The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (54 page)

At forty-seven, Larry Fortensky was still despairing over his divorce from Elizabeth, and spending all day lolling around his Southern California condo in San Juan Capistrano or drinking and starting brawls at the Swallow Inn. Kelly Matzinger felt that many people around town wanted to get rid of him. On January 28, 1999, he either fell or was pushed headfirst down a seven-foot circular staircase in his home, landing on his head and sustaining a broken bone in his neck, several splintered discs in his spine, and massive head injuries so serious he might never walk, talk, or move again. His alcohol level at the time was .265. According to Larry’s daughter Julie, doctors performed emergency surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain. Elizabeth comforted Julie, speaking with her on the phone several times daily, and issued a brief statement through publicist Shirine Ann Coburn. “I am deeply shocked,” she said. “My prayers are with him.” The tragic thirteenth-stepping that she and Larry had engaged in during recovery had done neither of them any good. By rushing into a relationship in early sobriety rather than taking time to get to know themselves, they’d courted disaster. “The money that Liz gave Larry became his curse, a curse that may lead to him losing his life,” opined one of Larry’s friends. The well-intentioned theorizing failed to take into account that Larry, who’d risen from being a big fish in the little pond of Stanton, California, to fame as Mr. Elizabeth Taylor, had not succeeded in either role, as a “slave in heaven or a star in hell.” Elizabeth was not the cause, but only a symptom, of his malaise. At the root of it, as with Richard Burton and Elizabeth herself, was alcohol.

Larry lay in a coma, on life support, finally regaining consciousness in March 1999, five weeks later.
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“He has a tracheotomy, and they were feeding him through his stomach,” Elizabeth told Barbara Walters. “He sounds much improved. I think he’ll be all right. He doesn’t remember what happened.” Walters reminded Elizabeth that Larry had been bugging her for money, and asked how she could forgive him. Elizabeth replied, “You can’t be with someone eight years and have loved them and shared a life with them and have it disappear like turning off a faucet.” The hard-boiled Walters disagreed, pointing out that some people certainly could. “Well, I can’t,” Elizabeth said. “If I love someone, I love them always.” Evidently she’d never felt love, only lust, for Eddie Fisher, about whom she said in 1999, “We’re not exactly intimate buds.”
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Her great loves, she revealed, had been Mike Todd and Richard Burton. “If love came along,” she added, “I wouldn’t push it away.”

She continued to date the shaven-headed, broad-shouldered Rod Steiger. They flew to Las Vegas in January 1999 to take in the act of popular blind Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, tickets to whose sold-out concert were going for $200. After hearing Bocelli sing Carole Bayer Sager’s Oscar-nominated song, she told Sager the tune should win and actively campaigned for it (it lost).
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Steiger went to work on a film in February, and Elizabeth started dating her handsome, relatively young Beverly Hills dentist, fifty-five-year-old Cary Schwartz.
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On the 27th, she celebrated her birthday at the Bellagio Hotel in Vegas with Dr. Schwartz and his two grown sons; chalky-faced Michael Jackson, who gave her a cantaloupe-sized, elephant-shaped, jeweled handbag inspired by Gypsy; long-haired, behatted José Eber; and Dr. Arnie Klein, Jackson’s dermatologist.

Movie offers were no longer coming her way, but Demi Moore suggested that Elizabeth join Planet Hollywood and donate memorabilia and make appearances to save the ailing restaurant chain. According to TV’s
Entertainment Tonight
, Elizabeth was “thinking it over.”
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She remained a shrewd, cautious business-woman who preferred investments that paid off. In a late January date with Steiger, they dined in a restaurant in Santa Monica, Elizabeth holding her pooch Sugar, and Steiger holding a pillow for her back. Looking chip-per, she was now wearing her grown-out platinum hair in her familiar teased bubble. In early February she and Steiger dined at Ago’s restaurant in West Hollywood with the irrepressible Italian actor Roberto Begnini and his wife Nicoletta Braschi. Afterward Elizabeth and Steiger went alone to a coffee bar on Melrose Avenue. She also continued dating Dr. Schwartz.

