QUEEN ELIZABETH
Aubrey Malone traces the life and loves of a true screen Goddess
When Liz Taylor died on March 23rd last, it was billed as the demise of Hollywood's 'last goddess'. One could hardly quibble with that estimation. Who's left apart from Kim Novak, another late septuagenarian, and our own Maureen O'Hara, looking hale and hearty at (gulp) 91. In the male league only Kirk Douglas and Mickey Rooney - Taylor's old friend - still tread this earth.
She often referred to herself as 'Mother Courage', justifiably. A catalogue of heart and back problems dogged her later years but she bore with them manfully (womanfully?). She outlasted Richard Burton, the especial love of her life, by many decades.
There were, of course, many others besides Burton, and she went to the altar with most of them. She complained that she was known in Hollywood as a 'scarlet woman' but in her defence she said, 'I only slept with men I married. How many more can make that claim?'
It's a good point, but she was also seen as a marriage-wrecker. This too is debatable. Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds were regarded as a golden couple when she 'stole' Fisher from Reynolds. Reynolds was Hollywood's sweetheart girl-next-door (as opposed to Taylor's vampish image) when she started making eyes at Fisher. But it takes two to tango. When I read Fisher's autobiography years later I was amused to read him saying, 'For years I wondered what was wrong with my marriage to Debbie. Then one day it dawned on me - everything!' (Fisher would add to that in 1999, spewing out, 'Debbie was indeed the girl next door, but only if you lived next door to a self-centred, insecure phony').
Burton's marriage was also on the rocks when Taylor met him on the set of Cleopatra, his alcoholic hands shaking as he tried to balance a cup of tea while he nursed the mother and father of one of his epic hangovers. They became lovers, then husband and wife, then divorcees after some years, then husband and wife again the year after parting and finally, a year after their second marriage, divorcees again. Only she could negotiate such a marital merry-go-round without appearing farcical.
Perhaps we shouldn't speak so much about her love life when she was such a gifted actress but often one seemed to bleed into the other. She was the first actress to receive $1 million for a role (in Cleopatra) and statistics like this also tended to detract from her work. All too often she garnered headlines for the wrong reasons - her love of jewellery ('The only kind of ice that keeps a woman warm,' she joked), her very public spats with Burton, her impetuousness, her tempestuousness, her battle with the bottle, her dependency on painkillers and so on.
She embraced the blandishments of fame with Burton and sold out her talent to an extent as the pair of them gallivanted around the world and seemed happy to pose for the paparazzi in between arguments, and/or spending sprees. Burton liked to think of himself as a Faust both onscreen and off; if this was true, Taylor seemed to be a partner in crime.
Perhaps her finest moment, in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, is a worm's eye view of The Battling Burtons up close and personal. The viewer feels like a fly on the wall as the expletives fly back and forth between the less than woosome twosome. She deservedly won the Oscar for this but Burton was passed over and apparently sulked as only he could.
I was less enchanted with her earlier Oscar turn in Butterfield 8, a film she herself reportedly despised for sanitising a lady of the night. Shirley MacLaine deserved to win for The Apartment that year (1961) but Taylor was rushed to hospital for a life-threatening operation just before the Oscar ceremonies. (Truly, she always had a sense of the occasion). She had pneumonia but pulled through to claim her statuette. MacLaine later grumbled - with some justification - 'I lost it to a tracheotomy'.
One of the few child actresses to carry her talent into the adult sphere, Taylor was also one of the most impossibly beautiful movie queens of our time, or any time. Neither did she appear to milk that beauty. This, I think, was one of the secrets of her success. She wasn't a Marilyn Monroe, even though they were rivals in the glamour stakes.
Could you imagine Monroe going brassy and downbeat in Virginia Woolf, even with her Method pretensions? Hardly. Taylor negotiated this crossover because as well as being a sexbomb extraordinaire she was also a very ballsy chick. She was a man's woman in all senses. She could enchant at the bar counter as well as in the boudoir. But Monroe died and became a figurehead. Taylor survived and outgrew her mystique - something Hollywood can never forgive.
I've sometimes thought of bringing out a book of her quotations. It would have photos of her looking lubricious on every page and opposite the pictures I would have the captions 'I do I do I do I do I do I do I do' opposite Elizabeth Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky.
The serial monogamist once said, 'I'm a very committed lady. I'm such a fool for love I deserve to be committed.' So she had wit, and self-deprecation, as well as everything else. When she married truckdriver Larry Fortensky, whom she met in rehab - the place superstars usually end up a few years after their third marriage and fifth nervous breakdown - he was, I believe, the same age as her first wedding dress. Always the bride, as the quip of the day went, never the bridesmaid.
Another thing I admired about Taylor was that she took her secrets to the grave. There was no kiss and tell; she was far too ladylike for that. She was also a great friend to troubled souls. She saved the life of her great friend Montgomery Clift when he had that horrible car accident on the way out of a party at her house in the fifties, pulling two teeth out of his throat when he looked like he was about to swallow them. Her most resonant performance for me was opposite Clift in A Place in the Sun. You really believed a man could kill for this woman, and resignedly go to his death as a result of being convicted for the murder.
