An ode to Liz. I will never forget the picture of her on her First Honeymoon in Cannes, in a Bathing suit. Took my breath away.
washingtonpost.com
In Elizabeth Taylor, America Found Its Queen
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 8, 2002; Page G01
From afar, and with tender respect and the hushed mincing that proximity to royalty demands, let us now consider the Elizabethan Age. Indeed, for Elizabeth Taylor, one of this weekend's Kennedy Center Honors recipients, there are several ages.
Elizabeth I was perfection in a child. Her first co-star was Alfalfa. Her next was a dog and her next was a horse. This sublime kid-goddess of MGM was innocence squared, cubed, pureed and filigreed, and yet also eerily beautiful, eerily poised. Was she an actor? Are kids ever actors? Aren't they more like trained animals who can be taught certain Pavlovian responses to certain cues and in that way come to simulate emotional states whose creation is the core of adult performance? Possibly. But what mattered, whether she was acting or not, was how she vanquished the supposed objectivity of the camera. It obeyed her and no other.
What brought her before it? Was she ambitious? Did she have a Medea-like stage mother pushing her forward? That seems not to be the case. She was born in England in 1932 of American parents, and there picked up enough accent to gild her syllables ever since. Unlike, say, Madonna's English accent, hers was authentic; it came from being, not wanting to be. The family rushed home during the early war years; her father opened an art gallery in Beverly Hills. (They were originally from St. Louis, and one simply cannot imagine a world in which Elizabeth Taylor comes from St. Louis!) There the child's beauty brought her screen tests and that role opposite Alfalfa in a short. Lassie arfed with her afterward, but a few years later, in 1944, "National Velvet" burned her into the American retina, where she has lingered, if now only in afterglow, ever since.
Elizabeth I begat Elizabeth II as a beautiful young woman, a human swan. She seemed never to develop pimples or limbs that awkwardly outpaced torso and sabotaged her grace. Braces? Fool, queens do not wear braces! Her pearly whites, though tiny, lined up like well-drilled Prussian soldiers on the field at Austerlitz. Adolescent pudge? Oh, you dirty bird, to even suggest such a thing!
Yet it must also be said that of all the Queen Elizabeths, Elizabeth II was the least interesting. The eerie precision of the eyes (violet!), the elegant avian neck, the well-machined orchestration of lips to nose to cheekbones to face to hair (raven!) to skin (alabaster!) simply receded into the banality of average beauty. Yep. Beautiful, all right, but all the starlets of the late '40s and early '50s were beautiful. Try another Elizabeth, the one without the E: Lizabeth Scott? Remember her? Now that was sultry, smoldering, sex-charged Amurican beauty, blond and lean and mysterious. What they whispered about her! Anyhow, her fire would have melted poor Elizabeth II's prissy good-girl ice. But Confidential magazine drove Lizabeth out of pictures, while Elizabeth-with-an-E endured. As the queen of the lot, she was luckily in movies that were better than her still-developing talent entitled her to, like "Father of the Bride," where old common man Spencer Tracy did his weary decent-guy thing so well it was a miracle, or "Giant," where hot new thing James Dean stole the show.
She was already a star. She got A-list movies. Yet somehow she wasn't . . . great. Not yet. "Raintree County"? Please. And then there's her turn as Rebecca the Jewess in "Ivanhoe," for whom George Sanders, a great cur, chose that day a mace and chain to knout the Saxon dog ("Then number your life in minutes and the Saxon dog's as well," Sanders mutters bitterly, one of the best bad lines in movie history) and went out and got clocked by Mr. Wooden himself, Robert Taylor. But her Rebecca could have been played by anybody, even Lizabeth Scott! She is pretty much just beautiful and English, a slightly more zaftig Jean Simmons or Dana Wynter.
