Liza Minnelli's New York
Liza Minnelli's New York
By Elisa Lipsky-Karasz
Halston, Andy Warhol, and Studio 54: Three-time Harper's Bazaar cover girl Liza Minnelli recalls all the fashion and fun of the heady '70s in the city that never sleeps. Read the interview below and then take a look back at some of Minnelli's iconic fashion moments from that time period as well as a present-day look at collection highlights from her friend and confident, Halston.
The next time you see a petite figure striding down New York's Madison Avenue, clad in black leggings and red lipstick with a baseball cap on her head, it might be Liza Minnelli window-shopping. Just her, taking a stroll offstage, out of the spotlight. Most of the time, she gets away with it. After all, if anyone knows how to go incognito, it's her; she learned from the best. "I walk fast," she explains. "Keep moving. Always be a moving target." She pauses. "Marilyn Monroe taught me that."
It's classic Minnelli: Just when you think that she might be just like us, out comes something that reminds you she's Hollywood royalty. And she's often treated like a queen, though she doesn't demand it. As she sweeps into the Plaza Athénée hotel with members of Team Liza--her publicist and indefatigable assistant--everything in the lobby stops. The staff lines up to greet her, and she bestows a kiss on the general manager. Seating is inspected and rejected, music is adjusted, and high tea is served.
But back to Marilyn: "I was walking down Broadway with her and nobody was stopping us. She was going to [Stella Adler's] actors' studio, and she was taking me to show me what it was all about. And I said to her, 'How come nobody is taking your picture?' She said, 'Well, watch.' She took her scarf off, straightened her shoulders, and draped something another way, and we were surrounded. It must have been 400 people. And I said, 'Now I know why!'''
Even as she turns 65 this month, Minnelli brings to mind Eloise, the character created by her beloved godmother, Kay Thompson, and often said to be based on her. The hotel's miniature jam pots and tea sandwiches elicit delight, and she'll happily trill a line or two of song.
"She's like a child. She's just a bundle of energy, and she doesn't have a sort of cynicism, and that can sometimes be useful as an adult," says actor Alan Cumming, her friend.
Like a real-life fairy godmother, Thompson introduced a young Minnelli to Halston, who became her confidant, partner in crime, and, most important, fashion guru until his death in 1990. She still wears his designs. Today it's a rich red cashmere sweater set over the black leggings and knee-high boots. "No one does colors like his," she says.
Her "aha" moment happened, she says, when she and Thompson were shopping at Bloomingdale's together. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed a Halston sweater-and-pants ensemble on display. "It was cut differently--thinner and longer," she says. "It was chicer. And I thought, Oh, wow, this is great." Seeing the spark, Thompson took Minnelli to meet Halston at his studio. "We got along instantly, and he became my fashion mate. I did what he said. He really took care of me."
Halston taught Minnelli how to dress, accompanied her to parties--from Studio 54 to society galas--and made his notoriously glamorous home at 101 East 63rd Street her own. She'd do fittings with Elizabeth Taylor--"We'd laugh and giggle," she remembers--and carry on into the night at "101," as habitués including Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, and Bianca Jagger called the pad.
It was through Halston that Minnelli got to know Warhol. Before that, she'd visited the Factory a few times but had been too shy to introduce herself. "He would be there in his leather jacket, and I never approached him, never told him my name or anything. I just wanted to see him," she says. She didn't dare utter a word to him until later, when Halston introduced them properly and they became close. "Whenever there was a dinner or something at H.'s house, he would be there," she says. "He was lovely. An interesting man.
"It was the period when Warhol wore a tuxedo and carried a camera," she continues. "He was fascinated by things around him, and I admired him for that. He was fun, you know. Curious about everything, very nice man, wouldn't harm a fly." She says that sitting for him was not a drawn-out affair, since the Factory was a bustling social outpost where she'd bump into stars like John Lennon. "It was so busy down there," she remembers. "[Shooting with Andy] was fun and very short. He would get what he wanted very quickly; he had an idea." Minnelli still has her Warhols hanging in the foyer of her Upper East Side apartment. ("That's the first thing you see: She opens the door and there's like five Lizas staring at you," says Cumming. "She's managed to hold on to them through several divorces.").
She, Halston, Warhol, and Bianca Jagger became seemingly inseparable, and their clubhouse was Studio 54. In 1977, Halston hosted a white-themed party for Jagger at the nightclub, where she and Minnelli released white doves. "He wanted us both in white, but we had such different looks," says Minnelli, who donned a custom Halston white sequined sweatsuit, while Jagger wore a frilly white lace dress by David and Elizabeth Emanuel. The unlikely duo were already great friends, having met in Paris when Minnelli was hanging out with Charles Aznavour and Jacques Brel. "You just get along or you don't," says Minnelli, "and she was great."
