Liza, Gasping for Breath

She sprawls--giggling and gangly--in a Waldorf-Astoria suite, looking as out of place as a cheerleader at a debutante ball. Her shaggy haircut springs out from her head. Her nails are bitten to the quick, her black boot heels are run over. She sprays words and sounds. She is having a frantic kind of fun, like a kid rolling down a hill, dizzy and excited at the same time. But who cares? Certainly not Liza Minnelli.

She has wound up a successful engagement at the Waldorf's Empire Room, a knockout, nonstop show that had everybody--including Liza--gasping for breath. She opens at Puerto Rico's El San Juan Hotel this week. She has just been nominated for an Academy Award for her first starring role in The Sterile Cuckoo. She will soon be seen in the title role in Otto Preminger's Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, in which she has to be convincing as a facially scarred girl in love. And in the talk stages, a Liza Minnelli TV special for late spring.

TIME Contributing Editor Katie Kelly reports how Liza feels about it all:

Liza folds her mouth around those sugar-lump teeth and winds up into a giggle that moves from the top of her head right straight down to her toes. "Yeah--I'm happy," she says, the big smile looped securely in place. "But then, if I'm feeling anything, I figure--WHEW! --I'm here! I exist! I am!"

This from the kid who gave her first public performance at age seven on the stage of the Palace. She remembers. "My mother called me up on the stage and I danced while she sang Swanee." There are worse ways to start. "I thought it was terrific--just terrific--to be able to kick up your legs that way. I remember hearing the waves and waves of applause washing over us. I also remember wondering whether my pants showed while I was dancing."

In the Night. It was a childhood to be reckoned with. "I think I went to 14 schools in all," says Liza, by this time lying on the floor alternately bumming cigarettes and hugging her dog, Ocho. "We started moving around a lot from one house to another. Usually we moved in the night. That was probably because Mama was so broke and maybe she owed money to landlords. Anyway, every time we moved I'd find myself in a different school. Private if we could afford it, public if we couldn't." As a result, "I hated school. It annoyed me. Oh, I went through the whole bit when I was nine--you know, wanting to be a teacher and all that. I used to line my dolls up and give lectures. Hah! But that passed."

It was hardly the all-American childhood, full of Girl Scout meetings and slumber parties. "To other people, being Judy Garland's daughter meant that either I led the glamorous, spoiled life of a movie star's child or that I was a poor little waif, a vagabond gypsy kid." Neither was true. Or both. "I may have been reared strangely compared with other kids, but I had a swell time growing up. Really." Childhood was visiting movie sets where Judy was filming or where Liza's father, Vincente Minnelli, was directing. It was enormous birthday parties, "all with the same hired clown." It was on the set watching Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse dancing, being spoiled by Robert Mitchum and Eleanor Parker while visiting her father on location, being fascinated not one whit by her mother's talent because, after all, "she sang all the time at home."

Outside the Door. Liza herself comes equipped with much the same kind of versatile and volatile talent. She can belt out a song with the best of them, Judy Garland included. Her dancing is spirited and ceaseless. Her acting has been known to bring on spontaneous bursts of applause from the movie crew. She can move people to laughter and to tears with equal ease--sometimes simultaneously.

The first break with home and family came at age 16. "Mama went on a kick every now and then where she used to kick me out of the house. Usually I'd stand outside the door, and pretty soon she'd open it and we'd fall into each other's arms, crying and carrying on. But one day she did it and I took her up on it. I went to New York. I had my plane fare and $100, and I've never taken a penny since. Perfect." After a few nights with friends, Liza moved into the sheltered, regimented Barbizon Hotel for Women. Liza says: "I went bananas!" After that--two nights on a park bench in Central Park and then onto another friend's couch for two years.

"I don't kid myself about the reasons success happened so easily for me: my mother and the curiosity factor," says Liza. When she was 18, her mother asked her to share the bill at a Judy Garland comeback at the London Palladium. "That was terrifying," says Liza. "First of all, Mama was so adored. It's hard to buck that orgy of emotion. Second, Mama suddenly realized that she had a grown-up daughter, that she wasn't a kid herself any more. She became very competitive with me." By 19 Liza had the lead in a Broadway musical, Flora the Red Menace, which lost money for its backers but won praise and a Tony award for her.

It's God! Five years ago her mother introduced her to Australian Rock Singer Peter Allen. Two years later, they were married. For Liza, there are no doubts whatsoever about this marriage of hers: it will work. It is working. "Peter is my rock," she says. "I love him. In fact I like him. I really like him." Though she loves to be with friends, talking, talking, talking, she claims, "I'm a little shy, especially in crowds. Except when I'm wafting." Wafting? "That's when you pretend you're not really you. It's like when you were a kid and used to play games where you were Nancy Drew. Like you walk into a crowded room as an observer and not as a participant. You just look everybody over. You can just sort of SWO-O-O-P through the whole evening. It's not taking things too seriously, because if you take things too seriously you can't do anything about them. You've got to be a moving target always. Don't let anyone cut you off at the ankles. You stand still long enough, someone's gonna come along and C-UUUU-TTTTT! There are those kinds of people who just walk around hackin' away."

On Liza's schedule are more nightclubs, plus college tours. "Even being on the road is fun," she says, although "it's kind of a crappy thing for a girl to do--sing in a bar." There is one thing she'd like to try. "Now this sounds really stupid, but I'd like to do a modern version of Joan of Arc. Play her in love, you know? There she is, forging on through life groping for something--and it's God! She falls in love and feels like she's flyin' high and she can conquer the world and she's the best-lookin' lady ever. Terrific!"

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