The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (47 page)

Tom Clark answered the door at 9402 Beverly Crest Drive when Elizabeth called that autumn. The Castle was situated on a steep ridge overlooking Beverly Hills, affording a view west to the Pacific Ocean and east across the sprawling metroplex to the San Gabriel Mountains. Rock was tired of sickroom visitors and trying to rest, but when Elizabeth arrived and Tom put his hand on Rock’s and said, “Elizabeth is here,” Rock revived somewhat. “Oh, good,” he said. He’d dropped from 225 pounds to 140, and she felt nothing but bones when they hugged. His body itched all over from a rash, and he couldn’t digest anything except Swiss Miss tapioca pudding. He put the film they made together at the top of his list of his best pictures: “
Giant
,
Seconds
,
Pillow Talk
,
Lover Come Back
.”

In his final days, Rock occasionally wandered around The Castle, but most of the time he slept, sometimes twelve hours at a stretch. Born-again Christian singer Pat Boone led prayers in his bedroom, and actress Susan Stafford brought a Catholic priest, Father Terry Sweeney, to Rock’s bedside, where he received Communion and the Anointing of the Sick. He was heartened that Elizabeth’s CTL dinner grew so big that a producer was assigned to help her with the planning.

Gary Pudney, a former ABC vice president, laid out the dinner and its accompanying entertainment on cards, and he took these, as well as an easel on which to display them, to Elizabeth’s home in Bel Air. At the door, he was advised that she would receive him in the pool area. He went through the house and out onto the patio. It was a blazing Southern California day, and Pudney was sweating in his suit and tie. Finally she appeared, wearing a scanty red bikini and one of her mammoth diamonds. Pudney noticed she’d lost weight and was in good shape. She lay down on a chaise longue and, suddenly all business, said, “Just start flipping the cards.” Quickly grasping his concepts for the show, she made pertinent, helpful remarks about the musical numbers and the speeches. With an admirable lack of ego, she seemed completely indifferent to matters such as where she’d be seated, when she’d be called on, or what she was to say, focusing entirely on the overall effect of the dinner.

On September 19, 1985, twenty-five hundred guests jammed into the ballroom of L.A.’s Bonaventure Hotel for the CTL benefit. Betty Ford showed up as promised, and it was announced that Rock’s AIDS case had launched a historic turning point in public acceptance of the disease. Burt Reynolds read a telegram from President Reagan, marking the first time that the Chief Executive had acknowledged the existence of the health crisis. Most important of all, the CTL dinner netted $1 million for APLA. Two weeks later, on October 2, Rock succumbed, in his sixtieth year, the first celebrity to die of AIDS. A memorial service was held at The Castle on October 19. Wearing a navy-and-white dress and pearls, Elizabeth addressed the three hundred mourners, reminiscing about
Giant
and concluding, “Rock would have wanted us to be happy—let’s raise a glass to him.” On October 20, his ashes were strewn in Catalina Channel. On November 2, Christian engaged Marvin Mitchelson, the palimony lawyer, to sue Rock’s estate for conspiring to endanger his life,
¹⁵
but nothing could diminish the importance Rock had achieved in finally coming out. According to Misenhimer, “From an AIDS-activist viewpoint, Hudson’s announcement was the best thing that had happened since AIDS started, because, finally, people could connect a name to AIDS.”
¹⁶

Rock had bequeathed $250,000 to Elizabeth’s AIDS foundation. Mathilde Krim, a doctor of biology studying interferons at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and wife of Arthur Krim of Orion Pictures, had started the AIDS Medical Foundation. When she heard about Rock’s donation, she called Elizabeth and suggested they combine forces. Along with businessman Jonathan Canno, they founded AmFAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Research—which represented a marriage of science (Mathilde) and pizzazz (Elizabeth). “A shotgun marriage,” Gottlieb called it, and conflict was not long in developing between the strong-minded Elizabeth and the indomitable Mathilde. The board of directors did not want AmFAR to go international, but Elizabeth insisted they were being “chauvinistic” and rammed her proposal through anyway, later remarking, “I did have a big fight . . . The United States is not the only nation that is suffering with AIDS.” In recognition of her global humanitarian efforts, France gave her its highest civilian award, the Legion d’honneur.