They spent so much time at Studio that on its first anniversary, the club tried to stage a performance. "Oh, that?" says Minnelli, who recalls it was a surprise to her. "There was a platform set up, and they were playing one of my records, and Bianca was like, 'What the hell?' And I said, 'Just keep moving.'"
Halston's house must have seemed like the opposite: a refuge where Minnelli could kick up her heels in private. After all, she had been on her own since 15, when she left her Los Angeles home with the dream of making it on Broadway. It was her way of coming out from the Hollywood shadow of her beloved parents, Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli. "I thought that making movies was drab. I'd lived through that," she says. "And I didn't want to use my parents, ever. ... They didn't want to push me into this business. [Broadway] seemed like a completely different direction."
From the start, Minnelli was a hit. Her debut, at 17, in the off-Broadway musical Best Foot Forward won her a Theatre World award, and by 19, she'd bagged a Best Actress Tony for Flora the Red Menace.It marked the first time she'd worked with composers John Kander and Fred Ebb, who went on to write such classics as "New York, New York" for her (which she performed in the 1977 film of the same name with Robert De Niro) and introduced her to Bob Fosse, with whom she developed her 1972 concert film, Liza with a "Z." But all along, Minnelli refused to rely on her parents for direction.
"I wanted my mother to be proud, so I really went out and learned," notes Minnelli. "And if she thought she could help me, she would." Her father helped conceive her now-iconic haircut while she was prepping to play Sally Bowles in 1972's Cabaret, the role that won her a Best Actress Oscar. "I thought that everybody in the '30s looked like Marlene Dietrich," she says. "I was telling my father, and he goes, 'You know, there were other people who were wonderful, [like] Louise Brooks, and they all had dark hair.' So I looked at the pictures and he explained to me about wanting to be different."
And Halston taught her how to celebrate being unique. One time, dressing Minnelli for a night out, Halston asked what sort of jewelry she had. "I didn't have anything. I said, 'I'm supporting myself in New York, doing all this stuff, you know.' He said, 'All right, you can't afford gold, and men have to buy you diamonds, so you have to wear silver.' And I was appalled. I thought, 'Oh my God, Albuquerque.'" But what he gave her was Elsa Peretti. "I had never seen anything like it. He dressed me, and suddenly I was able to go anywhere I wanted."
It was a revelation for Minnelli to have that passe-partout. In her film roles, she often played the outsider, the foil to more conventional beauties like Marisa Berenson. Now she was as inside the fashion world as she could get. As she and Halston drew closer, they developed the Liza look. "If I liked something that he didn't think was right, he would tell me, 'No, that is not the right shape for you; you need to hang everything off your shoulders.' I'm broad shouldered, short waisted, and long legged, so you hang it off here," she says, pointing, "and it would look great." Her classic style--long buttoned shirt, black stockings, and stilettos--was born.
Minnelli especially appreciated having Halston on her side when she left America for the circles of haute European society, where one senses that the young Minnelli felt like a bit of a scrapper. On one particularly nerve-racking trip, she was invited to attend the opening of a casino on the French Riviera. "Halston told me what to wear every second. He dressed me in a sleeveless purple cashmere turtleneck dress, just absolutely straight down. And a sweater that had no buttons and the silver [Elsa Peretti]." When Minnelli walked in, everyone stopped and stared. "I thought, 'Oh, crap, what did I do wrong?' and then I looked at the other women, and they had poufs and layers. I thought, 'Oh, my God, am I underdressed?' Then I thought, 'No, I trust H.,' so I walked in. And that year I was on the best-dressed list."
All this time later, she's still going. This month she's touring to promote her new album, Confessions, although she still gets stage fright. "It's a different kind of nervous. It's like a race horse gets nervous. Because I want to do it right."
And she is giving her Sex and the City 2 costar Sarah Jessica Parker, now Halston's president and chief creative officer, the thumbs-up. "The thing about Halston was that he had a complete look. I hope they capture that. I think she will."
As for the man himself, Minnelli has found him to be irreplaceable. "He thought of me when he designed just like Fred [Ebb] said he thought of me when he wrote a song," she says. "H. was wonderful. He had a great sense of humor about himself, and he pushed the envelope. He put us on the map."
Certainly Halston also gave her one thing that her four husbands did not: a killer wardrobe. And what, if anything, did she learn from those other relationships? She laughs and shoots a mischievous glance across the table. "To be a moving target!"
