“Larry was always very protective toward Elizabeth,” says his and Elizabeth’s friend José Eber, in Fortensky’s defense. “He was always on the lookout for people he thought were taking advantage of her. At the end, though, he did get a little obsessive, and it caused some problems.” (Elizabeth elaborated to Larry King:
“All of a sudden he had obsessive-compulsive disorder and didn’t want to leave the house.”)
As soon as Elizabeth heard about Larry’s edict to her staff, she rescinded it, which only caused more problems between them. There were other problems, some difficult even for the casual observer to reconcile. For instance, Elizabeth had a collie puppy, Nellie, descended from the legendary Lassie with whom she had starred when she was eleven in Lassie Come Home. She asked Larry to care for the animal while she was out of town on AIDS
business. He took Nellie into his bedroom, but was negligent about taking her outside to relieve herself . . . and so she did so all over the room. He became angry and began cursing out the dog. He then locked her in her traveling container, which she had long 444
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ago outgrown, with no food or water. The dog whimpered for many hours until she was finally rescued by one of the household staff. When Elizabeth found out about it, she became extremely upset at Larry, and a big argument resulted.
Larry’s temper and inconsideration weren’t the only issues in the Fortenskys’ marriage. There was Elizabeth’s health as well. Earlier, in the winter of 1994, she had to undergo a complicated hip replacement operation, the possibility of which doctors had been discussing with her ever since she took that fall in Gstaad. Her recuperation continued to be long and difficult all the way into 1995, with Larry at her side the entire time. She would be confined to a wheelchair for much of the time, to her great exasperation. It was a shame; she had been doing so well in so many areas of her life. Her movie career had faltered, true. She would have a cameo in the movie version of The Flintsones, which starred John Goodman and Elizabeth Perkins, but it was just a fun sendup, nothing that anyone will ever remember in years to come. (“Oh, she just did it for fun,” says Liz Smith, “and because they promised they would hold all of the premieres as fund-raisers for AIDS, and they did.”) However, her perfume business was thriving—by the early 1990s it had grossed $500 million. All things considered, it had been a good time in her life. However, it would never be quite the same after the hip replacement surgery. There would be another operation on the other hip, then still yet another to repair residual damage. She’d never be able to fully bounce back. As her good friend José Eber so succinctly put it,
“Her rehabilitation took forever . . . and ever.”
She wasn’t at her emotional best after the operation, either. Mostly, she didn’t want to be seen in such bad shape, her pride overtaking her common sense where her husband was concerned. The two fought about her recovery, and Larry began to feel as Richard Burton once had (and even Michael Wilding before him), that Elizabeth really didn’t want to get better, that she thrived on her illnesses. Of course, only Elizabeth knows in her heart whether this is true, but it certainly does fly in the face of All Woman
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her recuperative powers and her will to continue to live, despite her many health challenges along the way. In June 1995, things got even worse when she had surgery to replace the other hip, her right one. There was no way that her marriage would survive a second recuperation. “I was a cripple,” she later told People magazine. “It was hard on me. It was hard on Larry. It was hard on our marriage.”
In summer of 1995, she decided to end it with Larry. “I think it’s time for you to go,” she told him. “I’m not happy, and you’re not happy.”
“Larry didn’t give up easily,” said one of Elizabeth’s staff members. “He convinced her to go to a marriage counselor with him, but their counseling didn’t last long. The therapist was star-struck at having Elizabeth as a client.” From the employee’s tone, it’s easy to see that Fortensky was not going to win any points in that household, no matter what he did. It was his own fault, though; he had poisoned them all against him with his temper. He was in therapy, though, which was admirable, and he wanted Elizabeth to join him. His offer could have been viewed as a willingness to save his marriage, but instead it was seen in a pejorative light. Elizabeth later explained that when she and Larry went for counseling, she felt that her husband and the therapist had “a conversation which had become a sort of code. I felt left out. But we did it anyway. Got into the car. Did it. Then we wouldn’t speak until the next appointment.”