Ripeness is all, said Edgar in "King Lear." And that could be why Elizabeth Taylor was put on Earth, to give flesh to one of Shakespeare's most piercing lines. And when you saw Elizabeth III, ripeness was what you thought of. It was all you thought of. Flesh came to her elegant frame, and it stayed. It found interesting places to adhere. It had tone and strength and suppleness. She suddenly wasn't a woman but somehow meta-woman. She knocked your freaking eyes out. That began with 1958's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and its famous poster art: her in a slip, playing at slatternliness but only achieving pure blazing eros. Her erotic self became the reigning sexual reality in "Suddenly Last Summer." "BUtterfield 8" is in there somewhere, too, and even the ludicrous, expensive "Cleopatra," where her cleavage alone seemed to topple the Caesars.
Dame? Babe? Bombshell? These vulgar words don't even come close. Jayne Mansfield was a bombshell. Sophia Loren was an Italian bombshell. Elizabeth Taylor was none of these things. She may have been a goddess. In any event, her physical presence was nearly unbelievable, because it was so perfect it seemed alien. You still didn't think about having sex with her as you might a Marilyn or a Jane Russell or an Angie Dickinson. She was somehow too cool for sex.
Meanwhile, her private life was making her interesting in ways no one else's was. Briefly Ingrid Bergman rivaled her for scandal with an offshore fling with Roberto Rossellini, but meanwhile Elizabeth was marrying up every man on Earth. (As the great Shel Silverstein said, someday she'll get around to me!) This is where the boys were: at the altar with Liz. For the record, there was a Nicky, a Mike, another Mike, an Eddie, a Richard, the same Richard, a senator and a Larry. "You didn't expect me to sleep alone," she once explained, and it was a pretty good explanation of a woman who could not let herself have sex with men without marrying them! Sexual revolution? She never heard of it.
Anyway, only two of the guys are notable. That is Eddie (he was married to Debbie), who succored her upon the death of the second Mike and, in the sense that no bad deed goes unrewarded, soon was married to her. He dumped Debbie to be with Liz! The horror, the horror! The coolness, the coolness.
Can you young people get how cool this was? Oh, nobody said so. Instead, the public response was outrage. You'd think the foundations of society had crumbled, the commies had unleashed irradiated Pez or something. But if you were a guy in those days, even a young one, man, you thought: That is so cool! She takes this perky little twink's hubby, then . . . this is the really cool part . . . she dumps Eddie for Richard Burton. She ruins both Eddie and Debbie! Good shooting, Tex! Hats off to the lady who takes what she wants and brazenly plays femme fatale to the whole world. No noir spider dame ever got the hate mail she did.
Burton. Well, what can be said? Great actor who squandered it all and became a Hollywood hobo. All that talent, so little to show for it. How big did this guy hate himself? How hungry was he to die? At least he got her best performance out of her and ushered in Elizabeth IV -- the actress. Suddenly she was pretty damned good. Watch "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and marvel at the ferocity of her performance, her willingness to play with the image of blowsy vulgarity that so many projected upon her. Watch her act! Watch her win an Academy Award for acting instead of disease-surviving. (She seemed to get sick a lot. More orange juice would have helped.) Watch her do the same in "Reflections in a Golden Eye." Watch her fight to be serious for just a little while longer.
But Elizabeth V came along too soon. By the '70s, she had morphed again. She no longer played parts, she played Miss Elizabeth Taylor. It was at this stage, bruised and defiant, sick and radiant, having weathered much and stood full-face to the storm, that she became a gay icon, a Great Lady. Almost nothing she did has any artistic merit from this point on, but as social and cultural history, it is fascinating. In fact, I will almost guarantee that if you look her up on the Internet Movie Database, you will find no actress who has more credits in the following part. She played it 49 of the last 51 times she is listed: "And Elizabeth Taylor as Herself."
Herself! Yes! Who else would dare be Herself? The diamonds, the perfume, the Vaseline on the lens. If wrinkles couldn't be stretched away, they were blasted into shadow by genius cinematographers. She was vast, she was regal, she was almost like Kubrick's star-child floating toward Earth to be born, some strange godly creature beyond human knowability or judgment.
Which led to the last phase, Elizabeth VI, the paragon. She became one of the first public crusaders against AIDS, a cause she's fought for as valiantly as her namesake fought the Spanish armada. It may be the best of all the Elizabeths: not nearly as much fun to look at or think about, but still, isn't it nice to know she's there? |
