Liza--Fire, Air and a Touch of Anguish

By the time I was eleven I was hiring the household staff. I'd tell them that the hours wouldn't be the same as in other households, but that they wouldn't be asked to do anything outrageous. I'd call the police to check the chauffeurs' references. I began answering Mama's fan mail when I was eleven too. She paid me $3 a week until I complained that the work was too much for me; then I got $5 a week. When I was 14, I drove my sister and brother to school and back because our chauffeur was drunk all the time and Mama liked him too much to fire him.

WHEN you are Judy Garland's daughter, you don't grow up as other children do. Liza Minnelli, the only child of Judy's marriage to Director Vincente Minnelli, was born into a bizarre fairy tale in which she was destined to be both the princess and the scullery maid. Her life had a careening plot line with glittering characters and fantastic reversals of fortune. At one moment she was a pampered Hollywood brat; at another she was holding together a disintegrating menage, playing nurse to Judy and Judy's sliding career, hiring servants they could no longer afford.

When you are Judy's daughter, performing is almost the only mode of existence you know. From her earliest days, Liza took in her mother's performances and visited her father's sets. She was "on" all the time. Recalls Kay Thompson, Liza's godmother and the author of the Eloise books: "The language of the house was: 'What time is rehearsal? When is the next recording session? The script has to be ready by tomorrow.' And it was all mixed with a great rushing to get to the studio."

Then, too, when you are Judy's daughter you inevitably grow up in your mother's shadow. In her early professional appearances, Liza had to face audiences that came to see her largely because she was "Judy Garland's kid" and were frankly skeptical about whether she could measure up to the name. In time she did--and then some. She played in an off-Broadway musical, starred in one on Broadway, and won roles in three movies. She made records, appeared on TV and went out on the nightclub circuit. At

an age when many performers are still living in fifth-floor walk-ups, Liza was earning close to a million dollars a year.

Today, a few weeks shy of 26, Liza has evolved in her own right into a new Miss Show Biz, a dazzlingly assured and completely rounded performer. The Justice Department should investigate her. She is a mini-conglomerate, an entertainment monopoly. In the new movie musical Cabaret, the full range of Liza's singing, dancing and acting talents dominates and steals a rambling and disorganized show (TIME, Feb. 21). As Sally Bowles, she is supposed to be a third-rate singer in a second-rate dive, belting out tunes to pay for schnapps and cigarettes. But as soon as she opens her mouth and begins strutting around the stage, the image--and some of the movie's credibility--goes happily haywire. Her liquid, throaty voice rises stylishly from a caress to pure, ringing brass. Her body--a broad-shouldered 5 ft. 5 in. with long showgirl legs--weaves a rhythm of its own even when she is standing still.

Liza's dramatic incarnation of the antic, available Sally is a nice mixture of naturalness and calculation, too innocent to be immoral and too knowing to be truly amoral. But even with her fingernails lacquered green and her huge Bambi eyes circled with

eyeshadow, she is too contemporary and American to be fully convincing as the "divinely decadent" Sally of 1930s Berlin.

The real glory of Liza's performance in Cabaret is that it allows her for the first time in movies to do what she does best: a cabaret act. She is one of the finest nightclub performers in the world. On the ever-shrinking circuit of high-class spots, she is one of the few headliners who can still pack a club. Las Vegas' Riviera pays her $60,000 a week, which puts her near the ceiling. The French, those connoisseurs of cabaret, christened Liza la petite Piaf americaine after her triumphant stand last year at Paris' Olympia music hall. "She has that personal magnetism," says Joel Grey, her co-star in Cabaret. "She is capable of making you care about her, making you want to protect her --and then you realize that she's perfectly capable of protecting herself."

Slow Simmering. In the act that Liza has been doing for the past two years--most recently at Miami Beach's Eden Roc Hotel last month--she makes her first entrance dressed in a rust silk tube with a revealing slit from ankle to thigh. With not a word to introduce herself, she trills: "If you could read my mind, my love," and builds the song to a climax, afterward melting slowly into a simmering "la, la, la, la, la." Then, her whole body gyrating, she snatches the mike off the stand, crooks one leg, and throws back her head, as if the melody were surging up from her toes. The effect is at once sexy and dramatic. Anybody in the audience who had not previously dropped his fork--or his conversation --does so by the last "la, la, la."

