So Long, Liz!
It's funny the way things sync up. I've been reading Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra: A Life, her amazing new historical biography of the first century Egyptian queen. Meanwhile, every night I've been watching Elizabeth Taylor in 1963's Cleopatra—maybe 20 minutes of the four-hour epic each night as I fall asleep. And I've been doing my eyes in a vaguely Egyptian style occasionally when my friends and I go out. One night last week a friend of mine, apropos of nothing, said I looked like Elizabeth Taylor. Of course he meant the eyeliner.
I woke up this morning to find a text message from the same friend: "What did you do to Elizabeth Taylor?!" And I knew immediately. She was gone.
It took me a really long time to appreciate Taylor. I'd grown up only knowing her as the lady in the White Diamond's commercials, and for her almost weekly appearance in every supermarket tabloid. She seemed like a batty old broad, someone who'd been rich and famous way too long. Someone Hollywood had eaten alive and regurgitated as a fat, tragedy prone nut job, a caricature. She didn't seem like someone I could ever take seriously.
I'm not sure what film it was that changed my mind. Maybe it was Cleopatra—one of the first and still one of the best movies available on Netflix's streaming service. Maybe it was Suddenly Last Summer or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or A Place in the Sun. It seems like I saw them all in a matter of months only a few years ago. Although, as I'm writing this, it occurs to me that it must have been Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf that first made me appreciate Elizabeth Taylor. Odd, since in that film she basically plays a drunken, over-the-hill nut job—but she plays her like a possessed woman, throwing everything, every part of herself into that role.
Watching her earlier films for the first time, I was struck by how utterly, luminescently beautiful Taylor was, a fact that had somehow always escaped me, overshadowed as it was by her latterday image: overweight and with bleached hair. But it wasn't just her beauty that made her captivating. There was a fierce intelligence, a self possession that shone through in every role she played. She wasn't just some pretty face. She was a force to be reckoned with.
Earlier this week, as I lay in bed drifting off to sleep watching Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra seduce Rex Harrison's Ceasar, I remember thinking about Taylor and all the health problems she's reportedly had over the last couple decades. "It can't be long now," I thought. And then just as quickly that thought seemed ridiculous. A world without Elizabeth Taylor? Not possible!
Many people will have written far more eloquent and informed eulogies for Taylor. (I particularly reccommend Linda Holmes's meditation of Taylor and the nature of celebrity on NPR's Monkey See blog.) But as a fan who learned to appreciate her far too late, I had to pay my respects.
So long, Liz. Have fun!
