On the night of March 27, 1961, Elizabeth Taylor won her first Academy Award for BUtterfield 8, a film she had publicly described as the worst she had ever made, a role she had accepted under contractual duress, a performance she considered beneath her actual capability. She accepted the Oscar anyway. She wore a white gown.
She was 29 years old and she had already buried a husband, survived a tracheotomy that doctors said should have killed her, lived through two divorces, and been denounced from pulpits across America for destroying Eddie Fisher’s marriage to Debbie Reynolds. The audience gave her a standing ovation.
Whether they were applauding the performance or the survival is a question nobody asked, because in the case of Elizabeth Taylor, the two things had always been the same. This is the story of what it cost to be the most beautiful woman in the world and what it cost everyone around her. Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born on February 27, 1932, in Hampstead, London, to two Americans who had relocated to England for reasons that combined professional opportunity with the specific restlessness of people who have decided that the country of their origin is not quite the country they belong in. Francis Taylor was an art dealer, a man of genuine aesthetic sensibility and modest commercial success, who had established a gallery in London that served the British upper class with the quiet authority of someone who understood beautiful things and knew how to present them to people
who could afford to acquire them. Sara Warmbrodt Taylor was an actress who had performed on the American stage under the name Sara Southern before her marriage and who had, in the transition to wifehood and motherhood, redirected the performance instinct from the stage into the management of her family’s social presentation.
The combination of parents, the aesthete father and the theatrical mother, produced in Elizabeth a child who was beautiful in a way that even people accustomed to beautiful things stopped to notice. The eyes were the element that strangers mentioned first, always. Violet in certain lights, deep blue in others, framed by a double row of eyelashes that were not, despite decades of subsequent rumor to the contrary, artificial.
They were a genetic anomaly, a mutation of the gene governing eyelash development that produced a density and length not naturally occurring in most people. She was aware of the eyes before she understood what awareness meant. Adults looked at her differently than they looked at other children. They stopped conversations.
They touched her face with the specific entitlement that beautiful children are subjected to, the assumption that beauty is public property. That the beautiful child owes access to the people who want to look. Sara Taylor understood the beauty as an asset to be developed. This was not cynicism.
It was the pragmatic assessment of a woman who had performed professionally, who understood how the entertainment industry evaluated female physical appearance, and who recognized in her daughter something that the industry would pay for. The development began early. Dancing lessons, riding lessons, the social training that converted natural grace into performed grace, the specific cultivation of a child who was already extraordinary into a child who knew she was extraordinary and could deploy that knowledge. The family returned to America in 1939, driven by the approach of the war that everyone in London could feel coming. Frances Taylor established a new gallery in Beverly Hills, a location that placed the family immediately and permanently in the specific geography of the American entertainment industry. The move was practical. Its consequences
were total. Elizabeth was 7 years old. She was enrolled in a local school, began riding lessons at a stable in the valley, and was noticed because she was always noticed in every room she entered by the wife of a Universal Pictures executive who arranged a screen test. The screen test was unremarkable.
Universal passed. MGM did not. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed Elizabeth Taylor to a contract in 1941. She was 9 years old. The contract paid her dollar 100 a week and gave the studio authority over her professional activities, her public image, and the carefully managed presentation of her private life that the studio system considered an extension of its commercial product.
She was not, at 9, a star. She was a promising child actor, one of dozens on the MGM payroll at any given time, developed through the studio’s training infrastructure with the systematic efficiency of an organization that understood child performers as long-term investments requiring patient cultivation. Acting lessons, voice lessons, the continuous assessment and adjustment of every element of her presentation that the studios’ development and apparatus produced.
What distinguished Elizabeth from the other promising children on the MGM lot was what had always distinguished her from other people in every room she entered. The face. The camera’s relationship with her face was, from her first screen tests, the relationship of an instrument that has found its perfect subject.
Not simply recording what was there, but appearing to worship it, finding in the specific geometry of her features the exact qualities that the photographic process was designed to celebrate. Directors who worked with her in her early career describe the experience of seeing her on a monitor for the first time with a consistency that suggests they were all encountering the same thing.
The realization that what they were watching was not simply a pretty child, but something the camera was doing something to. Something that the technology of film was producing from the raw material of her appearance that exceeded what the appearance alone contained. National Velvet, released in 1944, was the film that converted the promising child into the genuine star.
The story of a girl who trains a horse to compete in the Grand National, a role that required both acting ability and genuine horsemanship, two things the 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor possessed in abundance. Produced a performance of natural authority that reviewers found remarkable and audiences found irresistible.
The film made $4 million against a production cost of $2 7 million and established Elizabeth Taylor as a commercial property of significant value. It also established, with the irreversibility of early public identity formation, the specific image that would govern the rest of her life. The beautiful girl who could do anything, who was possessed of extraordinary natural gifts in multiple domains, who made difficult things look effortless because they were, in her specific case, genuinely effortless. This image was accurate as far as it went. It did not go far enough. What it missed was the specific cost of being that girl, of growing up under the management of a studio system that owned your professional identity before you had developed a private one, that made decisions about your public presentation that you were not old enough to assess, that surrounded you with adults whose
relationship with you was entirely mediated by your commercial value. The other children on the MGM lot, the tutors in the schoolroom adjacent to the sound stages, the publicists and photographers and costume designers who constituted the human environment of her daily professional life. None of them were capable of providing what a child actually needs, which is the experience of being known as a person rather than as a product.
Sara Taylor, who was present on the MGM lot for most of Elizabeth’s working days during her childhood years, understood her daughter’s commercial value with a precision that had always made biographers uncomfortable. The mother who arranged the first screen test, who managed the transition from Universal’s rejection to MGM’s acceptance, who was present at every significant professional decision of her daughter’s childhood.
Sara Taylor was the enabling infrastructure of a child star’s career, performing the management functions that the child could not perform for herself. What Sara also was, and what the subsequent history of Elizabeth Taylor makes impossible to ignore, is the first person in a long series of people who loved Elizabeth Taylor in ways that were inseparable from what Elizabeth Taylor represented, the beauty, the talent, the commercial value, the specific quality of being in proximity to someone the world could not stop looking at. The love was real. The inseparability was also real, and Elizabeth, growing up inside both, had no reliable way to distinguish between the two. The MGM years gave her the career. They gave her the technical foundation, the acting instruction, the camera experience, the understanding of how performance worked, that would eventually produce the work she was genuinely proud of.
They gave her the public identity that the rest of her life would be spent negotiating with. What they did not give her was the private identity that the public one required for ballast. She was going to spend 30 years finding it in marriages and losses and pills and diamonds and grief by a process of elimination that eliminated a great deal before it found what it was looking for.
