Elizabeth Taylor was the corporeal Venus. Lust in human form. A voracious devourer of life itself.
She was known as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” famous for her violet eyes. She was Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation after watching her dear friend Rock Hudson die in the shadows of the disease. She was godmother to Michael Jackson’s children, Paris Jackson and Prince Michael; and was best friends with the tragic Montgomery Clift. She was the “temporary custodian of some incredible and beautiful things,” with her astounding jewelry collection something over which Richard Burton competed with Aristotle Onassis to give her. Most of all Elizabeth Taylor was the female movie icon of the 20th century who earned movie star status that no other woman could ever claim. She was also a brilliant, Academy Award winning actress, winning Oscars for “Butterfield 8” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, a role every young serious actress with chops takes for a spin (including yours truly, back in my Broadway days).
Elizabeth Taylor was also a heart-breaking ball-buster of a femme force who chewed up the scenery of life and the men she loved, f—ed with ferocity and left behind her when the force of wills became too strong. The list of cocksmen is long: Conrad ‘Nicky’ Hilton, Michael Wilding, Michael Todd, Eddie Fisher, Richard Burton twice, John Warner, and Larry Fortensky, but the leading man after Todd was always Burton. Elizabeth also leaving men at her feet well beyond her mating conquests, including studio heads who were expected to present her with gifts of jewels, excepting the legendary asshole Jack Warner who said “I’m paying her a million, and one hundred thousand, plus 10 percent of the gross. Let her buy her own brooch.” Men who offered contracts befitting the queen of the silver screen for the pleasure of allowing them to film her quintessential essence.
A legendary boozer, eater, pill popper, a primal sexual partner, Elizabeth had no rivals and never will. The Golden Age of film dies with her and now the legend can rise.
From Dame Elizabeth Taylor’s Twitter account, circa July 22, 2010: Every breath you take today should be with someone else in mind. I love you. Her last entry publicizing her Harper’s Bazaar interview with Kim Kardashian. Her comments on rumors of a movie of her life classic of Hollywood’s greatest broad:
Let the casting begin, because there was simply nothing like Elizabeth Taylor’s life. Just don’t call the move “Dick and Liz,” because she hated the chopping off of her name and that this is what she and Burton became as their most decadent heights fell away to them becoming simply mortals, well almost.
After she lost her love Mike Todd in an airplane crash, then peeled through his best friend’s life making Eddie Fisher Taylor her husband, then moving to the staid Sen. John Warner’s wife, which bored the hell out of her, Elizabeth went on to live on yachts with the tortured Welshman genius Richard Burton, whose only dream was to be a writer and poet because he believed acting not fit for a man. This was the love affair that riveted the world for years, as they were hounded from port to port in order to duck taxes on their extraordinary wealth, always with dogs and children and family in tow. Fans hounding them in one city so ferociously Elizabeth thought she’d lose her life by being crushed to death before being rescued, which haunted them both ever after. Mr. Burton caring for his family, which went well beyond the norm, as his manic depressive Welsh roots hounded him through his tragic life. Family always the center of the Burtons’ world.
The extraordinary book about the life lived by Elizabeth and Richard Burton was chronicled in “Furious Love – Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century” and spares no delicious detail of this everlasting carnal coupling that was the libidinous equivalent of Zeus and Hera on earth. From their harrowing fright and flight from fans, to Burton’s quest to bathe his beauty in jewels, morphing the phenomenal Cartier Diamond into the “Taylor-Burton diamond” when the competition between Burton and Onassis to bathe Elizabeth versus Jackie in the opulent jewel boiled over to an Onassis loss, to their putting Mexico on the map as their den of iniquity that soothed their longing to hide away, even while their egos thrived on being Elizabeth and Richard, the most famous lovers on earth. Authors Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger capture their epic romance completely and tragically, as all love is, because the infinite heart can never outlast the finite human experience we are all living:
What Liz Smith had seen, perhaps, and the other critics had not, was that Elizabeth had finally embraced her new role of queen of camp. She had always loved the big show–Mike Todd had taught her that–the spectacular entrance, the opulent furs, the eye-popping diamonds, fabulousness for the sake of fabulousness. She loved it, she celebrated it, she understood it. And perhaps the biggest reason why she and Burton could not longer be together onstage, was that, by now, Richard was tragedy and Elizabeth was comedy. Elizabeth realized it herself, saying at the time, “When we were able to be Richard and Elizabeth, the marriage worked beautifully. It’s Liz and Dick that didn’t work, because they were two people who didn’t really exist.” But now it was all they had left. … …
[…] We’ve never really split up,” [Richard Burton] told Graham [Jenkins, his brother], and I guess we never will.” … But mostly they kept in touch through frequent phone calls. For a man who spent his whole life avoiding the telephone, he loved it when it was Elizabeth’s voice at the other end. Sometimes they would discuss new projects they could do together, or teach each other, or revisit the past. “The bond between them seemed to defy all efforts, including their own, to make a clean break,” Graham believed.
Then, in one long phone call from Celigny late in the summer of 1984, Richard did something he had never done before in his talks with Elizabeth. After hoping to meet again, either in London or in Gstaad or in Celigny, he uncharacteristically ended his call with “Good-bye, love.”
For Elizabeth, it had an eerie sound of finality to it, though neither she nor Richard knew that they would never see each other again.
A few days after Burton’s death, Elizabeth received a love letter from him. Maybe now we’ll find out what it said.
Elizabeth Taylor was a force of nature, an unquenchable inquisitive human who met a man who challenged her to rise to heights of her craft that she may have found alone, but in this coupling found nurturing amidst the cracking open of the eye of the lustful hurricane that she was as a woman and Elizabeth and Richard were as voracious and tortured lovers. Burton helped tap Elizabeth’s inexhaustible primal human force, which in the end is the purpose of great love between a man and a woman at its height of heat.
The spirit that made Elizabeth Taylor who she was in life should have exploded long ago through her choice of obliterating the boundaries of life’s possibilities, pleasures and worldly pursuits, indulgences and self-inflicted stresses, but nothing could dim the nuclear force that was Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Taylor lived out loud all of her life. She died untamed.
Taylor Marsh is a political analyst, writer and commentator on national politics, foreign policy, and women and power. A veteran national politics writer, Taylor’s been writing on the web since 1996. She has reported from the White House, been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her blog.
TM NOTE: “Furious Love – Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century,” by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, was an invaluable source for this tribute.