Liza Minnelli opened up about her love affairs with men including Martin Scorsese and Peter Sellers in her new memoir, out now
In her new memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, Liza — the only daughter of Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli — recalls growing up in Hollywood with famous neighbors that included Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby.
Her childhood playmates were Mia Farrow, Candace Bergen and Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, and she was a fly on the wall at house parties attended by Henry Mancini and Marilyn Monroe. Once, Liza went trick-or-treating while dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West — at the house of Gene Kelly. “To outsiders, this was a fairy-tale world,” she writes. “But we kids had no idea our lives were unique. There was nothing to compare it to.” Liza’s world only got bigger as she got older, and as an adult, her close friends included fashion designer Halston, artist Andy Warhol and composer Marvin Hamlisch. Her love affairs were legendary too: While married to her second husband, for example, she struck up a romance with Martin Scorsese on the set of New York, New York.Known to Liza as “Uncle Frank,” Frank Sinatra appears numerous times in the book. When Liza decided to strike out on her own and move to New York City as a teenager, Sinatra gave her a check for $500 — but she refused to cash it because she wanted to make it without anyone’s help. Liza also describes a “passionate love” between Sinatra and her mother, who was romantically involved with the Rat Pack crooner in the 1950s. “Mama would always back away from a deeper commitment,” Liza writes. “Yet it diminishes their relationship to call it an ‘affair.’ It was certainly more than that, and deeply romantic.” Later, in the late 1980s, Liza went on tour with Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. as a replacement for Dean Martin after he fell ill. While she and Sinatra grew closer, she also acknowledges that he could be difficult. “He got cranky some nights, and when that happened I’d just leave the room,” she recalls. “You didn’t want to be around when he got into one of those moods. Even if it wasn’t your fault.”While making her self-titled fourth studio album, Liza “gave a boost to a songwriter who was just breaking into the business.” That artist was Randy Newman, who wrote three of the songs on the album.After landing her first major film role in 1968’s Charlie Bubbles, Liza got a piece of acting advice from director and costar Albert Finney, who advised her to “tone it down, luv.”Liza’s collaboration with Bob Fosse is now the stuff of legend, and according to her, it wasn’t strictly professional while they were filming 1972’s Cabaret. “Did we get physically close? It would have been impossible not to,” she writes. “We had a chemistry, a back-and-forth that was electric and sometimes felt like a bonfire. Yes, there was sexual energy between us. Yes. A lot of people hated him. I was crazy about him.”In 1973, Liza sparked a romance with actor Peter Sellers — while she was already engaged to Desi Arnaz Jr., the son of her parents’ friends Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. After meeting Sellers, however, she publicly announced in a press conference that the engagement was off. Her relationship with Sellers, meanwhile, soon turned volatile. “He would scold me, taunt me, bully me in the voices of many different characters,” Liza claims. “He was triggered by anything, even a passing thought, and then he’d be off to the races, yelling in various, terrifying characters.”Liza starred alongside the late Gene Hackman in the famous 1975 flop Lucky Lady, directed by Stanley Donen — and according to her, they didn’t get on well. “I don’t like to whine but Stanley later shared publicly that Gene was very dismissive of me during the film,” she says. “It’s hard to go to work when the chemistry is absent. I think it’s fair to say that Gene was downright rude.”While married to her second husband, Jack Haley Jr. , Liza began an affair with Martin Scorsese on the set of 1977’s New York, New York. At one point, Scorsese allegedly confronted her while she was out for a walk with Jack Jr. to ask her about cheating on him with Mikhail Baryshnikov. “Even though he did not speak English , we hit it off immediately and later ended up in bed,” Minnelli writes of Baryshnikov. Her romance with Scorsese, meanwhile, imploded. “Years later, I saw Marty at the Oscars ceremony in 2014 and walked up to say hello. Unfortunately, he turned away from me,” she claims.Iconic actress Elizabeth Taylor was present for numerous important moments in Liza’s life, including her third wedding to Mark Gero and her fourth wedding to David Gest. Taylor also staged an intervention for Liza during one of her relapses from sobriety, encouraging her to go back to rehab for the second time.According to Liza, Kiss frontman Gene Simmons encouraged her to record a more pop-forward single after they met in the late 1980s. He helped connect her to someone at Epic Records, and she soon landed a contract — and then made her now-beloved 1989 album, Results, with the Pet Shop Boys. As Liza puts it, “Let’s raise a glass of Diet Coke to Gene Simmons.”Liza became friends with Princess Diana after they crossed paths at numerous events. “Somehow we always found a way to steal time alone,” she recalls. “We’d catch up on our lives and meet for tea. Sometimes she’d come to my hotel, and we’d have lunch. My instinct was always to protect her.”According to Liza, she “helped Michael develop his ‘moonwalk’ dance” after they became friends. “Here’s how it happened: I had been performing in Brazil, and I saw dancers practicing the exaggerated slide that became part of the moonwalk,” she claims. “I shared it with Michael, and he loved it. We’d always exchanged dance moves.”
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