The first marriage lasted eight months. It ended not with the drama that would characterize Elizabeth Taylor’s subsequent marital history, but with the quiet mutual acknowledgement of two people who had made a mistake and were capable, in the specific circumstances of 1952, of admitting it without requiring the mistake to become a catastrophe.
Conrad Nicholson Hilton Jr. Nicky Hilton, heir to the hotel fortune that his father Conrad Hilton was in the process of building into one of the largest hospitality empires in the world, was 23 years old when he married Elizabeth Taylor in May 1950. She was 18. The wedding was covered by the press with the specific intensity reserved for the marriages of people the public considers its own property.
The dress was MGM designed. The guest list was Hollywood’s senior constellation. The photographs were distributed to every major publication in the country. The photographs showed two extraordinarily attractive young people at the beginning of what the public narrative of the era required to be a fairy tale.
What they did not show, what the MGM publicity apparatus was specifically designed to prevent from showing, was the distance between the public image and the private reality. Nicky Hilton was an alcoholic. He was also, by Elizabeth’s subsequent account, and by the accounts of people who knew him during this period, a man whose behavior when drinking included physical violence directed at his wife.
The marriage that the press had covered as a fairy tale was, in its private reality, something Elizabeth Taylor had been entirely unprepared for. Not because she was naive about the world exactly, but because the specific world she had grown up in had not provided her with either the experience or the framework to recognize what she had married until she was inside it.
She filed for divorce in December 1950. The grounds were mental cruelty, the standard legal formulation of the era for situations that the law recognized required dissolution, but that the available legal categories could not fully describe. The divorce was granted in 1951. The first crack, which is what the Hilton marriage represented in the otherwise impeccable surface of the Elizabeth Taylor public narrative, was managed by MGM with the efficiency that the studio brought to all complications in the private lives of its contract players. The divorce was framed as the product of incompatibility rather than abuse. Elizabeth’s suffering was acknowledged in terms that generated sympathy without generating the specific kind of attention that would have required the studio to address what had actually happened. She was young. She had made a
mistake. She was moving on. What the management did not address, what the framing specifically prevented from being addressed, was the psychological residue of eight months of a marriage that had introduced her, at 18, to the specific experience of being physically hurt by someone who was supposed to love her.
This experience does not resolve through good public relations management. It does not resolve through the next contract or the next film. It becomes part of the interior landscape, a reference point in the specific education that human beings receive through suffering about what the world is actually like behind its presented surface.
Elizabeth Taylor was 19 years old, and she had already learned something that most people spend decades not learning, that the gap between what love looks like from the outside and what it feels like from the inside can be total. She married Michael Wilding in February 1952. He was 39 years old, 20 years her senior, a British actor of considerable charm and limited ambition whose appeal to Elizabeth was, her biographers have argued, precisely his difference from Nicky Hilton. Where Hilton had been volatile, Wilding was gentle. Where Hilton had been dangerous, Wilding was safe. The calculation was understandable. The marriage was its product. Wilding gave her two sons, Michael Jr., born in 1953, and Christopher, born in 1955, and a stability that she had not experienced in her first marriage and
that she valued with the specific appreciation of someone who has known its absence. He also gave her, unintentionally, the experience of a different kind of insufficient love, the love of a man whose gentleness was partly constitutional and partly the result of a fundamental passivity that extended from his emotional life into his professional one.
The Wilding marriage produced no specific crisis, no dramatic rupture, no event that forced its end. It simply ran out of momentum. The specific decline of a relationship between two people who are not badly matched, but are not well enough matched to sustain the engagement that marriage requires. Elizabeth was, by the mid-1950, one of the most commercially valuable actresses in Hollywood.
Wilding was a British character actor navigating the specific difficulty of a career that had been more successful in England than it was translating to American films. The power imbalance this created, the specific dynamic of a marriage in which one partner’s career is ascending and the other’s is declining, in which the world’s attention is directed overwhelmingly at one party, in which the financial dependence runs in the direction that the social architecture of the era had not designed for, was not something either of them had anticipated or knew how to manage. They separated in 1956. The divorce was finalized in 1957. The parting was, by the standards of what preceded and followed it in Elizabeth Taylor’s marital history, relatively undramatic. Both spoke well of the other. The children remained a shared concern that produced ongoing contact. What the Wilding years had
given her, beyond the sons, was the specific knowledge of what a safe marriage felt like when the safety was the ceiling rather than the foundation. She had been safe. She had not been consumed. And she had learned, in the specific way that people learn things about themselves through the experience of what they don’t want, that safety without fire was not a life she was built for.
The fire was coming. It arrived in the form of a film producer from New York named Mike Todd, who walked into a party that Elizabeth Taylor was attending in 1956 and announced, to the room in general and to her specifically, that he intended to marry her.
He said it the way he said everything, as a fact that the world had not yet confirmed but would. He was right. Michael Todd was not handsome in the way that the men Elizabeth Taylor had previously been involved with were handsome. He was not gentle. He was not safe. He was a force of nature in human form, a producer of theatrical and cinematic spectacles who had made and lost fortunes with the specific equanimity of a man for whom money was a medium of expression rather than a goal, who spoke in declarative sentences that left no grammatical space for disagreement and who pursued Elizabeth Taylor with the same combination of total confidence and utter indifference to obstacles that he brought to every project he had decided to produce. He had produced Around the World in 80 Days in 1956, a film of extraordinary logistical ambition that required coordinating
production across multiple countries, managing a cast that included 44 cameo appearances by major stars, and deploying a technology he had co-developed, Todd-AO, a a statement of the scale at which he intended to operate. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Todd accepted the award with the specific pleasure of a man who had always known it was coming.
Elizabeth Taylor had been with men who were appropriate for her, men whose age and temperament and social position made the pairing understandable within the framework of what was expected of her. Todd was not appropriate in any of the ways that the framework measured appropriateness.
He was 14 years older, twice divorced, ethnically and culturally distant from the Anglican-American world in which she had been raised, and possessed of an energy and an appetite for life that made every room he entered feel like a production number in a show he was directing. She was in love with him within weeks, completely, overwhelmingly, in the way she had not been in love with either Hilton or Wilding.
In the way that consumed her intelligence and her caution and her carefully maintained awareness of the gap between what love looked like from the outside and what it felt like from the inside. They married in February 1957. She converted to Judaism before the ceremony, a conversion that was genuine rather than performative.
Todd did not ask for it. And Elizabeth’s subsequent lifelong identification with Judaism was not the product of social pressure, but of a genuine spiritual connection to the faith and its people that the conversion initiated. The marriage lasted 13 months. It ended not through failure, but through catastrophe.
On March 22, 1958, Mike Todd boarded his private plane, a Lockheed Lodestar he had named The Liz, in Los Angeles for a flight to New York. He was traveling to a Time magazine event celebrating his designation as their Showman of the Year. Elizabeth had been scheduled to travel with him, but had developed a bronchial infection that her doctor had determined made the flight inadvisable.
