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Her Mother's Daughter

8 June 1996 The Guardian Weekend Magazine
(part of The Guardian UK newspaper)

Catch a falling star: Like Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli has always existed in the public gaze. These days, all eyes are focused on her private troubles. She says she has none. But one thing can't be denied. Her own life is beginning to mirror her mother's a little too closely. Interview by Jim Shelley.

Liza Minnelli is late, as perhaps a living legend should be. Half an hour after our appointed rendezvous, I'm still waiting in the ground-floor cafe of Barneys department store, where the legions of New York's Patsys and Edinas come to rest their weary soles - and souls - for lunch, before heading back into the fray of chicdom. The cafe, appropriately enough, is called Mad.61. When I ask what the risotto is, without missing a beat the waiter explains, "it's lots of little bits of rice, together in a bowl", as if he's auditioning for one of the Airplane! movies.

I wait at the bar studying the photos framed along the walls, pictures of New York's fashion glitterati - Halston and Bianca, Naomi and Linda, Warhol and Mapplethorpe - most of them friends of Minnelli's, many of them dead. Liza herself is not up there. Not up there, and not here either.

I'm becoming resigned to a cancellation by the time I hear a woman's voice saying she is meant to be meeting me. At first I'm surprised to see how ordinary she looks. Smartly dressed, with neat, bobbed black hair, big brown eyes, typical black turtle-neck and gold jewellery, her arrival has caused no commotion, or even interest. I can't help but feel a pang of disappointment that Liza Minnelli has become someone who can blend in so easily; that she doesn't seem more special and exciting. And no wonder. It's not her. It's her assistant - Lisa with an 's' - sent ahead to wait with me.

When Liza herself finally arrives, an hour or more later, it is quite an entrance. I first see her out of the corner of my eye (later on, I wonder if I just sensed her presence), clattering down a side entrance on high black heels, wearing a tight black dress, a rather tatty-looking black fur and elbow-length red suede gloves. All that's missing is a bowler hat and, maybe, a feather boa, although the fur coat more than makes up for it. (She calls it her Gorillas In The Mist coat. To me, it looks like a bath mat.) She reaches the top of the steps and stands there like a superstar at an awards ceremony. Then, hurling discretion to the wind, she throws her arms open and, with a dazzling smile, shouts "Dah-Nah!" like a fanfare, and charges down the steps, across the restaurant and rather haphazardly throws her arms around me.

She scurries around the table and crashes down into her seat, talking 19 to the dozen. She orders a Coke, asks for an ashtray, looks for a cigarette, apologises for being late, drops her handbag, asks about my love life, calls the waiter "dahling", cackles with laughter and theatrically breaks into several accents, from Southern vamp to New York camp, even mock Queen of England ("how charming").

The first, frantic minute of the interview over, any idea of an ordered line of questioning is immediately dispensed with. Then she's off again, zig-zagging towards the ladies ("now, where did he say it was?"), returning ten minutes later even more flustered and wayward than before.

Immediately after our meeting, Liza Minnelli is due to be interviewed on the prime-time gossip feast, Entertainment Tonight. The programme is good exposure and good publicity for Liza's new album, Gently, but there is a feeling among some of her people that the appearance is something of a risk. Although she recently celebrated her 50th birthday with typical joie de vivre, most of Minnelli's recent publicity has been of the wrong kind ("Liza Finds That Life's No Cabaret"), with rumours, led by the National Enquirer, that she is suffering from a return of the problems that saw a concerned Liz Taylor check her into the Betty Ford Clinic in 1984.

The stories have been forcibly denied, but "concern about Minnelli's well-being," as they put it, was fuelled in the UK by her appearance on Ruby Wax Meets... in which Liza and her friend Katy Manning appeared to be rather the worse for wear.

Entertainment Tonight is noted for not giving its celebrity interviewees too tough a time, but it is not always averse to a bitchy twist of the knife when it senses a juicy story. Although her profile has dimmed enough for her to need to do the show, Minnelli is a genuine star - American royalty. Her problems will always be big news.

