Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor 1932-2011

2011-03-24T12:29:00.001-04:00

“I’m more of a man’s woman. With men, there’s a kind of twinkle that comes out. I sashay up to a man. I walk up to a woman.” -- Elizabeth Taylor

“It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a big ring on Elizabeth Taylor’s finger.” -- Andy Warhol

“I am forever punished by the gods for being given the fire and trying to put it out. The fire, of course, is you.” -- Richard Burton, in a letter to Taylor

Ninth Marriage?

2010-04-16T05:16:00.006-04:00

"Last week the Internet was atingle with rumors that Elizabeth Taylor, 78, was engaged for the ninth time to her much younger companion, Jason Winters. But the actress used Twitter to set the record straight. Who is Winters? The 49-year-old millionaire is reportedly the new manager for a famous pop star. Long-term commitment: Taylor opened up about their relationship back in 2007. The actress has discussed her failed marriages in many interviews. Wedding No. 1: Her first -- and shortest -- marriage was to a hotel heir. Star-crossed lovers: Taylor's first marriage to Richard Burton was her longest. Their second marriage also ended in divorce. The other men: She went on to marry an English actor, a producer, her dead husband's best friend and a politician. Her last marriage ended in 1996. Her kids: Taylor's marriages produced two sons, one daughter and one adopted daughter." -- Microsoft BING

Reflections in a Golden Eye

2009-08-16T06:41:00.002-04:00

The title image, as in a play by Tennessee Williams, recurs uncomfortably often. I guess that’s the way gay Southerners wrote way back then. Williams’ plays were made into films, however bastardized, when he was young and hot. Carson McCullers’ novel was made into a film the year she died. The 1941 novel and 1967 film are set on an army base. And its stars were dimming: as Lyndon Johnson sent more and more troops into Vietnam, the Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor brands meant less and less. In 1941 people felt better about the army than they did in 1967. The film was not a hit, and it is difficult to find; but I liked it. Taylor is supposed to be sexy. And yet what fan would believe in Maggie the Cat after glimpsing Katharina the Shrew and the Martha of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Brando and Taylor were past time.

Die Dreigroschenoper

2009-03-05T01:55:00.001-05:00

I just saw G.W. Pabst’s film of the Brecht-Weill 3 Penny Opera. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera has always been a favorite text; Brecht’s play was based on the Gay; but Gay was handed the original idea by Jonathan Swift. The Reagan/Two Bush Era embodied exactly that operatic kleptocracy. When Polly in the Pabst film buys a bank, it is, as they say, priceless.

BEHAVIOR

2009-02-13T23:38:00.001-05:00

Character actors deceive us. Porn and movie stars behave naturally and delight us. Taylor behaves outrageously, always on the big screen.

Taylor and the World before AIDS

2008-10-22T18:49:00.002-04:00

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

2008-10-16T02:18:00.002-04:00

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.

The more Hollywood lies, the more She tells the truth. Citizen Kane fibs tons about William Randolph Hearst. “Rosebud”? I think not. I love La Vie en Rose -- but only because I am content to allow Marion Cotillard to efface Edith Piaf.

What stimulated my interest in Elizabeth Taylor was not her acting. Instead, some years ago I happened on a remaindered book about a con artist named Sante Kimes. The cover photograph seemed oddly, intimately familiar. Who did she resemble? Did Sante Kimes look like Elizabeth Taylor? Yes. I looked through the photos in the book. But she also seemed to look like -- my sister!

My sister, Joan, is eight years older than me, and growing up she cultivated
her resemblance to Taylor. But, more interestingly, Kimes pretended she was Taylor and as Taylor committed numerous, serious crimes. Kimes was a con artist, a swindler and finally a murderer.

Affection Deficit Disorder

2008-10-13T16:57:00.002-04:00

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?

The Other Elizabeth Taylor

2008-08-21T06:36:00.001-04:00

There is of course another Elizabeth Taylor:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200709/editors-choice

unknown auden

2008-02-29T00:32:00.002-05:00

A student film maker from N.Y.U. interviewed me about W.H. Auden. Auden was no unknown citizen. I confirmed the usual impressions. I had observed him on a panel at Columbia’s School of the Arts. Auden was slightly overweight and extraordinarily wrinkled. He dressed casually -- he even wore slippers. After an hour, he glanced at his watch, said he had to go, and shuffled on out. He was 63-years-old.

Then I saw him read to a huge sold-out audience at the 92nd Street Y. He recited his own poems by heart. Only once did he falter--did he glance quickly at a manuscript on the podium, or merely flip his hand a few beats to jog his memory? He seemed seamlessly to resume.

Auden was on TV! He was no actor but he had his lines down. Dick Cavett asked him questions. Auden tended to quote himself with his answers. He didn’t look at Cavett or at the camera.

So finally the time came to phone him and arrange our hour of interview. “I’ll be there promptly at 4:00pm,” I told him, “with my tape recorder.”

“No tape recorder,” he said. He then disparaged cameras, and clicked off.

Auden’s apartment was being broken up. Books and opera records were in piles or in boxes. Shelves were half-empty. He was leaving St Mark’s Place for Oxford, England.

At the end of his life, Auden’s poetry seemed to collapse into a faggy folksiness, a campy pointlessness. The poems were certainly charming but--why bother? They were in any case the opposite of The Orators, his willfully obscure and scarcely readable second book. Allen Ginsberg wrote a homage to this particular vein of camp verse in Indian Journals and it amused me mightily. I asked Auden if he liked Ginsberg’s homage. Auden seemed excited; he’d never seen it, and asked me to send it to him.

