Elizabeth
“Don’t push yourself so hard, honey,” she told the stranger. “You’ll get there, I know it. You have to be patient.”
“But it’s so hard,” said the woman, now with tears in her eyes.
“I can’t do it. I’m a failure at this.”
“Nonsense,” Elizabeth said as she got back into the pool herself.
“Here, let’s do those exercises together,” she told the surprised young woman. Soon, the two were exercising together, Elizabeth helping the woman with her coordination and posture during the movements. At that moment, it wasn’t Elizabeth Taylor, film icon, with some overweight stranger in a swimming pool. Class, status, celebrity . . . none of it meant anything when two flesh-and-blood women were working together to obtain optimum health. “It seems like a nothing moment in the telling of it,” Elizabeth would later tell the present author, “but when it happened, it was a real moment. I heard later that I had inspired that young woman, that she was about to give up before that day. Maybe that was true. But she had given me so much in that short time because her presence in that pool, and her exasperation, really crystallized for me that I was not alone in that battle, that it’s a struggle for many of us and on a daily basis. You never know,” she concluded, “when the golden moments will happen that will change the way you think about things.”
Over a period of months, she eventually lost forty pounds, but only by truly dedicating herself to the process because she had a goal: to get on stage and not look heavy in her costumes. She felt a responsibility not only to herself, but to the audience that would be paying money to see her. She wanted to look her best for them. It inspired her to continue to move forward with her dieting and exercise programs. By the end of 1980, it was clear that her marriage was in trouble, but she wasn’t as concerned about it as she was about her health and the possibility of rejuvenating her career.
The Little Foxes’ pre-Broadway tour had its premiere on February 27, 1981, Elizabeth’s forty-ninth birthday, at the Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, reportedly chosen by the Coming to Terms
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producers because of its proximity to the spa that Elizabeth had frequented in order to slim down and shape up for what promised to be a grueling eighteen months. The spa worked. At a svelte forty pounds lighter, Elizabeth’s next stop was the Eisenhower Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan occupied a box on opening night. John Warner had arranged for almost half of the United States Senate to be in attendance. Afterward backstage, Elizabeth was chilly to Warner, the strain between them evident.
After Washington, the show was off to New York, where it opened at the Martin Beck Theatre (since renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theatre) on May 7, 1981. The reviews would be mixed, but the audience reception was strong—and Elizabeth had achieved what she’d set out to do by taking the job. She looked like her old self, that much was certain. An hour after the final curtain, when she strode into Sardi’s on the arm of John Warner everyone in the restaurant stood up and began applauding. Upon seeing Rock Hudson at a table, she went to embrace him. The cheers grew even stronger.
In New York, Elizabeth appeared for 123 sold-out performances, until September 6. She missed only two weeks when the play was shut down after she became sick with recurring bronchitis. The play was a personal success for her, and for it she was nominated for a Tony, although the play failed to win any of the six for which it had been nominated. Elizabeth was, however, honored with a Theatre World Award as well as a special Outer Critics Circle Award. After New York, the show moved on to New Orleans and then Los Angeles. While on the West Coast, Elizabeth spent the day taping scenes for a five-day run on her favorite daytime drama, General Hospital.
Throughout the run of The Little Foxes, John Warner was not really in Elizabeth’s life, though they were still married. It was clear to them both that the marriage was over. It became even clearer to Elizabeth when he called her in London and told her 340
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that he had sold the estate and bought an apartment at the Watergate Hotel. She would have to find a place for all of her animals, he said. She had horses and dogs and cats, and nowhere to put them. Certainly she deserved more consideration! She noted that she had even sold the famous Burton-Taylor diamond to New York jeweler Henry Lambert for $3 million (three times what Burton paid for it) in order to help defray the costs of Warner’s political campaigns. (Lambert, in turn, sold it to internationally known diamond merchant Robert Mouawad.) She said she was
“sick” about having parted with the piece.