Brian Bellows, Larry’s friend from Stanton, California, recalls,
“Larry telephoned me in September of 1995 and said, ‘Before you read it in the papers, I want you to know that Elizabeth and I are separating.’ He sounded very depressed, unhappy. ‘What the hell happened?’ I asked him. ‘You know what? She’s set in her ways,’
he told me. ‘She’s been her own woman for so long, she never really listened to one goddamn thing I ever told her. Guess I can’t blame her,’ he said. ‘She’s Elizabeth Taylor, for Christ’s sake. Why would she ever listen to me, anyway?’
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ruined that marriage. He said, ‘She’s been hurting for so many years, it’s just a place she’s used to being in, and I can’t handle it.’
In a sense, I don’t think he had what it took to get her through the health issues, and she was unwilling to be helped, I believe. She was sixty-three. He was forty-three. The older they got, I think the difference in their ages became more pronounced. It was a losing battle, I guess.”
On August 30, 1995, Elizabeth called her good friend Liz Smith. “You were the only press person at our marriage,” she told her. “And I would have preferred not to have to call and tell you this. Larry and I both need our own space now. So we have agreed to a trial separation. We both hope this is only temporary.”
Liz asked how Elizabeth felt about the decision. Elizabeth sighed. “Obviously, I feel sad,” she said. “I sincerely hope it will work out. This is a difficult conversation for me to have . . .”
Before she hung up with the world-famous columnist, Elizabeth seemed to steel herself for what was to follow Ms. Smith’s announcement in the press the next day. “Let the tabloid games begin,” she said wryly.
In October 1995, Elizabeth had to return to the hospital for hip adjustment surgery because one of the operations had left her with one leg shorter than the other. There seemed no end to her misery at this time. In February 1996, she filed for divorce in Los Angeles Superior Court, citing “irreconcilable differences.” She offered a one-sentence statement: “We were not able to communicate, and I am very saddened that it didn’t work.”
With the mention of their failure to communicate, a comment Elizabeth made during her marriage to Richard Burton comes to mind. “A woman will try and dominate a man,” she said, clarifying the dominance theme of all of her relationships.
“She will try and get away with it. But, really, inside herself, she wants to be dominated. She wants the man to take her. If he does lean on her, everything goes slightly off key, like a bad All Woman
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chord. She hopes it will pass, that the guy will come through. When he doesn’t, she begins to needle him. If nothing happens, she goes on needling—until he stops listening. At that moment, she becomes bitter, and he goes deaf. Finally, there is no more dialogue, they have no rapport.”
Elizabeth was surprised when Larry sued her for $5 million and attempted to invalidate their prenuptial agreement, claiming they were both represented by the same attorney when it was signed. She was angry, and probably felt the way she did when Eddie Fisher went after her for money so many years ago. (“Try working. Like the rest of us.”)
During the Taylor-Fortensky litigation, details of Elizabeth’s financial documents were produced to provide insight into her wealth at this t
ime. Of course, one would imagine that Elizabeth Taylor would be a rich woman, but the exact details of her financial portfolio—as of 1994—were nothing short of stunning. Consider this: Her net worth was $608.43 million. Her properties around the world were valued at $127.45 million. Her art and jewelry was valued at $102.77 million. Her stocks and bonds, $274.21 million. Her interest-bearing bank accounts,
$104 million. She was also making about $12 million annually from her perfume business. She’d recently cashed in stock in the Hilton hotel chain (acquired through her first marriage) for a profit of $21.7 million. Also, interestingly, she inherited $8.7 million from the estate of her close friend, publishing mogul Malcolm Forbes. Is it any wonder that Fortensky felt he was entitled to more than the $5,000 per month he was to be paid in a divorce settlement, as per the prenuptial agreement? “For Elizabeth, it wasn’t really about the money as much as it was the principle,” said one of her attorneys, repeating the age-old refrain of rich celebrities who find themselves caught in marital disputes over money.