Months later I told Ginsberg how much I liked that homage. Ginsberg wondered if Auden had seen it.

“Auden’s seen it,” I said. “I sent it to him.”

Ginsberg looked stricken. “My poem was mean,” he said.

Beowulf

2008-01-02T07:55:00.000-05:00

Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother, rising from the waters in the movie Beowulf, beautiful and big-chested, reminded me of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. Compilers and historians often quote a similar scene with Sophia Loren. The motif becomes entangled with celebrity.

SCRAPBOOK

2007-11-17T00:24:00.000-05:00

Liz the Icon was in the news this week.

According to Wednesday’s Times, Warhol’s “Liz” sold at Christie’s for $21 million. It had been owned by the actor Hugh Grant, who bought it at Sotheby’s in 2001 for $3.5 million.

“The 40-inch-square painting is from a series of 13, each with a different-colored background. Mr. Grant’s 'Liz' is set against a deep turquoise blue and carried an estimate of $25 million to $35 million. Few expected it to sell, because the image is considered heavy-handed and not as sharp as the others in the series.”

Kathe Burkhart’s “ferocious paintings of Elizabeth Taylor, their images cribbed from publicity photos,” according to The New Yorker, “are encrusted with fake fur and mirrors and peppered with a sailor’s arsenal of expletives. Burkhart’s Liz is an abject diva, an emblem of a decadent golden age, and a serial bride who disavows premarital sex--in short, a gorgeous mess.”

Burkhart’s paintings will remain at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center until January 7

Violent Spectacle

2007-09-24T19:51:00.000-04:00

After a long trip, for no particular reason, I went to 3:10 to Yuma yesterday. Thirty years ago I was in Peru this time in September. Peru was run by Russians. Che posters were everywhere. There were free Russian lessons at the University of Cuzco. There happened to be an International Conference of Third World Nations in Lima while I packing for my return to the U.S. Everybody seemed to speak English, and reside in New York; their next stop was the autumn opening of the United Nations. However, on our way back to New York, rightist tanks rolled in the streets of Lima, and the Russians abruptly departed. Today the mass media is echoing Bush’s anti-Iran ploy. President Ahmadinejad spoke this afternoon at my alma mater, Columbia University, and will speak tomorrow at the U.N. The tabloids call him Mr Evil. First there was Osama, then there was Saddam, and now there’s Ahmadinejad. Are the Republicans preparing us for more war? Like O.J. Simpson they’ll eventually catch the guy who blew up the World Trade Center. Meanwhile the cowboys in 3:10 to Yuma kill just about everybody.

La vie en rose

2007-09-08T07:37:00.000-04:00

Edith Piaf’s life is chock-a-block with astonishing events. Raised in whorehouse? Check. Leaves whorehouse for circus? Check. Kicked out of circus with acrobat father and forced to make a living singing in the street? Check. A life with murders that ended with adulation at 44? Check. She was a tiny, pretty woman with an astounding voice. Check her out.

Good Night, Vietnam

2007-08-14T17:39:00.000-04:00

Goodnight Moon. Before the Iraqi distraction, I dreamt of Vietnam. I am an American flyer following a Vietnamese rail line, victory in Vietnam remains possible; -- or so I’d dream. In life I protested the war and cursed Johnson and Nixon. But the peace was not then as sweet as I anticipated. American soldiers returned to unhappy or blighted lives. Vietnam and especially Cambodia fell into misery. Maybe I sought to right matters in dreams. In Rescue Dawn, Werner Herzog portrays an American pilot shot down and imprisoned in North Vietnam. At one point we see a U.S. warplane flying high over the camp. It’s thrilling.

TV Without Liz

2007-07-28T07:38:00.000-04:00

"Oh, Great Altar of Passive Entertainment," says Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes, kneeling before a television, "bestow upon me thy discordant images at such speed as to render linear thought impossible." He turns the TV on. He sits open-mouthed.

LiVE MaG!

2007-07-13T04:52:00.001-04:00

Bring your poems, chapbooks, zines and fliers
yearning to breath free and get some attention dammit!

Sunday, July 22, from 4 to 6 in the afternoon
at Mo Pitkin's House of Satisfaction
34 Avenue A (just north of Houston) Manhattan

Host Jeffrey Cyphers Wright invites you
to participate in a fun-filled, action
packed publication party/talk show/poetry reading with
Michael Andre, editor of Unmuzzled Ox
Kenya Mitchell of Tribes Gallery/Magazine
and Murat Nemet-Nejat, poet, editor and translator.

Bring poems, books, rants and stories. Swap, sell or
give away magazines and chapbooks and be "published"
in LiVE MaG! #3! Have your book or chapbook instantly
reviewed. Receive a free publication. Be a part
of the hottest new concept in small press publishing!
Free. Snacks and drinks available.

Liz Smith on Lindsay Lohan and Liz Taylor

2007-07-03T12:36:00.000-04:00

Now listen -- Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield is worried about Lindsay Lohan’s career. He has already turned a premature thumb down on her coming thriller “I Know Who Killed Me” and asks “has any ‘world’s most famous movie star’ ever reigned so long without having a recent hit movie?”

Well, sure they have! Elizabeth Taylor to name one. Between 1968 and 1994, Miss Taylor made 17 feature films. The only bona fide hit was 1994’s “The Flintstones,” which was also her last big-screen effort.

