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31 May 1998 The Sunday Times Magazine
(part of The Times of London UK newspaper)

Liza Minelli: the star who burned too bright: After my afternoon with Liza Minnelli I was so exhausted I had to have a lie-down. She referred to the afternoon as "these few days that I've, known you". It had only been a few hours, so that's a clue to how time stopped, how long it felt.

She can still belt out a song and break box-office records. Yet Liza Minnelli seems hellbent on destroying herself. What demans lie beneath the make-up, bugle beads and crazy razzmatazz? Chrissy Iley report. Photographs by Nigel Parry

Secrets and Liza: She is the original emotional vampire. She needs you so much to like her it's fierce. And she's so fragile, although she'll tell you that she's as strong as an ox, and all those hip and knee and throat operations that rival Elizabeth Taylor's hospital record, well, she's just an indomitable spirit, isn't she? It's the kind of spirit that, when you're locked in a room with it, forces you to swing between exhilaration and exhaustion.

You can't ask her a question because she's prepared some little points that she thinks you want to hear and she's going to tell you them, regardless. Her concentration is haphazard, blurred. She's scratching and sweating, running off to the loo and not making my sense. And then she'll pick up on something and she'll be so extraordinarily, painfully lucid that it hurts. Some terrible line she'll say, with throw-away cynicism, that will be so profound I was scared, if I pursued it, I might inflict the kind of pain that would make her not come out of the bathroom at all or jump out of the window.

She gave me a necklace, a silver Tiffany Elsa Peretti from the 1970s. It is an apple pendant. She says it was to remind me of visiting the Big Apple. It's sweet, curvaceous, an apple of smiling silver, shiny and hopeful, and she's had it for some 20 years. You can imagine her wearing it at Studio 54. She gave it to me within seconds of meeting me. Why would she do such a thing? She handed it to me in the lobby of the hotel across from her apartment on the Upper East Side where she arrived late with her entourage - consultant, assistant and driver. It was raining, she was dripping with rain and sweat, the beads never went away. She gave it to me as an emotional bribe, to make me like her. She didn't have to do that, I would have liked her anyway.

And she kept looking at me with those eyes. Those eyes that are Hershey's chocolate kisses. I couldn't get Liza out of my head. That evening I had dinner with a friend who was connected to the Victor/Victoria Broadway show that Liza stumbled through last year. "You don't want to catch that gaze, let your eyes meet, because then she'll have you. She's so desperate to have anyone she meets who shows her kindness be her confidante, her best friend. Sad. Typical Liza move to give you that necklace."

Later I talked to another woman who'd met Liza. She'd met her more than 20 years ago, when she was nine years old. "I was on a flight to Tokyo and she was sat next to me. I thought she wasn't really quite human She was like this exotic bird and she was really nice to me." She doesn't look like that bird any more. I showed her the Tiffany piece. It is worth a few hundred dollars and I said it was such an obvious ploy I couldn't write the piece without mentioning it. The woman had another take on it. "People give things away when they are going to die, not willy-nilly but quite selectively when they want to divest themselves of things." I was spooked and I wondered about her, the way she railed through our meeting, sometimes wafting like a spirit that had already forsaken its body, and I thought about that thin line between self-destruction and getting through the day.

From the first moment of meeting her she looked disoriented, frail. But still she knows how to make an entrance, waiting for those around her to properly mother her so she in turn can mother and smother back. When Liza was introduced to me she had no recollection in her eyes that she'd ever seen me before. But her assistant Lisa reminded her that we had met 10 years ago for an interview with the Daily Mail. "Oh, you haven't changed a bit. You look so lovely. I remember you and I am remembering you as a man and what he would say if he saw you now and 10 years ago. I'm looking at you the way a man would because that's the way I would like to be looked at."

She, on the other hand, has changed a lot in 10 years. She can change a lot in 10 minutes. And it is easier to monitor change in a woman whose hair colour, style and slinky black clothes have changed hardly at all in 30 years. She's 52 and although I don't know what looking 52 is, Iet's just say she looks more worn and puffy although not necessarily less compelling, than other women I know of about that age. She's wearing some very high-heeled shoes from Moschino that say Love, Love in little gold bands, and shiny flared black pants, a black polo and a shiny black shirt. Her longtime close friend, the designer Halston, first told her she should wear shiny. He put her in very sheeny shiny and bugle beads. He told her because she sweats, so she should drip those beads and always be shiny.

