Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we examine the celebrity couples who give us hope for our own romantic futures as we try to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
If you’re doing anything with your Wednesday other than calling in sick to work in order to make your way through Liza Minnelli’s sparkling new memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, I’m going to firmly insist that you reevaluate your choices. Given how often celebrity memoirs fail to live up to their own hype, when you find one as candid as Minnelli’s, it’s important to squeeze as much old-Hollywood gossip out of it as you can.
In Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, Minnelli spills the tea about everything from her relationship with Princess Diana (they were gal pals!), to her experience working with Gene Hackman (he was apparently rude!) and her affair with Martin Scorsese (their love “had more layers than lasagna”!). But the detail that I absolutely cannot stop thinking about is the fact that at one point in 1973, she had two different fiancés at the same time…and a husband. Queen shit!
As Minnelli tells it, when she and English actor and comedian Peter Sellers announced their engagement not long after meeting in London, she was not only still married to her first husband, Peter Allen, but also engaged to her childhood friend Desi Arnaz Jr. (who, I assume, was able to relate to Minnelli on the level of having extremely famous parents; at one point in the memoir, Minnelli charmingly refers to herself as “the original nepo baby”).
“What on earth was I thinking, holding a press conference to announce the end of one engagement and the beginning of another? With a man I had just met and barely knew?” Minnelli writes in Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!. She goes on: “Things can get pretty wild at Casa Minnelli...well, that’s life in showbiz.” Sadly, the Minnelli–Sellers union was not to last; the pair only lasted about a month before breaking up.
Does the fact that I would deem a man with a wife and two fiancées either a creep, a bigamist, or both suggest a bit of a double standard? Perhaps. But come on; we’re talking about Liza with a Z here! To quote Justin Bieber, that’s my baby! She’s iconic!
Minnelli may now be a four-time divorcée, but at almost 80 years old, she’s nowhere near giving up on love. “Ideally, I’d like to date an older elegant man who dresses beautifully and is filthy rich. Then I’d like to date a 40-year-old guy who is passionate about something. I don’t care what. Then I’d like to date an 18-year-old, who I see twice a week and whose name I don’t know,” she writes in her memoir, and honestly, I couldn’t love that for her more.
