Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  publican Party came to her one day with the request that she not wear the color. Elizabeth Taylor not swathed in purple fabric? Never! However, she was told that the color denotes passion . . .

  “and we mustn’t have passion,” . . . and also royalty . . . “and we mustn’t have royalty.” Elizabeth would later joke that she wasn’t sure if they were trying to prevent her from looking like a whore, or the Queen . . . but at the time it wasn’t funny to her. Rather, it felt like evidence of what she was losing in her marriage: her very identity. She stopped wearing purple.

  The campaign went onward without incident except for one potentially fatal event that happened at the end of October. While at a political buffet in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, Elizabeth went into the kitchen with John. “Have a piece of chicken, Pooters,” he suggested. “Who knows when we will have the time to eat again.” Elizabeth reached for a breast, took a huge bite, and swallowed. She then began to choke on a bone she later estimated was about two and half inches long. In an attempt to dislodge it from her throat, she swallowed some bread, which only made matters worse. It was clear to everyone that she was choking to death. She was rushed to Lonesome Pine Hospital, where the bone had to be removed by a surgeon. Later, John Belushi’s popular portrayal of a zaftig Elizabeth choking on a chicken bone on a Saturday Night Live sketch was horrifyingly funny. But Elizabeth did have the last word in her Elizabeth Takes Off book: “How ironic and sad that that gifted young man satirized my excesses and then died of his own.” (Belushi died of a drug overdose in Hollywood on March 5, 1982.)

  Finally, on November 7, 1978, John Warner was elected to the United States Senate, by less than a 1 percent margin. Out of 1.2 million votes, he won by just 4,271. Without Elizabeth, there’s little doubt he would have lost. “I have to have at least 4,271 fans in Virginia,” she joked afterward, “so at least I know I pulled my own weight.” She couldn’t say much, though, during the electionnight festivities at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond. Hardly able to speak, she’d just been released from the hospital and had been 330

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  told not to strain her vocal cords. “I’m just so thrilled because I know you did the right thing,” she said from the lectern, her voice barely a whisper.

  “I cannot tell you how happy and proud I was of him,” she said of John Warner when remembering the day he was sworn into office, “and, yes, of myself, too. The ceremony marked one of the happiest moments of my life. I had no idea,” she concluded, “that it also marked the beginning of the end of my marriage.”

  An Important Transition

  W hen people who have followed Elizabeth Taylor’s life and times think of her marriage to Senator John Warner, they usually view those years as little more than just transitional between her fifth and sixth husband, Richard Burton, and her eighth husband, Larry Fortensky. It’s true that the six years Elizabeth spent as Warner’s wife were the most uneventful in her career. There were a couple of mediocre movies and a theater venture, as we shall see, but the glory days of her legendary career were pretty much behind her. It happens to the best of film stars as they mature. Elizabeth has said that she understood as much and wasn’t overly concerned about it. However, people who know her well have said that this was a much more difficult transition for her than she has let on. “The pressure on her to stay youthful and beautiful had been one she’d lived with all of her life,” said one good friend of hers. “With the passing of time, it was clear that she could not defy Mother Nature. She was getting older, and Hollywood was losing interest. It was a hard thing for her to accept. I know she Coming to Terms

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  was depressed about it, drinking a lot because of it. It just added to the general malaise of this time frame.”

  Even though the years as Mrs. John Warner would not yield much in terms of her film career, it would prove significant in the bigger picture of her life. It was during these years, after all, that Elizabeth would undergo a slow yet dramatic personal transformation of body and spirit that would begin to define her future character and personality.

  One of the biggest problems in Elizabeth’s life up until she married the Senator had to do with time: She never had any . . . to think, to review, to assess where she’d been, to contemplate where she was headed and how she felt about it. As for having any kind of inner life, of coming to terms with her mistakes and resolving to move forward and never make those choices again . . . it just was never Elizabeth’s way. Not only had she constantly been on a professional schedule of making movies, she had also been living a tumultuous personal life with her many illnesses and many husbands. The first time Elizabeth actually did take the time to consider her life was during her marriage to Senator John Warner. It was then that she began to review some—though certainly not all—

  aspects of her past, and come to certain conclusions. Ironically, there was little else to do in those rolling hills of Virginia for a movie icon in her fifties no longer the toast of the town. Her unintended and self-imposed exile was exactly what she needed at this time in her life. In 1987, Elizabeth would write a self-help weight-loss book about her experiences during this time, Elizabeth Takes Off. Certainly, if she hadn’t married Warner and then taken the time to finally assess her personal needs, she might not have become the Elizabeth Taylor we all know and associate today with AIDS research and charities.

