Elizabeth Taylor, who died today at age 79, didn't dwell on death—as she used to say, she'd already been there, done that.
"I'm a survivor," she once said, "a living example of what people can go through and survive."
Was she ever.
Nine Lives
In the beginning, in the 1940s, Taylor was a child star of uncommon beauty who won hearts in
Lassie Come Home and
National Velvet. In her prime, in the 1950s and 1960s, she was an A-list star who commanded the screen opposite
Paul Newman (
Cat on Hot Tin Roof),
James Dean and
Rock Hudson (
Giant)
, and
drew Hollywood's first $1 million payday. In later years, she was a
bawdy, grand dame who didn't shirk her past, or make excuses for her
excesses.
"When I was 15, I told
L.B. Mayer to go to hell," Taylor said in
The Advocate in 1996. "It was then that I realized I was a complete, free individual and that I loved God…And I felt free."
True to her spirit, if not her sense of the dramatic, Taylor was the
first actor to be pronounced dead—and go on to win two Academy Awards.
No, the great Elizabeth—she detested her media nickname, Liz—didn't do anything small.
"The more, the better, has always been my motto," she said in 1994.
Beginnings
Born Elizabeth Rosamond Taylor on Feb. 27, 1932, in London to
American parents, the girl for whom the phrase "violet-eyed beauty"
would become synonymous arrived in Hollywood in 1939 as her family fled
war-torn Europe. A neighbor secured Taylor a screen test with Universal
Pictures. She was put under contract, and at age 10, debuted in the 1942
comedy,
There's One Born Every Minute.
If Taylor's screen presence was evident early on, Universal didn't
see it—the studio cut her loose. And so it was MGM that would secure the
services of the future icon.
Her first feature for Mayer's star factory was the Technicolor canine classic, 1943's
Lassie Come Home, costarring
Roddy McDowall, a fellow child actor who became one of Taylor's fiercest real-life friends.
Her next major role, in 1944's
National Velvet, proved her breakthrough—and her medical downfall.
During filming of the equestrian drama, the 12-year-old
Taylor took a
spill from a horse. The resulting back injury proved chronic—the first
in a terribly long list of ailments, which included: an emergency
tracheotomy (a byproduct of near-fatal double pneumonia) (1961); severe
respiratory problems (1990); double hip replacement surgery (1995); an
irregular heartbeat (1996); a benign brain tumor (1997); a broken back
(1998); a second broken back (1999); pneumonia (2000); skin cancer
(2002); a broken foot (2003); heart surgery (2009); and congestive heart
failure dating back to the early 2000s. The health troubles helped fuel
dependencies on alcohol and painkillers, which landed the legend twice
in rehab, in 1983 and 1988.
During the double pneumonia spell, which resulted in Taylor being
administered last rites, the actress said she "actually saw the light."
"When I came to, there were about 11 people in the room. I'd been
gone for about five minutes—they had given me up for dead and put my
death notice on the wall," Taylor told
The Advocate.
Taylor's habit of holing up in the hospital was rivaled only by her habit of walking down the aisle.
Marriages and Divorces
In what's now known as corporate synergy, but then was just good old-fashioned publicity, MGM launched production of
Father of the Bride in tandem with the announcement that Taylor, at age 17, was engaged to one William Pawley Jr.
The Taylor-Pawley nuptials were never to be, superceded by the Taylor-Hilton nuptials. Hilton was
Nicholas Conrad Hilton Jr., the hotel scion and future great uncle of
Paris and namesake
Nicky Hilton. He was also the first ex-Mr. Taylor.
The Taylor-Hilton union endured less than nine months, with reports of Hilton's alleged abusiveness to surface years later.
A divorcee at not-quite 19, Taylor became a mother at not-quite 21, with the birth of a son to her second husband, actor
Michael Wilding.
The Taylor-Wilding union produced one more son before ending in 1957.
Proving that the 1950s must have been more a tad more permissive than
public-health films of the era let on, the moviegoing public never
disowned its "violet-eyed beauty," even if by mid-decade, she was a
two-time divorcee. Taylor, in fact, enjoyed her greatest cinematic run,
highlighted by four successive Oscar nominations, from 1958-1961, as she
embarked on her third
and fourth marriages.
In 1957, the 24-year-old Taylor wed producer/impresario
Mike Todd.
The marriage produced a daughter, born prematurely in August 1957, but
lasted only 13 months. The culprit wasn't divorce; it was a plane crash
that claimed Todd's life. (As noted by
People, Taylor's own passing came nearly 53 years to the day of the March 22, 1958, accident.)
Following Todd's death, public sympathy for Taylor was at an all-time high.
In 1958, Fisher was a chart-topping singer, a TV star, and a picture-perfect husband to girl-next-door
Debbie Reynolds. Fisher and Reynolds were good friends of Todd and Taylor. When Todd died, Fisher lent Taylor a hand. And then some.
"The thought of having a love affair with Elizabeth never entered my
mind. Never," Fisher wrote in his autobiography. "But at about 4 a.m.
[one] night…she called me. I don't remember much of our conversation,
except she said emphatically,
unsecured loans 'When you get back, we have to talk. I
want to see you.' I assumed she wanted to talk about Mike. Which
demonstrates how little I understand women."
And thus commenced the Taylor-Fisher affair, which begat the
Reynolds-Fisher divorce, which, in 1959, begat the Taylor-Fisher
marriage.