The plane crashed in New Mexico in the early hours of March 22nd in the Zuni Mountains near Grants. Everyone aboard was killed. Mike Todd was 48 years old. He had been married to Elizabeth Taylor for 13 months. She was informed at the Bel Air house. The accounts of the people who were with her describe a response that was, in its initial stages, the specific paralysis of grief that precedes the grief’s full arrival, the body’s protective delay between the information and its emotional processing. She did not scream. She did not collapse. She sat very still for a very long time. The subsequent days and weeks produced the public performance of grief that the situation required and the private experience of grief that no performance could contain. She had loved Todd in a way she had not previously experienced, had felt in the 13 months of the marriage what it was like to be with someone who matched her
in energy, in appetite, in the specific quality of total engagement with every experience that her own temperament demanded. The loss of that was not simply the loss of a husband. It was the loss of the first experience of what her specific kind of love actually felt like when it was reciprocated at the level it required. She was 26 years old.
She had been married three times. She had buried a husband. She was the mother of two sons and pregnant. It was later confirmed at the time of Todd’s death a pregnancy she subsequently miscarried. The grief was real and it was total and it required management that she did not have the internal resources to provide for herself.
The management she reached for was the management that was available. The company of people who had loved Todd and who could in their shared loss provide something that resembled the specific comfort of mutual witness. Eddie Fisher was one of those people. Fisher had been Todd’s closest friend.
A relationship of genuine warmth and mutual affection that it produced as its social extension a friendship between the two couples. Mike and Elizabeth, Eddie and Debbie Reynolds, who had married in had produced a daughter and a public image of wholesome young Hollywood love that the press and the public had enthusiastically adopted.
Fisher was at Elizabeth’s side in the immediate aftermath of Todd’s death, present, attentive, genuinely grieving for his friend and genuinely concerned for his friend’s widow. The presence became constant. The grief became something else. Within months of Todd’s death, Fisher and Elizabeth were having an affair that the press discovered in September 1958 and covered with a fury that constituted one of the most intense periods of negative public attention directed at a single celebrity figure in Hollywood history. Debbie Reynolds, wholesome, young, the mother of Eddie’s children, was the wronged party in a narrative that the American public of 1958 found morally unambiguous. Elizabeth Taylor was the villain. The woman who had just buried her husband was conducting an affair with her dead husband’s best friend. The woman the press had covered with sympathy through her grief was now the
woman the press covered with contempt for her conduct. The contempt was expressed in letters, thousands of them, directed to Elizabeth personally, to her studio, to her publicists. It was expressed in the withdrawal of the public goodwill that had accumulated through National Velvet and the Hilton divorce and the Wilding marriage and the Todd tragedy.
It was expressed in the specific, gendered, merciless way that American public opinion in the 1950 expressed its judgment of women who violated the codes of female conduct that the era enforced. Elizabeth Taylor absorbed the contempt with the specific quality of a woman who has, by this point in her life, been through enough that the opinions of strangers have been placed in their correct proportional relationship to the things that actually matter.
She had buried Mike Todd. She had lost a pregnancy. She was in love with a man she had not chosen to fall in love with at a moment she had not chosen. She married Eddie Fisher in May 1959, 3 weeks after his divorce from Debbie Reynolds was finalized. The marriage was, from its beginning, built on the structural problem that the affair had been built on. Fisher was not Todd.
He could not be Todd. Elizabeth had not fallen in love with Eddie Fisher. She had fallen in love, in the specific extremity of her grief, with the person who was most present in the space that Todd’s death had opened. And the person most present in that space was Fisher, because Fisher had loved Todd, too.
The marriage lasted 4 years. Its end was not precipitated by the exhaustion of a mistake, but by the arrival of something that made the mistake impossible to maintain. His name was Richard Burton. The grief that Mike Todd’s death installed in Elizabeth Taylor was not the kind that resolves.
It was the kind that reorganizes, that takes up permanent residence in the interior landscape, and from that position influences every subsequent relationship, decision, and response to loss that the grieving person encounters. This distinction matters because it explains the pattern of the decade that followed Todd’s death in ways that the conventional narrative of Elizabeth Taylor’s life, the marriages, the diamonds, the scandals, the Academy Awards, does not fully account for.
The conventional narrative presents the Fisher marriage as a moral failure, the Burton relationship as a grand passion, the various health crises as the product of excess. What it misses is the specific grief that ran beneath all of it, the Todd-shaped absence that every subsequent love was measured against and found wanting in ways that were not the fault of the loves themselves.
Fisher’s failure was not personal inadequacy. He was, by every account, a man of genuine warmth and genuine love for Elizabeth, capable of the devotion that her specific needs require. His failure was categorical. He was not the man she had lost, and no amount of devotion could bridge that categorical gap.
She had loved Todd with her whole self, not the managed, protected, performance-aware self that the MGM years had produced, and that every previous relationship had engaged with. But something beneath the performance, something that Todd’s specific energy and appetite and absolute indifference to her mythology had accessed in a way no one before him had.
When that access was destroyed by a plane crash in the Zuni Mountains, the specific interior territory that Todd had reached did not remain open. It closed. It closed in the way that grief closes things, not with a decision, but with the body’s protective response to the experience of that kind of opening being destroyed.
Elizabeth Taylor in the years after Todd’s death was not less herself. She was the same self with one region, the deepest one, sealed. The fishing attempted to access it. Burton would tear it open again. But between Todd’s death in March 1958 and Burton’s arrival on the Cleopatra set in January 1962, there were 4 years of living in the presence of a grief that she could not fully process, and that the circumstances of her life made it impossible to sit still with.
The circumstances did not permit stillness. She was the most famous actress in the world, under contract to a studio, committed to a series of films that required her professional presence regardless of her personal state. She was the mother of three children, Michael Jr.
and Christopher from the Wilding marriage, and Liza Todd, born in August 1957, who was Mike Todd’s daughter and who carried in her face and temperament, as she grew, the specific qualities of her father that her mother could not stop seeing. The film she made in the years immediately following Todd’s death are a record of a woman working through grief without the luxury of stopping.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1958, Maggie the Cat, a woman trapped in a marriage with a man who cannot love her, performing desire for an audience of one who refuses to perform back, received her first Academy Award nomination and produced the most emotionally raw performance of her career to that point.
The critics who reviewed it noted the quality of genuine feeling beneath the technical performance. They attributed it to artistic growth. It was not artistic growth. It was grief finding the channel of the character and flowing through it. Suddenly, Suddenly, Last Summer in 1959, a Tennessee Williams adaptation directed by Joseph L.
Mankiewicz, the same director who would oversee Cleopatra, required her to play a woman whose sanity is questioned by the people around her, whose testimony about a traumatic event is dismissed as pathology, whose experience of reality is declared insufficient by the institutions designed to protect her. She received her second Academy Award nomination.
