I learned of Elizabeth Taylor's death late yesterday afternoon. Like so many fans, I felt saddened and, of course, older. There was an excellent extended obituary in today's New York Times by the late Mel Gussow, written in 2005. Obviously, the Times (and doubtless other newspapers) has obituaries on famous people already written and "ready to go" when the death actually occurs. What was interesting was reading a posthumous obituary, written by someone whose own death preceded that of his subject--in this case by more than five years. The photograph on the front page shows Miss Taylor at her most beautiful, probably taken when she was in her late twenties or early thirties. The black and white head and shoulders photo could not, of course, do justice to those beautiful violet eyes, let alone her ample bosom.
When I was a pre-pubescent boy of eleven, I was asked by a more mature lad of twelve whom I found more attractive, Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor. Aware that this was a "taste test," I knew I was supposed to choose Miss Taylor, but to me, it was no contest. Although unaware of it at the time, I'd already been hard-wired for brunettes, and in that category, not even Gina Lolabrigida or Sophia Loren--great beauties in their own right--could hold a candle to Elizabeth Taylor. In any event, Taylor and Monroe were the reigning American beauties of the early 50's and neither choice could have been wrong. I suppose that Miss Taylor exuded a kind of sophisticated elegance to which Miss Monroe neither sought nor achieved, although one could argue that Marilyn's appeal (at least in choice of husbands) was felt by our very best athlete (Joe DiMaggio) and most prominent playwright (Arthur Miller). (Tennesse Williams was exempted from that universe by virtue of sexual preference, but he certainly recognized Miss Taylor's qualities by selecting her to play at least two of his movie heroines.)
Miss Taylor (she, apparently, hated being called "Liz," so I will refrain from so addressing her) was married eight times (twice, as is well known to the same man--Richard Burton) and admittedly loved not wisely, but too well. The marriages I remember most were those to Michael Todd, whose name I knew best as the producer of "Around the World in Eighty Days," and Eddie Fisher, his successor in interest. I saw a pregnant Miss Taylor beaming at the Oscars, accompanied by Todd, and envied him for putting her in the condition for which I would have so gladly substituted as an adolescent surrogate. When Todd tragically died in the crash of his small private plane, she was the beautiful, grieving widow with whom all America sympathized. In a blog from last September, I wrote about the passing of Eddie Fisher, who was headlined in one obit as "Princess Leia's father." For those readers too young to remember, Fisher had been a teen-aged heart-throb almost on the scale of Elvis Presley, who succeeded Fischer as America's most popular vocalist. Apparently, Miss Taylor, who was informed of Fisher's death by his daughter Carrie (she of the above Princess Leia reference), wept over his passing.
But, marriages apart, Elizabeth Taylor lives on through her movie roles. While she won Oscars for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe (which I saw) and "Butterfield 8" (which I didn't), those are not her most memorable roles to me. She was at her unattainable peak at 19 in "A Place in the Sun," the 1951 movie of Dreiser's "An American Tragedy." She was the rich man's daughter for whom the upwardly socially mobile Montgomery Clift forsook his pregnant everywoman, Shelley Winters, and ultimately paid the price of sin (and crime). Watching this movie, you can feel Clift's pain, years before Bill Clinton popularized the expression. I felt it, too. Some years later, in "Suddenly, Last Summer," Miss Taylor again played opposite Montgomery Clift (as a grant-seeking psychiatrist) and Katherine Hepburn. This time, she played the beard of a doomed young man named Sebastian, who literally got eaten alive (no kidding) by a band of natives on a beach to which he was accompanied by Miss Taylor. The movie is among Tennessee Williams's lesser, but more sensational efforts, most memorable for the white, skin-tight bathing suit Miss Taylor wore, complete with plunging neckline, in which she aroused more libidinous interest for my cohort of teen-agers than the most explicit pornography was to do less than ten-years later for the next.
I saw Elizabeth Taylor at a charitable event in 1982, an evening memorable for me because I had the opportunity of visiting with another legend, the late Lena Horne who had just concluded her Tony-award winning show, "A Lady and Her Music." She was gracious, friendly, and astonishingly beautiful at sixty-five. Sadly, Miss Taylor, at fifty-one, had not held up as well. Struggling with her own battle to control her weight, she was surrounded by a fawning retinue of three or four men and women, desperately applying powder to her lined and aging face. I write this not to speak ill of the dead, but to underscore the shock I felt at seeing her, finally, and flawed, "in the flesh." I suppose that one of the drawbacks of being the most beautiful woman in the world--and she was--is that it is a designation which is, by its nature, fleeting. Like a former heavyweight champion of the world who has become become fleshy and ungainly in middle-age, so Miss Taylor found herself confronted by the battle of time, the one fight that is impossible to win.
But that painful memory is supplanted by my visions of her on the silver screen, a legacy that she has left us all; for when I see her as, say, Maggie the Cat (in Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"), she makes one pause in disbelief at how even Paul Newman (as her tormented--and sexually conflicted-- husband) could have resisted her incomparable beauty. It is equally important to mention that Miss Taylor was universally regarded as a kind and caring person, beloved by fans and friends alike.
