"Just as the MGM studio system robbed Mama of her childhood, she robbed me of mine. By 13, she was my mother's caretaker—a nurse, a doctor, pharmacologist and psychiatrist rolled into one. When her daughter was six, she shut herself in the bathroom and made the first of many suicide attempts. Minnelli soon learned to monitor her mother and hide her pill bottles when she saw darkness descending."
"In her 20s she became hooked on Valium, diet pills, cocaine and alcohol. Later, as her career faltered and her private life imploded, her sister Lorna staged an intervention and got her into the first of many rehab programmes. Beneath the classic arc of fame and success turned sour is a more unusual tale of a woman battling the trauma of her childhood and struggling to step out of the shadow of her unpredictable mother."
"I was the original nepo baby, she observes, gleefully. But if show business was in her DNA, so was addiction. She was certainly familiar with the dark side of the industry from a young age through her mother Judy Garland, who was on the MGM payroll aged 13, before shooting to fame as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz."
Liza Minnelli, daughter of director Vincente Minnelli and actress Judy Garland, inherited both talent and trauma from her family's involvement in show business. Garland's depression, drug addiction, and suicide attempts forced young Liza into a caretaker role by age 13, robbing her of childhood. At 16, Minnelli escaped to New York to pursue her own career in entertainment, achieving rapid success as a singer and actor. However, she also inherited her mother's addiction vulnerabilities, becoming dependent on Valium, diet pills, cocaine, and alcohol in her 20s. Her sister Lorna eventually staged an intervention leading to multiple rehabilitation programs. Minnelli's memoir, written with journalists Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans and based on conversations with close friend Michael Feinstein, presents a cohesive narrative exploring her battle with childhood trauma and her struggle to emerge from her mother's shadow.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]