Elizabeth
Taylor is one of the most famous women in the world, and has been for most
of her adult life. More than any other film star, she symbolises the old Hollywood
glamour: extravagant and expensive, professionally organised, yet other-worldly.
She has been the subject of numerous biographies and innumerable magazine
articles. These have concentrated on Elizabeth's private life, in particular
on her frequent bouts of ill health and on her several marriages and divorces,
and have neglected the dynamics of her career.
One extraordinary aspect of
Elizabeth's career has not been noted at all. Whereas Marilyn Monroe became
better-looking as she matured, Elizabeth's looks deteriorated early. She was
far more beautiful between her late teens and mid twenties, when she was merely
famous but not yet supremely famous, than she was when her name and reputation
were known even to people who never went to the cinema.
She was born in London in
1932 to prosperous American parents and spent her early childhood in England.
When the Second World War loomed ominously in 1939, her parents found it expedient
to return to the States. Elizabeth took with her an English accent and a knowledge
of horse-riding.
On being told by many people
that Elizabeth was an unusually beautiful child, Elizabeth's mother negotiated
a contract for her daughter at Universal Studios. However, it was MGM who
gave Elizabeth her big break. For the female lead in "Lassie Come Home"
they needed a young girl who sounded English, was not particularly tall and
could ride a horse. They needed the ten-year old Elizabeth Taylor.
MGM gave Elizabeth the part.
They also gave her a contract and a run of commercially successful films where
her co-stars were animals and other children. (In one of the 'extras' on the
DVD of "A Place In The Sun", Elizabeth says "my leading men
before had been dogs and horses".) The critics were enthusiastic about
her during this period, and all went well until Elizabeth reached her mid-teens.
At fifteen Elizabeth was
already noticeably mature, both physically and in manner, and unlike Micky
Rooney and Deanna Durbin, was no longer plausible playing a child on screen.
MGM had to find teen-age roles for her. For the next few years Elizabeth's
career was in the doldrums as she played uninteresting parts in uninteresting
films, most of which are now rarely screened.
However,
although MGM had no clear idea about what film roles to give Elizabeth, they
certainly knew what do about her publicity. More than any other studio, MGM
were experts in glamorising their stars and in producing flattering publicity
photographs. For the remainder of her period with MGM, Elizabeth posed for
a series of portraits which constitute the finest set of glamour photographs
of any one film star, better even than those of Ava Gardner and Kim Novak.
It is not surprising that these pictures adorned the front covers of
magazines throughout the world, and today decorate Internet websites. What these
pictures reveal is that in her late teens and early twenties, Elizabeth
Taylor was astonishingly beautiful, with a face that often hinted at willfulness,
guile
and perhaps bad temper. It was not a bland, empty face.
While she was still in her
teens, Elizabeth began to receive publicity about her private life. By now she had
discovered the opposite sex and was actively indulging her curiosity.
For a time MGM tried to protect her innocence. (Towards the end of his life,
Peter Lawford told in an interview how he was warned by MGM that if he had
an affair with Elizabeth, his career would come to an abrupt end.)
Elizabeth, however, did not
seem to share MGM's respect for innocence, and was determined that her private
life would be more stimulating than her movies. Twice before reaching her
eighteenth birthday she became engaged to be married, and rapidly she became
a hot favourite of the gossip columns. It was during this period that she
received an offer to work outside of MGM with George Stevens on "A Place
In The Sun".
"A Place
In The Sun" was Elizabeth's first movie with any solemnity, and is a
key film in her career. Cast as a young beauty representing an entire privileged
way of life while also being a lively trophy any healthy man would desire,
Elizabeth had to combine glamour with humanity. She did this superbly, assisted
considerably by her co-star, her director and her cinematographer. George
Stevens used extreme, lingering close-ups of Elizabeth and Montgomery Clift,
a technique from the silent days that had fallen into disuse. (Stevens was
given credit for inventing a new technique. When he was told this, he laughed
and exclaimed how little some people knew about film. Still today, there are
people who believe lingering close-ups originated with "A Place In The
Sun".)
