The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  While they conceded that she had been excellent in National Velvet and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, they complained that these roles were merely aspects of Taylor’s own character, and therefore required no effort. They were right, to the extent that Taylor could be lazy as an actress. She never attempted to improve her worst faults, which were her high-pitched voice and weight problem, and she was at her best when the plot revolved around sex. But it was her misfortune to be hitting her stride as an actress just as she reached middle age, and the plum roles began to dry up.

  Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in London, near Hampstead Heath. Though Hollywood fan magazines later liked to stress her upper-class English background, she was, in fact, the daughter of two Americans. Her mother, Sara, was a promising actress who had given up her career to bring up the children, and her father was Francis Taylor, a handsome art dealer, whose job in London was to ship Constables home for the American market.

  The family’s entrée on to the bottom rungs of British high society was guaranteed by their friendship with the Cazalet family. Victor Cazalet, the gregarious Conservative MP, acted as unofficial godfather to the young Elizabeth. In truth, he was also her father’s lover for several years — one reason, perhaps, why Elizabeth, as she grew up, seemed happiest in the company of homosexual men.

  On the outbreak of the Second World War, Francis Taylor left England with crates of drawings by his friend Augustus John and set up an art boutique in the Beverly Hills Hotel. The Cazalets’ family friend Hedda Hopper gave the boutique a good notice, and also announced in her column “a new find — eight-year-old Elizabeth Taylor”.

  In the beauty-obsessed culture of Beverly Hills, Elizabeth enjoyed being at the centre of attention. She was a compliant child who danced for guests and allowed herself to be fussily dressed and ringletted. Having watched Shirley Temple, she also harboured ambitions to act, ambitions which her mother eagerly encouraged.

  A year’s contract at Universal gave her her first screen outing, There’s One Born Every Minute (1942). It was a flop. But her father, who had got to know a producer at MGM, persuaded him to take a look at his little girl. Sam Marx was then casting for Lassie Come Home. He already had six children lined up in his office when in walked his friend’s daughter, Elizabeth. “It was like an eclipse of the sun,” said Marx. “The child, dressed in blue velvet with white trim and matching hat, was breathtaking. She looked so splendid that we opted to forgo a screen test. I walked her to the casting office and we drew up a contract.”

  For the next two decades, Louis B. Mayer’s MGM was Taylor’s teacher, surrogate parent and eventually, in her eyes, her jailer. After Lassie Come Home (1943), in which she was cast opposite Roddy McDowall, her career stalled momentarily. The next year she played the consumptive Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, such a tiny part that she did not even receive a screen credit. However, backed by her resourceful mother, she accosted Clarence Brown, who was to direct National Velvet, and, legend has it, talked him into giving her the lead. The film was about a little girl who rides her horse to victory at the Grand National, disguised as a boy.

  Taylor was very short, with a high-pitched voice that tended to screech. But the real problem was that Velvet Brown was an adolescent with breasts. “Don’t worry,” Taylor is supposed to have said. “You’ll have your breasts.” Three months later, as if by willpower, she had grown three inches and graduated to a B-cup bra.

  Her performance put her in the top rank of child stars. But considering that she was still a child, Elizabeth was blossoming into a surprisingly adult-looking creature, with the face — slightly oversized for her short body — of a much older woman. Even at this age, she had a disconcertingly sexual effect on men around the MGM block, an effect of which she seemed fully aware.

  Studying during her afternoons at MGM’s Little Red Schoolhouse, she made a film a year steadily through her adolescence: with another dog in Courage of Lassie (1946); in Victorian costume in Life With Father (1947); and in a blonde wig for Little Women (1949).

  When she moved on to adult roles, Vincente Minnelli drew a charming performance from her in Father of the Bride (1950), opposite Spencer Tracy, as the eager young virgin, ready for marriage but tearful at the prospect of leaving her still beloved father. A Place in the Sun (1951) showed what she was capable of with another good director, when George Stevens cast her as the spoilt rich girl who proves to be Montgomery Clift’s nemesis.