Still, she wasn’t as angry at Warner as one might have expected, which was remarkable, because in fact he really had used her and wasn’t very helpful to her or overly concerned about her once he became a senator. Lucky for him that she had so many other pressing matters on her mind and there wasn’t much time for her to feel animosity toward him. She was just over him, finished with the marriage. He felt the same way. The official announcement came on December 21, 1981: They were separating. By the beginning of 1982, Elizabeth had moved back to Los Angeles, purchasing the home of Nancy Sinatra, Frank’s first wife, on top of a steep hill at 700 Nimes Road in a heavily wooded section of Bel Air, for about $2 million. Again, as in Virginia, her neighbors here would be the Reagans. This beautiful estate, behind stone walls and iron gates, complete with swimming pool and amazing view of L.A.’s wide vista, remains her comfortable home to this day. It’s not an opulent place. It’s three stories, but much smaller than one would expect as living quarters for a star of her magnitude.
She was a single woman, again . . . and happy to be “home,”
back on the West Coast where her career had begun so many years earlier. However, no matter where she ended up in her life, she could never escape the truth: She was a very sick woman, emotionally as well as physically. Though it might have seemed difficult to imagine considering her life up until this time, Elizabeth had not done the one thing she’d need to do to in order to bal-Coming to Terms 341
ance the scales of her life, to finally move forward and leave the past behind: She’d have to hit rock bottom, and she was about to do just that.
Sifting Through the Wreckage
E lizabeth Taylor arrived in London on February 23, 1982, to begin rehearsals for The Little Foxes there (which was scheduled to open at the Victoria Palace on March 11). Her first order of business was to visit Richard Burton. She hadn’t seen him since 1976, when he’d asked her for a divorce in a New York hotel. Since that time, they had both married other people. Still, she’d spent so much time in Virginia with nothing to do as John Warner’s wife but wonder about Richard, worry about Richard, obsess over Richard, and try to put her relationship with him into some perspective. What could she take from her two marriages and divorces from him? So much of it made no sense. When she was taken to the hospital on Christmas Eve 1981, complaining of chest pains, who was the first person she called on the telephone? Richard. The two then commiserated about their ruined marriages, hers to Warner and his to Susan Hunt, from whom he was now separated. They promised to see each other in February when Elizabeth would be in London for the opening of The Little Foxes there and her fiftieth birthday party. That time was now upon her. There had been a dark flip side in coming to terms with the past for Elizabeth, one that, in retrospect was perhaps not surprising considering her history. The more she thought about days gone by, the more she drank to escape the pain of so many memories. In recent years, her drinking had become more out of con-342 Elizabeth
trol than ever. She was sinking deeper into a dark abyss, unhappy with the way her life had turned out, wondering if she could have done anything to change it.
As she drank, she also took pills, Percodan being her drug of choice to numb the pain, not only in her body but also in her heart. It was as if dealing with her past life was making things worse for her in the present. “Drugs had become a crutch,” she would later admit. “I
wouldn’t take them just when I was in pain. I needed oblivion, escape . . . I was hooked on Percodan.”
It wasn’t a new problem, obviously. “There was a doctor, an infamous guy named Max Jacobson,” Debbie Reynolds recalls, “who had everyone in Hollywood and Washington and New York hooked on drugs. This is the evil guy who turned Eddie [Fisher]
into a speed freak. I used to call him Dr. Needles. I hated him, wouldn’t let him come near me. Others called him Dr. Feelgood. He’s the one, I think, who got Elizabeth really hooked on drugs. He had vials of bottles in his pocket and he’d give you a shot for anything. If you said, oh, my ear aches, he’d shoot you in the ear. Oh, I have a noseache, he’d shoot you in the nose. He ruined Elizabeth, if you ask me.”
The late Sydney Guilaroff once agreed. Of Jacobson he also told his biographer, Cathy Griffin, “I despised him ever since he treated Elizabeth. He’s the one that started her on drugs because of her back pain. There were times when I would forget and go to see her and hug her or squeeze her too tight, and she would go,
‘uh-oh.’ In other words, ‘I’m in pain.’ There were a lot of other doctors, but I believe he got her into the drugs to start with and always made himself available to her, just to make sure he had her as a patient.”
