Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  played in the passing on of AIDS, or even how it was transmitted. Could you get it, and AIDS, from casual contact? From kissing? It would be years before an HIV antibody test was widely available. There was discussion about experimental drugs. In 1980 and 1981, there were a combined 234 deaths in the United States attributed to the disease. In 1982, there were 853 deaths; it was the year the acronym AIDS was first used. In 1983, there were 2,304 deaths. In 1984, 4,251. In 1985, 5,636.

  A press conference on October 15, 1982, would mark the first public mention of AIDS in the Reagan White House. Reagan himself did not mention the disease for three more years. In the next twenty years, AIDS would kill more than 30 million people 396

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  worldwide, of both sexes and in all races and economic stations in life, almost a million of them in the United States. In those early years of the epidemic, Elizabeth Taylor knew about as much about AIDS as anyone else in the entertainment community: that some of her closest friends were dying from it and that much of the world seemed indifferent to their loss. Over the years, many of her gay colleagues in the entertainment industry had suffered terribly in their private lives as a result of their true selves not being accepted in the business. She’d known many actors who’d been closeted, such as Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson, and she had always reached out to them with friendship and a shoulder to cry on. It’s easy to think that Elizabeth, as a movie star known as much for her excessive private life as for her film work, was a totally self-involved and egocentric woman. However, all one has to do is consider her close friendships with Clift, Dean and Hudson—not to mention so many others whose names would be unfamiliar but whom she’d taken under her protective wing—to know that her capacity for love and generosity knew no bounds. Remember also that she adopted a child at a time in her life when she really didn’t need more responsibilities, and though she was taken to task for it—and by the Vatican, no less!—the reason she did it was because she wanted to give. Though the stress of her celebrity combined with certain very human weaknesses had caused her personal life to careen out of control many times over the years, her sense of decency, generosity, fair play, and compassion for others was never sacrificed as a consequence. As a sort of mother protector to so many gay men over the years, she was confused, hurt, and angry when AIDS

  began to take her loved ones. She didn’t know what she could do about it, but she sensed that she owed it to herself and her friends to become involved. “I felt early on that people needed to become better educated about the disease,” she would later say. “I just couldn’t sit back and watch this terrible sickness take so many of my friends without wondering if there was something I could do, though I couldn’t imagine what that might be.”

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  Elizabeth’s publicist, Chen Sam, knew that Elizabeth had become deeply concerned about the growing AIDS epidemic by January 1985. Around that time, Sam was contacted by two men who were attempting to put together an organization that would offer assistance to AIDS patients, and they wanted Elizabeth Taylor’s help. Bill Misenhimer, an AIDS activist, and Bill Jones, a Los Angeles caterer, had a vision they, along with five other gay men, would call AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA), and they hoped to convince Elizabeth to become chairperson of the first major AIDS

  benefit, which would be called the Commitment to Life Dinner, the proceeds of which would go to benefit APLA. In meeting with Misenhimer and Jones, Elizabeth learned that celebrities were shunning the disease as if it didn’t exist and didn’t pose a huge danger not only to the gay population but to the world. She was shocked at first, but after thinking about it, she wasn’t really surprised. No one wanted to be identified with this “gay epidemic.”

  There had always been rampant homophobia in Hollywood, as much as it vexed her. She began polling her friends to see what kind of support she could get, and as she did she saw that the prejudice against homosexuality was, indeed, one of the chief reasons AIDS was being ignored. “I was so angry,” she would recall. “The attitude that people had, the bigotry! Nobody was doing or saying anything and it incensed me. It offended my sensibility, my sense of fairness. I know so many homosexuals,” she said. “I mean, let’s face facts, shall we? There would be no art in America if it weren’t for gays.”

  Frank Sinatra turned her down when she asked him to become involved with the dinner, telling her that it was one of her “lame dog causes” and that it would hurt her to become involved in it. She got a similar response from Nancy Reagan when, in January 1985 she attended President Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration with Frank and Barbara Sinatra. Nancy didn’t really want to discuss the matter. “No one really wanted to get into it with me,”

  Elizabeth said years later. “I had to take the position, ‘I will not be ignored, so get used to hearing about this from me because you 398

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  will be, for a long time, or for however long it takes.’ I started noticing that my calls weren’t being returned. I must say, that was a first in my life.’ ”

  At about this same time, Rock Hudson was undergoing secret treatment for AIDS in Paris, though no one knew at the time that this was his crisis. Elizabeth knew he was ill, and certainly knew he was gay. The last time they had worked together was in 1980 when they filmed The Mirror Crack’d. Although Amy Archerd, a columnist for Daily Variety, broke the news to the movie colony of Rock’s AIDS diagnosis on July 23, it wasn’t until Hudson’s spokesman made the announcement on July 25 that the rest of the world learned of the actor’s diagnosis. Elizabeth was crushed, more determined than ever to spread the word about the disease. Hudson was the first major celebrity to announce that he had AIDS, and that, combined with the public’s leap to the conclusion that he was also homosexual—which happened to be accurate, but could just as easily have been wrong—was all stunning information to digest. So well loved in his youth as a dashing young matinee idol and for more than a decade at or near the top of Hollywood moneymakers, Hudson would unwittingly change the way the world viewed AIDS. He demystified it, gave it a face, an identity. When he returned to Los Angeles for further treatment, Elizabeth was the first to visit him at the hospital. “He knew that I knew,” she recalled. “We didn’t discuss it.” She simply could not believe how ravaged he appeared from the awful disease. Her mind went back to the fun they had on the set of Giant so many years earlier, and as she would later recall, it was difficult to imagine that his life had turned out this way. “He’s such a wonderful man,” she said. “He deserved happiness in his old age, not this.”