To make the point that her name is Ligh-za. with a z and not Leesa with an s, she goes into a specially written, funny tongue twister that might stop even Danny Kaye. Next she dashes offstage, emerging a minute later in an Indian-maiden costume. Behind her on a rolling platform comes the American Sunshine, a rock foursome from Houston that accompanies her everywhere. Her vocal change from blues to rock is as smooth as her costume change, and the heavy beat seems to propel her around the stage, twisting and kicking. By the time she slithers across the piano, she is awash in perspiration, and her false eyelashes, which might double as Madame Butterfly's fans, are falling off. "It's so hot up here," she says as she yanks the lashes off, "that I have hair in my eyeballs. It's one thing to be glamorous, but when you go blind . . ."

After another costume change, she reappears in a black velvet knickers suit with a black bowler, a costume strongly--and deliberately--reminiscent of her mother's black tights, black jacket and high hat. She swings into the old Jolson favorite, My Mammy --as close as a song can get to Judy's standard, Swanee. As Liza gathers momentum, she manages to ride to a socking finale that is at the same time suffused with nostalgia.

No Carbon Copy. The almost eerie resemblance to her mother is more than superficial. Her notes sometimes wobble with Judy's vibrato, and she has the same warming urgency and involvement in her performance. Says Singer Gail Martin, Dean Martin's daughter and Liza's childhood friend: "Her mannerisms are like her mother's. The gestures, that whole nervous thing--not quite getting the words out, and the fingers all over the place."

Still, Liza is far from a carbon copy. "She has a style of her own and a better range in her voice than

Judy did," Martin observes. Adds Gene Kelly, who acted with Judy before Liza was born: "Every once in a while you see flashes of Judy that you can't escape, but she had more of Judy earlier in her career. Now she's more her own person. I think there are thousands of sons and daughters of great artists who couldn't even carry a tune. I don't think it harmed her having two talented parents, but I don't think you can say it gave her her talent."

Maybe not, but it certainly helped her to develop what she had. When Liza was born, Judy was still at the height of her career. It was 1946, and for postwar Americans she still evoked the simpler times when Andy Hardy was in love and the Land of Oz was rainbow hued. Meanwhile, Liza's father, a courtly, cultivated man whom she still idolizes, was busy creating such polished movie musicals as Ziegfeld Follies and Meet Me in St. Louis. Though sometimes frenetic, family life was full of laughter, flowers and music. It was also somehow unreal.

Dressing Up. "Our environment was on the highest level of the absurd," recalls Candice Bergen, another childhood friend. "Our birthday parties, for example, were organized follies. There had to be trained-dog acts, magicians, cartoons, triple screenings of new movies--every imaginable extravagance. One of our friends even had an electric waterfall. It was all highly surrealistic, like living in a big playroom." Liza adds: "I remember a picture flashed through my mind, like a painting, at one of the parties. I had a feeling: This is not the average. This isn't the ordinary life.' "

That is the least that could be said. Liza's friends liked coming to her house because they could play dress-up better there than anyplace else in Hollywood--or the world. Their dresses might be miniature versions of costumes from movies, for example a replica of a waltz gown worn by Deborah Kerr in The King and I.

After school Liza would run over to MGM to watch the shooting, the way any other kid might go to her father's office. "It seemed like a factory to me," she says. "I loved it. I got so that I knew every inch of it, all the short cuts to different stages and all the underground passages. And all the people there knew me." Minnelli let her ride the boom with him when he was lining up a shot, giving her a view of film making that very few actresses have had. "What really interested me, though, was watching people dance," she says. "I used to go over to Rehearsal Hall B or C and watch Cyd Charisse, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and I'd learn all their numbers. Then I'd go home and practice for hours in front of the mirror."

