From Peter Sellers dressing like a Nazi, to having to manage her mother Judy Garland’s addiction, jaws will drop at Minnelli’s anecdotes
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uesday marks the publication of Kids, Wait Til You Hear This!, the enormously entertaining memoir by Liza Minnelli, and that title – gossipy, confiding and with no small measure of Broadway panache – sets the tone from the off.
As well as coming across as kind and politically aware, Minnelli is quite heroically unburdened by tact, and as she sketches her life from gilded Hollywood to scrappy New York and on through addiction, ill health and multiple marriages, everyone – most of all herself – is assessed with bracing honesty.
A jawdropping story about Lady Gaga patronising her at the Oscars has already been aired in a published extract, and it would be unfair on Minnelli to give away all of the other juicy moments in publication week, but there are so many such moments in the book that we couldn’t hope to summarise them all anyway. Without including choice anecdotes involving Princess Diana, Goldie Hawn, Charles Aznavour, Pet Shop Boys, Frank Sinatra, Halston, the pope and many more, here are just a handful of others.
