Back in 1955, a fervent French film critic named Michel Mourlet penned a homage to his favorite movie star that began “Charlton Heston is an axiom. By himself alone he constitutes a tragedy, and his presence in any film whatsoever suffices to create beauty.” Some of you think that sounds pretty loopy, and maybe you’re right, but what’s the point of a life without passion, on the other hand.
I sympathize with Mourlet in part because I feel exactly the same way, only about Elizabeth Taylor. A couple of weeks ago I was at a rep screening of her 1966 film The Sandpiper, her third picture costarring longtime real-life love Richard Burton, about a bohemian artiste in Big Sur (Liz) who confounds a buttoned-down but compassionate pastor (Dick). As I watched my mind was awhirl. “This was her third film with director Vincent Minelli, who first worked with her in 1950’s Father of the Bride, and in which he shot her with such adoration that she seemed almost a religious figure…where in this film will he show similar devotion?” Eventually it happened, in a different compositional mode, as Sandpiper is a widescreen picture and Bride was the almost-square Academy ratio, but the frames appeared, she was ravishing in an extra special way, and there was rejoicing in the land. The land of my head, at least.
Taylor, who died in 2011 at age 79, was an undeniable screen icon, but debate continues to this day as to whether she was a great, or even good, actress. I believe she often was. More often than not, in fact. But as the critic (now filmmaker) Kent Jones commented on my blog when I put up one of my homages to her back in the day, “It’s her openness that I find so disarming and moving, in all her incarnations. Was she a great actress? She was a game, hard-working one, and the interesting thing is that she never seemed to be milking her own beauty — the director and the cameraman worked every variation they could (how many actresses could have held close-ups as massive as the ones in A Place In The Sun?), but she never wielded her looks like a weapon.”
Her openness is the main attraction in a new documentary about her, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, which recently debuted on HBO. The movie, directed by Nanette Burstein, is concentrated on recently re-unearthed interview tapes conducted by the journalist Richard Meryman, for what would be published in 1964 as By Elizabeth Taylor, a memoir of sorts. (The book is long out of print, while dozens of other Taylor, or Taylor/Burton biographies, clog up Amazon.) The movie opens with that hoariest of devices in documentaries where the primary source is audio: a shot of a reel-to-reel tape recorder being switched on. Any viewer annoyance is immediately ameliorated by the sound of Taylor herself cheekily asking “Do you have your friggin’ machine on?” Soon enough she’s singing “The Night They Invented Champagne.”
Using a variety of archival footage that, among other things, shows off Liz’s hypnotic violet eyes at every age — colleague and friend Roddy McDowell will later be heard recalling that when he met her on the set of 1943’s Lassie Come Home, when she was ten and he was about thirteen, she had “the most exquisite face” — Taylor narrates a chronology of her life.
She was brought up not in Hollywood but in Beverly Hills — her father was a gallery owner at the Beverly Hills Hotel — and was astonished when she first saw a studio backlot. She was bundled up and put into pictures strictly on account of her beauty. Under contract to MGM, she came to feel like she was being used strictly as ornamentation in garbage programmers. Because she was. She was also a self-described “terrified little girl” who though she was in love at age 17 and imprudently married Nicky Hilton, socialite rotter of the hotel family. A good looking guy and an abusive drunk.
Such was just the beginning of a drama-filled life for Taylor. Between getting out of that marriage and putting up with a studio hierarchy that was “gonna keep me stuck as an ingenue” and a “teenage Hollywood puppet,” she had her hands full. A plum role in the An American Tragedy adaptation 1951’s A Place in the Sun put her in the care of an inspired Hollywood pro, director George Stevens. “I loved being given the chance of maybe becoming an actress, and I took it.” She acquits herself beautifully in the movie, acting opposite Montgomery Clift, whose “New York stage actor” rep intimidated her. They became the closest of friends. So too did she befriend James Dean on the set of 1958’s Giant, another George Stevens picture, albeit one on which Taylor recalls she “got off on the wrong foot’ with the director. Taylor speaks movingly of having spent time with Dean in the Porsche Spider he’d just bought and would die in that very day.
There’s a lot of time spent on her insane love life. After two marriages — the one to Hilton that she had to escape, and one to Michael Wilding that just fizzled, despite producing two sons — she found the love of her life in mega-producer Mike Todd. The movie is generous with its clips of the voluble and funny Todd, who adored Taylor and lavished gifts on her, including a 28-and-a-half carat diamond that he gave her on the sound theory that a 30-carat rock would be vulgar. “I get my hands on a few dollars occasionally,” he jokes, and then says he likes nothing better than to spend it on “spoiling” Liz. Todd died in a plane crash in 1958. While he was alive, the couple’s best friends were also-married crooner Eddie Fisher and musical star Debbie Reynolds. “I never loved Eddie,” Taylor admits here. “I liked him. I felt sorry for him.” And, after finding solace with him after Todd’s death, she married him anyway, scandalously.
And then along came Richard Burton. Who she famously married, divorced, then married again. “I don’t think I ever really tried to be alone,” she admits on the tapes. She also muses on the futility of ever trying to justify herself to the press or the public. “It’s a losing game. If you try to explain you lose yourself along the way.”
Sometimes her frankness is startling. She constantly disparages her work in Butterfield 8, the movie that won Taylor her first Best Actress Oscar (“I did it with a gun to my head,” she says, despite a clip featuring her delivering the line “I was the slut of all sluts” with uncommon gusto), saying the honor came because of peer sympathy for a medical trauma she suffered that year. “It was my tracheotomy Oscar.” At one point she bluntly states “I don’t want to talk about Nicky Hilton, about him kicking me in the stomach and causing a miscarriage.” She loses patience with Meryman after he calls her a “sex goddess” for the umpteenth time. “You put so much bloody emphasis on this sex goddess stuff! I’m a broad! I’m a woman.” Seconds later she allows that “sex is gorgeous.”
She never gives herself points for her incredible resilience, never pats herself on the back, never indulges in any “I’m a survivor” malarkey. She’s incredibly feisty and likable. Of course, the “lost” material peters out with several eventful decades left in Liz’s life, and Burstein handles that well, with archival footage showing that eventually Taylor did learn the art of being alone (with some help from rehab at Betty Ford) and demonstrated exemplary and typical courage as an early activist for AIDS research. If you’re a fan of Liz, you’ll love this. If you’re not a fan, I don’t know what your damage is, but this should undo it.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.
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