  Seeing Rock Hudson and coming to terms that he truly was dying strengthened her resolve to do something about the disease that would claim his life. It was shortly after her visit with Rock that she decided to establish a national AIDS foundation that would fund scientific research on the disease. She, Misenhimer, and Dr. Michael Gottlieb, Hudson’s doctor and an AIDS pioneer The Glory Years

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  who’d been warning about the disease since 1980, met over dinner in Santa Monica and decided, as she would later tell it, “that we were going to make a difference. Goddamn, we would!”

  In the summer of 1985, Elizabeth announced plans for the Commitment to Life Dinner. “Never has a disease left so many helpless,” she said, “leaving loved ones and families reaching out only to frustration and fear.”

  “The reaction was extraordinary. No one wanted to come to this dinner,” she told Whoopi Goldberg years later, in 1993. “I made the phone calls myself. I’ve never received so many no’s in my life. I couldn’t understand it and would ask why? And they said well we give to cancer or whatever and we really don’t want to be involved in this particular charity. Other people would say, ‘Drop it, Elizabeth. It’ll go away.’ I would just lose my cool and say this is not going away and it’s going to become an epidemic. I didn’t know then it would become a pandemic. It actually was because of Rock that I was able to get people to come to the dinner. The town sa
id, ‘Oh one of our own has been stricken,’ and then Hollywood really got their shit together.”

  In a couple of years’ time, the epidemic would again strike home for Elizabeth when her daughter-in-law Aileen Getty (married to but estranged from her son Christopher, and the mother of two of her grandchildren), would confide in her that she was HIV

  positive. Aileen would admit she’d had an unsafe sexual affair outside of her marriage in 1984, and through it had caught the virus. She’d tell Elizabeth the terrible news in France in 1987, where the two of them attended an AIDS benefit. Her friend the columnist Liz Smith recalled, “Elizabeth said to me, ‘Liz, this girl is like my own child. She’s the mother of my two grandchildren. How can I do anything but everything I can do to save her life? I am going to save her.’”

  Previously, when Elizabeth had learned that Aileen was a drug addict, she had supported her through a difficult recovery process. Her HIV infection brought the two women even closer, but the two had always had a special camaraderie, perhaps because they 400

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  shared such troubled lives. Aileen once said she was “victimized by my parents, by my legacy, by life. I’d been in seven institutions, I’d had twelve shock treatments, I had seven miscarriages. I was anorexic, a self-mutilator. I’d been there and back.” She also said of her mother-in-law, a woman who’d also “been there and back,”

  “It was always easy to talk to her. She taught me that I was still a beautiful person, that I could die with Mom [Elizabeth] and she would hold me safe and tight.” (Aileen continues to keep a hospice near Los Angeles for people suffering from AIDS and also remains an active figure in amfAR—the American Foundation for AIDS Research. She has remarried, and remains close to Elizabeth.) The Commitment to Life Dinner took place in the ballroom of L.A.’s Bonaventure Hotel on September 19, 1985. It was a huge success, generating more than a million dollars for APLA. During the proceedings, Burt Reynolds read a telegram from President Reagan in which Reagan acknowledged that the spread of AIDS

  was indeed a critical issue, marking the first time the President had made any public statement about it. (Two days earlier marked the first time Reagan mentioned the word AIDS in public, in response to a reporter’s question.) Soon after, Elizabeth would join forces with Mathilde Krim, a doctor specializing in a form of biotherapy using interferons—a natural substance produced by the body in response to infection and disease. Mathilde, wife of Arthur Krim (who had been a major player in the motion picture industry), practiced at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and had established the AIDS Medical Foundation. Dr. Krim and Elizabeth, along with businessmen such as Jonathan Cannon, Dr. Arnold Klein, Dr. Michael Gottlieb, David Geffen, Bill Misenhimer, and others founded amfAR. “The stakes are phenomenally high,” Elizabeth said. “We hope the foundation will emerge as the national organization to support research, with the staying power to attract adequate financing and resources from the private sector. We plan to muster the talent and energy of America’s brightest scientific and medical researchers to solve The Glory Years

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  the mysteries of AIDS. We are prepared to do what it takes to find a cure.”

  Two weeks later, on October 2, Rock Hudson died, but with his tragic death came the emergence of a new and reborn Elizabeth Taylor. From this point onward in her life, she would have a cause that inspired more passion in her than anything else in which she’d ever invested herself, and considering the life she’d led up until this time, that was really saying a lot. In May 1986, Elizabeth testified before a congressional subcommittee in an effort to get more funding for AIDS research. “I will not be ignored,” she said, repeating her motto. “And I will not go away. So . . . help me. Please.”

