The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (53 page)

She’d broken her back in the fall, later describing the injury as “a severe compression fracture of my first lumbar [vertebra].” She was rushed to Cedars-Sinai’s luxurious suite 8401 in the exclusive North Tower, by now like a second home. Emerging from Cedars ten days later, she looked “zoned out—her eyes were glassy,” according to observers. Doctors again insisted she drop twenty-five pounds as soon as possible and told her to use a wheelchair or walker, but she allegedly said, “A wheelchair is my worst nightmare. It makes me feel like such an invalid.”
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At home, her pain was so intense that she remained in bed, seeing only José Eber, Nastassja Kinski, Christopher Wilding, and Laele, daughter of forty-five-year-old Michael Jr. Laele was living in San Francisco, and she and Todd McMurray were expecting a child. Elizabeth looked forward to the birth of her first great-grandchild.
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When a baby boy arrived the following August, Laele and Todd named him Finnian McMurray. After visiting Elizabeth, a family friend said, “You can usually tell when she’s in pain—she won’t say anything to anyone. She’ll just sit there, her eyes open as if she’s looking into the distance with her mouth tightened. Her staff will do anything for her. But when they see her like that, they know just to leave her in peace and make sure she’s not disturbed.”
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Her torso was confined in an uncomfortable back brace for two months. Possibly fearing the end was near, forty-two thousand fans showered her with get-well cards, and show business colleagues heaped more and more honors on her.

On March 8 she was awarded the Life Achievement Award of the Screen Actors Guild for her acting as well as humanitarian contributions. On March 10 she re entered Cedars-Sinai for tests and remained overnight for treatment of her pain. On April 7, after an ominous announcement canceling all engagements for the next four months, she went into seclusion in Bel Air. In agony, she reverted to pain medication that made her unsteady on her feet. Though the prognosis was grim, one friend recalled what Elizabeth had said on being wheeled into the operating room during a previous crisis: “The fat lady has not sung.” Nonetheless, she disappeared from public view, later recalling, “I did not want to leave my bedroom. I just didn’t want to go out.”
¹⁰

She amused herself as best she could, admiring a new Chrysler Town & Country car in a TV advertisement and having it delivered to her in a metallic blue model. A check for $35,000 was waiting when the car arrived at Nimes Road, and though she refused the delivery man’s request to meet her, she tipped him $500. Her friends had not forgotten her, and instead of flowers, Madonna sent over a male stripper. Elizabeth permitted the beefcake dancer to go through his routine, commenting, “It’s just what the doctor ordered.”

Eventually she resumed her regular daily schedule, getting up when Sugar woke her at 6 a.m. One of her three round-the-clock nurses helped her go through a stretching exercise routine. After reading the morning papers, she breakfasted at 9 a.m. on toast, fruit, and coffee, following the low-fat diet prescribed by her doctors, who again urged a twenty-five-pound weight loss to ease pressure on her spine. While breakfasting she planned the day’s activities with her three secretaries, her housekeeper, and several servants. As usual, the chatelaine of Nimes Road did her own makeup and hairdo.

Despite the danger of falls and other accidents, Elizabeth insisted on taking short walks, strolling around her two-acre estate, inspecting her rose plants, always accompanied by a nurse in case of a spill. As seventy-five-year-old author Norman Mailer once said, “When you get older, every time you drop something it’s a drama. What bones are you going to use to pick it up?” Elizabeth enjoyed spending time with her pets, including Nellie, a Shetland collie; twenty rabbits; pheasants; peacocks; and of course the ubiquitous Sugar. Before going back inside, she always checked to make sure that enough food had been put out for Bel Air’s stray cats. From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., she was at her desk answering mail and attending to AIDS business. Sometimes she sent comforting letters to people in trouble, such as the letter she wrote to Delta Burke after the TV star was bumped from her popular series,
Designing Women
, following a run-in with the producers over her weight and mood swings. “It was like a letter from God,” Delta revealed, “thanking me for describing her as a role model and calling me ‘beautiful, courageous, and radiant.’ I carried that letter around in my purse until it practically disintegrated in my hands.”
¹¹

At one o’clock each day, Elizabeth had her lunch, and at 3 p.m. she caught
The Rosie O’Donnell Show
, her favorite TV program. Afterward, over tea and scones, she relaxed in her sitting room, with its two fire-places and a view of the garden. For the rest of the afternoon she napped or rang up friends. Dinner—pasta or fish and rice—was at seven o’clock if she was alone, eight o’clock if guests were expected. Then she retired to her upstairs suite to read or watch TV until bedtime at 11 p.m.