The physical crises of this period were real and serious. In March 1961, the month that BUtterfield 8 won her the Academy Award she had not wanted, she was hospitalized with pneumonia that developed into a respiratory failure requiring an emergency tracheotomy at the London Clinic. She stopped breathing.
The doctors who performed the procedure described her survival as uncertain until the moment it was certain. The tracheotomy left a scar at the base of her throat that she wore for the rest of her life without concealment. She did not cover it with jewelry or makeup or the specific stagecraft that celebrities deploy to manage the physical evidence of their vulnerability.
The scar was visible in every photograph taken of her from 1961 forward. A mark on the most photographed neck in the world left by the instrument that had kept her alive. She wore it the way she wore everything as a fact without apology, without the performance of feeling about it that the public might have expected.
The Academy Award for BUtterfield 8 was, as she had stated publicly, undeserved. A recognition not of the performance but of the survival, the sympathy vote of an industry that had watched her bury a husband, fight for her life, absorb the public’s contempt for the Fisher affair, and continue working through all of it with the specific implacable endurance that her constitution demanded.
She accepted the Oscar with the grace that the occasion required. She went home to the Fisher marriage that was, by that point, already dying of the same categorical problem that had always defined it. 4 years after Mike Todd’s death, Elizabeth Taylor arrived in Rome to film Cleopatra. The production was a catastrophe of organizational dysfunction that would eventually cost 20th Century Fox $44 million, the most expensive film ever made to that point, and that would produce, as its primary lasting consequence, not a film but a love affair. She met Richard Burton on the set in January 1962. The sealed interior territory, the region that Todd’s death had closed and 4 years of grief had kept closed, open. It opened with the specific violence of things that have been held shut too long. Richard Walter Burton was born Richard Jenkins in Pontrhydyfen, a
village in the Welsh valleys, the 12th of 13 children of a coal miner. He had been taken in and effectively adopted by his school teacher Philip Burton, whose surname he took after his mother’s death and had been transformed through Philip Burton’s specific ambition for him and his own extraordinary natural gifts from a miner’s son in a Welsh village into one of the most celebrated Shakespearean actors of his generation.
He was, by every account of everyone who encountered him, the most compelling physical and vocal presence in any room he entered. The voice was the primary instrument, a Welsh baritone of extraordinary range and resonance that had been trained to the peak of its natural capability, and that, even in casual conversation, produced the specific effect of being addressed by someone whose words carried more weight than other people’s words.
Laurence Olivier called it the finest speaking voice in the English language. Directors who worked with Burton described the experience of hearing him speak a line as the experience of understanding, for the first time, what the line was actually about. He was also, and this is not a minor biographical detail, a man of considerable personal disorder.
He drank with the specific commitment of the Welsh Valley culture that had shaped him. Drinking not as a social lubricant, but as a serious occupation, conducted with the same intensity he brought to Shakespeare, generating the same extremity of effect in a different register. His marriage to Sybil Williams, a Welsh actress who had been with him since before the fame, had survived years of affairs conducted with a frequency and an openness that suggested Burton operated on the assumption that his talent exempted him from the ordinary requirements of fidelity. He arrived on the Cleopatra set having heard about Elizabeth Taylor in the way that everyone had heard about Elizabeth Taylor. As a mythology rather than a person. The most beautiful woman in the world, the most famous actress in Hollywood. The woman who had just won an Academy Award for a film she hated while wearing the
scar of a procedure that had kept her alive. He arrived by his own subsequent account specifically not intending to be another man destroyed by the Elizabeth Taylor mythology. He was going to be professional. He was going to be Welsh and disciplined and immune. He was immune for approximately four days.
The specific chemistry between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The quality that made their affair the most covered romantic event in the history of celebrity journalism. The thing that produced the paparazzi siege of Rome that forced 20th Century Fox’s production into a security operation resembling military logistics was not simply physical.
Though the physical dimension was real and documented by everyone who watched them together. It was the recognition of two people who operated at the same emotional temperature and who had in finding each other found the one person in the world who did not require them to turn themselves down. Burton’s temperature was Shakespearean.
Absolute, unironic, capable of moving from tenderness to rage to grief with the specific swiftness of a man whose emotional range had been trained to extremity by decades of performing the most extreme emotional material in the English language. Elizabeth’s temperature was its match. She had been running at full capacity since childhood, had never developed the social thermostat that most adults install to manage their impact on the rooms they move through.
Had always been too much for the spaces she inhabited in the specific way of people whose natural intensity exceeds their environment’s ability to contain it. They were the same temperature. For Elizabeth Taylor, who had spent her life being either managed by the studio, by the husbands who couldn’t match her, or destroyed by the grief that had been accumulating since the Hilton marriage, the experience of someone who could meet her at her actual level was the equivalent of what the sealed interior territory required to open. The affair began in January 1962 and was public by February. Made public not by any announcement, but by the specific impossibility of concealing something that large from a press corps that had been stationed outside the production since the film’s troubled beginnings. The photographs taken by the paparazzi on Roman streets and boat decks in early 1962,
Elizabeth and Richard together, undeniable, circulated through the international press within days. The Vatican newspaper condemned the affair in an editorial. Members of the United States Congress introduced resolutions denouncing Elizabeth Taylor’s moral conduct. The production, which was already a catastrophe of budget overruns and directorial incompetence, became the most photographed film production in history, primarily because the love affair happening on its margins was the most interesting story in the world. Sybil Burton remained in the marriage for two years with the specific endurance of a woman who had weathered Burton’s previous affairs and who understood, even as she endured, that this one was different. The previous affairs had been episodes, intense, consequential, but ultimately insufficient to displace the marriage. This one was not an episode. It was the discovery on both sides of something
that could not be treated as episodic. Fisher’s marriage to Elizabeth ended more quickly. He was by 1962 the least interesting person in a story that had no room for him. The man in the position of the wronged spouse in a romance that the world had decided was inevitable and therefore forgivable. He filed for divorce.
He was in the subsequent decades of his life defined primarily by his marriage to and divorce from Elizabeth Taylor. A definition he found with understandable bitterness insufficient to the actual dimensions of his life. Elizabeth and Richard married in Montreal in March 1964, one day after their respective divorces were finalized.
The ceremony was conducted by a Unitarian minister. They were in the middle of filming The V.I.P.s. The press coverage was global. The marriage was everything the affair had promised and more than the affair had warned. It was passionate, consuming, mutually destructive, and mutually sustaining in the specific way of relationships between two people who are each other’s best audience and worst influence.
Burton read poetry to her. She sat in the wings of theaters watching him perform Shakespeare with the attention of a woman who has found the one thing in the world she is content to watch rather than be. He bought her diamonds. The diamonds were not simply gifts in the conventional sense. They were Burton’s specific language for what he felt about her.
