W.

Woody Allen

To meet Woody Allen in London is to meet a man violently out of context. Imagine stubbing your toe on the Statue of Liberty while out walking the dog on Tooting Common and you grasp the scale of the incongruity. He belongs in New York, he’s synonymous with the place; as he says at the beginning of Manhattan (1979), it’s his town.
I once saw him there, wearing a baseball cap and a lumberjack shirt, marching towards me across a bridge in Central Park. It was six in the morning – I couldn’t sleep – there was no one else around and I was nonchalant about the encounter until the moment he had passed, at which point I began stalking him. A film crew appeared on the opposite side of the lake, he joined them, and so, surreptitiously, did I – and spent the next few hours staring at him, slack-jawed, as he set up shots, played chess with his sound engineer and ate corn muffins. How could I not? For the past three decades he has made a film a year and I, anorak that I am, have them all on video, in chronological order. I even have that series of wilfully beige and morose films he did in homage to Bergman – September, Alice, Another Woman, Interiors – the ones which nobody likes, including me.
In Central Park he was focused and energetic, but cold in the way he directed his actors. In London, by contrast, sitting on the edge of a large sofa in the Dorchester, his 5ft 7in frame seems almost out of focus: slight, spavined, his edges blurred despite the neatly pressed creases in his cream trousers, blue shirt and white vest. It is to do with the paleness of his eyelashes, his freckled skin, his thinning wires of hair and his right eye which, behind black-rimmed glasses, looks lazy and sore. It’s also to do with the way he holds himself. When I ask a question, he cocks his head to one side and leans forward so far he almost slides off the cushion. ‘I-I-I’m sorry,’ he says softly, with that cracked, reedy, much-impersonated Brooklyn-accented stutter. ‘My hearing is dropping a little in my left ear. This is hereditary. I listen keenly and I read lips. If people’s lips are covered, or I take my glasses off, I don’t hear as well.’
I’d been asking him about the ills the flesh is heir to. He is 66, a good age, presumably, for a hypochondriac? ‘Yes, everything falls apart. You, er, you lose your hair and your faculties, and you eventually get a disease from which you do not recover.’ He folds his arms defensively. ‘I’ve always thought [pronounced to-wart] I was falling apart anyway, but as I get older it becomes a more realistic fear.’
Fear: it’s been said that since September 11 we’ve all become Woody Allens. He and Soon-Yi, his wife, live with their two adopted children in a $17 million, five-storey Georgian town house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was in his kitchen when the planes crashed into the towers. As he has always rhapsodised about the New York skyline in his films, did the attack feel almost personal? ‘It was a shock,’ he says with a wheezy, nervous laugh. ‘Such random slaughter. But not a surprise. We always thought that terrorism would show up in one of our cities. But the government was caught napping when it did.’
Before he began shooting his latest film, Curse of the Jade Scorpion, he sued Jean Doumanian, his producer and one of his oldest and closest friends. Allen claimed Doumanian cheated him out of profits – thought to be about $15 million – from his last eight movies. In July she counter-sued, claiming that a ‘self indulgent’ Allen squandered her company’s money by demanding a large salary, chauffeur-driven cars, rooms at five-star hotels, private jets and a 50 per cent slice of his films’ profits. Hasn’t he been put off going to court after his ordeals in the early 1990s (when he and Mia Farrow were involved in a bitter, bitter custody case)? ‘Er, no. No, I’m a normal citizen and if there are matters that have to be solved in court I go to court. No.’
When Mia Farrow, his leading actress in several films and his long time companion, came across pornographic Polaroids he had taken of her (not his) 21-year-old adopted daughter Soon-Yi, she went berserk. According to Allen, Farrow had threatened to kill him and commit suicide – she had also sent him a Valentine’s card pierced with knives and skewers. Vindictively, it seemed (or protectively, depending on your sympathies), Farrow brought a child abuse charge against Allen (relating to another adopted daughter, Dylan). The police were compelled to investigate, they put together a 200-page report, and Allen took a lie detector test. He counter-sued, ran up legal fees of $7 million and eventually won and lost: all allegations of abuse were dismissed, he married Soon-Yi in 1997, but was banned from seeing Dylan and his natural son Satchel. The judge said Allen was ‘the most opaque of narcissists’, and added that ‘you don’t have a clue about the needs of your children.’ Since the separation, Farrow has adopted four more children – she already had 11 – and has damned Allen in her autobiography (recording that his neurotic solipsism was such that he needed weeks with his analyst before agreeing to change the bedsheets from polyester satin to cotton).
