How to Be a Movie Star (58 page)

Warner won the election on November 7, 1978. Almost immediately, however, Elizabeth began to realize that her husband had gotten a far better deal than she had. Once all the inaugural festivities were over, she found herself terribly lonely in Washington, rattling around Warner's drafty Georgetown house in her caftans. She wasn't used to living in cold weather. She missed friends like Roddy McDowall. She had nothing in common with the other senators' wives. "I think they [Washington] thought I was a freak, which is probably true," she said. To pass the time, she ate, drank, and ate some more.

"She was eating and drinking a
lot,
" said one of her assistants from that period. "She'd order cases of Clyde's chili [from the popular Georgetown restaurant] and keep them in a refrigerator in her bedroom. That way she'd only need to take a few steps out of her bed to grab another bowl. She'd take the chili back with her to bed and pull the sheets up over her as she'd give us our marching orders for the day."

At the Republican National Convention, Elizabeth looked even more zaftig sitting next to a rail-thin Nancy Reagan. For something to do, she tried becoming a patron of the Wolf Trap Farm Park, the premier outdoor performing-arts venue for metropolitan Washington in nearby Vienna, Virginia. Though the galas she hosted raised considerable funds for Wolf Trap, they could sometimes be downright tumultuous. At one event, she was determined that she would read a poem onstage with Johnny Cash. "It was the most absurd thing," said the assistant, "about some mother who spun straw into gold, very Rumpelstiltskin or something. It was the strangest sight during rehearsals. There's Elizabeth with her little girl voice, and there's Johnny with his deep drawl, drawing out all his words. Everyone was like, 'Who the fuck thought this was a good idea?' It was just the craziest thing." But on the night of the actual performance, poet Rod McKuen, a friend of Elizabeth's, stayed onstage past his allotted twenty minutes, which meant that the poem had to be cut for time. "Elizabeth was furious," said her assistant. "She
really
wanted to read that poem with Johnny Cash! So she went up to Rod and slapped him across the face. We couldn't believe it. Elizabeth started to leap at him and she would've been rolling around on the floor if Chen hadn't pulled her away."

She was probably drunk. Sitting alone in Georgetown or on Warner's farm, she had started drinking more heavily than ever. She'd also developed an addiction to Percodan, originally prescribed for her back pain but increasingly used to palliate all of her aches and pains and frustrations. The problem was exacerbated when Chen Sam started drinking too much herself; the two women could be spotted at hotel bars knocking back shots together. Married and divorced before she met Elizabeth, Chen had tragically lost a young son, and now found herself entangled in a destructive marriage to a much younger man. It meant that for a time she lost some of her renowned ability to keep her boss on the up-and-up. The result was only deeper chaos for Elizabeth.

At one Wolf Trap function, her assistants could barely get Elizabeth out of her dressing room and onto the stage. "Do you remember that scene in
Lady Sings the Blues
where Diana Ross is doing the lipstick on the mirror?" the assistant asked. "Elizabeth was like that. She was so far gone that night. They'd all been drinking and doing drugs—it was Elizabeth and Halston and Liza Minnelli. It was just mayhem backstage. Liza was walking into walls and Elizabeth was just sitting there, talking loudly to herself, not realizing she needed to go on."

But he admitted that when they finally got her onto the stage, she was "majestic," despite being completely "out of it" an hour earlier. "That's the power of a real movie star," the assistant said.

Still, for all of her power, or perhaps because of it, she was miserable in her country-estate marriage. She'd wanted the good life, so where were the parties? The music? The Mediterranean islands? And she continued to miss Burton terribly. "When I saw her with John Warner," said Gianni Bozzacchi, "she had lost her sparkle, the glow she had with Richard. It was just gone."

Making it all worse was the fun the press was having with her public image. On
Saturday Night Live,
the portly comedian John Belushi played her in drag. No longer did the paparazzi stalk Elizabeth to snare a sexy shot of her in a bathing suit, or kissing lovers on a yacht; now they looked for shots where she was struggling to get out of a car or waddling down the street. "Just like that," Bozzacchi lamented, "the most beautiful woman in the world was gone. It was very sad. After that, I could not sell a photo of Elizabeth where she looked good because [publishers] said, 'Oh, no, that's been retouched.' I had to say, 'No, it hasn't been, this is truly how she looks.' But they wouldn't believe me."

