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Her current romance is with Actor Desi Arnaz Jr., the son of Lucille Ball, a handsome, younger version of his father. She professes not to be concerned about the fact that Desi, 19, is six years her junior. Desi is really much older than the calendar shows, she maintains. "Desi understands the need for calmness the way I do. He has a steadiness that's very important to me. I hate abrupt changes of emotion, and I can't live in that kind of atmosphere." There are no immediate plans for marriage, but both wear wedding bands to symbolize, in Liza's words, their "bond of union and understanding."
Selective Blotter. Each of the men to whom she has been attached has had some virtue that attracted her. like characters in a morality play. With Desi it is steadiness; with Allen it was joie de vivre; with Kramer it was a kind of simplicity. "She has the ability to totally believe in a situation at any given time, which is what Judy had too," says Allen. "She's incredibly smart and intuitive, but she never intellectualizes anything. She'll push down her natural intellect to work with her emotions every time."
Other children had something solid they could cling to. Liza had no permanent home and nothing she could hang on to. She depended on love —often nothing more complicated than the love an audience shows for a performer. Describing the early days of their marriage, Allen remembers that "she was always jumping on people's laps and throwing her arms around their necks. People wanted to take care of her, and they did." Adds a friend: "She's the kind of girl you either want to take in your arms or put in your pocket. She's a blotter, but a selective blotter. She has good taste and uses the right people." Like Ariel, Shakespeare's creature of the air, she takes any shape, puts on any mood. "I come," says Ariel—and might say Liza—"to answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the curl'd clouds."
She is a mixture of calm and frenzy, toughness and vulnerability. At all costs she avoids scenes, anything that looks like aggravation, and she believes the same positive philosophy she preaches to everyone else. Her early life has not left her unscarred. She chain-smokes and bites her nails to the quick. She cannot—she will not —be alone. Much of her energy seems to come from nervous tension. "Liza's philosophy is to be a moving target," says Peter Allen. "But if you keep moving, things still continue to pile up. It's just more pleasant and so much easier to run."
Underneath everything, however, Liza is one of nature's survivors. When she feels that she may be losing control, she simply wafts. Wafts? "That's when you pretend you're not really you," she says. "You're like a cork bobbing on the ocean. No matter how rough the water is, the cork stays afloat. Nothing can happen to it."