Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Elizabeth

  difference between what Sara had done back then and what Elizabeth was doing now. Francis wanted to change and actually welcomed Sara’s suggestions. In fact, he missed her coaxing of him when Sara suddenly shifted focus and began working on the transformation of their daughter. But Larry wasn’t nearly as welcoming of Elizabeth’s suggestions. Their biggest arguments in the first year of their marriage resulted from his taking umbrage at her ideas of how he might change.

  In February 1992, for instance, Elizabeth celebrated her sixtieth birthday with a fantastic party at Disneyland with hundreds of guests. The one problem of the day concerned Elizabeth constantly trying to tell Larry how to pose for photographers. “You mustn’t smile so broadly,” she told him in front of several witnesses. “It causes lines to form around your eyes. You don’t want lines, now, do you?” It must have been the proverbial straw breaking the camel’s back because Larry snapped—and that was when Elizabeth first learned something about him she wasn’t aware of in the past: his temper. “Stop picking at me,” he told her angrily. “I mean it. Stop it, now.” He stormed off. It could have been embarrassing, except that Elizabeth is a first-rate actress who knows how to act completely unperturbed. “Men!” she exclaimed, and then she went about the business of having fun.

  In the intervening months, Elizabeth had Larry’s hair restyled in a way she felt better suited him. She even started giving him speech lessons. One of her servants recalled, “Elizabeth summoned the top designers like Valentino, Versace, and Armani to customize a wardrobe for him. He had never owned a tuxedo in his life. He soon began to rebel against her attempts to dominate him.”

  For instance, he refused to stop smoking in the master bedroom. Elizabeth had given up smoking in 1990 after her terrible bout with pneumonia, and had asked him repeatedly not to smoke in the bedroom. It didn’t say much for him that he refused to do it. In fact, it sent up the proverbial red flag for Elizabeth, who began to wonder why her husband would care so little about her The Glory Years

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  health that he would do the one thing that could definitely cause her problems. Perhaps he viewed it as a way of seizing control, but his Marlboros in the bedroom were dangerous to his wife’s health, and smoking them there wasn’t much of a way to make the point that she didn’t control him. Also—and this was minor but became an issue—he insisted upon eating in bed, getting crumbs all over the sheets. The more she asked him not to do it, the more he did it. Finally, Elizabeth is a light sleeper. He liked to have the television on all night, and refused to compromise his viewing habits. She wasn’t going to tell him when he could watch TV. It was fairly childish, and in the end he lost. It had been her bedroom for a good deal many more years than it had been his, and one day she had all of his belongings removed from it. It was back down to the Yellow Room for Larry, from whence he came. When the press got wind of these arrangements, it was assumed that it was because of Elizabeth’s health problems. It wasn’t.

  Larry continued to fight Elizabeth’s domination of him, and even began using her household staff as his accomplices. “He wanted to be informed about every telephone call Elizabeth received,” said a former household staff member of Taylor’s. “Who was calling and why? The pharmacist would send over medication on a weekly basis. Suddenly, Larry demanded that we not take her medication up to her until he had examined the prescriptions and counted the pills. If he was not around, we were supposed to hold the medicine downstairs until he returned. We explained to him that he was putting us in a difficult position and he said, ‘Look, I am doing this for her own good.’ None of us believed that, though. We knew it was about control.”

  Brian Bellows is a friend of Larry’s from Stanton who was invited to a cocktail party at the Fortenskys’ hosted by Elizabeth to thank some of her wealthier friends for money they donated to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. Larry had invited Bellows and a few other friends of his so that he would, as he told them, have someone to talk to at the gathering. “I was amazed at how much Larry had changed,” he recalled. “I hadn’t seen him since the wed-434 Elizabeth

  ding. He looked great in his suit with his haircut, the whole bit, but he was quiet and seemed afraid to say anything or do anything. Not like the outgoing Larry I knew. He was just standing in a corner drinking a soft drink, taking in the view, watching people but not getting into the mix at all.”

  Bellows went over to Fortensky. “What’s going on, man?” he said, extending his hand. “Looks like you’re hiding, buddy.”

