CHAPTER 2

ELIZABETH TAYLOR

Notorious

DIFFICULT WOMEN SHARE many commonalities. But the one trait they all possess is complete indifference to what people think. There was no one for whom this was more true than Elizabeth Taylor.

During her seven decades in the spotlight as America’s sexiest, most gossiped-about film actress, there was never any doubt that Hollywood’s first modern movie star was doing exactly what she wanted to do, regardless of what people said about her. She rarely explained herself or interpreted her behavior to put other people at ease. She was both wondrous and terrifying: a hyperfeminine and hypersexual woman who couldn’t be contained or controlled by public opinion. To be a woman like Elizabeth—who tells you to take your scarlet A and shove it—is to be difficult, dangerous, and powerful.

Her résumé is well known, though less so as time marches on. When I asked my 24-year-old daughter what she knew about Elizabeth Taylor, she said Liz had a lot of husbands and rocked the eyeliner in Cleopatra. True! But she also was a child actor whose breakout role in National Velvet (a film my horse-loving daughter adored and apparently forgot) occurred when she was 12. From that moment on, Elizabeth Taylor was a star, and would remain one of the brightest in the firmament for the next 67 years, until her death in 2011 at age 79.

Elizabeth made a handful of classic films, including A Place in the Sun (1951), Giant (1956), BUtterfield 8 (1960), and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966); the last two earned her a pair of best actress Oscars. But the real show was the way she conducted herself. She was a sexy woman who did nothing to hide her appetites; she lived her very public life with gusto and a complete lack of remorse during the buttoned-up 1950s.

In 1964, she married Richard Burton, with whom she costarred in Cleopatra. They would divorce, then remarry, then divorce once and for all in 1976. Every public quarrel, separation, and tearful reunion was front-page news.

During and after the Liz and Dick years, Elizabeth made some great and terrible movies (Doctor Faustus, anyone?^*1), spent two stints in rehab after becoming addicted to booze and prescription pain pills, got fat, got thin, married a few more times (Republican senator John Warner, construction worker and mullet-rocker Larry Fortensky), launched a series of fragrances that made her extremely rich, and founded what would be the first important organization to battle AIDS. And these are only a handful of the high points.

ELIZABETH ROSEMOND TAYLOR was born in London to American parents in 1932. The Taylors traveled in rarified circles: Elizabeth’s father, Francis, was an art dealer with a posh gallery on Bond Street; her mother, Sara, had acted a bit on the stage. From the time she was a toddler, people remarked on Elizabeth’s beauty: her black hair, her alabaster skin, and her stunning eyes that were in fact a lovely medium blue (and not violet, as everyone would one day have it^*2). Eye color aside, she was also blessed with a genetic mutation called distichiasis: double eyelashes. (I know: I feel for her too.) In 1943, Elizabeth costarred with Roddy McDowall in Lassie Come Home. McDowall liked to tell the story of how the director ordered Elizabeth to wash off her mascara the first day on set. Except: She wasn’t wearing any.

More evidence, as if we needed any, that life is unfair.

Elizabeth’s eyes may have been beautiful, but they were also alarming. Studio heads at Universal, where she had a brief contract that was allowed to expire, said she didn’t look like a child, but had “old eyes.” In those days, the studios were all looking for the next Shirley Temple, with her sausage curls, jaunty pinafore, and chirpy songs about the Good Ship Lollipop. But that was not Elizabeth Taylor. There was something too knowing about her, something unsettling and a little wild.

The 11-year-old Elizabeth had been a huge fan of National Velvet, the 1935 novel by Enid Bagnold. Together, she and her mother lobbied Pandro S. Berman, the head of MGM, for the costarring role of Velvet Brown. Berman turned her down flat, saying that she was simply too short for the role, which required her at one point to pass herself off as a male jockey. In one of the first, great apocryphal stories meant to convey the sheer tenacity of Elizabeth Taylor, she went home, willed herself to grow three inches, then came back and landed the part.

