Halston and Liza Minnelli were inseparable in the 1970s and most of the ’80s—he in all-black ensembles and sunglasses, she in his shimmering designs. There they were, smiling and dancing inside Studio 54; smoking long cigarettes in V.I.P. banquettes and striking poses at gala premieres; even holding hands at Andy Warhol’s memorial service. Dazzling, dominant talents in their respective creative fields, Halston and Minnelli synched almost immediately.

“When I met Halston, I just remember him talking and me listening…he’d say, ‘Alright, I got it.’ He put [a design] on you,” recalled Minnelli in 2019’s Halston documentary. “And it danced with you. His clothes danced with you. We were joined at the hip from then on.”

Minnelli said that Halston’s command of costume and clothing reminded her of her relationship with her father, Vincente Minnelli, the Oscar-winning filmmaker (Gigi).

“He was like my dad in a way because, when I was a little girl, my father would give me five costumes every year. It was a dress from An American in Paris, and perfectly made…and I guess I got into appreciating how clothes changed the way you felt,” Minnelli explained. Halston sent the performer a new pair of tailored black velvet trousers every three months. “He made women feel glamorous,” Minnelli told the New York Times in 2011. “He took the American look and made it high fashion.”

Halston dressed Minnelli for everything—whether it was her 1973 Oscar win for Cabaret (she wore a canary yellow gown), her films, or her stage shows, including Liza with a “Z.” (The creation of her red halter minidress is reimagined in episode one of Halston.) She, in turn, supported him both behind the scenes and in the front row at his fashion shows. If he needed her to hop onstage and give his runway a little extra razzle-dazzle, she would do that too—memorably performing and choreographing an adaptation of “Bonjour Paris” for Halston’s “Battle of Versailles” fashion show in 1973, as depicted on the series. Five years later, at the 1978 opening party for Halston’s Olympic Tower showroom, Minnelli strode down the runway performing “New York, New York” and handing a rose to Elizabeth Taylor as the grand finale.

Even 18 years after Halston’s death, when Halston’s brand was revived for a 2008 show in New York, Minnelli sat front row, cheered on the designs, and raved about her late friend to press. Acknowledging the Halston design she was wearing, she told the New York Times, “It’s Halston vintage, 1975—and I think it is great to celebrate the first designer who put American fashion on the map.”

In the 2010 documentary Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston, Minnelli explained that Halston “was my big brother. I loved him. I trusted him.” When she bought her Manhattan apartment, she told the filmmaker that she was overwhelmed at the prospect of decorating such an expansive space. So Halston told Minnelli to go out of town and forget about it. “They designed the whole apartment. I came home, and Mark [Gero, her third husband] and I walked in the front door, and the whole place was candlelit,” Minnelli said, recalling her very own Halston Home Makeover. “There were candles on every table. The lights were perfect…. We walked into the most beautiful apartment I had ever seen in my life. He had gone to all that trouble and then left so that we could discover it ourselves.”

Minnelli told the same filmmaker that Halston was her “protector.” And since the designer’s 1990 death, Minnelli has reciprocated for her late best friend—fiercely preserving his legacy and doing her best to separate his creative genius from the seedy Studio 54 narrative. When that interviewer tried to draw her into saying something salacious, she refused. “Everybody I know loved him so much,” she said, urging the on-camera filmmaker to avoid “trashy” portrayals. “This is a great American who changed fashion,” she told the filmmaker. “He put us on the map.”

Minnelli remained a staunch defender of her friend in 2019’s Halston, when the performer resisted speaking negatively about the designer when asked about his downfall. “It’s very hard to do an interview about your best friend, especially if what’s popular in that day and age is digging a little,” Minnelli said. “I don’t like it. I hated it when they did it to my mother, or my father, or myself. And I won’t do it to Halston, I just won’t. I refuse.”

Before Ewan McGregor began filming Netflix’s Halston limited series, he was able to get a private meeting with Minnelli—with the actor vowing to keep their conversation secret. “He got to meet her and tell her that her best friend was in good hands,” McGregor’s costar Krysta Rodriguez, who plays Minnelli in the series, told Vanity Fair. “He had a really special meeting and bond with Liza herself and brought that to our rehearsals. When we started rehearsing, that was already in his heart, and I could recognize that.”

Rodriguez said that she, McGregor, and Halston’s creators envisioned Halston and Minnelli’s friendship as the show’s “love story […] these were each other’s soulmates.” Though Rodriguez had been a lifelong Minnelli fan, she was surprised to learn how deep Minnelli and Halston’s friendship ran when doing her research.

“I don’t think I ever really knew that everything she wore was Halston, all the costumes […] Halston is uncredited as a costumer for Cabaret because she called him and was like, ‘I hate all my costumes.’ And he redesigned the entire wardrobe for her,” said Rodriguez. “They sharpened each other as friends and collaborators, and ultimately were each other’s greatest love.”

Though Halston and Minnelli were the most glamorous best friends of the ’70s, Rodriguez relished the scenes that took place behind closed doors—“in our homes, curled up on a couch, eating some food, almost like a slumber party.” Wherever Halston and Minnelli’s careers or romantic lives took them, the one consistent was that friendship—“curling up with that person and clinging to them through that whole journey.”

After Halston’s death, Minnelli cohosted a tribute to the designer at Lincoln Center, in 1992. Onstage, Minnelli remembered her last meeting with her friend, which took place at an informal Thanksgiving get-together where she complained and he cheered her up. In her closing words, Minnelli remembered Halston as “tender always, courageous always, challenging always, daring me to be better than I ever thought I could be. I’ll miss him always.” Looking up towards the sky, Minnelli said, “Thanks, pal. It was a joy. We just wanted to let you know we were thinking of you.”

Speaking to Vanity Fair, Rodriguez said she hopes that Minnelli is happy with her and McGregor’s representation of the friendship when Halston premieres Friday. “I obviously hope she loves the show,” said the actor, “and I hope that she feels like we honored her best friend and their relationship in a way that she can be happy with.”

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