A sentimental journey

18 September 1991 The Guardian (UK) newspaper

"In this art form, performance, what you want is to be able to stand, without any tricks, in the light. To be pure, to be truthful" - Liza Minnelli interviewed by Suzie Mackenzie.

Liza Minnelli is sentimental and proud of it. "Of course, aren't you?" She sits, curled up in a chair, a cushion, for God's sake, clutched to her stomach, as though trying to cover up old wounds. The huge, helpless Bambi eyes, the self-conscious adolescent gaucheness, the trembling do-I-dare bottom lip, all contrive in the picture of trammelled innocence that is her inheritance.

Although she is now 45, she looks, in a way, ageless. Her face is a mask but her voice cracks regularly and on cue, and from somewhere I have an image of her with glistening glycerine tears. You sense that she hates to be touched, physically as well as emotionally, and at one point when I go to light her cigarette, she recoils into her chair. The laugh is forced, defensive and always ready, another prop. Such things you can rely on, she seems to say. Other things not. Dependency in different forms has always been her theme.

She was born the daughter of Judy Garland, the first child. And the daughter of Vincente Minnelli. She adored her mother but, "I was always a daddy's girl. He was so wonderful, supportive, patient. He made me feel the prettiest, the best little girl in the world. I think there are a lot of girls like that all over the world."

All the cuttings from the period, the various biographies, document the misery of Garland's drug and alcohol abuse, vented on her family, and Minnelli's vain attempts to shield his daughter from the rages that would strike like lightning out of nowhere. The breakdowns, the illnesses, the 23 suicide attempts, the violent weight fluctuations that led to more drugs, more dependency. The miraculous recoveries. And, of course, the divorces, four in five marriages. One apocryphal story has it that when she wed for the last time, Liza quipped, "Sorry, I can't make it to the wedding but I'll be at the next one, I promise."

She was, of course, created in her mother's image and her life has been in part a struggle to sever those bonds. We are used to the idea that fame breeds insecurities, intensifies insecurities, but if you are born of famous parents, insecurity is part of your birthright. Minnelli has said her major anxiety is that, "I am not an interesting person" and, "I fight to be Liza Minnelli on-stage and off-stage." But when I repeat this to her she denies it. "No, no. I don't have to fight. I just am." It's very nice to be part of a tradition of excellence, she says, to feel she's done her parents proud. But she did not follow them into showbusiness. "I loved what my parents did but film sets are boring for a child, repetitive. Nothing I thought fun or wanted to be."

What she wanted to be was an ice-skater, then a dancer, "the chorus girl with the little speciality". At her first big break on Broadway, Best Foot Forward in 1963, for which she won a promising newcomer award, her mother did not turn up. And by the time she won an Oscar for Cabaret in 1972, Garland had been dead three years.

I ask if she feels she was spoilt as a child: "Not by things." Was she emotionally spoilt? "You can't be emotionally spoilt. Spoilt is when someone doesn't take the time to explain, when you are given a toy and told, 'Go play with this'. When you don't get the attention you need." She was given attention? Yes. Was happy? Yes. And then she says, and it is the nearest she gets to any insight into her relationship with her mother, "I grew up surrounded by humour, wit and brainpower. My father was funny, sensitive." A long pause. "My mother was too. But my father's influence was so... different. I never thought I was anything like my mum. Other people made that comparison" An invidious one? "Stupid. That's the only word for it."

Stupid or not, the comparisons are there. In July 1984, after years of rumours and denials, "sick and tired of feeling sick and tired", she checked herself into the Betty Ford clinic in California. It was, she says, like someone saying, "If you don't have this, drink and drugs, then you can have your whole life." And she thought, "Oh, thank God."

The dependency she believes was inherited, a disease. "Not lack of willpower, not some slob falling apart, but an illness, like diabetes." Her "sobriety" now is her freedom. "If you don't like the way the day is going, start it over. Sometimes I do that three or four times in a day." Look, she says, "Life is adversity. Just getting up is adversity. But the decision to be happy is a conscious choice. I like that, that it's up to you. In this art form, performance, what you are looking for is to get rid of anything that's not the truth. Suddenly you find yourself relying on gestures, a certain type of song. Kick it away, it's something you're leaning on. What you want is to be able to stand, without any tricks, in the light. To be pure, to be truthful."

Which is all beginning to sound like an incantation. And, sure enough, within minutes we're on to God, higher beings, the leaves on the trees: "Sometimes they're so pretty." And, inevitably, "gratitude". She advocates, with practised sincerity, what F Scott Fitzgerald once called, with delicious irony, "the standard cure for one who is sunk". Charity. Says Minnelli, "What takes the loneliness out of your life? Gratitude. Help someone else. Do hospital work. Boy, does your gratitude come back."

It is easy to mock her when she talks like this, with all the characteristic Californian cloying candour. But there is a gentleness there. Her third marriage, to the sculptor Mark Gero, has recently ended after 12 years. I had been told she would not discuss this, so was surprised when she brought it up. "If your lives are going in different directions, and you realise that before it gets too awful, and make that decision together, then that's positive, isn't it? Our marriage lasted 12 years, that's a very good run, isn't it? We're proud of it. Of course it's tough but it's also real. If you deal with it as reality, then it doesn't have to be a failure, does it?"

"I didn't say it was a failure, Liza."

"No, I know you didn't and thank you for that."

She looks, for a moment, defeated and you can see what people mean when they talk of her vulnerability and her resilience in the same breath. She has this technique of slapping herself down and picking herself up which she uses almost like repartee. Everyone, I suppose, has to learn how to ease their own private grief and perhaps she has done this with small evasions which yield what she calls small successes. I don't think I am being sentimental when I say she looks, always, as if she is about to divulge some great private sorrow. But her sentimentality is her shield, of course.

"I don't project any more," she says. "Projection can kill. It's where all your fear comes in. You can write the scripts, you can create such dramas." And then? "When you're a movie star, the men have to sacrifice. It's terribly difficult for any man, who's a real man, to be married to a powerful, famous woman. They're proud at first but then they want you all to themselves, and you want that too, but someone else screws it all up. Any marriage is hard, everyone understands that. You know, I just don't want anyone to sacrifice anything for me any more." Which echoes something she once said she admired about her mother. "She never really denied herself anything for me."

I just wish she hadn't made Stepping Out, a film of ineffable banality and incorrigible sentimentality. All sugar and fat. Soft landings, few bumps. It is about Mavis, a tap dance teacher, and her class of hopeless dancers, 'the girls', who are transformed, through enthusiasm and heightened self-esteem, into an award-winning team. It is, Minnelli says, about finding yourself through others. About co-dependency. Which I thought she had been telling me she'd jilted. Not a bit of it. In fact, she and the girls have been planning a new musical about dependency. The theme tune, she says, giggling effusively, to be With You Or Without You I'm Nothing.

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