Velvet Brown is a young English girl who wins a horse in a raffle and aspires to ride him in the Grand National Steeplechase. She’s aided in her quest by a down-on-his-luck jockey (is there any other kind?), played by Mickey Rooney. Because girls weren’t allowed to ride in the Grand National, she disguises herself as a boy and rides to triumph. Rooney is ostensibly the star, but Elizabeth steals the show. It’s a treat to see her in a prepubescent moment: that blink of a cultural eye before she became a woman to be reckoned with.

That was the thing about Elizabeth Taylor: There were no coltish years during which she languished awkwardly on the cusp of womanhood. She was a kid, and then suddenly, she was a va-va-va-voom hottie. In 1949, she starred with 38-year-old Robert Taylor in Conspirator, complete with torrid-for-the-time love scenes. She was a mere 16 during the film’s production.

These days, there are some women who take pride in being called “girls,” shopping in the junior (or even children’s) department, and banishing post-baby pooches as soon as is humanly possible. But Taylor reveled in her hourglass figure and looked to cash in on the spoils of adult womanhood as soon as she could.

As a child star, Elizabeth had been cloistered by her parents and managed by the studio; she had no real friends. “Without the usual crowd of peers most teens use to define themselves, I knew I would have to grow up even faster,” she wrote in her 1987 memoir/self-help tome Elizabeth Takes Off: On Weight Gain, Weight Loss, Self-Image, and Self-Esteem. “I didn’t have to be a genius to realize that I would have to find a place away from both my parents’ house and the studio. After several failed attempts, I realized the only way I could escape was through marriage.”

Which she did, to Conrad “Nicky” Hilton, in 1950. Even at the tender age of 18, marriage for Elizabeth wasn’t marriage as we lesser mortals think of it. It was more like industrial-strength dating. For the rest of her life, she would breezily swing from one man to the next, like Tarzan from vine to vine. Mr. Right Now was always Mr. Right. “I’ve only slept with men I’ve been married to,” she once said, “How many women can make that claim?” If that’s true, she was more decorous than anyone gave her credit for.

There were the Major Husbands who rocked her world (Michael Wilding^*3, Mike Todd, Richard Burton, and Richard Burton). And then there were the Minor Husbands, companions who seemed only to keep her bed warm (Conrad Hilton, Eddie Fisher, John Warner, Larry Fortensky). She loved them until she didn’t; then it was on to the next. Elizabeth was romantic, passionate, impetuous, but she had no aptitude for riding out the rough patches. Nor, in her entitled way, did she believe that she should.

The engagement to Nicky Hilton was multipurpose: an instance of boffo cross-promotional kismet. Studio publicists routinely stirred up gossip about romances between costars as a form of cheap marketing. But rarely did something like this happen: In the spring of 1950 Elizabeth also happened to be costarring in Father of the Bride with Spencer Tracy as, you guessed it, a bride. MGM was thrilled to pick up the tab for Elizabeth’s May wedding (including the dress). The church for the real wedding was decorated in the same way as the church in the movie wedding. The ceremony took place a month before the release of the film. The film was a hit, while the marriage was not; they were divorced after eight months. Elizabeth was still 18.

In 1951, she costarred in the classic A Place in the Sun. It was the height of the Hays Code era, when movies were censored within an inch of incomprehensibility. The Motion Picture Production Code, as it was also known, ruled Hollywood between 1930 and 1968—but it was particularly stringent during Elizabeth’s early movies. Every page of every script was scrutinized to be sure that there was no nudity, profanity, shots of people in bed, or references to “sexual perversion,” which included homosexuality, open or implicit criticisms of marriage, law enforcement, or religion. There was also a specially appointed BI, or Bust Inspector, to police the cleavage.

The film starred Montgomery Clift as George Eastman, the poor nephew of a rich uncle who manufacturers women’s bathing suits. He meets vivacious, breathtaking socialite Angela Vickers (Elizabeth) at one of his uncle’s parties. Assuming she’s completely out of his league, he settles for innocent factory co-worker Alice Tripp, played to perfection by Shelley Winters. George and Angela meet again and fall in love, just as Alice learns she’s “in trouble.” George wants her to terminate the pregnancy; we know this because he makes a few phone calls from a sketchy pay phone and writes down the name of a doctor on a sad little crumpled piece of paper. Alice drags herself to the doctor, who apparently cannot help her (unless you consider his stern lecture about how she will make a healthy mother, “help”). Alice blackmails George into marrying her—but thinking better of it, he decides to drown her instead. In short order, he’s apprehended and sent to the electric chair. The end.