Little Drama. Judy had been released from her MGM contract in 1950, after her increasingly erratic emotional behavior made her a truant from work on several pictures. A year later Judy and Minnelli were amicably divorced, and although Liza continued to see a great deal of her father, her young life was becoming complicated. Judy soon married her manager Sid Luft and embarked on a nomadic life. By the time Liza was 16, she had been to a score of schools, from Chadwick School in Palos Verdes, Calif., to suburban New York's Scarsdale High, to Whittingham in London.

Her mother either had a lot of money or none at all--usually none at all. At one point she was living in a little hotel in Santa Monica. When a newspaper or magazine would ask for an interview, she would borrow a friend's house, put her own pictures on the mantel and try to be there before the reporter showed up. When Judy was on tour, the whole brood, which eventually included Liza's half-brother and half-sister Joey and Lorna Luft, had to learn to put on layers and layers of clothing and waddle out of a hotel, leaving behind their luggage and an unpaid bill. "Just remember, I'm Judy Garland," Mama would say, or, "Well, I need a new wardrobe anyway," and the episode would be laughed off. The way Liza tells it now, it was almost like a little drama Judy enacted for the amusement of her family.

Judy's emotional problems--her drinking bouts and her numerous attempts at suicide--were less easily laughed off. But again, at least according to Liza, they are worse in the telling than they were in fact. At home in Los Angeles, Judy would often take a few aspirins, lock the bedroom door and announce that she was committing suicide. On to the act after the third or fourth time, Liza would merely borrow the clippers from the gardener and snip a hole in the window screen so that she could climb in. Once inside, she would try to talk her mother out of her depression. Saving Judy became one of her chores, like washing the dishes or sweeping the kitchen floor. Once a week she and Lorna would sit down and empty out three-quarters of Judy's sleeping capsules and refill them with sugar. Later Liza did take the precaution of acquiring a stomach pump from a nearby hospital.

Reversed Roles. "I worried about Mama, but not in certain ways," she says. "I never saw her in a situation she couldn't handle, even if she was having a tantrum or hysterical crying. But when she'd get in a temper, it was frightening, because she'd yell a lot and I'd freeze. Lots of yelling. Now I avoid people who are screaming at all costs. My eyes glaze over when someone begins to yell, and my mind retreats back to someplace else so they can't get through to me."

Minnelli recalls that "Liza actually was a very calming influence on her mother. Their roles were reversed; Judy had some very childlike traits, while Liza was grown-up." Adds Liza: "Mama and I talked a lot. She'd put too much trust in somebody, then they'd do something slight, and she'd take it as a slap in the face. The thing I tried to get through to her was that none of it really mattered. Of course people were going to let her down. They couldn't help it."

When Judy had money, she would entertain, and Liza stayed up and mingled with the guests. "Terrific people were there like Lauren Bacall, Bogart and Sinatra. And Mama always invited Marilyn Monroe, too, because Mama was very adamant about how rottenly people treated Marilyn. Marilyn talked to me a lot, and I remember knowing why: because no one else talked to her. We were really good friends when I was about ten. She used to tell me how lonely she was. I told her that she had to talk with people and let them know she didn't want anything from them."

Lots of Laughter. "Everyone used to tell me their problems; it was really funny. But I wasn't like a kid then. I don't really remember having any childhood. I always had responsibilities and never felt free until I was 20. Then I thought, 'This is ridiculous. I'm going to be a kid for a while.' "

The decisive spark to Liza's career was set off when she attended a string of Broadway shows with her mother. "It wasn't that tedious process I saw at Metro," she says. "I could see it happening before my eyes. The chorus of Bye Bye Birdie fascinated me. It had kids in it, and a camaraderie that I recognized. It seemed like an answer to the kind of loneliness I felt. Just friends kidding around, with lots of laughter." Two years later she quit school and began trying to join in the laughter. She was 16.

New York was almost as tough on Judy Garland's kid as on any other show-biz hopeful. While looking for work, Liza stayed with a friend of her mother's, then moved into a hotel for women, only to be thrown out and have her clothes confiscated when she could not pay the bill. Neither parent could be found for help, and she spent one night on the steps of the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel, another in Central Park. Luckily, she was cast in an off-Broadway revival of Best Foot Forward. The salary, $34 a week, barely covered expenses.

