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Liza Minnelli has opened up about the events that led to her first seeking professional help for addiction issues in 1984.
“In Manhattan, I had favorite bars where bartenders were happy to serve me any hour I showed up. I had boxes of pills and bottles of booze stashed away in my co-op apartment. With no one watching, I self-medicated myself to foggy perfection, to a place where I felt nothing or no one could hurt me,” the iconic performer, 80, wrote via Instagram on Tuesday, August 18.
Her post, accompanied by a photo of herself looking drawn and sweaty on a couch at the time, further reflected on her return from New York City to Los Angeles after finding fame. “Now, in California, I got lost in the same fog. It was the same old bulls***, this time with more sunshine. That’s one of the reasons I checked into rehab as quickly as I did. I was out of options,” she confessed.
The Los Angeles-born Cabaret star, who is the daughter of Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, recounted her experiences after initially sharing details of the time in her March memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!. The Instagram post noted that her first rehab stay at Los Angeles’ Betty Ford Center saw her “f***king scared to death” ahead of checking into the facility.
“I thank my amazing sister [Lorna Luft] who had to buy me a hot dog to get me on board Frank Sinatra’s private jet for my first rehab visit,” Minnelli’s Instagram post continued. “Lorna, how the hell did you put up with me? My brother from another mother Michael Feinstein and his husband, Terrence Flannery, and my Dr. Lawrence D. Piro who refused to buy my Oscar worthy performances for drugs that could kill me … these four are the quartet that truly saved my life.”
Minnelli, who went to rehab multiple times over the years to treat addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs including Valium, said she hit rock bottom after getting familiar with the wrong type of crowd.
“In New York, I had surrounded myself with people who, at worst, encouraged me to use drugs, or, at best, didn’t encourage me to stop,” she wrote via Instagram. “I was equally irresponsible with money. If someone admired something I had, something I wore, I simply gave it away. I may have felt guilty about the ease with which money came to me and never bothered to think about what would happen when I wasn’t touring the world, singing my songs. Not smart.”
Her final rehab stint, in 2015 at a facility in Malibu, California, is attributed as the place where she achieved long-lasting sobriety. In her memoir, she described her final stint as a wake-up call, writing that she “realized maybe my nine lives were up.”
Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! delved into Minnelli’s complicated relationship with Garland, who died in 1969 at the age of 47 from an accidental barbiturate overdose. (Barbiturates are a class of depressant drugs created from barbituric acid, per the Cleveland Clinic.)
“At 13, I was my mother’s caretaker — a nurse, doctor, pharmacologist and psychiatrist rolled into one. It was a crazy balancing act,” she wrote in her book of the “nightmare” situation. “I lost count of the times I called doctors to say she’d run out of pills. They often told me they couldn’t give her another prescription. It was too soon. I’d say: ‘I’m a kid! Please fill my mama’s prescription!’”
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357). If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
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