Elizabeth Taylor: The Eyes Had It

AN APPRECIATION

Both on screen and off, the actress' violet eyes were irresistible and her star power formidable.

By Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times Film Critic
http://www.latimes.com/
7:21 AM PDT, March 23, 2011

"Tell Momma. Tell Momma all."

If you are a fan of Elizabeth Taylor, and how could you not be, you don't have to be told the source of that dialogue. It's the heart of Taylor's country club love scene with Montgomery Clift in "A Place in the Sun," and the actress' face in huge close-up is so exquisitely, so heartbreakingly beautiful you never doubt that Clift's intoxicated character would do anything to keep her in his life. Up to and including murder.

Both on the screen and off, Elizabeth Taylor and her irresistible violet eyes had that effect on men. She was only 17 when she filmed that scene for director George Stevens in 1949 (the film was released two years later), and her career as a talented adult actress and world class femme fatale was just beginning. Before she was finished, Taylor had collected five Oscar nominations, two victories, seven husbands and innumerable broken hearts.

In this and in many things, the actress was in a class by herself. Her astonishingly dramatic personal life, characterized by full-throttle romantic love and later recriminations, serious illnesses and tragic deaths, matched the drama of her on-screen roles stride for stride and maybe even bested it. While many actresses specialize in public private lives, it's hard to think of another one quite as astounding in its fearless pursuit of happiness as Taylor's.

She began as a child actress, on screen at age 10, and the best of her early films, which often matched her with animals, still captivate today. Both "Lassie Come Home" in 1943 and "National Velvet" a year later showcase a youthful performer with uncommon determination and poise.

As a young adult Taylor was luminous with the promise of youth not only in "A Place in the Sun," based on Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy," but also costarring with Spencer Tracy in the still-charming 1950 "Father of the Bride."

"Giant" marked another step forward, as Taylor was the cynosure of all eyes as the romantic interest fought over by Rock Hudson and James Dean. The same thing happened in the screen version of Tennessee Williams' sultry "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," with the actress playing Maggie the Cat and holding the screen with Paul Newman and Burl Ives with the help of a seductive white slip.

Though MGM, not Yale Drama, was her acting school, Taylor was a gifted performer, more than she gave herself credit for. She was nominated for the best actress Oscar four years in a row before winning it on the fourth try for another slip role, a high-class call girl in 1960's "Butterfield 8."

That victory, Oscar historians claim, came partially as a gesture of sympathy after a severe case of pneumonia nearly killed her. It was not the first or the last time her private life merged with and accentuated her movie star appeal.

Taylor's first brush with tragedy came in 1958, when her third husband, producer Mike Todd, died in a plane crash after little more than a year of marriage. Just as shocking to America was the way she immediately took up with Eddie Fisher, married to America's sweetheart Debbie Reynolds, and the best man at her wedding to Todd.

All this was just a warm-up for Taylor's volcanic relationship with the great Welsh actor Richard Burton. They met on the set of "Cleopatra," a flop of legendary proportions, married, divorced, remarried, re-divorced and made a number of films together, from the forgettable to the one that won Taylor her second Oscar, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

I never met Elizabeth Taylor, but when I think of her career I think of a moment when I saw her across a crowded room, the Washington Post newsroom in the mid-1970s, where I worked and where the actress was paying a kind of Hollywood state visit.

Other stars had come to the Post newsroom in the post-Watergate era, and despite their celebrity they had often tried unsuccessfully to blend in to the point where they were irritated if people gawked. Not Elizabeth Taylor. Dressed to be noticed, her fabulous eyes accentuated by makeup, huge diamonds on her hands, she knew she was a star and relished, even cherished her position. She will be missed.

Photo credit: A pose and hairstyle that recalls her later portrait by Andy Warhol, here against a striking verdant backdrop in 1951. (By François Lochon/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images).

kenneth.turan@latimes.com


Movies, Men, Melodramas: A Lust for Life

By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
March 23, 2011

The last movie star died Wednesday. By the time Elizabeth Taylor left this mortal coil at 79, she had cheated death with a long line of infirmities that had repeatedly put her in the hospital — and on front pages across the world — and in 1961 left her with a tracheotomy scar on a neck more accustomed to diamonds. The tracheotomy was the result of a bout with pneumonia that left her gasping for air and it returned her to the big, bountiful, hungry life that was one of her greatest roles. It was a minor incision (later, she had surgery to remove the scar), but it’s easy to think of it as some kind of war wound for a life lived so magnificently.

