Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

A few months earlier, Elizabeth Taylor had asked Larry Fortensky to marry her. She actually hadn’t asked a man to marry her since she was nineteen, when she had requested the hand of Michael Wilding. He was twenty years older than she. Now she was asking Larry the same question, and he was twenty-one years younger. He accepted. In the past, when she became engaged she always received an expensive and eye-popping bauble from her fiancé. Not this time. Instead, she took Larry’s grandmother and aunt shopping for new dresses and shoes. Things were definitely changing in her life! In July, Elizabeth and Larry made the announcement that they would marry in October, and the ceremony would take place at her friend Michael Jackson’s Neverland Valley Ranch. “After being together for four years, Larry and I finally The Glory Years

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  decided we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together,” the fifty-nine-year-old Miss Taylor said in a statement released by her publicist, Chen Sam. “Life is good and sweet and we love each other. I always said I would get married one more time and with God’s blessings, this is it, forever.” Elizabeth had been single for eleven years—“history-making for me,” she joked—and was now ready to try marriage for the eighth time.

  But how did Michael Jackson fit into this puzzle? Elizabeth and Michael had been friends since the early 1980s. Michael once explained to the present author that he sent Elizabeth a dozen tickets to one of his Los Angeles concerts at Dodger Stadium in hopes that she might attend the performance. It had been a dream of his to meet her. “I didn’t know it, but it was her birthday—February 27,” Michael recalled. “I thought I was giving her great seats because they were in the VIP box. But when Elizabeth got there, she became angry because the seats were so far away from the stage. And she left, upset. The whole time I was performing, I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, Elizabeth Taylor is watching me, right now.’ But she wasn’t even there. When I got offstage, they told me she had gone home, mad. The next day, I called her, and I cried because I felt so awful.”

  According to Michael’s memory, Elizabeth was cordial but direct. “Michael,” she said, “a star such as myself never sits in the cheap seats.”

  “After that, we talked on the phone every day, on every stop of my tour,” Michael said. “She somehow got my schedule. I would be in Cleveland and the phone would ring. Elizabeth. Or I would be in Denver and the phone would ring. Elizabeth. And I thought,

  ‘Wow. Doesn’t she have other things to do? After all, she’s Elizabeth Taylor!’ At the end of the tour, I asked her if I could come by for tea. She said yes. I brought Bubbles, my chimp, along. She didn’t mind.”

  When asked, Michael will always say that no one has been a better, more understanding friend over the years than Elizabeth Taylor. She can deal with any problem, he says, and is always 424

  Elizabeth

  available with a warm hug and an understanding ear. After getting to know him, she felt that he was terribly misunderstood. She took him under her wing, as she had so many emotionally wounded people over the years. She was concerned about his antisocial behavior and wanted him to become more outgoing, perhaps live a more normal lifestyle. He fought her every step along the way. (In the end, she would lose that battle.) Because both had been child stars, they understood each other’s problems and commiserated about their lost childhoods. Theirs is a friendship that defies complete explanation, though. To say that she has mothered him over the years is reductive of what they share, yet theirs isn’t a romantic love, either. In a sense, Elizabeth and Michael really are, as she has termed it, “soul mates.”

  “We had a similar type of childhood,” Michael said, “without the opportunities enjoyed by others. We shared a quest, in search of acceptance from an adoring public who never really knew our inner turmoil. She’s someone who knows and understands the loneliness of our business.” Elizabeth put it this way to the New York Times: “He had one of the worst childhoods. I think I had the second.”

