Globe Staff / March 23, 2011
VIA : Boston Globe
Elizabeth Taylor, the last of the great Hollywood studio stars and the first of the modern mega-celebrities, died Wednesday in Los Angeles of congestive heart failure. Although seemingly ageless, she was in fact 79.
Miss Taylor began her career as a child actress and rose to fame in the movies, but it was as herself -- or a melodramatic projection of herself the media dubbed "Liz" (a nickname she detested, incidentally) -- that she captured the often outraged attention of the world.
She was nominated for five Oscars and won twice, for "Butterfield 8" (1961) and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1967). She married eight times, twice to Richard Burton. She was denounced by the Vatican for "erotic vagrancy." She stole husbands only to abandon them and became an ever larger object of fascination as a result.
In her final decades, as her stardom outgrew the need for movies, Miss Taylor sailed on in a state of perpetual celebrity buoyed by personalized perfumes, a diet book, AIDS charity work, illnesses, and romance, always romance. Her final husband was a construction worker she had met in rehab. She called her close friend Michael Jackson "the most normal person I know." She had her 60th birthday party at Disneyland, and irony was not on the menu.
We will not see her like again.
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born on Feb. 27, 1932, in London, the daughter of a St. Louis art dealer and his actress wife who had relocated to England to open a gallery. Although Miss Taylor was only 7 when her parents moved to Los Angeles to escape the oncoming war, an air of British refinement clung to the young girl and, coupled with her striking, violet-eyed prettiness, led to a screen test and a short-lived contract with Universal Pictures.
Miss Taylor's first film was a 1942 short called "There's One Born Every Minute." She also appeared that year opposite Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer from the "Our Gang" comedies in "Man or Mouse."
Her father's chance meeting with an MGM producer resulted in a new contract and her first large film role, at 11, as Roddy McDowall's sweetheart in "Lassie Come Home" (1943). Miss Taylor's quality of intense self-possession was seen in "Jane Eyre" (1943), where she played Jane's doomed childhood friend, and "The White Cliffs of Dover" (1944), but it was "National Velvet" (1944) that turned the young actress into a household name.
As the horse-crazy Velvet Brown, she so visibly throbs with emotion that one British reviewer was unsettled, writing that "whenever she speaks or thinks about horses her strange azure eyes gleam and her whole frame trembles with the intensity of her passion."
In the wake of the film's success, MGM promoted its new discovery as a small pantheist -- a nature freak who literally talked to animals. The young Miss Taylor even wrote a children's book about her pet chipmunk in which she described returning the animal to the wild in terms that oddly predicted her future attitude toward husbands: "(I knew a new one) would come to me -- not to take his place, but to bring the same sense of love to me, and he did -- and I knew him immediately, and I named him Nibbles -- not Nibbles the Second, but just Nibbles -- my favorite chipmunk."
Miss Taylor's early persona was of a young girl living on the knife-edge of her senses, but MGM rushed to cast her in frothy comedies and light dramas: a spoiled child in "Cynthia" (1947), a cousin in "Life With Father" (1947). She played the youngest March sister in a remake of "Little Women" (1949) and finally had a romantic lead, opposite Robert Taylor, in "Conspirator" (1950).
In 1951, she took on her first major adult role, in George Stevens's "A Place in the Sun": Angela Vickers, the spoiled rich girl who dazzles Montgomery Clift into murdering for her. Stevens told Miss Taylor to play her as "not so much a real girl but the girl on the candy box cover," and critics, never the actress's best friends, acknowledged that her performance marked a new and mysterious complexity. Even modern audiences are shaken when Miss Taylor enfolds Clift in her arms and murmurs into his ear, "Tell mama ... Tell mama all."
As on film, so in life. The film marked the beginning of her deep friendship with Clift, one of many troubled Hollywood outsiders Miss Taylor would take under her wing over the decades. He nicknamed her Bessie Mae and gave her advice that would serve her well in both acting and star attitude: "Let them come to you."
Audiences and fan magazines did. So did husbands. Her first marriage, in 1950, was to hotel heir Nicky Hilton, and a month after the wedding Spencer Tracy was escorting Miss Taylor down the aisle in theaters across America in "Father of the Bride". But Hilton was a party boy who spent their honeymoon drinking and gambling, and the couple soon separated; the divorce was finalized by the time Miss Taylor played pregnant in the 1951 "Bride" sequel, "Father's Little Dividend."
Public sentiment remained with the actress through her five-year marriage (1952-1957) to Michael Wilding, a British actor 19 years her senior with whom she had two sons, Michael and Christopher. Miss Taylor's film career languished, however, with decorative roles in formula pictures. Of such movies as "Rhapsody" and "Beau Brummell," both 1954, she later said, "A lot of them I haven't seen, but I must have been appalling in them."
A corner was turned with her courtship and 1957 marriage to showman Mike Todd, the dynamo producer/impresario of "Around the World in 80 Days." Miss Taylor appeared with James Dean in "Giant" and starred in "Raintree County," both lavish melodramatic epics that cost and made a lot of money. The latter co-starred Clift, who was involved in a serious car accident during production; Miss Taylor cradled his ruined face while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. "Raintree" marked her first Oscar nomination.
When Todd died in a 1958 plane crash, after a year of marriage and a daughter, Liza, sympathy for the three-time-unlucky widow ran high. Todd's funeral was mobbed by photographers and gawkers while newspapers blared the details of "Liz Taylor's Year of Disaster." Within months, however, the same newspapers were vilifying her.
Miss Taylor's crime: stealing her late husband's best man, Eddie Fisher, from his wholesome, all-American wife, Debbie Reynolds ("Singin' in the Rain"). Unrepentant, Miss Taylor famously said "I'm not taking anything away from Debbie Reynolds because she never really had it," and told gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, "What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?" She received bags of hate mail and was denounced in editorials and pulpits.
Even her children's birth by caesarean section was chalked up to spoiled impatience in one newspaper account that stated, "Gestation was impossibly long from Liz's viewpoint." It was the premier scandal of the 1950s and gave Miss Taylor a new and lasting public persona as a willful wanton.
The movies reflected that persona. In "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958), she was Maggie the Cat, clinging seductively to her brass bed and daring Brick (Paul Newman) to come back. Next she was Catherine Holly in "Suddenly Last Summer (1959), hoping to reveal the bizarre secret of her cousin's death before her aunt (Katharine Hepburn) has her lobotomized. Both films were written by Tennessee Williams and both netted Miss Taylor Oscar nominations; her next, "BUtterfield 8" (1960) came from a novel by John O'Hara and cast her as a model-escort who describes herself as "the slut of all time."
Miss Taylor reportedly hated the movie, but by the time the 1961 Oscar season rolled around, the actress was hospitalized with double pneumonia, the newspapers were breathlessly reporting on her emergency tracheotomy, and a sympathy Best Actress statuette was in the cards.
Miss Taylor later said, "I won the Oscar because I almost died -- plain and simple."
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