Unlike Marilyn, Liz survived. And it was that survival as much as the movies and fights with the studios, the melodramas and men (so many melodramas, so many men!) that helped separate Ms. Taylor from many other old-Hollywood stars. She rocketed into the stratosphere in the 1950s, the era of the bombshell and the Bomb, when most of the top female box-office draws were blond, pneumatic and classifiable by type: good-time gals (Betty Grable), professional virgins (Doris Day), ice queens (Grace Kelly). Marilyn Monroe was the sacrificial sex goddess with the invitational mouth. Born six years before Ms. Taylor, she entered the movies a poor little girl ready to give it her all, and did.

Ms. Taylor, by contrast, was sui generis, a child star turned ingénue and jet-setting supernova, famous for her loves (Eddie & Liz, Liz & Dick) and finally for just being Liz. “I don’t remember ever not being famous,” she said. For her, fame was part of the job, neither a blessing (though the jewels were nice) nor a curse. Perhaps that’s why she never looked defeated, unlike those who wilt under the spotlight. In film after film she appears extraordinarily at ease: to the camera born. She’s as natural in “National Velvet,” the 1944 hit that made her a star at 12, as she is two decades later roaring through “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” proving once again that beauty and talent are not mutually exclusive, even in Hollywood.

In many respects she was a classic product of the old studio system. Pushed by a quintessential stage mother, she was signed to a contract in 1943 by MGM, which was banking on child talent, much of which was used up by adolescence, either disappearing for good or absorbed into the ranks of character actors. Unlike so many fledgling stars then and now, Ms. Taylor bloomed as a teenager and seemed remarkably relaxed in that newly plush body that soon became a big-screen fetish. She made it all seem so effortless, as did the studio machinery grinding away in the background. “She’s the kind of a girl,” wrote a reporter for The New York Times in a charmingly naïve 1949 profile, “to whom nice things just happen.”

Yet Hollywood and nice don’t often keep company, as one after another crash-and-burn studio tell-all attests and the perils faced by the young, beautiful and exploitable are legion. “Remind me to be around when she grows up,” Orson Welles joked after watching the 10-year-old Ms. Taylor shoot a scene in “Jane Eyre.” It’s a half-funny, queasy comment and however made in jest (or so you hope), it’s also a reminder of the predators that were always lurking and could have swallowed Ms. Taylor whole. That seems particularly the case given how, as she developed (at 16, she was “obviously mature,” as the reporter from The Times put it), she often seemed far too knowing, too womanly for the juvenile and young-lady parts she played.

It was George Stevens, who directed “A Place in the Sun,” who gave the young actress her first Elizabeth Taylor role, the one in which everything — her looks, presence and power — came together. Based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel “An American Tragedy,” it starred Ms. Taylor as an heiress whose allure is so potent it drives a young striver (Ms. Taylor’s close friend, Montgomery Clift) to murder his pregnant working-class lover (Shelley Winters). Everything wondrous and mysterious about cinema itself is captured in a dazzling, sensuously lengthy kiss between Ms. Taylor and Clift that Stevens shot in tight, almost claustrophobic close-up, filling the frame with beauty made immortal by film. It’s an intoxicating vision of bliss if one that — and this is critical to the film’s force — has been paid for by the murder of another woman.

Here, the movies seemed to say, was a woman worth killing for. It’s hard to think of many actresses, even those die-hard professionals raised inside the old studio bubbles, who could have weathered such an impossible burden. Ms. Taylor managed the role of sex object effortlessly as if it too were just part of the job. In contrast to so many other actresses, she seemed as desiring as desirous, with the gift of a thrillingly unladylike appetite. She was a great lover of food, of course, as her cruelly documented weight gains make evident. Yet the appetite that appeared to drive, at times even define her, exceeded mere food to include everything, and her consumption of men, booze, jewels and celebrity itself was an astonishment.

Living large proved a brilliant survival strategy as well as something of a rebuke to the limits of the studio system, both its formulas and false morality, which was all but gone by the time she appeared in “Virginia Woolf” in 1966. Her weight went up and down and the accolades kept coming. She cheated on one husband and then another at a time when adultery was still shocking, and her career kept going. She was a lovely actress and a better star. She embodied the excesses of Hollywood and she transcended them. In the end, the genius of her career was that she gave the world everything it wanted from a glamorous star, the excitement and drama, the diamonds and gossip, and she did it by refusing to become fame’s martyr.

