The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice (18 page)

During the epidemic’s first year—June 1981 to June 1982—the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spent only $1 million on AIDS, as opposed to $9 million on a far slighter problem, Legionnaires’ disease. In 1982, Congress allocated $2.6 million for the CDC’s AIDS research, but the White House opposed the allocation and tried to block future spending on research and prevention.

Although Democrats held a majority in Congress, representatives from areas worst hit by the crisis—New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—faced two ongoing battles: one, of course, for money; the other for a recognition of the situation’s gravity. Reagan never even uttered the word “AIDS” in a speech until 1987, when, on the eve of the
Third
International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C., he could no longer shrug off a global epidemic.

Without private fund-raising, AIDS research and education would have stalled in the epidemic’s critical first years. And without Elizabeth Taylor leading the charge, private fund-raising would likely have stalled, too.

“I don’t think anyone else could have done it,” Gottlieb said. “No one else had the strength, the celebrity, and the will to do it.

“Someone in a leadership position—a president or a first lady—could have told the country: ‘Do the right thing,’ ” Gottlieb continued. And the country would have listened. But no one in power rose to the moral occasion.

The cause needed “a woman at the pinnacle,” he explained. “Because openly gay men are not given the respect that they are due. And if a straight man speaks up on a gay issue, his orientation becomes suspect. Elizabeth was perfect for the role. And I think she knew that.”

The year 1984 was tough for Taylor. On August 5, Richard Burton died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage at his home in Switzerland. He and Taylor had made peace since their scorched-earth tour in
Private Lives
, and she had hoped to attend his funeral. But his widow, Sally Hay, made clear that Taylor was not welcome.

Things did not improve in 1985. On July 15, a rail-thin Rock Hudson made his last public appearance—to help Doris Day promote a new TV show. He then flew from L.A. to Paris for an experimental AIDS treatment, which he was too weak to receive. After returning to L.A. on a private flight, he was airlifted to UCLA Medical Center, where, on July 25, he gave Gottlieb permission to go public with his diagnosis. Gottlieb’s brief announcement stunned mainstream Americans. They felt as if they had known Hudson; he had been inside their own living rooms—as a star of
Dynasty
and
McMillan & Wife
. Some began to realize: AIDS wasn’t just a disease of “those people.”

In 12-step recovery programs, addicts learn to help themselves by reaching out to others. In 1985, when Taylor lent her name to AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA), she believed that she was doing this—honoring Hudson by reaching out to strangers—far beyond her immediate circle. But the disease soon struck her immediate family. Taylor’s daughter-in-law, Aileen Getty, then married to Christopher Wilding, learned that she was HIV positive, a consequence of an unsafe affair.

Taylor threw herself into recruiting luminaries for the first APLA “Commitment to Life” dinner, an ambitious fund-raiser set for September 19 at Los Angeles’s Bonaventure Hotel. Its guest of honor was Betty Ford, to whose treatment center she owed her sobriety. But her friends did not leap to help. Many hung up on her. Frank Sinatra called AIDS another of her “lame-dog causes.” She received anonymous death threats. Yet she soldiered on, recruiting, among others, Sammy Davis Jr., Rod Stewart, Stevie Wonder, and Cher to attend. The dinner raised $1.3 million—more money in one night than the CDC had spent on the epidemic in its entire first year.

That night she also found something she had not thought existed: a use for her celebrity. A reason for enduring metaphorically what her
Suddenly, Last Summer
character had experienced literally: standing on a catwalk above a crazy mob, its fingers grabbing ceaselessly at her ankles.

“When I saw that my fame could help in my fight against AIDS, I thought, Bring it on!” she told Liz Smith. “If people wanted to come to an AIDS event to see whether I was fat or thin, pretty or not, or really had violet eyes, then great, just come. My fame finally made sense to me.”

She did not stop with APLA. Later that year, with Gottlieb and Dr. Mathilde Krim, a New York–based cancer researcher who had set up the AIDS Medical Foundation, Taylor helped start the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmfAR)—now the foremost national nonprofit devoted to AIDS research and prevention.

Her courage fortified people with HIV. It worked synergistically with the new medications—the protease inhibitors and the reverse transcriptase inhibitors—that by the 1990s had begun to emerge from labs which AmfAR had helped to fund. “At a time when the disgust, neglect, and derision of the broader society and culture was making people with AIDS feel dirty and ashamed, Elizabeth Taylor blessed us with her glamour,” AIDS activist Sean Strub wrote after her death.

On September 20, 1986, APLA honored Taylor at its second “Commitment to Life” event, which had evolved from a dinner into a show at the Wiltern Theater. Produced by Hollywood agent Barry Krost, the show filled the giant venue—with Madonna, Billy Crystal, Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Willis, and nearly every iconic 1980s face either on the stage or in the audience. There were inexpensive seats, too—to include regular people who wanted to contribute to the cause.

Like most award booklets, the “Commitment to Life” programs contain tributes from friends and associates of the honoree. Not surprisingly, Taylor’s booklet was very thick—she had lots of friends. I was amazed, however, at who was among them: Nancy Reagan—whose husband’s willful ignorance had created many of the obstacles Taylor was struggling to overcome.

