Liza Minnelli’s Memoir Has the Sequins, but Not the Sparkle

KIDS, WAIT TILL YOU HEAR THIS! A Memoir, by Liza Minnelli, as told to Michael Feinstein, with Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans

It’s Liza with a zzz.

After candid, sprawling memoirs from her contemporaries — Barbra; Cher (we await Volume II!) — America’s sequined sweetheart, Liza Minnelli, is ringing in with something more compact and circumspect.

Twelve years in the making but readable in an afternoon or two, “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” has been plucked, buffed and powder-puffed within an inch of its long life by the Great American Songbook champion Michael Feinstein and two veteran newspaper writers.

Those of us who are not kids anymore have heard much of this already, including in last year’s documentary “Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story”; or from Minnelli’s half sister Lorna Luft’s 1998 book, “Me and My Shadows,” about life with their brittle and brilliant mother, Judy Garland.

Liza’s story was being told before she even had a choice about the matter. She grew up in the Hollywood Hills with Candice Bergen and Mia Farrow as playmates, and was, with Lorna and their brother, Joey, often trotted out for the cameras by an unraveling Garland.

We’ve heard many times how she found her own crowd (Kander and Ebb and Fosse, oh my!) and was cast as the angular gamin Sally Bowles in the 1972 film version of “Cabaret.” The role has shadowed her, for better and worse, forevermore.

But Minnelli had range, displayed as the scrappy shoplifter Linda in “Arthur,” in the underrated period piece “New York, New York,” whose title song was written for her (and whose director, Martin Scorsese, she dated).

To Stephen Sondheim’s consternation, she even experimented with a highly synthesized, mega-’80s take on his “Losing My Mind” with Pet Shop Boys. Cue the rain machines!

The story of the disco palace Studio 54, where Liza reigned with Halston, Warhol et al, has been thoroughly swept over and is now the stuff of museums.

And tabloids closely chronicled Minnelli’s four messed-up marriages, from the songwriter Peter Allen (she walked in on him in bed with another man), to the grifter David Gest.

Still, there are moments in this mostly anodyne recap when Liza — who turns 80 on March 12 and has fought a litany of health problems — lets loose. Like at Lady Gaga, who she says flustered and patronized her by hovering like a home health aide over an unwanted wheelchair as the two women presented the Best Picture award at the 2022 Oscars, on the 50th anniversary of “Cabaret.”

“I believe she bears some responsibility for the havoc that so unnerved me, minutes before we went on stage,” Minnelli writes of Gaga, a successor to Garland (and Streisand) in a remake of “A Star is Born.”

So many layers of diva here, “havoc” itself being a word to unpack like an old trunk stuffed with show tunes. For the beginning of Minnelli’s career did indeed resemble that of June Havoc, one daughter of the most famous stage mother in history — if that mother had actually succeeded in the entertainment industry herself.

Liza first appeared onscreen as a toddler with Garland in the 1949 movie “In the Good Old Summertime,” costumed in an old-fashioned frilly frock.

But when one of the actors picked her up, “my bottom felt incredibly cold,” she writes. “The dresser forgot to give me underpants! I was too young to realize that I had just learned an old Hollywood lesson: Always cover your ass, because no one will do it for you, honey.”

Certainly not Gest, who also comes in for a sustained thrashing in these pages. “Whenever I looked for my missing eyelashes, I checked his bathroom,” Minnelli writes, comparing their widely broadcast wedding kiss to “a shark mangling a piece of meat.” (The middle two husbands were Jack Haley Jr., son of the man who played the Tin Man, and Mark Gero, a sculptor.)

That she has made it this far is a miracle. Her mother — notoriously hooked on pep, diet and sleeping pills at a young age by Metro Goldwyn Mayer — struggled with substance abuse through her second marriage, to Liza’s father, the director Vincente Minnelli, and until she was found by husband number five dead on a toilet after an overdose at 47 in 1969.

Liza’s godfather may have been Ira Gershwin — her name, its frequent mispronunciation spoofed and zhuzhed by Ebb, came from his lyrics — but she also had to fetch Judy’s prescriptions and endure her violent mood swings and suicide attempts; a self-inflicted throat slash was followed by gales of laughter at breakfast the next morning. The grown-up acknowledges that on one level “this was a brilliant performance. Attention would be paid”; the inner child would never recover.

Liza was thrown in the deep end: forced onstage in a bathrobe and slippers at the Flamingo in Las Vegas at age 11; and enlisted in a hair ribbon, with six male backup singers, to deliver “Put on a Happy Face” on the short-lived “Judy Garland Show” on CBS.

Mentored by Kay Thompson, the busy hyphenate who created “Eloise,” and the French singer Charles Aznavour, and with the Rat Pack on speed dial, she nonetheless spent a few nights sleeping on a park bench in Central Park on the way to her first big break.

At 19, she won a Tony for starring in “Flora, the Red Menace.” By her late 20s, she had earned an Oscar for “Cabaret”; by her late 30s, she had checked into the Betty Ford Clinic.

In her late 40s, she was “raising the roof” at Radio City Music Hall; in her late 50s, she was passed out lying on Lexington Avenue with hundreds of people stepping over her.

New York, New York.

Introducing this resolutely jaunty book, Feinstein wrinkles his nose at the “Saturday Night Live” sketch “Liza Turns Off a Lamp,” starring Kristen Wiig as our heroine in high-kicking, jazz-handsy and blotto mode, unable to pull it together to depart for the curtain of “Cats.”

But along with reruns of “Arrested Development” this may be the only way a younger generation knows this original nepo baby, so many years did rehab and relapse steal.

Live performance, which exhausts even the most abstemious bodies, turned out to be Minnelli’s medium. The tired-looking smiley face under the dust jacket says as much as the 400-plus over-polished pages inside. She survived, sparkled and still shimmies; that’s enough. Kids, let this plucky Hollywood princess pick up some royalties.

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.

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