In those days Liza was overweight, with long, stringy hair that looked "like a forest of evil," according to one friend. Liza became one of the theater gypsies, the singers and dancers who play in Broadway choruses and wait for the big break. Her morning would often start at night and her night in the morning, a reverse cycle that she still follows. For all her waif-like air, she drew on a vast reserve of energy, a fierce instinct to keep moving no matter what happened. "Liza's got a desperate thing," says Mia Farrow, another childhood friend. "She reaches just as far and as deep as she can. There's a lot of depth in her, and a lot of anguish."

Boos and Raves. A friend introduced her to Fred Ebb, the lyricist for an upcoming musical called Flora, the Red Menace. "I remember this shy, awkward girl coming into the room," says Ebb. "She looked awful, like Raggedy Ann. Everything was just a little torn and a little soiled. She just sat there and stared at me, and I stared back." Liza convinced Ebb that she was his Flora,

but she had a harder time with Director George Abbott, who gave her the part only because he could find no one else. Liza's revenge was that the critics booed the play and raved over her. She received the 1965 Tony Award as Best Actress in a Musical. At 19, she was the youngest actress-winner in the award's history.

When Flora closed, Ebb worked with her on a nightclub act. Not for the first time and not for the last, Liza realized how much her mother's aura hung over her. Ebb wrote a routine for her that opened with the songs Judy had taught her, then switched into a rock number--one of the songs she had taught Judy.

All in all, it was a graceful way of acknowledging her legacy from her mother without letting it overwhelm her. Making that acknowledgment has not always been so simple. Liza obviously adored Judy and talks about her frequently, but she is afraid of being swallowed by the legend. She consciously evokes Judy's ghost in her act but is resentful when middle-aged women with purple hair coo that she is Judy all over again. Judy seems to have had the same ambivalence. Though a doting mother, she was jealous when Liza sneaked off with some of her applause during their most notable joint appearance, at the London Palladium in 1964. "Judy was fighting for a love that she had had a long time," a friend says, reconstructing that memorable if unhappy event. "And here was a newcomer taking some of that love." At the end of the concert, Judy virtually shoved Liza off the stage.

Judy's death in 1969--the result, according to the coroner, of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills --was both a tragedy and a liberation for Liza. "When she died, I almost knew why," Liza says. "She let her guard down. She didn't die from an overdose. I think she just got tired. She lived like a taut wire. I don't think she ever looked for real happiness, because she always thought happiness would mean the end." In the midst of making the funeral arrangements, Liza was the calm center in the vortex, as she always had been where her mother was concerned. "Elevator men were falling around me weeping," she recalls. "I was the only one standing up. I got so mad at everybody. I remember yelling at someone: 'You cried for her when she sang Over the Rainbow and The Man That Got Away. Now at last she's at peace. Smile, for God's sake!' "

Just Perfecto. Liza clearly has no intention of letting her own guard down. Work is the one constant in her life. She plans to go on the concert circuit and hopes to play Zelda Fitzgerald in a film under her father's direction. Having paid off many of her mother's debts, Liza is now determined to make herself very rich. According to Martin Bregman, her business manager for seven years, she is doing a shrewder job of it than many stars. Besides some holdings in blue chip stocks, she owns various pieces of real estate, including part of a shopping center in New York.

The closest thing she has had to a vacation in years was a fling in the international jet set a few months ago in Paris. After making Cabaret in Munich, she was taken in tow by Fashion Model Marisa Berenson, the granddaughter of the late Bernard Berenson, the ultimate aesthete. Marisa, who plays a rich Jewish girl in the picture, introduced her to the Rothschilds and their circle. "She was like Alice in Wonderland," says Fred Ebb. For the opening of Liza's show in Paris, Baron Alexis de Rede gave her a party at his home in the Hotel Lambert. "I walked up the stairs," Liza says, "and they were decked with orchids and bathed in candlelight. When I walked into the room, ten violins started to play. Everybody in the world was there --Salvador Dali with his mustache twinkling, princes and clothes designers, St. Laurent, Richard and Liz. There was nobody who was halfway. Everyone was perfecto, just swell."

