National Post (National Edition)
A TAYLOR-MADE CAREER
THE STRANGE, BUT TRUE, TALE BEHIND THE HOLLYWOOD LEGEND'S CHILDISH LIFE
Was Elizabeth Taylor ill all the time to remind herself she was human? Year in and year out, she was prone to food poisoning, pharyngitis, cystitis, slipped discs, bronchitis, appendicitis, the odd car crash, piles, suicide attempts and bee stings. Compared with Taylor, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux had it easy.
Perhaps the gods required payment for what one of Taylor's biographers listed as her “sexiness, rebellion, honesty and sheer life-force.”
Certainly, the actress could never remember a time when she wasn't famous or glamorous, and in her 80 years on this earth, she never once cooked her own breakfast. “I don't pretend to be an ordinary housewife,” Taylor admitted.
She never had an ordinary childhood, either. The “champagne and revelry” began when she was making National Velvet, at the age of 12. Taylor played the girl who masquerades as a boy to ride her horse to victory.
Taylor was a pampered child star at MGM, her first consort being Lassie. Louis B. Mayer treated her as a “miniature adult” and studio photographers were soon telling her, “You have bosoms! Stick them out!” An alliterative press release in 1949 described the 17-yearold Taylor as “the luscious, long-lashed lass of love.” Orson Welles was heard to murmur, “Remind me to be around when she grows up.” Taylor's first marriage, at the age of 19, was a lavish, studio-managed affair. Unfortunately,
Nicky Hilton, the millionaire hotelier, was also a gambler and a drunk, “who got a kick out of beating the s--t out of me,” according to his bride. When they returned from honeymoon, Taylor divorced him. In 1952, she married mild-mannered English actor Michael Wilding. Finding him boring, Taylor was seen in the company of bombastic impresario Mike Todd. He'd already declared bankruptcy twice, and it's a wonder he didn't go bust yet again.
“To keep Elizabeth happy,” he realized, “you had to give her a diamond before breakfast every morning.”
Todd married Taylor in 1957. He was killed in a plane crash a year later. “Well, Mike is dead and I'm alive,” said his widow, pragmatically. She comforted herself with the well-endowed singer Eddie Fisher.
“My father consoled Elizabeth with his penis,” said his daughter Carrie Fisher, who was later to find fame as Princess Leia in Star Wars.
For having “stolen Eddie away from sweet little Debbie Reynolds,” as the newspapers saw it, Taylor was attacked in the press as “a detestable little tramp.”
Nevertheless, she married Fisher in a Las Vegas synagogue in 1959. Soon enough, tedium set in. Fisher became addicted to amphetamines, Taylor fell into a cycle of pills and drink, and in Rome in 1961, when playing the Queen of the Nile, Taylor dumped Fisher for Richard Burton, another married man with two children.
The studio encouraged the liaison, as the epic about Antony and Cleopatra now had additional resonance — “an adulterous couple flaunting their lovemaking on the screen.”
The publicity for Fox was priceless, especially when the Pope castigated Taylor and Burton for their “erotic vagrancy.” As Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the director, announced: “Liz and Burton are not just playing Antony and Cleopatra!”
The history of Cleopatra is a history of record statistics: 142 miles of tubular steel were used for the sets, which also required 20,000 cubic feet of timber and 300 gallons of paint. Palm tree fronds were flown to Pinewood every morning from Africa. Such were overtime and union costs, by 1963 the $6-million budget had grown to $62 million.
After Taylor went down with viral pneumonia and failed to leave her suite at the Dorchester, production was finally abandoned in England entirely, and everything started from scratch in Rome. Leftover costumes were worn by Sid James and Kenneth Williams in Carry On Cleo.
Of her 228 designated shooting days at Cinecittà Studios, Taylor turned up on only 12. She was absent on 57 occasions and late 99 times, adding seven months to the schedule.
Nevertheless, Mankiewicz managed to shoot 26 hours of footage, and though it is axiomatic to scorn the four-hour film eventually released, I personally love it, from the vodka bloat of the stars to seeing the likes of George Cole and Michael Hordern in minor roles. Everything is marble and gold — golden palaces, golden clothes, golden facial makeup: Cleopatra is like a travel agent's poster of an impossibly exotic foreign country.
The whole thing is also flat-out 1960s, with the Burtons (interchangeable onscreen and off) not doing the sensible thing, but instead enjoying all the turbulence, anarchy, money, tastelessness and shamelessness.
“Why do the Burtons have to be so filthily ostentatious?” barked Rex Harrison, the film's Julius Caesar, seeing 14 pieces of monogrammed luggage in a hotel foyer. When Taylor, at the conclusion of the epic shoot, went to her villa in Switzerland, she was accompanied by three trucks for her pets, six trucks for her furnishings, and three Rolls-Royce limos for herself and her entourage.
Taylor and Burton were married in Quebec in 1964, and after many separations and battles, remarried each other in Botswana in 1975.
This was Taylor's prime, when she commanded million-dollar fees and a percentage of the gross. Out of the noise and mess came Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew and Joseph Losey's underrated Boom! Taylor's blowsy, fretful, boastful, pathologically impatient and easily distracted personality got a full airing, and she swanned about on private jets and yachts, swathed in mink. She dripped with jewels.
“Big girls need big diamonds,” she stated — and her weight waxed more than it waned.
Taylor loved the vulgar trappings, the palatial dressing rooms, the colour-coded cigarette holders that must never “clash with the tablecloths,” the paparazzi, the reporters, the crowds of adoring fans waiting outside nightclubs.
As Burton sighed, “Elizabeth liked a good chase scene,” with gossip columnists in hot pursuit.
You ought not to be able to remain a child star all your life, but Taylor did. Her idea of love was egotistical, possessive — involving a childlike intensity. She liked material things, shiny objects, such as her famous gems. She was always aware of the impression she was making on others, and if the Burtons left one legacy it was that, after their riotous public courtship and marriage, people had to think about morality, respectability, in a new way.
For here suddenly were celebrity lives openly revealed. With Taylor, we were given an excess of personal information — her operations, her medical bulletins. It was all a premonition of today's social media.