  Her longtime agent and friend Robert Lantz recalls, “She called me one day and said, ‘We have a big dinner to raise money for AIDS, and I’m leaving many hours early to do some begging.’ I asked, ‘What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘We can’t sell the tickets to anyone and so I’m going from studio to studio with these damn tickets until I sell every one of them.’ And she did. And of course, she didn’t need appointments. When Elizabeth Taylor arrived at a studio, she could see anyone she wanted to see.”

  Anyone who knew Elizabeth, who had tracked any portion of her sensational fifty-three years on the planet thus far, either from the intimate vantage point of a close friend or the distant one of just a fan, would have to marvel at the change in her as she entered this new and significant phase in her life as an AIDS activist and philanthropist. It’s also interesting, in assembling the puzzle pieces of her life, that her time as a senator’s wife is what really helped to prepare her for so much in-person, hands-on work as an AIDS activist. Without her experiences on the campaign trail, it’s very likely that she would not have been able to connect to the public so easily and so genuinely.

  Also, and it must be said—even at the risk of trivializing her very important work—that becoming an AIDS activist at this particular time in her life took her focus from the one thing that would surely have caused her despair had she begun to obsess over 402

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  it—Richard Burton’s death. She needed something else in her life at this critical time, something to hold on to and give her a sense of purpose—and how astonishing that it would turn out to be the sort of philanthropic work that would cause a veritable revolution in AIDS awareness, research, and care. It was almost as if she, on some level, decided that she would not waste another second being consumed by thoughts of Richard—that she would instead put her energy elsewhere. No doubt, his sudden death also served to remind her that her time on this planet was to be all to brief and that she needed to fill her days with something worthy of her time and attention.

  Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion

  B y the beginning of 1987 as she approached her fifty-fifth birthday, it was clear that plum film roles were no longer coming Elizabeth Taylor’s way. Like many of her peers in Hollywood, she was obliged to adjust to—if not ever fully accept—the sexist and ageist attitudes of movie studios when it came to hiring actors, especially women, over the age of forty. Occasionally, an interesting part would be brought to Elizabeth, such as a role in Franco Zeffirelli’s Young Toscanini, which, as it happened, would turn out to be one of his most obscure ventures. In a strange bit of casting, Elizabeth played a Russian soprano (her singing dubbed) who becomes involved with maestro Arturo Toscanini (played by C. Thomas Howell).

  While the occasional film or TV role kept her from falling into creative atrophy, Elizabeth moved gracefully through this challenging time in her life. After all, she now had a life’s purpose that The Glory Years

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  was, in her view, much more important than making movies. She was fulfilled by her invaluable work raising not only the public’s awareness about AIDS, but also raising millions for important scientific research about the disease. She also would branch out, in 1987, with an exciting new business venture that would lift even higher her public profile, generate many millions of dollars in the process, and also increase the “celebrity quotient” so beneficial to her when it came to her work with AIDS. She would license her name to a perfume company, the Parfums International division of Chesebrough-Pond, to market a fragrance that would be called

  “Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion.” Elizabeth would announce the new venture at a press conference in New York on January 14, 1987. Photographer and reporter Tom Gates recalls, “The invitation to the press conference was very mysterious and simply stated that Elizabeth Taylor would be at a banquet room of the Palace Hotel in New York to make an announcement. A large card mounted near the elevator bank in the hotel lobby never mentioned Elizabeth by name, ostensibly to keep away the curious, but instead simply stated the particulars involving a ‘Chen Sam Press Conference.’ Once inside, Taylor’s press agent, Chen Sam, gave members of the press their name tags and assigned seats. We were told that Miss Taylor would make her announcement a
nd then answer questions. Looking spectacular in a fur hat and a fur-trimmed tweed coat, she came out and explained that she would be involved in every aspect of developing the scent. What would it smell like? ‘It will have a violet aroma, of course,’ she said. When Chen finally announced that Elizabeth would only take one or two more questions, I summoned up the courage to raise my hand. She pointed to me and I stood, stating, ‘Hello, I’m Tom Gates and I’m with Palm Beach Society magazine.’ At that point, she winked at me in recognition, which unsteadied me for a second, but I continued by asking if she had any prior arrangement with the one fragrance that she had been associated with up until that time, Jungle Gardenia, whose advertising slogan was ‘The Perfume Worn by the World’s Most Beautiful Woman.’ She laughed and 404

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  said, ‘No, but I think they might have sent me a bottle once.’ You instantly knew that she would love to have said, ‘Those cheap bastards.’ ”

  Passion’s premiere to the world would be financed by a $10 million promotional investment from Chesebrough-Pond. Elizabeth would make appearances in department stores to promote the fragrance, as well as appear in a lavish television and print advertising campaign. With the passing of just a couple of years, Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion would become the fourth-largest-selling women’s perfume in America, grossing $70 million annually. The fragrance business would enhance Elizabeth’s portfolio significantly; her net worth was nearly $100 million by the end of the 1980s, thanks in great part to Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion.