In the opening moments of Bruce David Klein‘s “Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story,” Liza Minnelli, all in black, sits in a chair, facing the camera. There’s a lot of bustle around her as the shot is prepared, and Liza instructs the cameraman where to place the light and also where he should put his camera. She’s quite bossy, but the way she does it is charming and chaotic, inclusive even, and she reminds everyone, with a raucous laugh, that yes, she is her mother’s daughter, but don’t forget she is her father’s daughter too (her father being, of course, the great American film director Vincente Minnelli). Put the camera a little higher, darling.
So much information is provided in this one-minute sequence, and it’s a great place to start. Liza Minnelli has been in front of the cameras since the moment she was born (literally), and so she knows what’s best in terms of her angles/light, but what you also see is her collaborative humorous spirit. She loops the team into her world. They’re all doing this thing together. The documentary takes great pains to convey Liza’s gift for friendship, and how crucial this was to her rise.
Because, let’s face it, Liza Minnelli did not have an easy time trying to distinguish herself as a performer. Her mother was Judy Garland, for God’s sake. How could she even begin to step out from behind that massive shadow? How could she ever compete? One of the ways Minnelli did this was by cultivating mentors, people who helped her shape her identity as a performer. These people became her friends, sometimes became her husbands, always remained devoted to her (and she to them). Minnelli was smart. She sought out people like Bob Fosse, Fred Ebb, Kay Thompson, Halston, Charles Aznavour … each one crucial to her development.
Klein gathered together a murderer’s row of interview subjects, most of whom are friends with Liza Minnelli: Ben Vereen, Chita Rivera, Mia Farrow, George Hamilton, Jim Caruso, Joel Grey, composer John Kander. Michael Feinstein, a lifelong friend of Minnelli, isn’t “interviewed” so much as he acts as a narrator in interview form. He contextualizes her for us, providing the story behind the story and the emotional background of what was going on in any given well-publicized event. Feinstein not only has Minnelli’s entire life in his head, but he understands the context and can explain the importance of a forgotten figure like Kay Thompson, placing her for us in the continuum. It’s a detailed, intricate cultural history lesson.
One interview subject is a psychoanalyst, who talks in general terms about the anxieties of fame and addiction, etc., but she didn’t say anything that wasn’t said more eloquently elsewhere, by Vereen or Feinstein or Farrow. Her presence feels random and tacked on. For the most part, the people talking have been friends with Minnelli, in some cases for seventy years.
“Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” has an affectionate tone and a lightness of style, which seems appropriate to the subject, even with its heavy passages about drugs/miscarriages/burnout. Mia Farrow marvels that after all the men, and all the addiction problems, Liza has remained such a pure person, not at all “jaded”. This may very well be Minnelli’s superpower.
The film is broken up into chapters, with each chapter heading a quotation—from Liza, from Fosse, from Halston, etc. The quotes reveal their relevance in the chapter that follows. One chapter is called “Not everything has to be the national anthem”, and the “reveal” of who said it, and why, is so funny I laughed out loud. There are chapters on her relationships, on fashion, on dance, on friendships, on the collaborations with Kander and Ebb. The documentary is not just a walk through the events of her life in chronological time. It’s organized.
Liza herself is interviewed, and she’s transparent even in her lack of transparency, which might be difficult to grasp. At one point, she says nobody was doing drugs at Studio 54, an incredible statement. But then she talks so openly about her struggles with addiction (and she did so from the start). She jokes that she was “raised by MGM”, and MGM made you put a happy face on everything, even love affairs ending, even miscarriages, even the pain of her mother’s death.
“She is most comfortable on stage,” says Feinstein. “She feels safe there.”
This might have been an abstract platitude had I not actually seen Minnelli in action. I loved Liza in “Cabaret”, in “New York New York”, I appreciated her talent since I was a kid. But I didn’t truly “get it” until I saw her live in Las Vegas. I will never forget that night, and her, all spangly and glimmering, reaching her arms out to the audience as if she wanted to scoop us all up. The overwhelming memory I have is how happy she was to be up there, how much she wanted to connect: the songs were not just vehicles to express herself but a way to be with us there at that moment in time. I have never seen anything like it. Meryl Streep has talked about seeing Minnelli in concert back in 1974, and how it was a defining moment for Streep.
History can be lost. The algorithm swallows up the continuum. We forget where we came from. One of the many reasons I value my friend Mitchell is I can ask, out of the blue, “Can you tell me the importance of Dinah Shore?” and he will instantly start talking about not just her career but what the career meant. Mitchell is a container of cultural history, but perhaps the better image is he carries a torch, lighting up the things of value in danger of being forgotten. Gay men are often torch-bearers for cultural history of this kind: they remember, they hold things up, they save things for safe-keeping. And so someone like Michael Feinstein can sit us down, point his torch at Kay Thompson and say, “She was extraordinary. Let me tell you all about her.”
And so “Liza,” a tribute to someone still alive, is gentle in its intentions, but the overall effect is meaningful. A torch is being held up, lighting the way through decades past, and then passed on to the next person. History doesn’t have to be lost. Pass it on.