Of course, La Liz is always the exception to the rule. The less popular her movies were, the more famous she became. We don’t call her “The Star of Stars” for nothing!

Poets & Art Critics

2007-06-27T09:34:00.001-04:00

Jeff Wright and Michael Andre will be giving a Poetry Reading Plus at Gallery in the Field, Brandon, Vermont, this Saturday 30 June at 4:00PM. Jeff and Michael also write art criticism; they will be introduced by Patt Cavanagh, a Vermont artist. The gallery is currently showing the collages of Matthew Rose. Matthew and Michael read together two years ago in Paris. The artist Fran Bull directs the readings and exhibitions at Gallery in the Field.

Gallery in the Field is at 685 Arnold District Road just off Route 7 in Brandon.

Reflections in a Golden Eye

2007-04-29T07:49:00.000-04:00

The title image, as in a play by Tennessee Williams, recurs uncomfortably often. I guess that’s how gay Southerners wrote way back then. Williams’ plays were made into films, however bastardized, when he was young and hot. Carson McCullers’ novel was made into a film in 1967, the year she died. And its stars were dimming: the Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor brands meant less and less as Lyndon Johnson sent more and more troops into Vietnam. And who could ever believe again in Maggie the Cat after seeing the untamed Katharina the shrew and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Giant

2007-04-21T08:56:00.000-04:00

George Stevens directed such famous films as Gunga Din, A Place in the Sun and Giant. Kids used to love Gunga Din (1939). Have you seen it? Half the cast is in brownface and Sam Jaffe plays Gunga Din. It’s banned in India. Ignorant children in the U.S. and Canada, such as myself, adored it through the ’50s when it was broadcast, for instance, on Saturday afternoon TV. It’s based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling. Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951) is based on the great novel by Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy. Elizabeth Taylor plays a socialite in Place in the Sun opposite Montgomery Clift. In Giant (1956), she plays a socialite opposite Rock Hudson and, more antagonistically, James Dean. Like Gunga Din, Giant has a problem with make-up. The film is a family saga; Taylor, Hudson and Dean, in their real world twenties, age into their sixties. It feels like an amateur theatrical which just happens to be produced by Jack Warner and stars the cream of Hollywood. It’s very hard to accept, particularly when you know how Hudson, Dean and Taylor really aged. Dean died days after filming finished. Nevertheless the film is pretty great. Dean starred in only three films, yet has to this day an enduring cult. Within the film, time and Taylor change Hudson’s character with the acutest psychological verisimilitude. The film is a rousing denunciation of racism.

300

2007-03-14T00:54:00.000-04:00

The Spartans were spare with gab and garb.

Notebook: "Mon 9 Oct 2000"

2007-01-19T08:26:00.000-05:00

“girlfight” = Raging Cow

Most good independent films are like long short stories. I’m no indie film buff, but I’m surprised how quickly these films vanish.

“Meet the Parents” opened number one at the box office this weekend; so did “Scary Movie” a few months ago. Jon Abrahams has lead roles in both. “Meet the Parents” is a comedy starring Robert De Niro; his comedies aren’t funny. I laughed at “Scary Movie.” I’ll skip “Meet the Parents,” although I was Jon’s temporary step-parent.

Seven years is temporary.

“girlfight” is a portrait of the boxer as a young girl. She falls in love with another boxer named Adrian (an allusion to “Rocky”), but then humiliates him in the ring. The interesting emotion was anger. The language was raw for Ben.

Ben and I also saw “Ed Wood.” Because Tim Burton, the film’s director, also made “Batman” and “Beetlejuice,” I thought Ben would like it. But the hero is a cross-dressing horror-movie director; other characters, e.g. Bela Lugosi played by Martin Landau, are drug addicts; or aspiring transsexuals, e.g. Bill Murray playing someone from the real Ed Woods entourage.

What am I doing? Am I trying to use film to educate my son? Ben is now ten. I lost Jon, born in 1978, in 1988.

The Good Shepherd

2007-01-03T04:57:00.000-05:00

I have a studio in TriBeCa across the street from Robert De Niro’s longtime residence. Neighbors for 25 years included a CIA couple. I knew them well. Bobby Kennedy would ask him Monday mornings, “Is he dead yet?” Meaning Castro. He had no luck with Castro, but he was station chief in Chile when Allende was assassinated. Then he left the CIA and eventually moved to TriBeCa. They were friends with William Buckley from their days together at Yale.

The wife was much livelier than the husband. She seemed to have accompanied him on his missions, despite children. Robert De Niro has directed a new film about the founding of the CIA, The Good Shepherd, and it so resembles aspects of their lives that I wonder if the actor somehow knew these spies. The last time I talked to the spy intelligently was 11 September 2001. We stood together in the middle of the street watching the World Trade Center burn. He told me before the buildings even collapsed how it was all done.

And then they fell victim to Alzheimer’s. She had it worse than him. Their son moved them away. I inherited their books. Looking for something to read after seeing the film, I happened to pick up a book on Mazzini and secret societies which belonged to him and a book by the naturalist Konrad Lorenz which her son gave her, according to a notation, one hot summer day in 1980.

I picked the Lorenz.

