Hollywood has had few stars as brilliant as Elizabeth Taylor. Child prodigy of cinema, she made the leap to adulthood in front of the camera successfully, falling in love with the public with her extraordinary beauty, her jet black hair and her incredible violet eyes, with a rare mutation that made her possess a double row of eyelashes.
Her worldwide fame is only comparable to that of women like Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth II of England. She won two Oscars for playing a luxury prostitute in A Marked Woman (1960) and the frustrated and irascible Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) - her third was awarded for her humanitarian work - she was married eight times to seven different men and, despite her sentimental failures, she always opted for love. Throughout her 79 years of hectic life she suffered serious health problems and she was a tireless activist against AIDS, which she took down close friends like Rock Hudson.
Hers was an exciting life in every sense that journalist Kate Andersen Brower has taken it upon herself to make known in what is the first authorized biography of the Anglo-American actress. Through almost 500 pages, Andersen Brower traces Taylor's intense career using diary entries, unpublished letters and poems written by the performer, interviews with more than two hundred family members and close friends, and transcripts of unofficial interviews that shape Elizabeth. Taylor, the strength and glamor of an icon (Libros Cúpula). "I've been lucky all my life. I've been given everything: looks, fame, wealth, honors, love. But I've paid for that luck with disasters, terrible illnesses, destructive addictions, failed marriages," he confided to Life magazine shortly before turning sixty this woman born in London on February 27, 1932 to American parents.
Her father was an art dealer and her mother, Sara, insisted that her little daughter be the famous actress that she could not be. In England they lived in the countryside and Elizabeth was happy riding horses. With the start of World War II the Taylors returned to the United States. In Los Angeles, Elizabeth began working for Universal at the age of nine on the comedy There's One Born Every Minute and later landed a contract as a child star for MGM, which created "an artificial patriarchy around her," in the words of director George Stevens, who directed her in A Place in the Sun and Giant.
In The Invisible Chain he became friends with a young Roddy McDowall. She admired Katharine Hepburn and couldn't stand the tyrant Louis B. Mayer. At the age of 12, she was already a star thanks to her role as Velvet in Fire of Youth, where she met Mickey Rooney and Angela Lansbury and spent the filming riding. The young actress gave great vulnerability to her characters. She started earning a lot of money and her father, who felt financially humiliated, hit her. Over the years, Elizabeth did not blame him for it: "I suddenly became famous and he had been a very proud, handsome and dignified man (...) I know that when he did that to me he was drunk and he didn't want to do it."
Her mother, a fervent Christian, taught her that she could not sleep with any man until she was married to him. Her first husband, Nicky Hilton, also had a long hand. He was an alcoholic and violent. During their honeymoon, she kicked him in the stomach, causing her to miscarry. "My pain was terrible. I could even see the baby in the toilet." The union ended when she was about to turn 19. "When I married Nick, I fell off my golden cloud and took a beating," she said.
The playboy and businessman Howard Hughes wanted to include her in his long list of conquests, but Elizabeth always ran away from him. Her insistence was such that she even offered her two million dollars to marry him. The actress had many close friends and most of them were gay. She met Montgomery Clift on the filming of A Place in the Sun and they became inseparable. They both exuded a burning sensuality, they were incredibly handsome. "We had a language that we understood, we could read each other in seconds, even on the phone," she noted.
She acted as a protector with him, just as she did with James Dean during the filming of Giant. She longed for having had an ordinary childhood and to George Hamilton she confessed that she wished "to be a little girl again." The book describes a woman who was as beautiful as she was intelligent, direct, empathetic, tenacious, honest and sensitive. Her second marriage was with British actor Michael Wilding, 20 years her senior and with whom she had two children.
But it wasn't until she met producer Mike Todd that she surrounded herself with the passion and drama she needed in her life. He showered her with diamonds, travel, and Elizabeth thought about retiring from acting until the filming of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof restored her enthusiasm. The happiness, which was completed with the birth of Liza, was cut short too soon after he died in a plane accident. She was devastated by grief and sought refuge in the arms of Todd's best friend, Eddie Fisher, married to actress Debbie Reynolds, who publicly accused her of stealing her husband and gained public favor. "With Fisher, someone needs me. Maybe I can make someone happy," she thought.
