“The 20th century was not short of famous people who led ludicrously unsustainable lives,” said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. But there can’t be many “more ludicrous or unsustainable” lives than that of Liza Minnelli. The 80-year-old singer and actor, best known for playing the bowler hat-wearing Sally Bowles in “Cabaret”, received lessons in “how to be famous” from her mother, Judy Garland, who died from an overdose aged 47.
“Just as the MGM studio system robbed Mama of her childhood, she robbed me of mine,” she writes: her early life was spent negotiating Garland’s “mood swings and addictions”; she inherited a lifelong addiction to alcohol and drugs, and a tendency to fall for unsuitable men.
In her long-awaited memoir, Minnelli catalogues the highs and lows without ever sinking into self-pity. Full of sentences that verge on self-parody – “I was married to a gay man at the same time as I was engaged to two other men” – it is both “heart-rending” and hilarious. “If there’s a more enthralling celebrity memoir out this year, I’ll eat my bowler hat.”
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The book’s “strongest section” is that detailing Minnelli’s “complicated childhood”, said Joanne Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal. Garland split from Liza’s father – the Italian film director Vincente Minnelli – in 1951. Soon after this, Garland attempted suicide for the first time, and Liza was forced to become “Mama’s mama” – or, as she puts it, her “nurse, doctor, pharmacologist and psychiatrist rolled into one”.
Once Minnelli embarked upon her own career, she also had to negotiate her mother’s tempestuous jealousy, said Tanya Gold in The Observer. Appearing with Garland at the London Palladium aged 18, Minnelli received a loud ovation only to hear her mother whisper to the producer: “Harold, get her off my f**king stage.”
Despite wanting to “grow up differently”, Minnelli couldn’t stop herself “repeating old patterns”, said Helen Brown in The Telegraph. She details her abuse of Valium and booze, and her often disastrous love life: married and divorced four times, she was also briefly engaged to Peter Sellers, and had an affair with Martin Scorsese.
While Minnelli isn’t afraid to call out bad behaviour – she describes her fourth husband, David Gest, as a “pasty-faced jerk with weird hair” – there are few traces of bitterness: Minnelli is a “funny and generous” narrator. Co-written by her friend Michael Feinstein in an “intimate, chatty style”, this is a “high-kicking hoofer of a book”.