We go up to the hotel suite. She orders Coke, the Real Thing, and a dozen of those little candles that come in glass jars. And I have expressly pre-ordered that the entourage stays in the other room. "Beige," she exclaims, giggles and plonks herself on the sofa. "How kind of them to paint the room beige and flatter all complexions." The candles are lit and we have heightened beige.

She tells me she knows that I get it, I get her, I understand. I am bewildered. She then launches into a diatribe about understanding that is utterly incomprehensible. She makes the point that certain words have a certain nuance, just like certain chords do, and a certain delivery hits it, but she talks about this via a story about being under the piano the first time Previn played for Mama, and then it's Mama and Noel Coward.

She is scratching and pulling at her polo neck, so it has become quite baggy. She's scratching on her knee and digging her nails into her thigh. This is her undiluted, uncensored by me on the subject of instinctive understanding: "It's so marvellous, everybody says, oh, yes, we understand. Just like they don't understand you and you go one little thing, one little sentence in a thing, or [a pause]… Some people get it. I am one of the people who get it became I was raised up with these other cats. Do you understand? So you're the proof that I was raised in that era."

Me: "Really. Do you think that's the most important thing, to be understood or to understand?"

"I think probably the most important thing is to make yourself completely clear so you can sell an idea but never completely understand. Just a little bit of magic. You have to be a businesswoman. Back when they were doing 10 shows, how to make it work. And there are tricks. They are not tricks, they take solid talent. They take more than being a performer. They take listening to what will excite you. How can I get you off your chair? It's almost like I know where I want them to go because it feels so good. How do I get them there? Not through politics, but through music and movement and one horn hitting at the right note. And that's what you're about. I know that. I'm trying to tell you that."

I know it doesn't make sense, and her intention was probably to say that she knows how to perform, even if her back or knee or heart is breaking. She can catch that sob in that phrase, in that note. She can talk that schmaltz and be unequivocal, unironic. And an audience can recognise in her the extremes of emotion that go to the pit of themselves.

So, I don't know whether she'll make it on her British tour, which is due to begin next Friday, just like I didn't know whether she'd get to the end of the interview. The next day she apparently delivered a brilliant performance in Boston. A week or so later her New Orleans dates were cancelled. Despite some scathing reviews of her Broadway performance in the Julie Andrews role of Victor/Victoria, the show broke all box-office records. Who needs Jerry Springer when you've got Liza Minnelli?

She's not a victim, she's a fighter. She's fighting for me to like her. If you review her life she's always saying how now she feels better than ever, now she's really cracked it. She once told me, when she started singing songs written by the Pet Shop Boys, that for the first time she'd found her place, her time. She liked to sing songs not written before she was born. But those old songs are her life blood. She used to joke she came out of the womb and did the perfect pause for applause. In showbiz, anything can turn around. She promised her mother, Judy Garland, she'd never sing any of her songs. Hard, because her mother had sung all those great songs. Last year, she says, she broke the promise by singing an aching a cappella rendition of You Made Me Love You.

Everything she says aches, because when she says the hopeful stuff, you don't know if she's trying to fool herself or you, but either way you don't like to put her right. "Scottie," she calls to her consultant, Scott Moreau. "Will you tell her what happened when I was standing backstage with Michael Jackson? Only please don't write it like I said it. Just use it for background. But, er, um, um, um.

"Anyway. I look up and here comes this guy in a hat, but it was a major hat. And he said, 'I don't want to bother you but you are what we all want to be.' I said why. And he said, 'Because you are the music, the song and the light, and nothing else is needed.' And I said, who is the guy in the hat. And it was Bono from U2. So I go over and I say, do you mean it? And he says, 'Yes. Everybody is searching to distract you from, and you always go towards. That's what we all want. There's an underground rule in rock'n'roll about you.' I'm an underground rule? I've sung songs about what we all go through, not over or under or around. We go through," she says with certainty.

