The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (59 page)

How Elizabeth got the idea she could play the lead in
Hello, Dolly!
was at last explained in two recent biographies of Barbra Streisand, the actress who landed the coveted role. In
Barbra
in 2006, author Christopher Andersen tells how the Taylor-Streisand relationship evolved over the years from chilly disdain to warm admiration. Like such other celebrities as Audrey Hepburn, Carol Burnett, Lauren Bacall, Julie Andrews, and Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth and Richard Burton went backstage to congratulate Streisand after her 1964 Broadway breakthrough in
Funny Girl
and got a very cool reception; la Streisand “barely seemed to tolerate” them.
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But a few years later, when Streisand found herself embattled on the set of
Hello, Dolly!
, she exclaimed, “I’m too young to play this part. They should get someone like Elizabeth Taylor to play it.”
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Biographer Anne Edwards related in
Streisand
that scenarist Ernest Lehman approached Elizabeth about taking on the role. “She got quite excited at the prospect,” Lehman recalled. “When I came to cast the picture, her agent rang me up and told me Elizabeth really wanted to play Dolly. And I must admit I felt very guilty at having ever mentioned it to her because it was a thoroughly rotten notion of mine.”
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Their philanthropic work during the AIDS crisis brought Taylor and Streisand together. Both attended President Bill Clinton’s Inauguration-eve gala in 1993, singing “We Are the World” with Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Michael Bolton, Kenny G, Kenny Rogers, and Diana Ross. Two years later, when Streisand addressed Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, she said she’d “rather have America listen to Elizabeth Taylor on the subject of AIDS than to Jesse Helms.”
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In 2001 it was Elizabeth’s turn to toss a bouquet to Streisand, and she did so, delivering a fulsome tribute when her friend received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award. Streisand “beamed, sighed, and laughed” as Elizabeth “stood to sing Barbra’s praises” during a program that also included encomiums from Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, Sidney Poitier, Shirley MacLaine, Lauren Bacall, Quincy Jones, Kris Kristofferson, Phyllis Diller, Dom DeLuise, and Robert Klein.
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The magical glamour Elizabeth once brought to Hollywood awards shows was poignantly evoked by Marlee Matlin in her 2009 autobiography,
I’ll Scream Later
, in which she describes the emotional roller coaster she was on the night she became, at twenty-one, the youngest woman ever to win the Best Actress Oscar, and the only deaf person—all for her very first film,
Children of a Lesser God.
On March 30, 1987, at the Fifty-ninth Annual Academy Awards, Marlee received her Oscar, in sign language, from Bill Hurt, her lover on-screen and off. “In the chaos backstage, I felt a tap on my shoulder and whirled around,” Marlee recalled. “It was Elizabeth Taylor. I had to keep my jaw from dropping to the floor. Talking to her even just for a moment was mind-blowing.”
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A resentful Bill Hurt, who’d won the year before for
Kiss of the Spider Woman
but lost that night to Paul Newman for
The Color of Money
, told Marlee, “What makes you think you deserve it? There are hundreds of actors who have worked for years.”
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Though their romance had been sizzling—“sex with Bill was take-my-breath-away fantastic, always,” Marlee wrote—it now came to a quick end. “It really shocked him when I won the Oscar,” Marlee added, “because it took him a long time to win.”
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Elizabeth presented the Best Picture Oscar the same night.
Platoon
won, “and a somber Oliver Stone was counterbalanced by his glamorous, all-in-pink presenter, who received thunderous applause just for saying, ‘Hi, I’m Elizabeth Taylor,’ ” wrote Jim Piazza and Gail Kim in their 2008 book,
The Academy Awards.

