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When you’re reading Liza Minnelli’s memoir, picture the star lounging on her lipstick-red couch, talking to you like a friend.
“Kids, Wait Till You Hear This One!” (out now from Grand Central Publishing) reads like a conversation with a close pal because it is one. Longtime friend Michael Feinstein started recording her telling her life story in her living room in 2014. In just over 400 pages, Minnelli opens up about her childhood with mother Judy Garland, her career-making role in “Cabaret” and her journey to sobriety.
While Minnelli, 79, pens darker moments of grief and addiction, her memoir is an overall romp through a life in showbiz, complete with plenty of witty zingers. Readers will delight in the “who’s who” of Hollywood as Minnelli describes wild parties, torrid affairs and theater magic.
Liza Minnelli details complicated relationship with mother Judy Garland
From a young age, Minnelli details a thorny relationship with Garland, who abused drugs and alcohol for most of her adult life. Minnelli writes that Garland would remain in bed for days, depressed and heavily drugged. She also “began confiding her fears, resentments and anger” to Minnelli when she was just 5 years old. While Garland and her husband at the time, Sid Luft, burst into “vicious arguments,” Minnelli escaped to the refuge of her father, Vincente Minnelli.
Minnelli recalls several times Garland attempted suicide, including once when she was struggling with postpartum depression and drug abuse. Minnelli felt “responsible” for getting more prescription pills for her mother, but would often swap out pills for Aspirin so Garland wouldn’t overdose. The family was also “flat broke” at this time, and snuck out of hotels before check out so they didn’t have to pay the bill.
“At 13, I was my mother’s caretaker – a nurse, doctor, pharmacologist, and psychiatrist rolled into one,” she writes.
As she got older, Garland’s “violent mood swings” got worse. She’d sometimes lock Minnelli’s younger half-siblings out of the apartment, and Minnelli would take the children in in the middle of the night.
On several instances, Minnelli writes that Garland attempted to thwart her career, using Minnelli’s boyfriends and the press as bargaining chips to get her to ditch off-Broadway gigs and be with her mother instead. When they performed together, Minnelli writes of palpable “creative tension.”
“None of this would have been apparent to anyone in the audience. They saw affection and love. … Behind the scenes, Mama was proud, confused, and scared. She was holding the torch in front of me but had no intention of passing it,” Minnelli writes.
Minnelli was 23 when her mother died from an accidental overdose at age 47. Despite their complicated relationship, Minnelli writes lovingly about her mother’s legacy and their later memories together.
“My beautiful mother is still here with me. She always will be. Through the good times and bad. We talk to each other every day. And we laugh like hell,” Minnelli writes.
Minnelli spills on Hollywood love affairs
Minnelli spares no detail about her four ex-husbands and Hollywood lovers, many of whom she remained on good terms with after they split. Minnelli was first married to Peter Allen, an Australian singer who later came out as gay (Minnelli walked in on him having sex with a man).
She writes about a “sexual energy” with choreographer and “Cabaret” director Bob Fosse and a disastrous affair with Martin Scorsese while filming “New York, New York” in the ‘70s. She takes readers through whirlwind romances with Broadway actor Ben Vereen and Desi Arnaz Jr., comedian Peter Sellers and ex-husbands Jack Haley Jr. and Mark Gero.
“If this is confusing to you, how the hell do you think I felt?” Minnelli writes. “I was married to a gay man at the same time I was engaged to two other men!”
She also shares regrets about her final short-lived marriage to film producer David Gest, who she says she married in 2002 when she was “very lonely” despite feeling “no physical attraction to him.” Minnelli writes that Gest, who died in 2016, duped her into thinking he could make her career “hotter than ever.” He controlled who she hung out with and spoke to, wouldn’t let her have her own phone and spent her money extravagantly. They separated after 16 months but officially divorced four years later.
This marriage left her feeling “disgusted” and “humiliated” and vowing to never marry again, Minnelli writes.
Liza Minnelli felt ‘sabotaged’ by Lady Gaga and Oscars producers
If you’ve learned anything about “Kids” so far, it’s that Minnelli is not afraid to name names – dead or alive.
In the very last chapter of her memoir, she critiques Lady Gaga, who wheeled her onstage at the 2022 Oscars to present the best picture award. Minnelli expected to sit in her usual director’s chair to give her back some relief. But just before she went onstage, Minnelli was informed she would only be allowed onstage if she used a wheelchair.
Minnelli uses a wheelchair for “going any distance, but never for performing,” she writes. She found it insulting and fought back, but Lady Gaga agreed with the producers that she would not go with her unless Minnelli was in a wheelchair.
“Then, incredibly, she asked if I wouldn’t be better off going home. ‘Why?’ was my incredulous answer. At one point, she quizzed me, to see if my memory was intact,” Minnelli says.
Minnelli writes that she went onstage because it would be better than the speculation around if she left, but that she felt “sabotaged” and “so hurt by this young woman I had mentored and whose talents I admired and publicly acknowledged for many years.”
When she stumbled over her words onstage, Gaga held her hand and leaned over her. Minnelli writes the “seemingly gentle gesture” garnered praise from the audience but made her feel humiliated because it was Gaga who made her rattled in the first place.
“Stefani Germanotta, who created the fantasy of Lady Gaga, became someone I didn’t know on Oscar night,” Minnelli says.
USA TODAY has reached out to Gaga and the Academy for comment.
Liza Minnelli opens up about keeping addiction ‘at bay’
Minnelli writes extensively about her substance use disorder, which she calls “a final gift, a genetic inheritance from Mama I could not escape.” Her drug use started following Garland’s death, when a doctor prescribed her Valium to get through the “stress and tension” of the funeral.
“I’d had a front seat to Mama’s demons. But I was convinced I was different,” Minnelli writes. She continues, “As I learned, luck and brains have nothing to do with handling addiction. You’re dealing with chemicals that are baffling, cunning, and powerful. Keep it up, keep denying it, and you’ll become dependent on them sooner than you think. You’ll fool yourself for years, even decades.”
Minnelli writes that she continued using even while she was telling the public about her sobriety and recovery. In 2003, she writes that she collapsed, drunk, on the sidewalk in New York City and laid “almost comatose” for “God knows how long” while passersby stepped over and around her body.
Eventually, Minnelli got a severe case of encephalitis triggered by drug abuse. After a relapse of the brain swelling and worsening seizures, Minnelli writes that she had an epiphany that she needed to stop. In March 2015, she checked herself into rehab and started working with a new doctor who would no longer let her self-prescribe medication.
Minnelli is now 11 years sober, she writes.
“I haven’t ‘beaten’ addiction. Nobody does if it’s in the blood. It can flare up without warning if you’re not vigilant,” Minnelli writes. “But for the first time, I’ve fought it to a draw. I’m keeping it at bay. That’s the truth. That’s the difference. One day at a time. And baby, there’s no going back.”
Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at cmulroy@usatoday.com.