"It's happened to you. What I love is when you sing three words on stage, someone goes ooh, because for one minute they're not alone. Not a woman by herself. All I'm saying is I find comfort in the fact that people all go through what someone else has gone through dramatically and survived. That gives me hope." She might have been born with a genetic sense of pain, disappointment, abandonment, loss.

The world she was born into in March 1946 was a precarious one: a showbiz child, she moved with her parents from one set, one tour to another. Her father, the director Vincente Minnelli, and mother were already tearing each other apart. There was all that under-the-piano stuff, while her parents' famous friends sang for their supper. She appeared as a baby in her father's classic film Meet Me in St Louis, and was always dragged on stage by her mother. It's hard to imagine what it would have been like after her parents' separation when Garland became crazed, suicidal, leaving Liza to be a mother to her own mother.

In previous interviews she has said that, as a child, she was hiring her mother's nurse and dresser, listening to her mother's talk of loneliness, professional crises and rejection. And she spoke of the time that she and her sister, Lorna Luft, emptied all the pills in the bathroom and filled them with sugar because they were afraid of what their mother might get up to. She was there with bandages after Garland tried to slash herself with a broken tumbler, sitting in the wings when she did a show shortly before her death, saying, "Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated."

Bing Crosby had a handy line about his friend Judy. "There wasn't a thing that girl couldn't do except look after herself!" She died in 1969 of an overdose, possibly accidental, after a series of financial calamities and tax troubles, leaving enormous debts. Liza is good at rewriting history. She says her mother was by no means tragic. She was actually a lot of fun. But I'm not sure whose life it is she's rewriting. She's had to live all her life with the grotesque comparison with her mother. She is as good a singer, but is she as troubled? Does she think that that was thrust upon her?

"Yes, but it was thrust upon her too. They found out, the studio, that the public was more happy when she was troubled than when she was happy. They had other movie stars who were best when they were successful. But with Mama they wanted family problems." She must be so fed up with the comparisons to her mother. She is always asked about her lineage. She'll say something and she'll give the perfect soundbite, like, 'My mother gave me my drive but my father gave me my dreams." Her mother's relationship to pills was a lifelong bond. Minnelli sought treatment in the 1980s at the Betty Ford clinic to deal with her own alcohol and pill dependency. Ever since, newspapers have speculated about her health.

She calls for Scottie to come and do her back and spreads herself out with her bottom in the air, arm placed across a hotel chest of drawers. Scottie has to put his elbows in a massaging position. "There's a whole generation of Americans for whom it's going to be Judy Garland's daughter, and then I got recognised for myself, only because I f***ing did it, and not many did." She says that there was no real professional comparison to her mother because, for a start, she never wanted to be her, all she wanted to do was dance, and also "she died before that happened. She died before I did The Sterile Cuckoo. I wish she could have seen it. I think she would have been proud of that".

The Sterile Cuckoo was a movie she did in 1969 where she played this geeky, edgy girl who gets dumped in the end, and she got an Oscar nomination for it. Three years later she won the Oscar for Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Sally Bowles's look, the hair, the dark eyes, the bugle beads, stayed with her. Despite her intuitive performance as Pookie Adams in Cuckoo and her very sweetly delivered Linda Marolla in Arthur and hauntingly put-upon Francine Evans in New York, New York, Sally Bowles is the one that people remember. She said at the time, "Sally is a girl who improvises her whole life, and her fantasy of tomorrow is so strong she really can't take a good look at it now." People thought this described Liza Minnelli.

She describes herself as "hopeful and cynical. I would love to be cynical because I admire it, but hopeful is what I am". She says that is similar to her mother and that she understood how she was "cast" as a manic-depressive. She leers towards me, wagging her fingers. She says, "Don't try to correct the rumours. Nobody wants them corrected. The legend will grow by itself!"

So it's not true, then, that you had to fill the aspirin capsules with sugar?