It's easy to see why Minnelli invites such concern and inspires feelings of protection. She has a wonderfully quixotic, excitable personality, and the term "erratic behaviour" can embrace eccentricities considered normal to many stars. She has spent most of her life in the public eye, driving herself through years of constant touring and performing, often by relying on uppers, downers, tranquillisers and sleeping pills (specifically Valium, which she was first prescribed for her mother's funeral).

Today, for whatever reason, she seems worn down, reckless, blurred. Objects around her fall and collide. Twice she misses her footing and nearly falls. Her watch has stopped and, after a brief struggle, she welcomes her assistant's offer to wind it and re-tie it for her, giggling like a baby: "Yes, please!" Her concentration wanders. Connections jump - a question about a song on her new album ("the songs mean so much to me. And the stillness. And the, er, focus"), ends up with an answer about what her mother, Judy Garland, said about legend and whether her mother's death was suicide ("I waved that death certificate around for months").

Her two assistants chaperone her with enormous care. One, rather simplistic conclusion is that, given the nature of her celebrity childhood, she is playing up and just likes being mothered. She does, however, seem frail, damaged. She had a hip replacement operation at the end of 1994 and hobbles slightly up the stairs, a legacy, she says, of the late-night rehearsals for her current show. The day we meet, she has a small cross of plasters over the back of one wrist, which reminds me of the time her mother was recording a TV show the day after a heavily-publicised statement by her third husband that she had tried to commit suicide on "at least 20 occasions". "Is there a nurse in the building?" Garland had asked her producers, appearing on screen with crutches and covered in bloody bandages, joking that reports of her demise had been greatly exaggerated. When I mention this, Liza laughs keenly, without fully knowing which story I'm talking about. "Is that the one where me and my sister had to throw the aspirin all over the floor?" she asks with unbearable poignancy.

She is still the most animated person you could ever meet - everyone's fabulous big sister - but this makes the times when her energy and life are dimmed seem only more significant than they would in anyone less exuberant. Telling a joke, she is uncontainable - acting it out with irresistible saunter, the sing-song/ Southern Belle quality back in her voice. Mention a song and her heart visibly lifts. It's when she's singing a few bars, drifting off into a few dah-dah-dee's, that she seems happiest. Happy. But these moments only increase the feeling that you are in the presence of someone almost permanently keeping other problems at bay.

Although we have met only once before, she greets me with warmth, making me her new best friend for the day, which is very touching, but not entirely reassuring. When I offer encouragement or compliments, she clings to the approval ("God! Thank you! Thank you!"), even though I'm in no position to comment on her performance of songs by Gershwin or Cole Porter that she has been singing all her life. Time and time again I watch her fall into the trap of the persecuted, where explaining things can make them only worse. "Isn't it enough?!" she cries at one point, with an edge of desperation. "I guess it's boring to read that somebody's very nice and bringing out a nice record. Someone says 'here, let me help you down the stairs'. You've had three Coca-Colas and they pick you up and piggy-back you down the stairs, and the next day you read you were drunk in a nightclub!"

Equally, though, there are times when suddenly she will pick up and be so bright as a button that her heart and spirit cast shame on such cynicism.

The cover of her new album, Gently, shows Minnelli close-up, chewing distractedly on her fingers, staring out at the camera/ the audience, looking trapped, almost as if it was designed to symbolise a feeling, after nearly 40 years in showbusiness and a life spent in the public eye, that she is caught inside the business; inside showbusiness.

When Liza May Minnelli was born in Los Angeles on March 12, 1946, her parents, Judy Garland and film director Vincente Minnelli (Gigi, An American In Paris), were already squabbling, drifting apart. (They tried reconciliation for the benefit of their daughter, but divorced when she was five.) Children of the famous are renowned for having difficult lives, of course, but few have to live with two celebrity parents. As a result, Minnelli's childhood was entirely without stability. In one sense, she is a rarity in that her life became more normal as she grew older and more famous. She grew up on film-sets, in TV studios, on tour or watching rehearsals. At home, her parents and their friends were always up, singing or dancing, putting on a show.

