Setting the record straight!
In her upcoming memoir Kids, Wait Till You Hear This, Liza Minnelli reveals, per People, that she was “inexplicably ordered” to use a wheelchair at the 2022 Academy Awards.
Once on stage, the 79-year-old stumbled over her words while presenting the award for Best Picture.
“I couldn’t easily read the teleprompter above me,” she explains, adding that her co-presenter Lady Gaga, 39, “didn’t miss a beat to play the kind-hearted hero for all the world to see.”
“[Minnelli] felt so exposed and humiliated,” a source tells Closer. “Writing about [that night] in the book was important because she needed to tell her side.”
However, Minnelli’s recent revelation “upset Gaga,” says the source. “She idolizes Liza and swears she never meant to upset her.”
Minnelli’s new memoir “really only scratches the surface of what she’s suffered,” Closer’s source admits.
In it, she opens up about her mother Judy Garland’s crippling addiction and reveals she became the Wizard of Oz star’s caretaker at age 13.
“I lost count of the times I called doctors to say she’d run out of pills,” the “Cabaret” crooner writes. “I’d say: “I’m a kid! Please fill my mama’s prescription!”
Minnelli famously struggled with drugs, too, after Garland, 47, passed away in 1969 from an accidental overdose of barbiturates.
“A doctor prescribed Valium to help me relax before the funeral. It was the first time I took any such drug and I marvelled at how quickly it took the edge off,” she recalls, per The Times. “Where had it been all my life? Valium eventually triggered something dreadful in me, like a match igniting a fire.”
One she long struggled to put out.
“A one-day blessing turned into a habit, then a full-blown case of addiction,” Minnelli confesses. “It was a final gift, a genetic inheritance from Mama I could not escape.”