The Divine Mrs. M

Exactly kitty-corner from the Beverly Hills Hotel, at a somewhat faded but once grand Italianate home, a maid answers a side door and ushers a visitor in. A few minutes later, Lee Minnelli enters her vast pale-peach living room. Petite and chic, she’s in black leggings and a black sweater under an open white cotton shirt, blond hair tucked behind her ears, flipping up slightly at the nape of her neck.

She is maddeningly secretive about her age, but an embroidered pillow on one of her many sofas gives a hint: “Screw the golden years,” it reads in delicate script.

‘It’s certainly how I feel,” she says merrily, in an upper-crust English accent.

She is the widow of director Vincente Minnelli and stepmother to Liza. As such, she is a member of Hollywood’s shrinking Old Guard, the kind of people who seem younger in photographs with each passing year. A lifelong socialite and clotheshorse, her name crops up on lists of fashionable attendees: Here she is at the Carousel of Hope ball, here she is lunching with pals at the Bistro Garden, here she is at Dominick Dunne’s latest book launch.

“I adore it,” she says of seeing her name in society columns. “It means nobody’s forgotten me!”

She leads the way, past the front door and python-skin-covered walls of the foyer, through a den decorated with Minnelli’s Best Director Oscar (for “Gigi”) and other artifacts of his brilliant career, and up a flight of stairs. Though she didn’t marry him until well after his major artistic successes--she became his fourth wife in 1980, and he died in 1986--he provided her with an identity she cherishes.

“I’m a Minnelli,” she says at one point when asked if it’s important to keep up appearances. “If I didn’t, they’d say I was slipping.”

Her appearances are kept up, thanks to closets filled with designer clothes. She’s the kind of client designers love: tiny, rich and social. She has many Adolfo suits. She loves David Hayes, too, and Galanos and Givenchy and Dior and de la Renta. She loved it when Halston got his hands on Liza, but never really bought his clothes herself.

“I like the Chanel look, too,” she says. “I use Chanel a lot.”

Minnelli’s closets, which she is happy to show, are enclosed by glass-front cabinets in the vast dressing rooms. “This is Mr. Minnelli’s suite,” she says, as she enters a large, light-filled bedroom. “That’s my darling baby,” she says, pointing to a photograph on the bed stand. “Isn’t he divine?”

In her own suite, surfaces are smothered by books, papers, catalogs and, of course,

many framed photos: “This is our very first date, upstairs at the Bistro Garden, and this is Henry and Shirlee Fonda.” While Lee is often pictured in off-shoulder gowns (“I have very beautiful shoulders,” she explains), Vincente Minnelli usually wears his trademark yellow sports coat over a black turtleneck.

Nearby, sets of false eyelashes wink in their boxes, occasioning a discussion of how to apply them correctly: “You get some glue, and you take a little stick like this, and you hold them down until they dry. Otherwise, they wave! And isn’t that awful?”

Hanging heavily in one closet is the Oscar de la Renta plaid sequin jacket she wears to parties every Christmas. “It weighs a ton!” she says. And though she knows it was “one of the most expensive things he’s ever made,” she can’t remember what it cost since “Mr. Minnelli was alive in those days, and he paid the bills.” She wears the jacket with a black Adolfo skirt, one with boxy “carwash pleats that look wonderful when you walk.”

She’s also partial to an Adolfo jacket, a navy blue one with black and red lines running through it that, she says, “Nancy Reagan almost lived in.”

Across a landing, in a book-filled study, she settles into an armchair. Over coffee and brioche, she tells what surely must be an expurgated version of her story. It is a life of calculation and romance, of not always doing the proper thing, maybe, but always doing it in the right clothes and in the right company.

Her husbands were a rich French oilman, a rich Arizona cattleman and, of course, a rich movie director.

It’s unclear exactly when she met Minnelli, only that it was at a party upstairs at Romanoff’s, hosted by Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons. (Inquiring about the slightest time frame puts her on her guard; she will not be tricked into revealing her age. “I always say a woman who will tell you her age will tell you anything!”) Best guess on when the party took place: 1958, the year Minnelli won his Oscar.

At the time, Lee Minnelli was on her moribund marriage to the cattleman; Minnelli was already divorced from Judy Garland, about to be divorced a second time, and on the verge of an ill-fated third marriage.

She was visiting a friend, and Romanoff’s was her first Hollywood party. “I just wore Chanel. You can’t go wrong with that,” says Minnelli. “Louella took a sudden liking to me (she liked everyone English), and she said, ‘You sit by me.’ Every star in the world you can imagine was there. I said, ‘Over there in the corner is a man talking, and he’s very good looking. He has big black eyes. What’s his name?’

“And she said, ‘Oh, that’s the Academy Award-winning director Vincente Minnelli.’ I said, ‘I’d like to meet him.’ She said, ‘No, he’s married!’ I thought he was so wonderful. Oh, I was just mad about him. And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I am never going to see that handsome Italian again.’ This was awful. Dreadful.”

She returned to Arizona, divorced her cattleman and moved to Los Angeles. At some point, she attended a party for an Italian movie star (best guess: 1960), hoping to see her handsome Italian. Instead, she encountered a young woman named Denise who was about to marry . . . Vincente Minnelli.

“My heart sank to my boots,” she says. “I thought, ‘Why didn’t Louella tell me he was getting a divorce?’ I would have, you know, I would have . . .”

Put out a contract on the bride-to-be?

“Of course,” she says, laughing. “Don’t think I wouldn’t have!” Instead, the women became friends. Lee was often the “extra woman” at Minnelli’s dinner parties and, she says, spent most of them yearning for her host. “I would look across the room and say, ‘Oh, that’s the only man I’ve ever really been in love with. . . .”

One day (best guess: 1971), Denise Minnelli phoned Lee with big news: “She said, ‘Vincente and I are getting a divorce.’ ”

Which is, more or less, how Margaret Lee Anderson Suter Goetz became Mrs. Vincente Minnelli in 1980, 22 years (or so) after they met. The marriage took place at Reese and Virginia Milner’s home in Beverly Hills, with Jules and Doris Stein standing up for the bride and groom. Lee wore a lavender silk dress by no one in particular that she’d bought a year earlier in Deauville, France, with no occasion in mind.

Vincente Minnelli died of heart failure in 1986. His widow has changed almost nothing in their home since then. Even his paints and easel are where he left them in his dressing room.

She’ll not marry again, she says, not for love or money (though the two are hardly separable for her). Loving a poor man was not in the cards for Lee Minnelli. “Never!” she replies with a laugh. “I’ve never even met one!”

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Hair and makeup: Sabrina B. Paul/REX