Queen Elizabeth 2006

2006-12-24T09:05:00.000-05:00

The Queen was the most roundly informative and entertaining recent film. Clint Eastwood’s two new movies, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, bookend, for me, James Bradley’s book Flags of Our Fathers plus Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on the Roosevelts during World War II and Don Keegan’s encyclopedia of that War and the Life magazine’s illustrated history (1951); in short, my random recent reading on that gigantic 20th century conflict. I also keep returning to The Iliad, despite its funny Greek alphabet. Yup, I’m a geek. Gunpowder accounts for the small differences between the Trojan war and World War II.

For seven lucky years I was step-dad to Jon Abrahams. Jon starred in Kids and went on to a successful career in film, as a second male lead in films starring the Wynans and Robert De Niro. But, as Lauren Bacall asserts, midnight for an actor is his 26th birthday. And this is the first year I saw Jon in no films.

And Elizabeth Taylor, they say, has Alzheimer’s. Who knows? She seems to be 27 film years old. If we see her again, it’ll be not Elizabeth the queen but Elizabeth the raree. But Clint Eastwood is older than Elizabeth, and the world looks forward to more of his work.

THE U.S. vs. JOHN LENNON

2006-09-16T19:27:00.000-04:00

The new movie about John Lennon should make anyone paranoid about opposing Bush. I was surprised by one thing in the film. The film seems to indicate that the Nixon administration attempted to deport Lennon and Ono on the false charge that Lennon had smoked marijuana. Shortly after they won their case, I happened to spend a day in the country with John and Yoko and some friends. We all smoked a joint. I hadn’t realized it was John’s first time.

Virtucracy

2006-08-25T22:49:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth Taylor is well known for her ardor on behalf of medical research to cure AIDS. She speaks of it whenever she is interviewed on television. She does ads on its behalf. She recently appeared in the middle of a photograph with, among others, Richard Gere (who is also keen on saving Tibetan culture), Natasha Richardson, Harry Belafonte, Nelson Mandela, David Baltimore (the biologist), Greg Louganis (the Olympic diver), Ashley Judd, Eric McCormack, Whoopi Goldberg, Sharon Stone, Tom Hanks, Will Smith, Rosie O’Donnell, Kenneth Cole, Desmond Tutu, Elton John, Alicia Keys, and others. The ad, which appears in recent magazines, reads, “We all have AIDS if one of us does.” But what has it cost these people to have posed for this photograph, in which they all (apart from Mr. Mandela) appear barefoot with their trousers cuffs rolled up? Perhaps a few hours’ time. For all I know, many of them may give six-figure and even larger sums for medical research to find a cure for AIDS. But there is an element of the virtucratic about this advertisement. By virtucratic I mean that it is an ad propelled by the need to demonstrate caring concern on the part of the men and women who posed for it. “We, all of us famous, care deeply about this killing disease,” the ad’s not-very-secret subtext reads. “What about you? Don’t you care? If you do, prove it. Ante up. Show that you are just as caring, just as wonderful, as we.” Why do I look at the people in this ad and to myself mutter, “Ah, the usual suspects, once again proclaiming their goodness.” Because AIDS has affected so many people in the arts and show business, it has become one of the central charitable causes for celebrities. Here the charitable can sometimes shade off into the political, with the disease and the gay liberation movement melting into one cause.

--Joseph Epstein, author of Friendship: An Exposé (Houghton Mifflin, 206)

http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=65

Among School Children

2006-08-23T09:29:00.000-04:00

Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite end in triumphant dances. Both films portray outsiders. In Napoleon Dynamite, an outsider, a Mexican kid named Pedro, becomes president of his All-American Idaho high school. In Little Miss Sunshine, little Olive Hoover attempts to win a Jon-Benet-Ramsey-like little girl beauty contest. But the Hoover family realizes that winning such a beauty contest would be a defeat. There’s no success like failure, as Bob Dylan sang. Olive becomes a beautiful loser, in the Leonard Cohen phrase. Little Olive does a strip-tease. Olive is almost as chubby as Liz Taylor.

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

SCRAPBOOK

2006-06-26T06:48:00.000-04:00

Usually I ignore the scandal sheets, but as a chronicler of Elizabeth Taylor, my duty forced me to buy the June 26 2006 National Examiner. The cover story on Taylor is “a shocking report. The secret’s she’s hiding! Liz’s Collapse. Plus: She falls apart after a recent TV appearance.” The article argued that she had fallen victim to Alzheimer’s. On the Larry King Show, she talked about having to consult little notes she wrote to herself--and how even then she got the facts wrong. “Writing notes of reminder is a common way to combat the memory loss of early Alzheimer’s,” the Examiner notes. The photographs are disturbing. She’s wheelchair-bound and bloated; her eyes mirror a lost soul. The Examiner does not seem to have a web site, but they quote the Daily Mail, which does:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/dmsearch/overture.html?in_page_id=711&in_overture_ua=711&in_start_number=0&in_query=Elizabeth+Taylor&in_name=on&in_channel=-1&in_pub=0&in_order_by=relevance&in_start=%2F%2F&in_end=%2F%2F

SCRAPBOOK

2006-05-08T09:44:00.000-04:00

In a 'Talk of the Town' piece, Lauren Collins talks about the Heimlich maneuver and Choking Man, a new film opening at the TriBeCa Film Festival. In the movie, Mandy Patinkin's character "says to the shaken customer, who has just vomited, in a cinematic slow-mo arc, all over his shirt, 'You know, Elizabeth Taylor was Heimliched. You're in good company. ' Elizabeth Taylor, it turns out, actually belongs in both categories. Twenty-two years before choking on a chicken bone, she saved Montgomery Clift from swallowing his own teeth."
-- The New Yorker May 8, 2006

United 93

2006-05-01T18:32:00.000-04:00

Demonstrations against the war in Iraq Saturday, against genocide in Darfur Sunday, against felony imprsisonment for illegal aliens today--it looks like the Left is coming to life. After a showing of United 93, which features suicidal jihadists on 11 September 2001, a woman shouted "God bless America!" Then another shouted "Rot in Hell you bastards!" The seat in the movie theater felt disconcertingly like a seat in that airplane. There seemed to be no actors; this was cinema verite, and if unity of place was violated, you sure got unity of time. A charismatic star like Elizabeth Taylor would have had difficulty fading into the action. United 93 was a good movie which nonetheless left me depressed.

