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The closest thing she has had to a vacation in years was a fling in the international jet set a few months ago in Paris. After making Cabaret in Munich, she was taken in tow by Fashion Model Marisa Berenson, the granddaughter of the late Bernard Berenson, the ultimate aesthete. Marisa, who plays a rich Jewish girl in the picture, introduced her to the Rothschilds and their circle. "She was like Alice in Wonderland," says Fred Ebb. For the opening of Liza's show in Paris, Baron Alexis de Rede gave her a party at his home in the Hotel Lambert. "I walked up the stairs," Liza says, "and they were decked with orchids and bathed in candlelight. When I walked into the room, ten violins started to play. Everybody in the world was there —Salvador Dali with his mustache twinkling, princes and clothes designers, St. Laurent, Richard and Liz. There was nobody who was halfway. Everyone was perfecto, just swell."
Men move in and out of her life, but except for Singer-Songwriter Peter Allen, the Australian-born husband from whom she is now separated after four years of marriage, none has stayed very long. "She tends to react from one situation into another," says Allen, who remains a friend and still has visiting rights to Ocho, the shaggy mutt Liza adopted in Puerto Rico a few years ago.
After splitting with Allen about a year ago, she took up with Rex Kramer, the guitarist in her accompanying band. "Rex was exactly opposite from me," says Allen. "He was a country boy who hated the city and loved girls. Liza enjoyed herself at first. She thought she was getting back to roots, and after that she began talking about spending the rest of her life on his family's farm in Arkansas and eating black-eyed peas and grits. I knew she hadn't really gone country when she also mentioned that Ocho still ate only steak and caviar."
Terrific Pace. Unlike most of her romances, the affair with Rex ended with some unpleasantness. Rex's ex-wife is suing Liza for $500,000, charging alienation of affection. Rex, who now plays in joints in Houston, apparently saw a more unstable side of her nature than did most other people. "The pace she sets for herself is simply terrific," he says, "but she just can't slow down. She would worry about not sleeping and would start taking downers to help herself." He describes terrible tantrums, after which she would "literally rave, then collapse."
Liza angrily rebuts him point by point and now claims that she knew all along that Rex was using her. Finally, to get rid of him in Germany, where he was such a nuisance that he was barred from the set of Cabaret, she says that she and her secretary, Deanna Wenble, arranged an elaborate, melodramatic scheme to make him think she had fallen in love with a cameraman. "He said he'd leave me only if I fell in love with somebody else," she explains.