Liza Minnelli talks steamy extramarital affairs with Martin Scorsese and Peter Sellers in bombshell tell-all

Liza Minnelli is blowing the lid off her wild and varied love life in her upcoming bombshell memoir Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!.

During her first marriage, which was to the gay Australian singer Peter Allen, she became involved with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's son Desi Arnaz Jr.

Their romance blossomed to the point of an engagement, only for her to then also become engaged to the by then thrice-married comedy legend Peter Sellers, all while she was still legally married to Allen.

Her second husband was Jack Haley Jr. - the son of the man who had played the Tin Man alongside her mother Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz - and during that marriage she conducted a tempestuous affair with Martin Scorsese.

She also discusses her third and fourth marriages - to sculptor Mark Gero and showbiz 'wheeler-dealer' David Gest - in excerpts of the book in People.

Out March 10, the memoir includes a passage in which she recalls that one day during her marriage to Allen she 'returned early from an indulgent shopping spree, I walked into our apartment and found Peter having passionate sex. With a man. In our bed!'

She added: 'As the other gentleman quickly dressed and disappeared, I felt fragile and afraid. Too emotionally frozen to vent my anger and pain. Then, Peter walked up to me and held me tightly. We both began crying. Racking sobs. He told me for the first time: “Liza, I love you more than anyone in the world...and I’m gay.”

Allen, she shared, 'apologized over and over, telling me that, alongside our active and very fulfilling sexual life, he was also attracted to men.'

Minnelli embarked on her marriage to Allen in 1967, and in spite of their divorce remained friends with him until he succumbed to AIDS in 1992. 

While she and Allen were still legally husband and wife, she struck up a romance with Arnaz, whom she was able to relate to because of their common upbringing as 'nepo babies' who 'could look at life and help each other through the tough spots.' 

They became engaged in 1973 and he accompanied her to that year's Oscars, where she won best actress for Cabaret, prompting her director father Vincente Minnelli to scream with joy so loudly in her ear that he gave her tinnitus.

Later that year, Minnelli took her Emmy-winning concert Liza with a Z to the London Palladium, which she had played with Garland a decade earlier.

Sitting in the front row was Peter Sellers - already a comic icon from pictures like Dr. Strangelove and The Pink Panther - and their romance began that night.

The relationship fizzled after five weeks, but not before a blink-and-miss-it-engagement, which overlapped with her engagement to Arnaz and marriage to Allen.

In 1974 she went down the aisle with her second husband Jack Haley Jr., wearing a yellow Halston suit as well as set of ruby slippers in an idiosyncratic nod to the fact his father and her mother had co-starred in The Wizard of Oz.

While married to Haley, she took up with Scorsese, who directed her alongside Robert Den Niro in the 1977 movie New York, New York, a cult classic with a title song by Kander & Ebb that has emerged as an unofficial anthem for the city.

The following year Scorsese directed Minnelli again in the Broadway musical The Act, her performance in which became an inspiration to the young Meryl Streep. 

'Truth be told, our love affair had more layers than a lasagna. We were both Italian. Passionate. Intense. Committed to our craft,' Minnelli observed in the book.

'We both had volcanic tempers. He was a diabolically handsome man who shared my love for film. I was a director’s daughter,' she said, noting also that Scorsese was a devoted admirer of her father's work.

Their romance apparently ended on hostile enough terms that decades later, he 'turned away from me' when she tried to say hello to him at the 2014 Oscars. 

Her love life became what her friend Andy Warhol described as 'complicated' in his diaries, in which he claimed her affair with Scorsese coincided with a dalliance with the world-famous ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Minnelli confirmed the longstanding rumors of her frolic with Baryshnikov last year, without mentioning whether she was with Scorsese at the same time.

'Sexy, sexy, sexy! Yes, he was…and yes, we did. If I told you it was on a street in New York, would you believe it? If you see Mikhail, blow him…a kiss from me,' she told W.

The 1970s also saw her plunge into a 'haze of substances,' she recalled in the book. 'Benzodiazepines. Barbiturates. Amphetamines. Alcohol. Cocaine.'

After a fling with Pippin star Ben Vereen, she began her third and longest-lasting marriage to sculptor Mark Gero, which lasted from 1979 to 1992.

She repeatedly tried to have children, telling one interviewer: 'I desperately want a family,' but suffered three miscarriages and ultimately never became a mother.

In the memoir, she shatteringly looked back on the experience of delivering a stillborn baby at five months pregnant during her marriage to Gero.

'I prayed every day that our child would survive, but it was not to be. I was rushed to a hospital in Reno, Nevada, where I went through the wrenching experience of a stillbirth,' she revealed. 'To this day, I can’t talk about these events without sadness and anxiety. The inability to become a mother is a tragedy I will never get over.'

In 2002 came her final marriage, to Michael Jackson's childhood friend David Gest, a bizarre spectacle that turned instantly into a media circus.

'I clearly wasn’t sober when I married this clown. Gest was a fast-talking, wheeler-dealer promoter who wore more makeup than I did. Boy, did he have a line: “Liza, you deserve to be the biggest star in the world,"' she dished in the book.

'Fast-forward to our $3.2 million wedding extravaganza on March 16, 2002. Michael Jackson was David’s best man. Elizabeth Taylor was my matron of honor. Politicians, movie stars, rock stars — you name it. Also highway robbery.'

She elaborated: 'I found out that the freebies Gest couldn’t wrangle from the hotel and celebrities, he charged to American Express. My American Express card!'

During their marriage, Minnelli accused Gest of controlling 'everything I ate, from morning until night. He controlled the people I saw and spoke to on the phone. He screened my calls. In truth, I was his prisoner.'

Their union dissolved into a rancorous and protracted divorce, in which he sued her for $10 million alleging spousal abuse but had his case dismissed. 

Minnelli recently reconnected with Desi Arnaz Jr., thanks to the process of putting together her memoir with her close friend, song-and-dance man Michael Feinstein. 

'While writing this book, Michael helped me drum up the courage to call Desi for the first time in years,' she has now shared. 'I started to apologize for the pain I had caused him so long ago. But Desi stopped me. “Liza,” he said, “all I remember is the love. Please let everything else go. I have.” Talk about a gentleman.' 

Although she has never remarried since her split from Gest, she has offered a sly reflection on the sort of love life she hopes to lead now.

'Ideally, I’d like to date an older elegant man who dresses beautifully and is filthy rich,' she said in the book. 'Then I’d like to date a 40-year-old guy who is passionate about something. I don’t care what. Then I’d like to date an 18-year-old, who I see twice a week and whose name I don’t know.'