  With his kind of money, Jackson could pretty much do anything he wanted at Neverland, so he decided to turn it into his own private amusement park with a huge Ferris wheel, bumper cars, steam trains and a carousel. There was a zoo with a menagerie of alligators, giraffes, lions, and a twelve-foot albino python. There was also Cricket, a miniature stallion, and Petunia, the potbellied pig, and Linus, the two-foot-tall sheep. Of course, Bubbles the chimpanzee also lived there, often sitting in the fortyseat cinema with Michael, eating free candy from the sweets counter. There’s a game room, a toy room, an arcade . . . all of it designed for the purpose of allowing Jackson to relive his childhood and also to entertain children there. Its existence would play a part in getting him into a nightmare of trouble in years to come, but in 1988 it was just a dream come true for him. Overlooking the somewhat eccentric nature of what Jackson The Glory Years

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  brought to Neverland, the property itself provides the perfect backdrop for a romantic, storybook wedding. It is verdantly green as far as the eye can see, countryside hills rising and falling in undulated sweeps, irrigated pastures stretching to the horizon, all of it reminiscent of the English countryside where Elizabeth was raised. Old-fashioned windmills dot the landscape. Thousands of trees gently shade superbly manicured grounds, which include a five-acre, man-made, ice-blue lake with a soothing five-foot waterfall and a graceful, inviting stone bridge. It would be here, amid the infinite silence of this gentle countryside, that Michael, thirty-three in 1991, would host the wedding of his friend, Elizabeth, fifty-nine, to Larry Fortensky, thirty-eight. Michael would personally plan every detail of the event. He gave his executive assistant, Norma Staikos, a million dollars and told her to do whatever necessary to make the day a memorable one for his good friend Elizabeth and her new husband.

  Elizabeth Marries Larry

  O n October 6, 1991, a large, white gazebo festooned with ornate silk swags of green and decorated with huge arrangements of daisies and gardenias was set up out near the lake at Neverland. The day was, to say the least, memorable. Among 160 guests present were Quincy Jones, Brooke Shields, Merv Griffin, Gregory Peck and Franco Zeffirelli. Former president Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy were also there. The chauffeurs of the invited guests had their own barbecue in a special area, with their own waiters bringing them drinks. Esteemed entertainment reporter Liz Smith, the only journalist present, documented the event in 426

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  her column. Her stories about the event and Herb Ritts’s photos were sold around the world, with all of the proceeds going to several AIDS organizations. In an interview with Ms. Smith, Elizabeth said, “I’ve been single for ten years now. I always thought, knowing my nature as a marrying kind of woman, that I would try, just one more time, before I die.”

  Before the wedding, Elizabeth’s good friend José Eber did her hair. “She was like a teenager getting married for the first time,”

  he recalls. “Very nervous and excited. She’s always said that she loves being in love. But then again, she’s a pro. I mean, this wasn’t her first time, obviously.”

  At 5 p.m., Elizabeth’s mother, Sara, was escorted in a wheelchair to the front row. She sat with Larry’s mother; his father, from whom he was estranged, did not attend. Larry then walked down the aisle, wearing a white jacket with black trousers. He met his best man, Elizabeth’s hairdresser, José Eber, at the podium. And then came the bride, the lovely Elizabeth, in a golden anklelength gown, designed for her by Valentino at a cost of $30,000. She wore yellow roses in her hair and long diamond earrings of her own design, by Cartier. She had rarely been any slimmer, at just 110 pounds. The only thing plump about her was her lips, which seemed as if they might have been injected with collagen. She looked smashing, collagen or no.

  Michael Jackson was at her right side, an unusual substitute for the long-gone Francis Taylor, especially since her brother, Howard, was alive and present. Still, Elizabeth was delighted to have Jackson with her, and he looked dapper in a black suit with black gloves, a large diamond pin on his collar, a
nd gleaming silver boots. Elizabeth’s thirty-nine-year-old son Michael Wilding Jr. was at her left side.

  Well-known New Age evangelist Marianne Williamson performed the ceremony, which was interrupted by airplanes and helicopters overheard containing paparazzi trying to get their photos as best they could. Indeed, the worldwide attention Elizabeth’s wedding generated was stunning even to longtime followers of the The Glory Years

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  actress. She was fifty-nine and had been a star for almost fifty years, yet there seemed no end to the public’s fascination with her. At one point, a man with a parachute dropped out of one of the planes, almost landing on top of Gregory Peck. He was immediately tackled by one of Elizabeth’s security team and quickly ushered off the property. Dozens of giant purple and yellow balloons were released into the sky as an effort to get rid of the aerial intruders. It didn’t work. The noise was unbearable.