A language he had developed from the understanding that Elizabeth Taylor’s relationship with beautiful things was not vanity but something closer to the response of a person who has grown up surrounded by art and who recognizes in exceptional objects the same quality of achieved excellence that she recognized in exceptional performance.
He found the diamonds that were exceptional. The La Peregrina Pearl, the Krupp Diamond, the Taylor-Burton Diamond. Each acquisition was a declaration in the specific language of a man who had been formed by Shakespeare and who understood the gesture as text. She loved the diamonds.
She loved him more. The distinction is important because it has been lost in the mythology. The image of Elizabeth Taylor as the woman who loved jewels has obscured the woman who loved the man who gave them. The woman for whom the diamonds were inseparable from the hands that presented them. The films they made together, Cleopatra finally released in 1963, The V.I.P.
, Becket, in which Burton performed brilliantly and Elizabeth was not cast, The Sandpiper, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In 1966, The Taming of the Shrew in 1967, constitute a body of work that the critics of the era assessed with the distorting lens of the relationship celebrity. The performances were frequently dismissed as the product of the relationship’s chemistry rather than technical craft.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Directed by Mike Nichols, based on Edward Albee’s devastating examination of a marriage consuming itself, produced performances of such sustained, specific, technically demanding excellence that the dismissal became impossible to maintain. Both received Academy Award nominations.
Elizabeth won her second Oscar, this time unambiguously deserved. The win was, among other things, a statement that the woman who had been managed by MGM since childhood, who had been married four times, who had buried one husband and survived a tracheotomy and been denounced by Congress, was also one of the finest screen actresses of her generation.
The two facts, the mythology and the talent, had always coexisted. The mythology had always threatened to consume the talent in the public’s assessment. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Made the consumption impossible. She was 34 years old. She had everything the mythology promised. The beauty, the talent, the diamonds, the man who was her match.
She also had the specific knowledge that she had been accumulating since the Hilton marriage. The knowledge that everything the mythology promised was insufficient protection against what the world actually delivered. The world was not finished delivering. The Burton marriage at its best was the marriage that Elizabeth Taylor had been moving towards in Steubenville.
Since the beginning, since the MGM contract, since the specific hunger for someone who could match her had been installed by the factory system’s systematic replacement of her private self with its commercial product. At its best, it was two people of extraordinary capability living at the full extension of their respective natures, generating between them a quality of shared experience that neither could have produced alone.
At its worst, it was a war. The drinking was the primary weapon in the war, deployed by both sides with the specific accuracy of people who know each other’s vulnerabilities with the completeness that total intimacy provides. Burton drank with the Welsh miner’s son’s commitment.
Seriously, consistently, in quantities that his physical constitution managed for longer than it had any right to. And that eventually produced the neurological deterioration that defined his final years. Elizabeth drank with the specific quality of someone who had been using chemical management of emotional states since the MGM years.
when the studio’s doctors had first prescribed the barbiturates and stimulants that the factory system required its stars to maintain the production schedule, regardless of their actual physical and emotional states. The pills had come first. In the late 1940, sleeping pills to manage the insomnia that the anxiety of performance produced, stimulants to manage the fatigue that the sleeping pills produced.
The cycle that this combination initiated, the pharmaceutical management of states that the pharmaceutical management itself was producing, was not unusual in Hollywood in that era. It was standard practice, institutionally enabled, medically supervised in the specific way that supervision serves to make chronic problems manageable rather than addressed.
By the Burton years, the pharmaceutical management had become a structural feature of Elizabeth Taylor’s daily existence, not a crisis, not a collapse, but the operating system through which she managed the gap between what her life required of her and what her body and mind could provide without assistance. She was not, in the early years of the marriage, visibly impaired.
She was functioning, working, performing, generating the material that the studios paid for and the critics assessed. The functioning required the chemicals. The chemicals required increasing quantities to produce the same effect. This is the arithmetic of pharmaceutical dependency, and it is invisible to everyone, including the person doing the arithmetic, until the numbers become impossible to ignore.
The Burton marriage also required, for its daily maintenance, a quantity of emotional energy that would have been demanding under any circumstances, and that the specific combination of two strong-willed, emotionally extreme, chemically managing people made genuinely exhausting. The arguments were real, not the performed arguments of people who fight for effect, but the actual disagreements of two people who were, on significant questions, genuinely incompatible.
Burton’s drinking, at a certain level, produced behavior that was its own category of destructiveness. Elizabeth’s pharmaceutical management, at a certain level, produced a quality of emotional unavailability that frustrated a man whose temperament demanded total engagement. They divorced in June 1974.
The decision was made and announced and grieved in the specific way of decisions that both parties understand are necessary and neither party wants to make. Burton described it afterward as the most painful decision of his life. Elizabeth described it in terms that suggested she understood, even as she made it, that it was not final.
She was right. They remarried in October 1975 in Botswana, a ceremony that was, by the press’s assessment, either the most romantic reconciliation in Hollywood history or the most predictable recurrence of an established pattern, depending on the assessor’s temperament. The second Burton marriage lasted 10 months.
It produced no resolution of the incompatibilities that had ended the first. It confirmed, however, what both of them had known since Rome in 1962, that the relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton was not a marriage, exactly. It was a condition, a permanent feature of both their interior landscapes that neither marriage nor divorce could fully alter.
The Burton marriages, both of them, taken together as the single entity they actually were, had produced the best work of both their careers, the most public romance of the 20th century and a quantity of mutual damage that neither of them fully recovered from. Burton’s subsequent marriages to Suzy Miller in 1976, to Sally Haye in 1983 were the marriages of a man who needed the stability that Elizabeth could not provide and who had discovered, too late to be useful, that stability without the specific electricity of the relationship with Elizabeth was manageable but hollow. Elizabeth’s subsequent marriage to John Warner, the Virginia politician and future United States Senator in December 1976 was, in retrospect, the most complete departure from her established pattern.
Warner was not a performer. He was not an artist. He was not possessed of the emotional extremity that her previous marriages had in various ways required. He was a man of political ambition and social conservatism who needed, for his political operation, a wife of celebrity and charm and who offered Elizabeth in exchange the specific commodity that 44 years of extraordinary public life had made genuinely scarce.
The possibility of anonymity. She moved to Virginia. She attended political events. She gained weight. The weight that the combination of reduced activity, continued pharmaceutical management, and the specific grief of the post-Burton years produced. And the press covered the weight with a cruelty that was both gendered and relentless.
As though a woman who had been the most photographed face in the world for 30 years owed the world the maintenance of her appearance, regardless of what her interior landscape required. The Warner marriage lasted 6 years, produced no children, and ended in 1982 with the mutual recognition that the departure from pattern had been a departure too far.