The movie was provocative in its time because it dared to dramatize the plight of pregnancy out of wedlock. But it’s also an unwitting cautionary tale for what happens to men who settle. Don’t have unprotected sex with the first girl who says yes, sir. You’re better than that! Have a little self-respect! With that handsome mug and full head of hair, you could land gorgeous, ditzy Angela Vickers.

A Place in the Sun won a slew of production Oscars, and Clift and Winters were both nominated. Elizabeth was not, and for good reason. Variety wrote: “[Taylor’s] histrionics are of a quality so far beyond anything she has done previously, that Stevens’ skilled hands on the reins must be credited with a minor miracle.”

But it didn’t matter. It would never matter. Whether she turned in an Oscar-worthy performance or something more typical of a community college theater department on the skids, Elizabeth Taylor on the screen—with that heart-shaped face and 19-inch waist—was a female force to be reckoned with.

Elizabeth Taylor would be called the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, but come on. Beauty is possibly the most subjective thing on Earth (after how people like their eggs). Grace Kelly, Elizabeth’s peer, was easily as beautiful. But Elizabeth stirred up something in our wayward human hearts. In The Accidental Feminist, M. G. Lord writes about Elizabeth’s genius for evoking primitive, nonverbal feelings: “Taylor spoke directly to our ancient aft-brain: our amygdala, the repository of love, hate, fear, and lust.” Camille Paglia, in her usual overheated way, wrote, “[A]n electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens.” Elizabeth was, in fact, the perfect screen siren for the Hays Code era—because she could evoke deep, dirty, confusing thoughts simply by standing there.

IN HER WOMANLY WAY Elizabeth was also a prodigy of procreation. In 1952, a year after she cast aside Hilton, she tied the knot with British actor Michael Wilding in a low-key wedding at the registry office. He was 40, she was a month shy of her 20th birthday. He was a friend-and-protector-style husband. A year later, their son Michael Jr. was born. Two years later, another son, Christopher, was born. An heir and a spare. Done and done.

Elizabeth had been making movies all along, as best she could. Her pregnancies stalled her career. Weddings were great publicity, but the pregnancies that followed? Not so much. A pregnancy wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t something the Hays Code could reframe, and the specter of a wasp-waisted lovely gaining 50 pounds, as Elizabeth did with both pregnancies, was too appalling for words. There was no provision for maternity leave in a studio contract. Actresses who dared to get pregnant were suspended without pay. When they returned, wasp-waisted again, they were often given the lousy roles that less troublesome, nonpregnant actresses had turned down. I’m simplifying the situation, but not much. After her sons were born, Elizabeth dutifully appeared in a handful of forgettable films because she needed to work. Wilding was a rank-and-file actor, respected in London, but unknown in L.A. Touchingly, they needed the money.

At the tender age of 23, Elizabeth told the press she’d had it with Hollywood and was thinking about retiring to devote herself to her family. Had this happened, perhaps another actress would have been left to lay the groundwork for modern celebrity culture, where the so-called private life is the entertainment, and whatever the celebrity produces—movies, plays, paintings, fragrances, or Instagram accounts—gives us an excuse to form a devoted and completely illogical attachment.

Producer Mike Todd, husband number three, arrived on the scene in 1956. Elizabeth’s rebound marriage to Michael Wilding was in tatters. He was unhappy in Hollywood, both at the state of his career and in his role as Mr. Taylor. He soothed his despair with strippers, thus proving he was also ahead of his time.