  In real life, with two broken engagements behind her and an enamoured Howard Hughes in pursuit, Taylor’s love life was worryingly out of control. Her parents persuaded her to marry, and in 1950, disastrously, she chose Nicky Hilton Jr, heir to the Hilton hotel chain. After a spectacular MGM stage-managed wedding, the marriage barely outlasted the honeymoon in Europe. Taylor returned to Hollywood covered in bruises and determined on divorce. While she enjoyed a little plate-smashing with her men, she would not stand for being beaten.

  Elizabeth Taylor bringing glamour to the premiere of The Lady with the Lamp in 1951. She married one of the film’s leading actors, Michael Wilding, in 1952

  In 1952, seemingly as a reaction to Hilton’s temper, she married the much older, kindly British actor Michael Wilding, by whom she had two sons. But Wilding proved too mild-mannered for Taylor. Not content with having destroyed his career by transplanting him to Hollywood, she proceeded to humiliate him with her affairs with Victor Mature and Frank Sinatra, much as she was later publicly to emasculate the gentle Eddie Fisher.

  Eventually she left Wilding for the producer Mike Todd. They were married in 1957, when he was in the middle of a publicity drive for Around the World in 80 Days, and she bore him a daughter. Having declared twice before that all she wanted was to settle down to a happy marriage, Taylor now seemed genuinely to have met her match in Todd.

  Professionally, too, she was riding high after several years of drubbings from the critics. One, who had watched her performance as Rebecca the Jewess in Ivanhoe (1952), wrote that he would never forget her being led to the stake with the expression of a girl who has just been stood up on a date. Giant (1956), in which she played the wife of a Texan cattle rancher, gave her a chance to change their minds. The Times talked of “a long-sustained achievement by Elizabeth Taylor which is an astonishing revelation of unsuspected gifts”. The film was aided at the box office by the untimely death of its co-star, James Dean.

  By the mid-1950s Taylor was a role model. A new hairstyle or strapless dress worn by her could change fashions. As a sex symbol, she was in the same league as her slightly older blonde equivalent, Monroe.

  Oscar nominations followed for Raintree County (1957), in which she played a Southern belle, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), in which she was the frustrated wife of a homosexual (played by Paul Newman). During filming of the latter, Todd was killed in a plane crash, and production ground to a halt as Taylor grieved. Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) brought a third nomination, despite the ludicrous nature of her role — an unstable woman who has witnessed her homosexual cousin being eaten by cannibals, and who is being threatened with a lobotomy.

  In the interim Taylor had flouted public opinion after her bereavement by almost immediately being seen out on the town with her dead husband’s best friend, the crooner Eddie Fisher, who was then married to Debbie Reynolds. Hedda Hopper, when she heard the rumours, rang Taylor to find out what was happening. “Mike’s dead and I’m alive,” Taylor snapped down the telephone. “What do you expect me to do — sleep alone?” Taylor never expected an old family friend to publish her ill-judged words, but Hopper did and the column fanned Taylor’s growing notoriety as a man-eater.

  It seemed ironic, therefore, that the last film which MGM wrung out of her contract was Butterfield 8 (1960), in which she played a prostitute. She had wanted to go straight on to film Cleopatra, for a reported $1 million. (In due course it was to pay her several times that much.) Incensed to be forced to make the film before her old studio would release her, she behaved badly on se
t. It was the last film she made as a contract player. From then on, like other stars of her generation, she became independent, and started making real money.

  However, Butterfield 8 did bring her her first Oscar, though she called it a sympathy vote. Filming on Cleopatra was held up when she was stricken with pneumonia. Her health had never been robust. She had suffered from chronic back pain since a fall in 1956 on Lord Beaverbrook’s yacht, and despite surgery she took handfuls of painkillers daily for the rest of her life. This time the pneumonia had the benefit of restoring public affection.

  That affection was tested again when the cast of Cleopatra continued filming in Rome, where Taylor, her new husband Fisher and their entourage took a villa. The former Shakespearean actor Richard Burton, playing Mark Antony, lived in a villa nearby. He first met Taylor on the set when he was suffering from a hangover. She was solicitous and their friendship rapidly became a passionate and not very discreet love affair.

