Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!

Liza Minnelli's memoir, written with her best friend Michael Feinstein, a singer, pianist, and former archivist for Ira Gershwin, traces eight decades of triumphs and crises. Born on March 12, 1946, in Los Angeles to Judy Garland, one of the twentieth century's most iconic performers, and Vincente Minnelli, a trailblazing film director, Liza describes herself as "the original nepo baby." She frames the book around two parallel narratives: her extraordinary entertainment career and her lifelong battle with substance use disorder, a condition she identifies as a genetic inheritance from her mother.

Liza's earliest memories center on Hollywood. Her father took her to the MGM studio lot, where she watched him direct, rode in the camera boom, and observed dancers including Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. This stability fractured before her fifth birthday, when she accidentally kicked her mother in the head with a cowboy boot. Garland screamed at her for what felt like hours before apologizing. Liza identifies this incident as the origin of her compulsion to protect her mother, a dynamic she calls characteristic of a child of someone with addiction.

Garland's substance use disorder, rooted in pills forced on her as a child star by studio executives, produced volatile mood swings, depression, and suicide attempts. Liza's parents divorced when she was five, both financially ruined. Garland married Sid Luft, a gambling B-movie producer, and the family moved into a lavish Holmby Hills estate. When the film A Star Is Born flopped commercially, Garland toured relentlessly, taking the children with her. By thirteen, Liza was managing her mother's medications and replacing pills with aspirin. Her father remained her anchor, nurturing her artistically at MGM.

At sixteen, Liza dropped out of high school and moved to New York with almost no money. She returned a check from Frank Sinatra, a longtime family friend, slept on a Central Park bench after being evicted from a hotel, and studied acting with Uta Hagen. Her breakthrough came in 1963 with an off-off-Broadway revival of Best Foot Forward. Garland missed opening night, and Liza channeled her devastation into the performance, resolving never to bring anything negative onstage.

Through actress Carmen Zapata, Liza met composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb, who became her most important creative collaborators. In November 1964, she performed alongside Garland at the London Palladium, an experience she describes as a baptism by fire: As she won over the crowd, she heard her mother whisper to the producer to get her off the stage. That evening she met Peter Allen, a gifted Australian singer-songwriter Garland had found on tour. Liza won the lead in Kander and Ebb's musical Flora the Red Menace, and at nineteen she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. She and Allen married in 1967, but Liza came home one afternoon to find Allen in bed with a man. Despite the heartbreak, they remained married for several years out of genuine love. She also earned her first Academy Award nomination for The Sterile Cuckoo (1969).

Garland died on June 22, 1969, at forty-seven, from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. A doctor prescribed Valium to help twenty-three-year-old Liza through the funeral, triggering the addiction that would shadow her for decades.

The early 1970s brought Liza's greatest professional achievements. Director Bob Fosse cast her as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, a film set during the rise of Nazism in which the songs are performed inside a Berlin nightclub as commentary on fascism's spread. Fosse used her physical imperfections as choreographic assets and taught her to communicate more by doing less. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1973. That same year, Liza with a "Z", a groundbreaking live concert film also directed by Fosse, won Emmy and Peabody Awards. Fashion designer Halston, introduced to Liza by Kay Thompson, her lifelong mentor, invented her signature sequined look. In November 1973, Liza helped lead the American team to victory at the Battle of Versailles, a fashion competition against French couture held at the Palace of Versailles.

Professional success could not steady her personal life. She married television producer Jack Haley Jr. in 1974. In 1975, she stepped in for an injured Gwen Verdon, Chicago's original star, learning the show in one week and performing five sold-out weeks that saved the production. An affair with director Martin Scorsese during the making of New York, New York (1977) was fueled by cocaine. She divorced Haley and married sculptor Mark Gero in 1979, suffering two devastating miscarriages she says she has never overcome. Throughout these years, pills, alcohol, and cocaine steadily tightened their grip.

In 1984, Liza's sister Lorna staged an intervention. With encouragement from close friend Elizabeth Taylor, Liza flew to the Betty Ford Center, an addiction-treatment facility, on Frank Sinatra's private jet. She relapsed within months, entering Hazelden, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Minnesota. Sobriety and relapse alternated for years. Her father died in 1986. Peter Allen and Halston both died of AIDS in the early 1990s, losses that fueled Liza's involvement in AIDS activism alongside Taylor.

Her body broke down from decades of performing: a hip replacement, knee-replacement surgery, and vocal cord procedures. In 2000, narcotic abuse triggered severe encephalitis, a potentially fatal brain inflammation. Doctors warned she might never walk or sing again. She rehabilitated through dance and gradually returned to performing, singing "New York, New York" at Shea Stadium ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Her fourth marriage, to promoter David Gest in 2002, proved catastrophic. Gest raided her bank accounts, sold her memorabilia, and isolated her from friends. After the sixteen-month marriage ended, Liza collapsed on Lexington Avenue in October 2003 after drinking at a bar. Pedestrians stepped over her unconscious body. She describes this as possibly the worst day of her life. Fred Ebb died of a heart attack in 2004, a devastating loss of the collaborator who had shaped her stage persona.

Unexpected gifts emerged amid the wreckage. Ron Howard, an Oscar-winning director whom Liza had babysat as a child while he acted in one of her father's films, cast her as Lucille Austero in the television comedy Arrested Development, introducing her to a younger audience. She won a fourth Tony for Liza's at the Palace in 2009. But in October 2012, sustained seizures from an encephalitis relapse nearly killed her. At Lenox Hill Hospital, Michael Feinstein took her hand and sang the Gershwin standard "Love Is Here to Stay." She began mouthing the words and slowly regained consciousness. She credits Michael with saving her life.

In March 2015, nearly bankrupt from years of financial exploitation, Liza checked into a Malibu rehabilitation center. She describes this stay as genuinely different: She made a private vow, motivated by the knowledge that her body could not survive further abuse. Her physician, Dr. Lawrence Piro, took complete control of her medications. Michael and Terrence, a member of her inner circle, helped restructure her finances and set up a Los Angeles condominium for her. As of writing, she has been sober for eleven years.

The memoir's final catalyst is the 2022 Academy Awards, where Liza co-presented Best Picture to honor Cabaret's fiftieth anniversary. Minutes before airtime, she was placed in a wheelchair against her wishes, leaving her unable to read the teleprompter. The humiliation drove her to write the book she had long resisted, determined to tell her own story. She closes at eighty, living in peace and sobriety, urging anyone battling addiction to seek help.