11 Fascinating Things We Learned From Liza Minnelli’s Stunningly Candid New Memoir

The legendary entertainer, 80, opens up about her addiction, romantic disasters and wild successes in ‘Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!’

Donna Freydkin,

AARP

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Published March 10, 2026

a collage with a vintage portrait of liza minnelli alongside the cover of her memoir

AARP (Courtesy Hachette Book Group, Getty Images)

For nearly eight decades, Liza Minnelli has been firmly in the public eye — first as the daughter of film star Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli, and later as a beloved, multitalented entertainer herself. To just scratch the surface of her résumé: She won a Tony at age 19 for her Broadway debut in Flora the Red Menace and an Oscar at 26 for her role as Sally Bowles in Cabaret; appeared in a long list of films, from Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York to the Dudley Moore comedy Arthur; toured with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.; and was introduced to a new generation of fans as the memorable recurring character Lucille 2 on the Emmy-winning sitcom Arrested Development.

But Minnelli, who turns 80 on March 12, has always drawn a curtain around her personal life — a life with more drama, arguably, than any of her films or stage productions. There were her mother’s overdoses and suicide attempts, and her own substance abuse problems, which were so severe that, among other incidents, one day in 2003 Minnelli collapsed on a New York City sidewalk while strangers stepped blithely around her.

Minnelli describes all of the above in her new memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, finally offering the public a look into her usually fiercely protected private world. “This book is going to unlock secrets that I never expected to share,” she writes.

Her memoir is cowritten by her lifelong friend and collaborator, Michael Feinstein, with writers Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans. What emerges is a portrait of almost jaw-dropping candor. It depicts a woman shaped by joy and catastrophe in nearly equal measure who managed her mother’s medications as a child, managed her own addiction as an adult and still managed, somehow, to put on the show — and all without ever throwing herself a pity party.

Here are 11 surprising things we learned from Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!

1. Her name was chosen with a marquee in mind — before she was born

Liza Minnelli was not so much born as announced. According to the memoir, late one night when Garland was heavily pregnant, she shot up in bed, woke her husband and declared, “Vincente — Liza, like the Gershwin song. Liza Minnelli! Liza Minnelli! It’ll look terrific on a movie marquee!” Vincente agreed, added “May” as a middle name to honor his own mother, and both parents promptly fell back asleep. On the day Liza arrived at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Hollywood, the photos taken of the newborn were “flashed around the world,” she writes. She had barely drawn her first breath and the publicity machine was already running.

judy garland and vincente minnelli with a young liza minnelli

A young Minnelli with her parents, Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, in 1950

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

2. As a child, she replaced her mother’s sleeping pills with aspirin to keep her alive

One of the memoir’s most quietly devastating revelations is how thoroughly Minnelli and her younger sister Lorna Luft (the now-73-year-old daughter of Garland and Garland’s third husband, Sid Luft) served as their mother’s de facto caretakers from an early age. A doctor told Minnelli that if Garland took more than two sleeping pills a day, the outcome could be fatal. So the girls devised a system: They would take their mother’s prescription bottles, empty them and refill them with aspirin. “The trick was figuring out when and how often to do this,” Minnelli writes. “It was life and death, with no time to learn on the job.” She was dealing with the pain and trauma of her mother’s hospitalizations — and managing her medications — at an age, she notes, when most kids were still riding their bikes.

3. She walked in on her first husband in bed with another man

Minnelli writes about her first marriage, to Australian singer-songwriter Peter Allen, with surprising tenderness, resisting the easy narrative of betrayal. The two married in 1967, when she was just 21, and she describes their early years in New York as joyful and electric with creativity. But Allen was struggling privately with his attraction to men at a time when openness carried enormous professional and personal risk. One afternoon, returning early from a shopping trip, Minnelli walked into their apartment and found her husband “having passionate sex. With a man. In our bed!” She writes, “My center of gravity crumbled. My mind was spinning.… It was impossible for my heart to absorb what my eyes had seen.” Their marriage ended, although their emotional bond did not.

4. She had an affair with Peter Sellers, who had anger issues

In 1973, at the height of her Cabaret fame, Minnelli met the legendary comedian Peter Sellers in London and the two began an intense romance. She describes it as consuming — “logic and caution flew out the window” — and Sellers moved into her suite at the Savoy Hotel for a week. But behind closed doors, she writes, “the crazy came out.” He lashed out and, when Minnelli asked what she had done wrong, snapped, “Shut up!” She feared he was about to get violent. Then came a dinner with friends at which Minnelli, who describes herself as a lifelong practical joker, reached behind Sellers and yanked off his hairpiece. “Boy, was I wrong” about how he’d react, she notes. He exploded with rage, and the relationship soon ended.

5. Elizabeth Taylor saved her life twice

Minnelli describes how her close friend and fellow star Elizabeth Taylor intervened in Minnelli’s addiction at two critical moments. The first came in 1984, when Minnelli was in a New York hospital after an overdose. Lorna Luft, desperate for help, called Taylor’s press agent — knowing that Taylor had just checked out of the Betty Ford Center. Taylor was able to break through Minnelli’s wall of denial on the phone: “You are in danger,” she told her friend. “You could die if you don’t take care of this now.” Minnelli credits that call with saving her life. She flew to Betty Ford on Frank Sinatra’s Learjet, stopping only on the way to the airport to demand a hot dog from a street vendor. As one does.

