This sounds remarkably unlike something a real human might say, but then sounding like a human has never been Minnelli’s strength. In an early interview, she boasted about knowing the price of paper towels, and in her late fifties she was still talking of borrowing “a quarter from a chorus kid.” Grasping for a relatable metaphor, she once compared the satisfaction of performing to the act of “waxing a floor really well and looking back and knowing that the job will make people happy.” Ironically, Minnelli’s belief that she is some kind of everywoman might be her biggest pretension. It is a theme she returns to repeatedly in the book: Sure, I fell in love with multiple gay crooners, but who hasn’t? Yes, my mother almost filed a lawsuit to keep me from doing regional theatre, but aren’t all moms a little controlling?
While Garland is by far the most vivid, complex characterization in “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!,” Minnelli offers a handful of pleasing capsule portraits. Frank Sinatra was “like a mother who can’t stop hovering,” she writes, and Lucille Ball was uncomfortable with prolonged displays of affection. (“I think I was being too sentimental, because she broke the hug and lit a cigarette.”) Having underprepared for an audience with Pope John Paul II, a panicked Minnelli offered to sing. “An aide translated this for him,” she writes, “and he gave me an interesting look. As if to say, ‘Why would I be interested in that?’ ”
Unfortunately, the bulk of the memoir is about addiction. Minnelli discusses her substance use more candidly than she ever has before, even confirming a story I’d long dismissed as urban myth in which she angrily demanded a hot dog with “a lot of mustard” before she would agree to check in to Betty Ford. Somehow, though, these exploits make for dreary reading. Minnelli’s animating force was always the compulsion to lie; the joy of her performances and talk show appearances lay in watching her overcome the truth through sheer will power. To acknowledge reality is to cease to be Liza Minnelli, and the secret self revealed in these pages has disappointingly few insights to share. Again and again she poses questions like “What could I have possibly been thinking?,” sounding like a reporter with limited access.
There may be a reason she seems that way. The title page of the memoir lists three co-authors, including the entertainer Michael Feinstein, and they’ve clearly done heavy spackling to fill out Minnelli’s recollections. While celebrity memoirs are routinely ghostwritten—in 2024, Cher admitted that she hadn’t even read hers—Seth Abramovitch of The Hollywood Reporter has pointed out the disparity between the Minnelli of the book and the frail, meandering woman who participated in a March 17th book event; he suggested that her story was being “mediated, shaped and, perhaps, quietly reconstructed” by Feinstein. It’s an intriguing theory, especially in light of Minnelli’s uncharacteristic pivot to honesty.
Of the many personal disclosures in “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!”—about drugs, bad marriages, dental-bill discrepancies—only one has stuck with me. In October, 2003, Minnelli escaped her handlers and beelined to a bar; she was found some time later lying face-down on Lexington Avenue. It was a humiliation for Minnelli, and in her memoir she obsesses over what passersby must have thought. “Did anyone recognize me and shake their head in horror?” she writes. “If anyone did know who I was, it must have been disgusting for them.” Minnelli’s relationship with her audience has been the most stable, enduring relationship of her life, and even at her lowest ebb she was worried about letting them down.
Reading this passage, I was reminded, oddly enough, of Maggie Smith. A sort of anti-Minnelli, Smith avoided the public eye and loathed interviews, never quite understanding why anyone would care about her “real” life. When she was acting, Smith explained, she was in “a much better world.” “I’m never shy on stage,” she said. “Always shy off it. . . . It’s the real world that’s the illusion.” We’re so desperate to find out the truth about actors, blind to the fact that their truest selves emerge in the ecstasy of performance. We want to know about Liza Minnelli’s life, but we were there for it. We got to see the best part. ♦