Judy Garland said of her own life: "I was born in a trunk, raised in a vaudeville family. We had lunch for breakfast, dinner for lunch and a show for dinner. From age five, my appetite for entertainment was keener than my taste for food." Her daughter's life cannot have been very different. When I asked her to quantify how unreal her life had been, she put it at "30 per cent - more than enough." Showbusiness has always been real life for her. She was a baby in her father's classic Meet Me In St Louis, and, as a child, always featured in her mother's publicity stills and TV shows.

In one Garland show, her mother sang the song Liza surrounded by huge photographs of her daughter, from infancy through to age 17, as if in recognition that her whole life had been public property. "My life has been lived in front of the press," she says. "I was born and someone took a picture and it's been that way ever since."

She is often asked about the "burden" of being Judy Garland's daughter and of having to live up to that. But the damage and the details of what that involves go way beyond such a flip assessment.

The glamour of being the child of a superstar like Garland may present one set of problems, but at least they are normally offset by the financial advantages such fame accords. Yet Garland's run-ins with the IRS, legal wrangles over tour cancellations or filming delays, and her hopeless extravagance often meant that her family was hounded for money. Amazingly, Garland was often penniless, and eventually homeless. (She died in 1969, $4 million in debt.) Liza once joked that before she could read or write, she learned how to check out of hotels without paying. Even when Liza married Peter Allen in 1967 (the first of three husbands, compared with her mother's five), Garland was unable to afford a present. Her friend Bing Crosby summed Garland up when he said: "There wasn't a thing that gal couldn't do. Except look after herself."

Garland's addiction to pills and alcohol is always regarded as a factor in Minnelli's own problems, but the lasting psychological damage of the day-to-day effects of dealing with her mother were possibly even worse and certainly more complex. As a child as young as nine, she would sit listening to her mother talk of her loneliness, her professional crises and romantic rejection. Liza once dismissed the "tragic" effects of being Judy Garland's daughter, explaining, "I had tremendously interesting childhood years - except that they had nothing to do with being a child." After her parents' separation, it was left to Liza to be a mother to her mother.

By the age of 12, she was her mother's nurse and dresser, even hiring and firing staff, interviewing applicants to assess whether they could deal with her mother's erratic behaviour and addictions, and asking the police to check their references. When she was 14, she started driving her brother and sister to school because the chauffeur was always drunk and her mother liked him too much to fire him.

David Shipman's book, Judy Garland, logs one suicide attempt in 1947 while Liza was in her nursery (when she dragged a broken tumbler across her wrists and ended up in a sanatorium), and, several chapters later, at her 17th birthday, they are still occurring. As children, Minnelli and her sister would replace their mother's sleeping pills and refill them with sugar (in case she accidentally, or deliberately, overdosed). Liza took the precaution of acquiring a stomach pump. Shipman describes one occasion when Liza was watching TV with a school friend when her mother came in, announced she was going to kill herself and ran into the bathroom. "Mama! Don't kill yourself!" cried Liza, only to catch Garland pouring aspirin down the toilet.

It was probably too much to hope that Minnelli, after such a trying childhood, could forge a normal or even relatively painless life, but after nearly 40 years in showbusiness, she has suffered three broken marriages and now given up hope of having children herself. It would not, I tell her, be surprising if she didn't sometimes despair and wonder, "Why me?"

"Not really," she says, with a shaky-looking smile, adding demurely, "most of the time, I'm terribly grateful. That's what my show's about. It's like that Stephen Sondheim song, where, after all his problems, he ends up just saying, 'I want more.'" When I ask her if she's kept a diary all these years, she looks at me as if I had just asked her if she keeps orangutans. "God, are you crazed? Keep a diary! And then some waiter steals it... No! In my show, I always look at the audience and say, 'Don't worry, we're exactly the same. The facts are different but the feelings are the same.' You either do it that way or the Marlene Dietrich way - 'dahling, you know nothing. Wait till I tell you my experiences.' Hah! But I'm not like that. I'm one of the people. I'm a worker."

