Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  On February 27, Elizabeth turned fifty-five. The next day, a party was hosted for her by songwriter Carole Bayer Sager and her husband, composer and arranger Burt Bacharach, at their Bel Air home. Attended by more than 150 of her friends, including Sydney Guilaroff, Joan Collins, Barry Manilow and Michael Jackson, it would become one of the most memorable nights of her life.

  “The theme of the party was diamonds,” she once explained. “At the end of the party, each woman was given a ring, a cut-glass Cartier reproduction of the Taylor-Burton diamond, inscribed

  ‘E.T./ 2/27/87/.’ Can you imagine all of those flashing gigantic ‘diamonds.’ Camp, yes. But I loved it.”

  One of those present—indeed, one of the guests of honor—was sitting in a corner, holding court, surrounded by a group of people who couldn’t seem to get enough of her. Michael Jackson recalled to the present author, “I was standing there looking at this wonderful older woman, who was talking in an animated kind of way, full of life. Elizabeth tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Come with me.’ She took me by the hand.”

  Elizabeth walked Michael over to the older woman, breaking through the crowd around her. “Michael, I would love for you to meet the most special person in my life,” she said. “This is my dear The Glory Years

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  mother, Sara. Mother, this is the fellow I have been telling you about. This is Michael Jackson.”

  Michael was speechless, as he recalls it. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. This woman, who I later learned was ninety-one years old, was so beautiful. Elizabeth’s essence was emanating from her, but she was actually the origin of that beauty, of that persona. I think I was more nervous about meeting her than I had even been about meeting Elizabeth. I didn’t know what to say to her. I just stood there with my mouth open, thinking, ‘My God, this is Elizabeth Taylor’s mother!’”

  Finally, after a few moments of silence, Sara Taylor pointed a crooked finger at the pop star and said, “Speak up, Michael Jackson. What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

  He and Elizabeth had to laugh. “That was so totally Elizabeth Taylor,” he said of the moment. “I knew, then, where she got her personality from . . . and it all made sense.”

  Among the many celebrity guests was movie legend Bette Davis, who was escorted by Elizabeth’s agent and good friend Robert Lantz. (Lantz also represented Michael Jackson on his memoir edited by Jackie Onassis at Doubleday, as well as Bette Davis.) At the end of the evening, as Lantz walked Davis to her car, Elizabeth and Michael came running out of the house. “Bette, Robbie, wait, wait!” she shouted at them. The two stopped and waited for Elizabeth and Michael to reach them. “Michael wants his picture taken with Bette,” Elizabeth said. Michael stood behind her, looking embarrassed. “He didn’t know how to ask, though. I told him to just ask, but . . . well, can we do this, please?”

  Bette smiled, graciously but, as Lantz later said, she really had no idea who Michael Jackson was. Michael handed Elizabeth his camera. He then stood next to Bette. The two smiled broadly.

  “Say cheese,” said the one movie icon as she snapped a picture of the pop sensation with the other movie icon. “Wow,” Michael exclaimed. “Me and Bette Davis. Who’s gonna ever believe this!”

  The AIDS benefits and fund-raisers continued through 1987—

  the year that both entertainer Liberace and Broadway director-406 Elizabeth

  choreographer Michael Bennett died of the disease—with Elizabeth totally immersing herself in her work for the important cause. A late but very welcome birthday present for her came in the form of a statement from President Ronald Reagan. He had not mentioned AIDS since a speech he gave back in February 1986. Now he appeared before the College of Physicians in Philadelphia to deliver his first major speech on the disease, calling it “public enemy number one.” Vice President George H. W. Bush was later heckled when he called for mandatory HIV testing, a controversial issue at that time. Elizabeth, as amfAR’s new chairperson, convinced the President to speak at the amfAR awards dinner in Washington in 1987. During his speech, Reagan also mentioned mandatory HIV testing. People began to shout at him and heckle him from the audience. Elizabeth sprang into action.

  “The President looked so bewildered,” she later recalled. “I jumped up onstage and said, ‘I don’t care what your politics are. I don’t care how you feel about the President or what he’s not doing. He is still the President of the United States of America and you owe him some due respect so shut the bleep up!’ And they did.”

