“Liz,” by Georgina Howell, was originally published in the June 1991 issue of Vogue.
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Elizabeth Taylor will give an interview, but she won’t talk scandal. Her private life is off-limits. So when I ask if I may see her bedroom and her clothes, those mascara-rimmed eyes the color of mauve moonstones turn on me as if I were a spidery thing that had crept onto her pillow.
All the same, her small, animated voice betrays no animosity. “Oh-o,” she says with that famous little gulp, “you don’t want to do that! Actually, like, that’s my floor, and I don’t let anyone in.”
She studies me for a minute and adds, kindly, “I’ve just got through doing a den there. It’s really funky and terribly sweet. Would you like to see that?”
She rises with the queenly deportment that gives the lie to her five feet six inches and tip-taps in high heels across the pleasant tile-and-brick expanse of the two-million-dollar house that spreads itself comfortably over ten thousand square feet of Bel Air. Her teased and spiky black hair lifts proudly from the Hamlet collar of a cream silk shirt. Round hips are jazzily belted over tight black jeans. Bracelets chink, earrings wink, brassy things jingle, clouds of scent waft behind her. Her whole presence is ridiculously, endearingly feminine. We track past a table of photographs of her standing with the Queen of England, President Ford, Marshal Tito, Richard Burton, Noël Coward.
She throws a door open with an air of triumph and…
“Ooops!” she exclaims in a low, ironic voice.
I pull up in the doorway of a small library flickering with light from the television and follow the line of her eyes. A bubble-permed golden head lies pillowed on one arm of the sofa, large bare feet rest on the other. Heavy jaws work on something crunchy.
She gives a little shrug and giggle. “Well, here’s Larry.”
There is a pause.
“Larry. Larry! This is Georgina.”
The blond head lifts one and a half inches off the cushion, turns forty-five degrees, utters, “Hi!” and falls back like a stone. The big right hand of Larry Fortensky, the forty-year-old ex-trucker she met at the Betty Ford Center a couple of years ago, dips into a bag and carries something to his mouth.
We reverse out, whispering deferentially, and make our way back past the Frans Hals, the Monets, the Rouault, and the Van Gogh—which was bought by the Burtons for their yacht and failed to reach its reserve at Christie’s in December—and all the way, Elizabeth Taylor is laughing. Amusement is written all over her. She’s grinning like someone discovered eating chocolates without handing the box around. These days, good humor has returned to her. Obesity and alcoholism and Percodan addiction have been crated up and left behind. Life is, touch wood, OK.
A year off sixty, she is the Helen of Troy de nos jours, a survivor like her great-grandparents, who crossed America in a covered wagon, or like her screen-struck mother, Sara, now ninety-five and living in Palm Springs. Elizabeth Taylor has only just stopped marrying the men she loves, saying, “At my age you don’t have to tidy up.”
She has always been the kind of full-blooded lover and liver who could say of her explosive marriage to Mike Todd, “We had more fun fighting than most people have making love.” Are men still scared to enter her zone of irresistible, earth-mother sexuality? Do they fear to get close?
Her eyes widen. “I hear that they do, and”—the shiny pink lips give a small gasp—“it a-ston-ishes me. It is true. With any famous woman men can feel intimidated.”
She makes two tiny fists and pulls them into her chest.
“I’ve matured, I’ve grown up, I’ve gone through phases, but I haven’t changed. I’ve always been what they call a liberated woman. To me, it was just being me. I’ve always had my equal rights.”
She chuckles.
“I haven’t wanted to be dominated, but I’ve never wanted to wear boxer shorts either. I enjoy being feminine. I don’t think you have to burn bras. I like bras if they’re pretty, and I love lace underwear!” Her soft voice broadens out into the kind of laugh you hear at the end of a late, good party.
She has been married seven times to six husbands, four of whom died prematurely. She has four children, one adopted, and five grandchildren. She is Hollywood’s most popular guest, and her parking lot is perpetually blocked with the cars of her friends and entourage.
“‘A man’s woman?’” says her old friend Sheran Cazalet Hornby, smiling. “Of course. And a woman’s woman, a child’s woman, a horse’s, parrot’s, goat’s, dog’s, and cat’s woman. And mostly someone who wants to stay home with the family and eat bangers and mash.”
Bearing this out, a pale cat preens on the table between us, and if you listen you can hear, from all over the house, a distant cackling, bleating, yapping, and barking.