ANDY WARHOL’S INTERVIEW INTERVIEW: LIZA MINNELLI
By Andy Warhol
Photography Andy Warhol
Photography Andy Warhol
Published October 22, 2014.
Legend of the stage and screen, daughter of the Hollywood titans Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, Oscar winner (for her classic performance in 1972’s Cabaret), and Tony-, Emmy-, Golden Globe-, and Grammy Lifetime Legend award-winner Liza Minnelli has always been our sparkly sequined “New York, New York” gal. To celebrate our 45th birthday, the showbiz Hall of Famer puts on her best red dress and belts out the hits with Andy
ANDY WARHOL: What did you have for breakfast?
LIZA MINNELLI: Steel-cut oatmeal with lots of honey and sugar.
LIZA MINNELLI: Steel-cut oatmeal with lots of honey and sugar.
WARHOL: What was your first job?
MINNELLI: I moved and made scenery in summer stock. I did just about everything from the bottom up, and I enjoyed every minute.
WARHOL: What are your beauty secrets?
MINNELLI: Oh, honey…moisturize!!!
WARHOL: What’s your favorite movie?
MINNELLI: So many, but I’m partial to the films my parents did.
WARHOL: When do you get nervous?
MINNELLI: Right before a show, I feel like a racehorse before it leaves the gate. But once I step foot on stage, I’m home.
WARHOL: What’s your favorite color?
MINNELLI: I think everyone knows this…RED!
WARHOL: Do you take showers or baths?
MINNELLI: There’s nothing like a nice, HOT shower.
WARHOL: What kinds of clothes do you like?
MINNELLI: Anything Halston will always be my favorite.
WARHOL: What’s the most number of people you’ve performed for?
MINNELLI: I performed at Wembley Stadium at the concert to honor my friend Freddie Mercury, and there were a lot of people there. They asked me because Freddie was a huge fan of mine, which I am still tickled to know. He was one of the best of all time.
WARHOL: Do you dance at home?
MINNELLI: With all these false parts…not so much.
WARHOL: Do you think that it is vanity to worry so much about what you look like?
MINNELLI: Are you kidding? With HD now, we don’t have a choice.
WARHOL: What would be your dream date?
MINNELLI: Dancing with Fred Astaire.
WARHOL: Isn’t New York great?
MINNELLI: Ha! You’re asking me? I sing about it every chance I get. A couple of years after New York, New York came out [1977], I performed a whole medley of songs about New York at Carnegie Hall, and there were so many to choose from. Naturally it ended with “New York, New York.”
WARHOL: What do you think about love?
MINNELLI: I’m all for it. More of it for everybody, please.
Secrets and Liza
Oscar-winner, alcoholic, drug addict, four failed marriages, messy affairs... sometimes it seems as if Liza Minnelli's whole life has been lived in the public gaze. And yet, do we really know her? Even after meeting 'Liza with a Zee' on the eve of a British tour, Lynn Barber found it difficult to get to the heart of the matter
The following apology was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday June 1 2008
In the article below, we suggested that David Gest had accused Liza Minnelli of giving him herpes. In fact, David Gest has never had the disease and has never accused Ms Minnelli of giving it to him. We apologise to Mr Gest for any embarrassment or distress caused by this mistake.
Years ago, a colleague suffered the worst of journalistic embarrassments: he interviewed Meryl Streep for the Sunday Times and failed to notice that she was not Meryl Streep. He'd been told she was Meryl Streep, so he believed it: how was he to know he was the victim of a Mail on Sunday practical joke?
Since then, I've always worried that I could find myself in the same position and now, confronted with this small lollipop woman in a Knightsbridge hotel suite, I panic: how do I know this is Liza Minnelli? She looks like no picture of Minnelli I've ever seen - neither Minnelli in her gorgeous young Cabaret bloom, nor the bloated Minnelli of recent years, nor anything in between.
She looks slim and well-preserved for 62, but the great dark eyes that used to be her trademark have vanished into the surrounding orange mask. She could be almost any woman who has had extensive plastic surgery. I suppose it would be rude to ask to see her passport. It doesn't help that there is an audience in the room - her publicist, a woman she introduces as a friend and a television crew waiting to film her for The South Bank Show - who make me feel like the maid coming in to do turndown and taking too long about it.
The other problem is that although Minnelli has been famous for ever - born into Hollywood royalty and a star in her own right from her teens - I seem to have missed her career entirely. I saw her in Cabaret and that's about it. She is a year younger than me, but always seemed to belong to an older generation; she was singing with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jnr while we were listening to the Beatles. And she was always, even in her twenties, a 'gay icon', just like her mother. When I asked why she thought that was, she said it was because 'gays have good taste!', but maybe it has more to do with the fact that she shared her mother's predilection for marrying gay men - her first husband, Peter Allen, is supposed to have been the lover of Judy Garland's fourth husband, Mark Herron.
