The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (60 page)

Thanks to Twitter, her response to Michael Jackson’s death in the summer of 2009 was recorded, almost minute by minute, on her site. Michael had become a hopeless junkie, going beyond hard drugs to the killer IV-drop knockout anesthesia Diprivan (propofol). While playing Russian Roulette during the frenetic last act of his life, he thought of Elizabeth and invited her to the premiere of
This is It!
, which was to launch his fifty-concert engagement in London. On the morning of May 13, 2009, she tweeted, “Counting the days until Michael’s opening night in London.” Sadly, that night would never come. On June 25, at 11 a.m., his comatose body was found on the floor of his bathroom in Beverly Hills.
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Later that day, Elizabeth tweeted, at various times, “I was packing up my clothes to go to London for his opening when I heard the news. I still can’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. We had so much in common and we had such loving fun together. My heart, my mind are broken. I loved Michael with all my soul and I can’t imagine life without him. My mind, my soul were transported by his beauty, his voice, his inner being. God has kissed this man and I thank God for it.”

Elizabeth scrupulously avoided the Staples Center, where the Jackson family was throwing a memorial extravaganza starring Mariah Carey. “I wouldn’t go to the Staples Center and I certainly don’t want to become a part of it,” Elizabeth tweeted. “I love him too much. I just don’t believe that Michael would want me to share my grief with millions of others. How I feel is between us, not a public event. And I cannot guarantee that I would be coherent to say a word. I’ve been asked to speak at the Staples Center. I cannot be part of this public whoopla. I will always love Michael from the depth of my being and nothing can separate us. I am a survivor not only for myself, but for my family and for Michael too.

“I keep looking at the photo he gave me of himself which says, ‘To my true love Elizabeth. I love you forever.’ And I will love HIM forever. I can’t imagine life without him. But I guess with God’s help I’ll learn. I don’t think anyone knew how much we loved each other. The truest, most giving love I’ve ever known. O God! I’m going to miss him. It can’t be so. He will live in my heart forever, but it’s not enough. My life feels so empty.”

According to Jack Larson, after Michael’s death Elizabeth treated his three orphaned children to a day at the Universal City amusement park.
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The oldest, Prince Michael I, born in 1997, was Elizabeth’s godchild. A daughter, Paris Katherine Michael, was born in 1998, and Prince Michael II (Blanket) was born in 2002. The older children were said by Michael to have been “a natural conception” during his thirty-six-month marriage
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to Debbie Rowe, his second wife, and Blanket was the result of “a surrogate mother and my own sperm cells,” according to Michael.
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At the memorial ser vice at the Staples Center, the boys acted like typical kids, by turns curious, bored, and fidgety. It was Paris who emerged as the star of the day, an uncommonly poised eleven-year-old, whose eloquent words, “Daddy was the best father you could ever imagine,” were as unexpected as they were convincing.

The following September, when asked how Elizabeth was faring, a source close to her family, who asked not to be identified, said, “She is the head of that house hold, that clan. She’s very much a hands-on mother and grandmother. She knows where everybody is and what they’re doing. They are her major interest right now. When she says I want you for dinner, they drop everything and show up for dinner.” If friends or family members are strapped for cash, she sends first-class airplane fare with a note simply stating, “Join me. Love Elizabeth.”
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It’s mainly her family that keeps her going, “and that’s a gift from God,” she says.
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On October 6, 2009, she tweeted, “Dear Friends, I would like to let you know before it gets into the papers that I am going into the hospital to have a procedure on my heart. It’s very new and involves repairing my leaky valve, using a clip device, without open-heart surgery, so that my heart will function better. Any prayers you happen to have lying around, I would dearly appreciate. I’ll let you know when it’s all over.” Later she added, “They [the press] said I had diabetes which is a total lie.” The procedure was carried out at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on October 7. The following day, she tweeted, “My heart procedure went off perfectly. It’s like having a brand new ticker. Thank you for your prayers and good wishes.”

