Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (47 page)

Maybe the age difference between us helped us avoid some of the pitfalls of sibling rivalry. I was fiercely, painfully jealous of Joey from the day Mama brought him home from the hospital. Two years younger than I am, Joe immediately became a source of competition and displacement in my young life. Liza, on the other hand, seemed light-years away in my childhood. With seven years between us, she was in junior high by the time I entered kindergarten, and by the time I started junior high school, she’d been out on her own for more than two years.

It would be true to say that although I loved Liza as a little girl, I didn’t really know her. Joe and I lived in a world separate from our older sibling’s. We were being put to bed in the nursery while she was off at the movies with her friends. It’s the same now with my two children, who are also seven years apart. Jesse loves his little sister, but at fourteen he has nothing in common with her. He’s playing Nintendo while Vanessa dresses her Barbie dolls. When people ask me about my memories of my sister when we were kids, I have a hard time thinking of any. I have a thousand memories of Joe as a child, but few of Liza. It wasn’t until we grew up that we really got to know each other, and when we did, we became true friends.

Over the years our friendship continued, but in the early eighties our lives began to take different paths, in part because of Liza’s inability to have a child. She desperately wanted a baby of her own, and although she never said so, Jesse’s birth—and later Vanessa’s—must have been deeply painful for her. Ironically, the stupendous professional success that made her a world-class celebrity also complicated her life tremendously. Wealth and fame are glamorous, seductive, but they don’t make life simpler. On the contrary. My mother’s life had been destroyed by the Garland legend. My mother had too much adoration and too little privacy. As a child she inhabited a make-believe world at MGM; as an adult she became trapped by the celluloid image of that same child. Once she became a star, she lost the luxury of making a mistake the way private citizens do.

Liza inherited some of the same problems. As a child her father took her to MGM with him when he was filming. On Vincente’s sets, Liza was the little princess in a fairy-tale kingdom. Vincente even had costumes made for her by Irene Sharaff and the cream of Hollywood costume designers. My father was a businessman at heart, but Liza’s father was an artist. In a sense, Liza also grew up in a movie studio. I didn’t envy Liza’s celebrity; after years of watching the toll fame took on my mother, I had no desire to repeat the pattern. Living in the constant glare of the spotlight, Liza had pressures on her that I never experienced.

While I was busy cleaning up my act and getting my personal life in order, Liza’s life had been falling apart. She and second husband, Jack Haley, hadn’t lived together since Liza came back from Europe to do
The Act,
shortly after my wedding to Jake. Legally they remained married, but they lived on different coasts and were deeply estranged.

I sometimes wondered if Liza would ever find happiness again, the way she’d once found it with Peter Allen. On some level I don’t think Liza ever got over Peter. She loved him so much, and when
their marriage fell apart, it almost destroyed my sister in the process.

When Liza and Peter married, she had no more idea that her husband was gay than our mother had when she married Mark Herron. When the truth finally came out, Liza was devastated. I vividly remember the day it happened: I was still living in West Los Angeles with Dad and Patti and Joe at the time. One evening Liza showed up unexpectedly at our front door, sobbing and distraught. When Dad asked her what was the matter, she cried out, “Oh, Papa Sid!” and threw herself into my father’s arms. As I sat quietly nearby, Liza sobbed out the heartbreaking news about Peter. Her marriage was over, she told us, because Peter was in love with a man. She simply couldn’t comprehend it. None of it made sense to her. It didn’t make sense to any of us.

Eventually, Peter and Liza became friends again, and in their own way, they loved each other until the day he died. When Peter became so ill with AIDS near the end of his life, Liza helped take care of him. In a sense, Peter really was Liza’s true love, and I am saddened by the thought of what might have been in my sister’s life.

During the Studio 54 years, after Liza separated from Jack Haley, she tried once again to find happiness in a relationship. She became publicly involved with Mark Gero, the assistant stage manager for
The Act.
Physically and psychologically separated from Jack, in Liza’s mind the marriage was already over. Jack felt angry and humiliated by the rumors and the pictures of Liza and Mark in the tabloids, so he had filed for divorce, saying he “wasn’t going to be made a fool of by Liza.” By the time her divorce from Jack became final, Liza was already living with Mark, and eventually they got married.

