Though she may well have been “one of the world’s most celebrated, beloved and iconic performers,” who’d have wanted Judy Garland as a mother? When not remaining in bed “for days at a time, heavily drugged and in a deep state of depression,” she was, according to her daughter Liza Minnelli, slashing her neck with a razor blade because “she loved playing the victim… Hospitals are a way of life for her.” Judy died of a (possibly accidental) drugs overdose in 1969, aged 47. At the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on the Upper East Side, her corpse was prepared for public view by the very same make-up expert who’d worked years previously on The Wizard of Oz. Twenty thousand people filed past the open coffin – more than had come to gawp at Valentino.

Her daughter writes: “At 13, I was my mother’s caretaker, nurse, doctor, pharmacologist and psychiatrist rolled into one.” From the beginning, everything was outlandish. Liza never played with ordinary children, only the kids of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and of Fred Astaire. One of their Hollywood neighbors was Lana Turner, whose daughter fatally stabbed Lana’s abusive mafioso lover. Down the street, Bing Crosby’s wife drank herself to death and two of his children committed suicide.

With her father Vincente Minnelli’s encouragement – he’d directed Meet Me in St. Louis – Liza started to perform in Off-Broadway shows with Marvin Hamlisch, even as Judy “tried everything in her power to stop me.” Far from being the dumpy waif of legend, unsteady on her pins and forgetting the lyrics, Judy, as described here, was a complete monster, beady-eyed, jealous and manipulative. As Liza, the recipient of several Tonys for musicals, mentions dryly, Judy always wanted to play the lead in a Broadway show. She never did.

When mother and daughter appeared together at the Palladium, Judy wasn’t happy about the applause Liza received, so she was to be seen freshening her lipstick “like she was putting on armor and getting ready for battle… I was invading her sacred space.” When Judy later threw a lavish first-night party for her daughter at the Waldorf Astoria, Judy sent her the entire bill afterward.

Reading Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, which is wholly admirable for its brash candor, it is clear that Judy didn’t only have a competitor or a show business rival........

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