Trapped in Washington and mocked by the press, Elizabeth needed a plan. "Thank God she had Chen," said another assistant. Although Chen continued to struggle with alcohol, she was able to get it together enough to help Elizabeth find her way forward once more. "Together these two women were determined to re-create the image and the legend of Elizabeth Taylor," the assistant said.

"I believe at that point Elizabeth wanted to start a new life for herself," said the actor Dennis Christopher, soon to be her costar, "and to take all that wonderful stardom she had and really make it work for her."

She couldn't go back to making films. She was forty-eight—the age Burton had once wanted to see her at, but not an age that Hollywood had much use for, particularly in women. The marriage to Warner had run its course, failing to deliver what she'd hoped for. So she needed to find something to replace it with, something financially lucrative enough to sustain the lifestyle she required, but also something fulfilling enough, and interesting enough, that it would give her a new place in the world, a world that was post-Burton and post-Warner, and defined only by herself.

Elizabeth was rebuilding her career, her image, and her life without a man for the first time. With Chen at her side, she figured that she could pull it off. If she'd been able to use her movie-star powers to turn her husband into a United States senator, she ought to be able to use that same know-how to turn herself into a success all on her own.

But if not movies—or Washington society—then what?

In September 1980 producer Zev Bufman was previewing his revival of
Brigadoon
at Washington's National Theatre. He was told that his seat mate would be "the wife of a senator who was working late." As the overture ended, he felt someone slam him on the shoulder, as if to say, "Move over!" It was Elizabeth Taylor. When she learned who Bufman was, she became far more charming. At each round of applause, she'd turn to Bufman and whisper that she wanted to go on the stage. By intermission, they'd arrived at a preliminary plan for a partnership. Bufman swore a cast of actors to secrecy and arranged read-throughs of several potential plays. They decided on Lillian Hellman's
The Little Foxes.

Elizabeth adored the part of the grasping, greedy Regina Giddens. But to her mind, Regina was more vulnerable than vindictive. The Regina she planned to bring to life would be very different from those played by Tallulah Bankhead or Bette Davis in previous incarnations. Departing from Hellman's vision of Regina as coldly manipulative, Elizabeth—with encouragement from director Austin Pendleton—chose to play her closer to her own skin. "What if
The Little Foxes
became about
appetite,
" Pendleton wondered, "a healthy appetite for life? Of course it would turn into greed before our eyes, but what if Regina started out as a hearty, hedonistic lady?" He laughed. "And who's better at projecting a healthy appetite than Elizabeth Taylor?"

She would layer facets of her earthy movie-star image onto her portrayal, bringing everything she knew about star charisma and larger-than-life public images to the effort. Her Regina—no matter her crimes—would wring every last possible drop of sympathy from her audiences. It was an undertaking that Elizabeth knew something about, of course, having mastered that same task for herself even as she stole other women's husbands and turned living in sin into just another way to live.

She understood the stakes involved. Where she had been stubborn and churlish on movie sets for much of the past ten years, she was a woman transformed rehearsing for this play. She knew she couldn't afford to fail. Nearly fifty years old, she was aware that she might end up just another old movie star, trotted out for an occasional retrospective or tossed an honorary career award, but without the cash or the clout or the cachet to support the movie-star life that she truly believed she needed to survive—and maybe, in fact, did. So despite her aching back, Elizabeth got down cross-legged on the floor with her fellow actors to run lines with them for as long as she needed to be there.

"She had an enormous work ethic," said Dennis Christopher, cast as her nephew. "She worked her butt off. She never made star demands. She was just an actor on a play who'd gotten the job." The little notes in pencil that she made to herself in her personal script show this: "Sit on sofa." "Look to Ben and Oscar, then sit." "Pause." "Go upstairs." More experienced stage actors might have known such things instinctively, or at least not have felt the need to write them down. But Elizabeth wanted to make sure that she got everything right.

After all those months of boredom and loneliness in Washington, she adored the camaraderie of the company. Elizabeth's lack of airs meant that her cast mates could tease her the way they would anyone else. Practical jokes, like moving props without telling her, left her in hysterics. "Asshole!" she'd bray, drawing the word out, punctuating it with her distinctive cackle. "It's hard not to love her," said Maureen Stapleton, who played her sister-in-law. "You really have to go out of your way not to."

