Show Business: Liza, Gasping for Breath

She sprawls—giggling and gangly—in a Waldorf-Astoria suite, looking as out of place as a cheerleader at a debutante ball. Her shaggy haircut springs out from her head. Her nails are bitten to the quick, her black boot heels are run over. She sprays words and sounds. She is having a frantic kind of fun, like a kid rolling down a hill, dizzy and excited at the same time. But who cares? Certainly not Liza Minnelli.

She has wound up a successful engagement at the Waldorf's Empire Room, a knockout, nonstop show that had everybody—including Liza—gasping for breath. She opens at Puerto Rico's El San Juan Hotel this week. She has just been nominated for an Academy Award for her first starring role in The Sterile Cuckoo. She will soon be seen in the title role in Otto Preminger's Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, in which she has to be convincing as a facially scarred girl in love. And in the talk stages, a Liza Minnelli TV special for late spring.

TIME Contributing Editor Katie Kelly reports how Liza feels about it all:

Liza folds her mouth around those sugar-lump teeth and winds up into a giggle that moves from the top of her head right straight down to her toes. "Yeah—I'm happy," she says, the big smile looped securely in place. "But then, if I'm feeling anything, I figure—WHEW! —I'm here! I exist! I am!"

This from the kid who gave her first public performance at age seven on the stage of the Palace. She remembers. "My mother called me up on the stage and I danced while she sang Swanee." There are worse ways to start. "I thought it was terrific—just terrific—to be able to kick up your legs that way. I remember hearing the waves and waves of applause washing over us. I also remember wondering whether my pants showed while I was dancing."

In the Night. It was a childhood to be reckoned with. "I think I went to 14 schools in all," says Liza, by this time lying on the floor alternately bumming cigarettes and hugging her dog, Ocho. "We started moving around a lot from one house to another. Usually we moved in the night. That was probably because Mama was so broke and maybe she owed money to landlords. Anyway, every time we moved I'd find myself in a different school. Private if we could afford it, public if we couldn't." As a result, "I hated school. It annoyed me. Oh, I went through the whole bit when I was nine—you know, wanting to be a teacher and all that. I used to line my dolls up and give lectures. Hah! But that passed."