Were you to line up all the warts and all autobiographies that have been written, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! could emerge as one of the wartiest.It contrasts a career with massive successes — Liza Minnelli was the youngest performer to become a coveted Egot (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) honouree in history — with some spectacular low points.Her life has been one of addiction and failed marriages, with unscrupulous advisers robbing her of financial security and the tabloids relentlessly pursuing her and relishing her every stumble and fall. However, this captivating and enthralling look behind the scenes is also a tale of resilience, determination and raw energy.Now in her 80s, she explains: “All I know is that every single time I’ve fallen, I’ve gotten back up. And that’s why I’m still here.”Minnelli is showbiz royalty, the daughter of legendary silver screen idol Judy Garland and designer and director Vincente Minnelli.“I always tell people that I get my drive from Mama and my dreams from Papa… Remember, I’m the daughter of a director. I used to joke that I came out of the womb looking for a good camera angle,” she writes.Garland died from a drug overdose in London in 1969 at the age of 47. Minnelli refuses to believe the rumours that this was suicide, instead insisting that her mother burnt out too soon.While Minnelli inherited massive talent from both parents, she also seems to have inherited her addictive nature from her mother, and what is remarkable is that she has achieved so much despite her battles with alcohol and drugs.“I’ve been waging a war my whole adult life with what we now call SUD, substance use disorder,” she writes.“It’s a disease, a condition caused by physical and mental wiring that can trigger abuse of drugs and alcohol. I got it from Mama — along with my sister, Lorna, and my brother, Joey — and she got it from her family. Just like Mama’s sense of humor, all of us inherited it in the womb... This is just as much a part of my life story as my journey as an artist and performer. I’m 80 years old and lucky to be alive. Most people with substance use disorder don’t live that long.”If you recoil from name-dropping, this is not the book for you. From lists of the guests at her parents’ Hollywood parties when she was still a toddler, through to the stars with whom she worked throughout her own spectacular career and in her partying at New York’s legendary Studio 54 nightclub, the famous names just keep popping out.Minnelli has been far from chaste, with some big names notched on her bedpost. These include Peter Sellers, to whom she was engaged, but who she never married, and Charles Aznavour, who would never leave his wife to be with her.She got on fabulously with her first four husbands, not all of whom were gay, but her marriage to the last one, David Gest, went wrong from the wedding day. She has vowed to never marry again, which seems sensible.I have attended many impressive concerts over many decades, seeing some remarkable talent, but no-one came close to Minnelli, whom I saw in concert in Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1993, at the peak of her prowess.Her ability to draw on her acting genius and inject that extra dimension into her song-and-dance routines made this a spectacular evening, and we learn in Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! that she had learnt this ability to fuse music and drama from Aznavour.Chatty, shameless and brutally honest, this is a remarkable life story, and while the recounting of her career is fascinating, so, too, is the brutally short childhood she enjoyed. Even before she became a teenager, young Minnelli was called on to support her dysfunctional, ill-disciplined and often broke mother.“Yes, she was unbelievably funny, a doting and caring mom and the life of the party,” Minnelli writes. “Yet after that party, she might be rushed to the hospital following a suicide attempt. I was dealing with the pain and trauma of her hospitalisations — and managing her medications — at an age when most kids were still riding their bikes.”The famous friends who are paraded throughout this book include fellow child star Michael Jackson, of whom she was clearly very fond. It is notable that she does not seem to refer to the dark clouds of child abuse that hung over him, but she does claim to have taught him one of his trademark dance moves.“You may be surprised to learn that I helped Michael develop his ‘moonwalk’ dance that became a global sensation,” Minnelli recalls.“Seriously. I’m not beating my own drum or trying to claim any credit for his artistic genius. Here’s how it happened. I had been performing in Brazil, and I saw dancers practising the exaggerated slide that became part of the moonwalk.“I shared it with Michael, and he loved it. We’d always exchanged dance moves. Earlier, he gave me a trademark shuffle that I’ve incorporated into my performances.”Lady Gaga receives far more critical treatment, relating to Minnelli’s appearance at the 2022 Oscars, when the Cabaret Oscar winner believes she was ambushed, being forced without warning to go on stage in a wheelchair, which made her appear frailer than she was, and then she had to struggle to read the teleprompter without her glasses. Minnelli believes she was patronised and insulted by her co-host.“I was inexplicably ordered — not even asked — to sit in a wheelchair or not appear at all,” she wrote. “I was told it was because of my age and for safety reasons, because I might slip out of the director’s chair, which was bullshit. ‘I will not be treated this way,’ I said. I was heartbroken. I was much lower down than I would have been in the director’s chair. Now I couldn’t easily read the teleprompter above me.”Despite this humiliation, Minnelli went on to party after the ceremony and is confident that nobody she encountered (apart from a few close friends) would have known how deeply she had been wounded. The show had to go on.Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! is a witty, tearful and ultimately uplifting autobiography from one of the last true Hollywood legends.Business Day