For the Movie Legend's 75th Birthday, Celeb-zine Puts the Frosting on the Cake
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Hey, look! There's Elizabeth Taylor with a chimpanzee!
And there's Elizabeth Taylor fishing! And there's Liz in hot pants and go-go boots! And there's Liz in a crew cut! And there's Liz driving a convertible and flipping somebody the bird! And there's Liz showing a big brown bear named Bonkers the book "Nibbles and Me," which she wrote when she was 14 about her pet chipmunk Nibbles, who died of a tragic overdose of Easter candy!
The special Elizabeth Taylor issue of Interview magazine is chock-full of great pictures of Liz. But that's not all. It's also got a long interview with Liz that not only will change the way future historians think about disgraced British prime minister Neville Chamberlain but also reveals the heartbreaking details about the death of Nibbles.
"I had let him loose in my room," Taylor tells Interview's interviewer. "And it was Easter. I had left a big chocolate Easter egg, opened, way up on top of a wardrobe at the house we were renting on the beach. I came charging into my room to get some dry clothes. The minute I came into the room, I'd always hear a clatter from wherever he was swinging and he'd come running up my leg. But there was no sound, there was nothing. I called and I called. I looked up at the wardrobe and there was the chocolate Easter egg, half gone, and there was Nibbles, dead, lying beside it with his little feet up in the air."
Whew! That's the kind of amazing info you get in Interview's "Special Eye-Popping, Jaw-Dropping, Show-Stopping Collector's Edition." Interview has been hyping celebrities since Andy Warhol founded it in 1969, but this is the first time it has ever devoted an entire issue to one celebrity! But they really had to do it because (1) she is Liz Taylor! and (2) she will celebrate her 75th birthday on Feb. 27.
Amazing! Elizabeth Taylor is 75! I'm shocked. I thought she was much older than that. I figured she was at least as old as Cleopatra, whom she played in the four-hour-long 1963 movie "Cleopatra," co-starring with Richard Burton, who was her fifth husband, and also her sixth husband.
Sometimes it seems like Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky has been around forever -- the smoldering ur-brunette, starring in movies and tabloid headlines, getting married, getting divorced, wearing diamonds as big as the Ritz, getting rushed to the hospital for various ailments, checking into the Betty Ford Clinic, selling perfume, gaining weight, losing weight, fighting AIDS, befriending Michael Jackson and perpetually floating through crowds of star-struck fans on the way to her eternal limousine.
She appeared in her first movie, "There's One Born Every Minute," in 1942, when she was 10, and she made dozens more -- including "National Velvet" and "Giant" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "A Place in the Sun" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" -- until she was such a huge movie star that she didn't have to bother making movies anymore; she just played Elizabeth Taylor in the endless soap opera of Elizabeth Taylor.
"Private? What makes you think my life is private?" she once said -- a quote that Interview runs atop a picture of Liz and Burton surrounded by cops and gawkers outside a Broadway theater in 1964, with Burton looking dazed but Liz smiling blissfully.
Interview's special issue is hideously overdone and ridiculously over-the-top, which is, of course, perfect. Who wants an understated Liz Taylor issue?
So Interview runs a gallery of photos of Liz, the queen of bling, wearing scads o' humongous diamonds! And a gallery of Liz's greatest costumes as re-imagined by 10 hotshot designers! And a gallery of artworks created especially for Liz by 10 famous artists I never heard of, including Francesco Vezzoli, whose painting shows Liz with a rose-shaped tear dripping from her left eye and what looks like a diamond dripping from her right nostril! Classy!
There's also an interview with Camille Paglia, the college professor turned over-caffeinated pop-culture pontificator, who warms up by calling Liz "the archetypal femme fatale, the sexual predator, the adventurous, smoldering brunette vixen" and ends up calling her "the flaming embodiment of the erotic energies of the universe!"
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.
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