Does he now regret the scorched earth policy he adopted with Mia Farrow in the courts? ‘I, I, I wouldn’t know what you meant by scorched earth policy.’ I elaborate. ‘Ah, OK. It was big and messy and it could have been handled better and had better consequences. But I didn’t have any choice. I was put in that position and I had to respond. Normally I like to handle everything quietly and discreetly and I’m a, you know, a friendly and forgiving private type. But I will always… There are certain situations where you are forced to act.’ He shakes his head. ‘It was a terrible, terrible, terrible situation. My not having access to the children is completely cruel and unfair. Not in their best interests. But these dreadful things happen in life. To balance that I had parents with good longevity [his father lived to 100, his mother 95]. I’ve been healthy. I’ve been blessed with a talent.’
What effect did the scandal have in terms of his commercial success? ‘None! I’ve never had any success commercially! Never.’ Now, now. It’s not quite true. He had box office successes with his two Oscar-winning films Annie Hall (1977) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). ‘No. Annie Hall was the smallest earning Oscar-winning film in the history of the movies. People always ask me, “Why don’t you do any more of those early funny films?” Well, my first, Take the Money and Run (1969), I made for $1 million and it got great reviews and ten years later it still had not broken even.’
Woody Allen’s films may go unnoticed in America, but in Italy, France and Britain they have a devoted following. ‘In Europe I’m idolised, it’s true. I walk down the street and they shake my hand and throw flowers and kiss me. In the United States I’m a bum. It mystifies me.’ He rubs his hands together; hunches his shoulders; gulps. ‘I’ve had this conversation a million times with my producers. They sit me down and say, “What is it? Is it that you are in these films?” Then I would make The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and not be in it and it would still not do any real business. And they would say, “Maybe it is that they only want to see you as this neurotic New York intellectual type.” So I would make a film like Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and it would not do great business and then they would say, “Maybe they want to see you in something different, your films are too alike.” So I would make Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) and I still don’t get a decent sized audience.’ He blinks repeatedly and nods to himself. ‘Maybe the problem is that my films are like Chinese food. There is no real similarity between an egg roll and spare ribs but in the end it is all Chinese food.’
In 1998 Allen said to Newsweek: ‘If my films don’t make a profit I know I’m doing something right.’ Doesn’t he take a perverse delight in the fact that they aren’t commercial? ‘No, I don’t delight in it. It would make my life a lot easier if they made money. But I do feel that if you are succeeding all the time you are doing something wrong.’
He claims that failure has dogged his career. But after dropping out of New York University, where he studied film, he found early success as a gag writer for Sid Caesar. He then became a successful cabaret comedian, one of his jokes being that he was kicked out of NYU for cheating in a metaphysics exam. He had looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to him. ‘When I was a nightclub comic I used to get these great reviews and club owners would pay me a very substantial salary,’ he says. ‘But then they would see that half the house was empty. They would have to move these big, potted palm-trees around so that the room looked fuller.’
Dr Johnson believed that all censure of a man’s self is oblique praise and this seems to apply to Woody Allen. He talks himself down but only as a strategy, because he so clearly has confidence in his own abilities. And though he has often cast himself as a self-doubting loser in his films, it has always been as an endearing one. He claims his films aren’t autobiographical, of course. Yet the characters he plays invariably share his neuroses and phobias – most of which are genuine, apparently. He prefers darkness and rain to sunshine. He is so claustrophobic he has on occasion taken a 100-mile diversion rather than cross a bridge or go through a tunnel. He has a morbid fear of dogs and deer and a thing about bright colours – which is why he, and the characters he plays, nearly always dress blandly, in green and brown corduroy. And there are enough examples of his own life overlapping with his characters’ to make his claim seem disingenuous. In 1973, for instance, he became convinced he had a brain tumour, as his character does in Hannah and Her Sisters. Or consider the grimly ironic Husbands and Wives (1992) in which his character leaves Mia Farrow’s character for a 21-year-old. Tellingly, he slips into the first person when talking about the characters he plays: ‘I never went back to Hannah.’ Or: ‘Julia left me in that movie.’
Can he understand why people assume his films are autobiographical? He coughs into his hand and grins crookedly. ‘Right, right. I think what it is is that the sensibility is me. The character I am playing has hypochondria and he obsesses about his life and his mortality and he fails in his relations and, in that respect, it is me, because that is what I do in my off-screen hours. But the details of the movies are, 99 per cent of the time, made up. Once in a while there will be something that comes up, like the concept of the brain tumour you mentioned, but that is so exaggerated compared to my real life that it may as well be made up. In real life I’m productive. I’m not totally incompetent. I get up in the morning. I’m not a little weakling – I was a good athlete when I was younger. I work at the typewriter. I practise my clarinet [he still plays with his New Orleans jazz band every Monday night at The Carlyle Hotel in New York]. I’m able to make films and run my film company.’ He smiles wanly. ‘You know, I-I-I I’m not the character in Deconstructing Harry (1997). This guy had a writer’s block, I’ve never had a writer’s block in my life. I wouldn’t know what it meant. This guy was seeing whores, he can’t stop his alcohol, he kidnapped his child. These are things I couldn’t and wouldn’t do, but people think, “So that is how he lives”.’
