BONUS NUMBER 103: LIZA WITH A ZERO
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
From Variety, December 3, 2024:
“Liza Minnelli’s memoir, set for spring 2026 via Grand Central Publishing, is also in the works as a TV series. Warner Bros. TV and Magnolia Hill have partnered to option the project, Variety has learned. Minnelli is writing the book alongside her longtime friend and collaborator Michael Feinstein as well as Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans.”
Reading this, I recalled a review in Mandate written by Charles Jurrist, a regular contributor who became a good friend. I wrote about him at length in Chapter 18, Part One, which posted on April 21, 2023. I hadn’t planned to revisit his review for several reasons. For one thing, Liza’s many fans know everything about her already, and Charles’s take-down of Alan W. Petrocelli’s 1983 biography, Liza! Liza!, would displease them enormously. It might also turn away younger readers from the Minnelli cult.
The main reason for my hesitation, however, was that the review was truncated by the Mandate printers. The beginning centerfold, which should have contained several paragraphs of copy, is bare — embarrassingly naked.
This snafu occurred in the March 1983 issue of Mandate. In the May issue I ran an explanation and an apology, along with the missing text, which opens today’s post.
Was Charles too severe in his judgment of the biography? It didn’t purport, after all, to be anything other than a fan’s worshipful, heart-pounding catalogue of every Liza scrap, as well as adoring morsels from the lives of her parents, Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli.
I am fan neutral in the Garland-Minnelli world. Have they, in fact, been overshadowed by Taylor Swift? You tell me. My own scrap-gathering, after all, runs in the direction of All About Eve and other 1950s classics.