All her family were with her for her traditional Mother’s Day brunch. “I owe it to my kids to make the most of my life,” she said.
¹²
Rod Steiger was photographed on dates with
General Hospital
soap star Joan Benedict,
¹³
and Elizabeth found herself “in this dark place,” she recalled, “like a pit.” At one point she was desperate enough to try anything, engaging a Kabbalah rabbi, Eitan Yardeni, who conducted classes at her home several times a week. Though there was no charge, a typical celebrity donation—Dolly Parton, Madonna, and Roseanne Barr were also studying the mystical text—was $200 to $300 per session. Healing prayers attempt to banish negativity and replace it with positive energy, lessening pain. Followers wear a red string tied with seven knots that they keep on at all times, even when bathing. Kabbalah’s teachings come from twenty-four books called the
Zohar
, which include several chapters on health. The Kabbalah movement brought Elizabeth and Madonna closer together. Elizabeth gave the singer advice on raising her daughter Lourdes, whom Madonna was allegedly rearing according to the wisdom of Kabbalah.
¹⁴

José Eber came to fix her hair, Michael Jackson dropped in, and other friends who offered support included Shirley MacLaine, Liza Minnelli, Roddy, Farrah Fawcett, and Nastassja. The love she and Michael Jackson shared had sustained them through the early 1990s, a rocky time for both stars. When Michael told Elizabeth he was marrying Lisa Marie Presley, she gave Lisa maternal tips on marriage and urged her to have a child with Michael as soon as possible.
¹⁵
Though Lisa told Diane Sawyer on national television, “Do we have sex? Yes, yes, yes,” no issue came of their short-lived union. Jay Leno quipped, “Lisa Marie bought Michael a beautiful wedding gift—the Vienna Boys Choir.”

Steiger reappeared one day, driving his little Honda up Nimes Road, and “saved my life,” Elizabeth said, “got me out of the doldrums. I’d been stuck—out at sea without any wind. We love each other, but in a platonic way. I would do anything to help him. He has already helped me.” With Rod’s encouragement, she made a tentative reentry into the L.A. social swirl, hosting a Memorial Day party on May 28, 1998, at 700 Nimes Road for sixty guests, including her children, Roddy, Demi Moore, Johnny Depp, Rebecca deMornay, Gregory Peck, Carole Bayer Sager, and Anthony Hopkins.
¹⁶
In late June, she took several friends, including British actor Bill Hootkins, who was living in Steiger’s house, to a restaurant in L.A., wearing a full body cast like an iron lung but looking fit in her muumuu. She told Hootkins she’d been wearing the body cast for many weeks and was due to remain in it for another two weeks. Though he felt sorry for her, he noticed that her confinement in the cast did nothing to diminish her sense of humor, which he found to be deliciously self-deprecating during a three-and-a-half-hour lunch. Later, Hootkins, who was an excellent cook, sent Elizabeth some barbecued ribs. “I only got four of them,” she said. “The maids and the cook ate the rest.” Hootkins promised to host a party for Elizabeth at Steiger’s home.

Largely thanks to Steiger, she was able to say, “I haven’t felt this good in years!” In midsummer, she heard from Larry, who regretted their divorce and offered to move back in. He still referred to her as his wife. Wisely, she gave him no encouragement. Victor Luna also rang, telling her she was “the love of my life,” but at sixty-six she’d at last learned not to depend on relationships to solve her issues, particularly relationships with straight men, which always turned combative. Now she looked within for answers, through meditation, prayer, and, most important of all, through service to others.

