The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (58 page)

At home, she attempted to stay in touch with her few surviving peers in the film industry. In 2008, when she called cancer-stricken Paul Newman, he lacked the strength to pick up the receiver. In retrospect, Newman, her costar in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
in 1958, was one of the few leading men who’d ever created sexual chemistry with her on-screen. Only with Newman in
Cat
, Hudson in
Giant
, and early Monty in
A Place in the Sun
did significant on-screen sparks fly between Elizabeth and her leading men. Her pairings with Laurence Harvey, Eddie Fisher, Peter Finch, Robert Taylor, Don Taylor, Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando, and Henry Fonda were instantly forgettable, and with the single exception of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, she and Richard Burton were wasted on each other, an innocuous screen couple. Instead of making so many bombs with Richard, she’d have been better off working with Newman, something Newman himself was keenly aware of and tried repeatedly to do something about.

The fortuitous casting of Elizabeth and Paul in
Cat
was a fluke; Grace Kelly was originally set for Maggie, but she dropped out to marry Prince Rainier,
¹²
and Monty Clift, first choice for Brick, a closeted homosexual, declined because it hit “too close to home.”
¹³
Elizabeth and Paul met on the set at Metro in March 1958 and immediately clicked. She was twenty-six at the time and he was in his early thirties. According to actress Janice Rule, who’d appeared with Paul on Broadway in
Picnic
five years previously, Elizabeth was the “fantasy woman of his dreams . . . sexy . . . dangerous . . . earthy, vulgar.”
¹⁴
Some on the
Cat
set found Elizabeth “bratty,” but the most distinguished member of the cast, Dame Judith Anderson, who was a lesbian,
¹⁵
quite liked her,
¹⁶
and Paul called Elizabeth “extraordinary. Her determination was stunning.”
¹⁷

After their successful appearance in
Cat
, Elizabeth and Paul were sought for the leads in
Two for the Seesaw
, but delays in
Cleopatra
caused the roles to go to Shirley MacLaine and Robert Mitchum.
¹⁸
Fox bought
What a Way to Go
for Elizabeth, and Paul hoped to play opposite her, but she dropped out and again was replaced by MacLaine.
¹⁹
Paul had his heart set on playing George to Elizabeth’s Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, but the role went to Burton. Although Elizabeth and Paul never made another picture together, they remained friends and shared a knack for business and a passion for philanthropy. Launched in 1992, “Newman’s Own” supermarket foods raised millions for charity, including a summer camp for children suffering from AIDS or cancer. When Paul finally succumbed to lung cancer on September 26, 2008, at the age of eighty-three, Elizabeth said, “I loved that man with all my heart.”
²⁰
The feeling was mutual.

In 2009, with increasingly serious health issues, Elizabeth was rarely seen in public, but she was very far from being a recluse. “Elizabeth is leading an active life in bed,” said actor/writer Jack Larson, who’d just appeared in the film
Bob’s New Suit
, when interviewed for the new edition of this book. “Her friends—including her secretary and hairdresser—pull up chairs and gather around her bed. They tell her the gossip, and she laughs and enjoys, rather like Louis XIV at Versailles.”
²¹
Larson recalled being with Elizabeth in Los Angeles “immediately post
Cleopatra.
” His old friend Leslie Caron had invited him for lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel on the patio outside the Polo Lounge. “They were smoking like chimneys,” Jack recalled. “I’m allergic, but I never complained. At the table, I was seated facing Burton, and he was hilarious. They’d been in France, and Elizabeth insisted he go to her hairdresser, Alexandre de Paris, for a haircut. Richard was madly campy as he gave a flamboyant imitation of Alexandre, who promised he ‘wouldn’t damage a loving lock.’ Elizabeth’s hair was so sculpted it looked as if she hadn’t taken it down since Alexandre had coiffed her. You couldn’t possibly touch it; if you dared to, it might come off like a piece of the Parthenon.”

