Was Liza Minnelli’s Wedding to David Gest the Most Bananas Celebrity Nuptials of All Time?

The union of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce has me, of course, thinking about the biggest and weirdest celebrity weddings. Sure, getting hitched at Madison Square Garden in front of 1000 of your closest business associates is fun, but TNT could have gone wilder. Where were the matching thrones à la Posh and Becks? Or the bejewelled pink ball gown of Katie Price? The celebrity wedding industrial complex is not as sturdy as it once was, so perhaps there’s less need to be headline-grabbing (or you’re keeping all the details for the inevitable album and tie-in movie, as we all expect Taytay is doing.) But when I think of inexplicable and genuinely bananas celebrity weddings, I have to jazz hands with glee for the one and only Liza Minnelli.

I am studiously pro-Liza. Cabaret is one of my favourite films (I have a framed poster in my bedroom), and her performance in it is one of the greatest in cinematic history, no hyperbole. Liza with a Z is a glorious kook, a self-aware and witty diva whose ups and downs only further demonstrated her resilience. We all know the parodies and drag impersonations, but the queen herself is always in on the joke, even if she’s still a cockeyed optimist at heart. How could Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli’s kid not be a camp icon, and how could she not have at least one wedding to match it?

By 2002, Liza had been married three times. The first one, to Australian entertainer Peter Allen, ended because he was gay (like mother, like daughter.) Number two was Jack Haley Jr., the son of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. The third, sculptor Mark Gero, lasted over a decade before she charged him with abandonment. She also became engaged to Desi Arnaz Jr., but left him for Peter Sellers. In the '70s, she had an affair with Martin Scorsese, and she also dated Mikhail Baryshnikov.

And then she met David Gest, a producer and PR manager who was, well, kind of odd. He was seven years her junior and loved to talk about his celebrity friends, which included Michael Jackson. To put it bluntly, people either thought he was a fame seeker or gay or both. They had briefly met in the ‘80s, but a whirlwind romance occurred when they reunited in the 2000s. “I could see there was a little girl who needed to be loved,” he said. Ew. They were engaged within six months.

Cynicism was high, but the chance for a big blow-out celebrity wedding was too good for even hardened sceptics to resist. Or maybe they were hoping it’d be as wild as it ended up being.

The big day was March 16th, 2002. The location: the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, a pro-LGBTQ+ Protestant church renowned for its beautiful stained glass windows. The reception took place at the Regent Wall Street Hotel, part of the famous National City Bank Building, and a relatively recent addition to the location (it only operated as a hotel for a few years, shutting in 2003.) of course the original singer of “New York, New York” had to marry in the Big Apple (side note but Liza’s performance in the movie of the same name, directed by Scorsese, is stunning. She out-acts De Niro in every scene.)

The exclusive magazine rights were sold to OK!, a British magazine that had a reputation for paying big bucks for celebrity weddings. They'd paid $1 million for exclusive coverage of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas's wedding, and their rival, Hello, notoriously snuck a photographer into the event to snap some pics and put them on the cover a week early. For the Minnelli-Gest big day, they reportedly offered £500,000. Given her star power and Gest's reported schmoozing abilities, it was assumed that they'd have the starriest wedding of the century so far, although the London Evening Standard reported that the couple may have been encouraged to invite more British guests by OK! to appeal to their readers. They even speculated that their lavish payday may have been dependent on such an arrangement.

To be fair, it was a swell part of the most random celebrities you can imagine. Some of Liza's friends, like Lauren Bacall, Elizabeth Taylor, and Janet Leigh were there. Old-school golden age Hollywood figures like Franco Nero, Margaret O'Brien and Kirk Douglas were there. And then there were folks like Cy Coleman, Gene Simmons, David Hasselhoff, Graham Norton, and, uh, Donald Trump. People called it a “Gong Show celebrity mixer.” Rex Reed snidely noted the people who weren't there, like Barbra Streisand, Shirley MacLaine, and the Clintons. He also claimed that "the groom ran the show and the bride didn't know half of the guests." The New York Daily News lamented that the guests were "relics of the last century." What, they weren't impressed by the presence of Martine McCutcheon, the former Eastenders star who was inexplicably a bridesmaid? Apparently, Liza had seen her perform in a West End revival of My Fair Lady and was besotted.