  That same year, Sotheby’s hosted a fund-raiser for amfAR

  called “Art Against AIDS,” which was attended by more than a thousand people. Elizabeth, in a green, beaded silk gown, was radiant with diamonds on her ears, her neck, her wrists . . . it was difficult to find a place on her that wasn’t sparkling under the lights. After accepting a check for $400,000 from gallery owner Leo Castelli, she posed for photographs with a long line of excited admirers. One of the advantages to having Elizabeth Taylor involved with any kind of fund-raiser—and a quality that would serve amfAR well for years to come—was always her easy manner with the public, her endless reserve of patience for her longtime fans and others who just wanted to shake her hand or take her picture so they would be able to always remember the moment their paths crossed.

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  Back at Betty Ford

  T he latter half of the 1980s had seen the stunning rebirth of Elizabeth Taylor as an AIDS activist and perfume business entrepreneur, but in the process of undertaking so many new challenges in her life she would find that her recovery as an alcoholic and drug addict would not be easy to preserve. First off, Richard Burton’s and Rock Hudson’s deaths had both taken their emotional toll. Then there was the tumult of strategizing her war against AIDS. On top of all that, her many appearances in conjunction with the perfume business also proved exhausting. For a woman who had never been in good health, this was a punishing time. Slowly, over a period of about five years, from 1982 to 1987, the stress in her life contributed to a variety of illnesses—such as osteoporosis, the crippling bone disease, which had begun to affect her pelvis and hips. Her doctors, wishing to ease her misery, prescribed a variety of medications for her. She began to depend on them, and before she knew it, she was addicted again. Throughout the mid-1980s, she would spend many months in bed feeling very unwell, and taking a myriad of medications, including Percodan and Demerol. There were mornings when she would not be able to get out of bed, yet would have a full schedule of personal appearances with which to contend. Somehow, she had to get through it. She was in a wheelchair much of the time in 1987 and 1988, rising from it only for appearances. On top of all of that, she continued to battle her weight. After leaving Betty Ford, she had decided to adopt a sensible eating regimen and stick to it as much as possible—but also, importantly, not to feel deprived or guilty when she would splurge. She wrote a book about her experiences with dieting and food rationing, Elizabeth Takes Off, which was a best-seller in 1987. Touring to promote the book posed a new set of problems, though. On the road, she was obliged to “openly” discuss her sobriety in press interviews, but was at the same time taking many prescription drugs 408

  Elizabeth

  just to get through the tour. It felt wrong and disingenuous, as she would later admit, and just added to the pressure in her life. Meanwhile, Elizabeth was very concerned about her mother, Sara, now ninety-two.

  In the fall of 1988, Sara was hospitalized with bleeding ulcers in the Eisenhower Medical Center, which happened to be adjacent to the Betty Ford Center. Margaret DeForest and Eleanor LaSalle, two women from Palm Springs whose mothers were friends of Sara Taylor’s, both spent much time with Sara and, in the 1980s and 1990s, with Elizabeth when she would visit her mother in Palm Springs.

  “I think what people don’t know about Elizabeth is how utterly devoted she remained to her mother,” says DeForest. “Yes, there was some frustration, especially when Sara got into he
r nineties. They had their share of mother-daughter battles, but they were absolutely in love with one another.

  “One day in the summer of 1988, I was at Sara’s with my own mother and she [Sara] announced, ‘Elizabeth is coming by today, so I need to freshen up.’ She went into another room with a livein nurse—she was in a wheelchair at the time, very feeble—and was gone for about an hour. When she came back, she was all dolled up in a lovely lavender dress, her hair meticulously combed, makeup on. She always got dressed when Elizabeth came to visit. A few minutes later, there was a big commotion in the front entrance and, sure enough, Elizabeth had arrived with a group of gay men—about six—none of whom I knew, all fawning over her and carrying on about the two-hour drive from Los Angeles and the stifling desert heat. They had elaborately wrapped presents and bunches of exotic flowers and boxes of cakes and bags of cookies and . . . well, it was a big production. Elizabeth was very slim, I remember. I complimented her on it and she said, ‘Thanks, honey. But all I want every minute of every day is a simple pepperoni pizza. That’s really all I want. I mean, is that too much for a fading screen star to ask for, a simple pepperoni pizza?’ We all The Glory Years

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  laughed and she said, ‘Now, see that! That’s exactly the problem. Everyone thinks I’m joking. I’m not!’