  “Well, it was everything we expected,” says José Eber, “because, let’s face it, it was at Neverland and such an extravaganza, so of course people were going to be going crazy over it. So, everything that happened, we expected—helicopters, parachutists, whatever. You couldn’t hear a thing, though. I was standing next to Larry, and, honestly, you couldn’t hear one word Marianne Williamson was saying because of the helicopters.”

  “I heard a little of it,” Liz Smith recalled, “but only because I went over to a loudspeaker and took my notes there. After all, I was supplying the whole world with the story of this wedding, I needed to at least hear it! But it was like Vietnam overhead!”

  “Shall I speak louder so that everyone can hear me?” Marianne Williamson asked over the din.

  “No,” answered Elizabeth. “Why not just speak to me and Larry?”

  “Larry and I decided to forget all about the helicopters and the noise,” Elizabeth later recalled. “We looked into each other’s eyes and quietly spoke our vows.”

  “From this day forward you shall not walk alone,” they each said. “My heart will be your shelter, and my arms will be your home.”

  They then exchanged rings, a plain gold ring for him, hers a diamond. Marianne Williamson pronounced them man and wife. Afterward, they exchanged a kiss, then strolled to the dining tent. There they sat with Michael. Elizabeth didn’t throw any bouquets or garters, but she and Larry did the traditional cutting of a cake covered in white bows, and she fed him a piece. A steady 428

  Elizabeth

  stream of guests brought congratulations to their table, and the couple also stepped out for the first dance. The Fortenskys then spent their first married night together at the ranch, having spent the previous night there as well. The wedding cost Michael Jackson $1.5 million—$500,000 over budget—but, as far as he was concerned, it was worth every penny just to make his friend Elizabeth happy. The couple would honeymoon in Europe. Later that month, to show their appreciation to him, the Fortenskys would gift Michael with a rare albino bird from the Amazon . . . as well as a 70,000-pound elephant, named Gypsy.

  The night of their wedding, after all the guests had departed, Michael arranged for Elizabeth and Larry to have some time alone. Though the two had changed from their formal wear into casual clothes—jeans and T-shirts with light denim jackets—Elizabeth’s hair was still in its wedding-day bouffant, yellow roses in place. The newlyweds boarded one of Michael’s golf carts with Larry in the driver’s seat and Elizabeth in the passenger’s. He leaned over and kissed the nape of her neck. She tousled his long blond hair with her fingers and touched his mouth to hers. Then he started the ignition and began to drive his new wife slowly into a night that was now, mercifully, filled with immeasurable silence. There were twinkling lights hanging in the trees and, above them, a sky that took on a soft, violet hue. A spectacular full moon had emerged, its warm and magical glow wrapping them and all of Neverland in its snug embrace. Even Michael Jackson with all of his millions couldn’t have prearranged such a moon. Soft music emanated from the bushes. In the distance, a Ferris wheel turned and turned . . . with nobody on it. A few feet from it, a train chugged along, but with only its conductor . . . no passengers. The scene was lovely and peaceful.

  An unlikely marriage had taken place on this day: A movie star who’d been one of the most famous women in the world for almost fifty years had wed a day laborer twenty-one years her junior, a man she’d met while waging battle with her worst demons at a drug rehabilitation center. Could such a union last? Who could The Glory Years

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  predict what the future would hold for them? However, in this serene time and very strange place, Elizabeth Taylor was content with the seventh man to take her as his wife. Certainly, if there was one thing she’d learned in her sixty years, it was to enjoy the moment and not look too far into the future. She rested her head on Larry’s shoulder. A small group of servants collected on one of the nearby patios to watch the couple. They pointed at them and cheered them on as the newlyweds’ golf cart disappeared around a curve in the road, headed toward an unknown destination. Re-creating Her Mother’s

