The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (57 page)

Exercising her right to preen as the movie industry’s elder stateswoman, Elizabeth was regularly trotted out as a presenter of industry awards, despite being obviously disoriented. In 2001, she made a spectacle of herself at the Golden Globes in front of 22 million television viewers and an A-list crowd at the Beverly Hilton Hotel that included Tom Hanks, Al Pacino, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey, Michael Douglas, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Her addled antics proved embarrassing for the audience if not for Elizabeth, who appeared to be having the time of her life. Janet Charlton, a reporter who’d covered the Golden Globes for fifteen years, called it “one of the most cringe-making moments ever on television. The whole audience just wanted the stage to open up and swallow Liz before she embarrassed herself any more.”
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True, it was a fiasco, but perhaps this amazing septuagenarian had one final miracle up her sleeve: to make a youth-seeking culture less ageist and more accepting of all the stages of life, including the one in which she now found herself, the last. Falling apart before our startled eyes, she was launching, perhaps unwittingly, a Senior Citizens’ Liberation Movement. As always, just by being herself, she was once again the catalyst for a paradigm shift. If Elizabeth Taylor was old, maybe old was okay. If she could pull this one off, and make old age as respectable as she had homosexuality, half the anxieties of the world would disappear overnight, and plastic surgeons would go out of business.

Early in 2002, a fire broke out at Nimes Road during a dinner she was hosting for thirty guests, including Gregory Peck, requiring seven fire trucks to douse flames in the kitchen. They’d just sat down to eat when an electrical overload sparked by the caterers set the kitchen and pantry ablaze. After the commotion, she posed for pictures with firefighters and signed autographs. Her son Christopher, with whom she was close, feared his often infirm mother, if alone, would never make it out of a blaze alive, and made plans to build a ramp from her second-floor bedroom.
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“I never thought about it before,” she said, “but now I can’t sleep at night worrying about being trapped and having no way to escape.”
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She turned seventy on February 27, 2002, and two weeks later, on March 16, participated in the most bizarre nuptials seen in America since Elizabeth married Larry at Neverland: the unlikely wedding of Liza Minnelli and David Gest at the late Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church on Madison Avenue in New York City. Elizabeth was matron of honor and Michael Jackson and his brother Tito were best men. The strictly B-list guests included Donald Trump, Rosie O’Donnell, Kirk Douglas, and Dionne Warwick. Born in 1953, David Gest was younger than Liza, who was born in 1946. The groom was already planning a reality show called Liza and David,
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which VH1 canceled when the marriage, to no one’s surprise, went on the rocks sixteen months later. Bitter lawsuits ensued, Gest’s for $10 million, charging “domestic violence,” and Liza’s for $2 million, charging “questionable expenses” as her producer.
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The summer of 2002 was a carefree period for Elizabeth. According to a press report in June, she was seen at the trendy LA Japanese restaurant, Koi, surrounded by three male dinner guests, to whom she bubbled, “I still feel as sexy at 70 as I did when I was 20!”
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A living legend rarely has a problem attracting ambitious young admirers even in her Senior years; a more serious issue of old age is how to avoid isolation when beloved peers begin to fall like dominoes. That summer, when Rod Steiger underwent four hours of surgery for gallbladder removal at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, she was able to be as strong for him as he had once been for her, and she was at his bedside when he died on July 9.
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All her cozy R’s were now gone: Richard, Rock, Roddy, and Rod. At Roddy McDowall’s memorial ser vice in 1998, she had stood in her living room with its white couches and white rug talking with one of his intimates, who over the years had been the favorite confidante of several megastars. “Now when I need to talk to someone at four in the morning, I have no one to call,” she said. He knew how to give her what she wanted, but he let the opportunity pass, deciding he could no longer take the heat. “I’ve had my last movie star,” he later told me.

