Vamps, Hollywood and Activism: The Passing of Liz Taylor

The Hampstead-born lady with distinct double-rowed eyelashes went through husbands at a greater rate than tissues. And why not? Richard Burton had the good fortune of being married, not once, but twice to her. But the passing of Dame Elizabeth Taylor does strike a note of sadness, not least of all because it makes life just that much duller. Some scholars keen to expend grants on watching fabulous films from Hollywood’s golden age (after all, we are knee deep in an age of iron – or is it animation?) argue that both Taylor and her two time husband were important in initiating the modern celebrity culture.

Taylor was one who persistently courted controversy. When she was of tender years, Universal’s studio production chief Edward Muhl, on reviewing her contract with the company after months, was scathing. ‘She can’t sing, she can’t dance, she can’t perform. What’s more, her mother has to be one of the most unbearable women it has been my displeasure to meet.’ But for all these drawbacks, Taylor would find herself propelled to fame as an equestrian in National Velvet (1944), which also featured Micky Rooney and Angela Lansbury. Her adolescence became highly bankable, with Life with Father and Cynthia in 1947 and A Date with Judy the year afterwards being a few notables.

Taylor lived her life on screen. Fantasy was her oxygen. In time, her emergence as Hollywood’s ingénue gave an impression she was rehearsing not merely on the screen but off it. Of her marriage to hotel heir Conrad ‘Nicky’ Hilton she played, in her own words, ‘the role of a young woman in love.’ That role concluded, at least with regards Hilton, within a year.

The critics were never far behind to fashion an attack or two on Taylor’s talents (or perceived lack of them). David Susskind claimed she ‘set the acting profession back a decade.’ But such a deficit was not something the academy shared. Oscars were netted for playing a call girl in Butterfield 8 (‘[T]he most pornographic script I have ever read’, she fumed) and her role as the bitter, large and very well-watered Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf.

By the time Taylor began playing the role of Cleopatra in 20th Century Fox’s ostentatious production, she was not only the highest paid actress in Hollywood, but the most likely to headline the gossip column. Her involvement with the lyrical and unstable Burton (the erstwhile Mark Antony, repudiator of Rome in favour of Egyptian temptations), netted tabloids and the incipient paparazzi millions of voyeurs. No less a professional peeping tom than the Pope was involved in the drama, claiming through the offices of the Vatican that Taylor’s ‘erotic vagrancy’ disentitled her to taking care of her three children and the girl she was duly adopting.

A snippet from an Italian paper Il Tempo highlighted her energetic role as a ‘vamp who destroys families and sucks on husbands like a praying mantis.’ Fox executives decided to desperately conceal all details of the eager praying mantis and her even more eager victim. (Both were married to others at the time.) Burton himself termed the spicy unfolding of events as Le Scandale. Marcello Gepetti’s shots of the couple amorously engaged had done the trick. Killjoy Congresswoman Iris Blitch was enjoying the story so much she demanded that Burton and Taylor stay out of the United States for good for their extra-curricular activities.

Such prudish idiocy was to no avail. Cleopatra opened on June 12, 1963 to thousands of enthusiasts in New York’s Time Square and promptly became an enormous success. The critics were left aghast. The celebrity couple, a mixture of nauseating glitz and permanent spectacle, was born.

Taylor did make an effort to move beyond bedroom and studio, chiselling a role as activist celebre. While some members of Hollywood prefer to look at their toe nails grow in a state of cultivated egomania, she decided to publicise the dangers of AIDS. When people began perishing in Los Angeles from what was dismissed as an ‘unknown disease’, she decided to get her activist boots on and stomp through lobby rooms with an unnerving conviction. ‘I will not be silenced and I will not give up and I will not be ignored.’

Enter then, her efforts to help form the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). She would go to Washington to berate officials for that ‘scandal of neglect, indifference and abandonment’, and be mocked for doing so as one who had lived for so long in the dream factory. Celebrity and the moral cause remains a problematic ground that both public and official struggle to accommodate. The Hollywood lens does wonders to dull the political mind.

With her passing, the golden age of Hollywood slides further into memory. Not only did she forge a career so saucy one still sees its tingling naughtiness, but she managed to wed celebrity to activism in a manner that was neither shallow nor insincere. She may not have given a damn, or so people thought, when it came to breaking and burying marriages, but she did give a damn about much else.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne: bkampmark@gmail.com

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