The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (42 page)

Her D.C. blitz began with a fund-raiser for the American Ballet Theatre at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Halston, who’d dressed her for the occasion, was her escort, and they were double dating with Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth’s hairdresser Arthur Bruckeld. “She swept into Washington like Cleopatra into Rome,” wrote one reporter, and the
Washington Post
estimated the cost of the jewels she wore to the Kennedy Center at $1 million, including a diamond-and-emerald necklace, matching diamond-and-emerald drop earrings, a ring, a bracelet, and a large brooch.

After the ballet gala she attended a reception and dinner at the Iranian Embassy. The United States and Iran were not yet at each other’s throats. Under Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi, the embassy had become an important social center in the capital, operating on a lavish budget from the oil-rich Peacock Throne. The sexual current between Elizabeth and Zahedi was sizzling. He was forty-eight, intelligent, rich, had a head of shiny black hair, and was an irresistible flirt. When he asked her to dance, he boldly embraced her with both arms, and she nestled into him, her hands at the nape of his neck. Watching them from a divan in the Persian Room, Polly Bergen said, “It looks like Liz is still carrying the torch for Burton.”
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Elizabeth was installed in the royal suite as a permanent guest of the Iranian government, and a sizable contingent of Washington society turned out for a caviar luncheon in her honor. Barbara Howar christened Elizabeth and Zahedi Washington’s “hottest couple,” and for a while she and His Excellency seemed altar-bound. Then the Shah got wind of his ambassador’s affair with the Jewish Elizabeth and ordered him to end it. On the prowl for a new life, she began to divide her time equally between Washington, with its political diversions and unabashed veneration of her; Hollywood, where she snared her most important role in years, that of Desirée Armfeldt, the aging actress in turn-of-the-century Vienna who sings “Send in the Clowns” in Stephen Sondheim’s
A Little Night Music
; and New York, where Halston and Warhol crowned her queen of the disco circuit. Like many another seventies partygoer, she made Studio 54 her home base in Manhattan, falling in with club owner Steve Rubell and Studio regulars Capote, Minnelli, Bianca Jagger, and Paloma Picasso. One night she sat among the coke-snorting Studio denizens complaining to Warhol about the offhanded way Zahedi had let their relationship wither. By the following year, 1977, the fickle Zahedi was pursuing Lee Radziwill.
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According to producer Ed Ditter-line, “During this crazy period Chen Sam was all that held Liz together.”

Back in Washington on July 4, 1976, she was presented to Queen Elizabeth II, both of them smiling as they recalled other meetings over the years. The occasion was the Queen’s dinner at the British Embassy for the President of the United States on the occasion of America’s bicentennial year. Without a special man in her life, Elizabeth had planned to attend with her hair-dresser, but Sir Peter Ramsbotham, the British ambassador, fixed her up with John W. Warner, a Republican who was the Ford Administration’s Bicentennial Year Committee chairman. Fifty years old, a Harrison Ford look-alike, and a former secretary of the navy, Warner had been divorced for three months from millionairess Catherine Mellon, with whom he’d had three children. Barbara Walters declined Warner’s proposal when he’d told her, “A woman like you could probably get me elected senator.” Warner had just resigned his bicentennial duties to run for political office.
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He must have learned from his experience with Barbara Walters to be less candid about his motives. When he proposed to Elizabeth at Atoka Farms, his Virginia estate, shortly after they met, she thought he loved her and said yes. He put her to work campaigning almost immediately, driving her harder than L. B. Mayer or George Stevens ever had. Garry Clifford, chief of
People
magazine’s Washington bureau, summed up John’s behavior during the next year, calling it “fucking upward . . . Elizabeth Taylor was responsible for netting him the Senate seat.” The Warners spent $1.2 million trying to get John elected, and Elizabeth had to sell the Taylor-Burton diamond to cover their expenses. I had dinner with Elizabeth and a small group when she came to New York to raise funds for John. Members of what would later come to be known as her “millionaire’s club”—rich Elizabeth Taylor fans—had been assembled for a dinner party, during which a number of items were to be auctioned off. I was there as the escort of Radie Harris, a columnist for the
Hollywood Reporter
and one of Elizabeth’s oldest friends in the press. Radie, Elizabeth, and I were seated alongside Halston and Warhol at a U-shaped banquet table. Elizabeth was slightly zaftig, but her body looked curvy and appealing beneath her sleeveless, décolleté, gold-lamé gown, which was slit to the knees. She wore no diamonds. Her only jewelry was a long, heavy necklace of crude, hammered gold that had a primitive, rough-hewn look, like something Martha Graham would have worn as Medea or Clytemnestra. When Radie introduced us, Elizabeth looked me directly in the eye, appearing genuinely, even warmly interested, and shook my hand firmly.

