The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (52 page)

“I was agoraphobic for about two years,” she recalled. “Didn’t leave the house, hardly got out of bed. Rod Steiger got me out of here. He said I was depressed. Then we dated.”
⁹¹
It was during the 1997 Christmas holidays that Rodney Stephen (Rod) Steiger, New Jersey’s burly gift to Method acting, took her out for hamburgers and fried chicken. “I was after her diamonds, and I didn’t get anywhere,” he joked. “I went to see her about a movie I wanted to direct. She was interested, so I went back. I had eight years of clinical depression, and I noticed she was always alone and didn’t seem very happy. She hadn’t been out of the house except for her AIDS work for two years. I asked her to dinner. It was just like when I called Joan Crawford regarding a picture and asked her to dinner at the Luau. ‘Oh, God, yes,’ Joan said. ‘Anything to get out of the house.’”
⁹²
The movie was
Somewhere
, a script Steiger cowrote, set in the mythical land of Oz, with Dorothy and her friends, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, all grown older. Elizabeth was to play the aging Dorothy in this new version of Frank Baum’s classic fairy tale. Shocked to find Elizabeth cooped up and depressed, he realized, “She’ll go anywhere for fresh air.”

He took Elizabeth to a party at the Bob Dalys, where everyone agreed that Elizabeth and Rod, two perdurable veterans of the Hollywood wars, made a remarkable couple. Rod had emerged as an actor in 1954 on the strength of a single movie sequence—the famous taxicab scene in
On the Waterfront
in which gangster Charlie Malloy, played by Steiger, pulls a gun on his brother, Terry, played by Marlon Brando, who says, “I cudda been a contender. I cudda been
somebody
instead of a bum—which is what I am.” Steiger’s first marriage, to a woman named Sally Gracie, ended in divorce. At thirty-four, he starred on Broadway in 1958’s
Rashomon
, impregnating his leading lady, Claire Bloom, twenty-eight and rebounding from her affair with Richard Burton. “I was searching for the paternal masculine support of the kind I had been deprived of when I was a child—the support that Richard, because of his marriage to Sybil, had not been in a position to give me,” Bloom recalled. Steiger was not the tough guy he appeared to be, but “sensitive, sentimental, kind, even if, like many actors, somewhat self-involved,” Bloom added.
⁹³
They got married, and their daughter Anna was born in 1960. In 1967, the year after Elizabeth’s Oscar for
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, Steiger won the best actor Oscar for his performance as Sheriff Gillespie in
In the Heat of the Night
.

He received no film offers for the next year, and his marriage suffered as he went into a near-catatonic state. A city girl who’d never learned how to drive, Bloom hated the isolation of Steiger’s remote Malibu beach house. During his depression, they evolved into a father-daughter relationship, and Bloom found their sexual life “only partially fulfilling.”
⁹⁴
When he began to work again, playing Benito Mussolini and Al Capone, Bloom complained, “He seemed to think it necessary to play Mussolini and Capone at home.”
⁹⁵
In 1969, Steiger left for Russia to film
Waterloo
, and asked his friend, flashy, street-wise, opportunistic Hillard (Hilly) Elkins, producer of
Oh! Calcutta!
, the revue that introduced nudity to Broadway, to take Bloom out while he was away. Elkins got her high on marijuana and showed her “the dark part of my sexual nature,” Bloom wrote. To her eternal regret she divorced Steiger and married Elkins, who, during their five-year marriage, filled her with “self-loathing.”
⁹⁶
Steiger sought happiness in his subsequent brief marriages to Sherry Nelson and Paula Ellis. His reputation as an actor was trashed by his grotesque biopic of W. C. Fields, and he underwent open-heart surgery. When he started dating Elizabeth, he’d just emerged from ten years of hell.

At the December 23 party, Steiger called Elizabeth a “heroic” survivor. “We’re both survivors,” he added.
⁹⁷
Indeed, his career would shortly be on the upswing. There were persistent rumors that Rod and Elizabeth would wed, but nothing came of them.