  Elizabeth was bored to tears, as she would tell it, during the years she was married to John Warner. After the constant adrenaline rush of the campaign trail, to suddenly find herself alone on a giant farming estate in Virginia was a shock, definitely something 332

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  for which she was ill-prepared. After all, she was a woman accustomed to a busy schedule and constant activity, and her social schedule had almost been the death of her on several occasions. Now she had little more to do than tend to the gardens of melons, peppers, and tomatoes, her previous life in Hollywood seeming worlds away. It was peaceful, yes, but also incredibly dull. It could be argued that Warner used Elizabeth when he needed her during his senatorial campaign, but then left her to her own devices for the rest of their marriage. Elizabeth will say today that she and John had shared everything during the early days of their courtship and marriage and that when he was elected she found herself “in a kind of domestic Siberia.” In fact, they shared everything . . . that mattered to John. Elizabeth later tried to play down his selfishness by saying he “turned to his senatorial tasks with passionate devotion.” She was being magnanimous. If Warner had really wanted to, he probably could have looked for interests that his wife might have and invest himself in those as well as in politics. But he didn’t. When he became a Senator, Elizabeth had to admit, “I had no function anymore, not even as an ornament.”

  It wasn’t totally Warner’s fault, though. He was a hardworking man, and no doubt viewed Elizabeth as a resourceful woman who had made her life work in the past—at least that’s how it must have seemed to outsiders—and would certainly find a way to make it work in the present. He probably thought she could take care of herself. In truth, there was probably nothing keeping her from a full and exciting life as Mrs. John Warner. After all, she was Elizabeth Taylor. She made the rules. Years later when she was promoting Elizabeth Takes Off, she was interviewed about this time by Jane Pauley. Elizabeth was talking about her life as a Senator’s wife and making many excuses as to why it didn’t work for her. Pauley gave her a look of skepticism. Elizabeth then backtracked: “Oh, but it’s not that I couldn’t have tried harder . . .” In fact, she simply could not cope and had lost interest in life, in trying to find a way to make it worthwhile for herself.

  It must also be noted that, traditionally, Senators’ wives serve Coming to Terms

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  little purpose in their husbands’ careers, other than as partners on the campaign trail. Most don’t even move to Washington from their home states, preferring to stay behind and raise their children and continue with their domestic duties. H
owever, not only were Elizabeth’s children grown, but she had never been a housewife and wasn’t about to become one at the age of forty-nine. John would leave the estate in the morning after a rushed breakfast. Elizabeth wouldn’t even bother getting out of bed. Eventually she would rise, and then spend the day watching soap operas on television and talking to friends on the telephone. Sometimes she would visit hospitals, particularly the mental health wards, where she formed relationships with several of the young patients. She also gave acting seminars—forty-five of them in a five-year period—which, for the most part, only served to further depress her. She was a film star, not an acting teacher. She didn’t even recognize her own life anymore. Her nights were worse. Warner would show up at home with stacks of paperwork and involve himself in his work while Elizabeth tried to figure out ways to get his attention. There was the occasional cocktail party, but for the most part nothing much for her to do.

  On some weekends, she would flee to her friend Halston’s East 68th Street digs in Manhattan. During these sojourns, she would hang out with Andy Warhol and Truman Capote at Studio 54 and party with the Liza Minnelli crowd. The tabloid press had a field day, photographing and publishing unflattering pictures of an overweight, boozy, obviously miserable Taylor that took her Martha character in Virginia Woolf to a whole new level. It was reported that her weight had ballooned to nearly two hundred pounds. The seventy tent dresses, muumuus, and caftans she had ordered from Halston before her marriage to Warner could scarcely conceal her growing girth. The photo of her struggling to exit the backseat of a car during this period was famously selected for the cover of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon II. As she tried to come to terms with her new identity as a politician’s wife, Elizabeth faced a crisis of self-esteem. It may seem 334

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  strange to those who don’t know Elizabeth Taylor personally to think that she would grapple with issues of self-esteem, since she has always seemed confident and secure. But of course, like most of us, she has had those times in her life when she was unsure of herself and her place in the world, rare as they were and never did she feel more like that than when she was married to John Warner. During this time, she became more depressed than she’d ever been before, and that was saying a lot considering some of the dark moments she’d experienced in her life. “It was there,” she says, in Virginia, “that I first lost confidence in Elizabeth Taylor the person.”

  Her only outlet was to eat and drink and take pills to escape her unhappiness. Actually the pattern of abuse had started earlier, on the campaign trail and, obviously, even before that. As we’ve seen, excessive living had always been a problem for Elizabeth: too much liquor, too many pills . . . too much food. As her weight soared, Halston kept making her caftans bigger, and she just continued to eat to dull her pain. By the end of 1979, Elizabeth was in real trouble. Her marriage was just about over—they were living separate lives, his outside the house and hers in it—and her health had seriously deteriorated. “I was falling apart in every direction,” she recalled. “And for the first time in my life, I had lost an essential ingredient of self-esteem. My pride.” The constant barrage of fat jokes by popular comics during this time only served to further whittle away at her. She had never much cared what people thought about her in the past. But to be made fun of, to now suddenly be the butt of jokes, was more than she could bear. It hurt her deeply, probably more than the comedians ever imagined, if they even cared (which, more than likely, they didn’t).