The Kennedy Center Honors, America’s equivalent of England’s Honors List, came Elizabeth’s way in 2002, and she went to the capital, along with singer Paul Simon, Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine, dancer Chita Rivera, and actor James Earl Jones, to receive one of the nation’s highest civilian decorations. In an interview in November 2009, her friend Jack Larson saluted her achievements, saying, “For me she can do no wrong. If she hadn’t come out for AIDS, even before Mathilde Krim, gays might have been quarantined and confined to concentration camps. Before Elizabeth AIDS had been known as ‘the gay disease.’ I went to fundraisers and saw her lead the battle against prejudice. She pulled her hetero power and explained what it actually was.”

In the fall of 2002, Elizabeth published
Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair with Jewelry
, an opulent coffee-table book featuring lavish four-color reproductions of her famous gems. The Peregrina Pearl, the Krupp diamond, the Prince of Wales brooch, the 1880 Mike Todd diamond tiara—they’re all here, but the most touching piece in the book is the little gold-plate-and-colored-stone brooch she saved up to buy for her mother in 1945, which came back to Elizabeth on Sara Taylor’s death, along with this letter: “Elizabeth my darling, this pin is one of my most valued possessions . . . When you were a little girl [you] pedaled your Lux soap from door to door to pay for it.” Just as Elizabeth had presented it to Sara on Mother’s Day with all her love, now Sara, at the end of her life, was returning it to her daughter “with all my eternal love – Mom.”
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The most beautiful piece in the breathtaking collection is the Van Cleef & Arpels daisy parure, a necklace made up of thousands of pave-set white diamonds with circular-cut yellow-diamond pistils, linked by leaves made out of green rocks called chrysoprase. Elizabeth borrowed it from the jeweler to wear to the Sixty-fifth Annual Academy Awards, where she accepted her third Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in 1992; subsequently, she purchased the necklace, along with a brooch and a pair of ear clips en suite.

The ugliest piece is the 1627 Taj Mahal diamond, as big as the Ritz, but crude, cloudy, uncut-looking, and marred by tacky graffiti. Bizarre as it sounds, Elizabeth and Richard Burton acquired it during a stopover at Kennedy Airport. She later explained, “Cartier kindly managed to bring some jewelry out to the airport to show us while we waited for our connection.”
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Elizabeth admitted perhaps more than she intended to when she told how she acquired so many precious baubles. “Mike! Oh God, oh Mike, couldn’t I please, please, please?” she implored her husband when she saw some dangling earrings in a shop window in the Place Vendome. “I can’t go home without them! Couldn’t we at least go in and look at them?”
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Years later, with Michael Jackson in Las Vegas, she said, not very subtly, “Michael, I know they have great jewelry shops in the lobby. I can’t believe you haven’t noticed. This is really breaking my heart, Michael. I’m not sure I can go on.”
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She told a reporter that men gave her jewelry “because they love to watch my reaction. I don’t know exactly what I do that makes them feel so good, but I guess I go into a slight coma—a jewel-induced coma.” She admitted that, at seventy, she wasn’t always the best custodian of her historic collection, and had only recently misplaced a thirty-three–carat diamond ring valued at $4.5 million that Richard Burton had given her. “I must have taken it off when I washed my hands and left it on the sink.” She was “still sick,” she said, that she’d let John Warner talk her out of the 69.42-carat Taylor-Burton diamond, worth $1,100,000.
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“My dear ex-husband said I had to sell it to ‘maintain’ my part of the marriage.”
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She unloaded it on New York jeweler Henry Lambert in 1978, and he in turn sold it to diamond merchant Robert Monawad the following year.
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Michael Jackson was represented in the book by a dumb monkey-and-banana necklace that must have emptied several African diamond mines, and a jewel-encrusted elephant evening bag that appeared to have been fashioned from camel dung, though it was actually titanium, in a particularly glum shade of gray. It was purchased in Las Vegas and looks it.

