by M. G. Lord
Taylor’s modest kitchen, with its wicker chairs and Mickey Mouse clock, made me think of something that Liz Smith had said: “No movie of hers quite captures the rather ordinary woman she is—full of fun, rather wacky, often wise, often foolish, her life and her motivations inevitably morphed by fame. When you are with her, it is her history and the atmosphere around her that are daunting. She is just a short, funny gal who wants to talk about what’s next on the menu.”
I could picture that gal in this house, sinking her toes into the carpet, dangling her feet in the swimming pool, whose lining twinkles with iridescent tiles. (Christopher Taylor, son of her brother Howard, did the mosaic work.) I could picture her in her upstairs bedroom—an octagonal space with big windows and a wraparound balcony that felt breezy—kookie—like a tree house or Laura Reynolds’s beatnik pad in The Sandpiper.
Taylor loved looking down on the garden from her bedroom. One tree in particular inspired her. “Its three roots were twined around each other and then bent over to hug the ground,” she wrote in her memoir. “I think tree surgeons use the term ‘tortured.’ ” Yet it endured, renewing itself each spring. “Anytime I’ve wanted to give in to the dark forces in my life—from over-eating to self-pity—I look at that tree and find the courage to go on.”
In her house, beside that tree, Taylor chose a path to which “accidental” no longer applied. This path required bravery. She had taken challenging paths before—when, for example, she overcame Vatican opposition to adopt Maria Burton. But the obstacles on her new path were larger. In Los Angeles and elsewhere, she saw gay men, including her beloved Giant costar, Rock Hudson, wasting from an illness that could be neither treated nor cured. Worse, heterosexuals in the entertainment industry, who had once made money from the talents of these gay men, now shunned them.
Taylor was not one to desert her friends. “She has been surrounded by gay men who doted on her, her entire life,” Liz Smith said in 2009. “And a great many of her friendships—gay or straight—spring from her wanting to help a bird with a wing down.”
So she stepped up, changing with one decision the way the world remembers her. No director told her to do this. No booze affected her choice. “It was,” Kate Burton said, “her greatest conscious gift.”
19
Her Greatest Conscious Gift, 1984–2011
You are not here. You are nowhere.
Your son is dying upstairs, right above your head.
You can do nothing.
You can do nothing.
You can do nothing.
—Brenda Freiberg, “A Secret Gift,” 2008 (Freiberg’s two sons both died of AIDS)
It’s bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.
—Elizabeth Taylor testifying before the Labor, Health and Human Services Senate Subcommittee, May 8, 1986
WHEN I LOOK BACK on the last decades of Taylor’s life, I cannot help but think of Virginia Woolf—not just Taylor’s 1966 movie but the writer to whom its title alludes.
In Three Guineas, Woolf set down some goals and guidelines for women, which, although they were written in 1938, jibe uncannily with the goals and guidelines of third-wave feminism, formulated more than fifty years later. They also jibe with how Elizabeth Taylor intuitively lived her life.
Woolf urged women to question patriarchal authority—to ridicule its trappings. “A woman who advertised her motherhood by a tuft of horsehair on the left shoulder would scarcely, you will agree, be a venerable object,” she wrote. Woolf told them not to mistake formal education (from which their mothers had been excluded) for wisdom. And even if they gained access to institutions previously closed to women, they should stand apart, in a Society of Outsiders, daring to oppose the majority for justice’s sake.
In 1985, when Taylor joined the fight against AIDS, she entered into a true Society of Outsiders. It was more inclusive than the one Woolf proposed—containing men as well as women. But its goals—and its adversarial relationship to the majority—were similar.
The 1980s were a harsh, smug decade. In 1979, Jerry Falwell, a Southern Baptist minister in Lynchburg, Virginia, founded the Moral Majority, an extremist organization that used religion as a pretext to scare average people and whip up antipluralism. Without Falwell’s showboating, AIDS would have been just another epidemic: a medical problem, not a political one. But in the illness he saw an opportunity to foment hate. In 1983, on his TV show, Old Time Gospel Hour, he called AIDS “the judgment of God upon moral perversion in this society.”
