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Still tapping a gold mine
at the end of the rainbow

14 June 1992 The Sunday Times (UK) newspaper

To understand her is to leave your irony at the door, get dewy-eyed with nostalgia and wallow in the mythology alongside her. Interview by Lesley White.

There are three ways of recognising a true star. They arrive late in a cloud of breathy apologies. They are charm personified for the duration of your allotted time. They have had their public relations person negotiate the limits of the conversation relegating matters of an even mildly personal nature to the danger zone. It is generally best to abide by the contract.

Liza Minnelli is no exception. But when she arrives at her publicist's New York office she is at least something of a surprise. Usually a perfectly maintained likeness of her abiding image - ebony eyes and spidery lashes - today she is travelling without her make-up and the transformation is quite spectacular: no longer a celebrity icon from a Warhol print, or a drag artist's dreamboat, she appears a pale and fragile witness to the tribulations of a life that showbiz history has loved to document.

Her story slices easily into its well-read chapters. The Crown Princess of 1950s Hollywood, daughter of Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli and named after a Gershwin song. The devoted child who soothed the troubled spirit of her mother until Garland's accidental death by overdose in 1969. The divinely decadent heroine of the Studio 54 1970s scene, dressed in Halston, drinking champagne, popping party pills. The Betty Ford clinic resident who shed addictions to Valium and drink and came out smiling, crying, hugging and toasting life with Perrier.

More recently, after three failed marriages and the deaths of her close friends, the designer Halston and Sammy Davis Jr, the brave little showbiz survivor has triumphed in a one-woman show at Radio City Music Hall, and is putting together another album and a brand new show. In between, she has collected an Oscar for Cabaret, Emmys, Tonys and a set of such best forgotten films as Arthur 2 and Robocop. She is, in the idiom of American celebrity journalism, a Star Reborn.

Dressed in black trousers and polo-neck sweater with that brutally scrubbed face, Minnelli looks abnormally normal. Here is a well-preserved 46-year-old woman showing remarkably few ravages of old excesses, and no traces at all of a time when she seemed doomed to repeat the grand pathos of her mother's tragic life. Today Liza is feeling up. She is smiling, chain-smoking, sipping coffee from a plastic beaker and telling a story in a sweet gamine voice. She giggles constantly, the kind of laugh that can be easily nudged into sobs.

"Last night I was going to the Songwriters' Hall of Fame and I'm just getting out of the car, knowing that all the great songwriters are going to be there and that they are going to be inducting my friend, Billy Joel, and they come rushing up to me and say that Tony Bennett has just pulled his back and can't do his tribute to Nat King Cole and can I help? I say w-ow and turn to my friend the musician Billy Stritch and say, 'What should I...?' and he says, 'When I Fall in Love,' and I say, 'What key...?' So he grabs me and we go into this empty ballroom to rehearse and there isn't even a piano, and I'm thinking, gee, this is show business." I bet it was a terrific success, one feels duty bound to ask. "Well I just got up and said I'm going to sing this and thanks very much and I love you all..."

Princess Liza, as they used to call her down on the MGM lot, makes no attempt to downplay her stardom nor to deny the diamond-studded cast of her personal history. To do so, she is well aware, would be pointless. To understand her is to leave your irony at the door, get dewy-eyed with nostalgia and wallow in the mythology alongside her.

In a lifetime of bad times, she has found her stability in a profession feared for its fickleness: old-fashioned American glamour. Despite a momentarily successful rebirth into pop a few years ago, belting out the old songs is what Minnelli loves best. During a conversation she will suddenly click her fingers, shake her shiny cap of black hair and give you a few lines of a favourite ballad to illustrate a point. With anyone else this would be embarrassing, with Minnelli it is merely punctuation. "Sammy taught me that," she will say. Or: "Uncle Nat first sang this."

She is strangely attached to a childhood that, despite its painfully public miseries, allowed her to enter the hallowed halls of Hollywood royalty. While other movie brats her age were rebelling against the old studio hierarchy, little Liza sat literally at their feet. "As a kid I'd go over to Sammy's house and he'd have a group of friends there Mel Torme, Frank Sinatra, you know... at some point someone would start to play the piano and people would get up and sing. It was fun for me, it was normal for them but, in retrospect, it just kills me. There is a section in my tribute to Sammy based on that experience and Fred Ebb (co-writer of Cabaret, New York, New York and so on) has written a new song called Sammy's House."