Appearing with Barbara Walters on
20/20
, Elizabeth said, “If you hear of me getting married, slap me.” She remained friendly with Larry Fortensky. Thanks to his divorce settlement, he was able to purchase an $800,000 home in San Juan Capistrano, putting down $300,000. According to Kelly Matzinger, he lived for a while on the remainder of the settlement but when he failed to keep up his payments on a $73,000 RV, Elizabeth came to his rescue and paid the $53,000 balance. He soon acquired a bad reputation around local bars, picking fights with patrons and making numerous enemies. Before the divorce from Elizabeth was final, he became involved with Matzinger, who was thirty-four at the time. She left her husband and two sons to live with him, and recalled, “He liked going out to bars and giving mean stares to guys to try to start fights. One of his favorite places to start trouble was the Swallow Inn.” He used his new house as a base for partying with girlfriends, while the hapless Matzinger was reduced to being a live-in maid. She recalled in 1998 that Larry quickly “went down the tubes” after his divorce from Elizabeth. According to Kelly Matzinger, “He drank and popped pills all day. He smoked pot. He was drunk every day.” Unsurprisingly, his relationship with Matzinger eventually erupted into violence. The police were summoned, and Matzinger charged assault but Larry countercharged that she’d defrauded him of thousands of dollars. He was arrested for investigation of felony domestic violence, jailed for a day, and released on $25,000 bail. He told the police that he was firing Matzinger as both mistress and maid, and the police helped him throw her out of the house.
⁹⁸

According to Matzinger, Elizabeth and Larry often talked on the telephone. “She still loves the guy,” Matzinger said, but common sense prevailed, and Elizabeth resisted the temptation to take Larry back. Though she felt lonely and helpless with the approach of age and sickness, at least she had her self-respect, something she’d never been able to lay claim to in codependent relationships, whether with a U.S. Senator or a truck-driver. Her new self-esteem would stand her in good stead in the trials that lay ahead.

Chapter 14
September Songs
ROD STEIGER, MICHAEL JACKSON, AND CARY SCHWARTZ

As Katharine Hepburn once said, “Old age is not for sissies.” In
Steel Magnolias
, Dolly Parton described an aging friend and added, “When it comes to suffering, she is right up there with Elizabeth Taylor.” Under unprecedented public scrutiny for an actress her age, Elizabeth met the challenges of her senior years with characteristic pluck and wit. “I’ve been through it all,” she said. “I’m Mother Courage. I’ll be dragging my sable coat behind me into old age.” After her three hip operations, she was left with what interviewer Paul Theroux described as “a struggling sideways gait.”
¹
In December 1996, she began having headaches and lapses of memory, and then she started dropping things. In February 1997, she had a seizure and was diagnosed with a brain tumor the size of a golf ball. Friends found her the best brain surgeon in California, Dr. Martin Cooper, whom she fell in love with the minute he told her she could bring Sugar, her five-year-old Maltese, to the hospital with her. At first it appeared she would have to cancel a commitment to attend ABC’s sixty-fifth birthday party for her, but doctors postponed the operation, and Michael Jackson escorted her to the Pantages Theater. Twenty members of her family attended, coming from all over the world, and the invited audience contributed $1 million to ETAF.

Two days later she was in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where doctors inserted a catheter into an artery in her groin and pumped dye up through her body into her brain, hoping to discover, she later said, “what’s going on in there. It hurts like hell!”
²
After a decade of devoting herself to the sick and dying, she felt in touch with a higher power. Prayer had become a way of life, a state of consciousness. “I pray to God all the time,” she said. “We have a conversational relationship and those conversations calm my fears.” After the successful removal of the two-and-a-half-inch tumor from the lining of her brain, the first thing she wanted to know on regaining consciousness was whether she still had all her “marbles.” She did, but at first she had difficulty forming certain words. Her right hand was almost useless, but in time it healed. She was completely bald. With a seven-inch incision extending across the back of her shaved head, she looked like “an ax-murderer’s victim,” she said. When her hair grew back, doctors told her not to dye it while there were still scars on her scalp, and she decided to leave it natural.
³

