Posted on 10/26/2003 4:37:30 AM PST by RobFromGa
Punch drunk
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 26/10/2003)
Profile: Liza Minnelli
Until last week, even in an uncertain world, there were still a few things one remained confident we would be highly unlikely to see. Among them was the headline "Liza Gave Me Brain Damage In Drunken Beatings".
Thus, the Evening Standard in London reported the latest development in the ill-fated relationship of Liza Minnelli and David Gest. Mr Gest is now suing Liza for $10 million for repeatedly beating him up during their 16-month marriage. The claim that his brain was damaged during the marriage would be more persuasive if, before it, when it was allegedly undamaged, he hadn't chosen Michael Jackson to be his best man.
Unless, of course, Liza was already beating him up during the engagement, which would explain why, standing next to Jacko in the wedding photographs, David looks like Uday and Qusay's brother after being touched up by the Pentagon embalmers and put on display at the Baghdad morgue.
The plight of battered husbands is, of course, a serious issue, especially given the gender bias of modern society. But one can't help feeling Liza's ex is unlikely to be a useful role model in this regard. By his own description, his wife is an "overweight, raging alcoholic". An overweight, raging alcoholic with two artificial hips who's almost a decade his senior and barely over 5 ft tall. Couldn't he have run for his life? Or, come to that, strolled for his life?
As the talk-show host Jon Stewart observed, "There is no conceivable amount of money worth telling the world that you were beaten up by Liza Minnelli." But Gest contends that he is a "victim of domestic violence" and that marriage to Liza has left him with "vertigo, nausea, hypertension, scalp tenderness, insomnia, mood dysphoria, photosensitivity and phonophobia". I believe that last one means "fear of voices", which is not unreasonable given the shape his wife's was in on the Liza's Back! album he produced.
Inaugurating a new ground for divorce, David describes his wife as "unable to be effectively merchandised". Speak for yourself. For the world's media Liza-and-David is a wedding gift that keeps on giving. We have exhaustively covered the engagement, the ceremony, the honeymoon, the comeback CD, the first anniversary, the big split, and now the divorce. True, we weren't there for the consummation, but it is not entirely clear that either the bride or groom were.
I believe that I am the only Sunday Telegraph man to have met all three of Liza's previous husbands: the flamboyant gay guy who was the warm-up for her momma's nightclub act; the one whose dad played the Tin Man in The Wizard Of Oz. Anyone begin to see a pattern emerging here? Oh, well, the third one was an unGarlanded exception: a sculptor, and so unshowbizzy that when I arrived for drinks at Liza's pad before some Songwriters' Hall of Fame event I bumped into him slipping quietly out the service door. "They're all in there," he said, rolling his eyes. "Don't sit on the dog."
When David Gest, a producer of glitzy charity galas, came along, he was not exactly known as a ladies' man. To marry one gay husband is a misfortune, two looks like a pathology. Liza's grandfather, her father, and her first husband were all homosexual. Officially, Judy Garland's marriage to Vincente Minnelli was a union of Hollywood royalty: in 1946, the first person to swing by the hospital to visit the newborn Liza was Frank Sinatra; she was named after a song by her parents' pal Ira Gershwin; her godmother was Kay Thompson, who later based the Eloise books partly on the infant Liza's antics.
Sounds great. But one day Judy came back and found Minnelli in bed with another man. There followed her first suicide attempt. Liza can top that: she caught her first husband, Peter Allen, in bed with his boyfriend on their wedding night. Peter had been recommended to Judy by her fourth husband, Mark Herron. Judy in turn pressed him on Liza. Herron carried on a sexual relationship with Allen during their respective marriages to Judy and Liza. One is all for being broad-minded and tolerant about these things and Peter Allen was certainly a fetching young Aussie hunk in those days, but, how heartless does a guy have to be to screw his stepdaughter's husband?
Before his death from Aids, Peter Allen went on to make a nice living as the Liberace of the disco era. A musical about him has just opened on Broadway and what you can't help noticing about it is that, while Judy is a strong and forceful presence, the show's Liza is a cypher and you come away with the feeling that she was an afterthought in all these people's lives, who wound up getting damaged in their wake.
A decade or so back, I had enough small acquaintance with Liza to know that, somewhere underneath the self-parody, there's someone real with some (mostly squandered) talent. In private, she is shrewder and more perceptive than you would expect from someone who spent much of her adult life on the banquette at Studio 54 wedged between a lot of adoring coked-up queens.
She appeared on a television show I hosted, a tribute to George Abbott, the Broadway veteran who had directed the teenage Liza in her first starring role, in Flora the Red Menace in 1965. Today, her reputation for unreliability is such that she can't get insurance for her concerts, but, when we did that television special, she was prompt and professional and we were the ones who kept her hanging around for re-take after re-take because of some sound or lighting glitch.
She sang A Quiet Thing, a quiet song from Flora, very unLiza-like, accompanied at the piano by John Kander, the composer. Kander and Ebb wrote almost everything she is associated with - Cabaret, Maybe This Time, Liza With A Zee, New York, New York. They're hot now because of the film Chicago. The movie's been in the works for 25 years, and back then it was supposed to be Liza and Goldie Hawn starring. But, except for a brilliantly co-ordinated burst of film, television and concert work in the wake of Cabaret 30 years ago, Liza's career is as much about the projects that didn't happen.
That performance of A Quiet Thing is the last really good thing she did. On Roy Orbison's Cryin', the big melisma-crazed ballad on the Gest-midwifed Liza's Back!, her voice is shot. On the up numbers, it's hollow bombast, the showbiz equivalent of those decapitated chickens who carry on running around for five minutes. Will Friedwald, a sharp analyst of American singers, says Liza is "all energy and no style". And, when the energy's sapped by weight and booze and miscarriages and hip replacement and prescription drugs, there's not a lot left. Judy had off nights, but not off decades.
Still, she crossed a point of no return when she got mixed up with Gest and surely she must have known it. At his stag night, he's said to have appeared subdued as three Liza drag queens serenaded him with a medley of her hits, perhaps because he vaguely understood that he was making the queens redundant, completing Liza's 30-year transformation into her own drag act. The Matron of Honour was Liz Taylor and the bridesmaids included Mia Farrow, Petula Clark, Gina Lollobrigida, Chaka Khan, Esther Williams and some nine other stars in various degrees of eclipse.
Everyone who was anyone was there, no matter how long ago it was they were anyone: Donna Summer, Mickey Rooney, the Doobie Brothers, Jill St John. Even the hotter guests had been on ice for a good quarter-century. If my merchandising genius of a hubby did that to me, I'd beat him up. Whether or not Liza can recover her voice, it is doubtful whether she'll ever recover from the 16-month stewardship of her tacky Svengali, who moved her firmly from the sympathetically self-destructive category to camp joke. History repeats itself: if Judy's decline was the tragedy, Liza's is a farce. Which, when you think about it, is even sadder.
OUCH!! True, but exceedingly harsh...LOL!!
Love, American-style...MUD
If Liza DID beat him up, all the money in the world won't help him.
It really is too bad that Liza didn't happen upon a good agent and choreographer. She may not have been a great singer, but I think she could have fallen into the "entertainer" category. Some talent, and all that energy, combined with some good, well-designed acts could have made her a perennial at Vegas.
Have teenagers? Show them this photo and explain to them what a life of booze and pills does to you. You might want to have an old photo of Liz around when you do. (And, if you want to really shock them, have an old photo of Jacko. My kids could not believe what Michael Jackson actually looks like --- at least, before all the surgery.)
My hubby really liked, what he termed as, the Little Lord Fauntleroy collar.
You know, Steyn usually has to at least look aeound a bit to come up with a subject in need of his fabulous skewering.
Lately, OTOH, it has been a "target rich environment."
(Steyn Bump)
Marty, get a grip, would you?
Whatever happens, don't say, sing or even mention "Over the Rainbow."
Cute!
Tia
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