Men move in and out of her life, but except for Singer-Songwriter Peter Allen, the Australian-born husband from whom she is now separated after four years of marriage, none has stayed very long. "She tends to react from one situation into another," says Allen, who remains a friend and still has visiting rights to Ocho, the shaggy mutt Liza adopted in Puerto Rico a few years ago.

After splitting with Allen about a year ago, she took up with Rex Kramer, the guitarist in her accompanying band. "Rex was exactly opposite from me," says Allen. "He was a country boy who hated the city and loved girls. Liza enjoyed herself at first. She thought she was getting back to roots, and after that she began talking about spending the rest of her life on his family's farm in Arkansas and eating black-eyed peas and grits. I knew she hadn't really gone country when she also mentioned that Ocho still ate only steak and caviar."

Terrific Pace. Unlike most of her romances, the affair with Rex ended with some unpleasantness. Rex's ex-wife is suing Liza for $500,000, charging alienation of affection. Rex, who now plays in joints in Houston, apparently saw a more unstable side of her nature than did most other people. "The pace she sets for herself is simply terrific," he says, "but she just can't slow down. She would worry about not sleeping and would start taking downers to help herself." He describes terrible tantrums, after which she would "literally rave, then collapse."

Liza angrily rebuts him point by point and now claims that she knew all along that Rex was using her. Finally, to get rid of him in Germany, where he was such a nuisance that he was barred from the set of Cabaret, she says that she and her secretary, Deanna Wenble, arranged an elaborate, melodramatic scheme to make him think she had fallen in love with a cameraman. "He said he'd leave me only if I fell in love with somebody else," she explains.

Her current romance is with Actor Desi Arnaz Jr., the son of Lucille Ball, a handsome, younger version of his father. She professes not to be concerned about the fact that Desi, 19, is six years her junior. Desi is really much older than the calendar shows, she maintains. "Desi understands the need for calmness the way I do. He has a steadiness that's very important to me. I hate abrupt changes of emotion, and I can't live in that kind of atmosphere." There are no immediate plans for marriage, but both wear wedding bands to symbolize, in Liza's words, their "bond of union and understanding."

Selective Blotter. Each of the men to whom she has been attached has had some virtue that attracted her. like characters in a morality play. With Desi it is steadiness; with Allen it was joie de vivre; with Kramer it was a kind of simplicity. "She has the ability to totally believe in a situation at any given time, which is what Judy had too," says Allen. "She's incredibly smart and intuitive, but she never intellectualizes anything. She'll push down her natural intellect to work with her emotions every time."

Other children had something solid they could cling to. Liza had no permanent home and nothing she could hang on to. She depended on love --often nothing more complicated than the love an audience shows for a performer. Describing the early days of their marriage, Allen remembers that "she was always jumping on people's laps and throwing her arms around their necks. People wanted to take care of her, and they did." Adds a friend: "She's the kind of girl you either want to take in your arms or put in your pocket. She's a blotter, but a selective blotter. She has good taste and uses the right people." Like Ariel, Shakespeare's creature of the air, she takes any shape, puts on any mood. "I come," says Ariel--and might say Liza--"to answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the curl'd clouds."

She is a mixture of calm and frenzy, toughness and vulnerability. At all costs she avoids scenes, anything that looks like aggravation, and she believes the same positive philosophy she preaches to everyone else. Her early life has not left her unscarred. She chain-smokes and bites her nails to the quick. She cannot--she will not --be alone. Much of her energy seems to come from nervous tension. "Liza's philosophy is to be a moving target," says Peter Allen. "But if you keep moving, things still continue to pile up. It's just more pleasant and so much easier to run."

Underneath everything, however, Liza is one of nature's survivors. When she feels that she may be losing control, she simply wafts. Wafts? "That's when you pretend you're not really you," she says. "You're like a cork bobbing on the ocean. No matter how rough the water is, the cork stays afloat. Nothing can happen to it."

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