Her spirits soared when she was invited to a private screening of Michael’s posthumously released film,
This Is It!
, a pastiche of rehearsals for the concert he was to have given in London. Booting up her computer on October 26, 2009, she began furiously tweeting at 2:22 p.m.: “I was honored with the great privilege of seeing
This Is It!
last week. I was sworn to secrecy, but now I can let you know about it. It is the single most brilliant piece of filmmaking I have ever seen. It cements forever Michael’s genius in every aspect of creativity. If you listen to his lyrics, they are those of a modern-day prophet . . . From ‘Black and White,’ ‘Man in the Mirror,’ the inspiration behind ‘We Are the World,’ we must take his words of responsibility seriously . . . I truly believe this film should be nominated in every category conceivable.”
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Miko Brando, the son of Marlon Brando, and long a Michael Jackson bodyguard, said he and Elizabeth “enjoyed the movie together. We were numb afterwards.”
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On November 1, 2009, a source close to Elizabeth’s family said, “ ‘Grandma’s good’ is the word. She’d had a leaky heart, but now she’s at home, feeling stronger than she has in a long time.” Two months previously, in September, although she had skipped the media circus held in the Staples Center, she did attend, along with two hundred others, Michael’s relatively low-key funeral at the Forest Lawn Mausoleum, waiting outside the chapel for two hours in the blazing summer heat with the Jackson family, Lisa Marie Presley, Macaulay Culkin, Corey Feldman, and Al Sharpton. Bent and drawn, Elizabeth had never looked quite so old, and was barely recognizable.
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Hawklike in visage, she rather resembled Beulah Bondi, the granitic, redoubtable character actress who played Jimmy Stewart’s mother in
It’s a Wonderful Life.
Bondi was beautiful, if beauty is the summation of a life well and bravely spent; and if beauty can further be defined as character, then Elizabeth Taylor was still attractive, at least without makeup, as she appeared to be that day. Nor was she without male admirers. “There are still handsome young men around who worship Elizabeth,” said Jack Larson, “men like Bulent Tugrul, who comes from Istanbul. He worships her.”
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In 2010 she remained at the helm of the Elizabeth Taylor industry, a fierce guardian of her brand. “Hold your horses, world,” she warned. “I’ve been hearing all kinds of rumors about someone being cast to play me in a film about Richard and myself. No one is going to play Elizabeth Taylor, but Elizabeth Taylor herself.”
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Ever the canny businesswoman—Passion, White Diamonds, and Black Pearls rack up $200 million annually in U.S. sales
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—Dame Elizabeth expanded into jewelry, opening the House of Taylor, a line of “couture jewels,” at Geary’s Beverly Hills. On Twitter, she advised her followers, “I hope you’ll see both places for holiday ideas,” also promoting her pal Kathy Ireland’s “Monkey Mischief” at Neiman-Marcus.
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And ever the watchful humanitarian, she admonished on Twitter, “It’s a shame more public servants don’t have San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s courage in speaking out against Prop 8. Go Gavin! There is no such thing as a ‘Gay’ agenda. It’s a human agenda.”
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Also on Twitter, and from the throne of age and experience, she shared the guiding principle of her Senior years: “Every breath you take today should be with someone else in mind. I love you. Remember always to give. That is the thing that will make you grow.”