Friends observed that without Elizabeth’s charitable work, she’d probably “stay home and eat.” She went back on painkillers in 1985, and spent a total of five and a half months in bed using drugs prescribed by Dr. Skinner, including Percodan, Hycodan, Demerol, Dilaudid, morphine sulfate, and Halcion. By 1986, she was in the hospital for plastic surgery and liposuction, and her deadly pain-painkillers-addiction cycle kicked in again. She stopped going to AA meetings and soon became one of the program’s “revolving door” statistics. As an active alcoholic and drug addict, she was further weakening her system and leaving it open to a host of maladies.

On Mother’s Day 1986, Liza Tivey gave birth to Quinn, Elizabeth’s latest grandchild. Hap painted a portrait of Liza and the baby and gave it to Elizabeth, who hung it over the fireplace in her bedroom. Christopher Wilding’s marriage to Aileen Getty was a troubled one. When Elizabeth discovered that Aileen was a drug addict, she screamed at her on the phone. “I sobered up very quickly after that,” Aileen said. Christopher and Aileen managed to put together five years of sobriety and gave Elizabeth two grandchildren but finally separated. Elizabeth advised them to spare no effort in working out their differences and preserving their family life, but Aileen finally filed for divorce in September 1987. Elizabeth remained close to her thereafter and took care of her when she fell ill.
¹⁷
“I had had an unsafe sexual affair outside of my marriage,” Aileen confessed, and at her next test she proved HIV positive, though she told no one. Neither Christopher nor his children were exposed.

Aileen said nothing to Elizabeth about having AIDS until they found themselves together in Paris for the first AIDS dinner in France. After raising a large amount of money that night, Elizabeth returned to her hotel, “worn out and happy,” she recalled. “Aileen crawled into my bed and we were snuggling and talking and all of a sudden she told me that she was HIV positive.” To Elizabeth it was both a “shock” and “strangely ironic.” Aileen’s own family found it difficult to cope with, but Elizabeth boldly defended her in the press, and Aileen started calling her Mom. “It was always very easy to talk to her,” Aileen said. “She taught me I was still a beautiful person . . . I know that I could die with Mom, and she would hold me safe and tight.”
¹⁸
Elizabeth told the press, “I have two grandchildren under ten whose mother is dying of AIDS. My grandchildren ask their mother, ‘Mom, will you be around for my ninth birthday? Will you be alive for my fourteenth?’” Before her death, Aileen set up hospices for women with AIDS, establishing the Aileen Getty Women’s Program. Elizabeth stayed with her until the end, holding and comforting her.
¹⁹

Though screen roles no longer came Elizabeth’s way, she kept busy making television movies. In May 1986, she appeared with Robert Wagner and Chad Lowe in James Kirkwood’s
There Must Be a Pony
, which was about the gay Kirkwood’s adolescent rivalry with his movie star mother Lila Lee over her boyfriend. “She triumphs, even as the production sinks,” according to the
New York Times
reviewer. “She looks fab, svelte and sexy,” wrote the
Hollywood Reporter
critic, but Laurel Gross asked in the
New York Post
, “Where is the acting depth we’ve seen in
Butterfield 8
or
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
”
²⁰
The best acting in the piece was turned in by young Chad Lowe, who projected genuine feelings and reactions that made Elizabeth’s dazed performance seem bland in comparison. She seemed no longer able to access the wellspring of emotions an actress must call on for a believable performance. Something seemed to have numbed her emotional recall.

In March 1986 she began dating suave, dark-haired, forty-eight-year-old George Hamilton, who’d had a promising start in films, playing in
Crime and Punishment
in 1958;
Home from the Hill
in 1960;
Act One
in 1963 (as Moss Hart); and
Your Cheating Heart
in 1965 (as Hank Williams), but had later become something of a joke—a little too tanned, a little too slick, a little too facile—and evolved into a talk-show personality. As a lover, he was said to be in the same league with Sinatra, Beatty, and Joe DiMaggio. “He was funny, charming and attentive to my every need,” said Sandra Grant, who had an affair with Hamilton just before meeting and marrying Tony Bennett. “We soon became lovers and made love often. George loved to see me nude and once said, ‘Aphrodite would be jealous.’” Elizabeth put him back to work as an actor, casting him as her obsequious sidekick in the 1987 television movie
Poker Alice
, in which she played the madam of a bordello. George gave her a $5,000 pendant with diamonds spelling out “Liz,” but she’d hated the nickname ever since Howard Taylor had called her “Liz the Lizard” in childhood, and she sent George back to the jeweler with instructions to spell out “Elizabeth” in diamonds.
²¹

