The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice (16 page)

In 1974, Taylor made another flawed but engaging movie,
The Driver’s Seat
, based on a novella by Muriel Spark. Campy and erratic, the film flirts with a macabre sort of female power: Taylor plays a woman searching for a man she can induce to murder her. But her next project, a film version of Stephen Sondheim’s
A Little Night Music
, directed by Harold Prince, was cringeworthy. Much of the film’s funding came from Austria, so the producers set the story there instead of in Sweden, where the Broadway musical and the Ingmar Bergman movie on which it was based took place. The plot climaxes on a summer night when the sun seemingly never sets—a phenomenon that occurs strikingly at Sweden’s northern latitude (and not so much in Austria).

The film tanked. And by 1976, Taylor had become as tired of movies as Cousin Sebastian (in
Suddenly, Last Summer
) had once been of blondes. She needed a new role to display her talents: political wife. I will not dwell on Taylor in the 1970s, because her life was in transition. She should have had a chrysalis in which to change—from which she could have dramatically emerged. According to 12-step literature, a person must “hit bottom” before he or she can recover. Taylor began a swift slide toward that destination on December 24, 1976, when she married John Warner, an authoritarian, antifeminist Republican who would use her celebrity to advance his political career. (In fairness, the future U.S. senator had at least one thing going for him: he was very handsome.)

Warner served as secretary of the navy, but he gained his wealth through a strategic marriage. His Georgetown house and 2,700-acre farm were spoils from his divorce from Catherine Mellon, daughter of philanthropist Paul Mellon. From the get-go, his politics and Taylor’s were at odds. In 1960, he campaigned for Richard M. Nixon; Taylor supported John F. Kennedy. In 1976, he worked for Gerald Ford; Taylor backed Jimmy Carter. But when Warner ran for the Senate in Virginia, Taylor found herself in what could not have been an easy spot: campaigning for a candidate who opposed much of what she believed in. This included the Equal Rights Amendment.

“I’m sure Taylor did support the Equal Rights Amendment,” syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith, a longtime friend of Taylor, told me in 2009. “During her marriage to Warner, they actually had a public argument concerning women’s issues, employment. Please forgive me, it was 1980, and I just don’t remember the details. But I do remember Warner put his hand up to silence her—he was embarrassed—and she said something like, ‘Don’t you raise that all-commanding domineering hand to me!’ Of course, this was as much acting-out as ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ as it was her feminism kicking in.”

Warner lost the election. Weirdly, though, the winner was killed in a freak airplane accident. So Warner and Taylor campaigned again, and on November 7, 1977, Warner squeaked in—by less than one percentage point.

Kate Burton, Richard’s daughter, has a warm memory of visiting Taylor and Warner at Warner’s Virginia home—long after Taylor and her father had divorced. Burton was an undergraduate at Brown University, and she had traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend a campaign rally for Warner. She remembers the event as “a hoot.” Burton had never been to the American South before. And the idea of her cosmopolitan former stepmother “in this southern mansion making fried chicken was so incongruous to me.” Nevertheless, Taylor made her feel “very welcome.” And she thought Taylor seemed happy.

Burton was, however, alone in this perception. Taylor may not yet have hit bottom, but she was getting close. In her 1987 diet book, Taylor owned up to having gained fifty pounds: “Eating became one of the most pleasant activities I could find to fill the lonely hours and I ate and drank with abandon. When I gained weight, I just bought more clothes.” She and Warner drifted apart: “John went his way and I went mine. He headed for the Senate; I zeroed into self-destruction.” She dared not even open the funny pages for distraction.
Doonesbury
cartoonist Garry Trudeau attacked her viciously and repeatedly as “the wife of some dim dilettante who managed to buy, marry, and luck his way into the U.S. Senate.”

Clichés often contain some truth. It
is
always darkest before the dawn. And after you hit bottom, the only way to go is up. In 1980, exiled in what she termed the “domestic Siberia” of a senator’s wife, Taylor met Zev Buffman, producer of a revival of
Brigadoon
at Washington’s National Theatre. After the performance, she confided that she had always longed to do live theater, and Buffman, being no fool, leaped to give her a chance. They discussed many possible vehicles, narrowing the choices to Noël Coward’s
Hay Fever
and Lillian Hellman’s
The Little Foxes.