Out went the old Mike, in came the new, even older Mike. He was 49; she was 24. Best known for producing Around the World in 80 Days and developing Todd-AO, a widescreen theater format that improved the moviegoing experience, older Mike was loud and showbizzy, and sounds perfectly awful. He was one of those guys who, at a large dinner party, gestures to his wife with a chicken leg and says, “I’m going to eat this, and you, too.” Wink.

Todd’s proposal to Elizabeth was a statement, not a question. He asked her to come to his office at MGM. “He told me he was going to marry me,” she said. “He didn’t ask me, he told me. He was irresistible.”

Really, Liz?

Clearly she saw something in this arrangement—and indeed, Mike Todd laid the groundwork for her transition to Difficult Woman Extraordinaire. He was the wizard-husband who demonstrated to Elizabeth how to make her natural beauty, sense of entitlement, and lack of expectation in having a private life, work for her. Todd showed her how, without any serious effort on her part, she might keep people watching and wondering what was going to happen to her next, which would make her even more celebrated, allowing her to eventually ask a cool million for Cleopatra. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Never one to miss a marketing opportunity, Todd announced their engagement on the day Around the World in 80 Days was released, then slid a 29.4-carat engagement ring on Elizabeth’s finger. The thing was as big as a postage stamp, and inaugurated Elizabeth’s lavish fit-for-a-queen jewelry collection.^*4 Pretty much every week that followed, Todd would present her with some astonishing new piece. The ruby and diamond Cartier suite (necklace, bracelet, and earrings). The diamond tiara (she liked to wear it by the pool at their rented villa outside Monte Carlo). The $42,000 black pearl ring.

If there’s a page we can all take from Elizabeth’s book, it’s believing we’re worth the gems. To no one’s knowledge was there ever a moment when Elizabeth said, “Honey! What am I going to do with a tiara?! Take it back and let’s take a trip/remodel the kitchen/give it away to charity.” What Elizabeth Taylor never said in her longish life is, “Oh, you shouldn’t have.” And neither should we.

LAYERED BETWEEN ANNOUNCEMENTS of what precious bauble was nestled in the latest black velvet box were bulletins about Elizabeth’s health. They were surefire attention magnets: sparkling and very expensive gestures of love interwoven with alarming hospital visits. The birth of a baby girl, Liza, in 1957, added more luster to the love story.

Like her dramatic love life and growing world-class jewelry collection, Elizabeth’s health issues were larger than life. Although she endured a lot of genuine and prolonged agony, she was also raced to the hospital for the sort of twisted ankles and phlegmy coughs that the rest of us treat with Advil and a day off from work. The best we can tell, no one ever said take two aspirin and call me in the morning to Elizabeth Taylor.

She broke her foot while filming Lassie Come Home, required surgery to remove a piece of flint from her eye, and underwent the usual appendectomy and tonsillectomy. She was hospitalized for the flu. She was hospitalized for a pinched nerve.^*5 Her births were all C-sections. After she met Mike Todd, she underwent an extensive, multiple-hour back surgery to repair a crushed disk she’d suffered from falling down some stairs. These are only the greatest hits of her medical chart, all racked up before she was 24 years old.

Indeed, it was her dodgy health that saved her life. In March 1958, Mike Todd was scheduled to be in New York to receive an award for something or other, and Elizabeth, laid low by the flu, couldn’t join him. En route, his private plane, the Lucky Liz, crashed in New Mexico, killing all aboard.

Elizabeth was throttled with grief. Who wouldn’t be? As all the gossip rags would remind the world, she and Todd had only had 417 days together. She was in the middle of filming Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and production was shut down while she adjusted to her new life as a widow with three young children. But you know, she wasn’t alone for long, because that was not how Elizabeth Taylor rolled.

Enter Eddie Fisher, wildly famous crooner (and father, incidentally, of Carrie Fisher—see Chapter 29). Or I should say, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. They were couple-friends with Elizabeth and Mike Todd. Elizabeth and Debbie knew each other from girlhood, when they’d both been under contract at MGM and went to school together on the lot. Eddie and Mike were also friends. When Elizabeth and Mike married, Debbie was her matron of honor and Eddie was the best man. They were those kind of friends.