Bad fame followed Taylor for a time and she hated filming A Marked Woman, a film that MGM forced her to make by contract and which earned her her first golden statuette. As time went by, she and Reynolds smoothed things over. Fisher was her fourth husband, another guy who abused her trust and who couldn't do anything as soon as Taylor met Richard Burton's gaze while filming Cleopatra. That was her passion and with it she lived her happiest and most difficult years. "Hearing his voice gives me an orgasm," she wrote about the love of her life.
With Cleopatra, Taylor became the first actress to earn a million dollars. She knew her worth and she was never afraid to ask for what she wanted. She predicted the movie would be great...and expensive. She was accused of being an alcoholic vampire - she loved to drink Jack Daniels with ice and Dom Pérignon - and destroyed families because of her relationship with the Welsh actor, who was married at the time with two daughters. Burton was also into alcohol and he had a reputation as a womanizer. They wrote letters to each other declaring their fiery love for each other. Their relationship raised such media interest that they invented the paparazzi. They could not leave without being chased.
His hectic lifestyle was accompanied by alcohol and legendary arguments. Not in vain, Kate Andersen Brower stops to thoroughly explore the relationship of the actress's fifth - and ephemeral sixth - husband. "We were mutually self-destructive. Maybe we had loved each other too much," she declared of a man who showered her with the most expensive jewels in the world, including the Pilgrim Pearl. They made a total of eleven films together, including Mike Nichols' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The director, a friend of both, said that "there are three things that I have never seen Elizabeth do: lie, be unpleasant to someone and be punctual."
Burton was competitive, he felt guilty for abandoning his family, and Taylor's Oscar win did nothing to help a weakened relationship. They were married for ten years, then they spent fourteen months apart and got back together. "We are like magnets," said Elizabeth, "who alternately attract each other but, inexorably, then reject each other." At 44, she knew he would never love anyone like Richard, but he refused to be the victim.
From the seventh spouse, former Republican Senator John Warner, he learned how to move in politics when he wanted to raise funds for the fight against AIDS, a cause in which he devoted himself as a result of Hudson's death and for which he had a hard time finding support while his career as an actress was paling. At the Georgetown mansion she was not happy and, while she increased her intake of alcohol and painkillers for her back pain, she also gained a lot of weight.
Reading the book reveals to us an Elizabeth Taylor who reinvents herself in every up and down of her life. Her addictions led her to detox at the Betty Ford clinic and she published a self-help book. She never stopped speaking to Burton and his death in August 1984 left her "mute with grief." Three weeks before he died, Richard told his brother: "Elizabeth and I did not break up and we will never break up." A love to the limit of his that is reflected in an undated letter from the actor to Taylor: "Well, first of all, you should know that I revere you. Second, and at the risk of repeating myself, I love you. Third, and here I show off my command of the language, I cannot live without you".
Coco Chanel insisted that she create a perfume and Taylor became rich from the sale of Passion and White diamonds, very popular fragrances. In 1990 she nearly died from pneumonia from which she miraculously recovered and also coped with a brain tumor. The book tells of her fight against the numerous illnesses she contracted. She had scoliosis and osteoperosis and ended up in a wheelchair. Of course, she always appeared in public very well made up and haired and wearing her spectacular jewelry. Glamor to the death.
She celebrated her final wedding to construction worker Larry Fortensky on October 6, 1991 at Neverland, owned by her close friend Michael Jackson. The king of pop always trusted the actress. "She understands," he stated. Fortensky was too vulgar, 20 years younger, and they ended their marriage five years later.
Her many lesser-known romances include Frank Sinatra, Carl Bernstein, and she made out with David Lynch. Her last conquest was rather platonic with Colin Farrell, an Irish actor 44 years younger who reminded her of Richard, read her poetry and was a great companion in the last two years of her life, extinguished by congestive heart failure. "His personality was so simple," Lionel Ritchie recalls. For her friend Demi Moore, "Elizabeth's life was more captivating than any movie could be." In short, she was "a star larger than life itself" as she was described by the Anglo-Saxon media.