A touching addendum to Elizabeth’s friendship with John Wayne appeared in
Duke
by Donald Shepherd and Robert Slatzer. One night in late 1960, Elizabeth, Richard Burton, and John Wayne staged an all-night celebration after discovering they occupied adjoining bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The following morning, Wayne woke up “happy and smiling and still half drunk.” Subsequently, Elizabeth was behind legislation to mint a special gold medal to honor Wayne two decades later as he lay dying of intestinal cancer.
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American Rebel
, Marc Eliot’s 2009 biography of Clint Eastwood, portrayed Elizabeth’s relationship with the future
Dirty Harry
star, who in 1968 was filming
Where Eagles Dare
with Richard Burton in Salzburg. Tired of playing second fiddle to Elizabeth, Richard was cutting her out of his professional life, and she responded by hanging out with Eastwood while Richard was away shooting scenes. “She formed an easy informal relationship with Clint,” writes his biographer. “Liz and Clint would sit and talk about their careers, their lives, their loves, their dreams.”
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She told Clint she was interested in a story about a nun who rescues a mercenary, somewhat reminiscent of
The African Queen.
“The script was given to me by Elizabeth,” Eastwood recalled. “We wanted to do it together, and the studio approved of the combination, but she was going through some deal where she didn’t want to work when it coincided with Richard Burton’s working there on something else, but there were other problems.”
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Later, still intent on playing a nun, this time a Mexican one, she brought Clint
Two Mules for Sister Sarah.
Elizabeth and Clint were Marty Rackin’s first choice to star in the film, but obstacles arose when Elizabeth insisted production be shifted from Mexico to Spain. No dice, said Rackin, determined to stick to the script and minimize expenses. Elizabeth’s medical history became another stumbling block when insurance on her could not be budgeted. Even though her previous film,
Boom!
, had failed at the box office, she refused to cut her usual seven-figure fee, and the producer and Universal, while retaining Eastwood, replaced her with Shirley MacLaine.
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The movie was a dud, but Elizabeth’s efforts to find a property for her and Eastwood demonstrated casting savvy on her part. The on-screen synergy of two such magnetic performers would likely have put an end to her midcareer doldrums.

Another major book in which Elizabeth featured was James Gavin’s
Stormy Weather
, a biography of Lena Horne. With “three veteran glamour girls from old Hollywood—Elizabeth Taylor in . . .
The Little Foxes
, Lauren Bacall in . . .
Woman of the Year
, and Lena Horne in
The Lady and Her Music
,” Gavin writes, “they named the [1981 Broadway] season ‘Liz, Lauren, and Lena,’ with the commensurate pecking order.”
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On the evening Elizabeth caught Lena’s show, she waited outside the star’s dressing room with Barbra Streisand, Sidney Poitier, Ethel Merman, Sammy Davis Jr., Coretta Scott King, Jacqueline Onassis, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward. While Lena dutifully posed for photos with the celebrities and “flashed a dazzling MGM smile,” she “gaz[ed] out as disconnectedly as though she were alone.” Lena Horne may have remained a mesmerizing performer, but she seemed to have lost all interest in people, if she ever had any.

“One of the most beautiful women in the world,” Elizabeth commented, when Horne died in 2010. “Her dignity, grace, and talent shall be remembered forever.”
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Carrie Fisher, daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, got off some memorable one-liners in her 2008 tome,
Wishful Drinking.
“Eddie consoles Elizabeth with his penis” was Carrie’s summation of her father’s role in Elizabeth’s life after the death of Mike Todd. Explaining how Eddie “got all that high-quality pussy,” she said that Eddie was “beyond likable. I mean you would just love him. My father also smokes four joints a day. So I call him Puff Daddy. But he is just adorable: Except that he called Debbie a lesbian in his book
Been There, Done That
, or as I like to call it,
Been There, Done Them . . . My mother is not a lesbian!
She’s just a really, really bad heterosexual.”

