Maybe This Time

By Richard Zoglin

Liza Minnelli doesn't sweep, diva-style, into the restaurant for an interview. She sort of edges in, warily, close to a publicist, wrapped in folds of black that effectively hide a figure that once ballooned so much that paparazzi competed for photos as though they were getting paid by the pound. Yet she's looking better these days, down 40 lbs. thanks to a high-protein diet (this evening's menu: carpaccio, swordfish steak and hot milk for dessert). Her weight, of course, is hardly the only thing that has made her a star of the gossip pages. There were the slew of canceled concert appearances, the reports of erratic behavior, a faltering singing voice and a feud and chilled relations with her half sister Lorna Luft, author of a warts-and-all family memoir. No one ever said being the daughter of Judy Garland (dead of an overdose at age 47) was easy. But for a walking, talking soap opera, you'd have to look pretty hard to top Liza.

And like most soap operas, this one is gearing up for another emotional climax. It's a comeback on Broadway, where Liza opens this week in a month-long concert engagement at the Palace Theater, where Garland herself once staged a famous comeback. Called Minnelli on Minnelli, Liza's show is a tribute to the movies of her father Vincente, director of such classic Hollywood musicals as Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris and Gigi. In it she reminisces a bit, shows pictures from the family album, sings numbers identified with her mother that she would never touch before (like The Trolley Song from Meet Me in St. Louis) and demonstrates that her voice, if not the exuberant, no-holds-barred instrument it once was, can still curl stylishly around numbers like I Got Rhythm and Baubles, Bangles and Beads. A little nostalgia, a little Broadway pizazz, a little coming to terms with middle age (she's even got new lyrics for I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore)--what better way for Liza Minnelli, 53, to announce she's back?

She says she got the idea for her new show while watching her father's films in the hospital, where she has spent an inordinate amount of time in recent years--hip-replacement surgery, an operation to remove polyps on her vocal cords, arthroscopic surgery on both knees earlier this year. Getting reacquainted with Dad's movies "helped me so much," she says. "Sometimes God says, 'Slow down, you've got something important to do.' I feel like this was meant to be."

But there's hardheaded career calculation here too. Hollywood, which gave her an Oscar in 1973 for Cabaret, pretty much washed its hands of Liza years ago, and even Broadway hasn't been very hospitable lately. Her last appearance, replacing Julie Andrews as the star of Victor/Victoria in 1997, got mixed reviews and ended prematurely because of her health problems. On a concert tour in the months that followed, she began canceling performances, alienating fans and bookers alike. When she called in sick at the last minute for a tribute in her honor thrown by Burt Reynolds in Los Angeles--then showed up the next night at a charity event--the columnists had a field day. "There was a party. I couldn't go. I hurt too much to go," she explains now. "And then the following night I showed up for charity. I had no business showing up in that kind of shape. I was just sick."

About reports that she had relapsed into abusing alcohol or drugs, she explains, with only a bit of Hollywood indirection: "If somebody looked at you and [because of medical problems] said, 'You can't ever sing and dance again...' It was depressing. And if you have this disease, you have it. And it is a medical disease. You have to be so careful. It can get you down. But then it's your responsibility to get back up."

By all accounts, she has got herself back up--swearing off bad substances and giving her voice the rest it never quite got following her throat surgery. A year and a half ago, when she approached lyricist Fred Ebb, her longtime collaborator, about helping to put together a Broadway show, he said he'd do it only if she assured him she would get herself into shape. "I told her if I couldn't sit in a room and listen and be proud of her, I'm out. I said I don't want to see you fail." Now, claims Ebb--who wrote and directed Minnelli on Minnelli--she's in "the best shape literally I have ever seen her in."

The family inspiration helped. Liza remained equally close to her father and her mother after they divorced in 1951. The sets of her father's movies were her childhood playground: "I threw confetti in the American in Paris ballet," she recalls. "On The Long, Long Trailer I think I was playing hopscotch when the camera went by, but he may not have used that take." While her mother gave her practical presents, her father showered her with costumes from his lushly designed movies and would improvise bedtime stories from ideas that she threw out. "I fought my whole life to say I have this ordinary background, because I wanted to fit in," she says. "But it was an extraordinary background." Describe it in one phrase? "Imaginative opulence," she answers.

Which is not quite the way it sounds in Luft's tell-all book, Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (which, among other things, recounts Lorna's role in getting Liza into rehab). The two aren't talking now, though Liza doesn't describe it as a feud: "We're sisters, and we're going through something." She won't even bad-mouth the book, which she claims she hasn't read. "It's her point of view. I think it was probably cathartic for her to write it." Catharsis or not, Liza refused to join her sister in a couple of tributes to Judy Garland at the London Palladium and Carnegie Hall. "I've never gotten involved in those things," says Liza. "I sometimes resent that they use [my mother] for stuff. I don't want to exploit her. I've never exploited either of my parents. What I'm doing is a celebration."

Let's not parse that one too closely. But let's not completely rule out the sincerity either. "The last thing my father said to me before he died was, 'You haven't scratched the surface yet,'" she recalls. "So hopefully I'm digging a little bit deeper now. With a little more wisdom, knowledge, grace." If it took Dad to make Liza grow up, who are we to argue?