Michael Curtiz

2006-04-04T00:27:00.000-04:00

Life with Father (1947) and Inside Man (2006) are equally dated. In Life with Father Michael Curtiz directed William Powell, Irene Dunne Zasu Pitts and Elizabeth Taylor in a film of a stage play based on a memoir of 1880s New York. Powell and Burns do a version of Burns and Allen that derives surely from someone’s Ur vaudeville routine. Curtiz also directed Casablana. Inside Man is an action picture and Spike Lee joint. Who done it? The Nazis. Yes, it’s 2006 and Spike Lee has discovered that Christopher Plummer is a Nazi rat. Plummer seems to have recovered the diamonds Dustin Hoffman lost in the reservoir in Marathon Man. Denzel Washington “follows the ring” as in “follow the money.” Many current films do not so much allude to other films as pastiche their scripts.

I saw Inside Man Saturday afternoon at a Staten Island plex with my 15-year-old son. He’s studying World War II in his history class, and he was reassured to learn that World War II is basically still going on;--although he might have guessed that from the History Channel. He’s been sick, so I had secured a DVD of Life with Father for viewing that evening on the computer. Elizabeth Taylor plays a 15-year-old ingenue. She’s wonderful. Nevertheless the action is so stilted, the humor so stagey and the Technicolor so degraded that the film looks like to could have been shot 130 years ago. Both Inside Man and Life with Father are good, i.e. we enjoyed them thoroughly.

Elizabeth Taylor’s mother got her into pictures. Sheridan Morley is a concise and intelligent commentator on Taylor. “For the first but by no means the last time,” Morley notes, Taylor “interrupted the shooting schedule here for reasons of shaky health: five studio days were lost (and her paypacket accordingly adjusted) at just about the moment when it was being strongly rumored that Mrs Taylor had started an affair with the film’s director, Michael Curtiz, thereby somewhat disrupting home life with mother.”

Montgomery Clift

2006-03-17T20:22:00.000-05:00

In 1947 Ross Lockridge, Jr., published his one long, softly Modernist novel Raintree County. Lockridge had spent seven years on the book. It was acclaimed. Today, despite echoes of Joyce and Faulkner, it reads like endless dated historical fiction. But Lockridge committed suicide before critics had their second thoughts. And, at the time, his suicide may have seemed, as they say, a good career move. MGM made a film starring Taylor and Clift. But, then, the film wasn’t all that good. Lockridge is now truly dead.

Raintree County was the second of three Taylor and Clift films. Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy, as I have said, was the basis for A Place in the Sun. Tennessee Williams’s play Suddenly, Last Summer, with a screen play by Gore Vidal, was their last collaboration. Suddenly, Last Summer revisits the themes of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof less successfully. Gay men don’t sleep with women, even women as beautiful as Elizabeth Taylor; how strange is that? It seems less strange in 2006 than it did in 1959. Katherine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor both received Oscar nominations for best actress for Suddenly, Last Summer. Clift plays a neurosurgeon who, using Freud and sodium pentothal, unravels the truth. As absent dead Sebastian’s sexuality is slowly revealed, madness shifts from Taylor, the failed girlfriend or bait, to Hepburn, the failed mother. Unlike Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the film’s key revelation was fairly clear even to movie audiences of the Fifties. Coming up next: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The VIPs

2006-02-14T12:57:00.000-05:00

Snowed in myself north of Syracuse, I was delighted to find The VIPs on cable. The VIPs concerns a group of travelers fogged in at London’s Heathrow Airport. Margaret Rutherford won an Oscar as best supporting actress. It has an all-star cast, but in fact it’s the first Taylor-Burton quickie, filmed while Cleopatra was still being edited, and making big money quickly out of cinema’s most celebrated affair. Terence Rattigan, a playwright put in temporary eclipse by the angry young men, whipped out a screenplay derived from the film Grand Hotel and an incident in the life of Vivien Leigh. Anthony Asquith directs Orson Welles as a director resembling the Fellini of 81/2, and then there’s Maggie Smith, Rod Taylor, etc. As the film opens, Burton and Taylor take a helicopter to Heathrow --what fog? They then drive their Rolls to the V.I.P. lounge. In the backseat, Burton gives Taylor a platinum bracelet because she’s going to New York alone. But, in fact, Taylor is leaving Burton for Louis Jourdan who is already in Heathrow. Burton “plays” a tycoon. Burton has deals to do and has to stay in London. He gets in his Rolls and heads to the City for business. And then along comes this terrible fog.

INSERT

2006-02-14T06:45:00.000-05:00

I hope you enjoy my book about jewelry. It is one of the great passions of my life, but it is not the only one. The support and care of people living with AIDS has been my greatest priority since 1984. My organization, The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (ETAF), is helping people with AIDS by funding programs that deliver care and services to those who need them. I invite you to join me in this passionate endeavor by sending a contribution--big or small--to ETAF at the address below. I personally underwrite the costs of ETAF, so your entire contribution will go directly to those who need your help. You will have my gratitude forever.