When Eddie Fisher died, alone and ill, in the autumn of 2010, Debbie Reynolds prayed that he had “finally found peace.”
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I could locate no comment from Dame Elizabeth, but she did have something to say that year about another husband, Richard Burton: “He was magnificent at making love,” she recalled, adding, “My kids worshipped him.”
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According to a confidante of hers, on the night Burton died in 1984, he wrote Elizabeth from abroad, indicating that he wanted to come back to her.
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By the time she received the letter, it was too late. He was dead.
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Elizabeth still entertained at home, inviting friends to dinner, but she wasn’t always well enough to join them at table. “On Thanksgiving 2010,” Jack Larson recalls, “she had people over, explaining she might not come down but they would all have dinner. In fact she did come downstairs and she looked wonderful—charming and lovely.” In the next few months, sadly, all that would change. Completely hidden from public sight, she began to lose weight at an alarming rate, was unable to eat or sleep, and required a portable oxygen tank. Perhaps sensing the end was near, she celebrated her seventy-ninth birthday one month early, on January 29, 2011, in her Bel Air home, surrounded by intimates and trusted assistants. “I’m not dead yet,” she said, promising them she’d live long enough to see her eightieth birthday on February 27, 2012. Though frail and showing bruises at her January 29, 2011, party—one on her chin was possibly from wearing an oxygen mask, and one on her chest could have been from a fall—she had a rosy, bright-eyed, full-cheeked, firm-skinned, perky look, and when a toast was proposed, she raised her hands in the air like a delighted child. In the festive balloon-and flower-filled room, she smiled and chatted, flashing huge diamonds and pearls, clad in a white caftan with a pattern of red roses, her snow-white dog never leaving her lap.

But there were sinister signs. She had trouble breathing, spoke in brief sentences, and remained in her wheel-chair. Due to neck pain, she sometimes rested her head on her shoulder. She couldn’t eat but did manage to enjoy some of her birthday cake.
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In the next ten days her condition continued to deteriorate. Increasingly desperate respiratory problems required that she be attached to an oxygen tank virtually around the clock. Her bones disintegrating from osteoporosis, she developed stress fractures on both knees. Her weight plummeted to 98 pounds.

On February 1, she had to leave the house for a medical checkup, and as she arrived in her wheelchair at the doctor’s office, paparazzi caught images of a disease-ravaged woman in cowboy boots and too much gold jewelry. With an oxygen tube running up her nose, her shriveled form listing to one side as if she couldn’t keep her head upright, her cheeks caved in, her visage gaunt and withered, she somehow managed a smile, gazing at the camera with an expression full of wisdom, acceptance, and a courage that was ennobling—and heartbreaking. Something in her eyes announced to the world that she was still undefeated. Richard Burton, the love of her life, had foreseen her tragic end as a cripple in a wheelchair and was afraid she’d appear merely pathetic. Had he lived he would have been proud to see that suffering and an unshakable belief in God had imbued her with an altogether new kind of beauty—that of an un-conquerable spirit.

Then, on February 8, came a near-fatal blow. The leaky heart valve that had been previously repaired failed her again. Her blood pressure perilously low, and in agonizing abdominal pain, she was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit at Cedars-Sinai, where she was placed on a respirator. Her family rushed to her bedside as Dame Elizabeth absorbed the news that a life-saving operation would be necessary, though in her fragile condition any procedure could kill her. Nevertheless she opted for surgery, and on February 12, doctors successfully stemmed the bleeding. It took several tense hours for her to respond, but finally her heroic constitution kicked in and she began to stabilize.
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As she’d famously uttered onscreen a half-century before: “Nothing’s more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof—is there? Is there, baby?”

As she fought for her life over the weekend, thousands of her fans huddled together on Facebook and Twitter, sharing praise, prayers, and commiseration. From Canada twenty-five-year-old Andy Budgell posted, “Love how it’s Elizabeth Taylor who’s a trending topic on Twitter and not Lady Gaga. It’s just like
Cleopatra
days all over again. She’s on the front pages of the news and entertainment sites. After nearly seventy years of fame, Elizabeth is still the queen. Feel better, Elizabeth!”

I found myself drawn into the force field of her resurgent notoriety when, from Asuncion, Paraguay, twenty-three-year-old Serch Marron, finding me on Facebook, wrote, “We have a copy of your book
The Most Beautiful Woman in the World
in the library where I work, so you are read in pretty exotic countries like mine. You, Mr. Amburn, and Mr. Budgell :) are incredibly lucky . . . You have met the most beautiful woman in the world . . . I will never forgive you both for that :).”

Carly Michelle wrote, “Elizabeth Taylor is a boss,” and S. Blayr Hogg waxed hyperbolically, “The bitch is fierce. She ain’t goin’ down without a fight.”