Anyway, she has a huge, devoted fan base, which has already snapped up most of the tickets for her forthcoming UK tour, which starts at the London Coliseum on 25 May. It is billed as her first British tour for 25 years, though actually she did a tour here in 1986, and has been back for concerts in London many times. The first half of the show is, she says, 'just songs that I like and a couple that people ask me to sing. Because I'm not a record act. The only hit record I ever had was with the wonderful Pet Shop Boys here ['Losing My Mind', 1988]. I never had one in America. But it's all right, I sell out anyway!'
The second half of the show is a departure, a 45-minute piece called 'The Godmother and the Goddaughter' about her relationship with her real-life godmother Kay Thompson. Thompson is probably known now, if at all, as the author of Eloise at the Plaza but, according to Minnelli, 'She's an underground hero in showbusiness. She was the first one ever to understand a certain kind of harmony in a song.' She did all MGM's vocal arrangements in their golden years and had a hugely influential radio show. Later, she did a nightclub act which Minnelli remembers seeing when she was three: 'It was amazing. I was sitting on my mom's lap across from my father to see Kay Thompson at Ciro's. And I always remember this energy force, this woman flying around the room and singing these harmonies so everyone went, "Wow!" So I thought, "That's what I want to do." People who don't even know about Kay, I want to show them what I saw - that incredible drive, that sense of humour, that wit. She was so funny.'
Thompson was originally a friend of Judy Garland's but took over as a sort of surrogate mother to Minnelli after Garland's death in 1969 and was staying at Minnelli's house when she died 10 years ago. So this is Minnelli's musical tribute to her godmother and she plans to record it as a TV special when her tour is finished.
Minnelli says she's been rehearsing and 'building' the show for nine months. 'It's like being an athlete; you get into a certain shape where you really have the right wind, because it's all to do with breath. Because singing and dancing at the same time is not easy! The whole second half is all dance routines.' I thought she had a hip replacement? 'Two. And a wired-up knee. I've got two crushed discs too. Never stop moving or you'll stop moving. I go to dance class every morning and it's just good to stay strong; I like being healthy.'
But there were newspaper reports that she collapsed during a concert in Sweden just before Christmas and had to cancel the rest of her Scandinavian tour. What happened? 'Look!' she opens her mouth and bares her teeth. They look fine to me, much better than mine. 'I've got four of them missing. I had serious, serious - they took out part of my jaw, they took out all of these teeth! And because I'm a dancer, I don't complain, you just don't complain, so I was thinking, "Ow, this really hurts." And then I went to the doctor and said, "Please give me something, this hurts me so much." But it had a bridge over so you couldn't see anything. And he said, "Yer yer yer" [I think this is meant to be a Swedish accent] and I don't know what the hell he gave me, but I waltzed around that stage! It was horrendous.' Sorry if you find this as unintelligible as I do - she talks in a sort of breathless rush that often seems to miss out key connections.
Obviously she has had more than her fair share of health problems; apart from the hip replacements, the wired-up knee, the crushed vertebrae and an operation for polyps on her vocal cords in 1997 which left her unable to sing for 18 months, she has been in and out of rehab for years, attending AA and generally 'battling with her demons'. She says of her alcoholism: 'My whole life, this disease has been rampant. I inherited it, and it's been horrendous, but I have always asked for help.' She has also had problems with prescription drugs which she claims started when a doctor put her on Valium after her mother's death. Andy Warhol's 1978 diary records her turning up at fashion designer Halston's house imploring: 'Give me every drug you've got' and him obligingly handing over coke, marijuana, Valium and four Quaaludes.
But her most serious health setback came in 2000 when she contracted encephalitis from a mosquito bite and was told she'd spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. 'I had to learn to walk again, had to learn to talk again. People don't usually recover like I recovered but I would not give up. I just couldn't - I don't know how you'd do anything else. I was lying there, scared, and my father always told me, "The way you do something is you think about it." So on the wall when they turned my head there was a pattern of leaves and I started to count them and I was going "ah ah ah" until I could say them. And then I did the same thing with walking. I really worked to get back. Most people don't come through it.'
I wondered at times if the encephalitis had left her with a certain degree of amnesia; certainly the way she described her childhood to me bore no relation to the account given in numerous biographies of her and her mother. Despite growing up in the heart of Hollywood, she claims 'we were brought up to be as normal as possible. It was so much more normal than anybody else I'd ever met. It was a very scheduled life - breakfast at seven, go to school, it was very organised. And very reassuring and not wacky at all. I'm sorry to disappoint but it was not wacky!'