It's a tribute to Minnelli's character and determination that such talk does not seem disingenuous, rather mere wishful thinking, despite a childhood surrounded by an extraordinary array of famous talents. Garland and Minnelli Snr were on friendly terms with stars over three decades, and Liza grew up with the likes of Noel Coward, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart and Fred Astaire around the house. She remembers how, as a girl of ten at parties of her mother's, Marilyn Monroe would come up to her room and talk with her ("the 'pretty lady', I used to call her"). Songwriters like Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Marvin Hamlisch and Lieber & Stoller were all family friends.

"Yeah, but I didn't know they were all great people at the time," she complains, with a grin. "They were just boring friends of your parents, tish-tish. People say I must have seen a lot of life. I always want to say, 'and you, too! What happened in school? Did you move? Were you popular? Did you hang with a gang or have only one girlfriend?' Most of the time when I ask this, I've found that what we've been through was pretty similar."

By most people's criteria, though, nothing in her career was mundane. She made her TV debut when she was 13 - with Gene Kelly - and her live debut aged 11 - on stage with Judy Garland. Minnelli's appearances during her mother's shows quickly became commonplace, as Garland would bring her on to give herself more time between songs. Certainly her courage could never be disputed. Shipman describes in his book how Garland introduced her during her New Year's Eve shows in Las Vegas just a year later "as if it was part of the act, leaving the child to sing a handful of songs which she knew only from hearing her mother sing them." Liza shrugs at the recollection: "I knew they didn't want to see me. It used to annoy me when she would call me out there, only because you could feel the audience going [forced smile], 'Very nice. Now when is she going to get off?' But I always felt she brought me out there as proof that she was a normal woman and a mother. That was lovely. I like that the best."

From time to time, I get lost as her fractured line of thought jumps ahead without me, especially when she talks about "legend" (hers, her mother's, the public's concept of what a legend should be) in the third person. "My mother had a marvellous point of view on it," she says with a hazy drawl. "'That's over there, and that's what they call A Legend and that's gonna build on its own. It was invented by the public. You could go and plant corn seed in Iowa and it will keep going.'" It sounds like a speech her mother must have made to her when Minnelli was still a child. She continues carefully, as if she's concentrating, "'So, watch it, understand it, laugh at it, think about it, who's building it, and lead your own life with dignity and integrity. That's your job.' That's the family baggage - I picked that up and I have to carry it."

As if representing a continuation of her mother's troubled legend was not enough, Minnelli sealed her own legend with her Oscar-winning performance in Bob Fosse's film, Cabaret.

"Cabaret is a cool film. It ruined musicals. Hah! My father made it, with Meet Me In St Louis, by saying, 'music is in everyone's life. It shouldn't be hard to get it up there on the screen,' and Fosse, in making [Cabaret] almost like a documentary, took it off and we've never been able to get it back." Her own film career has never been the same either, despite films such as Arthur and New York, New York.

The stage has been the love of her life. She was the youngest actress ever to win a Tony Award for a musical role (her Broadway debut in Flora) and has regularly broken box-office records for shows in Vegas, at Radio City and Carnegie Hall. But her last commercial album, Results, with the Pet Shop Boys, raised a question mark over her ability to cross over, and although Gently features a duet with Donna Summer (Does He Love You?), most of the album consists of jazzy, romantic cabaret standards like It Had To Be You, Chances Are and Irving Berlin's I Got Lost In His Arms.

"My Dad taught me most of these songs in the car," she explains. "To keep me quiet!" She can't help but point out, with a note of amazement, that one song on the album, Embraceable You, was not only her father's favourite song, but was taught to her when she was only seven - by Ella Fitzgerald. The sleeve-notes for the album remark that she had 14 unrequited love affairs before she was 11, qualifying her as something of an expert on the album's theme of the hopelessness of love.

"Oh!" she gasps, dramatically throwing her head back and throwing her arms open. "I was in love when I was four... I was the most romantic child. I guess it came from watching my father's films. It was all in my head, you know." The songs are arranged to trace an arc, from being in love to being alone, and ends with her favourite song, In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning.