Liza went to her old friend Bob Mackie for the wedding dress. Her maids of honour were Liz Taylor and Maria Berenson, the granddaughter of Schiaparelli. Other bridesmaids included McCutcheon, Mia Farrow, Mya (who had only met Liza twice before), and Gina Lollobrigida. Gest's best men were Tito and Michael Jackson, and the other Jackson brothers were groomsmen. Apparently, Gest and the Jacksons go way back. Liza walked down the aisle to "Unforgettable", sung by Natalie Cole herself.

And then there was the kiss. It was… yikes. Time Magazine said it was "the most talked-about moment of the night" and compared it to a shark devouring its prey. People wrote that the guests "couldn't stop talking about it." One guest, Donald f*cking Trump, said he'd never seen a kiss like it before. It was awkward.

That kiss was as bad for Liza as you imagine it was. In her memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, which was released earlier this year, she went into detail about the whole mess. It was like "a shark mangling a piece of meat. Ugh! I felt degraded. In manhandling me, Gest put on a limp display of masculinity and testosterone. He never kissed me like that in our private life. Nor would I let him! This was a cheap photo op and nothing more."

For the reception, where the pair cut a 14-tiered cake, the guests ate porcini-crusted beef or roast halibut. The party was one for the ages, with everyone and anyone singing: Tony Bennett, Donny Osmond, Stevie Wonder, the Doobie Brothers, Andy Williams, Mya, Gloria Gaynor, Brian May, and Topol. Nothing from Michael Jackson, who elected to leave early with his friend Liz after she experienced a bout of back pain. The Pointer Sisters were rumoured to be reuniting for a performance, but it never happened. The final guests left at 2am, with everyone receiving cookies from See's Candies (the company Lucy and Ethel go to work at in I Love Lucy) with a portrait of the happy couple iced on top.

The couple were appropriately spoiled by their friends, who had shelled out big time for gifts listed at the Bergdorf Goodman wedding registry. Because anyone could access the list, we were treated to the cavalcade of glorious tackiness that Minnelli and Gest were hoping to receive: $65 butter knives, $250 napkin rings, $4000 tureens, and a $495 soap dish.

The pair honeymooned in Thailand and London, and said they planned to adopt four children. Rumours swirled that the pair were also pitching a reality TV show of their lives. But the marriage only lasted a year. Gest accused Minnelli of being abusive, saying she hit him during drunken rages (Minnelli has long struggled with alcoholism.) Minnelli denied the claims and said Gest had only wanted her money and fame. She also said he was gay. In 2006, a judge threw out a suit filed by Gest that alleged abuse, citing a lack of triable issue of fact. The divorce was finalised in April 2007.

Minnelli has remained single since then, and mostly retreated from the public eye, with sporadic interviews here and there. David Gest went on to become a meme-esque reality TV show favourite in the UK, where he starred in both I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! and Celebrity Big Brother. He died in 2016. A year later, the Associated Press carried a report claiming that Gest had attempted to hire an assassin to kill Elton John because the singer had apparently made a crack about his sexuality at his wedding to Liza. There is nothing I can say that will help that sentence to make any sense.

When we saw guests arriving for the Swift and Kelce wedding who seemed to have no connection to the pair, many of us were baffled. Why was Nikki Glaser there when she herself admitted she’s never met Taylor? What about accused abuser Brad Pitt? Or the ICE guy? Is this just a thing celebrities do? Yeah, pretty much. Celeb weddings like this are designed to be seen at. It’s a fancier version of networking, of strengthening your brand and making yourself more well-known. Liza and David’s big day was a surreal mish-mash of talent, many of whom had the barest connections to the couple, but their names brought attention. It more than justified what OK! paid for exclusive access. And for us plebs watching from the outside, it added to the spectacle of it all. Where else would you see Mickey Rooney, Anthony Hopkins, and half the women of The View hanging out? If the ghost of Bob Fosse had turned up to snort Dexedrine off a toilet seat then teach the bridesmaids the Hot Honey Rag, it would have been one of the more expected moments of the occasion.

We don’t really get big bananas celebrity weddings like this anymore. Publications don’t have the means or audience to pay for this kind of access nowadays. Big-name celebs either keep it super-private or sell photos to Vogue to keep it classy. This sort of spectacle is nowadays reserved for royal weddings or those of oligarchs, who can pay $5 million to get Rihanna to sing. But who likes seeing billionaires be happy? I far prefer the chintzy, camp, and 40-years-too-late razzle dazzle of Liza in Bob Mackie having to figure out who the hell Mya is. If only the groom was better.