The Tamesis
Sixty years old, she was Helen of Troy todayShe’s a survivor, like her great-grandparents who traveled across America in a covered wagon, or like her screen-enchanted mother Sarah, now ninety-five and living in Palm Springs. Elizabeth Taylor had just stopped marrying the man she loved and she said, “At my age, you don’t have to clean.”
Always the kind of passionate lover, she could say of her explosive marriage to Mike Todd: “We had more fun arguing than most people have sex.” Are men still afraid of entering her irresistible earth-mother libido zone? Are they afraid of getting closer?
Her eyes widened. “I heard they were, and”—a slight gasp from the shiny pink lips—”it blows my mind. It’s true. Men are intimidated by any famous woman.”
She made two small fists and pulled them into her chest.
“I’ve matured, I’ve grown up, I’ve gone through phases, but I haven’t changed. I’ve always been what they call a liberated woman. To me, that’s who I am. I’ve always had equal rights.”
She giggled.
“I don’t want to be dominated, but I also never want to wear boxer shorts. I like to be feminine. I don’t think you have to burn a bra. I like a nice bra, and I like lacy lingerie!” Her soft voice expands into the kind of laugh you hear at the end of a late, wonderful party.
She was married seven times to six husbands, four of whom died young. She has four children, one adopted, and five grandchildren. She was Hollywood’s most popular guest, her parking lot permanently blocked by cars from her friends and entourage.
“‘A man’s woman?'” said her longtime friend, Sheran Cazalet Hornby, smiling. “Of course. And women of women, women of children, women of horses, women of parrots, women of goats, women of dogs, women of cats. And mostly the ones who want to stay home with their families and eat sausages and mash.”
A pale cat groomed itself on the table between us, proving this, and if you listened carefully you could hear distant gurgles, bleats, barks, and barks coming from all corners of the house.
“When I was a kid, I was trying to make some friends my own age, and I wanted so badly that my brother’s friends would ask me out. But, no, they didn’t. When I tried to blend in, I stood out. I was famous and looked much older than I was. When I was fifteen, I played eighteen-year-olds and went out with guys in their twenties or more. Watch, I’m turning that around now!” She let out a laugh, dropping her scale two notes at a time. “My friends are still the same age.”
This is a woman who doesn’t remember a time when she wasn’t famous. When she was twelve she did country velvetThis was her fifth film, and she was already earning $300 a week. By eighteen, with the help of her first husband, Nicky Hilton, she owned stocks, minks, a Cadillac convertible and a ring worth fifty thousand dollars. By the age of twenty-four, with the help of Mike Todd, she had a movie theater named after her and received a gift every day—Saturday was a big one because that was the day they met—a Rolls-Royce, a thirty-carat diamond an inch and a half in diameter, and paintings by Degas and Vuillard. At thirty-one, with the help of Richard Burton and Twentieth Century Fox, she had made $1 million for one movie; the Krupp diamond (“Thirty-three and one-third carats. Don’t forget the third carat”); Shah Jahan’s diamond; the Peregrina pearl given to Mary Tudor in 1554; houses in Mexico and Gstaad; a penthouse in London’s Dorchester Hotel; and a yacht.