Falwell had no patience with Christian charity or forgiveness. His group was a political entity, part of the powerful New Right, to which President Ronald Reagan felt he owed his landslide victory in 1980. This allegiance colored the U.S. government’s handling of the epidemic. Because AIDS seemed only to affect marginal communities—homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and intravenous-drug users—the Reagan administration ignored it. Even within the academic medical community, the disease was viewed as a scary, controversial puzzle.
In January 1981, Dr. Michael Gottlieb, then a thirty-three-year-old immunologist working on experimental transplants at UCLA, saw his first AIDS patient: a gaunt youth, ravaged by an opportunistic infection, his immune system shot. In the next five months he saw four more. Concerned that the pattern might have public-health consequences, on June 5, 1981, he made a nine-paragraph report to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, identifying AIDS. He followed this report with a peer-reviewed paper on AIDS in the New England Journal of Medicine on December 10. For people in Los Angeles with HIV, Gottlieb became the man to see. Rock Hudson was his patient.
Like other physicians at the beginning of the epidemic, Gottlieb often felt helpless. “We were young doctors with young patients who were dying,” he said. “They had the disease; we had the frustration of not knowing how to treat them. We could offer very little, other than our sincere efforts—and hand-holding.”
To treat AIDS patients, doctors had to “make common cause with the sick,” Gottlieb said, using a phrase coined by physician and global health activist Paul Farmer. Many of the doctors, including Gottlieb himself, were conventional heterosexual men. But to serve their patients, they had to align themselves with those hardest hit: gay men. They had to join with society’s outsiders.
The need to do this divided the medical community. As a medical student in 1982, Dr. Francine Hanberg, now an infectious-disease specialist who treats people with HIV, saw her first AIDS patient. He had been flown by helicopter from California’s Central Valley to Stanford University Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Hanberg vividly remembers both the patient—and the annoyance that he caused to some of the emergency room staff. “Why did they bring him to us?” one colleague grumbled, irritated at having to deal with the body.
“Because he’s twenty-five years old!” Hanberg replied, livid. “Because it’s a new, mysterious disease. It’s going to be big. And they were hoping we could do something for him.”
Hanberg was right about its magnitude. By 1985, 15,527 AIDS cases had been confirmed in fifty-one countries. All but three thousand of those cases had resulted in death; the rest were expected to follow. These numbers mocked the U.S. government’s initial stinting response.
During the epidemic’s first year—June 1981 to June 1982—the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spent only $1 million on AIDS, as opposed to $9 million on a far slighter problem, Legionnaires’ disease. In 1982, Congress allocated $2.6 million for the CDC’s AIDS research, but the White House opposed the allocation and tried to block future spending on research and prevention.
Although Democrats held a majority in Congress, representatives from areas worst hit by the crisis—New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—faced two ongoing battles: one, of course, for money; the other for a recognition of the situation’s gravity. Reagan never even uttered the word “AIDS” in a speech until 1987, when, on the eve of the Third International AIDS Conference
in Washington, D.C., he could no longer shrug off a global epidemic.
Without private fund-raising, AIDS research and education would have stalled in the epidemic’s critical first years. And without Elizabeth Taylor leading the charge, private fund-raising would likely have stalled, too.
“I don’t think anyone else could have done it,” Gottlieb said. “No one else had the strength, the celebrity, and the will to do it.
“Someone in a leadership position—a president or a first lady—could have told the country: ‘Do the right thing,’ ” Gottlieb continued. And the country would have listened. But no one in power rose to the moral occasion.
The cause needed “a woman at the pinnacle,” he explained. “Because openly gay men are not given the respect that they are due. And if a straight man speaks up on a gay issue, his orientation becomes suspect. Elizabeth was perfect for the role. And I think she knew that.”