  “That’s ’cause I am,” Larry said, shaking his friend’s hand. “It’s best for me to stay out of the way.”

  “Why?”

  “Big night here for the wife,” Larry explained. “I don’t want to screw it up for her. Plus, I gotta tell you,” he continued, suddenly seeming very angry for no apparent reason, “I’m about to blow, man. I’m about to lose my cool, man. And if I do, man, I’m gonna’

  turn this whole goddamn house on its ear, man.”

  It was clear to Brian that something wasn’t quite right with Larry.

  At that moment, Elizabeth came sweeping into view looking elegant in a floor-length black evening gown, the Krupp diamond gleaming on her hand. Rarely did she ever wear it at home . . . this was a special night. “Oh, my darling. Why, I’ve been looking every- where for you,” she said with a flourish. “Michael’s here. Michael Jackson!”

  “No kidding?” Larry said, suddenly brightening up. “Mike’s here?”

  “Yes, he is,” Elizabeth said. “But you must come quickly, because who knows how long he’ll stay. Why, at any moment, he could simply vanish into thin air! Poof! You know Michael.” She laughed merrily and disappeared into the other room. As Larry left, he turned to his friend and muttered, “Finally, a real person I can talk to.”

  Part Eight

  =

  ALL WOMAN

  “Sara S. Taylor—Loving

  Mother, Devoted Wife—

  1895–1994”

  E lizabeth’s mother, Sara Taylor, had not been well in recent years. True to her nature, though, she still wanted to maintain her independence, and therefore insisted on keeping her condominium at the Sunrise Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California. One of her friends there recalls, “From her little home, she had a wonderful view of rolling green golf courses and lovely blue lakes. It was pristine, gorgeous. She just wanted to tend to her rose bushes, be with her friends in her ladies’ bridge club, have her life. I would go to visit and she would complain about the dust on her white plantation shutters. ‘It’s so dusty here,’ she’d say. ‘This goddamned desert, I hate it. I’d like to live near Elizabeth in Beverly Hills,’ she said, ‘but I’m not leaving my friends, here. No way.’ Living a full life had always been important to her, and I have to say that she did just that. She didn’t hate the desert, not really. It was just her way, complaining. Elizabeth had hired an Asian family to move into the condo next to Sara’s and take care of her, a very nice young couple with a baby girl. Elizabeth visited often. However, at the end, she wasn’t able to come as much because of her own health issues.

  “Sara looked at newspaper photographs of her unwell daughter and said, ‘Look, she’s sicker than I am. I’m the one who should be visiting her, not the other way around.’ ”

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  Elizabeth

  Indeed, Elizabeth had not been in good health for some time, and then, in December 1993, things took an even more dramatic turn for the worse when she took a fall at her chalet in Gstaad. She had just spent six months racing around the globe with Michael Jackson. He’d needed her assistance when, in the winter of 1993, he was accused of child molestation. She rose to the occasion and joined him on his concert tour to offer counsel and sympathy. She’d even managed to get him into a rehabilitation center in London, where he dealt with an addiction to pain medications. She put her health at grave risk to help someone who is not only a friend but also a fellow survivor of a childhood gone wrong.
However, it had not been easy for her, and by the time she got to Gstaad for the holidays she was physically and emotionally spent. It was speculated by her friends that this was why she tripped and fell. Unfortunately, the accident aggravated the osteoarthritis condition in her left hip. She began the year 1994 crippled by terrible pain, and her doctors were conferring with her about possible hip replacement surgery.

  Elizabeth and Sara spoke on the telephone as much as possible. By this time, Elizabeth’s brother, Howard, was living with his family on twenty-three acres on a mountain near Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico. He and Sara also remained close, as he always had to Elizabeth. In recent years, Sara had said she wanted to be there for Elizabeth, to help her “bring the magic back,” as she put it. Elizabeth, though, was less accessible to her mother later in her life—a fact that, while difficult for her to accept, Sara had come to terms with. As Elizabeth’s mother and the woman who had once shaped Elizabeth’s stardom, the desire to help her was second nature. Sara couldn’t help but recall her glory days, when Elizabeth not only needed her help, but welcomed it. However, it just may have been Sara’s modus operandi over the years that eventually helped to drive a wedge between them. For instance, many years earlier, in the spring of 1982—after Elizabeth had returned from her disastrous birthday reunion with Richard Burton in London—Sara had visited her daughter and in-All Woman 439

  vited a small group of friends to join them for tea in Taylor’s new home in Bel Air. Elizabeth and John Warner were separated at this point, and Elizabeth was, perhaps, at her heaviest. While she may have dressed to shield that fact from the world, Sara didn’t hide her disappointment with her daughter for “letting herself go.”

