Lady Gaga and David Gest are amongst those who obtain relentless dressings-down in this extremely candid memoir
Liza Minnelli’s papa, the movie director Vincente Minnelli, used to joke that his daughter’s profession in movie industry was foreordained. She was certainly acquainted with the dark side of the market from a young age via her mother Judy Garland, that was on the MGM payroll aged 13, prior to firing to popularity as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Garland was notoriously depressive and addicted to prescription alcohol and drugs. When her child was 6, she shut herself in the shower room and made the very first of many self-destruction efforts. When she saw darkness descending, Minnelli quickly found out to monitor her mommy and hide her pill containers. By 13, she was “my mother’s caretaker– a registered nurse, a pharmacologist, medical professional and psychoanalyst rolled right into one … Just as the MGM studio system robbed Mama of her childhood years, she robbed me of mine.”
In her memoir, Minnelli– who turns 80 this month– states how she broke free from her inefficient family at 16 and relocated to New York to make it as a singer and actor. Little surprise, provided her parentage, that her ascent was speedy. “I was the initial nepo child,” she observes, gleefully. Yet if show business was in her DNA, so was addiction. In her 20s she became connected on Valium, diet regimen tablets, drug and alcohol. Later on, as her career faltered and her exclusive life imploded, her sibling Lorna presented an intervention and got her into the first of several rehab programs.
Source: The Guardian