When we were seated, Elizabeth leaned over and told Warhol that John wasn’t coming. She stood up and delivered a pitch for her conservative Republican husband. “He really believes in what he’s doing,” she said. “He really believes he can make the world a better place. With your help we can make it come true.” It was a persuasive performance, but I could sense underneath her show of sincerity that she didn’t believe what she was saying. She must have loathed his reactionary views on women and minorities.

Aline Franzen got up and announced that she was the auctioneer. She started badgering the dinner guests to fork over their money. The prizes were things like a shopping bag full of Estée Lauder beauty products; a rather sad-looking fur stole; and some mediocre costume jewelry.
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As we stood talking with Elizabeth later, Radie asked her if it were true that she’d recently choked on some food. Elizabeth explained that she’d been eating fried chicken on the campaign trail in Big Stone Gap when a bone got stuck in her throat. She was taken to Lonesome Pine Hospital, where a thoracic surgeon went to work on her with an extended plastic tube. “This could have lodged in her larynx and killed her,” the doctor said.

After the auction-dinner, Elizabeth joined Warhol and Halston at the latter’s townhouse. “He gave her some coke and she got high and happy,” Warhol recalled. “Look,” Warhol told her, “you’ve got nine days until the election, you’ve got to really get down and talk to the Negroes. This lady stuff isn’t going to work.” Stoned, Elizabeth said, “Oh lawdy lawdy lawdy.” Warhol and another gay friend went off to the kitchen. “Halston and Liz were talking intimately in the other room,” Warhol recalled, “and he told me later that John Warner wasn’t fucking her.”
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John squeaked into the U.S. Senate by a mere one percent after the GOP sent in President Ford, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and John Connally to help Elizabeth campaign for him. Unfortunately, after the election John paid little attention to her. She’d served her purpose and now could be discarded, or, as Professor Arthur Green of the University of Virginia put it, John “used that woman miserably.” Garry Trudeau’s popular comic strip
Doonesbury
, syndicated in 450 U.S. newspapers including ten in Virginia, referred to Warner as Senator Elizabeth Taylor, “a dim dilettante who managed to buy, marry, and luck his way into the United States Senate.”
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Warner knew that he’d always be Mr. Elizabeth Taylor until she faded into the background, and the sooner the better.

That was something she would never do. Earlier in the year, she’d celebrated her forty-sixth birthday at Studio 54. In deference to John’s need for respectability, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager declared the unisex men’s room off limits to women and vice versa. The birthday cake was a portrait of Elizabeth with jutting breasts in buttercream. Forty-eight Rockettes in black tights held sparklers as they high-kicked their way around the cake. Halston told Elizabeth to make a wish, and then she sliced into a buttercream breast. John Warner hid from the cameras, but everyone else tried to crowd into Elizabeth’s birthday picture, including Diana Vreeland, Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Timothy Leary, Sylvia Miles, and Margaret Trudeau. Ian Schrager released an avalanche of plastic snow from the ceiling, and Lauren Bacall slipped and fell on the floor. “There goes Betty,” said Vreeland, who continued to shimmy to a disco version of “Happy Birthday.”

In 1978, Elizabeth accepted $200,000 to appear in the NBC television drama
Return Engagement
, playing Dr. Emily Loomis, an ex-singer-dancer turned professor of ancient history at a small California college. In the story, Emily rents a room in her house to one of her students, Stewart Anderson, played by Joseph Bottoms, and falls in love with him. In the play’s big payoff, Stewart persuades Emily to re-create one of her old dance numbers for the campus variety show. Emily and Stewart become a campus sensation doing their Ginger Rogers–Fred Astaire routine.

The role presented obvious difficulties for Elizabeth and Joseph Bottoms, neither of whom could sing or dance, and yet the television audience would be asked to accept that they received a standing ovation. Playwright James Prideaux wrote the show for Jean Stapleton, an accomplished hoofer, but the producers wanted Elizabeth, thinking, mistakenly, that she could garner high ratings.

Rehearsals started, but Elizabeth remained with John Warner in Bungalow 134 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, complaining of strep throat. Dark-haired Joseph Bottoms, whose youthful good looks were as striking as they were unusual, came to visit, and she immediately perked up. When the company went on location to the campus of Whittier College, he was the only member of the cast permitted to seek refuge from the heat in her air-conditioned trailer. Prideaux later wrote that Elizabeth “was setting [Joey] up for a fling with Liza [Todd], which they ultimately flung.”
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When the show aired in November 1978, the ratings were mediocre. Rex Reed wrote in the
New York Daily News
that Elizabeth and Joey’s big musical number reminded him of a “mating dance between Jughead and Kate Smith.” The same could be said for Elizabeth and John Warner’s performance as a Washington couple. Instead of being able to enjoy the life of a senator’s wife for which she’d campaigned so hard, she regarded John’s victory as the “beginning of the end of my marriage.” He was so busy trying to keep up with his new job that she rarely saw him. After she moved into his S Street house in Georgetown, she discovered that “Washington is the hardest town for a woman in the world—especially if you’re married to a politician . . . You are a robot. They even tell you what you can wear.” In her unhappiness, she began to overeat and gain weight, ultimately becoming the butt of cruel TV talk-show fat jokes.

To relieve her blahs in the capital she started spending most of her time in Manhattan with Halston. The seventies was America’s wildest, most debauched decade since the Roaring Twenties and Studio 54 was its decadent epicenter. In May 1979 she was at Studio the night a newly clean and sober Betty Ford, the former First Lady, sat on Liza Minnelli’s lap as Warhol, Martha Graham, Bianca, President Jimmy Carter’s sister Ruth Carter Stapleton, Capote, Mayor Edward I. Koch, and Barbara Walters looked on.
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Elizabeth embraced disco as a way of life, arriving at Studio’s crowded entrance nightly in a black limo and rolling her obese body out, looking like a drag queen in a garish caftan.

On a trip to Los Angeles, she went to the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel to relax and sunbathe. “Miss Taylor was quite heavy at that time,” the poolman, Svend Petersen, recalled in 1999. “Several ladies kept walking back and forth talking about her weight. I couldn’t stand it.” The forty-seven-year-old Petersen had been bringing towels and drinks to Elizabeth poolside ever since he’d begun working at the hotel as a lifeguard in 1959. Feeling sorry for her, he went to her deck chair and said, “Would you follow me?” He led her to a private, upper cabana. Appreciating his thoughtfulness, she said, “I love you.”
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Periodically Elizabeth would pull herself together and lose weight, invariably putting it on again.

When Michael Wilding Sr. died on July 9, 1979, at the age of sixty-six, Elizabeth attended his funeral in Chichester, England, with their sons and Liza Todd. Wilding Sr., an alcoholic and epileptic, had sustained fatal head injuries after a fall at home. On a wreath of white roses Elizabeth appended the message, “Dearest Michael, God bless you. I love you. Elizabeth.” Just two days after his death, while still in his Chichester home, she met Aileen Getty, who was fond of both of Elizabeth’s sons and having difficulty choosing between them. Resembling both Genevieve Bujold and Gilda Radner, the petite Aileen was an oil heiress, one of fifteen grandchildren of billionaire John Paul Getty. She’d been raised in Italy, moving to London when she was fifteen and to the United States when she was seventeen. The following year, she fell in love with Chris Wilding, though the relationship was complex due to her feelings for Mike Jr. In a further complication, if she married before she was twenty-two, she’d lose her share of the $750 million Getty trust fund, which stood to bring her $500,000 a year in interest. With regard to Chris she said, “We’ve been desperately in love for a long time.” When she asked the Getty trustees to waive the marriage ban, they refused.
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Returning to Washington, Elizabeth attended a Red-skins football game with Senator Warner, but spent most of her time talking and drinking with a male reporter. The senator sent word for her to rejoin him. “Fuck him,” she told the newsman, “I’m having fun.” The remark ended up in the
Washington Post
, along with the news that “Mrs. Warner’s much publicized recent weight loss has now been regained.” At a dinner at Katharine Graham’s house, Mrs. Graham asked Elizabeth if she and John were breaking up. Elizabeth denied it, but Mrs. Graham added that both of the major publications she owned, the
Post
and
Newsweek
, were getting regular reports of marital strife.
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At a Republican caucus, Elizabeth did not hesitate to make it clear that she disagreed with every word her husband said when he opposed servicewomen’s rights to participate in combat. Later, in an interview with the Warners, Barbara Walters asked John, “Do you ever want her to shut up?”