Taylor’s downward slide was over. She was slowly climbing back.
The Little Foxes
would gain her a great deal of ground.

17

The Little Foxes
, 1981

I’m going to be alive and have what I want.

—Elizabeth Taylor as Regina Hubbard Giddens to her ailing husband in
The Little Foxes

I’M NOT PROJECTING FEMINISM onto Austin Pendleton’s version of
The Little Foxes
. He admits to having put it there. In 1981, when Zev Buffman asked him to direct Elizabeth Tayor in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s 1937 play, he didn’t immediately say yes. He thought about the lead role—Regina Hubbard Giddens—and how Taylor might distinguish her Regina from the memorable Reginas of the past.

In William Wyler’s 1941 movie, Bette Davis played Regina as a cartoon villainess. She picked up where Tallulah Bankhead, who had originated the part on Broadway, left off. Likewise, in Mike Nichols’s 1967 revival at Lincoln Center, Anne Bancroft interpreted Regina as evil incarnate. But Pendleton—who had played Leo, Regina’s dim-witted son, in the 1967 production—saw another explanation for Regina’s behavior. And he wanted to explore it.

“What if this woman starts out a different way from how she ends up?” he mused. “What if she starts out like Elizabeth Taylor—a woman who is naturally sympathetic but who has an enormous appetite for living? And she becomes hardened by all the adversity she encounters, from her husband and brothers, into a woman of greed? She’s not a greedy woman at the beginning of the play—she’s a woman with an appetite for life.”

As Pendleton explained this, a sly smile crossed his otherwise diffident face. He accepted Buffman’s offer. And he set a challenge for himself: create a sympathetic Regina; a feminist Regina, a Regina twisted by the cruelty of men.

Pendleton’s version of
The Little Foxes
was so blazingly feminist—and, for Taylor, such a restorative force—that even though it can’t be seen, it deserves inclusion alongside her most famous movie roles. Of course I can’t re-create the experience. Viewers at a live performance don’t just gape at the actors. They engage with them: laughing, crying, clapping. And the actors, in turn, pick up on their energy. This crackle of feeling—this neural loop—makes theater thrilling. What I can do, however, is detail the production—as Pendleton did for me in 2008.

The Little Foxes
deals with the Hubbard family—turn-of-the-century strivers in the American South. Regina Giddens (née Hubbard) has two greedy brothers, a mentally challenged son, a cloying daughter, an alcoholic aunt, and a passive-aggressive husband—all of whom romanticize their “genteel,” slave-owning past. When a Chicago manufacturer scouts land for a factory in the Hubbards’ hometown, Regina’s brothers start scheming. He is also looking for investors—and a little capital now will likely mean a big fortune later. When Hubbards enter the picture, it will also mean thievery, deceit, backstabbing, and murder.

To play Regina, Taylor needed different skills from the ones she had honed in films. She had to memorize the entire play—not one scene at a time. She had to propel her voice to the back of the theater. At first Pendleton had more confidence in her than she had in herself. “Anyone who could do that sustained, long take at the end of
Suddenly, Last Summer
could be in a play,” he said.

Taylor worked hard, he recalled. “And she never once did anything that could remotely be called ‘pulling rank.’ ” This was good, because the other legend on the project—Lillian Hellman—pulled rank all the time. “She and I had the worst fights I’ve ever had with anyone in a professional situation. We screamed at each other,” Pendleton said. “But I absolutely adored her. I miss her to this day.”

Hellman’s characters were inspired by her own life. Oddly, given Hellman’s infamous volatility, she identified with Alexandra, Regina’s daughter, a beacon of harmony and peace. She hated the real-life model for Regina and could not see what Pendleton saw in the character. Pendleton kept mum about his feminist spin, lest Hellman try to ax him from the project.

The Little Foxes
opened at the Eisenhower Theater in Washington, D.C., four days before President Ronald Reagan was shot. Taylor’s Regina was not a one-note gorgon. She was hungry for life—until her vindictive husband and conniving brothers forced her to become a rapacious monster. When Hellman saw the production, Pendleton sensed her displeasure—as did anyone within fifty yards. “This is the worst night of my life,” she yelled, angrily banging her cane on the lobby floor.