George occasionally sought solace in the arms of other women, including ex-wife Alana (Mrs. Rod) Stewart and actress Allene Simmons, while Elizabeth dated singer Bob Dylan and international financier Sir Gordon White. On February 27, 1987, she turned fifty-five during the twenty-two-day
Poker Alice
shoot in Tucson, Arizona. George gave her a $50,000 mink walking jacket with a front zipper, wide collar, and pleated cuffs. The next day they flew back to L.A. for her diamond-theme birthday party at the Bel Air home of Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager. Down to a twenty-two-inch waistline, Elizabeth wore a low-cut white dress by Texas-born Nolan Miller, the
Dynasty
designer, accessorized with an array of diamonds. Serenading the birthday girl was a solid A-list houseful of 150 guests including her ninety-one-year-old mother, who came from Palm Springs, Jennifer Jones (Mrs. Norton Simon), Arthur Loew, Sydney Guilaroff, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Melissa Manchester, Charles Bronson, Jill Ireland, Joan Collins, Bette Davis, Dionne Warwick, Barry Manilow, Bette Midler, Shirley MacLaine, and Whoopi Goldberg. Elizabeth arrived an hour and a half late, but they saved her a piece of chocolate cake. The coat George had given her was “so soft, it feels like sable,” she purred. Correcting her, George said, “No, darling, it’s moon-dust mink.”
²²

Her reviews for
Poker Alice
were respectful and reflected the critics’ awareness of her intimate relationship with Hamilton. Kay Gardella in the
New York Daily News
wrote that Elizabeth had “slimmed down to perfection,” and her costar was “her offscreen companion, George Hamilton, in his well-rehearsed role: keeping an eye on La Liz.”
²³
According to the
New York Post
, Elizabeth “reclaims her former status as a larger-than-life, hypnotically beautiful media personality.”
²⁴

Elizabeth and George were seen together everywhere from Hollywood to Spain. He accompanied her to L.A.’s Del Mar Race Track, where her horse, Basic Image, was ridden by a jockey wearing her
National Velvet
colors of cerise with chartreuse diamonds. Fortunately George was a health-and-fitness enthusiast, and when they went cruising on his yacht, which he moored at Marina del Rey, he had the vessel cleared of all alcohol and cigarettes before she came on board. “George keeps her on her toes,” said a friend. “He won’t let her slip. He looks fantastic. As long as she’s with him, she has to keep up.”
²⁵
They both laughed off marriage rumors, but traveled the world together, showing up at Aspinall’s in London, where they paid $3,000 a night for adjoining rooms; Spago in Hollywood, where George wandered away with an attractive woman only to be told by Elizabeth to get his “suntanned keister”
²⁶
back over to her table pronto; arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi’s estate in Spain; Gstaad for Christmas 1986; and at Las Brisas in Acapulco, where one of the maids reported that they were “hot and heavy . . . at it like cats and dogs.”
²⁷
By the next autumn, the romance cooled off, replaced by an enduring friendship.

Following the AIDS deaths of Chester Weinberg and other top fashion designers, Elizabeth attended a Seventh Avenue fund-raiser, “To Care Is to Cure,” for AmFAR. Sponsored by Bloomingdale’s Marvin Traub, Peter Allen, Jeffrey Banks, Claudette Colbert, Brooke Shields, Gloria Steinem, Albert Nipon, Fabrice, and Mary McFadden, the $150-a-person cocktail party was held at the Jacob Javits Convention Center on Manhattan’s West Side. The fashion industry was still very timid and paranoid about AIDS. Only Donna Karan came forward to help. “What the event needed, quite clearly, was Calvin Klein,” said Sally Morrison, who was director of program development for AmFAR, “but Calvin was resistant to our approaches for some time.” Mathilde Krim told David Geffen to let Calvin know that if he would help, he could take Elizabeth to the event as his date. The bait worked. One hour later, Calvin called and asked, “What do you want me to do?” Previously he’d been AIDS-phobic, in contrast to Geffen, who candidly supported the cause on the West Coast. Now Calvin underwrote the entire event, and soon all of Seventh Avenue fell in behind him.