When Mike Todd was killed, Eddie was also throttled with grief. Debbie was perhaps also upset, but she had two very small children to tend to, plus her career. Here is Carrie Fisher on what happened next:

“Well, naturally, my father flew to Elizabeth’s side, gradually making his way slowly to her front. He first dried her eyes with his handkerchief, then he consoled her with flowers, and ultimately consoled her with his penis. Now this made marriage to my mother awkward, so he was gone within the week.”

The one thing I don’t understand is why Debbie didn’t rush to her friend’s side upon the death of her husband. Think of it. One of your best friends is The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, and when her husband dies unexpectedly, your husband rushes to her side?

Many years later, Elizabeth would offer a commonplace—though rare for her—analysis: The marriage between Debbie and Eddie was over; she was not the home-wrecking Jezebel the world had made her out to be. But at the time, the only explanation she offered appeared in Hedda Hopper’s gossip column. “Mike’s dead, and I’m alive. What do you expect me to do, sleep alone?”

You can imagine how well that went over. The woman who could probably quite literally have any man in the world (except the gay men she loved like brothers: Roddy McDowall, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson) could only be happy with her best friend’s husband, also the father of two small children.

It was indefensible, and Elizabeth offered nothing in her defense.

When we generally think of difficult women, we think of those who are opinionated, who shoot off their mouths, who won’t take no for an answer. Who refuse to sit down and shut up. Who nevertheless persist. But Elizabeth said nothing. Why should she?

In a much slower time, when you had to be home to catch a phone call and wait for monthly magazines to get caught up on Hollywood gossip, Elizabeth’s reputation had nevertheless rocketed from heartbroken young widow to whore of Babylon in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was released and made a mint. Perhaps in her grief Elizabeth didn’t have it in her to gild her performance with her usual actress-y flourishes. Whatever the analysis, she was sensational, and earned an Oscar nomination for best actress.

In May 1959, a year and two months after Todd was killed, Elizabeth and Eddie were married in Vegas. The bride wore brown, and a lot of the beautiful jewelry given to her by Mike Todd. The next year she starred in BUtterfield 8 as high-priced call girl Gloria Wandrous—wearing, I swear, the same slip she immortalized in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She was a white satin slip–wearing husband stealer, and moviegoers came out in droves. She allegedly hated the role—but the movie was another hit, and allowed her to cheekily demand that historic seven-figure fee to play Cleopatra.

Eddie Fisher’s career didn’t keep pace with Elizabeth’s. His TV show was canceled, and he was dropped from his record company. The general feeling among the public was that however grief-stricken he might have been over the death of his friend, he was a bit of a cad for leaving his family—especially because it was to be the lesser consort of a queen.

ELIZABETH MET RICHARD BURTON on the set of Cleopatra in 1962. This time, they were both married. It’s likely her reputation would never have survived another round of juicy, flagrant adultery; however, the year before she had nearly died. And there is nothing we like better than celebrities who escape death. Especially, apparently, shameless hussies of whom we disapprove.

The movie was originally filming in England, and Elizabeth came down with a bad case of pneumonia. She was rushed to a London hospital. She stopped breathing. A quick-thinking doctor performed a tracheotomy on the most beautiful neck in the world, thus saving her life. But the media jumped the gun and reported that Elizabeth Taylor had died. Joan Collins, another light-eyed brunette with an hourglass figure, was tapped to replace her.

But Elizabeth did not die, and this is how weird human beings are: By not being dead after her death was reported erroneously, it was as if she had been resurrected. She was not a queen after all, but a goddess. Suddenly, all was forgiven. She was no longer the whore of Babylon. She won the Oscar for best actress for BUtterfield 8, even though she’d been much better in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Elizabeth was no dummy. She knew it was a sympathy award, but accepted it graciously anyway. As one does.

By the time she was fully recovered, the Cleopatra production had moved to Rome. Elizabeth arrived with a full entourage, including her three children, five dogs, two cats, hairdresser, personal physician, and Eddie, who was hired by the production to make sure she made it to the set on time.^*6 They stayed in a 14-room villa just off the Appian Way.