The year 1984 was tough for Taylor. On August 5, Richard Burton died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage at his home in Switzerland. He and Taylor had made peace since their scorched-earth tour in Private Lives, and she had hoped to attend his funeral. But his widow, Sally Hay, made clear that Taylor was not welcome.
Things did not improve in 1985. On July 15, a rail-thin Rock Hudson made his last public appearance—to help Doris Day promote a new TV show. He then flew from L.A. to Paris for an experimental AIDS treatment, which he was too weak to receive. After returning to L.A. on a private flight, he was airlifted to UCLA Medical Center, where, on July 25, he gave Gottlieb permission to go public with his diagnosis. Gottlieb’s brief announcement stunned mainstream Americans. They felt as if they had known Hudson; he had been inside their own living rooms—as a star of Dynasty and McMillan & Wife. Some began to realize: AIDS wasn’t just a disease of “those people.”
In 12-step recovery programs, addicts learn to help themselves by reaching out to others. In 1985, when Taylor lent her name to AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA), she believed that she was doing this—honoring Hudson by reaching out to strangers—far beyond her immediate circle. But the disease soon struck her immediate family. Taylor’s daughter-in-law, Aileen Getty, then married to Christopher Wilding, learned that she was HIV positive, a consequence of an unsafe affair.
Taylor threw herself into recruiting luminaries for the first APLA “Commitment to Life” dinner, an ambitious fund-raiser set for September 19 at Los Angeles’s Bonaventure Hotel. Its guest of honor was Betty Ford, to whose treatment center she owed her sobriety. But her friends did not leap to help. Many hung up on her. Frank Sinatra called AIDS another of her “lame-dog causes.” She received anonymous death threats. Yet she soldiered on, recruiting, among others, Sammy Davis Jr., Rod Stewart, Stevie Wonder, and Cher to attend. The dinner raised $1.3 million—more money in one night than the CDC had spent on the epidemic in its entire first year.
That night she also found something she had not thought existed: a use for her celebrity. A reason for enduring metaphorically what her Suddenly, Last Summer character had experienced literally: standing on a catwalk above a crazy mob, its fingers grabbing ceaselessly at her ankles.
“When I saw that my fame could help in my fight against AIDS, I thought, Bring it on!” she told Liz Smith. “If people wanted to come to an AIDS event to see whether I was fat or thin, pretty or not, or really had violet eyes, then great, just come. My fame finally made sense to me.”
She did not stop with APLA. Later that year, with Gottlieb and Dr. Mathilde Krim, a New York–based cancer researcher who had set up the AIDS Medical Foundation, Taylor helped start the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmfAR)—now the foremost national nonprofit devoted to AIDS research and prevention.
Her courage fortified people with HIV. It worked synergistically with the new medications—the protease inhibitors and the reverse transcriptase inhibitors—that by the 1990s had begun to emerge from labs which AmfAR had helped to fund. “At a time when the disgust, neglect, and derision of the broader society and culture was making people with AIDS feel dirty and ashamed, Elizabeth Taylor blessed us with her glamour,” AIDS activist Sean Strub wrote after her death.
On September 20, 1986, APLA honored Taylor at its second “Commitment to Life” event, which had evolved from a dinner into a show at the Wiltern Theater. Produced by Hollywood agent Barry Krost, the show filled the giant venue—with Madonna, Billy Crystal, Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Willis, and nearly every iconic 1980s face either on the stage or in the audience. There were inexpensive seats, too—to include regular people who wanted to contribute to the cause.
Like most award booklets, the “Commitment to Life” programs contain tributes from friends and associates of the honoree. Not surprisingly, Taylor’s booklet was very thick—she had lots of friends. I was amazed, however, at who was among them: Nancy Reagan—whose husband’s willful ignorance had created many of the obstacles Taylor was struggling to overcome.
