"Fame was the bane of her existence"
Film-maker Nanette Burstein reveals how candid audiotapes of Elizabeth Taylor paint a revealing portrait of the Hollywood star
- Michael Hodges
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Think of Elizabeth Taylor and who do you picture? The child star of National Velvet? The pioneering 1980s campaigner on behalf of people with Aids? One half of the alcohol-soaked on-off romance with Richard Burton? She was all these things but also much more, as American film-maker Nanette Burstein’s new documentary reveals.
“I’m 54, so my version of her during my lifetime, outside of the cinema, was her relationship with Michael Jackson,” says Burstein, recalling a period in the 80s when Taylor was seldom out of the tabloids. “It was a tawdry type of image, but after working on this film I have a much better understanding of her.”
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Born in Hampstead, north London, in 1932 to American parents, Taylor died, aged 79, in Los Angeles in 2011. In her pomp, she was one of the great screen actors of the 20th century; the star of Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and, alongside Burton, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She never took an acting class yet won two best actress Oscars, and was the first actor, female or male, to be paid $1 million for a film (Cleopatra in 1963). By then, she was the biggest star in the world, but her public persona was tailored to the requirements of the Hollywood PR machine and the press; the real Taylor was unknowable.
The tapes are really candid… She gets very confessional
Thanks to Burstein, whose film features a recently discovered tranche of recordings Taylor made in 1964, that’s no longer true. “The tapes are really intimate and candid,” says Burstein. “She’s silly at points, but she also gets very emotional and very confessional. There was a lot of liquor being drunk during those recordings.”
The audio was recorded as Taylor worked on a ghosted autobiography with Life magazine journalist Richard Meryman. When they were rediscovered by the trust representing Taylor’s estate, Burstein, who had previously peered inside the soul of Hillary Clinton for the 2020 series Hillary, was approached. But how to make a film from an audio source? Burstein’s solution was to juxtapose the conversations with the abundant archival footage and pictures available of Taylor. The result is revelatory and disturbing, not least because it comes directly to us in Taylor’s voice.
Elizabeth Taylor with Mickey Rooney (left) and Jackie Jenkins in National Velvet (1944).
Worldwide fame arrived when Taylor was only 12 years old and starred in National Velvet in 1944. Within four years, the studio was pushing her into inappropriate roles. In the tapes, Taylor reveals her first ever adult screen kiss was with actor Robert Taylor. He was 38, she was 15. “I don’t think you could do that today,” says Burstein. “She was being asked to play adult roles with men more than twice her age. It’s creepy.”
As she was increasingly marketed as a sex symbol, Taylor retreated into a coterie of gay friends: Rock Hudson, Roddy McDowall and Montgomery Clift. “They were never going to hit on her,” says Burstein. “She trusted them to just be her confidants, and they trusted her. They were closeted to the outside world, but they needed their good friends to know who they were. And she had zero homophobia.”
This would lead directly to her campaigning to raise awareness of Aids in the 1980s, though the film has little room for the same decade’s friendship with Michael Jackson, or her marriage to construction worker Larry Fortensky – partly because the tapes were recorded in 1964. By then Taylor had been through much trauma already, though there was more ahead.
Taylor was as famous for her life off-screen as on. Alamy
After two failed marriages – the first in 1950, aged 18, to the hotel heir Conrad Hilton Jr, who physically abused her; the second, two years later, to British actor Michael Wilding, who was 20 years her senior – she met film producer Mike Todd and appeared to be happy when they married in 1957. A year later, Todd was killed in a plane crash. Pictures of the devastated young widow flashed around the world.
Taylor had America’s sympathy, until it was revealed that she had begun an affair with Todd’s friend, the singer Eddie Fisher. He was married to Singin’ in the Rain star Debbie Reynolds and the couple had two children (one of whom was Carrie Fisher). Taylor became public enemy number one.
“She’s not naive,” says Burstein. “It shouldn’t be shocking to her that there’s such a backlash about her affair and then marriage to Eddie Fisher when he was married to America’s sweetheart, but she lived her life the way she wanted, whatever the consequences might be. When she did the philanthropy for Aids, no one was talking about it because they were scared. She was never scared. She suffered from the consequences and didn’t like being seen as a homewrecker and slut-shamed. Her attitude was, ‘This is who I am. This is what I want to do with my life at this moment.’”
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Cleopatra (1963). 20TH CENTURY FOX
She married Fisher in 1959 – “a disastrous mistake,” says Burstein. One of the most unnerving moments in the film is when Taylor recalls Fisher saying, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to shoot you. You’re much too pretty.” Why did Taylor keep getting married? “She didn’t go to school with other kids – she didn’t have any friends her own age other than Roddy McDowall, and they became lifelong friends,” Burstein explains. “She always had a guardian in tow until she got married. She was very naive on the one hand, but then on the other hand, on the big screen, she’s playing these adult roles. She falls in love with love.”
And then there was Burton. They met in Rome on the set of Cleopatra (Burton played Mark Antony) and the attraction was immediate and mutual. “Taylor has already been cast as a homewrecker, but thinks, ‘OK, round two, here we go! He’s married with kids, and I’m married with kids, but what the hell.’ They fell madly in love, and they were not able to hide it in the least. They’re making this movie in Rome and the affair is playing on the public stage. The Vatican newspaper comes out against it, there’s a bomb scare against her. Even her father called her a whore. But the heart wants what the heart wants when it came to Elizabeth Taylor.”
Life with Burton, whom she married and divorced twice (1964 to 1974, then 1975 to 1976) would lead to alcoholism and more public opprobrium before, aged 51, she became the first celebrity to check into the Betty Ford clinic, refusing, as ever, to be bowed by circumstance. “
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There was a lot of tragedy in her life, but she redeemed herself,” says Burstein. “Fame was the bane of her existence because it became infamy. But she used that as her superpower to do the things she was most proud of. It’s a complex story.” But what a story it is.
Authors
Michael Hodges
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