Liza's Rehab Checkup

Thu., Mar. 20, 2003 1:15 PM PST by Joal Ryan

Liza Minnelli's lavish anniversary party may be off, but we know how the bride marked the occasion: In rehab.

The Betty Ford Clinic alum, who has battled addictions to Valium, alcohol and what she once called "party drugs," is at a Pennsylvania treatment facility for an eight-week, "self-help" program, her publicity firm has announced.

Reps and Minnelli deny she is at the five-decade-old Caron Foundation for anything other than routine sobriety maintenance. ("Every year, she does eight weeks at Caron," a rep told the New York Daily News.) Still, the timing of her current stay has eyebrows arching. March is a month of key Minnelli milestones--she turned 57 on March 12; she marked her first wedding anniversary to producer husband David Gest on Sunday.

According to the New York Post, Minnelli was due to check out last week, but opted to stay another week because, as the entertainer said, she's "learning so much about myself."

It was just weeks ago that Minnelli and Gest invited 1,200 of their closest friends to an all-star blowout in New York's Times Square to celebrate their not divorcing. Then, last Friday, the scheduled April 15 bash, to have featured Ray Charles, a 68-piece orchestra and a cast of hundreds, was nixed on account of, the couple said, the looming war with Iraq.

The postponement gave rise to whispers that Minnelli had succumbed to her demons and overdosed. In the Post, Minnelli says that's not true, and neither is a story about her and Gest splitting. Vouching for the entertainer, the Post's Cindy Adams wrote Minnelli "sounds great."

The singer with a Z's camp concurs.

"She is fine and she will continue her concert tour and all of her commitments as promised," Warren Cowen & Associates said in a statement. "She is in great condition."

As for Gest, he has described his Oscar-, Tony-, Grammy- and Emmy-winning wife as "completely fine."

To be sure, Minnelli's devotion to Caron, offering a host of so-called "life-enrichment" workshops, including "Self-Exploration with Horses" (learning one's true self through equine bonding, per its Website), is nothing new. In December 2001, she checked in to kick prescription painkillers in preparation for her wedding to Gest.

Last fall, Minnelli revealed that she intended to name her and Gest's would-be adopted child (as yet un-adopted) after a lecture hall at the center: Serena.

"The disease of alcoholism...is a legitimate disease," Minnelli told Entertainment Tonight in October. "And the Caron Foundation is where I found the help and the intelligence and the information to really understand that it is something that one inherits in many, many cases."

Minnelli's mother, show-biz legend Judy Garland, died in 1969, at age 47, of a drug problem that dated back to her days as an MGM child star.

Minnelli has credited Gest, her fourth husband, with righting her life and career after both faltered mightily, leaving her near death, from viral encephalitis, in 2000.

But, of late, the road's been rocky for the couple. They're embroiled in a batch of lawsuits, including complaints and cross-complaints over their aborted VH1 reality series, and one, filed this week by a Queens contractor, over allegedly unpaid home repairs.