While the scandal cooled the career of Fisher, who died in 2010, it helped his new bride score a groundbreaking movie deal.
In October 1959, Taylor, notorious as a home-wrecking sexpot, agreed to star as the empire-wrecking sexpot of
Cleopatra for $1 million, the first time any Hollywood star—male or female—hit the seven-figure mark.
In the beginning, Taylor's salary amounted to one-half of
Cleopatra's budget. In the end, it didn't amount to one-fortieth.
Cleopatra was, in two words, a mess. The production schedule
was plundered by bad weather. Sets were built, taken down and rebuilt. A
director quit. Costars bailed. The script never quite got done.
Pneumonia nearly killed the leading lady.
By April 1961, Taylor, at least, was back
bad credit loans on track, having risen from
her deathbed to accept her Oscar, her first, for the call-girl drama
Butterfield 8. (Remarked Shirley MacLaine, nominated that year for
The Apartment: "I thought I might win...until Elizabeth Taylor had her tracheotomy.")
Meanwhile, back at
Cleopatra:
Richard Burton, then in-demand as the star of Broadway's
Camelot,
was brought in to play Marc Antony, Taylor's onscreen lover. In time,
he became Taylor's offscreen lover, too. And thus commenced the
Taylor-Burton affair, which begat Burton's divorce from his wife, which
begat Taylor's divorce from Fisher, which, in 1964, begat Taylor's
marriage to Burton.
"What do you expect me to do?" Taylor asked once. "Sleep alone?"
Meanwhile, back at
Cleopatra: The movie finally got made. It
bowed in theaters in 1963, won four Oscars and grossed a then-strong
$26 million. One problem: It cost its studio a then-staggering $44
million—the equivalent of a $300 million-plus production today.
What marriages, divorces and scandal could not do,
Cleopatra did: The movie put a drag on Taylor's career.
Transitions
After
Cleopatra, Taylor never again starred in anything
approaching an epic or box-office blockbuster. In just her early 30s,
she became the world's most famous character actress, taking on offbeat
films, such as
John Huston's
Reflections of a Golden Eye, and rejecting glamour for dowdiness, as in
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which she won her second Best Actress Oscar.
Taylor's new career was Burton. The star couple costarred in eight films, including
Virginia Woolf, and one TV-movie. Most of the projects were bad or worse. With movies such as
Boom! to their discredit, Taylor and Burton proved themselves the anti-Tracy and Hepburn.
At least the couple appeared to be enjoying themselves. They adopted a
daughter in 1964, and stayed together long enough for Taylor to
celebrate her first, and only, 10-year wedding anniversary. But not long
after the milestone, the Taylor-Burton union ended. It was briefly
revived for Taylor-Burton II, from 1975-76.
By the 1970s, Taylor's film career was all but over. During her
1976-82 marriage to U.S. Sen. John Warner, her seventh husband, Taylor's
weight ballooned, and she became a comic target for the likes of
John Belushi and
Joan Rivers.
Eventually, the laughter died; Taylor lived on. She did stint on
General Hospital,
at the height of the soap's Luke-and-Laura popularity. She did
Broadway, even reuniting there with Burton. In 1985, as friend Hudson
was dying of AIDS, she led Hollywood efforts to battle the disease,
cofounding the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and later,
establishing the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation and the Elizabeth
Taylor Endowment Fund. She launched her own line of perfume. She even
got married—again.
During a 1988 rehab stay at the Betty Ford Center, Taylor met
Larry Fortensky,
a fellow patient and mullet-maned construction worker 20 years her
junior. It was a match made for a paparazzi-pleasing 1991 wedding at
Michael Jackson's
Neverland Ranch. Said Taylor at the time: "I always said I would get
married one more time and with God's blessings, this is it, forever."
Forever lasted about five years. Taylor and Fortensky separated in 1995, with the divorce finalized in 1997.
Burton, whom Taylor called, along with Todd, "one of the two great loves of my life," died in 1984, at age 58.
In later years, about the closest Taylor came to the altar was when she stood up for
Liza Minnelli at the singer's own ill-fated 2002 wedding to producer
David Gest. (Appropriately, Jackson was present for those nuptials, too.)
Taylor's last film appearance came in 1994's
The Flintstones.
The Dame
If Taylor's career waned in the later years, then her early years
were enough to ensure a wealth of career honors—from the American Film
Institute, the Kennedy Center, the Motion Picture Academy, and even the
Queen of England, who deigned Taylor a Dame of the British Empire in
2000.
In 2003, Taylor announced her retirement. Public appearances became
rare. When she did venture out, she was often in a wheelchair. In 2006,
Australian and U.K. tabs said Taylor was "at death's door." Her
publicist labeled the reports false. A month later, the
National Enquirer said Taylor was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. This time, Taylor herself labeled the report false.
"Oh, come on, do I look like I'm dying?" Taylor asked
Larry King in 2006, her first TV interview in years. "Do I look like or sound like I have Alzheimer's?"
Ever the survivor,
Taylor outlived the author of her
New York Times obituary by nearly six years.
Though retired from Hollywood, Taylor refused to retire from her
activist work. "There's still so much more to do," she told the
Associated Press in 2005. "I can't sit back and be complacent, and none
of us should be. I get around now in a wheelchair, but I get around."
Yes, Taylor did manage to get around.
As she herself once admitted: "My life has had so many ups and downs that sometimes it takes even my breath away."
The other