  The director Joseph Mankiewicz did not have time to contain “le scandale” as Burton jokingly called it, as he was battling with budgetary problems of his own. Cleopatra eventually cost about $40 million to make, and to pay for it Twentieth Century Fox had to sell many acres of its backlots. No studio could bear that kind of expense, and the fallout from Cleopatra changed irrevocably the way Hollywood did business.

  Once the critics had seen the laboured product, they agreed unanimously that its cost and the Taylor/Burton affair were the only aspects of Cleopatra worth remembering — “The mountain of notoriety has produced a mouse,” wrote Judith Crist in The Herald Tribune.

  After filming ended, Burton wavered for a while between Taylor and his wife Sybil, before eventually getting a divorce and marrying Taylor in 1964. Her fifth marriage introduced Taylor to a more normal life than she had ever known. Burton took her to rugby matches, to his Welsh home town and taught her to drink beer and eat fish and chips. The daughter she had intended to adopt with Fisher became instead her adopted daughter with Burton.

  Just as after Todd’s death she had converted to Judaism in his memory, so now she took up British citizenship in honour of Burton.

  Even as respectably married tax exiles living in Switzerland, the Burtons were still big news, and they cashed in by making a run of films together. Films such as The VIPs (1963) and The Sandpiper (1965) were good as well as lucrative. The Taming of the Shrew (1967), for which Burton threw out two fifths of Shakespeare’s lines and concentrated on gorgeous pictures, was rewarded with excellent box-office takings. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), in which Taylor played the frowsy, academic wife, Martha, was the high point of their collaboration, and won Taylor her second Oscar. It was one of her most brilliant performances, vulgar yet truly passionate. Taylor yelled her “Screw-yous” and “God-damn-yous” at top volume, daring to abandon glamour to show life’s underbelly.

  The pendulum began to swing the other way at the end of 1967 with Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Comedians, followed the next year by Boom! — all of them flops. Audiences were staying at home, perhaps out of boredom with the Burton-Taylor double act, perhaps because Taylor, despite giving good performances, was looking out of date. Modern bare-faced actresses such as Vanessa Redgrave were casually stripping for the camera, where Taylor was still clinging to low-cut gowns.

  Having bordered on chubby since the late 1950s, she was now becoming uncontrollably fat. In the film of Under Milk Wood (1971) her personal photographer, according to one observer, “kept flinging himself to the ground to photograph her from below so that her double chins wouldn’t show”.

  But if Taylor was not such good box office, her personal life was still as big news as ever. As the Burtons had become richer, so their lifestyle had become more ostentatious and imperial. Her habit of arriving late on set, which had been a minor annoyance to directors in MGM days, seriously threatened to undermine some of the independent productions in which she now appeared. Directors would be alerted to her arrival by a stately procession of secretaries and hairdressers.

  It was during the 1960s that Taylor became the owner of some of the world’s costliest diamonds. Princess Margaret asked to try on one of them, the 33.19-carat Krupp, when she met Taylor at a wedding. “How very vulgar,” she said when it was on her finger. “Yeah, ain’t it great?” was Taylor’s response. Besides the Krupp, she also owned the 69.42-carat pear-shaped Taylor-Burton diamond, a gift from the actor. A book, My Love Affair with Jewellery, appeared in 2002.

  It was Burton’s yearning for a more normal life, as much as his wife’s professional slump, which led to their divorce in 1974. To a noisy fanfare they were remarried in Botswana in 1975, but the second marriage was upset almost immediately by Burton’s womanising and drinking. He went on to marry Suzy Hunt, the former wife of the racing driver James Hunt, and Taylor, in 1976, wed the Republican Senator John Warner.

  In 1981 she leapt at the chance to act in a stage play, The Little Foxes, and, meeting Burton in London, she agreed to do another with him, Noël Coward’s Private Lives. The plot about two middle-aged divorcees who still love each other would guarantee good box office.

