In Liza Minnelli’s new memoir, several paragraphs into a section in which she accuses Lady Gaga of “sabotaging” her dignity at the Oscars in 2022, the Cabaret star says something that rings profoundly true. “I ask you to please remember how important it’s always been that sympathy never be part of my art and work,” she writes. “I worked years, decades, to send that message.”
Throughout her book and throughout the 80 years of public life that preceded its publication, Minnelli has expressed an abject disinterest in courting sympathy. Perhaps she knows she is ill-placed for it, as a brash, attention-stealing daughter of show business – “the original nepo baby”, by her own admission. This is, after all, the woman who in 1973 staged a press conference to announce her love affair with Peter Sellers – abruptly ending her engagement to another man (Desi Arnaz Jr), while still married to her first husband. Elsewhere in the book, she recalls the time she and her second husband, Jack Haley Jr, ran into Martin Scorsese on the street. Scorsese and Minnelli were having an affair at the time, and the filmmaker began chastising her for cheating on him with Mikhail Baryshnikov, while her husband watched on. This is to say: Minnelli was messy. Even by celebrity standards.