Photo Credit: On the set of "Giant", Taylor poses in a bikini top and waist-cinching slacks in November of 1956. By Frank Worth/Emage International/Getty Images

Related:

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/04/movies/film-view-elizabeth-taylor-her-life-is-the-stuff-of-movies.html


In Memoriam

The Death, and Many Near-Deaths, of the Hollywood Cleopatra

by David Kamp
http://www.vanityfair.com/
March 23, 2011, 12:30 PM


“I was pronounced dead four times,” Elizabeth Taylor told me. “Once I didn’t breathe for five minutes, which must be a record.” This was in early 1998, when I was interviewing Taylor for my V.F. story in that year’s Hollywood issue about the calamitous making of her film Cleopatra, “When Liz Met Dick.”[1] She was talking about her health scare of March 1961, when, wracked with what her doctors called “Asian flu,” she fell into a coma in London.

I don’t mean to make light of Taylor’s death today, at the age of 79, but when I heard news of it, my first instinct was to ask: Are they sure? This was a woman who turned the emergency hospitalization into an art form, the wheelchair into a red-carpet accessory, and the sickbed into a press room. In her later decades, especially, her bouts of ill health, along with her extraordinary bounce-backs from the brink, were themselves a kind of performance.

Taylor had a sense of humor about this. Upon reviving at the London Clinic in ’61, she found her room garlanded with flowers and piled with fan mail and appreciative newspaper writeups. “I had the chance to read my own obituaries,” she said. “They were the best reviews I’d ever gotten.” Not long thereafter, she won what even she recognized was a sympathy best-actress Oscar for the middling 1960 film Butterfield 8. (She told me she’d been more deserving for the previous year’s Suddenly, Last Summer.)

This was quite a turnabout for a woman who only weeks earlier—days, even—had been pilloried as an amoral wench, already on her fourth husband at 29: that husband being Eddie Fisher, whom she had “stolen” from his wife, Debbie Reynolds. Now, even Reynolds was among the well-wishers who sent telegrams. (Forty years later, she and Taylor, in a sign of salty-survivor solidarity, costarred in the bawdy TV-movie comedy These Old Broads.) A still-bigger scandal was yet to come—Taylor’s affair with Richard Burton—but for now, Taylor had discovered the palliative effect of public sympathy. She soldiered on with Cleopatra, and her tracheotomy scar, a souvenir of the emergency measures taken by her London physicians, is visible throughout the film.

When I got the assignment in 1997, I put in a request for an interview with Taylor and was turned down. She wasn’t keen on talking about Cleopatra, for understandable reasons: it had resulted in lawsuits, it had turned marriages upside down, and the Vatican’s own newspaper, theatrically outraged at Taylor for carrying on with Burton, had published a catty open letter to her, accusing her, marvelously, of “erotic vagrancy.”

But as Christmas and my deadline approached, I’d gotten nearly everyone else associated with the film who was still alive to talk to me. The one other exception was Roddy McDowall, who played the nefarious Octavian in the film and, in real life, was very close to Taylor, Burton, and Burton’s first wife, Sybil. McDowall could not have been nicer in saying no; he called me himself to explain that he understood what my job was, but that he could never betray his loyalty to his friends. He graciously invited me to come see the holiday show he was in, a gaudy Madison Square Garden production of A Christmas Carol (he was playing Scrooge, against type), and to pay him a visit afterwards backstage.

And so I went. I appeared at McDowall’s stagedoor after the show at the same time as a striking, fortyish woman with a young son in tow. McDowall welcomed us all in, and we passed a few convivial if awkward minutes of conversation before I got up to leave. Later that evening, McDowall called me. “I am so sorry about today.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I thought you had all come in together, so I didn’t introduce you. That was Elizabeth’s daughter, Liza Todd. I should have introduced you.”

I explained that there was no need to apologize, and that, perhaps, it was for the better; Todd might have been dismayed to learn she was in the same room as a writer who was reporting a piece about her mother’s most notorious chapter. (Liza Todd is an amazing-looking person, by the way, with the dark brow and sharp jawline of her father, the late producer Mike Todd, and the glassy, otherworldly gaze of her mother.)

Anyway, McDowall said he would do his level best to get Taylor to talk to me for the article, at least on the telephone. V.F.’s Dominick Dunne got in on the act, too. Their powers of persuasion worked. One night, Dominick gave me a number to call.