Elizabeth had not found anonymity in Virginia. She had found a different kind of visibility, the visibility of a fish out of water, the celebrity wife at political fundraisers, the woman whose identity was consuming itself in the service of someone else’s ambition. She filed for divorce.
She entered the Betty Ford Center in 1983. The Betty Ford admission was, in the context of Elizabeth Taylor’s biography, simultaneously the most significant turning point and the most clearly inevitable development. The pharmaceutical dependency that the MGM system had initiated in the late 1940 and that 40 years of professional and personal extreme living had deepened into a structural condition, a condition that had been managed, treated symptomatically, and never directly addressed, was finally being addressed directly. The treatment was not her first. She had been through medical interventions for various aspects of the chemical management at various points in the preceding decades. What distinguished the Betty Ford admission was its nature, a genuine engagement with the dependency as a primary condition rather than a symptom
of something else, conducted in an institutional environment specifically designed to make the engagement sustainable. She completed the program. She spoke publicly about the experience with the directness that had always characterized her engagement with the facts of her own life, the same directness that had refused to conceal the tracheotomy scar, that had acknowledged the Hilton marriage violence when the social expectation was silence, that had made no public pretense about the nature of the Fisher affair. The dependency had been real. The treatment was necessary. She was grateful for it. The return from Betty Ford was not a transformation in the dramatic sense. It was a recalibration, the establishment of a different relationship with the specific chemicals that had been managing her states for 40 years, a relationship that required ongoing attention, and that she maintained with the same consistency that she had maintained every other
significant commitment of her life. She was 51 years old. She had been married six times. She had buried one husband and survived a tracheotomy and two divorces from the same man, and a congressional denunciation, and the public assessment of her body weight. She had won two Academy Awards. She had accumulated a collection of diamonds that were, in their totality, the most valuable personal jewelry collection in private hands.
She was not done. The AIDS crisis arrived in American public consciousness in the early 1980 with the specific force of a catastrophe that was simultaneously new, and in the way that catastrophes that affect populations the mainstream has decided are expendable are always treated, slow to receive the institutional response its scale required.
The gay men who were dying in San Francisco and New York and Los Angeles in 1982, and 1983, and 1984 were dying in a landscape of governmental indifference, public hostility, and institutional abandonment that made the disease more catastrophic than its biology alone required. The Reagan administration had not mentioned AIDS publicly by name as late as 1985, four years into the epidemic, with thousands of Americans already dead.
The institutional response of the medical establishment, the public health infrastructure, and the political system to a disease that was killing people in accelerating numbers was delayed by exactly the degree to which the people dying were people the mainstream had decided were not its concern.
Elizabeth Taylor had been introduced to the AIDS crisis through her friendship with Rock Hudson, a friendship of decades rooted in the shared experience of MGM contract years, maintained through the decades of both their careers with the specific warmth of people who had known each other since before either of them was a myth.
Hudson’s diagnosis, which became publicly known in July 1985, when he was photographed at a Paris hospital looking devastatingly diminished, was Elizabeth’s introduction to the human face of what she had been reading about in the statistics. Hudson died in October 1985. He was 59 years old.
The grief was real and it produced, in Elizabeth Taylor, the specific response that genuine grief sometimes produces in people of sufficient capability. It converted itself into action. She had been a celebrity for 44 years. She had spent those years being looked at. She had spent them selling films and perfumes and diamonds and the mythology of her own life.
She understood, with the clarity of a woman who had been inside the machinery of public attention since she was 9 years old, exactly what her name could be used to do and she understood, in the months following Hudson’s death, that it could be used for something that mattered.
She co-founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research, amfAR, in 1985 with Dr. Michael Gottlieb, the physician who had published the first medical report on AIDS in 1981. The founding was not a celebrity gesture, the endorsement of a cause for the promotional value of the association. It was an organizational commitment.
Elizabeth Taylor using the specific resources available to her. The name, the connections, the fundraising capability, the access to powerful people that her particular combination of fame and force of personality produced in the service of a cause that the people with institutional power to address it were choosing not to address.
The fundraising work she conducted for AmfAR in the years between 1985 and the early 1990 was by the assessment of the organization’s subsequent leadership qualitatively different from the celebrity fundraising that charitable organizations typically receive. She did not simply lend her name. She attended meetings, made calls, negotiated personally with major donors, testified before Congress and brought the specific, undeniable weight of her presence to every encounter with a potential donor or a hostile legislator.
Her congressional testimony in 1986 before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee on the subject of federal funding for AIDS research was by the accounts of senators who were present and of staff members who prepared the testimony the most effective single act of advocacy on the subject that the legislative process had encountered.
She spoke without notes directly with the specific quality of a woman who was not performing concern but expressing it. Who had watched a friend die and was now in a room with people who could prevent other people from having to watch the same thing and was not willing to be polite about the gap between their capability and their action.
The committee increased its recommended funding. The increase was not sufficient. She came back. The AIDS activism was not, for Elizabeth Taylor, a departure from her previous identity. It was a clarification of something that had always been present in it. The specific quality of directness, the refusal to perform deference to institutional authority, the willingness to be inconvenient in the service of what she considered important.
These were the same qualities that had produced the refusal to conceal the tracheotomy scar, and the refusal to apologize for the Fisher affair, and the refusal to cover the weight gain with the stagecraft that her status and resources would have made available. She had always been, beneath the mythology, a woman who said what she saw.
What she saw in the AIDS crisis was people dying for institutional reason, not simply medical reasons, but political and social ones. The specific mortality that accrues when the people in charge of the institutional response decide that the people dying are not their people. She said it. She kept saying it. She used her name to make rooms that had been closed to the subject of AIDS open to it, and she used her presence in those rooms to make the subject impossible to dismiss.
The perfume line Passion, launched in 1987, followed by White Diamonds in 1991, was, in the public narrative, evidence of celebrity commercialism. The Hollywood actress leveraging her name for cosmetic revenue. In the private reality, it was the financial foundation of the AIDS activism. The perfume revenues, White Diamonds became the best-selling celebrity fragrance in history, generating hundreds of millions of dollars annually at its peak, provided the personal financial resources that allowed Elizabeth Taylor to fund the advocacy work at the level it required without depending on the uncertainty of external fundraising. She had understood with the business intelligence that her decades inside the entertainment industry had developed that the advocacy required money that external sources would not reliably
provide. She had made money available. The mechanism was a perfume. The mechanism was irrelevant to the function. The friendship with Michael Jackson was one of the genuine and misunderstood relationships of her later life. They had met in the 1980 and had developed over the following decade.
A friendship that was real in the specific way of friendships between people who recognize each other’s specific experience. In this case the experience of having been famous since childhood of having had a public identity formed before a private one of living inside a level of celebrity that no one who hasn’t inhabited it can fully understand.
