Liz Taylor's Candle Blowout

Even the ads are over the top. The folks at Taylor's jewelry company, House of Taylor, bought an ad so they could say, in faux calligraphy, "Dame Elizabeth, you are the world's greatest jewel." The folks who make White Diamonds, Taylor's perfume, bought an ad saying, "You are a beautiful and remarkable individual, a legendary actress, a woman of extraordinary achievements, an accomplished designer, businesswoman and a fearless champion of causes."

Left unstated was this secret message: Thanks for making us a ton of money!

Abercrombie & Fitch bought an ad that starts by saying, "To Elizabeth Taylor for her love of animals and men," and then unfolds with 11 pages of pictures of naked and near-naked guys frolicking with an elephant, a lion, a horse, a giraffe and a chimpanzee. (But not the same chimp seen frolicking with Liz in that other picture.)

If you're looking for a coherent summation of Taylor's career, you won't find it here. Interview specializes in the art of the anecdote, and there are some great ones about Liz. My favorite comes from Bruce Weber, the famous photographer and Taylor crony who is listed as "guest editor" of this issue.

When he first met Taylor, he was nervous, he says, so he brought along his golden retriever "as my security blanket." When Weber arrived at Taylor's suite in a swanky New York hotel, the star's legendary publicist, Chen Sam, greeted him at the door and took a long look at the dog.

"He is so beautiful," Sam said. "If Elizabeth wants him, you'll have to give him to her. She doesn't like the sound of the word 'no.' "

A few minutes later, Taylor appears and the dog licks her hand -- and her huge diamond ring. She likes that. "He's so beautiful!" she says. "Can I have him?"

"No, no, Elizabeth," Weber says, nearly weeping. "You can have my heart but you can't have my dog."

Which pretty much sums up Taylor's quasi-royal sense of entitlement -- and the pathetic fawning of her hangers-on.

Aside from the photos, the best thing in the magazine is the interview with Taylor, who seems to be the only person quoted here who has a sense of humor about Elizabeth Taylor.

When Interview's editor, Ingrid Sischy, starts babbling about how courageous Taylor was to put out her own perfume back in those benighted days before every celebrity sold her own fragrance, Taylor scoffs at the idea that selling perfume takes courage.

"I figured if my perfume smelled bad it didn't necessarily mean my performances were going to smell bad," she says. "They had their own separate aromas."

Asked about her AIDS activism and her support for gay rights, Taylor says this: "If it weren't for homosexuals, there would be no culture. We can trace that back thousands of years. So many of the great musicians, the great painters, were homosexual. Without their input, it would be an entirely different, flat world."

And then, of course, there's her history-revising revelation about Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who is reviled for attempting to appease Hitler in 1938 by giving him a big chunk of Czechoslovakia. Taylor -- who was born in England to American parents who dealt in art in London -- reveals that Chamberlain warned her father about the coming war.

"Chamberlain said, 'Francis, you'd better take your family back to America.' So we were sent packing," she says, "and when I arrived in Hollywood, they called me the Little Refugee."

So there you have it, historians: The guy who gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler also gave Elizabeth Taylor to America. Hey, one out of two ain't bad.