  “After saying hello, people scattered about, busying themselves in the kitchen, making desserts and mixing cocktails. All the while, Elizabeth was saying things like, ‘Francesco, my mother likes chocolate, so make sure she has chocolate in her parfait, please, and hurry up, she’s very old, you know?’ It was a party, and Sara loved it. Through it all, she and Elizabeth were inseparable, holding hands and laughing. About an hour later, someone was buzzing at the door. It was a pizza delivery boy. One of her friends had actually ordered Elizabeth a pepperoni pizza as a surprise. She was delighted. ‘See how lucky I am,’ she told me. ‘When you’re a star, people do these kinds of things for you!’ I’ve never seen a woman enjoy a slice of pizza as much as she did on that day. Then, after her one slice, she refused to eat another bite. “Get rid of it, quickly,’ she said, ‘before I just inhale the whole thing.’

  “When Sara went into the hospital with the ulcers, it really scared Elizabeth. My mother told me that she thought it was the thing that put Elizabeth over the edge that year, the thought that Sara might die. Then, one morning in October [1988] my mother got a call from Elizabeth. ‘No one can know this,’ she told her, according to what my mom later recalled, ‘but tomorrow I am going into the Betty Ford Center. Can you believe it?’ She said she was totally addicted to painkillers again, because of her osteoporosis. Ironically, she had just been on a book tour saying how she was off drugs. She truly did not want people to know. She was afraid they would discount all of the valid information in her book about dieting if they thought she was fibbing about the drugs. She was very, very concerned about secrecy. ‘I owe it to my public to try to be discreet about this goddamn thing,’ she said. She just wanted my mom to know so that she could help her make certain arrangements at the hospital with Sara. I remember this as an extremely difficult time for everyone concerned.”

  Elizabeth felt she had no choice but go back into the Betty Ford Center for help. Her drug use was out of control, and now, she was 410

  Elizabeth

  even drinking again. However, she must have known that she would never be able to keep it a secret when she checked in on October 25, 1988. It was a nice coincidence that Sara was hospitalized just a few blocks away, on the same campus. Every day while Elizabeth was at Betty Ford for her second stint there, Elizabeth and her brother, Howard, would visit Sara in the hospital. One day, Eleanor LaSalle showed up with her mother to visit Sara. Elizabeth and Howard were present in the room. “It was a sad scene,” Eleanor said, “Elizabeth was in a wheelchair because she could barely walk. She was trying to get off painkillers, but she was in excruciating pain. There she was, in the wheelchair, sitting next to Sara, who was lying in bed, quite ill, in and out of a coma. The two were holding hands and whispering back and forth to one another. It took my breath away, it was so moving. After a little while, I pushed Elizabeth out into the hallway and we waited there while Howard went to a telephone to tell the Center that he was returning Elizabeth to their care.”

  “Oh my God,” Elizabeth told Eleanor, according to her recollection. “Getting old is such a bitch. I swear, I never would have believed this thirty years ago . . . me in a wheelchair? Osteoporosis? Damn those doctors,” she exclaimed. She also said that she was under constant medical care, “and it’s turned me into an addict.” She added that it was difficult seeing Sara in such frail shape and added, “We were like two balls of fire in our day, you know? I mean, we were unstoppable.”

  For the next twenty minutes or so, Elizabeth regaled Eleanor with stories about dance classes when she was young, the audition gone bad for Hedda Hopper, and some of the other wild stories about Sara Taylor back in happier days, including the time she and Elizabeth met with L. B. Mayer and Elizabeth told the muchfeared MGM boss to “go to hell.”

  “My poor father,” Elizabeth said wistfully. She said that Francis did not know how to reconcile her childhood stardom,

  “so if it were not for my mother, I would never have become who I became.”

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  “Well, I’m sure you had a little something to do with it, too,”

  Eleanor told her.

  “I may have,” Elizabeth agreed with a smile. “But my mother started it all. My God, she was relentless, that woman. Sometimes, I wanted to kill her,” she said with a chuckle. “Funny how life is, isn’t it?” she asked. “Now, all I want is for her to live . . . just one more day.” With that, Elizabeth took a deep breath and slumped forward slightly, as if suddenly overcome by emotion. The moment hung awkwardly. “Excuse me,” she said. She then slowly rolled away in her wheelchair.