A working girl all her life, she longed to return to the screen though past the age of retirement. Rod tried to help. His own career was taking off again in the Melanie Griffith–Antonio Banderas film
Crazy in Al-abama
and in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
End of Days
. There was talk of Elizabeth appearing in a video for Madonna, after Elizabeth convinced the rock star to reconcile with her English beau Andy Bird. Carrie Fisher penned an execrable TV movie as a costarring vehicle for Elizabeth and Debbie Reynolds, but what Elizabeth most longed to play was the vengeful heiress in
The Visit
, a role originated by Lynn Fontanne on Broadway. Producer Robert Halmi said that Arthur Penn would direct the film, but Elizabeth confessed to Barbara Walters that her career was going nowhere. “No one will hire me,” she said. “They’re scared to insure me. That was like a red flag—made me want to work.” And work she did, though behind the scenes—when fans thought they heard her familiar voice on TV ads for the new Beau Rivage casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, they were right. Dusting off her Southern belle drawl from
Raintree County
and
Cat
, she narrated the ad for her friend, casino owner Steve Wynn.
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Along with Celine Dion and Susan Sarandon, she was one of three celebrities chosen for Barbara Walters’s 1999 pre-Oscar telecast, the opening section of the most watched show on television except for sports specials. When a reporter inquired if she’d been chosen because she was an icon, Elizabeth replied, “No, it’s because I’m the oldest.” During the telecast, Walters asked her if she’d marry again and Elizabeth screamed, “No!” The odd outburst again was jolting, suggesting that Elizabeth had changed. And her speech seemed to have been slowed down by a fraction of a beat; her responses seemed exaggerated. When Walters asked her to rise from the couch to prove she could walk, she not only got up and walked, but went into an embarrassing shimmy, waddling and shaking her hips. Walters told her to “behave herself” and sit back down, like a care-giver gently reproving a somewhat addled senior. Clearly this was no longer the Elizabeth Taylor of legend, and it seemed unduly cruel of Walters to egg her on.
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Embattled but undaunted, Elizabeth still felt life was worth living—“to go on feeling good and healthy and doing things for AIDS,” she said, “getting my ass out of this house, to Texas, to New York. I would give up movies to be healthy and well enough to work for AIDS.” In April 1999, the wedding dresses Helen Rose had designed for her, the white one for her marriage to Nicky and the daffodil yellow for her marriage to Larry, were auctioned off at Christie’s and all proceeds went to AmFAR. Apart from her AIDS work, she was sometimes a reliable source of knowing advice for a younger generation of Hollywood vamps. When Demi Moore’s career began to falter in 1999, Elizabeth told her to get rid of her breast implants and go down a few bra sizes if she wanted better roles. Following surgery, Demi allegedly planned to recuperate at 700 Nimes Road as Elizabeth’s guest.
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In the spring of 1999, she jetted off to London with Dr. Schwartz. On April 11, glowing in Harlow platinum hair, dark caftan, and loads of heavy jewelry, she held a press conference in the Dorchester Hotel heralding her receipt of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts’ Fellowship award—the UK version of the Lifetime Achievement Oscar. On May 10, she appealed for work to the industry she’d once reigned over as number one box-office champion, asking to play character roles.
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There was a time in the movie industry when plentiful work was available for such seniors as Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, and Mary Astor, but good character roles for older actresses no longer exist, except for a precious few such as Lauren Bacall and Angela Lansbury. In June 1999, Elizabeth went to the Cannes Film Festival looking for work. Though tastefully dressed in a bouffant iridescent gown that seemed to float about her in clouds of satin and silk, and wearing many of her diamonds, she was, at sixty-seven, heavy, unsteady on her feet, and in obvious need of a walker. No offers of starring roles were forthcoming, but Elizabeth found work as a voice-over in a new NBC cartoon series, playing Sarah, God’s girlfriend. Elizabeth and Demi Moore tried to raise money for a film about a mother and a daughter. On June 28, 1999, she appeared on the cover of
Newsweek
’s millennium issue, as the symbol of a century that “twinkled with superstars . . . who shaped the way we live now.”