With much love--
Elizabeth Taylor

The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation
P.O. Box 55995, Sherman Oaks, CA 91413

SCRAPBOOK

2006-02-03T09:35:00.000-05:00

It was never going to work out, this break-up with France. The French-American love affair just keeps going, a folie a deux that's lasted nearly three centuries. It's tempestuous, hot and heavy, beyond reason. Like all the great, impossible mismatches -- F. Scott Fitgerald and Zelda, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee -- it cannot end.

--Willima Grimes in today's Times

An American Tragedy

2006-01-12T05:31:00.000-05:00

Goaded by the new opera, I finally read Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy. It was the source for A Place in the Sun. It's hard to believe the book came out in the heyday of Hemingway and Fitgerald. It evokes 19th century America, and Dreiser's realism suggests Zola or Stendhal. Dreiser didn't get through college, and his style is pre-grammatical. In the film Elizabeth Taylor plays the upper class trophy whom the misbegotten hero dies seeking. Coming from the wrong decade myself, it's hard for me to imagine anyone seeking Elizabeth Taylor. But there are pictures of Liz in today's Times wearing a slip. It's the new sexiness cf. Scarlett J and that peer of Elizabeth Taylor, the late Marilyn Monroe. Dreiser's earlier Sister Carrie as well as the luckless lower class girl played by Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun were based on Dreiser's sister.

Betty Ford

2005-11-06T08:42:00.000-05:00

Entire communities under stress can become alcoholic. No one particularly notices a pill-popping alcoholic in an American inner city or an isolated mining town, in Hollywood or Bohemia. Rehab for folks in these societies is a pipe dream. The fog of war? The fog of Betty Ford.

Rock Hudson

2005-09-10T21:53:00.000-04:00

I prefer Doris Day to Elizabeth Taylor. Perhaps Day is Taylor’s equal as an actress, although Day was restricted to musicals and light comedy. But I do like Day’s songs. They had Rock Hudson in common. Day was broke in the ‘80s, and had to go back on TV, and having Hudson as a guest in 1985 probably helped in the fight against AIDS. Taylor, on the other hand, chairs AmfAR and reduced poor Rock to a poster child. In Jewelry Taylor compares herself, for instance, to the Duchess of Windsor. It’s not that their friendship was all that important to Taylor; it’s that they competed for the same jewels.

Perhaps when Elizabeth Taylor dies, she will be properly appreciated. At the moment, people have forgotten that she’s an excellent actress. She may have been a better screen actor than, say, Richard Burton. How did she compare with Paul Newman? Let us not forget Newman in his youth was as known for his baby blue eyes just as Taylor in her heyday was celebrarted for violet eyes. But age and ill-health in women is mocked. Day is retired. Day never seemed to go to seed. Taylor is a highly visible celebrity, and mocked as a harridan, as a fat, scary banshee.

Must Love Dogs

2005-08-10T18:54:00.000-04:00

In recent years, Taylor has found comfort in her little dog. She has reportedly said that she "goes nowhere without her little Maltese, Sugar. Sugar has spent more time in her bed than any of the men she has had in her whole life. Eight husbands and one dog..." In an interview with American magazine W, Taylor says she was "happiest while with Todd and Burton, but now has to be content with her Maltese dog Sugar for company." She explains, "I've never loved a dog like this in my life. It's amazing. Sometimes I think there's a person in there. There's something to say for this kind of love - it's unconditional."

Andy's Liz

2005-08-05T20:09:00.000-04:00

Rent a Beatnik

2005-07-16T12:21:00.000-04:00

Gerald Williams asked Ted Joans about his memory of Elizabeth Taylor. "Oh, ya," Ted commenced, "that was when I started the 'Rent a Beatnik' business. Upscale party throwers could have folks like me and Gregory Corso attend their blasts for a fee. We helped to break the ice, provide momentum, add color.... It wasn't a bad deal: we got money, free food, a chance to recite our poetry, sell a painting, blow some horn...maybe even cadge a little Park Avenue pussy on the side...."

"What about Elizabeth Taylor?"

"Oh, she was just there...one of the guests. It was during her Eddie Fisher period. He was there, too. It was in a loft. She said she liked my poetry a lot, even bought one of my chapbooks. A beautiful person, a real person. Nothing phony about her at all."
---Massachusetts Review Vol XLVI, No. 2

Taylor's Snake

2005-07-14T17:10:00.000-04:00

All persons, chronically diseased, are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind or body; whether sin, sorrow, or merely the more tolerable calamity of some endless pain, or mischief among the cords of mortal life. Such individuals are made acutely conscious of a self, by the torture in which it dwells. Self, therefore, grows to be so prominent an object with them, that they cannot but present it to the face of every casual passer-by. There is a pleasure--perhaps the greatest of which the sufferer is susceptible--in displaying the wasted or ulcerated limb, or the cancer in the breast; and the fouler the crime, with so much the more difficulty does the perpetrator prevent it from thrusting up its snake-like head to frighten the world; for it is that cancer, or that crime, which constitutes their respective individuality. Roderick Elliston, who, a little while before had held himself so scornfully above the common lot of men, now paid full allegiance to this humiliating law. The snake in his bosom seemed the symbol of a monstrous egotism…
From Hawthorne’s Egotism or the Bosom Serpent (Classic Books CD)

Rocks in Head

2005-07-12T09:19:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth Taylor may have a brain tumor. My father and aunt died of brain tumors. It’s generally agreed by her biographers that Taylor faked illnesses for publicity. Nevertheless brain tumors make people act strangely. My father became obsessed with keys, duplicating every key he could possess, then arranging them in patterns which made sense to him alone. Taylor’s most recent book is called My Love Affair with Jewelry. It’s an autobiography. She tells her life’s story through associations with particular expensive rocks.