Jackson’s relationship with his own childhood the specific damage of having been managed as a commercial product from the age of five of having had his development organized around his commercial value rather than his actual needs was recognizable to Elizabeth in ways that her own experience made immediate.
The MGM years, the Sarah Taylor management, the studio system’s conversion of a child into a product. These were not the same as Jackson’s Motown childhood but they were adjacent in the specific ways that mattered. Both had been beautiful children whose beauty was identified early as an asset and managed accordingly.
Both had been deprived of the private selfhood that the management required consuming. She defended him publicly during the 1993 child molestation accusations with a force and a directness that the press covered as celebrity loyalty and that was in its actual motivation something more complicated.
The defense of a friend whose specific vulnerability, the damaged childhood, the public identity formed before the private one she understood from the inside and whose accusers she assessed with the specific skepticism of a woman who had been on the receiving end of public condemnation for most of her adult life as participants in a process that the media’s appetite for destruction was amplifying beyond its actual dimensions.
Whether her assessment was correct is a question that subsequent events and investigations have made more complex rather than more simple. What is clear is that the defense was genuine, not performed loyalty but actual belief based on actual knowledge of the person she was defending.
The marriage to Larry Fortensky in October 1991 her eighth and final marriage conducted at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch in a ceremony that the press covered with the gleeful incredulity reserved for events that confirm every previously held judgment about a subject was from the outside the most improbable of her eight unions.
Fortensky was a construction worker, 20 years her junior, whom she had met at the Betty Ford Center during a subsequent treatment program. He was not famous. He was not an artist. He was not possessed of the qualities, the emotional extremity, the public magnitude, the specific fire that her previous marriages had variously required or provided.
What he was by every account of people who observed the relationship in its early years was present, genuinely, practically, without agenda present. He was not managing her public image. He was not advancing his career through association with hers. He was not performing love for an audience. He was a man who loved a woman and was with her in the daily unglamorous specific way that daily presence requires.
For Elizabeth Taylor, who had been with men who loved Ava Gardner in the specific way Frank Sinatra had loved Ava Gardner, men who loved the mythology rather than the person, men whose love was inseparable from the public dimension of what she represented. The experience of being loved simply, without the mythology as a component, was not a disappointment.
It was, for a time, a genuine relief. The marriage lasted five years. Its end in 1996 was, like the Wilding marriage 40 years earlier, the product of incompatibility rather than crisis. The specific incompatibility of two people who are not badly matched, but are not matched enough to sustain the engagement that marriage requires over time.
For 10 years, Nicky had wanted a private life with a private woman. He had married the most public woman in the world. The gap between what he needed and what she constitutionally was could not be bridged by the genuine affection that had produced the marriage. She was 64 years old. She had been married eight times.
She had won two Academy Awards. She had co-founded one of the most significant medical research advocacy organizations in American history. She had launched the best-selling celebrity fragrance line in history. She had survived eight marriages, one near-fatal respiratory crisis, two divorces from the same man, a congressional condemnation, and 40 years of pharmaceutical dependency.
She was not finished. She was not done being who she was, but the public performances were becoming less frequent, and the private life, the one that had always been there behind the mythology, The actual Elizabeth Taylor, who had been looking for the experience of being known since the MGM contract, was becoming, at last, the primary one.
The house on Nimes Road in Bel Air had been Elizabeth Taylor’s primary residence since the 1980s. And it was, by every account of the people who visited it regularly in her final years, the most complete expression of who she actually was that any physical space she had occupied had managed to achieve. It was not decorated the way a Hollywood legend’s home was expected to be decorated.
There was no museum quality to it. No sense of a space arranged for the benefit of observers, rather than inhabited by a resident. The art was on the walls because she loved it. The Monet, the Degas, the Picasso that Burton had given her. The works accumulated over decades of genuine aesthetic engagement, rather than investment strategy.
The photographs were everywhere. The children, the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren who constituted, in her final years, the primary human landscape of her daily life. The dogs were present. She had always had dogs. The attachment as genuine and long-standing as Ava Gardner’s corgis in Knightsbridge.
The animals who provided the specific comfort of uncomplicated love. The diamonds were there, too. Not displayed, not in cases, not arranged for viewing, not performing their commercial value for any audience. Simply present in the rooms where she lived, the way beautiful things are present in the homes of people who love beautiful things without needing to explain the love.
The La Peregrina pearl, the Krupp diamond, which she had renamed the Elizabeth Taylor diamond after purchasing it at auction in 1968 for $305, 000 with a specific logic that such a diamond deserved a better name than that of a former Nazi industrialist. The Taylor-Burton diamond, the 69-carat pear-shaped stone that Burton had purchased for her in 1969 for dollar one.
1 million, and that she had worn to the Academy Awards and to state dinners and to the casual dinner parties that constituted the social life of a woman who treated the most extraordinary things as ordinary because they were, in her experience, simply the things she had.
She had sold the Taylor-Burton diamond in 1979 after the second divorce, using the proceeds to fund a hospital in Botswana, the country where she and Burton had remarried, the country she had a specific affection for. She had bought it back. Not the same stone that had been sold definitively. She had found another diamond of equivalent significance and reacquired it for reasons that had nothing to do with finance and everything to do with the specific relationship between the stones and the man who had given them.
The diamonds were Burton in the same way that the photographs of Spain on Ava Gardner’s walls were the corrida. They were the language of love that had been spoken in objects, and the objects retained the language after the speaker was gone. Burton had died in August 1984, a cerebral hemorrhage in Geneva at 58.
His body having finally presented the full invoice for the drinking that his constitution had serviced past any reasonable expectation. He was married to Sally Hay, the woman who had provided the stability his final years required. Elizabeth was not with him at the end. She had spoken to him by telephone in the days before his death.
The conversation was, by her account, ordinary. The conversation of two people who had been married twice and divorced twice and remained in each other’s lives with the specific permanence of people who had been too much to each other to become strangers. She told him she loved him. He told her he loved her. This was, between them, not a declaration, but a statement of an established fact.
The acknowledgement of something that had been true since January 1962 and that neither marriage nor divorce had altered. She grieved for Burton with the same quality of private intensity that she had brought to Todd’s death 26 years earlier, not publicly. The public grief of a woman who had been his wife twice and his ex-wife twice was not hers to perform in the way that a current wife’s grief was.