“When I was a child I tried to have friends my own age, and I desperately hoped my brother’s friends would ask me out. But, no-o-o, they didn’t. When I tried to blend in, I stuck out like a sore thumb. I was famous and I looked much older than I was. When I was fifteen I was playing eighteen-year-olds and going out with men in their twenties or more. Mind, I’m reversing that now!” She gives a shout of laughter, descending the scale two notes at a time. “My friends are still the same age.”
This is a woman who cannot remember a time when she wasn’t famous. At twelve she made National Velvet, her fifth film, and she already had a paycheck of three hundred dollars a week. At eighteen, courtesy of her first husband, Nicky Hilton, she had stocks, minks, a Cadillac convertible, and a ring worth fifty thousand dollars. At twenty-four, courtesy of Mike Todd, she had a cinema named after her, a present every day—a big one on Saturdays, because that’s the day they met—a Rolls, a thirty-carat diamond measuring an inch and a half across, and paintings by Degas and Vuillard. At thirty-one, courtesy of Richard Burton and 20th Century Fox, she earned one million dollars a picture; the Krupp diamond (“Thirty-three and a third carats. Don’t forget the third”); Shah Jehan’s diamond; the Peregrina pearl given to Mary Tudor in 1554; houses in Mexico and Gstaad; the penthouse at the Dorchester in London; and a yacht.
“Richard was generous,” she murmurs. “And not to a fault, but to a glorious degree.”
This is a woman who ordered carryout food from other continents. Chili con carne from Chasen’s in Los Angeles followed her to Rome; traditional English pork sausages from Fortnum & Mason pursued her to Leningrad. On nights before she traveled, a British Airways executive would camp out overnight in her drawing room to make sure she didn’t miss the flight. When she moved from Geneva to Paris, she took the train with four children, two nannies, five dogs, two secretaries, one budgerigar, one wildcat, one turtle (who had to be kept in water), and one hundred forty pieces of luggage.
At the wedding of a mutual friend, Princess Margaret asked if she might be allowed to try on the Krupp diamond.
“She said, ‘How very vulgar!’” Elizabeth Taylor remembers in a dulcet voice. “I said, ‘Yeah, ain’t it great!’” Then, “By the way, I’m not unique. My circumstances were unique.”
These days she drives herself around L.A. in her $153,000 Aston Martin Lagonda and reserves her aura to fund-raise for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), of which she is the founding national chairman. In emeralds and black lace, she helped conjure up one million dollars in a single evening this winter.
“I do it 100 percent with my heart and soul and hours of work,” she says. “I can never stop figuring how to hit people up for money. We’ve come some way, but people still act like it’s not happening, like they don’t want to be associated with it, because it’s”—the lips curl, the soft little voice grows incredulous—“dirty or something, and these are people in”—gulp—“show business!”
She’s interested in a new film, one for which she’d have to age, “which would be kind of fun,” but she has asked the producers to put it on hold for a year until she has fulfilled her rigorous 1991 AmFAR obligations.
She has always done good by stealth. Many know how she followed up the case of a crippled child she spotted limping around a film set and arranged for the operation that brought a complete cure, of how she and Richard Burton adopted Maria, a physically handicapped child who grew into a loved, sturdy, attractive young woman. “She adores the miracle-working power of money,” says her friend Norma Heyman.
“Did she tell you what she did just the other day? About the AIDS patient who hadn’t long to live and wanted a birthday party? Elizabeth didn’t just fork out—she held the party at her house and played hostess.”
She is also generous to her friends, Heyman says. She cites the airline tickets that get sent to intimates who have been ill or depressed with a scribbled “Join me — Elizabeth,” as well as one particular Taylor AIDS gala evening in L.A.
“When my escort, Dominick Dunne, arrived, the dress I wanted to wear hadn’t come back from the cleaners. I rang Elizabeth, who said, ‘Come on over. Borrow a frock, a necklace, whatever you want.’ I raced over and tried on all her gowns. They looked terrible on me, but finally I found a black dress with a tight pink top and charged off to dinner. Elizabeth came over to my table—every time she got to her feet the band stopped and played a fanfare—and the moment she saw what I was wearing she doubled up. She was convulsed! When she could speak, she said, “You’re wearing my nightdress!”
Her perfume, Passion, is one of the top fragrances in the country and, together with Passion for Men—“to be worn anywhere a man wants to be touched”—has created a company already worth more than one hundred million dollars. In August a second Elizabeth Taylor scent for women, White Diamonds, will make its debut. “If Passion was velvet, White Diamonds is blue denim. Sparkly and pretty. And you can count on it—I’ll be wearing diamonds in the ads.”
