Liz Taylor

A face, a pace, and a case.

Liz

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” (Max), directed by Nanette Burstein, draws on a series of interviews Taylor did with journalist Richard Meryman starting in 1964. Taylor died in 2011. The footage of her, starting as a child actor in Hollywood, is stunning, as is the beautiful girl Taylor was, who always looks a bit lost, on camera and off, as if to say, why are you looking at me? Who do you think I am? Who do I think I am?

In 1964, when the tapings began, Taylor was 32, and she was 32 when she played Martha, a woman in her 50s, in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. She gained 20 pounds for the part and wore gray hair. (The idea of Martha with gray hair at 50, what even is that?) Taylor was insecure about her acting and didn’t take classes to learn more. She was proud with good reason of this performance, though. In an interview, her husband and co-star Richard Burton says, begrudgingly, she took over the film. It was hers.

On the tapes at 32, Taylor sounds 100. She sounds like she’s lived the life all women lived for 10,000 years until around 1967, when women decided, more or less at the strike of a match, to stop lying about their real feelings. The tapes continue into the 1970s and possibly beyond. In the documentary, Taylor doesn’t talk about her children or her activism on behalf of AIDS. AIDS hasn’t yet happened during the time of the interviews.

Early on, she says to Meryman, “I need to be dominated by a man.” It’s a casual remark. I need soy milk because I’m lactose intolerant. I need a parrot in the room to tell me dirty jokes. What does it mean, “I need a man to dominate me”?

In Story of O, O is turned on by the same idea and winds up in a corner of the chateau wearing an owl mask. In real life, that is of course what happens, you wind up standing in a corner wearing an owl mask. How can Liz find a man to dominate her when she was already Elizabeth Taylor at twelve? She was already a movie star earning more money than her parents. She was already living at the pinpoint heart of fame, where there are cameras on you all the time and the fake things you say to entertainment reporters tip the zeitgeist in your direction, at the same time the zeitgeist is making you talk that way. Poor Liz. She can never be number 2. What a predicament to find yourself in.

All the other big women working with their big-woman muscles to be number 2 have a better shot at it. Simone de Beauvoir with Sartre. Sylvia Plath with Ted Hughes. Lee Krasner with Jackson Pollock. Elizabeth Hardwick with Robert Lowell. All these 50-foot women have a better shot at squeezing themselves into a muffin tin than Liz. Liz is the biggest 50-foot woman in the pack.

There is a moment in the documentary when she tells Meryman and her friend Roddy McDowell to stop harping on the image of her as a sex symbol. She doesn’t think she is a sex symbol. Beauty is not the same as sexiness. In the early movies, she’s very beautiful in a way that is almost always a series of still photos. She never smiles in the studio portraits of her. I thought, no, you're not really sexy. You're something else. Her hesitancy makes it hard for her to relax enough on camera to be sexy. She thought Butterfield 8 was a piece of shit and that she was given an Oscar not for her acting but, as she says, “for my tracheotomy." (During the filming of Cleopatra, she had been very ill with pneumonia and almost died.)

In most of the footage we see, Liz doesn’t look like she’s having fun. She looks like she’s looking for a way to get lost in a forest made of men.

Liz looking happy in a rare candid shot in London at 18.

Tea Leaf

Richard read about a woman who became demented at 78. I said, “Does that mean I’ll become demented in two months?”

When I was 20, I compared myself to other people my age all the time. I was in the derby of where is my life going. Everyone was headed somewhere good and clear, and I wanted what they had. At 78, what am I looking for in comparisons?

I’m thinking about a friend I’ll call Susan. Whenever I went anywhere with Susan, I was anxious, and my need to impress people made me awful to be around. I didn’t know this at the time. I remember a visit with Susan to the home of a famous novelist. Susan seemed wary, and in my memory she was wary of the famous novelist. Just now it strikes me, she might have been wary about bringing me. It was like bringing a grenade to a party. When was I going to go off.

Now, as I think about Susan, instead of loathing her for once telling me I was the most self-absorbed person she’d ever known, I feel oh dear, poor Susan, and I can see how far she went to include me in her life. Out of guilt? A sense of responsibility for taking me up in the first place? I showed so much pleasure in knowing her. It’s hard for people to resist this until they can.

Elizabeth Taylor said you have to pay your debts in life and she could never pay her debts. The same for me.

I find I can live with that. It’s a different sort of you can live with that these days than in the past. Easier. Not quite a shrug. Not so much self-pity—not to be confused with its close relative self-loathing, the way Sin, referred to by Milton in Paradise Lost as “a darkness visible” enters the scene of hell with its offspring Error.

On Saturday, we went to a party where everyone was a generation younger than us or more than a generation younger than us. We did see one woman with white hair and a rounded, post-menopausal figure talking to a group of younger people on the grass. She was probably younger than us but had the look of an allegorical figure in Milton called “Out the door very soon.”

Other than this person, we were by far the oldest people there, and I didn’t care any more about this than I did about my sense of failing in friendship.

Richard and I ate lox and talked about men who own the means of cultural production. He feels sold short because of his accent or something. I feel I have been living in the bathroom of the richest person I know, and I have to decide which perfume I am going to steal.

Spine

In the TV series The Good Place, heaven is a boring failure. It’s the same problem with paradise. No one can make perfection or endlessness interesting. The only thing in heaven that pumps the blood is the affection exchanged by the central cast of four dead humans, an ex-demon, and an entity that can know everything and be everywhere without a plan or a sense of will. For happiness to exist, you need change. Even the entity falls in love.

Yesterday I saw a spine surgeon in Albany. In October 2020, the day we moved things from our storage unit into our house, I was pulling a mattress going backwards and didn’t remember a step in the hallway. It leg checked me. I flew into the air and landed on my back. For a few hours, I couldn’t move. Then I turned over like a turtle and by the next day I could drive. A few months ago, I learned I had a compression fracture in my spine. In the fall, the T-12 vertebra had collapsed onto the vertebra below it. It’s a bone on bone situation.

During the appointment, I did not meet the spine surgeon until after I’d consulted with three female medical practitioners. By the time I met the man, there was no news for him to deliver to me and I had only one question to ask him. I said, “If I’d gone to a doctor earlier, would anything have changed?” He said, “No,” and I believed him, and it was a little like believing in God. He meant something true and also something that was unknowable. He meant the healing would have proceeded the same way because the part that was smashed and broken in my back could not be unsmashed and unbroken. The part that was bone had healed on its own as cells remodel themselves.

The God I prefer to believe in is me, and like gods everywhere I know nothing and have no good advice. There may not be such a thing as good advice. Maybe all advice is bad advice because cells will remodel if left alone to do their thing.

In my forties, when I had my knee reconstructed and learned to live with the consequences, I was dipping my toe in never the same again. With the spine, where things cannot return to their former state, it’s a further step in living and dying at the same time. You can’t jump in the same river twice. You can’t jump in the same river once, for that matter. That is where change comes in—the same sort of change necessary for happiness.

In the car, Richard said, “Well, you could have started physical therapy sooner.” That is true. There was no arguing with that, and if I had started physical therapy sooner, I might have spared myself pain and wound up looking better than I do. I care about how I look, but I don’t really know how I look. On Warren Street, I steal glances at myself in darkened windows, and I’m always shocked that I appear recognizably human.

Biz

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