  During the gathering, one friend recalled Sara turning to the group and asking, “Does everyone remember the last time you could be called gorgeous?”

  It was an odd question, to be sure, but all present, most over seventy years of age, recounted their last stab at ultimate beauty. Sara mentioned a time when she had visited Elizabeth in Rome during the filming of Cleopatra and spent a day in the able hands of her daughter’s grooming team. “I walked out of that hotel looking like a movie star,” she said. “When I met Francis that evening he almost fell out of his chair.”

  Then, after all the stories of faded beauty but Elizabeth’s had been shared, Sara turned to her daughter. “How about you, dear?”

  she asked pointedly. “Do you remember your moment?”

  The uncomfortable pause ended with Elizabeth’s hollow yet promising response. “My moment is yet to come, Mother.”

  Sara gleefully raised her glass and proclaimed, “I knew it! You’ll be beautiful again! Prove them all fools,” she said, referring to the press who had painted Elizabeth as a shell of her former self. It seemed as though Sara had arranged the tea in order to send Elizabeth a message—in a way that only Sara could do. She had challenged her daughter to reclaim her glamour, while managing to sidestep an awkward conversation. At her heaviest, Elizabeth had generated riotous public scenes and scathingly cruel press. Sara felt that the only way for her prized daughter to squelch the vicious chatter was to bring the past back. Elizabeth may have been wise to her mother’s tactics of manipulation, but if she was, it didn’t stop her from pursuing that goal with gusto. Of course, as we now know, Elizabeth did drop the weight she had gained, publicly citing her questioning of her self-worth as one of the reasons for the transformation. But as had happened so many times before, 440

  Elizabeth

  it was also her mother’s prodding that had helped Elizabeth achieve physical perfection—which, after her Betty Ford stay in 1982, she eventually did.

  During one of her visits with her mother in the hospital, during Elizabeth’s stay at Betty Ford, Elizabeth revealed her weight loss. Sara grabbed her hand and said, “You can always get the magic back, dear. Never forget that.” It was a supportive, wonderful moment between mother and daughter, played out in front of witnesses. Then, as would often happen with Sara, she continued where she might better have ended: “And if you avoid letting it slip away in the first place you’ll save us both a lot of trouble.”

  It was passive-aggressive statements like that one that may have set the tone for their relationship in the years that would follow. Elizabeth had a cordial, yet increasingly distant relationship with her mother. They would speak on the phone less frequently as time went by, but Sara’s later life was made quite comfortable thanks to her daughter’s generosity. Sara, however, often reminded interested parties that the career she had created for her daughter was what gave Elizabeth the means to be so generous. In many ways, Sara Taylor had the spirit of a passionate artist whose vision had been successfully realized. The joy of knowing that her ultimate goal had been achieved brought her great joy—

  but what it had cost her and her family was something of which she was quite aware. Still, she had to admit that, on the whole, it was worth it. Or, as her Palm Springs friend observed, “Her love for her children, but particularly for Elizabeth, knew no bounds. There were pictures of Elizabeth carefully placed all over her condominium, in silver frames. One that she most cherished was of her with Elizabeth and her granddaughter, Maria, at the opening night of The Little Foxes in New York, in 1981. In it, Elizabeth is wearing a red shawl, a white gown by Halston, I believe, with a deep, plunging neckline and, of course, lots of diamonds and pearls. Sara would show it to me and say, ‘Will you just look at my daughter. Now, if she is not the most beautiful woman in the world, then I don’t know who is. Don’t you agree?’ ”

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  Indeed, everything considered, Sara Sothern Taylor remained Elizabeth’s biggest fan until the very end. She passed away quietly on September 11, 1994, at the Sunrise Country Club. She was ninety-eight. She was then buried next to Francis in twin crypts in the Sanctuary of Peace section of Westwood Memorial Park. The small golden plaque on her burial site reads: “Sara S. Taylor—

  Loving Mother, Devoted Wife—1895–1994”; his: “Francis L. Taylor—All Our Love—1897–1968.”