Chapter 16
What Remains Behind

In 2006, following illnesses and hospitalizations, Dame Elizabeth went on the
Larry King Show
, her first public appearance in three years, to squelch rumors she was dying. Facing her biggest press crisis since
le scandal
in Rome, she decided it was time for some kick-ass damage control. Reports that she was being treated for Alzheimer’s disease and dying of congestive heart failure—she had been diagnosed with the latter in 2004—had to be squashed.
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Her now-famous death-denying stint on
Larry King
in May reassured the public that she was far from ready for the undertaker. She still had an undeniable glow, not just the “flourishing health” diagnosis by which doctors distinguish survivors from terminal cases but a genuine vestige of the Taylor lusciousness, and it helped make her point when she asked King, “Oh, come on, do I look like I’m dying?”

One report noted that when Larry King asked if she had Alzheimer’s, she sidestepped the question by replying, “Do I look like or sound like I have Alzheimer’s?” When he asked her how much money she’d raised for AIDS, she looked at her notes but still blew it. “I’ve got too many little notes,” she blurted. “It raised something like $270,000.”

“Million,” King said, correcting her, but by any criterion she had just given one of her greatest performances.
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Mission Accomplished: Elizabeth Taylor was still alive and kicking, despite osteoporosis, scoliosis, and congestive heart failure.
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By the summer, there was a new man in her life—well-heeled forty-seven-year-old African-American businessman Jason Winters. When she started a new jewelry line, he was involved as an executive, and they went to Hawaii together. “He bought us the most beautiful house in Hawaii and we visit it as often as possible,” she said.
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Off Oahu’s North Shore, aboard the sightseeing boat
Kainani
, she adjusted her mask and snorkel, entered a ten-foot-by-sixteen-foot Plexiglas cage, and went diving among the sharks. “It was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she said.
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“To be in that cage and watch the sharks get closer and closer, I had no sense of fear.”
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On September 20, 2007, she and Jason were driven by limousine to her private jet, which was waiting for them at an airport in Los Angeles. As documented in photographs taken that day, she had to struggle to get out of the car and only made it to the plane with difficulty. Two men supported her as she tried to mount the steps to the plane, desperately clutching the rails in a painful, ultimately futile effort to pull herself up, the expression on her face enough to break your heart. She slipped, but the men holding on to her kept her from falling. She never made it beyond the second step, collapsing into the arms of the people behind her. They were joined by a couple of pi lots and other airport personnel, who tried to figure how to get her into the plane. Finally a resourceful pi lot produced a special wheelchair from the plane and strapped her into it, using a harness. On the tarmac, trailing behind her wheelchair, which was being pushed by a young man, Jason Winters carried her red purse. Facing away from the plane, Elizabeth was hoisted up the steps by the pi lots and deposited in the cabin. After spending the weekend with Winters in Palm Springs, she retuned to LA on the same plane.
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“Jason is my manager and dearest friend,” Elizabeth explained. “I love him with all my heart. The rumors regarding my engagement simply aren’t true.”
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The couple were spotted on a yacht in Santa Monica on July 4, 2008.
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Even after a hospitalization for a serious heart episode the same year, she bravely honored a speaking engagement, accompanied by Winters, for Macy’s Passport HIV/AIDS benefit in Santa Monica, doggedly mouthing her words and saying, “Dammit!” when she made a mistake, or “Yoo-hoo!” when she managed to make it through a whole sentence.
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Evidently, nothing could keep this Dame down. She even returned to the stage, briefly, appearing with James Earl Jones in A. R. Gurney’s
Love Letters
, a fund-raiser for her AIDS foundation, held at Paramount, where she’d filmed
A Place in the Sun.
More than five hundred attended, paying $2,500 each, raising over $1 million. Though the lot was being picketed by the Writers Guild of America, in deference to Dame Elizabeth, the strikers called a one-night moratorium.
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Recognizing the enduring power of her fame, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted her into the California Hall of Fame at the Museum for History, Women, and the Arts.