‘KIDS, WAIT TILL YOU HEAR THIS!’ REVIEW: LIZA AND MAMA

On the night before her fifth birthday in March 1951, Liza Minnelli, rigged out in a Hopalong Cassidy cowboy suit and matching boots, watched “The Milton Berle Show” with her parents, the movie star Judy Garland and the director Vincente Minnelli.

When Garland began expertly mimicking the hijinks on the TV screen, little Liza, eager to join the act, clumsily attempted a back flip. The stunt went awry, and she ended up kicking her mother in the head. “Suddenly she was screaming at me. She screamed and screamed, and it seemed as if the yelling went on for hours,” the Oscar-, Tony- and Emmy-award winner Ms. Minnelli writes in her curiously titled memoir, “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!”

Once Garland calmed down, she apologized to her daughter for getting angry and assured her she’d done nothing wrong. Nonetheless, “from that moment on, my fear of her never went away,” Ms. Minnelli writes. Each morning she would brace for a sorry mix of “chaos and anger followed by moments of love and kindness.”

There are a lot of extravagant emotions in “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This,” which also has a lot of authors—four, counting Ms. Minnelli. Second billing goes to her close friend the singer-pianist Michael Feinstein. The journalists Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans are also credited.

The brilliant, tormented Garland, who died of an accidental drug overdose in 1969, was both a horror show and a touchstone for Ms. Minnelli; her father was balm and ballast. A former costume designer, he fashioned crepe-paper outfits to help fire the imagination of his young daughter. He brought her along to the movie studio; explained cinematic terms such as “flashbacks”; and played an episode of “Tom and Jerry” for Liza before screening the “dailies,” unedited footage shot during the making of a movie. “I remember a roomful of actors muttering ‘Jesus Christ’ each time they realized they had to sit through another cartoon,” Ms. Minnelli writes.

Soon after Ms. Minnelli’s parents split in 1951—both would remarry and have more children—Garland, who had long struggled with depression and chemical dependency, attempted suicide. The barely adolescent Liza became Mama’s mama, substituting aspirin for the amphetamines and sleeping pills Garland kept on her bedside table and locating the liquor bottles she had cunningly hidden.

She became a “nurse, doctor, pharmacologist, and psychiatrist rolled into one,” Ms. Minnelli writes. “It was a crazy balancing act. I’d give Mama drugs every day so she could function. Then I’d watch to make sure she was okay. I lost count of the times I called doctors to say she’d run out of pills.” Told it was too soon for a refill, Ms. Minnelli would plead Garland’s case. “I’m a kid!” she’d say. “Please fill my mama’s prescription!”

Ms. Minnelli’s account of her complicated childhood is the strongest section of her book. Once the 16-year-old Liza declares her independence and moves to New York to make her way in show business—Mama had a thing or two to say about that—the book devolves into a standard, frequently repetitive blend of triumph and trial, albeit with a very impressive cast. Sammy Davis Jr., Princess Diana, Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson (who, Ms. Minnelli writes, learned the moonwalk thanks to her) are among those who flit through the pages.

There are the career highs, among them, her Oscar-winning turn in “Cabaret” and her TV special “Liza With a ‘Z,’” both in 1972. And there are the career lows, such as the bum treatment she says she got from Gene Hackman when the two starred in the poorly received movie “Lucky Lady” (1975). And always there is Mama, who haunted her life and haunts her memoir, though Ms. Minnelli wants it understood that she’s her own personage. “I wasn’t a fragile, vulnerable creature onstage, begging the audience to protect me and envelop me,” she writes. “I was like an athlete daring anybody to get in my way.”

When at liberty, Ms. Minnelli wasn’t sitting alone in her room. In 1966, while engaged to the first of her four husbands, Peter Allen, whom she later learned was gay, she had a passionate affair with the musician Charles Aznavour. In 1973, while married to Allen, she fell madly in love with the actor Peter Sellers and quickly became engaged to him. That was . . . awkward. Even more awkward: She was already engaged to her childhood friend Desi Arnaz Jr.

Wait, kids, there’s more. While married to husband No. 2, Jack Haley Jr., whose father starred as the Tin Man with her mother in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), Ms. Minnelli had an affair with the director Martin Scorsese while shooting his movie “New York, New York” (1977) and simultaneously a fling with the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. Mr. Scorsese, who was also married, became positively irate about Ms. Minnelli’s faithlessness. Mein Herr, she didn’t care. “I make no apologies,” she writes. “It’s who I am. I didn’t waste time. When it comes to new love and romance, I’ve always lived in the moment.”

Ms. Minnelli is similarly blunt about her inattentiveness to fiscal matters (for a time she was all but bankrupt) and about her drug use. There were years of denial, the stints in rehab and the relapses. (After one too many in a New York bar, she ended up in a drunken stupor on the sidewalk; pedestrians simply stepped over her.) Ms. Minnelli has long faced serious medical problems, including encephalitis, related to her drug use. It is harrowing but also wearisome stuff, a bit Liza with a zzzzz. The extended potted histories of the communist witch hunts and the AIDS epidemic don’t help.

Ms. Minnelli, now sober for 11 years, has few regrets and many adoring friends. Good for her. “When someone asks me about Liza,” the lyricist Fred Ebb once said, “I say that’s like asking a kid about Christmas.”

Ms. Kaufman writes on culture and arts for the Journal.

2026-03-06T15:50:45Z