One week after her surgery she had a seizure, and afterward went on daily medication to prevent further attacks. Rock star Madonna and her baby, Lourdes, came to Nimes Road to visit, as did Billy Bob Thornton, who’d just received an Oscar for
Sling Blade
. During Billy Bob’s acceptance speech he thanked “Miss Elizabeth Taylor,” acknowledging that she’d helped spread word-of-mouth about his performance, swinging the vote his way.
⁴
During an interview with Kevin Sessums, Elizabeth said she no longer believed in marriage, but she begged Sessums to fix her up with someone. There was an unguarded candor in the plea, and somehow it didn’t sound exactly like Elizabeth Taylor. In subsequent public appearances, she didn’t seem to be quite the same following brain surgery. A poignant and shocking example was her hysterical interview on national television hours after Princess Diana was killed in a car wreck on August 31, 1997. When a TV reporter told her that photographers had been chasing Diana, Elizabeth screamed, “
She must have been TERRIFIED
!” There was something out of control in her voice and expression, and indeed on that occasion something about Elizabeth seemed to be permanently out of kilter. Though she still clearly had her intelligence, there was a glitch somewhere in the circuitry, and she was not the same familiar Elizabeth, at least in manner and delivery.

Shortly after Princess Diana’s death, Elizabeth gave a Labor Day picnic at her home on Nimes Road, serving baked chicken and cole slaw to Gregory Peck, Cher, Johnny Depp, Nastassja Kinski, and Roddy. Everyone shared his feelings about the late Princess of Wales, and the picnic turned into a somber affair. Later Elizabeth and AmFAR took out an advertisement of condolence in the
New York Times
hailing Diana’s “willingness to reach out to those who suffered from HIV and AIDS when it was unpopular to do so.”
⁵

Severe back pains plagued Elizabeth in 1998, and she was swept up into a new cycle of pain-painkillers-addiction. She felt so confused and depressed that her family begged her to go back into rehab. When she appeared at the Passport AIDS benefits in San Francisco and L.A., she was so unsteady that K. D. Lang and Magic Johnson had to help her to the podium. Nor was she herself at her granddaughter’s wedding in northern California. Her weight was up to 175 pounds. “I had seventeen falls,” she said, “breaking my ribs and ankle.” On January 6, 1998, looking swollen and feeble, she entered Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for spine scans. She was at her lowest point in years, overusing painkillers to ease the discomfort of her two artificial hips. “I’ll kill myself before I go through another drug clinic,” she reportedly stated. “They were the darkest days of my life.”

Throughout early 1998, there were rumors that she was romantically involved with Burt Reynolds, and she continued to date Rod Steiger. Reynolds frequently saw Elizabeth in conjunction with a new multimillion-dollar White Diamonds ad campaign, for which he was the model. The seventy-one-year-old Steiger was still in trauma over the breakup of his marriage to thirty-eight-year-old Paula, with whom he shared a four-year-old son. When Rod had come across evidence of Paula’s affection for a married contractor, he’d hired a private detective, who’d uncovered Paula’s affair, ending the Steigers’ eighteen-year relationship. Rod served Paula with divorce papers as she pulled into the driveway of their Malibu home on her birthday in June 1997, and Paula fired back in the press, calling Rod “a lonely, twice-divorced, washed-up actor. He was an alcoholic with black moods and a violent temper. One minute he was loving and kind. The next, he was angry, violent and often abusive. Numerous times he tried to take his life by overdosing on pills. Our sex life came to a crashing halt. There was no passion, no sex, no loving nights.” Though in 1999 Rod and Elizabeth seemed to draw closer every day, he told the press, “I have four marriages and I ain’t goin’ with nobody.”
⁶
Elizabeth told
Talk
magazine they “dated.”

She had yet another terrible accident on February 27, 1998, as she prepared to celebrate her sixty-sixth birthday with her son Christopher and his family at Nimes Road. She woke up at 10:30 a.m., watched the Home Shopping Network, breakfasted on toast, tea, and orange juice, and then resumed watching TV. Around 3 p.m., she started getting ready for her party. She was walking across the bedroom, heading for her dressing room, when she lost her balance. She fell forward, hitting her head on a nightstand and losing consciousness. Her housekeeper found her sprawled on the floor, blood smeared on her face. When paramedics arrived in fifteen minutes, they found her confused and desperate, clutching her throat and struggling to breathe.