  The day that Elizabeth forced herself to look into a full-length mirror after getting out of the bathtub was one she would not soon, if ever, forget. As she gazed at her reflection she realized that she was no longer the most beautiful woman in the world, as had been thought of her in the past. It wasn’t just her zaftig outward Coming to Terms

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  appearance, either. She might have been able to live with it if she’d been truly happy with herself. However, she obviously wasn’t. When she looked into the mirror that day she saw not only an obese woman, but a person who had allowed the circumstances of her life to crush her. It was on that day that she knew she had to accept the truth about herself and deal with it . . . somehow. Once Elizabeth decided that she had to lose weight, she was dedicated to doing it, even if meant having more than a few lapses in judgment along the way. She knew that her life would have to change before she would truly see a change in her physical body, but she wasn’t ready to leave John Warner yet. That process would be a slow one. She wasn’t in a mad rush to be on her own at this time, and since he was practically an absentee husband it wasn’t as if they were fighting and she had no choice but to get out of a bad marriage. Instead, she decided to recapture some of her career, thinking that if she were motivated to lose weight because of an impending role, she might be more likely to stick to a diet. In May 1980, she accepted a role in the comic thriller The Mir- ror Crack’d, her first speaking part in a film in almost four years. The movie filmed in London and gave her an opportunity to get out of America and away from her husband for a time. When EMI Films decided to make this movie, based on the novel by Agatha Christie, it seemed like an excellent idea, especially with the cast of stars it eventually assembled: Taylor, Angela Lansbury, Kim Novak, Rock Hudson, and Tony Curtis. How could it go wrong? Well, it did . . . and very wrong. One critic said, “It plays like a TV

  movie of the week,” a perhaps too harsh assessment. But despite the presence of five onetime important Hollywood stars, the film could not overcome the hoary plot and mediocre writing. It would fizzle at the box office.

  In July, Elizabeth returned to America to attend the Republican convention in Detroit, sitting in the VIP box with her friend Nancy Reagan as Ronnie was nominated for President. The Reagans had recently purchased a home next to the Warners in Virginia, and Elizabeth had hosted a chicken barbecue for them (and 336

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  4,000 of their closest friends) at Atoka Farms. Though it was an exciting night at the GOP convention, the world of politics held less meaning to Elizabeth by this time. She had been saying that she felt that she wanted to do something on the legitimate stage, a real challenge for her because it truly was something she hadn’t done before, save a few personal appearances and readings with Richard Burton. She needed a good challenge, though, and so she reached out to producer Zev Bufman, whom she had met about a year earlier in New York. The two chose to mount a production of The Little Foxes, for which she would be paid $50,000 a week—a pittance considering what she was used to earning, but still more than any other actress had ever been paid to do theater work. The Little Foxes

  W hen Lillian Hellman’s gothic turn-of-the-century drama The Little Foxes was translated from stage to screen in 1941, four leading members from the Broadway cast were invited to re-create their roles in the William Wyler film version for RKO. Noticeably absent was Tallulah Bankhead, who had been a sensation on the Great White Way as Regina Giddens. Bette Davis, then at the very pinnacle of her star power, already with two Oscars on her mantel, went after and got the role onscreen of the greedy, murderous, beautiful Regina. Now, forty years later in 1981, Elizabeth, with a string of successful film roles in which she had played very strong, highly motivated Southern beauties— Giant, Raintree County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly, Last Summer—in what would be her Broadway debut, decided to add Regina Gid-Coming to Terms 337

  dens to her portrait gallery of willful femmes fatales from the Deep South.

  Her director, Austin Pendleton, remembers his first meeting with his leading lady. “My first reaction when she walked into the room was that she was just like a terrific kind of . . . gal,” he said.

  “She was just so direct. She was also extraordinarily beautiful, but there is something about her beauty that includes you in, instead of excluding you. She is extremely generous as an actress, and also a person who has a great appetite for life, for living, for connecting with people . . . for finding the excitement in life. And I thought,
what if Regina in The Little Foxes had some of those traits? I always thought that was true of Elizabeth anyway, even before I met her, when I was a kid going to her movies. I thought back then, wow. She wants love. She wants good times. She wants her life to be an exciting one. And part of the reason I knew she would have no trouble making the transition from film to stage is because so many of her movies were adaptations of theater pieces: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Virginia Woolf, Suddenly, Last Summer, where you had long sustained narrations with tremendous builds, hills and valleys, and I knew if she could do that in front of a camera, she could do it onstage, too.”

  To begin losing weight, Elizabeth went to a health spa, where she dropped a few pounds. Each time she went back, she would lose a little more. It was a tough process. “I wanted to eat, to be frank,” she would recall. “I learned that the only way to lose weight is . . . guess what? Watch what you eat and exercise. There is no shortcut.”

  Elizabeth tells a story that happened one day at the Palm Aire Spa in Pompano Beach, Florida. A young woman, maybe twentyone, was in the swimming pool exercising and appearing to be quite frustrated. She was terribly overweight. Elizabeth could see the anxiety written all over her face as she attempted to do some water exercises and failed repeatedly at them. Elizabeth, who had just gotten out of the pool herself, went to its side and knelt down. 338