Taylor and the World before AIDS

LIZ AND ALL THOSE GAY GUYS

I loved Elizabeth Ashley on Broadway in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But I was subsequently puzzled and disappointed with the Taylor and Newman film. But the film absolutely outraged Tennessee Williams, for his theme of repressed homosexuality was snipped completely. Growing up in a small Canadian college town in the ‘50s and ‘60s, all Tennessee Williams films puzzled me.

Ah, the 50s and the 60s! My parents weren’t movie fans. They were serious. My sister however was frivolous and luxury-loving. She filled scrapbooks with color photos clipped from movie magazines, mostly of stars like Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson. My parents would watch Raymond Burr, TV’s Perry Mason. My father ran through dozens of Gardner novels. Burr, like Clift and Hudson, conducted spurious public romances to mislead the homophobic general; would you believe Natalie Wood broke Raymond Burr’s heart? And then in A Place in the Sun Burr took Clift’s head. Can we see here a foreshadowing of TV’s Ironsides?

BABYLON REVISTED

The Last Time I Saw Paris, unlike Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, did mediocre box office. Paris fails like Cat because of the script. It was based on Babylon Revisited, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella about visiting Paris after the Crash of 1929. As the current financial crisis deepens, Babylon Revisited grows in power. But in the Taylor retelling, the film is set in the early 1950s, and there is no connection whatsoever to history or to the larger world. Paris is quite nice, of course; but the Roaring Twenties apparently occurred c.1948-50.

Elizabeth Taylor performed by Sante Kimes

The bio-pic is the cream of Hollywood nonsense. In Night and Day, for instance, Cary Grant portrays Cole Porter. Although Porter was gay, Cary Grant in the film locks him in the closet. Oh, where does one begin? Many have claimed Grant himself was in the closet.
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Affection Deficit Disorder

Authorities differ about her number of marriages. The Columbia Encyclopedia (Fifth edition; 1993) states she was married nine times. The later Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia (Second edition;1998) says she was married only eight times. Both agree she was married twice to Richard Burton. That kind of careless error might reflect the contempt many in the academy feel for Elizabeth Taylor. Perhaps, as John Turturro's mother once said, Taylor's the type who'd only ever sleep with her husband, which is why she needed so many. She's had more husbands than Henry VIII had wives. Is it attention--or affection--deficit disorder?