Feature

Suddenly Liza

(Photo: Courtesy of Showtime)

She recently finished filming a comic spot in the upcoming movie The Oh in Ohio, in which she wears a blonde wig and a pink poncho with glittering letters on the back that spell out MASTURBATION. “My friend Parker Posey said, ‘Do you want to do a part in this film?’ ” Minnelli explains. “I said, ‘Do you like it?’ She said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘What do I play?’ And she said, ‘A sex therapist.’ ” She declines to recap her role—“I’m too embarrassed to say it out loud,” but “I’m willing to do anything ridiculous.” (This includes, perhaps, marrying David Gest, now her fourth ex-husband, in 2002.)

Part of Minnelli’s curious lingering appeal has always come from the seeming lack of distance between her characters and herself—not a surprising confusion since, for the last 30 years, her primary role has been that of concert performer of (in great part) her familiar repertoire. In the finale of Liza With a “Z,” she performs a medley of songs from Cabaret. The audience is visibly electrified as they watch her sing the songs for which she is still known, like “Married,” “Money,” and “Maybe This Time”—“Maybe this time, I’ll be lucky / Maybe this time, he’ll stay . . .” As the young Minnelli sings, the whites of her eyes glisten preternaturally, as if dabbed with belladonna.

Fosse said, “I’ll do it, but there’s only one thing I demand: Nobody sees it till that night.”

The pathos of seeing her singing that song—knowing that, for her, the idea that “he” would “stay” was no more realistic at 26 than it would be at 56—is overwhelming. But so is the finale. As Minnelli, in tap pants, garter belt, and sequined wrapper, struts, down in one, she builds to the triumphant title song, “Cabaret,” and sings of the doomed hoyden Elsie: “The day she died the neighbors came to snicker: ‘Well that’s what comes from too much pills and liquor.’ But when I saw her laid out like a queen, she was the happiest . . . corpse . . . I’d ever seen.”

“I think my belief in the songs is what made you like them,” she says. “If I don’t believe in them, I can’t do it.”

There is not much of a line between Sally, Elsie, and Liza these days; maybe there never was. “I made my mind up, back in Chelsea: When I go, I’m goin’ like Elsie!” Minnelli roared on that May evening 34 years ago. But for now, she’s stayin’.