What about when his character contemplates suicide in Hannah and Her Sisters? Was that based on experience? ‘Not really, no. I would be too afraid to kill myself. I would never contemplate suicide.’ He touches his glasses. ‘No, that’s not quite true. I have contemplated it in the sense that the thought has occurred to me, but that would never have translated into action. I would be too frightened – that is the only reason – to buy a gun and shoot myself.”
I only ask because he is a notorious pessimist and depressive who has been visiting psychiatrists for most of his adult life. ‘I have stopped seeing a psychiatrist now,’ he says nasally. ‘It’s very hard to have a good relationship, and I didn’t for most of my life. Now, though, I am very very happily married and that has been a wonderful thing for me and I’ve got great kids. But, for me, when you get happy then you start to get these awful existential thoughts. When a guy is lonely or miserable he just thinks, “What will I do to meet a girl tonight?” But when you find you are happy with a lovely wife only then do you realise what is in store for you – it is going to end somehow. You are going to die.’
So the trick is to keep yourself as miserable as possible? ‘No, my antidote is always to rush to work and blot out these thoughts by distracting myself. Film-making for me is like therapy, like basket-weaving or finger painting in a mental institution. When I’m not doing that I make sure I watch baseball or basketball or I play my clarinet. If I don’t distract myself I know I will get depressed and anxious and give in to morbid introspection.’
He is terrified of being left alone with his thoughts? ‘Yes. There have been times when I would buy a newspaper or a magazine prior to a five-flight elevator ride because I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts in the elevator for 30 seconds.’
Must be exhausting being him. ‘Let me tell you, when I go for a walk in Central Park on a beautiful day I have to set myself mental tasks, prepare a speech, think about casting. Otherwise I know I will want to run up to people and shake them and say, “Why are you bothering to sunbathe? What is the point of your pregnant belly? Why are you walking your dog? Toward what end? We’re all going to die one day. Am I the only one who sees it? Am I the only person in the concentration camp who knows what is going on behind that big hedge?”‘ He spreads his arms, fingers splayed. ‘I will look around the park and think, “We can cut to this scene 100 years from now and all these people will be dead.” Every 100 years a big toilet will have flushed and a new group of people will be in their place. The Islamic fundamentalists, the baseball players, the beautiful models, everybody who is here now will be gone. All gone. You and me. It is hard to combat this thought. It’s constantly nagging at me. Our seemingly busy busy lives ultimately mean nothing in this cruel and hostile universe.”
Poor Woody Allen: he sounds sincere but, because he has had so much comic mileage from his angst over the years – bleak despair combined with Jewish wisecracking – it is hard to take him seriously on the subject. Does he find this reaction frustrating? ‘Look, I, I, er, I don’t make jokes about these things deliberately. I just saw one day that that was my response to them. I don’t think, “If I make people laugh or make myself laugh that will alleviate the problem.” I can make jokes, that’s all. I’ve always been able to. It is an awful gift.’
One of my favourite Woody Allen lines is: ‘If only God would give me a clear sign. Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.’ I ask him why he can’t take Thomas Carlyle’s advice and just ‘accept the universe’? ‘If I tell you that someone at some point is going to come and shoot you and your wife it’s hard to live with it. It’s a very disquieting feeling. It’s unnerving. You can’t breathe easily and relax. I find it impossible to do.’
We’re all born astride the grave but surely he has a form of immortality through his films. ‘Yes, but as I have said before, it would be nice to live on in the hearts and minds of my audience but I’d rather live on in my apartment.’
I tell him I find his gloomy disposition in real life at odds with the tone of his films, which is often funny, romantic and charming. He presents his audience with these dark existential dilemmas then offers a diversion from them, a consolation: love, he often seems to be saying, is the answer to the question, ‘What meaning can there be to life when death is the end of it?’ ‘Yes, that is the best you can do. I agree with you. To say, “I love you” is the nicest thing, the most meaningful thing you can do in life. That is why my priorities in life are my children and my wife, not my movies. But this is cold comfort. When I’m with my wife and children I think, “This is so impermanent. There will come a point where we have to say goodbye. Love is the best you can do but it’s just not good enough! It’s too little too late. People should be angry instead. Angry at the whole deal.”‘ He pats my arm and grins lopsidedly: ‘I hope I’m not depressing you.’
