“Cliff Huxtable — now there’s a man I can relate to. The kids played nastier tricks on me. One time Donen had someone bake a laxative into my ‘birthday brownie.’ Jeanne Coyne kept leaving notes with my secretary saying she had nothing to do with it. Suspicious.

Ah, she’s singing Dorsey. She always had exquisite taste — I’ll give her that much.”

“Wait until L.B. hears about this. When she worked for Schaefer I always said she couldn’t live with shilling unless it was for the proletariat. Underneath all those gowns Helen Rose put on her, she was always a beer-and-jeans kind of gal.”

“Oh, Lena and her liberation. This is what she used to look like before Sydney Guilaroff got to her. Fashions change. We told the starlets not to blink, and, as you can see, Lena never changed that. She was a natural.”

“Hi, I’m Liza Minnelli, and I’m here to tell you a ‘Hey Kids!’ story.

So these fabulous photos were taken in 1983 when I was performing a summer weekend stint at a Catskill Mountain Hotel with my FAVOURITE person the world, Miss Lena Horne.

You know, daddy was SUCH a fan of hers. Most of her MGM appearances were directed by him, and they used to have SO much fun together on those sets.

If you look closely enough at these pictures — can you get a closer shot? — we’re both posing for a press photographer who had just told us earlier about shooting my mom at Carnegie.

Whenever Lena was performing, it was as if it were the most important thing happening in her life. Oh, she had such POISE. It wasn’t so much the power of her performance, but the interpretation. It was always just the right tone.

Kay taught us that. My godmother Kay Thompson was such a mentor to Lena, just as she was a mentor to my mother and I.”

“When it came to the album version of the movie, things got even worse. Being a great fan of Lena’s, I had copied her phrasing, note for note, on my test record. So they took my record imitating Lena and put earphones on her so she could sing the songs copying me copying her.

But Metro soon found out that they couldn’t legally release the album with my name and image, as they called it, without my voice being part of the package. So then I used earphones to try to record my voice over her voice, which had been recorded over my voice imitating her. I did it note for note, they wiped Lena’s voice off the album, and the record was a success. That’s the way they worked in those days. And I still get goddamn royalties on the thing!”

The only non-Fred number in Ziegfeld Follies worth watching is “Love,” sung by Lena Horne, a bit that is more about Lena than the song, which is (obviously) not very well known. Horne hated the “frame” for the number, which shows two black women fighting over a man in a Caribbean bar.