To fully comprehend the scope of Elizabeth’s drug problem, consider this: In the five-year period between 1980 to 1985, she was given prescriptions for more than a thousand different drugs ranging from sleeping pills to painkillers to tranquilizers. More than a thousand. As a result, three of her doctors were taken to task by the medical board. Moreover, the California attorney general’s Coming to Terms
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office filed “accusations”—though not charges—against those physicians, with one investigator noting that the amount of drugs Elizabeth was taking were “dosages incompatible with life.” The investigation also showed that on one particular day in the mid1980s, all three doctors prescribed massive amounts of Demerol, Percocet, Xanax, and Ativan. California deputy attorney general Earl Plowman said, “This was a systematic effort by doctors to keep a patient supplied with drugs. It was a classic case of abuse involving multiple prescriptions, multiple controlled substances at different pharmacies at the same time.”
On the one hand, Elizabeth’s situation demonstrates the lax attitude of the medical profession when it comes to celebrities. It is hard to forget the death of Elvis Presley in 1977 from a heart attack following an all-night binge of prescription drugs. People often have a hard time saying no to stars, and not just doctors. It’s one of the reasons the rich and famous have so much trouble in their lives. It’s corruptive for an emotionally unstable person to be able to have all of her dangerous desires instantly granted, no matter what it may be that the patient believes will get her through a stormy time. For Elizabeth, it was drugs, and she had no trouble getting them.
On the other hand, consider this: She needed them. She was in chronic pain and these drugs were prescribed to her for good reasons, even if they were overprescribed. The attorney for one of the doctors made a good point: “Liz Taylor is a different patient with intractable long-term, untreatable pain. She has no life without painkillers.”
The case against the other doctors was eventually dropped. It was in this treacherous environment of alcohol and drug usage that Elizabeth attempted the monumental task of sorting out her past with Richard Burton. Even under the best and most sober of times, it would have been a challenge to sift through the wreckage of their two marriages and divorces. In the end, the conclusion she finally came to, doing the best she could on her own without a therapist to guide her, could not have been more de-344 Elizabeth
pressing: She loved him for no reason other than that she’d always been compelled to do so. That was it. After months of deliberation about it, the only thing she was able to come to was as simple and as unsatisfying—and as superficial—as digging her heels into the ground and saying that she had no choice in the matter, fate had decreed it. And, worse, she had to admit that she still felt the same way about him. It certainly wasn’t much, in terms of trying to reconcile the past. As soon as she got to London, Elizabeth felt compelled to make a pilgrimage to the Hampstead Heath home, one of the houses in which she and Howard were raised by Francis and Sara. The old homestead had been owned since 1981 by socialite Susan Licht and her husband, a banker. Elizabeth, feeling confused about her present and hopeless about her future, needed to go back to a time when life had been simpler. She missed her father, she would say, and lately could not get him off her mind.
Sara was still alive, of course, but she was elderly and not well. Elizabeth still had ambivalent feelings about the way she had been long ago pushed into show business by her mother, but she was working her way through them. What else could she do but just go on with her life? It hadn’t been so bad, after all. Perhaps Sara had done her no favors by encouraging her along the road to stardom, and certainly Francis had felt that way. However, Elizabeth’s life had been filled with as many blessings as curses, and she couldn’t spend the duration blaming her mother for the bad and not at least crediting her for some of the good. Sara Taylor would be present in the audience for the London opening of The Little Foxes, which actually helped make the evening complete for Elizabeth. Still, Elizabeth wouldn’t think to burden her with the details of her present miseries. One afternoon at 4 p.m., Elizabeth showed up at the Lichts’
door with actor Nicolas Costa, a costar of hers in The Little Foxes (who was born in Hampstead). “We’re taking a stroll down memory lane,” she told Susan, after apologizing for not calling first.