In the "Critics Notebook" that accompanied Gussow's obituary, Manohla Dargis began her reminiscence of Elizabeth Taylor's movie career with a sentence that is a fitting ending to this piece: "The last movie star died Wednesday." Indeed.
When I was a pre-pubescent boy of eleven, I was asked by a more mature lad of twelve whom I found more attractive, Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor. Aware that this was a "taste test," I knew I was supposed to choose Miss Taylor, but to me, it was no contest. Although unaware of it at the time, I'd already been hard-wired for brunettes, and in that category, not even Gina Lolabrigida or Sophia Loren--great beauties in their own right--could hold a candle to Elizabeth Taylor. In any event, Taylor and Monroe were the reigning American beauties of the early 50's and neither choice could have been wrong. I suppose that Miss Taylor exuded a kind of sophisticated elegance to which Miss Monroe neither sought nor achieved, although one could argue that Marilyn's appeal (at least in choice of husbands) was felt by our very best athlete (Joe DiMaggio) and most prominent playwright (Arthur Miller). (Tennesse Williams was exempted from that universe by virtue of sexual preference, but he certainly recognized Miss Taylor's qualities by selecting her to play at least two of his movie heroines.)
Miss Taylor (she, apparently, hated being called "Liz," so I will refrain from so addressing her) was married eight times (twice, as is well known to the same man--Richard Burton) and admittedly loved not wisely, but too well. The marriages I remember most were those to Michael Todd, whose name I knew best as the producer of "Around the World in Eighty Days," and Eddie Fisher, his successor in interest. I saw a pregnant Miss Taylor beaming at the Oscars, accompanied by Todd, and envied him for putting her in the condition for which I would have so gladly substituted as an adolescent surrogate. When Todd tragically died in the crash of his small private plane, she was the beautiful, grieving widow with whom all America sympathized. In a blog from last September, I wrote about the passing of Eddie Fisher, who was headlined in one obit as "Princess Leia's father." For those readers too young to remember, Fisher had been a teen-aged heart-throb almost on the scale of Elvis Presley, who succeeded Fischer as America's most popular vocalist. Apparently, Miss Taylor, who was informed of Fisher's death by his daughter Carrie (she of the above Princess Leia reference), wept over his passing.
But, marriages apart, Elizabeth Taylor lives on through her movie roles. While she won Oscars for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe (which I saw) and "Butterfield 8" (which I didn't), those are not her most memorable roles to me. She was at her unattainable peak at 19 in "A Place in the Sun," the 1951 movie of Dreiser's "An American Tragedy." She was the rich man's daughter for whom the upwardly socially mobile Montgomery Clift forsook his pregnant everywoman, Shelley Winters, and ultimately paid the price of sin (and crime). Watching this movie, you can feel Clift's pain, years before Bill Clinton popularized the expression. I felt it, too. Some years later, in "Suddenly, Last Summer," Miss Taylor again played opposite Montgomery Clift (as a grant-seeking psychiatrist) and Katherine Hepburn. This time, she played the beard of a doomed young man named Sebastian, who literally got eaten alive (no kidding) by a band of natives on a beach to which he was accompanied by Miss Taylor. The movie is among Tennessee Williams's lesser, but more sensational efforts, most memorable for the white, skin-tight bathing suit Miss Taylor wore, complete with plunging neckline, in which she aroused more libidinous interest for my cohort of teen-agers than the most explicit pornography was to do less than ten-years later for the next.
I saw Elizabeth Taylor at a charitable event in 1982, an evening memorable for me because I had the opportunity of visiting with another legend, the late Lena Horne who had just concluded her Tony-award winning show, "A Lady and Her Music." She was gracious, friendly, and astonishingly beautiful at sixty-five. Sadly, Miss Taylor, at fifty-one, had not held up as well. Struggling with her own battle to control her weight, she was surrounded by a fawning retinue of three or four men and women, desperately applying powder to her lined and aging face. I write this not to speak ill of the dead, but to underscore the shock I felt at seeing her, finally, and flawed, "in the flesh." I suppose that one of the drawbacks of being the most beautiful woman in the world--and she was--is that it is a designation which is, by its nature, fleeting. Like a former heavyweight champion of the world who has become become fleshy and ungainly in middle-age, so Miss Taylor found herself confronted by the battle of time, the one fight that is impossible to win.
But that painful memory is supplanted by my visions of her on the silver screen, a legacy that she has left us all; for when I see her as, say, Maggie the Cat (in Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"), she makes one pause in disbelief at how even Paul Newman (as her tormented--and sexually conflicted-- husband) could have resisted her incomparable beauty. It is equally important to mention that Miss Taylor was universally regarded as a kind and caring person, beloved by fans and friends alike.
In the "Critics Notebook" that accompanied Gussow's obituary, Manohla Dargis began her reminiscence of Elizabeth Taylor's movie career with a sentence that is a fitting ending to this piece: "The last movie star died Wednesday." Indeed.