Even as a child, Woody Allen – born Allan Konigsberg – was visited by what he called the bluebird of unhappiness. ‘Even as a young child, yes. There was a dark cloud over my head in the cradle.’ He was a lonely boy – his sister Letty was born when he was eight – who usually ate alone. His earliest memories are of Nettie and Martin, his volatile parents, arguing. ‘They stayed together out of spite. Did everything short of exchange gunfire.’ Their arguments were usually about money. Martin, who worked in a poolroom, was a spendthrift, Nettie was frugal. The young Woody would escape the tension by sitting in his room teaching himself conjuring tricks (he became an accomplished amateur magician and at one point considered making a living as a card sharp).
He got married for the first time when he was 20 – to Harlene Rosen, who was three years younger. After six years, the marriage ended in acrimony. Allen had taken to joking about Harlene in public: ‘It was my wife’s birthday, so I bought her an electric chair. Told her it was a hair dyer.’ His second marriage, to actress Louise Lasser, lasted three years, ending in 1969. His longest friendship/relationship has been with Diane Keaton, the Californian actress who monopolised the female leads in his early films. She was his live-in companion for three years in the 1970s and when they split up they remained close friends. They still speak on the phone nearly every day and she is, he says, the only person whose critical opinion he really cares about.
He once joked that he never trusts a woman until she rejects him, yet he has always been successful with women, beautiful women at that. Why does he think this is? ‘I never have been.’ Do I have to list them? ‘OK, but very few. I had a wonderful wife in Louise Lasser and I’m friendly with her to this day. And Diane and I remain very close. Mia I had a bad time with but I had some very nice times with her, too.’ Does he speak to her now? ‘No, I don’t, because it ended too sourly. But I thought she was beautiful and a good actress and in many ways a good person, too. In other ways I had bitter disagreements with her. So, yes, I have had some good relationships in my life but I always thought that when I finally became what I always wanted to be, which is attractive to women, it was too late.’ He laughs a laugh that turns into a cough. ‘It was only after I was married, happily married and devoted to Soon-Yi, and older, in my sixties, only then did I sense that when I met beautiful women I could, you know, think, “Gee, I could really have a chance with this woman. I could really have an affair with her or go to bed with her.” And I never had that feeling before. It’s when you’re off the market, I guess.’
I’m sure it is, but could it also possibly be because he is a powerful figure in the film world? As Henry Kissinger said, power is the great aphrodisiac. ‘Yes, it’s possible that all that melds together. I’m a film director and there might be a reason to cultivate a relationship with me because they will get something out of it. But really, you know, I have had a below average record with women.’
A sense of humour, of course, is also a great aphrodisiac. Is there anyone he hasn’t been able to win over, eventually, with his relentless joking and banter? ‘Yes, the American people.’ And on a one-to-one basis? ‘I think when people meet me and talk to me they find me a reasonable person. Not a nasty egomaniac. Interesting on arts and sports and on the good side politically – liberal, you know. I don’t think I put people off one-to-one, just on a mass scale.’
Some who have worked with Woody Allen might disagree with his analysis. ‘Manipulative’ and ‘self-centred’ are two descriptions that have cropped up when his former colleagues have been asked to describe him. ‘The last person to accept blame’ is another. And, though he has seemed cheerful and engaged enough in this interview, the words which are most often used about him are: reclusive, melancholy, and detached. For his part, he considers himself to be drab and once said he felt sorry for his analyst because, ‘Whenever I am on the couch, I bore on like an accountant.’ Self-loathing, of course, is not incompatible with self-belief and tellingly, in the biographical documentary Wild Man Blues (1997), he talked of a chronic sense of dissatisfaction with himself: ‘I don’t want to be where I am at any given moment. When I’m in New York, I want to be in Europe. When in Europe, I want to be in New York.’
He never watches his old films and claims he hasn’t read any of the 40 or so books written about him. ‘I don’t want to waste time thinking about myself,’ he says. ‘And if I watch my own movies I only see what I could have done better.’ Most directors take about four years to make a film. Allen is able to bring out one a year because, in the past at least, he has always managed to find indulgent patrons to back him – and give him complete autonomy over scripts and production. Also it only takes him between one and three months to write a script. This is followed by eight weeks of pre-production and three months’ shooting. To his regret, though, he feels he has never made a great film – by which he means a Citizen Kane, Bicycle Thieves, or Wild Strawberries – and some of his films, such as Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters, he actually hates. Has he considered taking more time over his film-making, devoting five years to one project, say, in order to make what he might consider to be a great film? ‘I don’t think I could do it because when I finish with a script, even if I’ve written it in six weeks, I think it is the best I can do. I don’t think, “If I coddle it for a year I might be able to improve it.” I think, “This is great.” I’m completely uncritical of myself as a writer. But when I translate the script to the screen my slovenliness takes over. When I see what I wind up with I think, “Where did it go wrong? I missed by 90 per cent.” It’s maybe lack of perfectionism or dedication. When it gets difficult I give up. I don’t do enough takes and I only do these long master shots all the time because I don’t have the patience for close-ups. People think it’s a deliberate style of mine, but it’s really just laziness.’
He’s praising himself obliquely again. An indolent man could not make a film a year. Nor would a lazy man be rushing round the world promoting his latest film – he has just flown in from Venice, to be out of context here in London, and is just about to fly off to Paris. He looks around the room, points at himself, raises his eyebrows and says: ‘Me?’ He grins. ‘Know something? I’m so lazy, if I get a really good idea but it has to be shot in Texas I throw the idea away – just because I live in New York!’

L.

Liza Minnelli


Of course I know her name isn’t pronounced ‘Lisa’. Everyone does. She even had a television show in the 1970s called Liza with a Z. But the moment I learnt that she gets stroppy when people anglicise (or anglicize) her name, that was it: the word-gremlin began its evil work in my brain. I’m not sure what the technical name for this condition is, but it’s that thing that makes you mention the War to Germans, or that happens when you ask a man with enormous, sticking-out ears to pass the salt and instead say, ‘Can you pass the ears, please?’
But this is yet to come. For now I’m waiting in a hotel suite – yellow silk curtains, 18th-century landscape paintings, vases of roses – a few blocks away from where Liza Minnelli lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She is only an hour late, which is pretty unstarry of her, considering. Her fiancé David Gest, a music producer who specialises in multi-star extravaganzas, has phoned, introduced himself as ‘Mr Gest’ and told me that his intended is on her way. I hear a raucous laugh – ‘Hah!’ – in the hallway and, when I open the door, I almost get flattened against a wall as Liza with a Zee barrels in and starts pacing around the room signalling for her entourage of two – there are normally half a dozen – to come in and join us. ‘Hello old boy,’ she barks at me in a mock plummy English accent. ‘I need an ashtray.’ The curtain is up. The performance has begun.
She is wearing black, from her jacket to her high-heeled boots (which make her seem taller than her 5ft 4in). Her spiky hair – ‘I call this my wet hair with toe stuck in electrical socket look, hah!’ – is very black, bottle black indeed, as are her Cleopatra eyeliner, long false eyelashes and thickly drawn-on eyebrows. The blackness of her expressive, bulging eyes, though, is all genuine 100 per cent Liza Minnelli.
She is 56 this month but, apart from a few crow’s-feet and liver spots, she doesn’t look much different from how she looked in 1972 when she first became an international superstar after winning an Oscar for her high-kicking, big-voiced performance in Cabaret. She did look rather different this time last year, though. She was in a wheelchair and, after months of binge-eating junk food, she was five stone heavier than she is now. Having survived three broken marriages, chronic drug and alcohol addiction, rehab, depression, failed comebacks and three miscarriages she had, it seemed, finally hit her lowest point. In May 2000, suffering from arthritis and pneumonia, she had cancelled 14 concert appearances. This followed two hip replacements, three bouts of knee surgery and an operation on her throat. While convalescing she had been rushed back to hospital where she was treated for a life-threatening bout of encephalitis, a viral infection carried by mosquitoes.
Today the only physical intimations of this troubled past are a slight shake in her hand, a crack in her voice and an occasional tendency to make connection jumps and lose the thread of her thoughts in conversation. She is sipping cold, sugary coffee from a giant Starbucks cup; taking agitated drags from a Marlboro Light. ‘Know something?’ she says in a muscular, chewy voice. ‘It’s my last vice.’ She holds up the cigarette, turns up one corner of her pursed mouth and raises an accusing eyebrow. ‘And it’s going within six months. I stopped smoking for a while then I thought I’d have one, then half an hour later I found myself lighting another and I thought, ‘Son of a bitch.'”
She is getting married for the fourth time on Saturday. Does her bridegroom smoke? She widens her eyes. ‘No! Heavens no!’ So that is going to be a bone of contention? ‘I have smoking areas in the house. Yes I do! Hah!’ She touches my shoulder. ‘Marriage is about compromise, honey.’ I imagine she is busy doing all those last-minute things a bride must do: making sure there will be enough vol-au-vents to go round at the reception, ordering the flowers, wondering whether the best man will be bringing his monkey to the service. It is true that Michael Jackson is best man, isn’t it? ‘Well, yes. David grew up with Michael so he knows the family really well. They are partners in business.’ And Whitney Houston will be singing as Minnelli enters the church? ‘Sure.’ Her attendants will include Petula Clarke, Gina Lollobrigida and Martine McCutcheon, but Elizabeth Taylor will be maid of honour, correct? ‘Yes. But Elizabeth can’t bend down – her back is so bad – which I why I asked the others to help.’ Am I right in thinking that since Liza Minnelli’s mother, Judy Garland, died of a drug overdose in 1969, Elizabeth Taylor has been her surrogate mother? ‘Yes. No. She is more like a sister. I met her so many years ago when she was working with my father [the Oscar-winning director Vincente Minnelli] on Father of the Bride, the first one I mean. And she was nice to me. She loved me.’ From the nursery onwards what was ordinary life for Liza Minnelli would be extraordinary to other people. The first visitor to see her, just hours after she was born, was Frank Sinatra. No‘l Coward, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe were regular guests at her parents’ house. When she was seven, Ella Fitzgerald taught her how to sing ‘Embraceable You’, when she was 11 she made her television debut with Gene Kelly. ‘Yes,’ she says, blowing out smoke. ‘But you must bear in mind that these people were just the neighbours. It was all I knew. Hollywood was much more of a community then. Everyone stuck together. It’s like our wedding. Our friends are coming, that’s all. We’re all in the same business. If you were getting married, wouldn’t you invite journalists?’
No, they’d get drunk and cause trouble. ‘Well, you know what I mean. We’re a clan.’
‘She hasn’t been put off marriage? She didn’t think she should maybe just live with him? ‘But we’ve been doing that. Hah! No, David is so…’ She trails off. ‘It’s so different this time. I really waited. A long time. And I thought I’d never get married again. And he thought he would never get married.’
As did quite a few people. Indeed there was insinuation in the American press that David Gest, who is 46 years old, has a collection of Lalique crystal and hasn’t had a girlfriend since he was 29, might not be the marrying kind. David and she became engaged three months after she appeared on a Michael Jackson special he had organised last summer. Was it love at first sight? ‘No, because we had met each other several times over the years. It was always, ‘Hello Mr Gest,’ ‘Hello Miss Minnelli.’ But for this last show Michael said, ‘I want Liza on it.’ And David was sceptical. David knows every rock and roll act in the world but he didn’t know ‘Liza with a Zee’. So he sent his conductor over and I sang for a while and afterwards I could hear the conductor on the phone to David saying, ‘Yeah, three octaves! I’m telling you, she’s got her voice back. You’ve gotta come down here and hear this.’ So he did.’
David Gest has, it seems, been a good influence on Liza Minnelli. ‘I lost all this weight because David wanted me to. But I also did it because I don’t want to take any medicine. Nothing mood-altering. I have two crushed discs and two rotated vertebrae in my neck. If I’m carrying any extra weight, it hurts. I don’t want to be in any pain. I don’t want to take painkillers. So there’s the inspiration.’
Is she following a particular diet, such as the Hunza? ‘Yeah, it’s called the Hunga Diet. H-u-n-g-a. Hunga! Hah! You get used to eating healthy. I have half a banana for breakfast. Yogurt for lunch and fish and steamed vegetables for dinner. I went to Bob Mackie who is designing my wedding gown and he said: ‘Oh Liza, you look great. Did you have a nip and a tuck? Liposuction?’ And I said, ‘No, darling. Hunga!”
She disapproves of cosmetic surgery? ‘No, I don’t disapprove of it, but it hurts! That’s why I don’t want to do it, it hurts. Some people are more sensitive than others and I get a little claustrophobic with all that stuff.’
Is there anything about herself she would change? Long pause. ‘My attitudes.’ What’s wrong with them? ‘I’m in constant change now every day because I realise I have a choice. I don’t have to be a slave to anything. I have healthy fear.’ She embarks upon a long analogy about being bumped by someone and turning round angrily to find it’s a blind man. ‘Alcoholics and those of us with compulsive-obsessive disease get bumped on the street and I’ve got to turn round and see who it is before I open my mouth because I know the guilt of what I have done will keep revolving in my head.’
Riiight. But even as a recovering compulsive obsessive, she must perhaps feel she has no choice. It is inescapable. Indeed, in her case it has been suggested that her mental and physical problems are genetic. Judy Garland was notorious for her mood swings, her nervous breakdowns, her 23 suicide attempts, her five marriages, her violent weight fluctuations and her various drug addictions. And so far Minnelli seems to have crashed through life repeating the same mistakes her mother made. ‘Honestly, it is not inevitable because of one woman,’ she says in a hazy drawl. ‘It’s inevitable because of my family history on both sides. It skips generations, but it’s there, like cancer, like any other disease, that’s just the way it is.’
So she does think it was inevitable that she would go off the rails? She puts on her serious face. ‘I don’t want to dwell on the past. I like moving forward. But… Here’s something I’ve learnt. Whenever you get two people talking about me the conversation will follow the same pattern. ‘I saw Judy Garland’s kid in an off-Broadway show, I didn’t think she was very good.’ And the other person says, ‘Of course.’ Or it might go: ‘I thought she was terrific.’ ‘Of course.’ Or another conversation: ‘Liza Minnelli is out of the business, she has adopted children, she is working with brain-injured people and she is going to college.’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Did you know Liza Minnelli just jumped out of a window and died?’ ‘But of course.’ Do you see what I’m saying?’
Of course. Whatever she does, people will say it’s inevitable? ‘Yeah, it’s as if I can’t do anything by myself.’ She lies back on the sofa. ‘Look, my momma told me: ‘Give the people what they want, then go get a hamburger.’ Or several. She mentioned her compulsive-obsessiveness, has she turned to a psychiatrist for help with it? ‘I’ve reached out for help to all sorts of people all the way down the line and never kept my mouth shut. You need to know as much as you can about your condition. It’s like you can’t expect to know how to do a Broadway show from watching it. You have to practise.’ She stands up and starts dancing. ‘You have to learn: step, shuffle, tap, shuffle, hop, hop, take it slow. You gotta rehearse.’
And life is a cabaret. Does she think she would have been a successful singer if she hadn’t been Judy Garland’s daughter, in the sense that her trials and tribulations, her traumatic childhood, gave her performances, her torch songs, an added depth and poignancy? ‘I don’t think you can communicate from the stage with people unless you can identify with them, with their suffering. You know, if I am walking down the street, spinning, saying I have to do this, I have to do that, if I just perform a citizen’s arrest and say halt and look around I will inevitably see someone with one leg. Someone suffering so much more than I am. I have high-‘N’ [neuroticism] problems.’ Meaning? ‘I was never in the gutter. Up here [she taps her head] I was, but not in reality.’
But she grew up knowing about financial problems. Judy Garland was often in debt and died owing $4 million. Liza once joked that before she could read or write she learnt how to check out of hotels without paying. True? ‘Yes, well, there’s lots of stories.’ Aren’t there just. ‘Yeah, but it’s not my problem. I know how I grew up.’ She lights another cigarette. ‘It is strange. So many times I’ve been, say, visiting my half-sister on my father’s side, in Mexico where she works with the Church, and I’ve read that I’m drunk somewhere in some club and I’ve just thought, ‘Hello?’ And I’ve just kept on doing what I was doing, washing the dishes with my sister.’
So she just shrugs it off? ‘It’s not like any of this is new to me. For anyone who was not born into this, though, it is hair-raising. I grew up with it.’ Does she think ‘normality’ only came into her life once she became famous in her own right? ‘Well, my parents were so proud of me and supportive and wonderful. When I was 16 they said you can go to New York and Momma gave me $100 and my father gave me an airline ticket and another $100 and I went to New York and I never took another cent. Never. Not one.’
On the contrary she began sending money home to help her mother out. Judy Garland only realised that her daughter had become a star when Garland invited her on stage during a concert she was giving at the London Palladium in 1964. Was that when the world first recognised Lisa Minnelli in her own right?
‘Liza. It’s Liza with a Zee.’
I must look mortified because she laughs her maniacal laugh – ‘Hah!’ – and says with a shaky, lopsided smile: ‘It’s all right honey, people get it wrong all the time.’ Realising that I am now speechless with shame at my mistake she pats my knee and grins. ‘Don’t worry about it. Really. What were we saying? Yes, the first time I was recognised as a performer in my own right wasn’t on that London stage: it was in an off-Broadway show. I won all the awards there were to win. I was 16. I earned my stripes. So by the time I went to sing with Momma in London she had no idea I’d done all this work and she was quite surprised.’