Larson also described being on the set of
Suddenly Last Summer
with Elizabeth, Montgomery Clift, and Katharine Hepburn in London and at Shepperton Studios in 1959. Larson had been away in Germany, and Monty, according to Larson, had expected Elizabeth would take care of him as she had on past shoots, but “now she was with Eddie Fisher,” Larson said, “and Monty was on his own. Monty needed a friend, and Kate had been taking care of him, but Monty’s ‘friend’ on this picture turned out to be Kate Hepburn and Robert Helpmann and Jack Larson. In the end, Kate was glad to get Monty off her hands. I had done
Johnny Trouble
with Ethel Barrymore, and Kate had seen the posters around London. Later she saw me and liked me in
Johnny Trouble
, and told me that she and George Cukor had helped support Ethel Barrymore, who was living in a rented house owned by Gladys Cooper. Without Elizabeth, who was preoccupied with Eddie, Monty told me he was picking the sands of boredom out of his toes until I got there.”

Also in 2009, Richard Burton’s daughter Kate Burton, who as a little girl had cuddled and giggled with Elizabeth during cruises aboard the yacht
Kalizma
, became an estimable actress on Broadway, appearing to critical acclaim in Ibsen’s
Hedda Gabler
, one of the most challenging roles in dramatic literature. Reviewer Elyse Sommer wrote that Kate “is the play’s shining light . . . Ms. Burton has struck theatrical gold.”

Elizabeth Taylor figured in many of the memoirs written after the publication of the original edition of
The Most Beautiful Woman in the World
in 2000. The authors range from showbiz celebrities to such world leaders as U.S. President Ronald Reagan, whose
Reagan Diaries
, posthumously published in 2007, featured Elizabeth in an entry dated Thursday, March 19, 1981: “Kennedy Center in the evening for
Little Foxes
, starring Liz Taylor. She was darn good—so was the show.”
²²
One of Elizabeth’s key contributions to the dedemonizing of homosexuality was getting President Reagan involved in the crusade to wipe out AIDS. In his Sunday, May 31, 1987, diary entry, the president wrote, “Tonite 8 P.M. to big program on AIDS—Elizabeth Taylor in charge . . . Well received until I mentioned routine testing for AIDS . . . A block of the Gay community booed me enthusiastically. All in all though I was pleased with the whole affair.”
²³
A grateful Elizabeth remained loyal to the president for his support and leapt to his defense when the late Ethel Merman’s son banned him and the First Lady from Merman’s funeral. According to a source close to Michael Anketell, who worked with Elizabeth on AIDS projects, “Elizabeth came out and grabbed Bob [Ethel Merman’s son] by the ear. She’d known him since he was a baby, and told him, ‘You can’t do this! This is the president of the United States!’ ”
²⁴
She saw to it that the Reagans were ushered inside.

Edmund Morris’s massive biography of President Reagan,
Dutch
, published in 1999, accorded Elizabeth a brief and rather cranky walk-on. During the 1986 celebration of the Statue of Liberty Centennial in New York Harbor, attended by Elizabeth, President and Mrs. Reagan, French President Mitterrand, Kenny Rogers, and Andy Williams, Elizabeth emerged from a white tent “in a neck brace,” wrote Morris. “She gave me a sour look and headed for the grandstand on wobbly heels.”
²⁵

Robert Vaughn, once a TV sensation in
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
, described in his 2008 memoir,
A Fortunate Life
, a black-tie dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in the 1960s, during which Judy Garland, upon seeing Elizabeth and Richard enter the ballroom, yelled, “Here she comes, Miss MGM Tits, and look who’s with her—that no-talent nasal-voiced, pockmarked son-of-a-bitch from Wales!” The drunken Judy then dragged Vaughn onto the dance floor and grabbed “the Vaughn family jewels.”
²⁶

Elizabeth’s durable status as the leading beauty of her time was documented by author Lee Server in
Ava Gardner
, published in 2006. Social historian Stephen Birmingham, author of
Our Crowd
, and his wife Nan were in Puerto Vallarta during the filming of
The Night of the Iguana.
“I never saw anybody so beautiful [as Ava],” Nan said. “Maybe Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe on a very good day Elizabeth Taylor.”
²⁷
As well-known as Elizabeth was for drinking and cussing, Ava Gardner said she wanted to be “the first actress to say the word ‘fuck’ in a major motion picture but Elizabeth Taylor will probably beat me to it since every third word that comes out of her lovely lips begins with ‘fuck.’ ”
²⁸