"Yeah, but I can find you five kids on this block that did the same thing. Everybody's had an alcoholic in their family. Ours was just in the newspaper. People could relate to it because they were going through it in their own homes. She gave me the values to absolutely not end up like her. She was filled with love, she was so funny, and I can't say that any more because nobody believes me. But she was hilarious. She had that self-deprecating humour that was really funny. Once she literally had slipped on a banana peel and instead they had her falling down drunk. The newspapers. It's just a little bigger. But it still hurt just as much. You were embarrassed to go back to those people, weren't you?"

She's going random, tangential, contradicting herself. Then she says, "It's the difference between shame and guilt, which is huge. Guilt, I shouldn't have done that, shame, I am ashamed, it becomes something that you are." She seems horrified. "Shame is something that's put in you in childhood. I had a nanny who once said, 'You should be ashamed of yourself,' She was fired."

Much later on, she talks about an incident on the number 11 bus when she lived in London. Because of the way she is, with all her fidgeting and thoughts wafting in and out of her head, I think this anecdote relates back to shame. So, she was on the bus going to school and passed a newsstand, she was 12. The bus stopped at a light and she read, Garland runs through apartment naked. "And I'm sitting here and the girls here go to school with me and this girl whispers, 'Did you read that, Judy Garland naked?' So she tells me almost as if I wasn't involved. For a minute I thought I'd got away with it, but none of it was true. I had been at home the night before and none of that had happened. I was dying inside..." The rest is lost to me.

"I have never talked about my parents this much," she announces. This can't be true, but it's as if she wants me to feel that she's giving me what she thinks I want. "I think they wanted me to be addicted to absolutely everything that she was addicted to in her life to prove that there's some kind of continuity. She was less addicted than most people we know today who are in the limelight. The consistent stories they wanted from her were about tragedy where only the audience could save her. She understood that. She knew how to build a show beautifully. She knew how other women felt. She was tuned in. I don't feel as smart as that. All I know is that I'm kind of living through whatever years until they forgive me for being alive because it's much too long I've been alive. Holy Christ, she's not supposed to live that long. It's almost like a resentment. It will turn in a minute and they will realise that I belong to them. It's because of them I've lived this long."

She delivers this blase, but I feel shocked and inadequate. "I'm telling you this, just to tell you that my life is on schedule and I don't want the highs and lows."

By this time the full entourage has moved back in, Frankly I'm glad. I can't think of anything reassuring to say to her. And I'm thinking, if I don't there'll be no easing the desperation she's telling herself she's not feeling. But it's probably a dislocated desperation that she thinks she's got away with, like that time on the number 11 bus. I felt somehow guilty at seeing her pain. Because she'd tried so hard to show me she was non-perishable goods.

"Ha! the point is it's not terribly popular to have outlived your own tragedy. Not what they had in mind. You've outlived your own legend. For as long as I've been a legend they've never got their way. I don't quite understand… She's a big star, well, natch. She's not very talented, well, natch. Oh, she killed herself, well, natch. Those people who say well, natch, are the people we're fighting. You fight as a writer and I fight as an artist. My mum fought… It doesn't mean to say for 22 years I have helped kids with brain injuries. It doesn't mean to say I go and sing in hospices where all the people are dying. I'm not saying I'm a diamond but I can touch somebody. Is this as good as I think it is, now where did I put my bag, must go to the ladies."

When she comes back she wants to order food, cheeseburgers and dessert. She tells me that she's just had an operation on her knee and she wants Scottie to put his elbows in her back. I ask her if that cracks it back into place. She says, "No, it's a massage, I'll show you." Then she asks me to bend over and put my elbows down on the chest of drawers, "Open your legs a little, like this, there." She's screwing her elbows into my back. She was pretty good, actually.

Now that we've been tactile I think perhaps it's the appropriate moment to ask about her love life. "No, it's the first time since… I've been married my whole life, I'm so proud of standing on my own two feet. But I miss having my... " she trails off. "I'm romantic to the nth degree." She has been three times married. In 1967 she married Peter Allen, who allegedly spent the wedding night with his boyfriend. They split a couple of years later when either he could no longer hide his homosexuality from her, or she couldn't hide it from the world. Gay men always loved her, and when Allen contracted Aids she did everything to support him, and was devastated by his death.