Clift was gay, and Taylor seemed to have a particular preference for gay people, or those with bisexual orientations, like Clift, or his contemporary James Dean, who bonded with her so well in another stand-out performance in George Stevens' Giant. And of course she stood by Michael Jackson when he fought his own demons on the world's stage as the paedophilia charges dominated headlines for a few years.
Taylor also did sterling work for AIDS charities. Indeed, her other co-star in Giant, Rock Hudson, was the first high profile casualty of the disease in 1985. I've often thought how ironic it was that in this movie she was surrounded by two men whose primary orientation seemed to be men, so they wouldn't by definition be much interested in Taylor's vital attributes, while half the male population of the world were slavering over her beauty from cinema seats but couldn't get near her. ('I always hoped to catch her between husbands' went a familiar jibe).
A further irony was that Dean and Hudson despised one another as people, and actors. 'He was a taker, not a giver,' Hudson said of Dean, whereas Dean saw Hudson as a middle-of-the-road bore.
The word 'legend' is over-used today but Taylor was one. I imagine my first view of her was in Jane Eyre, where she had a brief cameo way back in the forties, and then in the landmark National Velvet a few years on. The fact that she was still treading the boards three decades later was a tribute both to her longevity and her versatility. Such versatility has worked to her detriment in one sense as it works against posterity having some handy box in which to place her. Having said that, I always seem to think of her in 'southern belle' mode for some reason. This seemed to be her comfort zone.
It was inevitable that she would have lean years, and forgettable performances - many of them with Burton, whom she generally acted off the screen. (She tried to teach him the 'language' of cinema but methinks he was far too fond of that booming theatrical voice to listen to the woman he referred to alternately as 'Elizabeth' or 'Miss Tits' - to his eternal loss).
After a while she seemed to stop caring about the craft herself. By then maybe one too many romantic heartbreaks had taken their toll and she retreated into a Garboesque kind of retirement, appearing briefly at charity functions to give something back to the industry which had been kind to her, and which she graced with such charm and explosive passion for so long.
I could never say she was one of my favourite actresses - she was too iconic for me to ever forget it was 'Elizabeth' I was watching - but I never found her less than adequate and in some cases, as in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Suddenly Last Summer, you just couldn't imagine anyone else carrying such dynamic power in the roles; she became inextricable from them. Of course she always pulled out something extra for Tennessee Williams - another homosexual, which may be significant.
When Liz Taylor died on March 23rd last, it was billed as the demise of Hollywood's 'last goddess'. One could hardly quibble with that estimation. Who's left apart from Kim Novak, another late septuagenarian, and our own Maureen O'Hara, looking hale and hearty at (gulp) 91. In the male league only Kirk Douglas and Mickey Rooney - Taylor's old friend - still tread this earth.
She often referred to herself as 'Mother Courage', justifiably. A catalogue of heart and back problems dogged her later years but she bore with them manfully (womanfully?). She outlasted Richard Burton, the especial love of her life, by many decades.
There were, of course, many others besides Burton, and she went to the altar with most of them. She complained that she was known in Hollywood as a 'scarlet woman' but in her defence she said, 'I only slept with men I married. How many more can make that claim?'
It's a good point, but she was also seen as a marriage-wrecker. This too is debatable. Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds were regarded as a golden couple when she 'stole' Fisher from Reynolds. Reynolds was Hollywood's sweetheart girl-next-door (as opposed to Taylor's vampish image) when she started making eyes at Fisher. But it takes two to tango. When I read Fisher's autobiography years later I was amused to read him saying, 'For years I wondered what was wrong with my marriage to Debbie. Then one day it dawned on me - everything!' (Fisher would add to that in 1999, spewing out, 'Debbie was indeed the girl next door, but only if you lived next door to a self-centred, insecure phony').
Burton's marriage was also on the rocks when Taylor met him on the set of Cleopatra, his alcoholic hands shaking as he tried to balance a cup of tea while he nursed the mother and father of one of his epic hangovers. They became lovers, then husband and wife, then divorcees after some years, then husband and wife again the year after parting and finally, a year after their second marriage, divorcees again. Only she could negotiate such a marital merry-go-round without appearing farcical.
Perhaps we shouldn't speak so much about her love life when she was such a gifted actress but often one seemed to bleed into the other. She was the first actress to receive $1 million for a role (in Cleopatra) and statistics like this also tended to detract from her work. All too often she garnered headlines for the wrong reasons - her love of jewellery ('The only kind of ice that keeps a woman warm,' she joked), her very public spats with Burton, her impetuousness, her tempestuousness, her battle with the bottle, her dependency on painkillers and so on.
She embraced the blandishments of fame with Burton and sold out her talent to an extent as the pair of them gallivanted around the world and seemed happy to pose for the paparazzi in between arguments, and/or spending sprees. Burton liked to think of himself as a Faust both onscreen and off; if this was true, Taylor seemed to be a partner in crime.
Perhaps her finest moment, in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, is a worm's eye view of The Battling Burtons up close and personal. The viewer feels like a fly on the wall as the expletives fly back and forth between the less than woosome twosome. She deservedly won the Oscar for this but Burton was passed over and apparently sulked as only he could.
I was less enchanted with her earlier Oscar turn in Butterfield 8, a film she herself reportedly despised for sanitising a lady of the night. Shirley MacLaine deserved to win for The Apartment that year (1961) but Taylor was rushed to hospital for a life-threatening operation just before the Oscar ceremonies. (Truly, she always had a sense of the occasion). She had pneumonia but pulled through to claim her statuette. MacLaine later grumbled - with some justification - 'I lost it to a tracheotomy'.
One of the few child actresses to carry her talent into the adult sphere, Taylor was also one of the most impossibly beautiful movie queens of our time, or any time. Neither did she appear to milk that beauty. This, I think, was one of the secrets of her success. She wasn't a Marilyn Monroe, even though they were rivals in the glamour stakes.
Could you imagine Monroe going brassy and downbeat in Virginia Woolf, even with her Method pretensions? Hardly. Taylor negotiated this crossover because as well as being a sexbomb extraordinaire she was also a very ballsy chick. She was a man's woman in all senses. She could enchant at the bar counter as well as in the boudoir. But Monroe died and became a figurehead. Taylor survived and outgrew her mystique - something Hollywood can never forgive.
I've sometimes thought of bringing out a book of her quotations. It would have photos of her looking lubricious on every page and opposite the pictures I would have the captions 'I do I do I do I do I do I do I do' opposite Elizabeth Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky.
The serial monogamist once said, 'I'm a very committed lady. I'm such a fool for love I deserve to be committed.' So she had wit, and self-deprecation, as well as everything else. When she married truckdriver Larry Fortensky, whom she met in rehab - the place superstars usually end up a few years after their third marriage and fifth nervous breakdown - he was, I believe, the same age as her first wedding dress. Always the bride, as the quip of the day went, never the bridesmaid.
Another thing I admired about Taylor was that she took her secrets to the grave. There was no kiss and tell; she was far too ladylike for that. She was also a great friend to troubled souls. She saved the life of her great friend Montgomery Clift when he had that horrible car accident on the way out of a party at her house in the fifties, pulling two teeth out of his throat when he looked like he was about to swallow them. Her most resonant performance for me was opposite Clift in A Place in the Sun. You really believed a man could kill for this woman, and resignedly go to his death as a result of being convicted for the murder.
Clift was gay, and Taylor seemed to have a particular preference for gay people, or those with bisexual orientations, like Clift, or his contemporary James Dean, who bonded with her so well in another stand-out performance in George Stevens' Giant. And of course she stood by Michael Jackson when he fought his own demons on the world's stage as the paedophilia charges dominated headlines for a few years.
Taylor also did sterling work for AIDS charities. Indeed, her other co-star in Giant, Rock Hudson, was the first high profile casualty of the disease in 1985. I've often thought how ironic it was that in this movie she was surrounded by two men whose primary orientation seemed to be men, so they wouldn't by definition be much interested in Taylor's vital attributes, while half the male population of the world were slavering over her beauty from cinema seats but couldn't get near her. ('I always hoped to catch her between husbands' went a familiar jibe).
A further irony was that Dean and Hudson despised one another as people, and actors. 'He was a taker, not a giver,' Hudson said of Dean, whereas Dean saw Hudson as a middle-of-the-road bore.
The word 'legend' is over-used today but Taylor was one. I imagine my first view of her was in Jane Eyre, where she had a brief cameo way back in the forties, and then in the landmark National Velvet a few years on. The fact that she was still treading the boards three decades later was a tribute both to her longevity and her versatility. Such versatility has worked to her detriment in one sense as it works against posterity having some handy box in which to place her. Having said that, I always seem to think of her in 'southern belle' mode for some reason. This seemed to be her comfort zone.
It was inevitable that she would have lean years, and forgettable performances - many of them with Burton, whom she generally acted off the screen. (She tried to teach him the 'language' of cinema but methinks he was far too fond of that booming theatrical voice to listen to the woman he referred to alternately as 'Elizabeth' or 'Miss Tits' - to his eternal loss).
After a while she seemed to stop caring about the craft herself. By then maybe one too many romantic heartbreaks had taken their toll and she retreated into a Garboesque kind of retirement, appearing briefly at charity functions to give something back to the industry which had been kind to her, and which she graced with such charm and explosive passion for so long.
I could never say she was one of my favourite actresses - she was too iconic for me to ever forget it was 'Elizabeth' I was watching - but I never found her less than adequate and in some cases, as in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Suddenly Last Summer, you just couldn't imagine anyone else carrying such dynamic power in the roles; she became inextricable from them. Of course she always pulled out something extra for Tennessee Williams - another homosexual, which may be significant.
Copyright ©2012, Senior Times.