A dramatic moment in the divorce proceedings occurred during a deposition in the office of one of Elizabeth’s lawyers. Larry didn’t know that Elizabeth would be present for it, or at least he 448
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probably hoped she wouldn’t attend. When he walked into the room, she was already there, waiting for him. She then sat across from him looking like a million bucks in her lavender power suit and stared him down as he explained why he required more money from her. He made observations such as, “The suits I own cost several thousand dollars each. The Valentino sweaters I own, many of which were handmade, also cost several thousand dollars.” He also said that, when he was working—and he wasn’t at this time—he’d become accustomed to being driven to the construction site in a limousine, which seemed ludicrous but was apparently true. Even he couldn’t pull it off, though, and he ended up fleeing from the conference room saying, “I can’t do this with her sitting there. It’s ridiculous.”
In the end, Elizabeth did love Larry and decided to just work it out with him. They settled for more than a million dollars. In November 1996, they were officially divorced. The two are still friendly today.
Earlier in the year, she had lost another of her dear friends, her longtime spokeswoman Chen Sam, who had suffered from cancer. It was a terrible blow; the two had been very close. “These last couple of years have been hard,” Elizabeth said at the end of 1996.
“My marriage to Larry had come undone and I lost Chen Sam. Truly, she was my sister for more than twenty-five years. She died of cancer, here in my house. I had gone to her room to say good night and found her breathing laboriously. I kissed her and held her and talked to her. After a while, I left. Five minutes later, she was gone.”
It was sometimes difficult for her to resist becoming very depressed, and she spent much of 1997 and 1998 at home, nursing her physical as well as emotional wounds. “I was agoraphobic for about two years,” she recalled. “Didn’t leave the house, hardly got out of bed. Rod Steiger got me out of here.” Steiger, the famous movie actor, became a constant companion. On their first date, he took her out for hamburgers and fried chicken. They had a wonderful time, and became good friends. However, her marriage days All Woman
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were over. “If you hear of me getting married, slap me,” she told Barbara Walters during a television interview.
At the end of 1996, Elizabeth began having terrible headaches and, much to her dismay, memory loss. “What fresh hell is this?”
she asked one friend of hers. She was a woman who had done so much with her life despite many formidable physical challenges, yet the greatest one was ahead for her. As she approached the age of sixty-five, she would face her mortality like never before . . . and the greatest lessons of her life were about to be revealed to her.
Facing Her Mortality . . .
Again
I t was in early February 1997 when Elizabeth Taylor knew something was very wrong with her. She couldn’t figure out how to use the telephone. “And who ever had used a telephone more than me?” she later asked jokingly. She’d been having headaches, loss of memory, dizzy spells. But that morning, staring at the telephone, she knew for certain that something was very wrong. She screamed for help. When a doctor arrived, she discovered that she couldn’t walk. She was taken to a hospital immediately, and after a series of brain scans she got one of the most frightening diagnoses of her life, certainly one that would cause any person the greatest of panic: She had a brain tumor. It was large, possibly the size of a golf ball, on the lining of her brain, and would obviously have to be removed. The doctors were 99 percent sure it was benign, they said. “I just sat there,” she later wrote for Life magazine. 450
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“Speechless. In sheer terror. A brain tumor! They wanted to operate on my brain, on my emotions, my thoughts, my memories, my sense of poetry, my feeling for colors, my soul, my self. Afterward, even if I survived, would I still be me?”
This very serious operation was immediately scheduled to occur in two weeks, on Monday, February 17. Ironically enough, at this very same time, the ABC network was planning a sixtyfifth birthday celebration to honor her, which was to be videotaped before a live audience and later televised. Entitled Happy Birthday Elizabeth: A Celebration of Life, it was to be produced at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood on . . . Sunday, February 16, the very day before her operation.