Years later, Taylor intervened again. When Minnelli’s addiction resurged, Taylor invited her to her Bel Air home, where an intervention had been arranged. Feinstein and Minnelli’s second ex-husband, Jack Haley Jr., were among the supporters waiting inside. Minnelli didn’t show up. Taylor called her with a stern tongue-lashing: “Liza, this disease is going to kill you if you don’t do the right thing. You’ve got to go back to rehab. Now. We all love you. Please, no more lies. You’ve done it. I’ve done it. Look in the mirror and see what we all see.” This time, Minnelli listened. Once again she flew to the addiction treatment center on Sinatra’s plane.

6. She had an affair with Martin Scorsese while both were married to other people

The making of New York, New York in 1976 and 1977 was, by Minnelli’s account, a creative and personal catastrophe. Director Scorsese threw out the approved script, improvised chaotically on set and was in the grip of serious drug use. And, Minnelli reveals, they began a love affair while she was married to Haley and he was married to writer Julia Cameron. “I’m not here to judge or apologize, because it was real and deeply compelling at the time,” she writes.

Minnelli and her third husband, artist Mark Gero, in 1982 while vacationing in Gstaad

James Andanson/Sygma/Getty Images

7. She claims she helped Michael Jackson develop his moonwalk

In one of the memoir’s more unexpected — and unverified — disclosures, Minnelli recounts how she believes she influenced the dance move that became Jackson’s signature. “I’m not beating my own drum or trying to claim any credit for his artistic genius,” she is careful to write. “Here’s how it happened: I had been performing in Brazil, and I saw dancers practicing the exaggerated slide that became part of the moonwalk. I shared it with Michael, and he loved it.”

8. At her lowest point, she collapsed unconscious on a New York City sidewalk

The memoir’s prologue contains one of its most shattering images: Minnelli, passed out cold on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan on an October day in 2003. Strangers walked over and around her. “The people stepping over me and rushing by … didn’t give a damn who I was,” she writes. She had been struggling with a relapse fueled by OxyContin abuse so severe that doctors said it had triggered encephalitis — a swelling of the brain. “Doctors said then I’d never walk or sing again,” she writes. “The press began writing my obituary.” Her assistants eventually found her, got her to her feet and brought her home.

9. Her fourth marriage was “the marriage from hell”

Minnelli opens the chapter on her 2002 marriage to entertainment promoter David Gest with characteristic bluntness: “His name was David Gest. What in God’s name was I thinking? I clearly wasn’t sober when I married this clown.” Gest, she writes, wore more makeup than she did and had lied his way into the celebrity world by claiming to have close ties to Michael Jackson and his family. He promised to relaunch Minnelli’s career and invest millions in her artistic projects; at the time, she admits, she was flat broke. He convinced guests that the wedding was also her birthday party to improve the quality of the gifts, then returned many of those gifts and pocketed the cash without telling her. Eventually they separated and sued each other. When Gest died years later, Feinstein called Minnelli, who said, “Ding dong, the witch is dead!” He replied, she writes, in a way that only her beloved friend could: “They say one should only speak good of the dead. David Gest is dead. Good!”

liza minnelli onstage with lady gaga at the academy awards in 2022

Minnelli onstage with Lady Gaga during the 94th Annual Academy Awards in 2022

Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

10. A humiliating Oscar incident finally pushed her to write this book — and she’s still not over it

Minnelli resisted writing a memoir for decades. What changed her mind, she reveals, was the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony, where she was set to copresent with Lady Gaga. Just minutes before airtime, she was told — not asked — to either sit in a wheelchair or not appear at all. Her own doctor said she was perfectly fine in her usual director’s chair. She adds that backstage, Gaga also suggested that Minnelli would be better off going home, then began quizzing Minnelli as if she had memory issues. Minnelli was, she writes, “utterly stunned.” Then, on live television, Gaga leaned over her, a gesture the world read as a touching show of support. Minnelli sees it entirely differently: “I believe she bears some responsibility for the havoc that so unnerved me minutes before we went on stage.” She has since said she believes she was sabotaged — a word Feinstein also used. “Nobody who was there has ever apologized to me for what happened that night,” she writes.

11. She never truly beat addiction, and is not pretending otherwise

In a memoir full of frank admissions, perhaps the most striking is Minnelli’s refusal to claim victory over the addiction that has defined her life. After treatment at the Betty Ford Center in 1984, she relapsed within months. She later told People magazine she had “finally” dealt with drugs, drink and her mother’s death.

“Finally?” she writes, recalling the statement. “How could I have possibly said this? I know now that I was just beginning to learn how much of an uphill climb this would continue to be.” She is equally unsentimental now. “I haven’t ‘beaten’ addiction,” she writes. “Nobody does if it’s in the blood. It can flare up without warning if you’re not vigilant. But for the first time, I’ve fought it to a draw. I’m keeping it at bay. That’s the truth. That’s the difference. One day at a time.”

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Donna Freydkin has spent 10-plus years interviewing celebrities for major publications, and has written for a variety of outlets such as USA Today, Allure, Yahoo! and CNN covering topics such as films, family and favorite meals.