Nicholas Lezard reviews Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon
The title page, and its verso, come dotted with little stars. How could they not be?
They are there not only to show that Elisabeth Taylor was a star, who outshone other stars, but I think also to suggest the jewellery she loved so much, lavished on her by so many husbands. Ah, so many husbands...
She once showed off a new ring to her ex-husband, Richard Burton (ex-ex-husband? ex-ex-ex-husband?), which was slightly smaller than her usual baubles, but still in the double-digit-carat range. He said, ‘You on a diet, luv?’
By the way, this is the kind of book in which the carats of her diamonds, and sapphires, and whatnots, are measured to two decimal places. And again: how could they not be?
Her weight was an issue for much of her career in a way that seems strikingly hypocritical even for the times, for her body was very much an asset. Burton described her breasts as ‘apocalyptic’, which is at least original.
Various creepy, religious-based busybodies who had a stranglehold on the production of Hollywood films would scrutinise her embonpoint. During the shooting of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she was visited by a BI, which actually stands for Bust Inspector. He asked for a stepladder, looked down, and declared that if they wanted to continue filming, she would have to have a higher neckline.
By that stage of her career, she had had enough of this nonsense and ignored him.
During the making of Suddenly, Last Summer, talk of her weight gain was going round the set. The producer, Sam Spiegel, said, ‘If Elizabeth Taylor is overweight, I for one am at a loss to suggest what there should be less of.’
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She had been a star since National Velvet, when she was 12. When she was 17, MGM centred its publicity campaign around the claim her next film would feature her first actual kiss.
She had a mother who was so monstrous that she arranged for an operation that would determine whether she was a virgin or not. Only Marilyn Monroe had to deal with such ogling, and look what happened to her. Taylor said she was afraid of getting old. Joan Collins said the problem with beauty is that it’s like starting out rich and getting poorer.
I pinpointed the moment when the world got too much for her and took her off her hinges: in March 1958, when she learned that her husband, Mike Todd, had died in a plane crash. Very slight variations of the sentence ‘Meanwhile, her marriage to X was unravelling’ occur throughout the book – but not with regard to Mike. They weren’t together for long, which might have had something to do with it, but he was the kind of man she liked: tough, domineering and ludicrously rich. He would buy Pissarros and Picassos to liven up her hospital room when she needed an operation, even when there were already plenty at home.
She dropped the need for wealth when she married Larry Fortensky, a construction worker she met in rehab who also happened to be 20 years her junior. That marriage unravelled.
But the real question is not when she went mad (early sign: dyeing her poodle to match her eyes for her first marriage) but when the world went mad. The maniac degree and intensity of the public’s appetite for her was boundless, and has no rival today that I can think of. It would have driven anyone off the rails.
Her idea of a good time came to be getting into a punching row with her latest husband and then rushing upstairs to have make-up sex. Not all the men she married liked that; her marriages to them unravelled.
But there was no wickedness in her. The director Mike Nichols said, ‘There are three things I never saw [her] do: tell a lie; be unkind to anyone; and be on time.’
If you were damaged and crossed her path – Montgomery Clift, Michael Jackson – she would be your friend. She stuck up for homosexual men at a time when it was considered unwise to do so. Lord knows how many lives she saved with her AIDS charities.
She was in a way monstrous; but one of the good ones. This book is unputdownable.
Nicholas Lezard is author of It Gets Worse: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury
