Liza With an Attitude in 1970: Young Minnelli Talks Making Her Own Way in Showbiz One Year After Judy Garland’s Death in WWD Interview
Liza Minnelli became a darling of Hollywood simply by birth. In this interview the 24-year-old talks to WWD about being the child of celebrity parents actress and singer Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli, standing on her own, doing things her way and her upcoming role as Sally Bowles in the Broadway hit “Cabaret” on July 6, 1970. Garland died on June 22, 1969, at age 47.
Below, a reproduction of WWD’s interview with Minnelli in 1970.
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LOS ANGELES — Liza Minnelli isn’t just another pretty face.
Nor is she willingly the vulnerable waif…everybody’s little girl…the logical heiress to the Judy Garland cult. If you insist on emotionally tripping at that happy ending somewhere over the rainbow, then that’s your problem. But Liza has other races to run.
“Mama and I went after something different,” she says. “She had more of a needing quality. With mama, it was. ‘Help me. Give me.’ And it was terrific. She’d get out on that stage and open those little arms. And I’d be very much a part of the audience that reacted to her. I’d stand up, too, and reach out and cry my brains out.
“But I have more defiance in me. If I say, ‘Please help me,’ I’ll always add, ‘if you’ve got the time.’ I’m not singing mama songs. I don’t think I could ever do them well. I know I get annoyed when anyone sings ‘Over the Rainbow.’ I would rather present a first-rate version of myself than a second-rate version of mama. It’s just cheap to fall back on something like that. When I entertain, I love to create a feeling of a party. And don’t want to be everybody’s little girl.”
It’s a wise attitude Liza has shown in her appearances this season, as she prepares for the final leg of the Triple Crown of Nightclubs — her July 15 opening at Las Vegas’ Riviera Hotel. This follows her previous triumph at the Waldorf in New York and the loving reception the hometown girl received at the Ambassador in Los Angeles.
The coltish Liza brings her own special singing-dancing-mugging appeal, and though the voice occasionally makes you remember mama and the mobile Italian face strongly brings papa Vincente to mind, she is still very much her own lady, slight remnants of adolescent acne and all.
Liza curls up on an ottoman in the presidential suite of the ambassador…her White Halston pantsuit unintentionally see-through as she modestly drapes a scarf over strategic locations.
These are the happiest times for the 24-year-old Liza. Late afternoon with someone running through a song on a piano.
“I’ve always liked rehearsing. I love working it out until it finally works. Making it work comes slowly. But I haven’t left it to luck or to chance. I like to be well-prepared. I had a terrific time doing my television special. But TV is so different, it drove me crazy. I was given a song and told we’d do it in four minutes. They live by that in television — the sheer panic — but it doesn’t thrill me at all.
Liza is used to hard work.
“You know. I never could sing at all. My sister Lorna, who’s 16, has a natural voice and she has the power. But had to learn how to sing so that I could be on Broadway. I could act and dance, so I kept working at it. It was a great triumph when I got to where I was at least on key.”
As she progresses with her acting career, Liza takes a view backward. “The saddest time in the whole world is when you’ve gone through something you know you’ll never go through again. I see Truman Capote’s ‘A Christmas Memory’ and it kills me every time. This is the time of life when I’m awakening to other things. To pain too.”
When the going gets lugubrious and the voice begins to sound eerily like mama’s, Liza turns on gee-whiz inflections with great effect to change the mood. Then off she goes on a verbal tangent as she talks about Fred Ebb, with whom “I’ve been joined at the hip” since they teamed up after “Flora the Red Menace,” the Ebb-written musical which won Liza a Tony Award. “He wrote my act. We’ve chosen the maternal together.”
Liza won’t talk about any film projects she and Ebb might be embarking upon, but she’s eager to talk of those roles she’s played thus far and the upcoming Sally Bowles in “Cabaret” with Joel Grey of the original Broadway cast.
“The best things about my roils that they’re always such in-vere-sting people, such rich characters.”
All have had a tragedy in their life: Pookie Adams’ loneliness, June Moon’s facial disfigurement. Sally Bowles’ drifting.
“‘Junie Moon’ is a very strange picture. Most people seem to like it. If they don’t like the picture they seem to like the performance. When they put on my makeup (one whole side of Junie Moon’s disfigured by acid burns) I immediately knew why she felt that way. When I started wearing the make-up, people started pointing to me and whispering. She got defiant. That’s what kept her going. I developed a kind of hatred for pity. Janie is hard, bitter tough. She hides her vulnerability much more than Pookie in ‘Sterile Cuckoo.’”
“Sally Bowles is a complete departure. A sophisticated role, but in its own peculiar way. “Cabaret” was rewritten to expand the part in the film. The script is so decadent, so awful, it captures that whole permissive time. We’ll be filming it next year at the Munich studios. In talking about her roles, she speaks of her fascination with identifiable, slice of life things.
“Everyone has known a Pookie Adams or been through Pookie Adams’ stage,” she says of the role that won her an Academy Award nomination in her first film. “Everyone has been an outcast like Junie Moon.”
“And a lot of people want to be like Sally Bowles, who doesn’t worry about tomorrow, who doesn’t want to think the war will happen and that the roof will cave in.
“As for films I prefer romantic subjects to political subjects.
“My roles have been timeless where most recent film successes have been topical. But look at ‘Z.’ It’s both.
“What impresses me is when a person buys a book and sees it through to the end.” This Liza may imminently be doing with her director-father, though she says it’s premature to speak of it. “Papa and I talk constantly about doing a film together. He has such wonderful eye, such a way of not doing the obvious. He has a great feeling for detail. If he does a film on the 1920s, he won’t take the shortcuts of filming the Charleston and a bunch of balloons. He will capture the air of the 1920s, the strange elegance that went along with all that craziness.
“You know, I don’t mind the fact there are no longer any $1 million salaries.
I’m awfully lucky. I can always go to Las Vegas and earn good money. But I just want to be an actress and I don’t have to earn lot of money being one.
“I’m glad I’m not stuck with a studio contract. You have to go on what you think is right. If Dustin Hoffman had the protection of a studio he would never have taken the risk of doing ‘Midnight Cowboy.’ Junie Moon has been like that with me.”
Liza considers herself in the same character actor category as Hoffman to a degree.
“I’m not a glamour girl. That I know.” And with the saying she creates that heart tugging Caruso note that belongs to the legendary few, her mother included.
Then she lets out a self-conscious giggle and turns her attention to Ocho, the starving mutt she brought back from the streets of Puerto Rico a year ago, and who has now turned fat with her overdoting attention.
— Hector Arce
Research by Tonya Blazio-Licorish
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