The play ends with a line that recalls Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Regina has done a very bad thing—a thing that drives her daughter away. But before Alexandra departs, she asks her, “Mama, are you afraid?” And the audience realizes that Regina, like Martha, terrorizes others to subdue her own paralyzing fears.

On May 7, the play opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway. Critics kvelled. Pendleton’s take on the play was a hit. “Miss Taylor is no cardboard harridan,” Frank Rich wrote in the
New York Times
. “Regina perfectly taps this actress’s special gift—first fully revealed in the film version of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’—for making nastiness stinging and funny at the same time.”

Taylor also used her “special gift” offstage. When Hellman told her, “I’m really Alexandra,” Taylor replied, “Oh, come on, Lillian. You’re Regina.”

The tension between Taylor and Hellman traveled with the production to its run in Los Angeles, where Taylor finally diffused it, deploying her famous raunchiness. As Pendleton tells it, Taylor had been drinking; she had just learned that her friend Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, had been assassinated. Hellman, also drunk, initially offered Taylor her sympathy. But later, when she carped about the real-life models for her characters, Taylor told her to knock it off. Hellman refused, calling Taylor “Miss Lizzie” to provoke a fight.

Taylor was silent. Observers wondered what she would do. She looked Hellman in the eye. “You can call me cunt,” she said slowly. “But do not call me Miss Lizzie.”

Taylor prospered as Regina—in a way denied her as a Washington wife. Order had returned to the universe: Taylor was again a star. This magnified her differences with Warner. After Reagan was shot, Pendleton said, Taylor proposed putting a full-page ad for gun control in the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
. But Warner dissuaded her—winning a battle but losing the war. Soon thereafter, the marriage was over.

In 1982,
The Little Foxes
moved to London, where, conveniently, Burton had just divorced Suzy Hunt. Pendleton will never forget Taylor and Burton’s public reunion: “I’m standing at the bar with these character actors—these grizzled veterans of the stage. Nothing gets to them. And all of a sudden—outside—we see flashbulbs. In the door walks Elizabeth Taylor on the arm of Richard Burton.” The grizzled actors grew misty-eyed. “It was so touching, so moving. They looked so beautiful together.”

18

1982–1984

FOR THIS BOOK to have an old-fashioned Hollywood ending, I would have to stop here—with the Burtons reunited, more blindingly luminous than all the flashbulbs exploding around them. Taylor is incandescent: her ability as a stage actress finally recognized, her beauty restored, in the company of a light source as powerful as her own. Joy is frozen in this moment, along with fidelity. The moment shouts: happily ever after.

But Taylor’s best movies don’t end that way, so neither will this book. Velvet’s victory is tinged with loss; she fell off the horse. Angela said good-bye to George on death row, and Gloria—brave Gloria, who dared to assert ownership of her own body—was punished for this with death. Leslie was no stranger to grief: the Mexican baby whom she saved was killed in World War II. Catherine left the state asylum with her brain intact but her family in shambles. The minister who taught Laura to trust could not remain with her. And Martha—frightened Martha, cowering against the dawn—likely slept off her hangover and tormented yet more junior faculty after dark.

Screenplays can be quirky, but they adhere to certain conventions. They focus on a hero who desires something, but who must defeat an enemy to obtain it. The enemy can be as concrete as another person or as abstract as the natural world. Often the enemy is an aspect of the hero herself—a cunning adversary who undermines from within. Sometimes she has many enemies. There is only rule: by the end of act 2, the enemies must be ahead. They must seem impossible to defeat. To battle them, the hero has to face her deepest fears.

In a screenplay of Taylor’s life, her glittering reunion with Burton—set against the backdrop of her fiftieth birthday party—would occur in act 2. It would be suffused with hope. Yet something would foreshadow trouble—an incident as small as, say, the cavalier way that Burton treated Taylor’s director when they were first introduced. Pendleton, who did not take offense, recalled: “Richard Burton looked at me. He did not say hello. He did not say anything. He said, ‘She does one fucking play, she thinks she’s Eleanora Duse.’ ”