Liza A Truly Terrifically Absolutely True Story: Behind the Sequins, Sweat, and Jazz Hands
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A-
The first time I saw Liza Minnelli in concert, I discovered that she had a far bigger and richer voice than television conveyed. Also, that she sweated a lot.
By the end of the concert, following one of those sky-punching, hug-the-audience, ovation-demanding encores (“Maybe This Time?” “New York, New York?”), her hair was matted to her head and streaks were running down her cheeks. Like Bruce Springsteen and Louis Armstrong, she’s one of those live performers who pour out both their hearts and their sweat glands.
Minnelli’s perspiration gets a mention in Bruce David Klein’s new documentary, Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story. (Full disclosure: I’m a volunteer programmer at the Victoria Film Festival, Feb. 4-13, where I selected the film to screen).
Minnelli’s fashion designer friend Roy Halston custom designed dresses for her, sometimes making the same dresses in different sizes to accommodate her weight fluctuations. To distract from the sweat circles under her arms, he covered her dresses with sparkling sequins.
Happily, Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story isn’t just about the sweat and the sequins, the guts and the glory. (The effusive mouthful of a title is lightly ironic, drawing from the intro to the Fred Ebb and John Kander song, “Ring Them Bells,” written for her 1972 TV special, Liza With a Z.) In keeping with its subject’s disposition, the tone is defiantly jaunty, even unexpectedly educational.
Klein’s film doesn’t gloss over the many low points: The endless comparisons to her idolized and tragic mother, Judy Garland, the failed romances, marriages, miscarriages and recurrent substance abuse and health issues, all chronicled in relentless tabloid press coverage. In one archival scene, a European journalist even asks her how she responds to critics who find her ugly? Minnelli deflects the insult: That’s not what she’s thinking about when she’s onstage, she says.
The subject here is not about how a star is born, or what she has to bear, but how her persona was formed over time. The focus is on a handful of brilliant mentors and collaborators who, recognizing Minnelli’s legacy as showbiz royalty, saw her youthful talent and hunger, and turned her quirks into assets. Collectively, they helped create an old-fashioned concert star whose throwback style coincided with the zeitgeist shift from the dressed-down 1960s to the glittery artifice of the next decade.
Klein’s film starts with present-day Minnelli, now 78, dressed in black including her cocked cap, sitting in a chair in her Los Angeles living room, a row of Andy Warhol paintings behind her. She’s getting her make-up applied, facing the camera, barking out instructions to the director. Raise the camera, bring the light directly on her! “I may be my mother’s daughter but there’s a lot of my father in me,” she says, referencing the film director Vincente Minnelli.
As her conversation progresses, punctuated with moments of raucous laughter, we dip in and out of a trove of archival clips of the past eight decades, which are shown to her on an iPad. We shift back from the past to the present, Liza in her home where her hands flutter, and she expresses anxiety, jokes and reminisces. There’ s no line here between artifice and sincerity. (In his seventies’ diaries, Andy Warhol noted that “Liza is always on. I’m always off.”)
Minnelli’s story is also told by the film’s secondary narrator, her close friend and exhaustive Liza scholar, the five-time Grammy-nominated musician and singer, Michael Feinstein, a.k.a. “the Ambassador of the Great American Songbook.” In addition, the film fans out to a chorus of a few too many talking head commentators, including Ben Vereen, Mia Farrow, and Darren Criss.
The spine of the film, though, is a tribute to Minnelli’s five major mentors and collaborators. The first was Kay Thompson, her godmother, MGM’s chief vocal arranger, singing coach and author (she wrote the famous Eloise books about a girl living in Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel).
Thompson became Minnelli’s virtual guardian directly after Garland’s funeral when Liza was 23, provided both solace and canny career advice. One of Thompson’s maxims was “Don’t go around with people you don’t like” which serves as one of the chapter headings in the film. From Thompson, says Feinstein, Minnelli forged her “askew, kooky” perspective on life, as well as a disciplined approach to craft.
Second on the list of co-creators was the superstar French singer and songwriter Charles Aznavour, himself a protégé of Edith Piaf. Aznavour, we learn, inspired Minnelli to act her performances, rather than simply singing the songs. In a 1973 archival clip of the two cuddling together, he says that he and Liza are “more than friends but less than lovers.”
Next up is the choreographer turned film director Bob Fosse, who directed her in the TV special, Liza With a Z and her breakthrough Oscar-winning role as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, who helped create her look and helped adapted his revolutionary dancing style — the tipped hat, the curved shoulders, turned-in knees, stabbing arm movements — to her body type.
It was her father, the famed MGM director of American in Paris and Gigi fame, who directed her toward the retro hair helmet haircut, following the model of 1920s stars such as Louise Brooks. The big fake eyelashes were her own idea because she said, Sally Bowles needed to feel “special.”
Mentor number four was lyricist Fred Ebb, who along with composer John Kander, wrote songs specifically for Liza, and whose work from her first starring Broadway show, 1965’s Flora the Red Menace, on the TV special, through Liza With a Z, on through Martin Scorsese’s salute to the golden age of musicals, New York, New York.
Together, they provided the core repertoire of Minnelli’s career. According to Feinstein, Ebb saw Minnelli as a kind of alter ego, shaping her to express his own ideas. And finally, we come back to Halston again, who she met through Kay Thompson. She promoted his dresses, he gave her a dash of high-fashion cachet, as well as being her partner in partying at Studio 54.
Frothy, but deceptively dense, Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story focuses on Liza’s psychology and her friendships and teachers through the 1960s and 1970s. There is a great deal left out though; for those interested, Minnelli has a memoir due out next year.
Omissions include Minnelli’s inspired turn as Lucy Two on the television series Arrested Development and the fact that she once sang backup on Alice Cooper’s Muscle of Love album, never mind her collaborations with The Pet Shop Boys.
Yes, it’s all terribly lovey-dovey. If you took a drink every time someone in the film uses the word “icon” or “iconic,” you would rapidly lapse into a coma, but the description has irrefutable merit. Trace a thread in the entertainment industry over the past century, from Clara Bow and Betty Boop to Judy Garland on to Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga, and the character known as Liza With a Z is one big stitch that holds it together.
CLICK HERE to read Bonnie Laufer’s interview with director Bruce David Klein.
Liza: A Truly Terrifically Absolutely True Story. With Liza Minnelli, Michael Feinstein, Mia Farrow, Ben Vereen and Darren Criss. At Toronto’s Hot Docs Cinema (Jan. 31, Feb.1); The Mayfair, Ottawa (Jan. 31), VIF Vancouver (Jan. 31), The Fox, Toronto (Feb. 2), Revue Cinema, Toronto (Feb. 8-11), Victoria Film Festival (Feb. 7-16).