“We’ve never met and I didn’t have your phone number,” she ex-Coming to Terms 345
plained. “I hope you don’t mind.” After a stunned Susan let Elizabeth into the house, Taylor walked about with Nicolas, reliving some of her fondest memories. “The nursery was there,” she said,
“and there,” she added, her voice quivering as she pointed to a closet underneath the staircase, “why, that’s the walk-in closet where the awful maid used to stick Howard when he was a bad boy.” Susan and Nicolas were stunned by Elizabeth’s recollection of what had to have been an awful punishment for her brother. She also remembered that Sara had wanted to coax Howard into show business and arranged for him to have an audition with Universal. However, the youngster was so determined to stay out of show business that he shaved his head before the audition so that he would not be accepted! The matter-of-fact manner in which Elizabeth rattled off these memories was a little disturbing. It made the others wonder just what kinds of domestic problems the Taylor children had dealt with, situations that no one other than they and their parents would ever know about—or talk about. It was the first time, Elizabeth quickly said, that she had thought about those stories in years. In fact, she’d forgotten all about them. The actress shook her head sadly. “You know, I came here to feel better, and, oddly, I feel worse. But you have done a marvelous job of redecorating the house,” she told Susan, trying to perk up. “It’s just lovely. Maybe one day I will buy this house from you and live here again,” she concluded, her voice tinged with sadness. When Elizabeth Taylor aficionados hear this story, they think of another time Elizabeth blurted something surprising about her childhood, during an appearance she made at an interview Michael Jackson did with Oprah Winfrey in 1993. Elizabeth said a few words, and she mentioned, out of the blue, that she had also been abused, like Michael, as a child. Jackson had been physically abused by his father: Was Elizabeth saying that the same thing had happened to her at Francis’s hands? There was no other frame of reference for it; she never mentioned it before, or since. It’s just as likely that she was talking about emotional abuse, referencing her father’s lack of involvement in her life. Though there are no other 346
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sources to support that Francis had hit Elizabeth, Stefan Verkaufen, who knew Francis, said, “I can see it. He was frustrated. He drank. Sometimes, when he was drinking, he would lash out.
I never asked him if he hit his children, but as much as I truly loved Francis, I can’t say I would be surprised if he did.” If it’s true that she was abused by Francis, it does provide another puzzle piece to her life. Certainly some of the men in her life had beaten her, drank, abused her in some fashion. One way or another, it always seemed as if she were reliving her childhood trauma. Maybe this is why whenever she would think of Richard, who was sometimes abusive, she thought of Francis. Later that day, Richard Burton was to arrive in London. As it happened, he was flying into London for a charity performance of fellow Welshman Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, at the same time as Elizabeth’s rehearsal schedule for The Little Foxes. She called him and reminded him that they’d agreed to see each other. He remembered and said he couldn’t wait to see her as well. Her mood was lifted just hearing his dulcet tones on the telephone. A Birthday Reunion
with Richard
E lizabeth sent a car to collect Richard at the airport and bring him straight to her Chelsea townhouse at 22 Cheyne Walk, which had been leased for the run of the play. When he showed up at her doorstep, she was stunned by how he had aged. He was fifty-six now, but he looked a good fifteen years older. He’d always liked to say, “Forty is enough for Dylan, and it’s enough for me” (speaking Coming to Terms
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of his hero, Dylan Thomas, who died at forty). He had now surpassed Thomas by sixteen years, but was the worse for wear. He was thin—down from his ideal weight of 175 pounds to about 140—and weak. Not only had all of the drink definitely caught up with him, he was in unremitting pain from a damaged nerve in his hip that had made his right arm almost useless. He’d also had a serious back surgery almost a year earlier and had not fully recovered from it. Finally, he was suffering from ulcers. She thought he looked terrible; her heart went out to him. She suspected that he felt the same way about her—after all, she was terribly overweight and seemed out of breath just in running to the car to greet him. She had been on the road with The Little Foxes for eighteen months and had gained back all the weight she’d lost, and then some.
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