  Elizabeth and Larry End

  Their Marriage

  C ome with me,” Elizabeth Taylor said to five members of her household staff. “Quickly, now. Hurry!” They followed her up the stairs and into her master bedroom. Once they were all inside, Elizabeth closed the door and locked it. “There,” she said. “That should keep him out of here. We’ll be safe here until he cools off.”

  One of the surprising—and disappointing—facts Elizabeth learned about Larry Fortensky over the first couple years of their marriage was that he had a temper, or, as one of her household staff put it, “He had fits of uncontrollable rage.” Elizabeth certainly never could have imagined when she first met him at the Betty Ford Center that such a mild-mannered man had a flip side. After witnessing Larry’s “uncontrollable rage” become a pattern for him, she had one of her doctor’s prescribe Prozac for him in hopes that it might help his temper, but it didn’t work. It just got worse over the years. It would be unfair, though, to blame only him. No doubt, he learned what six other men before him had 442

  Elizabeth

  known: Being married to Elizabeth Taylor is a challenge. He was, as he would put it, “pissed off on a regular basis,” and often it had to do with her not putting much stock in his opinion or his advice. His pride had been whittled away over the years. Still, he knew what he was getting into when he married her. Wasn’t he the one who showed up at her doorstep with no socks? Did he really expect that he would be the one running the household? In a sense, though, he may have felt that he was doing just that. After all, it did seem that he had one of the greatest movie stars of all time hiding in the bedroom with her entire household staff . . . and it was his temper that had put them there. Don’t misunderstand, though: Elizabeth Taylor was not scared of Larry Fortensky. She wasn’t hiding from him. Rather, she was sick of him. She didn’t want to put up with him any longer that day, and she also did not want her servants to bea
r the brunt of his anger. However, if he thought for even a moment that she was actually afraid of him, he would have been wrong. She’d dealt with Richard Burton for more than twenty years. In terms of working up a good fury, Larry was just a beginner compared to Richard. On this day, Larry’s anger was fueled, Elizabeth believed, by steroids with which he’d recently been experimenting for bodybuilding purposes. It would be an hour before she would release her staff from the bedroom, and Larry ranted and raved in the living room . . . about what, no one was even absolutely sure. Elizabeth was adamant that her employees not suffer the consequences of her husband’s temper, and she had begun to believe that he might even strike one of them. One day, she walked into the kitchen and happened upon him berating one of her female employees. He raised his hand to her. Would he have hit her? He’d never been physically violent in the past. Still, Elizabeth was alarmed enough by the possibility to immediately step between them. “Larry, I don’t know how you treat your construction crews, but you will not behave this way to my staff,” she said angrily.

  “They are more than employees. They’re my family.” One witness All Woman

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  to the confrontation recalls, “Larry just stormed off and shut himself up in his bedroom, where he slept for three days straight.”

  Perhaps to exact his revenge on Elizabeth’s loyal staff, all of whom he perceived as being against him, he began to treat them poorly. One recalled, “He turned into a maniacal ogre. He wanted details of what we spent maintaining the household. He even restricted what we ate. Since there are no restaurants close to the house and because we rarely had time to take a lunch break when dealing with Ms. Taylor’s business ventures, we were given carte blanche in the kitchen. Elizabeth always told us to make ourselves at home. We never abused this privilege. One day Larry decided the kitchen was off-limits to us. Wearing only his boxer shorts and with a cigarette in his hand, he called everyone into a meeting from the secretaries to the gardeners and said, ‘From this day onward, you have a choice. You can either bring a packed lunch from home, or the cook will make you a tuna sandwich. And no more eating off our china. Use paper plates.’ ”