Taylor was in friendly form, not needing any time to warm up. “You want to talk about le scandale, don’t you?” she said. That was what she and Burton jokingly called the worldwide commotion over their affair.

The truth is, Taylor was not a critical source for the story, which was more of a moviemaking chronicle than a blow-by-blow of her romantic life. But it was great to get her comments into the piece, as elliptical as they could be. She wouldn’t get into the details of the off-and-on nature of the Burton affair, whose rhythms affected the film shoot. Then again, she admitted that the “food poisoning” story put out by publicists to explain her February 1962 hospitalization in Rome was hogwash. She had foolishly swallowed a bunch of Seconals, she said, because “I was hysterical and I needed to get away.”

The phone interview went on for about an hour: me sitting in the dark on a still winter night, listening to that famous voice through the receiver like it was a radio transmission. I tried to stretch things out as long as I could without pushing it. Finally, Taylor saw fit to proactively sum things up.

“It was the most chaotic period of my life. But I also fell madly in love, so it couldn’t have been all bad,” she said. “O.K., that’s it for me now, time to go. I’m all dried up.”

Photo credit: Looking positively bridal in creamy lace and a tiara, chin demurely down, for this 1956 seated portrait. © Underwood & Underwood/Corbis.

Link:

[1] http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2010/07/elizabeth-taylor-201007


Elizabeth Taylor: 'It takes one day to die – another to be reborn'

In a deeply personal piece, Hollywood biographer Peter Evans, who knew Elizabeth Taylor for 50 years, pays tribute to the film legend who has died aged 79.


By Peter Evans
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
24 Mar 2011

It has been more than three decades since she made a memorable film – and nearly as long since she made even a good one – but no other movie actress in the second half of the 20th century sustained a hold on the public’s imagination longer or more assuredly than Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe Marilyn Monroe ran her a close second, but she had to die in her prime to do it.

“Dying young does give Marilyn an edge over most of us,” Elizabeth conceded when the subject of Hollywood immortals came up the last time we met in Los Angeles, where she died yesterday, aged 79.

“But I nearly died quite a few times. Nearly dying was my specialty. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?”

It was a throwaway line, but typical of Elizabeth Taylor: dark, perfectly timed, and full of mockery – of herself, and of the Hollywood star system, in which she had lived since she was 10 years old, the fledgling heroine of Lassie Come Home.

I first met Elizabeth Taylor in 1960 when she began filming Cleopatra in London – a production that was abandoned, and later moved to Rome, when she nearly died of pneumonia. Doctors had fought for 10 days to save her life. She carried a scar on her throat for the rest of her life where the surgeons had inserted a tube into her windpipe to keep her breathing.

Survival, she liked to say, was her middle name. “I’ve appeared in more theatres than Dame Nellie Melba on her farewell tour. Unfortunately, mine have all been operating theatres,” she once told me. She could always be funny about her ailments. In 30 years she had more than 37 operations, including the removal of a benign brain tumour, congestive heart failure, and hip joint replacements.

She could be difficult when a leading man, a script or anything else displeased her; she provoked nervous breakdowns in hostesses whose dinners were spoiled by her habitual lateness; producers regularly counted the cost of the delays she caused.

But those who knew her well admired her courage. Her loyalty to old friends was staunch and often puzzling. She stuck by Michael Jackson at the height of his scandal, when it was considered unwise even to return his phone calls. She did the first big charity show for Aids when Aids was still a forbidden topic of conversation in polite circles.

Elizabeth was a great collector: of two Oscars (Butterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), innumerable global accolades (she treasured her DBE), and eight husbands (if you count Richard Burton twice).

It was her two marriages to the bibulous Welsh actor that most people remember, and which will always define her.

They first met on the set of Cleopatra in Rome in 1962. For her role as the fabled Egyptian queen, Elizabeth became the first actor ever to be paid $1  million for a film. For far less money, Burton played Mark Antony. Inevitably, this renowned, classic stage actor, and a womaniser of remarkable energy, would attempt to seduce her. She was, after all, “the most desirable woman in the world”.

“Richard came on the set and sort of sidled over to me and said: 'Has anyone ever told you that you’re a very pretty girl?’ ” she recalled of their first encounter. “I thought, 'Oy, gevalt’,” – she had been married to Mike Todd, the brash Jewish-America showman, whose religion and vernacular she had adopted – “the great lover, the great wit, the great Welsh intellectual, and he comes out with a corny line like that!”

