By Jim Seavor
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer
Liza's on the run. She's just finished a rehearsal and is headed for a vocal lesson. And there's an interview to be done. On the phone from Las Vegas, words spill out, along with the familiar nervous-sounding laugh. She's warm, friendly, and sounds eager to please. In other words, she's the Liza Mmnelh many of us feel we've grown up with - the award-winning performer/actress we’ve seen through the ups and downs of a hectic family life, personal problems, and a career that’s brought her to the top on stage and in film.
Whether we’ve met her or not, feel we’re on a first-name basis. Over the phone, she’s explaining that she’ll play her new show-which she’s bringing to the Warwick Musical Theater Friday-for a few days in Las Vegas, take two days off, and then open in Los Angeles, "which is huge.” She laughs and adds, "I keep on marching, you know.”
Liza's been marching since March 12, 1946, the day she was bom. She made her film debut in 1949, when she toddled before the cameras in In The Good Old Summertime, starring her mother Judy Garland and directed by her father Vmcente Minnelli.
In 1965, she made her Broadway debut in Kander and Ebb’s Flora, The Red Menace. The show received a mixed reception - but Liza became, at 19, the youngest person to win a Tony Award for a musical role. She got a special Tony in 1973 for breaking the box-office record at the Winter Garden with her one woman show. Another Tony came in 1978 for The Act.
She was nominated for an Oscar in 1969 for 7he Sten'le Cuckoo and won one in 1972 for Cabaret. Also that year came Emmy for her television special, Liza with a Z. Her career was a quick-step march.
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But she was marching to a much slower drummer for a while this year, when she underwent vocal cord surgery to have a polyp removed. "They stripped my cords too, which is heavy duty." Then her hip replacement - her "fake hip, got infected and they had to work on that."
She's fine now, but "I've been through hell the last four months, since Victor/Victoria. Liza's referring to the four weeks this winter when she subbed for vacationing Julie Andrews in the Broadway musical. Four weeks of bad press in which actor Tony Roberts was quoted as saying she was difficult to work with - in fact, he, wouldn't work with her, and stayed away for a few performances.
Liza didn't comment at the time. "You lay low and do your job," she says now. "I'm not a complainer. I'm a worker. . . . You show up, do your job and outlive the bull -" A quick laugh and she changes that to “the rumors.”
The experience was the opposite from the five weeks she spent in 1975 subbing for the ailing Gwen Verdon in Chicago. That she loved doing. But, she says, it was a "different kind of Broadway when I was there. Everyone worked together. As for her latest substitution, she says the "stress under gun-fire" of those weeks helped lead to her physical problems." You haven't done anything wrong except show up and make them more money than they've ever made." The entertainment weekly Variety reported, that Liza's first week brought in $727,822, nearly $112,000 more than Andrews's previous week. By her second week, that figure had climbed to $770,792, or 97.2 percent of capacity.
As for Roberts, she refers to him as "the poor guy." "Somebody thought they could get a lot of publicity out of something that wasn't real. It was just so cheap. Especially when people come to see you and you're terrific." Then she adds of the people behind the show, "They're not Broadway, they're from Hollywood, and you have to forgive them."
One of the words Variety used in its positive review of her in the show was "vulnerable," an image long associated with Minnelli. Is she?
"Oh, yes," she says. "Yes, I am. But I'm also extremely strong. You have to be in this business. I don't think I'm tough. I think I'm strong."
Strong enough, even with all the battling, to enjoy the cast and people working on Victor/Victoria. Rolt Smith, former assistant producer at the Theatre-by-the-Sea, backs her up. He is now a stage manager in New York and he was backstage at Victor/Victoria a few times during that period. "The kind of things I would do would be escort her from one entrance to another and make sure she made a quick change." He calls her "very friendly and outgoing. She didn't have any qualms about talking to people on the crew. She knew who she was, but would talk to me as easily as with her fellow actors."
Smith is stage manager for The Life, the Cy Coleman musical about life on 42nd Street before it was Disneyfied. He was working the night this summer when Liza dropped by that show. Disappointed that the musical didn't do better in the Tony Awards - she'd taken part in an album of songs from the show before it opened on Broadway she had decided to show her support.
It was all carefully planned, they thought. She sat in the audience for the first act and then went backstage during the intermission to be fitted with a microphone. There, Smith says, "She spent most of the time hanging out with the women's chorus." The dressing room now has a mirror and seat reserved for her, should she want to drop by.
During the curtain calls, she joined the cast on stage to sing a song with leading actor Sam Harris. That was planned. What happened next was the surprise. Liza called out her accompanist and, for the first time in public, sang a song closely associated with her mother You Made Me Love You. Smith thought she had planned it in advance. Liza says she hadn't. "Nobody had any idea, including me. I performed the song for the cast and the love between the cast and audience on Broadway." Smith calls the moment "the heart of who Liza is."
Ask Liza Minnelli if she minds people always bringing up the past, and she says, "No. It doesn't bother me, except that it's gone." But, she says, she's more interested in the .present and future. Still, it's more complicated than that.
You explain that the question was asked because comedienne Imogene Coca, when asked the same thing, had answered that she did mind. She didn't enjoy coming off stage after what she knew was a good performance and having people always talking about Your Show of Shows, something she had done many years before. That brings from Liza, the comment: "She put it in words I'm too polite to put it in." In other words, don't expect her to dwell on the past.
That past includes, as she told Time magazine in 1972, doing the hiring of the household staff when she was I I and answering her mother's fan mail.The article appeared the same week she turned up on Newsweek's cover with the line "A Star Is Bom" - a reference both to her triumph in Cabaret and to the name of one of her mother's most celebrated movies.
In that story she remembered appearing with her mother at the Palace Theatre when she was 7, dancing while Judy sang Swanee. ers was a family many felt was their family. We watched and worried as Judy Garland went through her highs and lows and moumed when she died in 1969. We celebrated as Liza climbed to the top and worried when her problems surfaced.
We watched her three marriages - to singer Peter Allen, actor Jack Haley Jr. and artist Mark Gero - and her three divorces. There were the attempts to have a child. In 1984 she entered the Betty Ford Clinic to battle an addiction to the tranquilizer Valium. And though there were more movie triumphs, such as the comedy Arthur with Dudley Moore, there also were movie disasters such as Lucky Lady. Even Liza didn't like that one.
But, as she says, she is strong, and she’s a survivor. The concert dates continue. So do the recordings. Her latest, Gently, includes duets with Donna Summer and Johnny Mathis.
Offstage, Liza's been active in AIDS causes for years. At one of the Washington displays of the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt - which contains a panel for Allen -she appeared at a candlelight march at the Lincoln Memorial. There she surprised those who expected her to sing by leading the throng in the Lord's Prayer. "It didn't seem appropriate to sing," she says "I was so angry until I found The Day After That, all I could do was pray.
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The show Liza's bringing to Warwick is all Liza. There's no opening act. "They came to see me and that's what they'll get." She will get a break, though. The Cortes Alexander Trio is also on the bill. The singers back up Minnelli and have a segment of their own. Her fans will also find a quieter Liza
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When she returned to the stage after her throat surgery she looked at what she was doing and thought, "Everything is a closing number. I'm shrieking my way through the show." Getting her newly restored vocal cords, she says, is "like giving somebody a new car you don't know how to drive." She talks of being "almost given a second chance."
So she's going easy with the voice and "studying like I've never studied before." Liza is making sure her career, already a long one, will go on. "The proof of your career," she says, "is your longevity. I'm very lucky I'm always able to work."