For
the next few years, Elizabeth was to play privileged young beauties in many
of her films, which varied from humble "programmers" to high budget
melodramas in foreign settings. Most of these movies were scorned by the
critics but not by the general public, and Elizabeth was consistently a success
at the box office. In all her movies of this period she was beautiful in a
very glossy way and, in terms of glamour, completely outshone co-stars like
Joan Fontaine and Donna Reed.
Some of her modest films
are still watchable today, contrary to their reputation, and it is the more
ambitious movies which let the audience down. The much despised "The
Girl Who Had Everything" is still entertaining, as is "Love Is Better
Than Ever". However, "The
Last Time I Saw Paris" is boring because it repeatedly flouts
one of the primary rules of narrative. Again and again, there is no narrative
progress within a scene, so that the situation at the end of the scene
is exactly the same as at the beginning.
During the early 1950s, Elizabeth's
private life was given more attention than her movies, and already she was
displaying two characteristics for which she later became famous. First, she
had a very individual attitude towards marriage
vows, and second, she had a total disregard
for public opinion. Elizabeth had married and quickly divorced Nicky Hilton,
the heir to the hotel chain. She had then married Michael Wilding, and had
induced him to abandon his British career and follow her to Hollywood. She
had born two children by Wilding and then divorced him to marry Mike Todd.
Although there were ritualistic
denunciations of Elizabeth by some gossip columnists, her career continued
to flourish. In this, Elizabeth was helped by the growing popularity of a strange
kind of quasi-film magazine. While pretending to be film journals, with names like 'Movieland', 'Silver
Screen' and 'Photoplay',
these magazines showed little interest in movies and rarely featured articles about them.
Instead, they peddled stories - mainly fictitious - about the private
lives of stars and starlets. Elizabeth, with her unconventional approach to marriage, provided these publications
with
endless opportunities for speculation, sermonising and pseudo-psychology. Consequently, she was almost a
season ticket holder in these magazines, and her name and face became ever
more famous.
This
increased Elizabeth's box office potency because
there was now an apparent similarity between her ostensible
private life and her film roles. Elizabeth did not play career girls, nor did she appear in thrillers,
westerns or war films where outside circumstances place characters
in dramatic situations. Instead, she played women who seemed to have little
existence beyond their emotional relationships. (Other actresses, representing
various shades of glamour, frequently played women with careers
and a clear purpose in life.) As there was
no evident discrepancy between Elizabeth's film roles and the way she conducted
her private life, audiences were not shocked by her various marriages
and divorces. A few years earlier, pious condemnation from pulpit and
press had done considerable damage to the careers of both Ingrid Bergman
and Frank Sinatra, but Elizabeth's box office popularity seemed to increase
with each new marriage!
It is probable that Elizabeth
was aware of this. Because she was one of the few stars who performed well
at the box office throughout the 1950s, her negotiating power grew year
by year. However, instead of demanding the kind of parts that Grace Kelly, Doris Day or Audrey Hepburn
sometimes played, Elizabeth chose repeatedly to play noisy, tempestuous, sexually-charged
women experiencing an emotional or psychological crisis.
In "Raintree County"
- a cross between "Gone With The Wind" and "Marnie" -
Elizabeth played Susanna, who tricks John (Montgomery Clift) into marriage
by claiming falsely to be pregnant, and later descends into insanity. As Maggie
in "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof", she wailed long and loudly about her
husband's strange indifference to her femininity and his future prospects.
In "Suddenly Last Summer", Elizabeth played a young woman
of enormous sexual attraction whose sanity is being questioned and jeopardised.
She followed this with "Butterfield 8" where she played a good-time
girl who had a powerful effect on men, and bewailed her situation. The similarity of these roles can not be purely
coincidental. (Elizabeth let it be known that she had not wanted to make "Butterfield
8", but she did not use her box-office power to reject the movie and insist
on something different.)
Quite
possibly Elizabeth did turn down movies. After 1954 she made only one film
a year, and while her frequent illnesses may have reduced her output, she
was not unwell continuously. For a major box office star, MGM would have had
projects ready and waiting.