This is a polite reminder that we are here to discuss Minnelli's contribution to the Sammy Davis Jr benefit concert at the Albert Hall on June 23. In aid of the Royal Marsden hospital's cancer appeal, she has agreed to provide the entire second half of the evening.

Sammy was her greatest, her very best friend, she says. She was five when they met. "My parents took me to Palm Springs for a family weekend and we all went for dinner to some club and my mother said to me, 'You are about to see the most extraordinary fellow.' I remember very clearly what he did and what he looked like, but most of all I remember this energy. It was like watching another kid up there. I thought, hey, I've got a playmate... But most of all he loved what he was doing, he loved the audience."

Davis was the first of her parents' friends - including the "father figure Sinatra" and uncles Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck - who became solid Minnelli allies. The age difference was never a problem, mainly because Liza placed herself in the sole custody of an era that was never really her own. "Sure Sammy was older than me, but he was hip. When I decided I wanted to go into the theatre he was the one that gave me advice."

Only once did her mentor steer her wrong, when she was asked to step in for the sick Gwen Verden in Chicago, the Broadway musical. "He said, 'Don't do it. You are a star in your own right, let the understudy take over.'" She was, of course, the cause of cheering crowds, jammed streets and mounted police the day after she opened. "The next day my dressing room was so full of flowers I actually could not get inside it. There was just a little card saying, 'Anyone can make a stupid mistake.'"

When not skipping home from school to watch her parents working at the studio, her early days were spent with her mother on the road. Her hobby was learning song lyrics. While her school friends were becoming the world's first teenagers, she found comfort in Garland's portable discography. "On the road we always carried these records: Ella Fitzgerald sings Gershwin, Tony Bennett sings Rodgers and Hart, Nat King Cole sings Rodgers and Hammerstein." By the time she was 11 she knew everybody's catalogue. It was, she whispers, her very own poetry. Sorry for the lonely little girl, Davis encouraged her obsession.

When Minnelli was offered her first audition at 16 she called Davis for advice; he said sing something fast, sing something slow and sing something they know. It was more than professional counsel, it was to turn into a way of life. More than her voice or her looks or her dancing talent, Minnelli's appeal is the link she provides with straight razzmatazz. The sentimental culture of America still weeps buckets every time Minnelli's lower lip trembles and she looks as though she may burst into Somewhere Over the Rainbow. This gives her enormous power. She knows it.

"I guess I just stuck with Broadway," she says, "because it was what I knew, I understood the lyrics and it was a novelty to have someone my age doing it." Songs are how she understands the world. For her stage shows she treats every number as if it were a little movie, even keeping notes on all the characters she imagines to be in the songs, what colour hair they have, how they wear their clothes. Singing, she insists, comes from acting. "And the best performances come from truth... Sammy taught me that," she says again.

Currently residing in splendid singlehood in a house on Manhattan's chic upper east side, Minnelli nurses no fantasies of escape. "I get peace at my house in the city. I don't have to go and walk along the shore to unwind. I go to the movies and watch other people's work... it's really kind of normal and boring." Though when recently asked in London if she did her own shopping, she disingenuously replied: "Sure, I waltzed around Harrods yesterday."

In a discreet transgression of the rules, I inquire after her romantic welfare, after her separation from Mark Gero, the sculptor to whom she was married for 11 years. She lowers her head and out comes that nervy giggle. "Aw, no, I don't want to talk about that." Though she wears her fame with ease, her skills of self-protection are expertly deployed - she does it by making you feel insensitive for having asked. These days her best friend, collaborator and avowed soul mate is the young composer and pianist Billy Stritch, who will be arranging her Albert Hall set, and working with her on the new record. "He is terrific. I knew as soon as I saw him perform that Sammy would have loved him."

At this point she stops, gets up, runs to a corner of the room and starts to tap a dance routine on the mud-brown carpet of her publicist's office. Shuffling her feet, swinging her arms at her sides, starting to sing the words of Don't Get Around Much Any More, she is offering a preview of her act. She is totally absorbed, utterly self-conscious. It is a thrilling moment.

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