Richard Burton was a mere seven years older than Elizabeth, and thus her peer. He was known primarily as a Shakespearean actor, famous for his rich Welsh accent and portrayals of Hamlet and Henry V on the London stage. (Later he would go on to star in the mid-century hit films Becket, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and with Elizabeth, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) When he wasn’t on the set, Burton was usually drunk and trying to get laid. He was married to a nice, tolerant woman named Sybil who, in the British way, turned a blind eye to his carrying-on, as long as he was discreet. Burton was known for routinely bedding his costar, and knocked boots with whoever caught his eye in the same way other people go to the gym. (Actually, if you go to the gym less than three times a week, Dick was having sex more often than you run on the treadmill.)

Given that Liz and Dick fell in love and carried on in the country that invented the word “paparazzi,” it will come as no surprise that when they tried to sneak away for a tryst, the whole world knew about it.

Poor Eddie Fisher, as I’ve come to think of him. He begged Elizabeth to deny the rumors. She refused. Furious, he did that thing that, then as now, is seriously uncool, even if you are being cuckolded. He rang up Burton’s nice, tolerant wife, Sybil, and ratted them out. Burton was furious, and his surprising reaction was to break it off with Elizabeth. This had never happened to her before. Her response was less surprising. She was rushed to the hospital. There were varying reports as to why: either food poisoning or sleeping pill overdose.

Then they got back together.

These days, no one blinks an eye when a scandalous celebrity love affair dominates the media. It’s hardly even news. In the mid 1960s, it was an entirely different enchilada: The studio asked Elizabeth to “desist” canoodling with Burton, and attempted to sue her for violating the morals clause in her contract. Elizabeth harrumphed and said, “Nobody tells me who to love or not to love.” The Vatican weighed in with a very proper “open letter” that included the frankly adorable and completely nonsensical argument: “Even considering the husband that was finished by a natural solution, there remain three husbands buried with no other motive than a greater love that killed the one before.” Later, when Liz and Dick went to Puerto Vallarta to film The Night of the Iguana^*7 and shacked up together at a local resort, a local convent that had kept a vow of silence as long as anyone could remember spoke out against the mortal sinners in their midst.

In 1964, after divorcing their respective spouses, they were married. Poor Eddie Fisher never quite recovered. He remarried a few times, struggled with a serious meth habit, and eventually declared bankruptcy.

My mother was a huge fan of Liz and Dick. I was maybe in second grade when they entered my consciousness. Because my dad was a Richard who went by Dick, and my uncle was a Richard who went by Dick, I was confused much of the time and thought perhaps Liz was somehow related. My mother especially loved Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which she took me to see when my dad was out of town on business and the babysitter had failed to appear. I felt terrified by the whole spectacle. So much shouting. And so boring. I was alarmed by how old and angry Liz looked, when I knew her to be a young, suntanned beauty who was often photographed wearing a big fur hat (also for reasons I couldn’t understand, because we lived in California and so did she).

After the movie, I remember driving down Whittier Boulevard in my mother’s Galaxie 500 convertible. It must have been summer, because we put the top down. I asked her what the movie was about, and she said, “It’s what happens when a woman doesn’t have anything of her own.” I said, “Liz doesn’t have anything of her own?”

You should have heard my mother laugh.

I ALMOST FORGOT ABOUT all the mad drinking. Dick, as we know, was a big lush. Liz liked to knock back a few herself. Together they were sauced a lot of the time, which led to a lot of arguments and crockery hurling. Since, as we know, Liz was also seemingly in a perpetual state of recovery from some surgery or other (in 1964 she had knee surgery; in 1966 she broke her big toe), prescription painkillers were also a regular part of her daily regime. Their romance, which was the most glamorous thing going, was a scrumptious layer cake of public arguments, hospitalizations, and staggeringly expensive jewels that made Mike Todd’s offerings look like they came from the Dollar Store. Dick gave Liz pieces that were so extravagant they had names. The 33.19-carat Krupp diamond. The 69-carat Burton-Cartier diamond. The 55.95-carat La Peregrina, arguably the world’s most famous pearl. Found in the 16th century by an African slave, it passed through the hands of kings and queens until Burton purchased it at Sotheby’s to give to Liz for Valentine’s Day. For a brief time the pearl was lost—Liz discovered the dog chewing on it—before finding a stunning home in a Cartier-designed necklace, set with pearls, diamonds, and rubies.