But hadn't she been exposed to the ups and down of showbiz? 'I don't even know what you mean by exposed. I was right there in the heart of it, but exposed? No. That's where I grew up. If my parents were coalminers, I'd have grown up in a mining town. And I had no interest in filming. I sometimes went to the studios with my dad but it was slow-going; it was boring to watch. I always ended up in the rehearsal hall watching the dancing. That's what I liked to do.'
Her parents split up when she was five, but she says that was fine - 'They married again so many times I have millions of parents.' By the time she was 13, she had a stepfather, a stepmother, a stepbrother, a half-sister from her father and another half-sister and half-brother from her mother, many of whom she was expected to look after. She was usually the one who had to cope with her mother's addictions, severe depressions and frequent suicide attempts. She claims that the suicide attempts were 'just silly things to attract attention', but still they must have been frightening for a child to witness.
She also went to 14 different schools, which can't have helped. So her parents didn't object when, at 16, she announced that she was moving to New York to live alone and try to make a stage career. Her parents said OK - but they wouldn't support her. Frank Sinatra sent her $500 but she sent it back. She really did support herself, which meant sometimes doing a runner from hotels without paying (a habit she picked up from her mother) and once or twice sleeping on park benches. But by the time she was 19, she had won a Tony award for her first musical, Flora the Red Menace and at 26 she won an Oscar for Cabaret.
She once said, possibly quoting her mother, that 'reality is something you have to rise above' and that seems to be what she has done with her childhood - banished the bad bits and remembered the good. Anyway, she is not interested in the past and once said that she would never have analysis because 'there are doors I don't want opened'. She prides herself on the fact that, whereas her mother was always making cries for help, she has always been self-reliant. As she constantly emphasises, she is her father's daughter too - she is far happier talking about Vincente Minnelli than about Judy Garland. She likes to say that her mother gave her her drive, her father her dreams, whatever that means.
Both parents seem to have given her a very cavalier attitude to marriage - she often had very public affairs while still married to someone else. Andy Warhol noted in his diary in 1978: 'Her life's very complicated now. Like she was walking down the street with Jack Haley, her husband, and they'd run into Martin Scorsese, who she's now having an affair with, and Marty attacked her for also having an affair with [Mikhail] Baryshnikov... this is going on with her husband standing there!' Haley was husband number two and straight, but they were friends rather than lovers.
Husband number three, Mark Gero, a sculptor, was the one she hoped to have children with, but after three bad miscarriages she gave up. Then there was her gripping fourth wedding to David Gest in 2002, known as the Night of a 1,000 Facelifts, with Liz Taylor, Mia Farrow and Michael Jackson as bridesmaids. The marriage lasted just over a year, the divorce case much longer. He accused her of beating him up.
Perhaps, more pertinently, he claimed that she was 'unable to be effectively merchandised' because she was 'alcoholic and overweight'. She in turn accused him of drugging her, of being 'a manipulative neat freak' and putting her dog down. There was also a suit from a bodyguard who claimed that she harassed him with sexual demands - all good tabloid fun and I was rather hoping there might be another marriage on the horizon, but she says she will never marry again. 'I'm adamant about it. There is no reason on this earth.' So why did she marry as often as she did? 'Because I kept trying to get it right and I never did, so I gave up!' But why did she ever think David Gest was right?
At this point, the PR announces that I have had long enough (a paltry 45 minutes) and it is time to start filming for The South Bank Show. Minnelli hugs me warmly - she feels light as a sparrow - and seems to think the interview has gone well. I am baffled. A few days later, I see the same woman on Jools Holland's show and conclude that I really did meet Liza Minnelli, but who she is or what she is like as a person I have no idea.
Hollywood child: Life in the limelight
Early years
Born 12 March 1946 in Hollywood, to Judy Garland and her second husband, film director Vincente Minnelli.
1949 Makes her first screen appearance aged three in In the Good Old Summertime
Career highlights
1965 Wins Tony award for best actress in a musical for Flora the Red Menace
1972 Wins best actress Oscar for her role as Sally Bowles in Cabaret
1977 Stars with Robert De Niro in New York, New York.
1981 Stars in Arthur opposite Dudley Moore.
Personal life
Married and divorced four times, to: Peter Allen (1967-72), Jack Haley Jr (1974-79), Mark Gero (1979-92) and David Gest (2002-03)
She has been in rehab for substance abuse and was dangerously ill with viral encephalitis in 2000.
Katie Toms
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