After Peter Allen, she married Jack Haley, whose father (rather spookily) played the Tin Man in The Wizard Of Oz to her mother's Dorothy. Then came her third husband, the sculptor Mark Gero, whom she divorced in 1991 after 12 years of marriage. For 18 months she has been defiantly single.

"I've always been married. Or going with someone. I always felt like I didn't exist unless I was defined through a man's eyes. It's called co-dependency. I'm so relieved I'm not in any kind of relationship now. I cannot tell you. I could just wake up each morning and applaud."

As soon as we arrive (late) for her interview with Entertainment Tonight, Minnelli heads for her dressing-room, emerging another hour later, in a cloud of Obsession, looking a million dollars. She is all excited smiles and superstar graces, embracing me with a clumsy hug on the way. Throughout the wait, the show's presenter has remained in her seat, having her make-up re-touched constantly until her foundation has the texture of stone cladding. Her dazzling television smile remains fixed. Fortunately (bizarrely), she seems to identify with her subject, comparing Liza's tragic childhood with her sorrow that her own father died without seeing his daughter present Entertainment Tonight. She gleefully remarks that making such a smoochy album will make Minnelli "responsible for a lot of pregnancies", blithely disregarding the fact that Minnelli has often talked of her sorrow at not having had children of her own.

However, Minnelli is soon on dazzling form, and has onlookers in stitches when she again maintains she was always in love as a child, and came out of the womb eyeing up the doctor, sighing "Hi!" She laughs off the tabloid stories, earnestly explaining that just as magazines now have photo-enhancement techniques, they also have others designed to create the opposite effect, and that's what they have been doing to her. "Since OJ's trial," she asserts, "bad publicity is good publicity. It's a case of 'there but for you go I'. Is that what I mean?" she worries, looking over in my direction for assistance. "The way the public look at celebrities, if you're in trouble, it makes them feel lucky."

Gradually, though, things begin to go awry. All the points she had prepared, and the stories she intended to tell, come out, but not in any order, and not always in response to the right question. There are times when she embarks on a story without knowing where it's going, but continuing with a feeling that it will be wonderful anyway. Rather misguidedly, she gives her bewildered host a long explanation of the concept of Chinese Whispers ("Chinese Whispers are what my whole life is about"), an analogy involving characters in an imaginary town and a complicated scenario involving the local gossip-monger. "Mildred runs the coffee shop... You go to the airport cos your sister's ill... Your flight landed at midnight. And the man she saw with you was the local taxi driver."

Looking down at the TV monitor nearby, I can see Minnelli in close-up. Staring away at the ground, gnawing her nail as she loses the thread, she looks as if she has suddenly become aware that - because this is for TV, and because she is Liza Minnelli, a legend - what she says should have not only meaning, but gravitas. Meanwhile, the interviewer is looking at her as if she has merely been rambling. So, she starts over-reaching, trying to be over-entertaining, but the confidence to pull it off is too shaken. She is visibly tiring.

She remembers a story she had mentioned to me earlier, about Bono from U2 telling her that "you know, we all want to do what you do. Stand in the spotlight and sing." But instead of slipping it seamlessly into the conversation, as TV chat shows require, she grabs on to it while she can, and rushes into it so roughly and abruptly that the point of the story is lost, wasted.

Alarm bells ring as she starts her next sentence with the fateful words "when your self-esteem has gone..." The words seem to echo around in the silence. I can see her on the monitor, looking around edgily, like a hunted animal, cornered in the TV lights. Around the studio, a dozen or so of Liza's friends and colleagues, her assistants and press officers, are watching in hushed trepidation, hoping she can pull it off, lay the rumours to rest and produce a triumph.

With almost heroic resolve, she again starts to turn it round, saying, "Look, I've formed a production company, built two publishing companies, had a play written, done a deal to write a musical, a cartoon. I've got a solid deal for a film, a solid deal for a musical production on Broadway, do 200 shows a year... Then you read you're a recluse! You can't do all of that and be a mess. It doesn't work."

