The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (45 page)

She was still expecting the knight on the white charger, but he was nowhere in sight, certainly not balding, paunchy Victor Gonzalez Luna, a fifty-five-year-old divorced Mexican lawyer who wanted to marry her. A quiet, courtly, paternal man, Señor Luna had handled Elizabeth and Richard’s holdings in Mexico. He was accustomed to a calm life in Guadalajara with his daughters, and although he told reporters he was willing to make concessions for his “beautiful lady,”
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he expected Elizabeth to settle down in what he described as “the strict, socially enclosed atmosphere of Guadalajara.” Her serial divorces were a source of embarrassment to him, and he was certain they would end up social outcasts in his hometown as soon as they got married. “My life,” he said, “isn’t flying and cruising and mixing with the international jet set—the life Elizabeth enjoys.”
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He wasn’t prepared to indulge her expensive whims.
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When they took a trip to the Far East together in the spring of 1984, she pointed to an elephant and said she wanted it. “No, Elizabeth,” he said, “you can’t take the elephant home.”
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They concluded their tour in a London pub with Richard and Sally Burton, and then Victor had to resume running his family’s business in Guadalajara, which put his relationship with Elizabeth under severe strain. According to Sally, Elizabeth was “having another go” at winning back Richard, “making phone calls. Making suggestions that they should work together.” Upon returning to Celigny, Richard told actor John Hurt, “I’m still fascinated by her.” A guest at Le Pays de Galles, Hurt went out a few nights with Richard, who was drinking again in 1984, but his marriage remained intact. Elizabeth’s engagement to Luna could not have been shakier, and Luna told reporters, “Since we can’t be together, we can’t get married.”
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Wealthy and politically well connected, Luna may have harbored dreams of Elizabeth putting him into office as she had Warner. Her hairdresser Zak Taylor suspected that Luna enjoyed the publicity of being seen with Elizabeth a little too much. When they became engaged, Luna gave her a 16.5-carat sapphire-and-diamond ring from Cartier valued at $250,000.

No one could quite understand it when Elizabeth, fifty-two, and rock star Michael Jackson, twenty-six, became intimates that year. Elizabeth was worth about $60-$80 million at the time, and Michael was worth $300 million, and the two stars also had in common an almost unparalleled degree of megafame. Michael was at the summit of a notoriety that equaled Elvis’s, or Elizabeth and Richard’s twenty years before. One day, out of nowhere, Jackson called Elizabeth and announced, “This is Michael Jackson,” his breathy, boyish voice as recognizable as a Vuitton steamer trunk. He was into iconography and had long been a collector of Elizabeth Taylor memorabilia. “I feel as if I’ve known you for years,” she told him.”
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Would she like fourteen tickets to his Dodgers Stadium concert? She leaped at the offer; the show fell on February 27, her and her son Christopher’s birthday. Unfortunately they were assigned to the VIP box, and Elizabeth and her party left, complaining, “You might as well have been watching it on TV.” In tears, Michael apologized over the telephone the following day, and they enjoyed a two-hour conversation. “Both of us had really strange childhoods,” Elizabeth explained in 1997,
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and two years later Michael added, “We’ve lived the same life: the great tragedy of childhood stars . . . My father took the money.”
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For Elizabeth, it was like having Monty back—a loving, a-sexual relationship with a spiritual twin.