Privately, in the house on Nimes Road, in the specific interior territory where the real things had always happened. The health crisis of the 1990 were the accumulated invoice of a life lived at the full extension of everything. The back surgeries that were the consequence of a riding accident during National Velvet that had never fully healed, the hip replacement surgeries, the pneumonia that returned periodically with the persistence of a condition that had found a reliable host, the cardiac surgery in 2009 that addressed the congestive heart failure that had been the primary threat to her survival since the early 2000. She managed the health crises with the same quality she had brought to every previous challenge. Directly, without self-pity, with the specific pragmatism of a woman for whom the gap between what the body required and what the life demanded had always been managed rather
than resolved. The management was more demanding now. The body’s capacity for managing it was diminished, but the management continued. The AIDS activism continued with it. She appeared at amfAR events through the late 1990 and the 2000 with a consistency that the organization’s leadership described as remarkable given the physical demands of her condition.
The wheelchair she used in her final years, the oxygen equipment she sometimes required, the specific logistics of appearing in public in a body that was making appearance increasingly difficult. She appeared because the cause required appearance and because the specific authority that her name and her presence carried in those rooms had not diminished with her health.
She testified before Congress for the last time in 2007 at 75 in a wheelchair on the subject of federal funding for AIDS research. The testimony was, by the accounts of staffers who were present, as direct and as effective as the testimony she had given 20 years earlier. The senators in the room were, in several cases, not yet born when she had first testified on the subject.
She had been making this argument for 22 years. She was still making it. They needed to hear it. The relationship with her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the final years was, by every account, the center of her actual daily life. Not the diamonds, not the advocacy, not the mythology, but the specific human web of people who had known her before or beyond the myth and whose love was not mediated by it. Michael Wilding Jr.
, her oldest son, now in his 50s, a man of considerable personal complexity who had navigated the specific difficulty of being Elizabeth Taylor’s child with a mixture of genuine connection to his mother and the distance that the difficulty required visited regularly. Christopher Wilding, the second son, the one who physically most resembled her, was present.
Liza Todd, Mike Todd’s daughter, who had grown up with her mother’s face and her father’s energy, maintained the specific closeness that the shared loss of Todd had always given them. The grandchildren were, in the accounts of those who visited the house on Nimes Road in the final years, the most reliable source of genuine daily pleasure.
Not the performed pleasure of a woman receiving visitors in her role as legend, but the unguarded pleasure of a grandmother watching children be themselves in her living room. She was with children what she had always been at her best, completely present, without the performance layer, interested in the specific person rather than the relationship social function.
She had been preparing for death with the thoroughness that characterized everything she undertook, not with morbidity, but with the practical orientation of a woman who had nearly died enough times to have lost her fear of the fact, and retained only the logistical concern for the people it would affect.
Her estate, her collection, the amfAR endowment, the charitable arrangements she had been developing for years, these were in order in ways that reflected decades of attention. The diamond collection was the subject of considerable public anticipation even before her death. Christie’s auction house, which had managed the eventual sale, described it as the most significant collection of jewels to come to auction in the history of the firm.
The sale in December 2011, conducted 9 months after her death, realized $137 million, more than twice the pre-sale estimate. The proceeds went to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, the renamed successor to the amfAR programs she had been funding since 1985. The diamonds in the end did exactly what Burton had always intended them to do.
They communicated the specific quality of love that had produced them. They communicated it at auction in a room full of bidders who understood what they were acquiring and were prepared to pay accordingly. And the communication translated into research funding, clinical trial support, and the continuation of the work that Elizabeth Taylor had been doing since she watched Rock Hudson die in 1985.
Burton had given her diamonds as a language. She had converted the language into medicine. He would have found that appropriate. He would have found it in the specific way of a man formed by Welsh mining valleys and Shakespeare and the love of a woman he could not keep and could not leave exactly right.
Elizabeth Taylor died on March 23, 2011 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The cause was congestive heart failure. She was 79 years old. Her children were with her. The announcement was made by her publicist in the specific formal language that the deaths of public figures require.
The press coverage that followed was immediate, global, and genuinely grief-stricken in a way that celebrity deaths are not always genuinely grief-stricken. She had been present in the public consciousness for 70 years since National Velvet in 1944 and the specific quality of her presence, the directness, the vitality, the refusal to be diminished by anything the world had thrown at her had made her something that the public felt it knew.
The public did not know her. The public had never known her. The public had known the mythology, the most beautiful woman in the world, the violet eyes, the diamonds, the marriages, the AIDS advocacy, the Academy Awards. These were real things. They were not the person. The person was the girl who had been signed to an MGM contract at 9 years old and had spent 70 years trying to find behind the public identity that contract had initiated the private self it had partly consumed. The person was the woman who had worn the tracheotomy scar without concealment and had absorbed the congressional condemnation without apology and had watched Rock Hudson die and had turned the grief into an organization and had kept going back to Congress until the funding was there. The person was the mother who had raised seven children through the specific chaos of her professional and personal life and who had in the house on Nimes
Road in the final years been most fully herself in the living room with the grandchildren. The person was the woman who had loved Mike Todd with her whole self and had spent the remaining 53 years of her life living in the specific quality of absence that his death had installed.
Not unable to love again, not closed, but permanently aware of what total loss felt like and permanently carrying the specific knowledge that the most extraordinary love she had found had been the most completely destroyed. Richard Burton had come close. He had come the closest of anyone after Todd.
Had reached the same interior territory through different means with different gifts, with the same ultimate insufficiency in the face of the specific incompatibilities that had always defined their relationship. The two of them had been together, the defining romantic story of their era. They had been, separately, two people who had been changed by each other in ways that neither subsequent marriage nor subsequent life could undo.
He had died in 1984. She had lived for 27 more years. She had done more with those 27 years in the AIDS advocacy, in the work of amfAR, in the legislative testimony, in the specific practical impact of the organization she had built than most people do in a full life. She had not done it to be remembered.
She had done it because Rock Hudson was dead and because the people dying deserved an advocate who would use everything available to her in their service. And because she was, beneath the mythology and the diamonds and the eight marriages and the Academy Awards, a woman who had grown up being looked at and who had finally, at 53, found a use for being looked at that she considered sufficient to the fact of it.
She had spent her entire life as a beautiful object. She had converted the beauty into force. The force had produced, in the funding it generated, in the political pressure it applied, in the specific authority of a name that no legislator could dismiss, an amount of actual human good that the beauty alone, deployed as mythology, could never have produced.
This was not the legacy the press emphasized. The press emphasized the diamonds and the marriages and the violet eyes. These were real. They were also the surface. The surface was extraordinary. The person beneath it was more extraordinary and considerably less often seen. She had always been there behind the mythology, the girl from the MGM lot, the woman who had loved Todd completely and lost him completely, the mother in the living room with the grandchildren, the advocate in the wheelchair testifying before Congress at 75 because the work was not finished. She had always been there. The world big pops just never quite knew how to see past what it had decided she was to what she actually was. It rarely does. But she knew. And in the end, that was the thing that mattered, not the diamonds, not the mythology, not the eight marriages or the two Oscars or the most famous face of the 20th century.
She knew who she was. She always had.