Pissing Apollo off

2005-07-11T15:09:00.000-04:00

The dust jacket copy of Donald Spoto’s A Passion for Life: The Biography of Elizabeth Taylor says: “Generous and compassionate, self-absorbed and egocentric, few stars have achieved as much.” In another place Taylor is described as a vacuous and vulgar egocentric. Egomania with her might be construed as a solipsistic vanity.

Probably writers about Taylor have the sensitivity to meaning all writers must have to succeed; yet only Sheridan Morley’s study shows real style and insight; I suppose the presumption that the audience for a star’s biography is unintellectual and probably downscale leads the other writers on Taylor to ignore, so to speak, Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Freudians have their id, ego and super-ego; Hollywood stars just have lots of ego.

In Latin the word ego tends to be suppressed. “Ego” is a particle which, as Chomsky would say, some languages suppress. Aside from the different alphabets, the Latin ego and Greek εγω are the same word. The Greek cognate is one of the first defiant words uttered by the first real character in The Iliad, the first real character in Western literature:
μη σε, γερον, κοιλησιν εγω παρα νηυσι κιχειω
Agamemnon says, “I will not return the beautiful girl, the beautiful booty, to her father, even if this angers Apollo.” Agamemnon may not be lovable or pious but his assertion of his desires against god and over those of the community is greatly significant. L’Etat, c’est moi?

Such too is the imperious significance of Taylor. Turturro admires Taylor because her whole life she has acted and she has never stopped acting. Marrying conservative Senator Warner and fundraising for AIDS research extended her career onto a political stage. Her nieces by marriage Paris and Nicky Hilton also perform on a kind public stage. Taylor has never retreated into impossible pseudo-Garboesque retirement, from the public eye. And does this assertion signify? Despite its primacy, I hesitate before a phrase like “the invention of self.” Is acting an assertion of ego? Does one thing underlies words like affection, attention, aggression and assertion? Aside from the different consonants, is this simply spirit in action?

Civet

2005-07-09T23:58:00.000-04:00

Believing you are a star, as opposed to believing in your star, can be a sign of egomania. Susan Sontag, the late Jewish lesbian, believed contemporary culture is the creation of Jews and homosexuals. T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, following Action francaise, believed Jews and women were destroying civilization. You decide.

Dick was a star in the Sixties, but, compared to Muhammed Ali, Dick was a lightweight. On the other hand, Daryl Strawberry, one might say, was the Judy Garland of baseball. Rex Reed would sympathize with Judy but despise Daryl.

In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Elizabeth the Cat loves a former athlete played by Paul Newman. But in the play wasn't Paul's character gay? Actors and athletes are valued in their youth. Taylor now sells perfume, Newman salad dressing. Does it smell like teen spirit? You don't see Rex Reed in the sports pages.

Stars in a Dark Night

2005-07-09T02:12:00.000-04:00

What is a star? Andy Warhol, when he started making underground films, dubbed his bohemian actors “super stars.” Lou Reed, Gerard Malanga and Jackie Curtis were talented; Jackie Curtis’ trajectory seems like the story of a star born to burst; he thought he was James Dean for a day. Jean-Michel Basquiat, from later in Warhol’s life, died similarly or, as they say, tragically: heroin.

The New York Times once described Hannah Wilke as Claes Oldenburg’s greatest objet trouve. After her career as a performance artist had attained an arc well beyond Oldenburg, after attaining what fame the art world offers, Wilke was struck with lymphoma, a disease that killed her mother. She had documented her mother’s illness; she documented her own ruthlessly. Her final photographic acts of art were horrifying, courageous, ugly and real. Was she a star?

Hannah Wilke was only an art-world star. Babe Ruth was more than a baseball star. Errol Flynn was a star and a creep. Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol were celebrities; Yoko Ono is still a celebrity. John Lennon was a rock star. Perhaps Wilke was a heroine. But artists and poets are not stars because stars have vast, uneducated publics who follow their doings, for good or ill, on television. You need brains to appreciate contemporary art, poetry and music.

Giant (1959), starring Liz, James Dean and Rock Hudson, was filmed in Marfa Texas; but Don Judd established a contemporary art center there that Liz’s fans rarely visit.
Poets and painters are known for their work. Actors are known for their persons.
Oprah or even Charley Rose won’t do it. The desperate classes of Hollywood fans described by Nathaniel West equally with the drunken blue-collar sports jock have no truck, after college, with literature, or philosophy, or art.

There are stars because of the night.

Prayer

2005-07-07T03:18:00.000-04:00

O, may the Latin god Ego invade and rule from this time to the next my actual living soul, may Ego be my aura expanding and in translucent flame commanding.

Ego

2005-07-07T03:14:00.000-04:00

Ego and ambition drive most human endeavors. Vanity, said the preacher, vanity! All things are vanity!

Someday they’ll make a movie about Elizabeth Taylor.

