JUDY AND LIZA
While many think of Judy Garland as a tragic figure, Liza Minnelli recalls a loving mum with a wicked sense of humour, as she tells Sharon Krum.
The real story of Hollywood’s famous mum and daughter
Liza Minnelli wants to tell this story about her mother. It’s one she knows people don’t often hear about the legendary Judy Garland, but it’s so endearing and fabulously showbiz that all these years later, Liza still gets a kick out of recounting it. “I was five years old,” she begins, explaining it was 1951 and her mother was performing on Broadway. “I was standing in the wings, where they let me hold the water. It was the end of the show, Mama bowed dramatically and the curtain came down.” Liza says Judy then jokingly collapsed. “So I ran out and said, ‘Mama, are you all right?’ And she said, ‘What do you want, Chinese or Italian food [after the show]?’ And I said, ‘Oh, Italian.’ She said, ‘Good, get off the stage.’
“I ran off, she put her head down and the curtain went up. She could turn it off and on brilliantly. See, when I think of Mama, I remember her humour. People want to see the sad side, but she was funny, really funny.”
As the world knows, that little girl in the wings grew up to be a Hollywood and Broadway star in her own right, “Liza with a zee”, whose showstopping songs, Cabaret and Maybe This Time, have become her anthems.
“When I sing, I sing as if I am never going to sing that song again,” she says.
“I’m a Minnelli, a pain-in-the-arse perfectionist,” she says, laughing. “I always say I got my drive from my mother, but my dreams from my father.”
Liza is 73 and, to use one of her favourite words, she looks “swell”. Every strand of her famous pixie haircut is in place, the brown eyes intense. She has fully recovered from a bout of viral encephalitis in 2000, when doctors said she would never walk again, is sporting two new hips and the Minnelli legs are still fabulous.
She speaks softly, but then out comes her bubbly, throaty laugh. Life, she says, is good now, yet she admits being
Liza Minnelli has been a journey of highs and lows – awards, acclaim and sell-out crowds, paired with drug abuse, alcoholism, miscarriages and four broken marriages, including one with the late Peter Allen, whose life was immortalised on stage by Hugh Jackman in The Boy from Oz.
If this sounds reminiscent of her mother’s roller-coaster life, unfortunately, sometimes it has been. Judy, too, had a phenomenal voice, became an adored star of stage and screen, and battled the demons of drugs and alcohol.
There were financial problems, suicide attempts and Judy racked up five marriages before dying of an accidental drug overdose in 1969, aged 47.
“Now, do I look like a tragic figure to you?” Liza asks when you mention the tough times. “And I never will be.
I love my life.” She starts to sing a line from But the World Goes Round...
“And one day it’s kicks, then it’s kicks in the shins... ”
Yet did she ever feel she was reliving her mother’s story? “What I drew from her was the humour and the talent.”
Later, though, Liza will speak of her alcoholism, which she believes is inherited. She has been to rehab and attends Alcoholics Anonymous. “Alcoholism is a disease,” she says. “I say it’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility and that’s how I live my life.”
The daughter of Wizard of Oz star Judy Garland and film director Vincente Minnelli, Liza was born into Hollywood royalty. “I didn’t realise when I was a kid who my parents were,” she says. “MGM [the film studio] was my playground. I would go there after school.”
After her parents divorced, Liza lived for a time with Judy at New York’s Plaza Hotel. At the age of six, she could dial for room service. The young Liza knew she wanted to perform at 13, after seeing Bye Bye Birdie on Broadway, yet it’s as if she never needed a lesson. There’s a video on YouTube of Liza, then 18, and Judy performing at the London Palladium, where Liza reveals herself to be a born talent.
“I was on stage with my mother, but suddenly she wasn’t Mama,” Liza once recalled. “She was Judy Garland.”
By 19, Liza had won a Tony award, then an Oscar at 26 for her careerdefining performance as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. For more than 50 years she has worked hard, she says, to build her own identity on film (New York, New York, Arthur), on stage, in music and TV. Which is why she won’t sing Judy’s songs. “My mother – and my father – were so supportive of me,” she says. “But they’re her songs. When people ask for Over the Rainbow, I say, ‘It’s been sung’.”
Plus, she says, her mother once advised her, “Be a first-rate version of yourself, not a second-rate version of somebody else.”
Liza says that Elizabeth Taylor once scolded her for reading upsetting news stories about herself, so she stopped – and missed the stories of her estrangement from half-sister Lorna Luft over her drug abuse, a rift now healed.
“I’d like to know what family doesn’t fight? It’s just that ours makes the paper,” Liza says.
“My mother – and my father – were so supportive of me.”
And she avoided the field day the tabloids had with her fourth wedding, in 2002, to concert producer David Gest, at which Michael Jackson was best man and Elizabeth Taylor the maid of honour. It was quite the spectacle, but ended bitterly 16 months later.
Not the luckiest in love, Liza had been married three times before: to Peter Allen, producer Jack Haley Jr and stage manager Mark Gero. She says she will never marry again, that it’s too difficult for men to be “Mr Minnelli”.
Yet she talks about Peter with deep affection. They married in 1967, after Peter’s group, The Allen Brothers, became Judy Garland’s opening act, and famously performed together at Chequers nightclub in Sydney. “Oh, Chequers!” Liza says. “We practically had to step over a man chopping shrimp to get on stage.”
They divorced in 1974 and Peter died of AIDS-related throat cancer in 1992. “We stayed friends his whole life,” Liza recalls. “I was with him when he died. Nobody made me laugh like Peter. He was a wonderful husband, but he had to make a decision [about coming out as gay] and he made it as a gentleman and with style.
“What a songwriter he was! I mean, Tenterfield Saddler? You want to cry every time you hear it.”
Liza didn’t see The Boy from Oz and has little interest in watching other productions about her family. “Will it change anything? I never have anything to do with movies about her [Judy] because all they want to do is use you.”
Perhaps Liza can’t watch because it’s too close, or maybe the key to her survival is that she keeps moving forward. “I don’t look back, because I’m lucky enough to have a future.”
Without the stage, she wouldn’t be Liza. No, she corrects me, without the fans, she wouldn’t. “I couldn’t do this if it wasn’t for them. I owe them everything, so I do my damndest.”
This article first appeared in the June 2009 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly – ages and time frames have been updated where appropriate. Judy, starring Renée Zellweger, opens in cinemas on October 17.