Entertainment reporter and producer Cathy Griffin worked on the television program as a consultant. She recalled that much of the planning for the special was done at Elizabeth’s Bel Air home, just prior to her startling diagnosis. As the producers went through various topics, she said yes to just about every idea. “One thing that was a definite no, though, was the subject of Eddie Fisher,” says Griffin. “She wanted no mention of him at all. ‘Keep him out of it,’ she said. And she meant it. Basically she approved everything else, even some ideas that were thought to be iffy, such as Roseanne Barr on a barge as Cleopatra. She loved it.
“She talked a lot about her life and times because, after all, that’s what the show was to be about. It was clear that she was still madly in love with Richard Burton. ‘What a shame that he couldn’t be here for this show,’ she said. Also, she wanted to make sure that Mike Todd was recognized. She felt that he’d often been overlooked in retrospectives about her, and she wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.”
Elizabeth’s only requirement? That Michael Jackson appear on the program and sing. Without him, she said, there would be no show. Once he agreed to appear, it was smooth sailing for the producers. That is, until Elizabeth got news of the pending brain surgery. All Woman
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She was then understandably uncertain as to whether or not she wanted to proceed with the tribute. How macabre would it be to sit through a retrospective program about her life, immediately before having brain surgery? Moreover, could she enjoy even a single second of it knowing what awaited her the very next day? She telephoned one of the producers and, crying on the phone, said that she would probably have to cancel; they’d have to go forward without her. “Oh no,” he exclaimed. “But can’t you put off brain surgery for just a day or two?” He was only half joking. She had to laugh. In the end, she decided she would go through with it, but only because the audience’s contributions, which could (and did) total more than a million dollars, were to be earmarked for the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. “To back out is really chicken shit,” she said.
The pending brain surgery—now postponed one day—made headline news instantly and was thus on the producers’ minds as they put together the broadcast. Now more than ever, they wanted to do a good job. Cathy Griffin explained, “The biggest problem was in putting together the photomontages. While there was certainly no shortage of pictures from collectors, Elizabeth had very little personal memorabilia, just photographs of her and Richard—and one other that she was very proud of, with Queen Elizabeth, in a silver fra
me on her piano. All of her memorabilia was in a storage facility. When we got there, we found that none of it was organized—just stuff packed away in boxes. ‘Living my life was tough enough,’ she said. ‘Did you expect me to make scrapbooks, too?’ She’s been the most photographed woman in the world but, really, she doesn’t care much about it. She looks at her show business history as having been attached to a brand—the Elizabeth Taylor brand—which has little to do with who she is as a woman.
“Throughout my work on the program, she was nothing less than a fabulous, bawdy class act, all the way,” Griffin recalled.
“I’ve been a big fan of Elizabeth’s since I was a youngster in Texas, 452
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so working on this big extravaganza to honor her in Hollywood was an unforgettable experience.”
In the end, Happy Birthday Elizabeth: A Celebration of Life turned out to be a star-studded success, paying homage to, truly, one of the greatest film stars of our time, but also one of the most memorable personalities of the twentieth century. It was actually rendered even more nostalgic and significant by the pending life-or-death operation. Michael Jackson did more than just show up, he escorted Elizabeth—and also sang a song he had written for her, “Elizabeth, I Love You.” (“You had grace and beauty, charm and talent, but they robbed you of your childhood,” he sang, repeating, once again, his life’s theme.) Most of her extended family—children and grandchildren included—
were also present.
It was interesting, though, that so much attention was paid in the retrospective tributes to her tabloid past. It was affectionate and brilliant in its presentation, but Eddie Fisher was mentioned . . . and many times. It had been an executive producer’s decision to include him, and, really he had no choice. Elizabeth talks about her marriage to Eddie as if one could never find a photograph of them smiling or clutching at each other. Don’t forget, they did adopt a child together, so there is legitimate history there. Still, Elizabeth couldn’t have been very pleased about his inclusion in her tribute . . . especially after having been so specific about wanting to exclude him.
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