They continued their phone relationship for two or three months before meeting face-to-face, Michael later explaining, “I’ve never liked people-contact. Everyone is looking and judging.”
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After inquiring if he could drop by her house and bring his chimpanzee, Bubbles, he appeared at her door, holding the monkey’s hand. “There is something in him that is so dear and childlike,” she said, “not childish, but childlike, that we both have and identify with.”
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Later, President Nelson Mandela called Elizabeth and invited her to accompany Michael on his tour of South Africa, telling her to call him by his given name. The next time Mandela rang her, she said, “Hi, Nelson,” and they chatted like old buddies. It had long ago ceased to surprise her that everyone from Toscanini to Tito wanted to know her. She didn’t go with Jackson on his South African tour, but when he returned, their friendship deepened. In 1999, Jackson said, “She’s a warm, cuddly blanket that I love to snuggle up to and cover myself with. I can confide in her and trust her. In my business you can’t trust anyone. You don’t know who’s your friend . . . because you’re so popular . . . Elizabeth is also like a mother—and more than that. She’s a friend. She’s Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, the queen of England, and Wendy.”
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Wendy is one of the characters in
Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up
, Sir James M. Barrie’s 1902 dramatic fantasy about a heroic boy who becomes the leader of a band of lost children. During one of his adventures, he discovers Wendy Darling and her brothers, teaches them to fly, and takes them back with him to Never-Never-Land. The Barrie story was like a scenario of the relationship that unfolded between Elizabeth and Michael Jackson. One day she found herself flying in a helicopter to Jackson’s twenty-seven-hundred-acre Neverland Ranch, his Xanadu-type hide-away near Los Olivos in the Santa Ynez Valley. From the corkscrewing helicopter, Elizabeth looked down on a wilderness wonderland of carnival rides, twinkling lights, galloping giraffes and llamas, swans on a pond, a movie theater, a large railway station, and an Indian reservation with tall teepees peeping out of the woods. The only people visible were uniformed security guards, some of them driving golf carts over acres of deep green lawns.

The chopper touched down at nearby Van Nuys airport, and a limousine whisked her to Neverland, which is near Santa Barbara. In front of Jackson’s mansion, she paused in the circular driveway, looking up at a thirty-foot-high statue of Mercury, the winged and helmeted god of commerce. The house had dark shingles and mullioned windows. Inside, she discovered an Elizabeth Taylor shrine in one of the rooms. Michael took her on a picnic in a wooded area on a cliff. For Elizabeth the relationship had an oddly therapeutic effect; with Michael she revisited childhood and at last had all the fun their parents had denied them. “Some of the money was put aside for me,” said Michael, referring to the millions he’d earned as a child, “but a lot of the money was put back into the entire family. I was just working the whole time.” Later, describing his relationship with Elizabeth, he said, “We try to escape and fantasize.” He wrote a song for her entitled “Childhood,” in which the singer asks if anyone can help him find his lost childhood.
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At Neverland, Elizabeth enjoyed a long, eye-to-eye, kissy visit with an orangutan named Brandy, and cooed to the critters in the reptile house, home to pythons, a cobra, and a rattlesnake. Sad little statues of smiling children were all over the compound, lining golf-cart paths and gravel trails, some of the bronze tots holding hands with each other or carrying fishing poles or banjos. These figures delighted throngs of children suffering from various illnesses who regularly visited Neverland.

Back at the main house, Michael gave Elizabeth beanbag beds for her pets. Her films played around the clock on a large video screen, and her face decorated wallpaper designed by Michael. Like one of the lost children in the Barrie fantasy, she felt completely at home in Neverland. She ate carob brownies with Michael and shared vegetarian dinners prepared by his Sikh chef, but she could order anything she wanted—and did. While she munched a cheese omelet with ketchup in the dining room, someone passed by with a plate of French fries. “Hey!” Elizabeth said, “where did you get those?” Before five minutes had passed, she was scarfing a large order of fries, the frozen Mickey D. variety.

Singer Lionel Richie was a friend of Michael’s, and one evening in January 1985, just after Michael’s Victory tour and his purchase of the Beatles songbook for $47.5 million, Elizabeth dined with the two singers. “They talked about isolation and what you do when you’re lonely,” Lionel recalled. “It was good for Michael to hear that Elizabeth often went out of the house without security guards. The idea that you could live without them was a revelation to him.”
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Elizabeth and Michael went to the movies together in Westwood after disguising themselves. Sitting in the back, they held hands. She came to enjoy a privileged place in his entourage and was his only guest during the highly publicized filming of
Captain Eo
. She and Michael had food fights on his
Captain Eo
set, doing $3,000 worth of damage a week to his dressing room trailer. He squired her around Southern California and continued to visit her Bel Air home.

