Based on excerpts published in the wake of its March 10 release, Liza Minnelli’s new memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, is riddled with showbiz bombshells — from revelations about her night at the Oscars with Lady Gaga to the late Gene Hackman being “downright rude” to her on the set of Lucky Lady. But one of the more attention-grabbing aspects of the dishy text concerns an alleged entanglement between Minnelli and Killers of the Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese.
In the book, which is co-authored by Minnelli’s longtime friend and collaborator Michael Feinstein, the self-described “original nepo baby” details how she and Scorsese descended into a dangerous, drug-fueled affair after meeting on the set of the 1977 movie musical New York, New York.
“As we filmed, Marty became a heavier and heavier user of cocaine. It seemed that it was no longer recreational for either of us. It was day and night. On the set, in between takes, and when we went out in the evening,” Minnelli writes, according to Page Six.
In a voice familiar to lovers of old Hollywood, the stage, and razzle dazzle alike, the legendary performer adds, “We were constant companions and I was right there beside him. Line by line, Marty claimed the drug helped his creative juices. Sure it did. Or is that just one more fabulous lie you tell yourself when you’re in the grip of substance use?”
The affair that Minnelli describes as a case of amour fou — or obsessive, crazed passion — occurred while both she and Scorsese were married to other people. Minnelli was with her second of four husbands, Jack Haley, Jr., whose father played the Tin Man opposite the memoirist’s mother, Judy Garland, in The Wizard of Oz. And Scorsese was married to his second wife, Julia Cameron, the mother of actor Domenica Cameron-Scorsese.
It seems the realities of marriage and fame didn’t keep the director and star from airing the attachment in public, however. The book reportedly details how Scorsese once berated Minnelli during a run-in in Greenwich Village after hearing she was also having an affair with the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and how the couple showed up at the designer Halston’s Manhattan residence looking for drugs — an incident that later appeared in Andy Warhol’s published diaries.
“We were on a runaway train,” Minnelli writes, admitting that New York, New York, which ran over schedule and over budget, “did not live up to box office expectations. “Nothing good could come of it.”
At nearly 80, Minnelli has spent a lifetime in the limelight, first as the daughter of Hollywood royalty and later as a star in her own right. Her struggles with addiction — and her mother’s ultimately life-ending reliance on barbiturates — has been fodder for substantiated reports and speculation for decades. And in Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, Minnelli tackles that history head on, describing how Elizabeth Taylor helped get her to rehab in 1984 and an incident where she collapsed on Lexington Avenue after relapsing with alcohol in 2003.
But admittedly, the scenes involving Scorsese are more glamorous, perhaps because they harken back to a more freewheeling time in Hollywood, during which, rightly or wrongly, affairs and all-night benders were seen as creative outlets and treated as open secrets. Or perhaps it’s Liza’s unique way with words and attuned sense of when an audience is eager to be entertained. Her flair spectacle, and sultriness, are certainly on show when she’s dishing about the director and their indulgent affair, which she describes as “having more layers than lasagna.”