Although Elizabeth made fewer
movies in the late 1950s, there was no reduction in her appearances in
gossip columns. Mike Todd's extravagance in buying jewelry and clothes for
his wife kept the columnists busy, and when he was killed in a plane accident,
the press was full of commiseration for Elizabeth. The mood changed however
when Eddie Fisher left Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth. Now columnists vilified
Elizabeth, and were joined in this by some politicians and clergymen. Once
again, their denunciations had no effect on Elizabeth's box office performance,
and her films continued to make money.
However there was a second
fly in the ointment. In the late 1950s, Elizabeth's looks began
to deteriorate. Eddie Fisher tells in his two autobiographies that Elizabeth was
recklessly undisciplined with food and drink, and the way her beauty declined
is consistent with that form of self-indulgence.
In "Raintree County" when she
tells Montgomery
Clift about a traumatic childhood incident, the beginnings of a double chin are clearly
visible. Elizabeth's stomach was noticeable in "Cat On A Hot Tin
Roof" when she wears only a slip. In "Suddenly Last
Summer" her opulence was useful in the scenes on the beach - no normal
man would be unaffected - but by the highest aesthetic standards she was
over-weight. By "Butterfield 8" her face had become heavier. In
the opening sequence Elizabeth once again wanders about in a slip, and again
her stomach is
prominent. Her bosom is still splendid and her arms and shoulders might cause Raquel Welch to
sob with envy, but the writing was on the wall. Elizabeth's
beauty was in decline.
Her career, however, was
not in decline. When producer Walter Wanger told 20th Century Fox that he
wanted Elizabeth Taylor for their quick and cheap re-make of "Cleopatra",
Fox agreed immediately and happily upgraded the project massively. They also
acquiesced to Elizabeth's demands about salary, location, technical crew,
cinematic process, cinematographer and co-stars. This was not a career on
the wane. This was real star power.
The
making of "Cleopatra" is now a legend in itself. A documentary
on the DVD provides a good summary, and Walter Wanger, Eddie Fisher and publicists
Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss have all written illuminatingly about the events as they
saw them. With hindsight, what is significant is not that Elizabeth and Richard
Burton fell in love, but that Elizabeth, as usual,
did not care how the public might react, and that the media responded with
a hysteria that has not been repeated since.
Because of the endless reporting
of the problems and shenanigans surrounding "Cleopatra", when the
film was released it was a target for critics seeking to establish their artistic
and intellectual credentials. Blanket, unconsidered scorn was poured over
the film, and it was left to genuine movie lovers to notice that there was
much to admire. (Forty years later, those genuine movie lovers have been vindicated,
and it now widely recognised that, although far from perfect, "Cleopatra"
is a substantial work.) One form of sneering was not included in the general
abuse: no-one was sufficiently ungallant to comment on the deterioration in
Elizabeth's beauty. Despite being lensed by Leon Shamroy - indisputably
one of the greatest of all cinematographers - the continued
ebbing of her beauty was apparent.
Yet neither the decline in
her looks nor the scandalised response to her private life affected Elizabeth's
career in the 1960s. She was able to command huge sums for making a film,
although almost none of the movies were much admired. The media was now
interested only in her private life and her finances, and never tired of reporting how much she
had spent buying a particular diamond or throwing a party. As the decade progressed,
Elizabeth's name became synonymous with financial extravagance and vulgarity. When
challenged about the way she spent money, Elizabeth would dryly declare
that it was good for the economy!
Elizabeth is one of the most
influential films stars ever. More than any other star, she demonstrated that
it was possible to have a successful career in the teeth of ferocious personal
criticism, and that it was not necessary to kow-tow to columnists or pressure
groups. She also demonstrated that the general public would continue to support
an actor of whose private life they might not approve. Elizabeth was the first
film star to demand a million dollars as her starting price for making a movie,
and was also the first to demand that entire movie projects should be re-constructed
around her. The demands that Elizabeth pioneered are commonplace among big
stars now, but today's stars should recognise that the path was cleared for
them by Elizabeth Taylor.
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