What a wedding it was. Liza’s friend Halston designed what had to be the ugliest dresses I’ve ever seen for me and Liza to wear—mine went straight from my closet to the bin at the
Salvation Army. Liza wore a long pastel thing—peach, I think. For me, Halston designed a truly ugly, old-lady thing in lavender chiffon. I’ve always said that dress was his way of letting me know that he really couldn’t stand me. But what could I say at the time? When Halston designs you a dress, you can’t very well refuse to wear it.

The wedding ceremony was held at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Park Avenue, in Manhattan. The place was a cavern; it was so empty it echoed. Only a few people were there, family and a couple of Liza’s closest friends. Her father attended, and Vincente’s lady friend Lee Anderson (later his wife) came with him. Jake and I were there, and Halston, and Steve Rubell. And that was pretty much it, besides Liza and Mark, of course. I kept wondering why they had chosen such a big church for such a small wedding.

Afterward we went to Halston’s house, where he gave her a big reception, and then on to Studio 54 to finish the evening. The comic point came when Liza threw the bouquet. Lee really wanted Vincente to marry her, and she was by-God determined to catch that bouquet. The minute Liza let go of it in the crowd of women at the reception, Lee, a tiny little woman not much bigger than my mom, suddenly turned into a Green Bay Packer. She went flying through the crowd and beat all comers to catch those flowers. It was hilarious, but I guess it worked, because Vincente did marry her. Lee loved Vincente with all her heart, and all these years after his death, still does.

I wasn’t exactly thrilled about Liza’s choice of husbands the third time around. I didn’t like Mark; however much he cared about Liza at the beginning of their relationship, it soon seemed to me that he was more interested in the money and fame than in my sister.

At the time I blamed Mark for other things, too. As a sculptor with no real demands on his time (and access to plenty of Liza’s money), Mark spent a lot of his days and nights partying. The fact
that I’d spent my life at the same party until recently somehow still managed to escape my attention. Liza tried to get his sculptures some attention in the art world, but I didn’t see anyone very interested in his work. The tension between Liza and Mark grew visible. The relationship was becoming deeply troubled; stories of their fights abounded. Sick of being “Mr. Liza,” Mark retaliated with harsh criticisms of Liza and her life.

It was also clear that Liza’s drug use was out of control, and I blamed Mark for that too. Stories were circulating about Liza’s drug problems, and hardly a day passed that someone didn’t call to tell me about this or that “incident” involving my sister. But what could I say to her? Until recently my own drug use had been so heavy that I was hardly in a position to cast the first stone at her. And although rumors reached me constantly, I had never seen any erratic behavior from Liza myself. I couldn’t very well tell her I couldn’t stand Mark; that kind of thing never goes over very well, no matter how troubled the marriage. So I kept my mouth shut, concentrated on my baby, and worried.

It wasn’t until Jesse was almost six weeks old that I came face-to-face with Liza’s unhappiness myself. Liza and Jesse were chosen to be knighted by the Knights of Malta, a charitable organization we’d been involved with for years. I had been knighted the year before, and now Jesse was also being knighted in my honor. We had a tiny tux made for Jesse that matched Jake’s, and he looked adorable.

We were all supposed to appear together at a special ceremony at a church in Manhattan. Jake and I went by Liza’s house to pick up her and Mark, but when we got there, Mark wasn’t around and Liza was in bad shape, high and out of control. I was angry with Mark for leaving, and worried about whether Liza could get through the evening in one piece. She made it through the knighting ceremony pretty well, but by the time we got to the reception at a private club, she was starting to go over the edge. She became extremely effusive, hanging all over people and inviting total
strangers back to her house, passing out her private phone number to everyone in sight. It was the same sort of thing our mother had done so many years ago, at the end of her life. I kept thinking, “Oh, God, this is really bad.” I followed her around all evening, “uninviting” people and trying to retrieve her phone number by saying, “Oh, no, that’s not her number. She got it mixed up with another one.” It was the first time I’d been with Liza when she was really stoned and I was completely sober. It was sad and frightening to watch her.

By midnight I was exhausted and well ready to go home to my baby, but when I told Liza it was time to leave, she said, “No, I can’t go home. I don’t want to be alone.” There was panic all over her face. I didn’t want to leave her like that, so I told her she could come home with me and Jake to spend the night.