Liz & Ego

2005-07-06T01:48:00.000-04:00

Egotism is a literary vice -- the excessive use of the word I.

“I was writing really the damnedest trash,” says Francine du Plessix Gray. “It would always be put into the third person and it would always be a twenty-two-year-old actress sort of weeping at the altar. Really adolescent -- awful…nothing to do with my feelings. I would always exteriorize my feelings into a third person….So, [Charles Olson, the poet,] said, ‘Stop this shit… cry into it, weep into it, rant at it… but stop all this third person writing. Get to know what your real feelings are or your real emotions are.” (Martin Duberman: Black Mountain)

I never met Charles Olson or Francine du Plessix Gray, but I met John and Yoko. And I met W.H. Auden: “Remember that another poet’s work is not a pair of spectacles, but a key with which to unlock one’s nature and find its unsuspected treasures. Ask yourself constantly and remorselessly ‘What am I really interested in?’ ‘What do I know for myself?’ ‘What, in fact, are my experiences?’ And however boring or silly those experiences may seem at first sight, those and only those can be the subject of your poems. Make the fullest use you can of your own visual and emotional experiences.” (The New Yorker,1 April 1996).

True Brits

2005-06-29T02:52:00.000-04:00

But the love of Dick and Liz was crowned not by Shakespeare or Shaw, who collaborated unwittingly on Cleopatra, but by Edward Albee. What’s my favorite Taylor movie? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Liz was Martha to Dick’s George. Born in Britain, they were as American as George and Martha Washington.

Sante, Liz & Meryl

2005-06-27T16:20:00.000-04:00

Sante Kimes, with little talent or beauty and no money, wished she were Liz Taylor and, growing crazy and dangerous, believed she was, and often made others to their sorrow share her belief. She was a cruel and cunning con artist. Like a rich Arab or Liz in Cleopatra, Sante kept female slaves. Her slaves were from Mexico not Nubia. She served her only prison term for this peccadillo. She and her son finally moved their act from Vegas to New York and grifted an old lady, Irene Silverman, out of her Upper East Side townhouse.

I became captivated at the photos of Sante Kimes in her biography Son of a Grifter (by Kent Walker and with Mark Schone; HarperCollins, New York; 2001). Ms Kimes did indeed resemble Elizabeth Taylor. But she also resembled my sister. All my life I have heard my sister proclaim Taylor’s beauty and genius. But my sister is older than me and essentially from a different generation. She is from the Fifties and I am from the Sixties. Generally people from my generation disdain Elizabeth Taylor. Meryl Streep is more our actress.

Overview

2005-06-27T01:30:00.000-04:00

Seabiscuit, a racehorse of the ’30s, is today's Wikipedia entry. A few years ago Seabiscuit was the subject of a popular movie and a best-selling book. No one seems to have noticed or cared how National Velvet, which opens the oeuvre of Elizabeth Taylor, echoes the tale of Seabiscuit.

Elizabeth Taylor, born in London in 1932, made her film debut at 10 in 1942; she emerged as a child star in National Velvet (1944). In that movie, Anne Revere won the Oscar for best actress for her portrayal of Velvet Brown’s mother.

As a young woman, Mrs Brown, in an act of folly and glory which reverberated through a lifetime of dependable work and virtue, swam the English Channel. Her daughter Velvet has won a jumping horse in a raffle and wants to enter the National. Opposite Velvet, Mickey Rooney plays a washed-up jockey. He would remind a current viewer of Red Pollard, the rider of Seabiscuit. As in all sports movies, Seabiscuit and Velvet Brown’s horse win!

Rooney, Margaret O’Brien, Shirley Temple and Judy Garland are typical child stars who fail to mature as actresses. But Taylor successfully played an adult in Father of the Bride (1950). Taylor first gains a place in film histories with A Place in the Sun (1951) a movie based on Theodore Dresser’s American Tragedy. This time Anne Revere played Montgomery Clift’s mother, not Taylor’s. Soon thereafter, this wonderful actress and descendant of Paul Revere was blacklisted.

Giant featured Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean; it was filmed in Marfa, Texas, a town coincidentally now renowned in the art world as the birthplace of Donald Judd and home for his museum and foundation. With Clift and Dean, Taylor was getting the meaty interesting roles of ‘50s Hollywood. And when she starred in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and won an Oscar for Butterfield 8 (1960), Taylor became a newspaper icon.

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?

With Cleopatra (1962) she became enmeshed with Richard Burton and, as Rex Reed might say, a legend. The icon wrecks homes! Who can forget? The New Yorker (9 September 2002), for instance, in a discussion of Puff Daddy and Jennifer Lopez, says: “Few couples since Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor have appeared more often in the gossip columns.” In the early Sixties, Dick and Liz set a standard for the inescapable. John Lennon and Yoko Ono set a similar standard when I settled in New York in the early Seventies.

Taylor was rich, beautiful, talented and famous. Andy Warhol painted Portrait of Liz (1963-64), The Men in Her Life (Mike Todd and Eddie Fisher) (1962) and Blue Liz as Cleopatra (1962).
Beauty fades. Parts become rare. Scholars grow careless. Yet Taylor remains iconic. For more than 20 years, beginning in 1983, Kathe Burkhart has painted an appetitive Liz as cartoonish bad-girl transgressor. ( See Art in America ) To Burkhart, the seven or eight--or nine?--husbands were hardly hagiographical. To Burkhart, Liz didn’t just play Katharina the shrew. Liz is the Shrew.