  Taylor divorced Warner in 1982. But any hopes that the old Burton-Taylor magic would be renewed on the American tour of Private Lives in 1983 were soon dashed. In rehearsal they were quarrelsome; in performance they were unexciting (and, in Taylor’s case, not always audible). Taylor had other problems too. Although not at her heaviest, she was 12 stone, and no amount of whalebone could conceal it. The show limped on to Los Angeles where it closed in November.

  The next month Taylor was persuaded to book herself into the Betty Ford Centre in California to tackle her addiction to painkilling drugs and alcohol. Though the cure appeared to work, she readmitted herself in 1988, and it was then that she met her eighth husband, a recovering alcoholic builder named Larry Fortensky. Not many gave the Fortensky marriage more than six months. But Taylor, who had always enjoyed thumbing her nose at Hollywood, seemed genuinely happy with her young husband — until their divorce in 1996.

  Her feature-film career never recovered after the 1970s. There was an ill-fated attempt at a comeback as an ageing diva in Young Toscanini (1988). And there were also unworthy television movies, mini-series and cameo roles. She hardly needed the money. Apart from her fortune invested in jewels and Impressionist paintings, she was making a tidy sum from the launch in 1987 of a new scent, Passion. But a shortage of good roles hardly affected her popularity. As she weathered the 1980s, in particular the deaths of Burton and her friend Rock Hudson, she was as newsworthy as ever. Her friendship with the singer Michael Jackson made her visible to a younger generation; and her charity work for an Aids foundation used up much of her formidable energy.

  When she became 60 Taylor appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, and, for a moment, became introspective: “I worked all during my childhood, except for riding horses. My peers were all grown-ups. The child in me was really suppressed. I worked, and was paid. And it was on the screen, but it wasn’t me.” Typically, the introspection did not last long. A moment later she raised her fist, triumphantly and said: “I feel great. I am happy. My life is wonderful. I never think about growing old. I barely think about growing up.”

  That vulgar joie de vivre was the key to Taylor’s longevity in the business. At home she looked at ease with herself, a plump, suburban grandmother in a tracksuit. And, at Hollywood parties, garishly dressed and pasted in diamonds, she showed that she could still play the grande dame.

  As her film career wound down she concentrated on charitable work, notably in the field of combating Aids, through her own foundation and through the American Foundation for Aids Research, which she established in 1985. In 1982 she had initiated the Elizabeth Taylor-Ben Gurion University Fund for the Children of the Negev.

  In 1987 France bestowed on her the Legion of Honour (she was also a Commander of Arts and Letters); in 2001 President Clinton awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal in recognition of her phila
nthropic works. In 2000 she had been appointed DBE, and in 2005 she received the Britannia Award for Artistic Excellence in International Entertainment.

  She had two sons from her marriage to Michael Wilding, and a daughter with Mike Todd. She and Burton adopted a daughter.

  Dame Elizabeth Taylor, DBE, actress, was born on February 27, 1932. She died on March 23, 2011, aged 79

  BRIGADIER ANNE FIELD

  * * *

  HEAD OF THE WRAC WHO PLAYED A SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN THE FULL INTEGRATION OF WOMEN IN THE BRITISH ARMY

  JUNE 29, 2011

  From the moment she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) as a private aged 21, after leaving the LSE without taking a degree, it was clear that Anne Field’s strong suit was leadership. If she ever let up until she became the Head of her Corps, it can only have been during quiet moments in her beloved Lake District. After official retirement she continued to work for the better recognition of the place women had won in the Army. Yet she was always at ease with soldiers — one of the boys.

  Born in Keswick, the daughter of Captain Harold and Annie Hodgson, she attended Keswick School and St George’s, Harpenden, before going to LSE. Commissioned in 1948 she applied for overseas service. Subsequently, she commanded 4th Independent Company WRAC in Singapore and Malaya from 1951 to 1953, the most dangerous years of the communist insurrection.

  She attended the six-month course at the WRAC Staff College, Frimley Park, in 1953, and on graduation was posted to Staff Duties branch in the War Office. She married Captain Anthony Field in 1956. The marriage was dissolved in 1961.