Michael had a ten-year-old friend who wiped sweat from Michael’s brow with a towel, and according to
People
magazine writer Todd Gold, Michael and the boy would “nuzzle and hug a lot . . . definitely a close friendship.”
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When asked in 1999 how she could reconcile herself to “his eccentricity,” Elizabeth explained that she accepted Michael because “he is magic. And I think all truly magical people have to have that genuine eccentricity.”
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In 1998 Elizabeth’s friend Jean Porter said, “She’s sweet. She will stick up for Michael Jackson forever and ever.” One day Michael told Elizabeth that he wanted to direct his next video himself, and asked her to recommend someone to teach him how to direct. She put him in touch with Eddie Dmytryk, who recalled in our 1998 interview, “I got to know Michael Jackson and found him to be a very nice guy. I was teaching at UCLA when Elizabeth put us together, and we had several meetings. There were always interruptions and finally the scandal erupted, and I haven’t seen him since then. He’s very good; I saw one of his videos on TV and it was tremendous. I met the kid he was having trouble with. Michael had dolls, dolls, dolls everywhere. He never had a chance to be a kid. Lifesize dolls, little dolls, teddy bears. The place was full of dolls. This boy was a friend at the time. He was a very nice kid, very bright kid, about fourteen. I didn’t see anything sexual going on between them, but it might be possible. When you’re talking with Michael, he’s very polite, but not soft spoken—he speaks up, he looks at you and talks right to you. I liked the guy.”

Michael wanted to alter his appearance to resemble Elizabeth as she’d appeared in
National Velvet
.
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Eventually, he even proposed marriage to her.
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One night she suggested they go to dinner but he told her he already had plans to dine with Diana Ross at Le Dôme. An expert at one-upmanship, she told Michael to have Diana meet them at the restaurant, but when Michael called Diana, she immediately detected Elizabeth’s ruse and canceled.
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Elizabeth and Victor Luna began to drift apart, and she spent more time in Switzerland, not far from Richard in Celigny. They didn’t see each other, but Richard’s brother Graham Jenkins dined with Richard in the summer of 1984 and reported that Richard was referring to his wife Sally as “Elizabeth.” Richard also lived in Elizabeth’s memory. She kept whole rows of photographs of him in her Bel Air home, but found the prospect of seeing him again too painful. When Liza Todd became engaged to be married to sculptor Hap Tivey, she asked Elizabeth if she could invite Richard Burton to the wedding. Elizabeth persuaded her not to.
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The wedding was held at the home of friends in upstate New York, and a country band played for square dancing. Liza and Hap settled down on a farm in Rhinebeck, New York, and Liza continued selling her equestrian statues in Saratoga galleries near the racetrack. Elizabeth purchased Liza’s
Northern Dancer
.

Not long after, Richard sat alone one day in Celigny, drinking at the Café de la Gare until he could feel that sunrise in his belly that booze brought about. He saw Oona Chaplin and told her to give his “undying love” to Claire Bloom. Later, at dinner with Graham Jenkins, he said, “Do you know what I heard the other day? That I’ve never found a part as good as playing the husband of Elizabeth Taylor.” His brother asked him if he missed Elizabeth and he replied, “Of course. All the time.” On August 4, 1984, just before going to bed at 10 p.m., he wrote on his bedside pad, “Our revels now are ended.” In his sleep, he suffered a colossal hemorrhage from which he never recovered. The following day he died at age fifty-eight.

On August 6, Valerie Douglas, his manager, rang Chen Sam, who relayed the news to Elizabeth. According to Victor Luna, she became “completely hysterical. I could never have that special place in her heart she keeps for Burton. For me, the romance was over, and I told Elizabeth that.”
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The romance had probably long since been over for Elizabeth if it had ever existed at all. She gave Luna back his ring.

Richard’s funeral was to be held in Celigny, followed some days later by a memorial service in Wales. Elizabeth rang Graham Jenkins and asked, “What do you suggest I should do?” Graham replied, “I might quarrel with Sally’s motives, but . . . we could end up with a riot on our hands . . . Come to the memorial service at Pontrhydyfen.” Elizabeth replied, “Sally is ahead of you. She already thought of the memorial service. She doesn’t want me in Wales either.” Although Sally had lived only two years with Richard, she “resented any assumptions of intimacy from family or friends which excluded her,” Jenkins wrote. “Most particularly, she resented the enduring love of the woman who gave Rich his happiest years—Elizabeth Taylor.”
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