Recovering my composure slightly, I ask if her mother became competitive. ‘She had to. My mother wasn’t dumb. She was one of the smartest, funniest women I’ve ever known. But, boy, after being on stage with her when she turned from Momma into Judy it was…’ She stands up again, puts her hands on her hips. ‘Well, she sang her five songs and then she introduced me and I came on and sang a song and she applauded. Second song she was still applauding. Then when I did my third she was pacing up and down and by the fourth she had her hands on her hips and was staring at me like this.’ She scowls. ‘By the fifth she was no longer looking at me but re-doing her lipstick, and I thought, ‘Yikes!”It must have been odd for Judy Garland to recognise that her reign was nearly over, that she was being usurped by her daughter. And of course just eight years later, Minnelli realised her full potential with Cabaret. It must be strange for her being preserved on celluloid as she is in Cabaret, this wisecracking coquettish young thing, practically a baby. Does she look at herself in that film now and think, ‘If only you knew what was in store?’ ‘No, I don’t see this baby dancing around. I see a ballsy performer.’ Is she any different from that ballsy performer now?
‘I can turn into her at any minute – so watch out! It’s a stage presence. I was taught all that. What I was never taught was how to live. Momma didn’t know. She’d been working since she was 13 years old.’ Live as in ‘living in the real world’? ‘Yes. Rather than this artificial world. They [the studio, MGM] protected Momma from the time she was so young right up until she had me. They got her addicted to pills, kept her on a starvation diet, and then they kicked her out. That’s not a good thing. There is help now in studios so anyone who is flailing around just has to raise a hand.’
Liza Minnelli mothered her mother. By the age of 12 she was her mother’s nurse and dresser and was even hiring and firing staff – interviewing applicants to assess whether they could deal with her mother’s erratic behaviour and addictions, and asking the police to check their references. As children, Minnelli and her sister Lorna, the daughter of Sid Luft, Garland’s second husband, would replace their mother’s sleeping pills and refill them with sugar, in case she overdosed. By the age of 14, Liza had taken the precaution of acquiring a stomach pump.
Some childhood. ‘Look, my father did his best to give me a normal upbringing. He really did. He’d see me and say, ‘What do you want to be, Liza?’ And I’d say: ‘A Spanish dancer.’ And he would go and buy crpe paper from a drug store and wrap it round me and he would then stretch it and put safety pins in and I would have a train and ruffles and he’s say, ‘What does a Spanish dancer do?’ And I’d say, ‘Dance?’ And he’d say, ‘Then dance, Liza, dance!’ And he’d watch me for hours.’
It’s a touching story. Clearly she felt closer to her father, who died of cancer in 1986, than to her mother. What objects of his does she still keep around the house? ‘I have his viewfinder in a glass case alongside my lucky five-dollar bill – the first money I ever earned. The two things remind me of who I am.’ Liza’s father was bisexual, as was her grandfather and her first husband, Peter Allen. Indeed, on their wedding night, she caught Allen in bed with his boyfriend (‘When we got divorced he got my wardrobe, that’s all he took!’ Liza said later.) Why does she think she has always been attracted to gay men? ‘Well, who else is in the theatre? Know what I mean? Are you going to meet a lot of basketball players when you’re performing on Broadway? I think not.’ In some ways she has continued in her mother’s role as a gay icon, a ‘Friend of Dorothy’ (the name of Judy Garland’s character in The Wizard of Oz) being an early idiom. How does Liza Minnelli account for her own gay following? ‘There is a difference in the genes with gay people. I find that gay people relate to women like me because I’m sensitive like they are. I describe what they are going through.’ Perhaps so: she was an ornament of Studio 54, a true bohemian, frolicking with Andy Warhol and taking many lovers, among them Mikhail Baryshnikov and Peter Sellers. By all accounts she could be immature, petulant and shallow but her quixotic, excitable, likeable personality always seems to have compensated for her flaws. And, as she says, fame breeds insecurity, and she was born to it.
It is time for her close up now. Her make-up man goes to work. ‘This is my best side, honey,’ she tells the photographer, presenting her left profile. Endearingly, she keeps absent-mindedly bursting into song – ‘Mr Saturday Night’ – and she keeps trying out dance steps, too, seemingly oblivious to other people in the room. At one point she wanders through into another room, and I can hear her say loudly: ‘What’s that English guy’s name again?’ When she comes back out she says: ‘It’s blaady cold, don’t you think, Nigel, old boy? When you lose weight you really feel it.’ She takes a sip from my coffee cup by mistake and nearly chokes on it. ‘Ahhh, no sugar! Yuk!’
Pictures taken, she gives the photographer and his assistant a big hug each, but sensing my English terror of such tactility she slaps me on the back instead and says: ‘Ta-ta’. Her mobile rings. It is Mr Gest. She ends her conversation: ‘I love you, sweetheart.’ A minute later Mr Gest walks through the door: 5ft 9in, dimple in chin, shaped eyebrows, permatan, neat little scarf around neck and, though the room is dark, sunglasses. ‘How did it go?’ he asks. Liza links her arm through his and says: ‘He called me Lisa! Hah!’