That Marilyn Monroe, the preeminent sex goddess of the twentieth century, sometimes obsessed on Elizabeth Taylor was reported by Truman Capote in his posthumously published
Portraits and Observations
, in which Monroe asks Capote what Elizabeth was “
really
like?” “She’s a little bit like you,” Capote replied. “She wears her heart on her sleeve and talks salty.” Later, Monroe commented that she didn’t wear rings because she had fat hands, and added, “Elizabeth Taylor has fat hands. But with those eyes, who’s looking at her hands?”
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Capote summed up Elizabeth as “sensitive, self-educated . . . tough but essentially innocent.”
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Ernest Borgnine, in his 2008 memoir
Ernie
, was impressed with how Elizabeth handled her fame. “The press was after her in a way that makes Paris Hilton look like a hermit,” the
Marty
Oscar-winner wrote. “But Elizabeth stayed above it, all class, true Hollywood royalty.”
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Tony Curtis was less generous in his spiteful autobiography
American Prince
, published the same year, complaining that Elizabeth in 1950 was “getting any star role she wanted, which made it hard on the other young actresses at MGM.” Like Janet Leigh, Curtis’s wife, who had to settle for “dwelling in Elizabeth’s shadow.”
³²
In
Audition
, her 2008 reminiscence, Barbara Walters repeated a quip by comedian Alan King, who was in the hospital when a wag asked him who he’d want in the next bed if he could have anyone. Richard Burton, he replied, because his wife Liz Taylor would come to visit.
³³
Walters complained that Elizabeth kept her waiting three hours for an interview on the
Today
show in 1967, and Oprah Winfrey, who announced the end of her twenty-five-year talk-show run in November 2009, called Elizabeth one of her worst interviews because she told Oprah not to ask about any of her relationships.
³⁴

Warren Harris’s biography of Sophia Loren filled in some droll details of the long and testy rivalry between Elizabeth and Sophia. In 1988, “Sophia,” Loren’s Coty perfume, declined after the introduction of Elizabeth’s Passion, and it wasn’t the first time Elizabeth and Sophia had been in heated competition. After Richard Burton outbid Sophia’s husband, Carlo Ponti, for the sixty-nine-carat Cartier diamond, paying $1.1 million, Sophia huffed that Carlo had had it appraised and it was only worth $700,000. The two women had also competed for roles. Franco Zeffirelli had planned to use Sophia and Marcello Mastroianni in
The Taming of the Shrew
, but ultimately cast Elizabeth and Richard.
³⁵

Another fabled leading lady, the Irish beauty Maureen O’Hara, related an Elizabeth Taylor horror story in her saucy 2004 memoir,
’Tis Herself
, in which she told how her old friend and
How Green Was My Valley
costar, Roddy McDowall, recruited her to present his American Cinema Foundation Career Achievement Award. Maureen came all the way from Ireland to Los Angeles to do her pal a favor, only to see Elizabeth preempt her job at the presentation ceremony. As Maureen waited backstage for her introduction, “Elizabeth Taylor walked up and took the award off the table,” she wrote. “I was so stunned I couldn’t say a word. I just sat there with my mouth open and watched her . . . I was heart-broken and furious . . . I couldn’t cause a scene with Miss Taylor and ruin Roddy’s special night.”
³⁶
That was gracious of Maureen O’Hara, but it is also possible that Elizabeth was entirely innocent of any wrongdoing. Roddy McDowall may absentmindedly have asked both ladies to present his award.

When mass murderer Charles Manson terrorized the film colony in 1969, Elizabeth turned up on his hit list, Dean Martin’s daughter Deana reported in her 2004 book,
Memories Are Made of This.
Deana had met Manson while dating record producer Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son. Following the infamous Sharon Tate murders in Melcher’s Benedict Canyon house, the LAPD advised Deana that the Manson Family planned to kill her father as well as Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen, Tom Jones—and Elizabeth and Richard Burton.
³⁷