Burt Reynolds remained a staunch champion, and the May 4, 1998, issue of
People
magazine ran a full-page color ad with a close-up of Reynolds holding a bottle of Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds. The caption read: “I never forget a woman in diamonds.” In TV ads for the fragrance he advised, “Don’t take your partner for granted.” The glamour and romance of the ads contrasted starkly with Elizabeth’s present reality, that of a virtual shut-in who spent her days in bed. But at least she hadn’t lost her appetite—for convenience, a mini-refrigerator was installed beside her bed.
¹⁷

Her lifetime of hard work—fifty-five movies plus nine TV films—continued to bring her prizes, and get her out of the house. Once all the honorary achievement awards had been exhausted, organizations started making up peculiar prizes for her, like the Special Award for a Lifetime of Glamour. Demi Moore made the presentation at the Seventeenth Annual Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards, attended by Ashley Judd, Sigourney Weaver, Isabella Rossellini, Rupert Everett, Matt Leblanc, John Stamos, Elizabeth Hurley, and Hugh Grant. After years of flaunting brassy Nolan Miller
Dynasty
-type getups that bordered on drag, she thought it hilarious to be cited as a fashion plate, admitting she’d “been on every Worst Dressed list ever compiled.”
¹⁸

In October she spoke at a fund-raiser for Children with AIDS in Santa Monica emceed by Jamie Lee Curtis. A Mattel doll of Elizabeth was auctioned off for $25,000. Similar to Mattel’s famous Barbie doll, the Elizabeth Taylor doll was twelve inches tall, costumed in the white formal she’d worn to the 1954 Oscar ceremony, standing on stiletto heels, and sporting twenty-seven diamonds set in platinum.

When Elizabeth saw Stephen Fry in the film
Wilde
, she told Rod Steiger, “That guy was amazing. I would love a part with him.” She optimistically announced plans to assay the grandiloquent Lady Bracknell in
The Importance of Being Earnest
, a role previously played by Dame Edith Evans and Maggie Smith. The Poly-Gram film was to be updated to the 1930s, but nothing came of it.
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On a Sunday in early November 1998, she hosted a private memorial service at 700 Nimes Road for Roddy McDowall. “Roddy died of untreatable cancer, brain tumor and elsewhere in his system,” said Jack Larson, who attended the service. “I visited him; we knew each other through Libby Holman, who was always close to Roddy. At the end, Roddy looked good; he was on massive painkillers.” According to the
Times
of London, Elizabeth and Sybil Burton Christopher “visited the ape impersonator [Roddy starred in
Planet of the Apes
] as he stood at death’s door.” Dominick Dunne observed, “The two ex-wives of Richard Burton I believe had not been in the same room since 1962 in Rome during the shooting of
Cleopatra
. . . It is said that the two women held hands as they sat with their dying friend.”
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Sybil’s marriage to rocker Jordan Christopher hadn’t lasted, costing her $50,000 a year in alimony. She later moved to Sag Harbor, New York, and became a popular and respected figure in community theater, producing off-beat shows like
Splendora
, a musical in which a gay man in drag makes love to a preacher.

“Roddy arranged everything with the Neptune Society and wanted no memorials,” said Jack Larson. “After he died, one persistent man insisted on putting together a memorial at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater, but Elizabeth and another friend of Roddy’s used their clout to have it canceled. Later, Elizabeth had a private memorial at her house for the friends Roddy had wanted to see in the last six weeks of his life. It was a lovely quiet affair with about eighty to one hundred present. Elizabeth was standing up without the aid of a cane but walked carefully. She was not wildly over-weight; her clothes were not tight fitting or fashionable. Her hair was white and short and she looked beautiful. The guests were gathered around the pool. She spoke and others spoke, and then, in the distance, an older man entered the house, from the street, playing a bagpipe. He came into the living room, played a farewell dirge, then walked out of the house. That was the only structured thing that happened; the rest was entirely informal.” Among the mourners were Lew Wasserman, Gregory Peck, George Axelrod, and Suzanne Pleshette.

Nine days before Christmas 1998, she was again in Cedars-Sinai. Steiger was by her bedside, and marital rumors immediately resurfaced. A spokesperson for Elizabeth denied these reports.
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Elizabeth was still grieving over the death of her beloved ex-daughter-in-law Aileen Getty from AIDS. In support of AIDS in 1999, Elizabeth donated her 1970 Oscar gown—an ice-blue Edith Head creation, low cut with spaghetti straps and a full skirt—for a Christie’s auction benefiting AmFAR.