But then she noticed that his hands were shaking, “as if he had Saturday-night palsy. He had the worst hangover I’d ever seen. He was obviously terrified of me. I just took pity on him. I realised he really was human. That was the beginning of our affair.”

From their first screen embrace, it was plain that she and Burton were more than just good friends. The director Joseph Mankiewicz, aware of the potential for scandal and trouble, cabled the studio: “I want to give you some facts you ought to know. Liz and Richard are not just playing lovers – they are lovers.”

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in 'The Sandpiper' - 1965

Their affair broke up each other’s marriage – his to former Welsh actress Sybil Williams, mother of his two daughters, Kate, then aged 5, and Jessica, 3; Elizabeth’s to the crooner Eddie Fisher. The scandal almost bankrupted the studio 20th Century Fox – though it made Taylor and Burton the hottest couple in Hollywood. Each got $1 million for their next film, The VIPs, but Elizabeth, regarded as one of the smartest actors in Hollywood, collected a piece of the profits, too.

They were still going through the process of their divorces when I caught up with Elizabeth in Mexico, where Burton was making Night of the Iguana, based on the Tennessee Williams play. It was 1963. He was now the top-notch star he had always wanted to be.

Aged 31, with four marriages behind her – the first to hotel heir Nicky Hilton, followed by English actor Michael Wilding, then Mike Todd, and Eddie Fisher – she contemplated marriage to Burton with an equanimity that astonished me. Wasn’t she apprehensive?

“Richard knows me better than any man I’ve known,” she said. “I think he was born knowing me. I feel I’m in safe hands.”

Burton agreed with proprietorial pride. “I know her inside out, stewed and sober, in sickness and what passes for health in her hurt and troubled life.”

At dinner that evening, she told me: “A lot of mistakes I’ve made were because of the peculiar world I’ve lived in. I’ve been a movie actress since I was 10 years old, so of course I’ve been spoiled and pampered. The most difficult problem for any actress is trying to understand the difference between reality and make-believe.

“Richard has given me a sense of reality. I’m now, above and beyond anything else, a woman. That’s his gift to me. I used to have these marvellous spending sprees, but they were just compensations. Most women, when they are depressed or unhappy, go out and buy a new hat. I used to go out and buy up Dior’s, which is singularly immature and doesn’t compensate for a thing.”

Burton would encourage her to overcome this spasm of immaturity with a season of diamond buying – the Taj Mahal and Krupp gems, the Koh-i-noor, La Pelegrina Pearl – that would stun the world.

She married Burton in 1964, but it was a tempestuous relationship as well as an enriching one. Together they made 11 films – including the memorable Virginia Woolf, an admired production of The Taming of the Shrew, and some others best forgotten – and achieved a kind of corporate notoriety. They drank too much. Privately, and increasingly publicly, too, they were never less than competitive. Only Burton had the temerity to laugh at some of the foolish things she said. Only Elizabeth had the feistiness to ridicule his sexual braggadocio.

Once, after another furious row with her, Burton dropped by my London home and offered to buy it – for a love nest. Later, when they came to dinner, Elizabeth told him: “This place is too big for a love nest. It’d make a fine harem, though – but you’re not up to that any more, Buster.”

I was astonished. Why had he told her about his plans to get a love nest? “It keeps her on her toes, luv,” he said.

In 1974, they divorced. But their addiction to each other remained unchanged. The following year they remarried. One year later they divorced for the final time.

“It takes one day to die – another to be reborn,” Elizabeth announced defiantly, but those who knew her well knew that Burton was still the love of her life. She wed twice more – to US senator John Warner, and to Larry Fortensky, a builder – but neither marriage lasted.

The happiest and most exhilarating years of her life, which began and ended with Richard Burton, were over.

Burton seemed to be speaking for both of them when he told me: “There is an emptiness in my life that only Elizabeth can make less empty. For 13 years we were together constantly, compulsively. How can you end such a wild and perfect relationship? You can’t. A love affair like ours is never ended – only temporarily abandoned.”

She was increasingly frail in her last years, and only seen in a wheelchair. “I never imagined there’d be such a price to pay for the fun we had,” she said the last time I saw her.

Last year, 25 years after his death, Dame Elizabeth Taylor was asked if she would marry Burton again if that were possible.

“In a heartbeat,” she said.

I’m told that she died with a picture of Burton by her bedside.

Peter Evans is working on 'Ava’, a personal memoir of Ava Gardner.