When Eddie married Elizabeth, that theoretically made Elizabeth Carrie’s stepmother. Carrie needed to figure it all out when her daughter, sixteen-year-old Billie Lourd, had a flirtation with Mike Todd and Elizabeth’s grandson Rhys Tivey. In the early days of their relationship, Billie and Rhys pondered whether they were relatives, and finally went to Carrie for enlightenment. “You’re related by scandal,” Carrie told them, and later reflected, “I just hope the two of them will get married so this will all be worthwhile.” As a young woman, Carrie had played Princess Leia in
Star Wars.
A drug addict at thirteen, she survived rehabs, nut houses, and electroconvulsive therapy. Fifty-two years old in 2008, she described herself as “a product of Hollywood inbreeding. When two celebrities mate, something like me is the result.”
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As tell-all confessions of the prominent continued to pour forth in the 1990s and early 2000s, Elizabeth was the recipient of brickbats as well as bravos. An example of the former could be found in Andrew Morton’s
Diana
, in which HRH the Princess of Wales revealed that one of her first Royal engagements with Prince Charles was the London production of
The Little Foxes.
The evening was “agonizing” not only because Princess Di was pregnant with Prince William, but because she and Elizabeth just didn’t click. “I didn’t find Elizabeth Taylor very easy to talk to,” she complained.
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Esther Williams certainly didn’t have that problem when she and Elizabeth were colleagues at MGM in the 1940s, Elizabeth as an ingénue and Esther as Metro’s resident bathing beauty. In her 1999 autobiography,
The Million Dollar Mermaid
, Williams writes of her first encounter with Elizabeth, “I couldn’t believe she was only fourteen. She filled out a swimsuit better than I did. . . . With that superstructure of hers, she floated just fine. What she couldn’t do was sink.”
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In
Vincente Minnelli
, published in 2009, biographer Emanuel Levy writes that Elizabeth, who had director approval, chose Minnelli for
The Sandpiper
because her first choice, William Wyler, called the story “a piece of crap.” Though Minnelli was past his prime and no longer bankable, she wanted to pay him back for having handed her two solid-gold hits in her youth,
Father of the Bride
, and
Father’s Little Dividend.
On
The Sand-piper
, Minnelli had to dissuade her from casting Sammy Davis Jr. in the role of her neglected suitor; she didn’t seem to realize that an African-American lover would turn the story into an interracial drama, and there was nothing in the script to support such a theme. The pre-
Death Wish
Charles Bronson got the part.
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Costuming Elizabeth for
The Sandpiper
was a problem; she’d grown so pudgy as Richard Burton’s satisfied—indeed, satiated—wife that designer Irene Sharaff, who knew every curve of her body from having designed her
Cleopatra
wardrobe, was brought in to do major camouflage. Elizabeth insisted on delaying the shoot because she wanted to be in Mexico while Richard was filming
The Night of the Iguana
with Ava Gardner, lest Ava swipe Richard.

If Elizabeth came across Shawn Levy’s
Rat Pack Confidential
in 1998, she would not have been pleased to learn that the real reason Peter Lawford refused to bed her in their early days at MGM was because he disdained her “fat thighs.”
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Years later, in 1984, when Peter was unemployable due to alcohol and drugs, Elizabeth “tossed him a career bone,” offering several days’ work on her film
Malice in Wonderland.
He screwed it up by drunkenly teasing her about her sobriety before passing out, and was fired.
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Levy also divulged that Elizabeth’s dumping of Eddie Fisher won him the friendship of Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, who said, “There’s a guy with a broken heart.”
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David Kaufman’s biography of Doris Day disclosed that in 2004, Elizabeth attempted to lure Doris out of retirement for “one last hurrah.” Doris was so reclusive in Carmel, California, that she refused to fly to Washington to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President G. W. Bush the same year, saying, “For what?” Awards meant nothing to her, but a call from Elizabeth Taylor did. Doris replied that she was “interested but want[ed] to see a script.”
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Nothing has yet come of the project.

A whole new dimension was added to Elizabeth’s life when in 2009, at the age of seventy-seven, she discovered a new attraction on the Internet called Twitter, which advertises itself as “a ser vice that lets you keep in touch with people through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” Establishing an account, she soon had 258,791 followers, advising them that she was “enjoying brie on a baguette, well toasted,” asking what she should name her new fragrance, “holding the world’s sweetest puppy, Delilah,” fuming at a doctor for having said Michael Jackson “had a homosexual relationship,”
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or “beaming with pride and welcoming the newest member of my family, a great grandson!”
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She thought it was “conceited” to call her perfume “Violet Eyes,” as her company recommended, and personally voted for “Follow Me.” “Which do you prefer?” she asked, and later thanked everyone “for your opinions on my new perfume’s name, Violet Eyes.” Her tweets offered political opinions (“I think it’s terrible for the California government to retract the law on Gay Marriage after they made it legal. You can’t treat people that way!”); family news (“Congratulations, Quinn, USC Class of 2009”); latest crushes (“I just love Susan Boyle! I want to hear her magnificent voice again and again”); plugs for friends (“Kathy Ireland was delightful, gorgeous [on
Dancing With the Stars
]. If they ever do a remake of
The King and I
, she should star in it”);
pensees
(“Humor is the only way to stay alive”); thinly veiled advertisements (“I’m so stoked! My fragrance White Diamonds entered the Hall of Fame at the FIFI Awards last night”); health advisories (“I’m home from the hospital [on May 26, 2009] and feeling great. Thanks for all the love and support”); and film criticism (“Just saw
Twilight
on DVD. I want more!”).