  Marriage . . . but Not Quite

  O n the first anniversary of Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding to Larry Fortensky, a longtime assistant went to the elegant Hotel Bel Air, which sits on twelve very private and well-manicured acres of lush gardens, and paid $3,500 for one night in its most commodious space—the Presidential Suite. It’s a two-bedroom, two-bath, wellappointed accommodation. The formal living room has a woodburning fireplace and double French doors, which lead to a private garden patio and large outdoor spa. The assistant decorated the suite with fragrant lavender and bouquets of yellow roses. She then placed scented candles around the sunken tub in the bathroom. She also ordered an extravagant meal to be delivered that night: beluga caviar to start ($250), and roasted rack of Colorado lamb with Niçoise olives and fig jus ($44 a plate), with chocolate soufflés for dessert ($25 each). It was all to set the stage for the perfect celebration of one year of marriage for her employer, Eliz-430 Elizabeth

  abeth, and her new husband, Larry. That night Elizabeth and Larry happily left for the hotel to enjoy their evening. The next morning, when the assistant came downstairs, she was stunned to find Larry lying on the couch in the living room, watching television. The entire household staff was concerned about what might have occurred to cut the romantic evening short. Before anyone had time to do any snooping, however, Elizabeth swept into the kitchen and announced, “We decided to come home because it was boring.” Then she walked back out, as if she just wanted to quell the gossip, once and for all, and not hear another word about it.

  Things obviously weren’t going well . . .

  Of course, it had been expected that there would be adjustments to be made when Elizabeth married Larry, especially considering their divergent stations in life, the huge disparity in their finances as well as the twenty-one-year difference in their ages. One of the more interesting developments in Elizabeth’s marriage to Larry, and one that would prove to be a big challenge to their union, had to do with her sudden determination to try to remake him. She thought of him as a diamond in the rough, and wanted to polish him. A longtime connoisseur of expensive jewels, she knew a good one when she saw one. Larry had a way to go before he would be perfect, but she began the work she felt necessary in transforming him into not only the ideal husband but also the perfect social partner. In that first year, her capacity for making suggestions seemed to have no limit.

  “You should always pick up both the champagne glass and wineglass by the stem,” she would tell him before they would go to dinner.

  “Don’t name-drop in public. Those we meet socially need not know who else we’ve met along the way.”

  “Don’t ramble on. If you get stuck and don’t know what to say, allow the other person to talk. People love to talk about themselves.”

  “Don’t slouch.”

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  “Don’t contradict me in public, it’s embarrassing.”

&n
bsp; It wasn’t that Elizabeth didn’t love Larry just as he was, it was that she knew in her heart, as she would tell it, that he had the potential to be an even better, more well-rounded person. He wasn’t as worldly as she, hadn’t experienced as much, and didn’t always understand the social interaction between people in high society or in show business—or the perfume business, for that matter. By this time, she was among the ten richest women in the world, according to Forbes, her fortune estimated at $150 million, in large part because of her fragrance business. She was one of the most sought-after celebrities in Hollywood, with a full social calendar that also involved Larry as her escort. All she wanted to do was whatever she could to make his new life easier for him. When she took him to a formal dinner at her friends Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager’s home, he seemed not to fit in with the others there. She didn’t even like the way his fingernails looked in comparison to the other men. She made a mental note, as she would later tell it, to make an appointment with a manicurist for him the next day. He also didn’t know which fork with which to eat his salad. Something else to work on. When Burt asked him about a film, he responded by saying, “Oh, yeah. I seen that one.”

  Elizabeth cringed.

  It had finally happened. Perhaps it was inevitable. Maybe the only surprise was that it had taken eight marriages to seven men before it had unfolded: Elizabeth Taylor had re-created in her own life the marriage her mother once had with her father.

  “I know what the problem with you is,” Sara used to tell Francis, “and here’s how to fix it.” She meant well, even if she was overly assertive. In time, she would mold Francis from a shy and retiring person into a more outgoing, social man with whom she was proud to be seen. She had even transformed Elizabeth from a bashful, awkward little girl into an effervescent and charismatic young lady, imbuing her with the self-confidence necessary for her to stand before movie cameras and give performances for which she would always be remembered. However, there was one major 432