“You can sleep on the nanny’s cot, in Jesse’s room.” Liza agreed, but when we got back to my house, she was still bouncing off the walls, unable to sleep and afraid to be alone. I kept saying, “Liza, I have to go to sleep, and so do you. You have a show to do tomorrow.” After a while she went into Jesse’s room and started talking to him, and I drifted off to sleep in the room next door. Two or three hours later I woke up to the sound of the television set. I went in the living room, and there was Liza, curled up in front of the television, sound asleep. It was three
A.M.
I put a blanket over her, made sure the shades and drapes were pulled tight so the dawn wouldn’t wake her, and went back to bed. It was so sad—my sister, the big celebrity, scared and lonely there in front of the TV. It was Mama all over again. When Jesse woke up hungry at seven
A.M.,
I took him into the bedroom to nurse so he wouldn’t wake Liza.

At nine
A.M.
the phone rang, and all hell broke loose. It was Liza’s secretary, Roni, saying they couldn’t find Liza, that she hadn’t come home. I told Roni that Liza was with me, but a second later Mark called to say, “Where the hell is she?” I put Liza on the phone, and she and Mark started screaming at each other. This was
the first time I’d witnessed one of their fights. Clearly, Liza’s marriage was in trouble.

After that it became a regular pattern. Liza would show up at our house late at night, after her performance at the Broadway show
The Rink
with Chita Rivera, and stay over. At first I would ask her what was wrong, but all she would ever say was, “I just don’t want to be alone.” It was clear she didn’t want to go home to Mark, either. After a while I quit asking. I would make up a bed for her on the couch, and she would settle down with the television on. Like my mom, Liza couldn’t sleep without a radio or TV on. Most of the time she was high when she arrived, so she’d take two or three pills, presumably sedatives, and eventually she’d fall asleep with the TV on. In the morning she’d gather her things and take a cab to her apartment. She never talked about what was wrong, but she was painfully unhappy. It made me so sad to see her like that.

Life was strange; all those years ago Joey and I had taken refuge with her and Peter at their apartment in New York when our mother was out of control, and now Liza was taking refuge with me and Jake. For the first time in our lives, I felt like the older sister instead of the other way around. On the nights she didn’t come to our house, friends told me she would sleep in her dressing room rather than go home. It was heartbreaking. Her personal unhappiness was also affecting her performance. She was going onstage with little or no sleep, constantly coming up or down from drugs, sometimes barely able to function for the performance. The other actors were running out of patience; their initial sympathy was turning into frustration and anger. This couldn’t go on.

That became clear to me one night in a Manhattan restaurant. Jake and I met Liza after her performance for a late dinner with Chita Rivera and her family and several friends. We were talking and having a good time when someone at the table said, “Did you read that funny story in the paper about spontaneous combustion?”

We started to talk about it, but Liza interrupted saying, “I can’t hear this. Stop talking about it.”

We looked at Liza, and someone said, “What is your problem?”

Liza repeated, “I can’t hear this!” I looked at Chita’s face, and she was tense with anger. Liza started to lose it; she jumped to her feet, yelling at us and crying hysterically. Everyone in the restaurant turned around and looked at her.

Carrying on at the top of her lungs, she finally ran out into the street, calling for a car. Chita’s daughter ran after her and tried to calm her down, to talk to her, but Liza just kept yelling at her. By that time everybody in the street was watching the scene, too; Liza Minnelli yelling at the top of her lungs in the middle of the street at midnight has a way of attracting attention. Finally her car came, and she got in and roared away as the other patrons watched in fascination. In the silence that followed her exit, I looked at our friends and said, “Well gee, I guess we better not talk about spontaneous combustion, huh?” Everyone broke up laughing.

Then it all came pouring out. “Do you see what we have to put up with every night?” someone said. Someone else said, “Oh, this is nothing. You should see one of her big scenes.” Finally Chita said, “Why doesn’t she just get ahold of her goddamned self,” or something to that effect. I couldn’t believe the anger at that table. Clearly, Liza’s friends were fed up. All I could think was, “What was that? What the hell was that?” None of it made sense to me. Only one thing was clear to me: Liza was in trouble. Real trouble. It was only a matter of time before it all fell apart.