But being one of the gang didn't mean that Elizabeth surrendered one iota of her star power. She summoned all of her mystique to create Regina. Slimming down, toning up, it was as if she were back in the MGM hair and makeup department, being transformed into a goddess. Her hair was elaborately styled. Her costumes were designed by legendary Broadway designer Florence Klotz, who'd dressed Elizabeth for the film adaptation of
A Little Night Music
a few years earlier. Klotz understood the importance of star power and accentuated Elizabeth's famous hourglass figure. By the time of the show's first previews, Miss Taylor looked gorgeous, every inch the glamorous movie star the world had known for so long. "She didn't try
not
to be Elizabeth Taylor," Maureen Stapleton said. "It came naturally to her—she wasn't contrived. She did it instinctively."

But there needed to be some accommodations. At the previews, the cast was mystified when Elizabeth didn't make her entrances on time the way she had during rehearsals. The problem was the red light backstage. In the world of movies, a red light meant that filming was under way. Everyone would fall silent; no one moved a muscle. In the theater, however, the red light was a cue for the actors to enter. "And there's poor Elizabeth," Dennis Christopher said, "conditioned by her mother all those years ago to freeze up when the red light went on. She was all dressed and ready to start her scene, and she just couldn't move." Pendleton had to post a couple of people in the wings to literally push her onto the stage.

The mother who'd taught her about the red light was still there, gazing up at her daughter at nearly every preview of the show in Fort Lauderdale. Sara Taylor was now eighty-six years old, a tiny white-haired woman with enormous eyes. She'd often join the cast and crew for parties after the show. "Elizabeth made a big deal out of her mother," Dennis Christopher said. "It was obvious she really loved her. She took her out and showed her a good time." After Francis had died, Elizabeth became extremely solicitous of Sara. "Despite all [Elizabeth]'s protestations about her mother over the years," Burton wrote in his diary at the time, "like the good girl she is, she now only wants to protect and cherish her."

She did this by covering Sara's small frame with jewelry, always the best way to cherish a Taylor female. There was a diamond platinum wristwatch, a Cartier gold medallion belt inscribed
TO MY HIPPY MOTHER
, a fourteen-carat gold pendant, a platinum stickpin with twenty-one diamonds, one large cultured pearl, and dozens of others—not to mention a full-length black diamond mink valued at $3,500 and a white ermine at $4,500. Sara was richly repaid for her years of devotion. Until she died at the age of ninety-nine, she'd live in a high style paid for by the daughter for whom she'd worked so hard.

But at the moment Sara Taylor was still very much alive, sitting in the front row and cheering on Elizabeth as always. The extended previews in Fort Lauderdale meant that when the show opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway on May 7, 1981, Elizabeth would be comfortable and at ease in her part. She no longer froze up when the red light came on. On opening night, she weighed in at just 125 pounds and looked absolutely smashing. Good thing, too. Peering from the curtain, Dennis Christopher spied Liza and Warhol and Halston and Halston's lover, the artist Victor Hugo, sitting in the front row. "All of New York was there, it seemed," he said. They all wanted to see how Elizabeth Taylor, Hollywood star, would fare on Broadway.

For the last couple of days, the news had been filled with reports of a throat infection and doctors' demands that Elizabeth cancel her performance. Some suspected that it was just Chen Sam playing a tried-but-true publicity trick to lower expectations. Elizabeth, of course, insisted to the press that she was determined to carry on. "No matter how sick I am," she said, "I will go on for the opening. I won't cancel it, even if I'm croaking." She was a trouper. And Broadway rewarded troupers.

She didn't miss a beat that first night. Her voice was strong and full. Her magnificent eyes seemed to reach the farthest seat in the theater. "If
The Little Foxes
is Broadway melodrama, it's as good as the genre gets," said Frank Rich, reviewing opening night for the
New York Times.
"Or so it is in the hands of people who know how to milk it for every last gasp, thrill and laugh that it's worth. Count Miss Taylor in that company." Maybe the part of Regina, Rich observed, didn't necessitate great acting or soul searching, but it did require "the tidal force of pure personality." Few phrases have ever summed up Elizabeth Taylor quite so well.