  Larry Fortensky

  E lizabeth Taylor’s stay at the Betty Ford Center in the fall of 1988 was, in many ways, more difficult than the first time, five years earlier. She was paranoid and disoriented upon her arrival and it was clear that she was, at the age of fifty-five, suffering now more than ever. As in 1983, she stayed at the Center for seven weeks.

  Amazingly enough, Sara Taylor recovered. At ninety-two, she seemed indestructible, leaving the hospital and returning to her home in Palm Springs. Elizabeth was having a more difficult time and when she left the Center on December 10, 1988, she was off alcohol but not the drugs. She would never be able to get off her medication completely, especially with her osteoporosis, but she was now taking it in a more controlled way. Still, a little poison as opposed to a lot of poison was still . . . poisonous. One day at Betty Ford, Elizabeth noticed a man with long blond hair and hazel eyes whose personality she found amusing. 412

  Elizabeth

  He was a tall, thirty-seven-year-old truck driver and construction worker named Larry Fortensky. Later, Elizabeth would tell one assistant that what most attracted her to him was that he had no idea who she was. Of course, he knew the name “Elizabeth Taylor”—he’d have to have lived on another planet for it to not ring a bell. He just didn’t know that she was this woman with whom he was beginning to strike up a friendship. (One has to keep in mind that this is what Larry told Elizabeth, and it’s a memory she treasures of him. But is it too cynical to suggest that he actually did know who she was and was just acting as if he didn’t in order to fascinate her? If so . . . it worked.)

  During subsequent group therapy meetings, he watched her intently and became taken by her demeanor, a mixture of frailty and fortitude. They began having long conversations about life and love as he pushed her about in her wheelchair. There was a spark between them, and they both felt it. However, the patients at the Betty Ford Center were not supposed to become romantically involved with each other. In fact, such involvement for its patients—not just with one another but also with others outside the Center—
was strongly discouraged, as it is in Alcoholics Anonymous, during the first year of recovery. Elizabeth and Larry didn’t plan on romance anyway. It was just a friendship. Amusingly, paparazzi staking out the clinic took photos of a tall blond man pushing her chair, thinking he was an attendant, not a fellow patient, and certainly not a potential love interest. Noted photographer Alec Byrne almost threw away his pictures of Elizabeth and Larry, that is until sources at the Center revealed to him that there might be something between the two. Then, when he tried to sell the photographs of Elizabeth and her new friend, he was met with skepticism. It was a story too far-fetched even for the tabloids!

  Eventually, though, the editors were convinced—it probably didn’t take much—and Byrne ended up making a fortune on these, the first photos of Elizabeth and her new beau. Lawrence Lee Fortensky, born in 1952, was the eldest of seven children, three boys and four girls. He was raised in lower-middle-The Glory Years 413

  class Stanton, about an hour south of Los Angeles in California’s Orange County. His parents divorced when he was five; his mother remarried. He dropped out of high school and began working odd jobs as a teenager. By the time he met Elizabeth, Larry had been twice married, both times to women he’d known since high school. His first marriage, when he was nineteen, coincided with the day of his being drafted into the military during the Vietnam War. He was discharged several months later. The marriage lasted eighteen months and produced a daughter who still lives in Stanton. A year later, he married again, his wife just seventeen. During his second marriage, he began to work as a construction worker. His was a tough nine-to-five workday, making minimum wage. He was a hard worker who enjoyed getting his hands dirty. No backbreaking labor was too strenuous for him. One problem that he faced, however, was that he had been a heavy drinker. It had interfered with both his marriages.

  For the first year that she knew Larry Fortensky, Elizabeth thought of him as a good friend and nothing more. One wouldn’t think that an iconic film legend and a hardworking day laborer would have much in common, and in most cases, they probably wouldn’t. The interesting thing about Elizabeth, though, is that she’s a woman who can find common ground with most people, whatever their economic position or social status. With Larry, of course, the fact that both of them were trying to stay sober helped to establish a strong bond between them. They offered each other support and understanding during times of great stress in their individual recoveries. They also liked to eat, which provided a lot of laughs as Larry took Elizabeth to all of the greasy spoons he enjoyed in and around Stanton. Dressed in her black leather jacket and blue jeans with boots, her hair teased out in a biker style, she would always be a total astonishment to the other diners when entering those hamburger joints. She could be totally unpretentious when she wanted to be, dressed down and completely comfortable in any surroundings. She had kept her humanity, despite her 414