She has always perfectly understood a star’s dual role, comfortably inhabiting and filling out the on- and offscreen performances. When Richard Burton, the last great love of her life, pontificated after dinner, spouting reams of Shakespeare, she would say, “Well, I don’t know anything about the theater, but”—flinging one arm over her head—“I don’t have to. I’m a star!”
“I know I’m vulgar,” she told friends once, “but you wouldn’t have me any other way, would you?”
She is right. The public wanted her larger than life, and she fitted too neatly into the role of the fatal brunette, playing Odile to the blonde Odettes of Grace Kelly and Monroe.
She made us forget she was an upper-crust girl who grew up with a weekend home in the English countryside, a pony, paintings by Augustus John on the walls, and dance lessons at Madame Vacani’s, where that other Elizabeth, the queen, went too. Hanging from a pillar in the office to prove it are her first white satin pointe shoes, right next to some boxing gloves given to her by Sugar Ray Robinson.
She is known for walking through rehearsals, hardly going through the motions, then coming on “like gangbusters” when the cameras roll. “I just can’t turn on my guts unless I know the audience is there,” she says, slowly and painfully, “because it costs… too much. When you do it from your guts your body doesn’t know that you’re playacting.”
Sometimes directors have forced great performances out of her by rounding on her just before the take, as George Stevens did before a crucial scene in Giant, accusing her of holding up the entire production through indolence and vanity. She played the scene palpitating with rage, gulping back the tears. But she says the hardest role was in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof because Mike Todd was killed two weeks into shooting.
“I developed an awful stutter, and the only way I could talk straight was in Maggie’s voice, with that southern accent. Any other time, I would just ug, ig, um, like that; my jaw would jerk.”
Maggie was an archetypal role for her, yet there was a persistent Hollywood rumor that she hadn’t understood the part. People said she had failed to grasp that the reason her screen husband, played by Paul Newman, ignored her advances was because he was gay. The screenplay deliberately obscured Tennessee Williams’s central theme, but even so, could they really have believed she was mystified, when her heart had nearly been broken by Montgomery Clift for the same reason?
The impression was given and circulated by a nettled executive, with whom she was arguing over the choice of director for a subsequent movie, Two for the Seesaw. “I won’t have him!” she said of the studio’s choice.
Exasperated, the executive responded, “I don’t think you should make the picture. I don’t see you as a little Jewish girl from New York who can’t get a date and falls in love with a traveling salesman who goes back to his wife.”
She regarded him for a second from under the famous double row of eyelashes. “But, Sam,” she said softly, “I’ve just made a picture in which my husband wouldn’t sleep with me!”
It is Elizabeth Taylor’s humor that betrays how smart she is under the sensual, silken manner that is the dowry of great beauty. Many have failed to spot the wit, and this has got her into trouble many times with people less bright than she.
When devastated by Mike Todd’s death and heavily on the rebound with Eddie Fisher, she was grilled by the prudish, long-divorced gossip writer Hedda Hopper; incautiously she flashed back an ironic, “What do you expect me to do—sleep alone?”—a remark that only remarriage and another brush with death finally obliterated from public memory. In a similar way, when she wrote, “I was told the Russians are very hospitable. If you admire something, they give it to you… so I admired and admired the crown jewels, but nothing happened,” it was cited as an instance of her greed.
Her creamy public demeanor masks the will of steel—the boxing gloves behind the satin slippers—that has brought whole studios to their knees. She says it was willpower that enabled her, at twelve, to prove the power of mind over matter—to grow three inches in three months to win the part of Velvet Brown. At thirty-three, she lowered her voice for her greatest of all, Oscar-winning performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
“Mike Nichols, the director, suggested I go to a coach and make my voice kind of raspy,” she remembers. “And I said to Mike, ‘You know, I’ve been acting so long and it’s always been instinctive, now I feel like a natural golfer who stops to take a lesson. It might put me off my swing.’ And I asked if he would let me think my voice down, which I did.”
It was one of the most painful portraits of a marriage ever filmed, but the tears and ranting on-screen marked an eerie calm in her volatile partnership with Richard Burton. “Going at it all day and night like that for six months… well, Richard and I had a ball, but we decided that for the sake of our marriage we would have to leave those characters behind at the studio like two old overcoats. We lived at fever pitch and got all that energy out on the set, and when we came home we were”—she purses her lips—“pussycats!”
She had to age seventeen years in order to look fifty. She put on twenty pounds. Twenty years later, she used the same willpower to force her weight down from 180 pounds to 122 pounds, a painful battle she entertainingly recorded in the book she wrote in 1987, Elizabeth Taylor Takes Off.
Whenever she set her heart on a man or a film role, a diamond or a racehorse, it was to be the only one in the world, for ever and ever. Once she had it in her sights, her hold on it was total and irreversible.
“My focus?” she reflects. “It was given to me by God. It takes a consciousness of that gift not to let it get lost. There are so many things in the business I’m in that cloud your vision—flattery, the ease with which we maintain fame, the way things seem, I say seem, to come to us easily. Oh, I’ve seen so many people lose focus.”
She took what came easily, and she paid for it. Few have suffered so many losses. The list of deaths is devastating: her adopted “godfather,” Victor Cazalet; friends James Dean, Gary Cooper, Rock Hudson, Halston, Laurence Harvey, and Malcolm Forbes; the beloved Montgomery Clift; husband Mike Todd; ex-husband Richard Burton; and most recently a longtime assistant who had become almost part of her family, who killed himself rather than have it be known he suffered from AIDS.
Observers who theorize about her upbringing as a Christian Scientist believe that she may have castigated herself with what one of her doctors once awesomely described as “a chaos, a symphony of illnesses.”
“I don’t think of myself as neurotic,” she says tartly. “But I don’t suppose many neurotic people do.”
She has been asked by a score of publishers to write her autobiography, “but I’m too busy. I’m living whole chapters right now… right now.” She puts on her best prissy manner, suggestive of a lady with a parasol sitting on the veranda of a great plantation house.
There’s a gentleman out there called C. David Heymann, the one who wrote a scurrilous book on Jackie O. “He’s got researchers calling up everyone saying they’re my best friend, and of course no one will talk.”
These days she expounds on life’s trials and rewards for the benefit of her grandchildren rather than for the press. She’s said to be especially close to eighteen-year-old Leila Wilding. What do they talk about?
“Boys!” says Elizabeth Taylor, smiling. “Oh, yeah, we talk to each other about our boyfriends.”
“It’s true,” says Wilding, a liberal arts student at the University of Oregon. “I stress out, and she makes me laugh. We talk in the kitchen after breakfast and in her dressing room off her bedroom while she does her makeup. Advice? Well, recently there was something I’ll never forget. I was feeling down because I was breaking up with my boyfriend, and she gave me another perspective on it. She said, ‘Of course you’re sad. You’re not just leaving a relationship behind. You’re losing love.’”
Those who know her well have always remarked on her lack of vanity. By consensus the most beautiful woman in the world, she never hid her frailties like Garbo or Dietrich did and wasn’t demolished, as Monroe was, by the rare unflattering photograph. All her life she faced the cameras radiantly, hair bedraggled, wearing only sun lotion, hand in hand with her latest love. Even when severely overweight, she seldom dodged the lens. The world was amazed to see her campaigning for her sixth husband, John Warner, facing the crowds after an all-night Greyhound bus trip in a crumpled coat, without a hairdresser, eating a hamburger for breakfast.
Elizabeth Taylor looks great, but her new independence from drink, drugs, and excess food has left her emotions vulnerably close to the surface.
“Once you have accepted you may be dying, life is sweet,” she says quietly. “I’m very glad I made it.”
Asked, for the zillionth time, who were the great loves of her life, she fights back the tears before murmuring, “Mike and Richard.” Could two such different men have known the same Elizabeth Taylor?
It has been thirty-three years since Mike Todd died in the crash of his Lucky Liz chartered plane, but she still frequently quotes Richard Burton.
“Richard said I’d be late for the Last Judgment.”
“Richard said I wasn’t accident prone, I was incident prone.”
“Richard helped me understand poetry so much more and not be intimidated by it. He said, ‘Just read it as if it were Tennessee Williams, speak it for the meaning rather than the beat.’”
If she still devours “the kind of adventure stories you read when you have the flu—Sidney Sheldon, Ross Macdonald,” she has also developed a genuine love for poetry.
I ask for her favorite poem, and after a pause she names Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo. I don’t know the poem but ask if it holds a special message for her.
It is a long time until she can whisper, “Yeah.
How to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty,... from vanishing away?”