All the people in the studio are holding their breath, willing her to make it through. Everyone wants it to be all right; for her to be fabulous. There is nothing they want more. But there is, in the tense hush of silence, an excitement, a feeling that Liza Minnelli herself is now the cabaret. The collapse of a great star is something we all find fascinating, and a part of all those present is wondering what it would be like if she collapses here, now, on television. They are all slightly thrilled by the possibility of being there to check the wreckage. Looking around, I realise that I am one of these people, too.

The day is ending. We swish down 5th Avenue in her chauffeur-driven car, peering out of tinted windows at the streets. Even the air-conditioning is silent. The outside world is locked out. Liza Minnelli has never looked happier, face pressed to the window, singing to herself, "when you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette, to your last dying day... When you're a pig, you're a pig all the way..."

"These shoes are real comfortable," she laughs. "My feet, on the other hand, hardly ever are. Hah!" She yawns contentedly, stretches her foot out by the handbrake, and sinks down low into the leather seat. The next time I look over at her, she is dozing. The shoe of her outstretched foot has dropped to the floor. One arm has flopped softly over her head, revealing again the cross of plasters on her wrist. She is still holding her Coca-Cola, the straw rested against her chin. She looks like a child, exhausted, on her way home from a day out.

I am thinking about the interview, about how, because people have problems, we underestimate their endurance; I am thinking that, maybe, in her own way, she is coping. She had spoken about her mother so often, and so freely, that at one point I find myself asking her what the last words she ever spoke to her were. She gives a loud groan, and for a moment just lays her head on the table, cradled in her arm - for so long, in fact, that I thought I'd driven her to tears.

"Oh, dear!" she gasps, sounding desperate. Then, just as I am about to apologise, she raises her head again, smiling brightly. "'Goodnight, I love you.' She says, 'I'll call you in the morning.' And she did, and we hung out together in New York for a while, and then she went home to London. And a week later she was gone, and I never thought that would happen. I always thought my father would go first, cos he was so much older. And the day she died, Kay Thompson [Liza's godmother and her mother's best friend] came back from Europe and she hadn't heard, and I said, 'Momma died,' and she said 'Everything she ever wanted to do in her life, she did, and she had a great, great life... Now what are you wearing?' I told her and she said, 'I'll be right over', and she never left my side after that. We sang all the time. She would tell me wonderful, funny stories - ones that you forget during a tragedy." She is always (not surprisingly) denying that she has continued her mother's legacy, and has tried to claim her life as her own, but it's hard not to see her life as too tragic, full of too much loss.

When Garland was once asked what she had learnt for the future, she said, "Everything passes. Friends go, and husbands and lovers, and you can't stop it. You just have to rely on yourself." Along with her mother's addictions, talent and temperament, what people rarely say about Liza Minnelli is that she also inherited her mother's strength. She has also continued her mother's role in the gay community ("friends of Dorothy", being an early idiom used by gays), inheriting many of her parents' friendships. Her first husband died of Aids and she has lost countless friends over the years. Besides her three divorces, the failure of her big romances (Baryshnikov, Sellers, Aznavour, Scorsese) and the heart-break she has suffered from three miscarriages, have been well-documented.

I tell her I don't know how she can cope with so much loss, and she smiles. "You get ready for it. It's tough losing people. It whacks you on the side of the head when you least expect it to. I wasn't prepared for Mama's death. But I knew my father was dying. I made sure I was there, even though he was in a coma. I thanked him, I told him how much I loved him, said goodbye and that's closure, and you need that. Otherwise, you keep trying to say it's all right and it's not all right. It hurts. It all goes back to those abandonment issues we feel as kids. When your parents aren't there..."

She recites a note that her friend, the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, once sent her, concentrating to get it right. "I'd lost a child,"' she explains quietly, "and all it said was: 'In my garden, at my studio, is a tree. It has grown crookedly and fought its way through a cast-iron fence... to be in the sun. Sometimes we have to be scarred to find the light. Martha.'"

I wonder if she agrees that dealing with loss makes you stronger. "'No,"' she says, wanly. "'It only makes people think you are."

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