Andrew McCarthy would like to set the record straight about the night he spent with Liza Minnelli.
According to Little House on the Prairie star Melissa Gilbert, Minnelli, 80, and the “Brat Pack” actor, 63, kissed during a night out in the 1980s. McCarthy denied the account to Page Six on Sunday. “I would love to have made out with Liza Minnelli, but we did not,” he told the site about the star, who is 17 years his senior.
The Daily Beast has reached out to a representative for Minnelli for comment.
In her 2010 memoir, Prairie Tale, Gilbert describes a star-studded evening out with her then-boyfriend, Rob Lowe, his agent, Michael Black, and McCarthy.
The Pretty in Pink star was part of the circle of teen stars who formed the “Brat Pack” in the 1980s, which included Lowe, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, and Ally Sheedy—the young actors who dominated 1980s teen and coming-of-age cinema.
Gilbert writes that the group had a swanky dinner at Spago in Beverly Hills—during which Minnelli and Michael Jackson joined their table—before heading to Sammy Davis Jr.’s L.A. mansion, and then Black’s apartment, where she claims she saw Minnelli and McCarthy share an intimate moment. McCarthy told Page Six that he remembers the night in question—just not that part.
“It was an incredible night... I should have quit show business then,” he said.
“We did not sing around the piano; mostly, we did a lot of drinking. Sammy was sober, but he was playing bartender,” he continued, insisting that despite his drunken state, he would have remembered having kissed Minnelli. McCarthy said the extent of his interaction with Minnelli was that she “gave me a ride home because I’d drunk too much.”
McCarthy recalled the evening again in 2024 on The Late Show.
“We partied on at Sammy’s house,” he told Stephen Colbert at the time. “Liza turns to me, who wasn’t drinking, also. I am a little tipsy, really drunk at this point. Liza says, ‘I’ll drive you home,’” he recalled. “Liza was driving her Rolls-Royce home. I start to feel like I’m a little queasy. I think I might throw up in Liza’s car, so I reach for the window to get the window to go down and get a little air in. The window is not going down, so I say, ‘Liza, is the window locked?’” he continued.
Minnelli told him the window was broken.
“I’m going to throw up in Liza’s lap. To distract myself, I start talking, and I start talking about mothers—my mother, a lovely woman from New Jersey. And Liza starts talking about her mother, Judy Garland from The Wizard of Oz, and everything else. She starts talking about Judy Garland, and I am sitting there and still feeling nauseous,” McCarthy added.
He started singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” he said. “Keep in mind, I’m a little drunk… Liza looks at me. We start singing together. And then suddenly I’ve got tears streaming down my face. I don’t know why. And I look at Liza, and she has tears streaming down her face. Both of us were just sobbing,” he concluded, as “The sun is coming up over Sunset Boulevard.”
Quipped Colbert, “I want to see that documentary.”
McCarthy declared, “Eventually she dropped me home,” and added that she was “the most lovely person,” but “I’ve never seen her again.”