Still, it was not enough to keep them together. They divorced in 1974, remarrying in 1975. By then they were like two old prizefighters holding each other up in the middle of the ring. This second marriage lasted less than a year. They divorced in 1976, the same year Liz married Republican Senator John Warner. She then proceeded to get fat, which only endeared her to us further. The Most Beautiful Woman in the World was no different from the rest of us.

THROUGHOUT HER LIFE Elizabeth maintained deep friendships with a handful of gay men. Some of her biographers have posited that it was because her father had had a long relationship with a set designer, and may have been at least bisexual. Others claimed it was because these were men Elizabeth couldn’t have. I’d like to think that it’s because your standard-issue heterosexual male was only capable of responding to her beauty. Once sex was off the table, men were able to see that she also had other admirable human qualities worth appreciating. Like boldly speaking up about AIDS when her friends, family, and business managers advised her to be quiet.

During the filming of Giant, Elizabeth and Rock Hudson had become fast friends. In the summer of 1985, he was dying of AIDS in a Paris hospital. The general public knew next to nothing about the disease whose name kept changing, but was known informally as “the gay plague.” Hollywood had more than its share of sufferers, and nevertheless turned a blind eye. Elizabeth was furious, and because she was a difficult woman, did absolutely nothing to tamp down her rage.

She was now a middle-aged woman of 53, and looked it. Two years earlier, she had entered rehab at the Betty Ford Center. The year before, Burton had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Her last great movie had been Taming of the Shrew, where she went toe-to-toe with Burton in 1967. She had been through some things.

Oh, how Hollywood’s apathy and homophobia galled her.

In September 1985, she founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). Her newfound passion was a difficult sell. Even friends who were sympathetic were wary. Her closest friends and allies advised her to steer clear. For the first time in her life, people didn’t return her calls, which only made her more determined. She starred in television spots and testified before Congress. She attended fundraisers, and embarrassed politicians into getting involved. She even wrote an open letter to then President Reagan to press for his involvement.

“I am writing from my heart to ask if you both would attend the dinner—and if you, Mr. President, would give the keynote speech. I am so pleased that you, Mr. President, have already spoken out on the issue of AIDS,” she wrote. Actually, up until that moment he’d sidestepped the issue. But he, like so many men who came before him, could not say no to Elizabeth Taylor.

In the end, she would raise $100 million for AIDS research.

Recently, Suzanne Venker, author of The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men and Marriage, which basically advises women to hop in the way-back machine and defer to their husbands, 1950s style, writes, “In essence, being feminine means being nice.”

Fair enough, except “nice” was never a word associated with the most feminine star of the last century. Elizabeth was a hyper-girly goddess before whom men lined up for the chance to buy Oreo-size diamonds. But she was still complicated, selfish, demanding, passionate—and unafraid to speak up and wield her power. We tend to write off Elizabeth Taylor’s charisma as a simple function of her beauty. But the secret to her timeless allure was her complicated, difficult nature.

^*1Renata Adler, in her blistering review in the New York Times wrote, “[Burton] seems happiest shouting in Latin, or in Ms. Taylor’s ear.”

^*2Go ahead and Google the color violet. You’ll see.

^*3Earned by virtue of being the husband of the longest marriage.

^*4As it happened, she was still married to Michael Wilding—silly detail! After their quickie divorce she married Todd on February 2, 1957. She was single for less than a week.

^*5The poor lamb was diagnosed with sciatica at 23. I’m a jaded old crone staring down the barrel of 60 and even I don’t have sciatica, knock wood.

^*6That sound you hear is romance leaking out of the marriage.

^*7Dick’s costar was Ava Gardner, and Liz was not about to let him toodle off to Mexico alone. She arrived on a private plane with 74 pieces of luggage.