Liza Minnelli’s gossip-filled memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, revealed the details of an illicit, drug-fueled affair with Hollywood legend Martin Scorsese.
The Cabaret star detailed how she “quickly got swept up in a passionate romance” with the Oscar-winning director during the filming of their 1977 musical drama New York, New York.
The affair “was the worst-kept secret on the set,” Minnelli, now 79, wrote in her memoir, which was released on Tuesday.
“I got lost in amour fou, the French term for a passionate relationship that becomes a self-destructive obsession,” Minnelli wrote. “The relationship becomes a powerful, hypnotic drug in every way.”
But it wasn’t just the relationship that was intoxicating; the pair soon began regularly doing cocaine both on- and off-set.
“Marty became a heavier and heavier user of cocaine,” she wrote. “It seemed that it was no longer recreational for either of us. It was day and night. On the set, in between takes, and when we went out in the evening. We were constant companions, and I was right there beside him. Line by line.”
“Marty claimed the drug helped his creative juices. Sure it did. Or is that just one more fabulous lie you tell yourself when you’re in the grip of substance use?” she added.
New York, New York flopped both critically and commercially, and racked up an additional $2 million in costs during filming. It recouped just $16.4 million on its increased budget of $9 million.
Both Scorsese, now 83, and Minnelli were married at the time—Scorsese to writer Julia Cameron, who divorced him that year, and Minnelli to Jack Haley Jr., whose father played the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz alongside her mother, Judy Garland.
“We were on a runaway train,” Minnelli wrote. “Nothing good could come of it.”
Minnelli later detailed a run-in with the Goodfellas director in Greenwich Village, in which Scorsese publicly berated her—with her husband present—because he had learned that she was having another affair with Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Minnelli recalled Scorsese screaming, “How can you do this to me?” over and over.
“Jack and I quickly walked away, trying to laugh it off. It would be impossible to forget. Marty was incensed. I’d been outed. Mikhail got caught up in a messy situation. And Jack now had a good reason for us to part,” Minelli explained.
Minelli and Haley Jr. divorced two years later, in 1979.
Soon after the film wrapped, Minnelli demanded that Scorsese direct her new Broadway musical, The Act. She quickly realized, however, that she had made a mistake.
“He was in over his head. Our out-of-town reviews were scathing,” Minnelli wrote.
Minnelli knew she had to can her lover. “I did what had to be done. It damn near killed me and broke my heart,” she wrote.
Minnelli discovered that Scorsese had been thoroughly “exhausted,” and a “steady diet of hostility and substances certainly wasn’t helping matters.”
“As it turns out, his life was in jeopardy, and he is now able to admit that he ended up in the hospital cheating death,” she continued. “He kicked drugs and booze out of his life and became one of America’s most beloved filmmakers.”
Nearly 40 years later, Minnelli bumped into the director backstage at the Academy Awards, but revealed that no love had been lost.
“Not all of the bad feelings have healed,” she wrote. “Years later, I saw Marty at the Oscars ceremony in 2014 and walked up to say hello. Unfortunately, he turned away from me. Very sad.”