After Allen she married Jack Haley Jr, whose father played the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, the original friend of Dorothy. Her third husband was Mark Gero, a sculptor whom she divorced in 1991 after 12 years of marriage. Those were the husbands, but the affairs were even more interesting. There was Charles Aznavour, an engagement to Desi Arnaz Jr, who got dumped for an insatiable time with Peter Sellers and then, if the Warhol Diaries are to be believed, she was having flings with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Martin Scorsese while married to Haley. Later on there was the composer/singer Billy Stritch and, rather worryingly, some kind of arrangement with Gene Simmons from Kiss.

She had always badly wanted children and suffered three miscarriages. With Gero she tried to adopt but agreed to fertility treatment which didn't work. One gets the impression that she's clever enough, funny enough and insecure enough to know how to make whoever she wanted like her. Is she alone now because she really doesn't want the highs and lows?

"No. I'm not good in drama, I'll lose in drama, somebody pretty will come along. I don't trust drama." Is that because you're expecting abandonment of some kind? "Yeah, because it's familiar. I'm good at it. I want stability, I want somebody who's a nice guy. In order to be strong enough to say it you have to have a back-up plan. My expectations are lowered. I'm not putting anyone on the spot." I think it's painful to lower your expectations because it's giving up, settling for less. "Right. You think there's anything that simple. We're talking about manipulation. I've manipulated something my whole life by expecting them to be great and making them think they are great and imposed the fact that I think they are great into reality. Now I don't impose it. You can be who the hell you are, it's fine with me."

You don't want someone who feels they really deserve you? "What have I done to be deserved?" she says, incredulous. I remind her of what Bono said. "Yes, but do I make flowers better, will the flowers be better?" They don't have to live with the flowers, they have to live with you. "They don't have to live with the flowers? Look how pretty you are inside. Do you have any idea..."

She's giving me lots of eyes and then a soliloquy in which I'm not sure whether the central character is me, her or womankind in general. She's talking about how we don't believe in the romantic dream any more, but how "It was always told that you deserved it, to come out in a wonderful dress to say sorry I'm late. You're allowed that. You are what men need. You are a marvellous, romantic woman. You will make trees look greener. You will make flowers flower in gardens around you. They make things to make your nails look good at night. You are the proof that woman should be adored. Look at your face. I am my father's daughter and I know how to celebrate beauty, I know what's right between men and women."

Although she seems lost she says that she was usually the one who left a relationship. "I always left for the stupidest reasons. I left because I thought I was going to be killed… You think you know what's going to happen. He was in line with your enthusiasm until suddenly he says, 'I'll be away Friday,' and you think, what do you mean away Friday, you're in the wrong script. It was beautiful and how dare you go away."

The cheeseburger has arrived and she's going for it. She's holding it as if it's some bloody wound with all the tomato sauce dripping out of it like some bleeding heart. By this time she has almost consumed me, and when she calls Scottie I'm relieved. Perhaps he will know what to say to her. Perhaps the entourage knows a secret language that I'm too stupid to understand. Or perhaps they've just reached a point where they don't notice how painful it is. She's exhausting in the way she's always giving. She told me that in the beginning of her career when she wanted to get a job in Charlie Bubbles and said to the director, "They're all blonde and have beautiful hair, but I'm good and if you let me learn something I'll learn it really quickly and do it any way you tell me, four different ways." She came back and did it four different ways. "I got it and I was nominated for an Academy Award. He said, 'You're special without being blonde.' I'm special, isn't that a bullshit line? I've always wanted to be the kind of woman who could be blonde. Every girl has had that dream and I have had every dream that every girl has had, truly." There she is again, the girl who has to carry other people's dreams.

She tells me, "I am exactly who I am. I promise you everything I am talking about is what I believe in. And you will know that the best is yet to come."

The candles are still flickering across the table. They look religious, hopeful and therefore tragic. On the way out there's some untouched chocolate ice cream and another chocolate fudgy cake. So we all, me and the Minnelli entourage, dip into it. She has great plans for me. Scottie tells me how much she really, really liked me. I feel burdened by this. I watch them cosseting her out of the building. She smiles a kind of Queen Mother smile randomly at people passing in the lobby and then she stumbles into her limousine.

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