charm. As the title suggests, Wait Till You Hear This! gives the inside scoop on the megastars in her orbit, including “Uncle Frank” Sinatra who would “give you the moon, but I don’t know anyone besides his children who ever heard him apologise for anything”. Minnelli is not averse to picking fights herself: she delivers a ferocious dressing down to Lady Gaga, her co-presenter for best picture at the 2022 Oscars. At the 11th hour, Minnelli was told she must sit in a wheelchair rather than the agreed director’s chair “because I might slip out of [it], which was bullshit”. She claims Gaga wouldn’t go onstage with her otherwise. This meant Minnelli was sitting too low to see the teleprompter and, without her glasses, couldn’t read the cue cards – hence her apparent befuddlement. “I had arrived at the Oscars thinking I was in the hands of wonderful colleagues and friends. Instead, I believe I was sabotaged,” she fumes.
But the most eyebrow-raising material concerns her tumultuous love life. Minnelli, who married four times, realised her first husband, Peter Allen, was gay after she found him in bed with another man; she later quipped that she would never again come home early – at least not without calling first. While still married to Allen, she announced her engagement to Peter Sellers a matter of days after meeting him in London, though their relationship quickly imploded, and not just because Minnelli was already engaged to Desi Arnaz Jr, son of Lucille Ball. She pulls no punches when discussing her fourth husband, David Gest, in a chapter titled The Marriage from Hell: “What in God’s name was I thinking? I clearly wasn’t sober when I married this clown.” Nearly 25 years later, the humiliation of her union with this “slight, pasty faced jerk with weird hair” still stings.
Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! naturally revels in its subject’s many career highs: the awards-festooned Cabaret; her 21-night run at Carnegie Hall, the longest in the venue’s history; her chart-busting version of Losing My Mind with the Pet Shop Boys; her knowing turn on TV’s Arrested Development. Neither does she miss a chance to recall a standing ovation, a glowing review or to list the stars attending an opening night or one of her legendary soirees.
Yet Minnelli understands that unchecked vanity has no place in a memoir. What elevates her book above the usual celebrity fare is her vulnerability and brutal candour in sharing her lowest moments, from the terrible marriages, to her mother’s manipulations, to the decades of substance abuse that once caused her to collapse in the street near her New York home, prompting pedestrians to step over her inert body. This 448-page doorstopper is a tell-all in the truest sense. It’s with characteristic breeziness that Minnelli concludes: “It’s been a lifetime of high notes and low notes, baby. And I want you to know … it’s been a life very well lived. I have no regrets. None.”
Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.