When Taylor accepted the award, she vowed to spend the rest of her life fighting AIDS, which she did. In 1990, she testified before Congress in support of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Care Act, which passed in August of that year. In 1991, she created the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, not for research but to assist people living with HIV. In its first decade, the foundation raised more than $50 million.
No vaccine yet exists for AIDS, though scientists continue to search for one. In the 1980s, French virologist Luc Montagnier (who identified the AIDS retrovirus) and U.S. researcher Robert Gallo (who devised a test to diagnose the HIV infection) made the first big breakthroughs. In 1996, Dr. David Ho, founding director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City, is credited with the next major advance: a “cocktail” of protease inhibitors and reverse transcriptase inhibitors that would permit a person with HIV to survive without developing AIDS. Ho met Taylor in the 1980s, when he was a medical resident at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. To him, her greatest achievement was not the money that she raised but the way she helped overcome the stigma surrounding AIDS. “On a personal level, she did a great deal to bring public attention to the disease,” he told me.
Taylor’s intuitive grasp of Virginia Woolf’s guidelines for women did not extend to an embrace of poverty. Woolf insisted that women support themselves, but urged them to do their jobs for “love of the work itself” when they had enough to live on. Taylor had no reservations about making money—launching her multiscent perfume empire in 1988 and the House of Taylor, a jewelry maker and distributor, in 2005. At her death, the press estimated her net worth to be between $600 million and $1 billion. (A Taylor spokesperson, however, characterized those estimates as “wildly exaggerated.”)
Taylor also worked hard to maintain her sobriety. In 1988, she returned to the Betty Ford Center, leaving with a new best friend, Larry Fortensky, a handsome construction worker who, she said, made her laugh. Three years later, she married Fortensky at Neverland, the California ranch owned by another best friend, the late pop singer Michael Jackson, who underwrote the $2-million celebration.
Ever loyal to her friends, Taylor stood by Jackson in 1993 when he was accused of child molestation. They were linked, she said, by their “horrible childhoods.” “Working at the age of nine is not a childhood,” she told talk show host Larry King. “He started at the age of three.” When Jackson was again charged in 2003, she continued to defend him—suggesting that his wealth might have made him a target for people seeking a payoff. “I’ve never been so angry in my life,” she said about the allegation.
On June 25, 2009, Jackson died unexpectedly at age fifty. “I really was concerned about her,” Kate Burton said, “because I know how close they were.” Prudently, Taylor avoided his circuslike public memorial at the Staples Center in L.A. So many fans wanted tickets that they had to be dispensed via lottery.
I had hoped to speak with Taylor about feminism, regardless of what she would say. Kate Burton saw the thread of feminism in some of her stepmother’s movies but d
oubted Taylor had been conscious of it. “I don’t see her thinking of herself as a feminist,” Burton said. “I think she just does what she does.”
The people around Taylor told me her health was too frail for an interview. Many thought my project might amuse her—though no one would say this for attribution. I assumed her fragility was made up, an excuse not to talk. But on March 23, 2011, when she died of congestive heart failure in Cedars-Sinai Hospital, I realized they had told me the truth.
Her death was met with an outpouring of grief and love. And hate: The Westboro Baptist Church—carrying Falwell’s torch of bigotry—threatened to picket her funeral. Margie Phelps, daughter of Fred Phelps, the group’s leader, fired off multiple attacks via Twitter, including this one: “No RIP Elizabeth Taylor who spent her life in adultery and enabling proud fags.”
Taylor’s small service at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, however, thwarted the protesters. It was limited to fewer than one hundred close friends and family. In death as in life, she mocked herself—arranging for her remains to arrive at the mausoleum fifteen minutes late.
As columnist Katha Pollitt observed, “Feminism is a social justice movement.” From 1985 until her death, Taylor fought consciously—not accidentally—for social justice. I believe her final role in life was influenced by the movies with feminist content that she had starred in as a younger woman. Actors both shape and are shaped by their parts. They bring aspects of themselves to their characters, and they take aspects of their characters away.
