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She came into my focus as my mother sat me down & explained the entire Elizabeth Taylor + Eddie Fisher – Debbie Reynolds= scandal equation to me at age 5 years old. She remains my mother’s favorite star; they are the same age & born in the same month. She is a favorite of mine & I think she is the last of the great Hollywood Royalty, & very possibly the most beautiful woman of all time. I love her deeply.
Elizabeth Taylor has been a trusted friend to the gay community, & we have loved her right back. She was very close friends & a confidant of gay men: Roddy McDowell, Rock Hudson, George Cukor, Noel Coward, James Dean & most famously to Montgomery Clift. Were there ever any 2 actors at the apex of their beauty, more stunning than Taylor & Clift kissing in A Place In The Sun?
Elizabeth Taylor is a conundrum: truly classy, but perfectly campy, deeply kind, but shamelessly embarrassing, perennially lonely, but serially monogamous. Pills, coke, booze, men, the commercials, the mascara, Studio 54, the guest apperances on soap operas… Elizabeth Taylor & I got through the 1970s together. She gave audacious performances in film adaptations of “gay” plays as Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer & Cat On A Hot Tim Roof, & Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
I appreciate that she has had a taste for expensive pharmaceuticals, rich fabrics & rich men. I tremble at the thought of 8 tumultuous marriages & a public denunciation by the Vatican as a home wrecker. I love her for her dramatic tracheotomy scar, of which she was never ashamed. I appreciate her love affair with jewelry that inspired a book simply titled My Love Affair with Jewelry… it looks handsome on the shelf with my own volume- My Love Affair with Whiskey. I admire her unswerving devotion to her friends, to gay people, & for gay activism & attention to fund raising for HIV/AIDS. My feelings are simpatico as Elizabeth & I both have lived with incidents replete with slurred speech, inelegant gestures of elegance & displays of dignity in the face of devastation & ruin. She turns 78 today.
One rainy night three years ago a little tiny black fur ball kitten arrived at are door. Wet, cold, hungry and needing a home. We named her Elizabeth Taylor. She knew where the boys lived and she also knew who would give her a white rhinestone collar. Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Taylor!
ReplyDeleteGODDESS!
ReplyDeleteElizabeth Taylor is the complete woman. All woman. All Class, All Taste. They don't make em like that anymore, and her life is truly the stuff of legend. Happy B'day & much love Liz, from kabuki
ReplyDeleteWow, 78. Telling on myself, but when I was a youngster, I had posters plastered all over my room of Elizabeth Taylor. I thought then, and still do, that she was the most beautiful person on the planet. Oh, and yes, she and Montgomery Cliff together equaled dynamite.
ReplyDeleteAs to her later missteps, I think she was a deeply sensitive and feeling person, and we all known that many times, along with that wonderful trait, comes vulnerability. I forgive you Liz!
Nice post and wonderful tribute Stephen.
never heard of her.
ReplyDeleteHappy Birthday Liz!!
ReplyDeleteShe is truly a beautiful woman - so timeless and classic!
ReplyDeleteWhat a lovely tribute to a great beauty.
ReplyDeleteA few years ago my partner and I went to a fancy dress party ('Best of British') as Dame Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. We styled ourselves after a photo from the 1970 Academy Awards (evening gown, a great deal of piled hair and cleavage for me, a cigar, dinner suit and Welsh accent for him). Oh, the glamour of it all. Getting ready for that party was more fun than the party itself.
Happy belated birthday Elizabeth!