Invariably in the life of Elizabeth Taylor, every crisis is followed by a medical emergency. Unfortunately, the emergency was not long in coming. She’d been given some painkillers while recovering from extensive dental implant surgery, and at 3 a.m. on August 18, 1999, she got out of bed and walked to her dresser to get a dose of pills, turned, and fell forward, crashing to the floor. “I was like the Flying Nun,” she later joked. Her maid helped her back into bed, and Elizabeth took the pain pills and fell asleep. Later in the day the medication wore off, leaving her in agony. She was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where Dr. Patrick Rhoten, a neurosurgeon, diagnosed her injury as “a compressive fracture of the twelfth thoracic vertebra.” The word “thoracic” refers to the thorax, the part of the body between the neck and the abdomen. In other words she’d broken her back again, and later sources said she’d broken two bones.

In pain every time she moved, she lay in an ivory-colored, two-room suite on the eighth floor at Cedars, paying $8,800 a night, with three personal bodyguards and revolving shifts of hospital security personnel. Two personal assistants and three nurses pampered her, always having her favorite oils and soaps at hand. Her chef brought her gourmet meals, and her weight ballooned to two hundred pounds. She took Tylenol for her pain but tried to avoid drugs for fear of a relapse. She watched
Sally Jessy Raphael
and
Days of Our Lives
on television, and donned a pink chiffon negligee to welcome visitors. Forty-six-year-old Michael Wilding Jr. was by her side, as was Sugar. Demi Moore sent her one hundred violet orchids in an antique vase. Michael Jackson cheered her up with a stuffed animal wearing a pair of $30,000 diamond earrings.
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When publicist Warren Cowan visited her, he said, “Come on, get out of here,” and she laughed good-naturedly. Mother Courage hadn’t given up, on herself or others.

The previous month, Project Angel Food, a mealdelivery program that serves homebound AIDS patients, had given her the Angel Award in recognition of her sponsorship of the program from day one ten years ago. In front of an audience that included Shirley MacLaine, Camryn Manheim, and Barry Manilow, Elizabeth accepted the award and shared a lifetime of hard-won wisdom in eleven words: “It’s all about hope, kindness, and a connection with one another.”

Beyond that, she refuses to analyze her life—one that has included eight marriages and seventeen romances—preferring to live in an eternal present, as if the past never existed. She says no to proposals that she author a serious autobiography. She has always avoided psychiatry. “It has been so painful,” she says, “I couldn’t relive it.” If anyone makes the mistake of bringing up failed marriages or health crises, she bursts into tears. If she ever forgets herself and slips into a reflective mood, she chases away ghosts with a self-mocking laugh that is one of her most beguiling qualities. When forced in 1999 by a reporter who’d called her “the last true Hollywood star” to comment on the state of the movie industry, and why something seems to be missing in present-day Hollywood, Elizabeth said, “There’s no tits anymore. And if they are, they’re fake balloons. I mean, you can spot them a mile off. It’s not very sexy.” More reflective than that, she won’t get, beyond pointing out, in 1999, “It’s a mixed blessing, discovering boys.”
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Marriage? Strictly for the birds—and “for those who haven’t tried it two hundred times,” but the new generation of girls contemplating matrimony shouldn’t be “such suckers.”

By late November 1999 she and Dr. Schwartz were no longer seeing each other, but she recovered sufficiently from her latest fall to attend Andrea Bocelli’s L.A. concert. The tenor’s victory over blindness had been a steady source of inspiration throughout her latest medical crisis. She was reportedly mulling over an offer from Whoopi Goldberg, star of TV’s
Hollywood Squares
, to fill a square on a permanent basis for $7 million a season. There was talk of Larry Fortensky trying to break into show business as a standup comic; during his recuperation he started writing jokes and working up an act as “the male Roseanne.” Elizabeth was reportedly “all for it.” Strolling along Rodeo Drive one chilly November day, she was a vision of vintage oomph in her snow-colored coat and shoulder-length platinum tresses. To many, she remains the most beautiful woman in the world, not so much because of her physical appearance, though she’s striking enough, but because of what she has become inside.

Chapter 15
There Is Nothing Like a Dame

In 2000, Elizabeth Taylor celebrated the New Year, and the new century, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the leader of the free world, President Bill Clinton, and his wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea. Her escort was Firhooz Zahedi, the nephew of her old Washington beau, Iranian Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi. At fifty-one, Firhooz was seventeen years her junior and had often worked as her personal photographer on film shoots before carving out a career for himself as a portrait artist. She could not have chosen a more appropriate companion for the occasion. Though he was not handsome, Firhooz was impeccably correct and perfectly at ease among Washington’s political and diplomatic elite.