(Above: Elizabeth Taylor photographed by Herb Ritts for my cover story on her for POZ magazine. 1997)
We end the week with Elizabeth Taylor. I met her at her home in Bel-Air for a cover story I was doing on her for POZ magazine. She had recently had surgery for a brain tumor and appeared as she does in this stunning Herb Ritts portrait above. Here is the room in which we met:
As I wrote in POZ:
The house on Nimes Road, around the corner from the Reagans on St. Cloud, once belonged to Nancy Sinatra, Sr. Taylor bought it in 1982 for a couple of million dollars after she divorced her sixth husband, Sen. John Warner of Virginia. She kept a lot of the house and its furnishing the way the first Mrs. Sinatra left them—except for the mezuzah that Taylor, a convert to Judaism, has attached to the front door’s frame.
It is a surprisingly small home, done mostly in white. The carpet is modified white shag. White chaise lounges lunge toward the living room from either side of a large fireplace. On each chaise is an ornate pillow designed by her late friend, Gianni Versace, one imprinted with the face of his trademark Medusa head, eerily saddened by his murder only two days before. A huge aquarium filled with exotic lavender fish takes up one whole wall. Jagged geological stones, echoing the colors of the fish, are precisely placed about the gigantic white lacquered coffee table. A collection of paintings by Degas, Van Gogh, Monet, Modigliani, Cassatt, and Renoir hang above the white sofa. On it is a needlepoint cushion embroidered with the adage IT’S NOT THE HAVING, IT’S THE GETTING.
On the bookshelves in the game room are three Oscars. Two are Best Actress statues, received for Butterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The other is the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, bestowed in 1992. Also on the shelves are cherished photographs with the Reagans and the Fords. There is a jaunty shot from Ascot; laughing, she is escorted by Noel Coward and Richard Burton. Two pictures catch her candidly keeping company with that other famous Elizabeth from London, that other queen. A beautiful portrait of Natalie Wood, a present from friend Robert Wagner, has been given prominence.
I walk back into the living room. Leaning toward the aquarium, I inspect the piscine shades of lavender floating before my face as behind me a reflection of Taylor floats into view.
“Hello, I’m Elizabeth,” I hear.
I turn to see the woman who is no longer a reflection. Taylor is wearing a white caftan-like gown. Her feet are shod in see-through plastic sandals, her toenails panted a frosty white. She wears very little makeup. Her hair, a shock of frostier white, is propped into a spiky flat-top. Sugar, her beloved 5-year-old Maltese, has entered with her. The tiny bundle of barking beribboned white hair seems to have molted from atop Taylor’s head and nestles there in her arms.
I take my place on the sofa. Taylor precisely places herself in a chair by my side. Surprisingly, her most noticeable bit of jewelry is the red piece of string tied about her left wrist as if it were a bracelet.
“Are you into Kabbalah?” I ask, knowing that a red wrist string is worn when one has begun to study this ancient Jewish form of mysticism, which has taken the place of Marianne Williamson’s spiritual shtick among the cognoscenti of Culver City and its environs. Madonna and Sandra Bernhard and Roseanne are adherents.
“Yes. I started about two months ago,” says Taylor, positioning Sugar in her lap. “I am deeply, privately spiritual. I’ve always been interested in spiritual things. Kabbalah is not conformist. You don’t have to be Jewish to believe in it. It’s not a religion. It coincides with many of my beliefs.”
“Which are?” I ask.
Taylor burst into the heightened giggles that gurgle up from her inner child-star. It is as if Lassie had just done something vulgar in front of adult company. “I don’t want to talk about it” she insists, calming herself by calming Sugar.
She does want to talk about a lot of other subjects. And our conversation is laced throughout with the sound of her distinct laughter, her most clarion of calls—not that girlish giggle, but a grown-up woman’s wanton, gritty cackle.
[Ed. note: I am looking into setting up a podcast page to download these audio files I have of conversations with actors, including Taylor, since there doesn’t seem to be a way to download them directly into a column as a file so you can listen to them. I had a couple of minutes of our conversation ready to download to let you hear that cackle.]
I asked Elizabeth to describe herself for me at one point during the couple of hours I spent with her that day. "I love trusting. I get hurt very easily. I am tough when I have to be. I can will myself to back away from an oncoming train. I can spin on a dime. I have led a very strange life,” she told me.
“A life entangled in celluloid? I asked
"Honey,” she said. “You can see through celluloid and it is brittle. Neither of those things would for a moment describe me."
We had planned to talk only about her HIV/AIDS activism, but she happily veered off into Hollywood lore and English politics circa 1997 and how she'd like to break the legs of cosmetic executives who test their products on caged and abused beagles. Taylor was feisty. And she was fun. There was, indeed, an animal theme throughout our talk. She ribbed herself for having a pet chicken she named Strawberry back on her family's farm in Kent, England, where she spent her early years. She lovingly recalled riding her horses there. And she called her counselor at the Betty Ford Clinic "a real cow."
When I told her about the then Conservative Party leader William Hague back in her homeland stating his support for gay marriage - a better term is marriage equality -she was elated. "My God! That's a step forward," she told me. "But it doesn't surprise me, really. When the English make a move, it's usually a good one—though it does take them a while. Everybody thinks everybody is gay who comes from England anyway," she said, that laugh of hers having become a kind of punctuation in our conversation, my cue to carry on.
"Even including you?" I ventured, taking her premise to an absurd conclusion and making her laugh even more. "Especially with that haircut you've got now, Elizabeth. You’re looking rather butch."
"Yes, it's my butch-do," she labeled it. "My new lesbian look."
Was part of her AIDS activism, I wondered, her attempting to get away from being "Elizabeth Taylor," yet another of her characters, but one she had to play all her life?
"God!" she screeched, then lowered her voice to a level both sensual and sonorous. "I would find being 'Elizabeth Taylor' really boring."
"Is that your Tallulah Bankhead imitation?" I asked
"Believe me, Kevin, Tallulah Bankhead would have found being 'Elizabeth Taylor' really, really boring as well."
But I didn’t find the real Elizabeth boring at all. She was as far from boring as someone living in Bel-Air could be. I cherish the afternoon I spent with her there and especially when that moment when our conversation turned to her dear friend Montgomery Clift with whom she starred in A Place in the Sun. Some of that still remains off -the-record. But I did tell her that I thought there was a quality to her AIDS activism that was not only warrior-like but also maternal. “It is as if you are turning to all of us who are HIV positive and saying, as you did to Monty in A Place in the Sun in that famous closeup, ‘Tell Mama...’”
Elizabeth Taylor touched my hand and stopped me. She leaned forward and, taking her hand from mine, then gently cupped my face. "Tell Mama. Tell Mama all..." she delivered the line to me with the most fervent of whispers. We both teared up for a few silent moments. Then she leaned back into her chair with Sugar who let go with a few jealous yaps, our cue to laugh. And so we laughed. Lord how we laughed that day.
Much more of our conversation is below. I’ll keep trying to figure out the technical side of Substack so you can actually hear us at some point soon … well … carrying on.
(Above: Elizabeth Taylor photographed by David LaChappelle. 1999)
(TO SEE THE CURATED IMAGES AND READ MORE OF OUR CONVERSATION, SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. THANKS.)