When Taylor accepted the award, she vowed to spend the rest of her life fighting AIDS, which she did. In 1990, she testified before Congress in support of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Care Act, which passed in August of that year. In 1991, she created the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, not for research but to assist people living with HIV. In its first decade, the foundation raised more than $50 million.

No vaccine yet exists for AIDS, though scientists continue to search for one. In the 1980s, French virologist Luc Montagnier (who identified the AIDS retrovirus) and U.S. researcher Robert Gallo (who devised a test to diagnose the HIV infection) made the first big breakthroughs. In 1996, Dr. David Ho, founding director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City, is credited with the next major advance: a “cocktail” of protease inhibitors and reverse transcriptase inhibitors that would permit a person with HIV to survive without developing AIDS. Ho met Taylor in the 1980s, when he was a medical resident at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. To him, her greatest achievement was not the money that she raised but the way she helped overcome the stigma surrounding AIDS. “On a personal level, she did a great deal to bring public attention to the disease,” he told me.

Taylor’s intuitive grasp of Virginia Woolf’s guidelines for women did not extend to an embrace of poverty. Woolf insisted that women support themselves, but urged them to do their jobs for “love of the work itself” when they had enough to live on. Taylor had no reservations about making money—launching her multiscent perfume empire in 1988 and the House of Taylor, a jewelry maker and distributor, in 2005. At her death, the press estimated her net worth to be between $600 million and $1 billion. (A Taylor spokesperson, however, characterized those estimates as “wildly exaggerated.”)

Taylor also worked hard to maintain her sobriety. In 1988, she returned to the Betty Ford Center, leaving with a new best friend, Larry Fortensky, a handsome construction worker who, she said, made her laugh. Three years later, she married Fortensky at Neverland, the California ranch owned by another best friend, the late pop singer Michael Jackson, who underwrote the $2-million celebration.

Ever loyal to her friends, Taylor stood by Jackson in 1993 when he was accused of child molestation. They were linked, she said, by their “horrible childhoods.” “Working at the age of nine is not a childhood,” she told talk show host Larry King. “He started at the age of three.” When Jackson was again charged in 2003, she continued to defend him—suggesting that his wealth might have made him a target for people seeking a payoff. “I’ve never been so angry in my life,” she said about the allegation.

On June 25, 2009, Jackson died unexpectedly at age fifty. “I really was concerned about her,” Kate Burton said, “because I know how close they were.” Prudently, Taylor avoided his circuslike public memorial at the Staples Center in L.A. So many fans wanted tickets that they had to be dispensed via lottery.

I had hoped to speak with Taylor about feminism, regardless of what she would say. Kate Burton saw the thread of feminism in some of her stepmother’s movies but doubted Taylor had been conscious of it. “I don’t see her thinking of herself as a feminist,” Burton said. “I think she just does what she does.”

The people around Taylor told me her health was too frail for an interview. Many thought my project might amuse her—though no one would say this for attribution. I assumed her fragility was made up, an excuse not to talk. But on March 23, 2011, when she died of congestive heart failure in Cedars-Sinai Hospital, I realized they had told me the truth.

Her death was met with an outpouring of grief and love. And hate: The Westboro Baptist Church—carrying Falwell’s torch of bigotry—threatened to picket her funeral. Margie Phelps, daughter of Fred Phelps, the group’s leader, fired off multiple attacks via Twitter, including this one: “No RIP Elizabeth Taylor who spent her life in adultery and enabling proud fags.”

Taylor’s small service at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, however, thwarted the protesters. It was limited to fewer than one hundred close friends and family. In death as in life, she mocked herself—arranging for her remains to arrive at the mausoleum fifteen minutes late.

As columnist Katha Pollitt observed, “Feminism is a social justice movement.” From 1985 until her death, Taylor fought consciously—not accidentally—for social justice. I believe her final role in life was influenced by the movies with feminist content that she had starred in as a younger woman. Actors both shape and are shaped by their parts. They bring aspects of themselves to their characters, and they take aspects of their characters away.

Two parts that Taylor played for director George Stevens seem to have had a strong effect on her identity in later life. Stevens saw qualities in her as a teenager that she had not yet recognized in herself. He saw the qualities that would enable her to make “her greatest conscious gift.”

When Stevens ad-libbed the “Tell Mama” line for her in
A Place in the Sun
, he identified a maternal quality in her love. This quality, journalist Kevin Sessums wrote, also informed her AIDS activism. In a memorial tribute published in the
Daily Beast
, Sessums described an interview that he had with her in the 1990s for
POZ
, a magazine for people with HIV. He told Taylor that he felt she had turned to “all of us who were HIV positive” and said, “Tell Mama—”

Taylor stopped him and touched his hand, he recalled. Then, as if to confirm his perception, she finished the line herself: “Tell Mama all.”

Taylor’s character in
Giant
also anticipated the activist she would become. As Leslie Benedict, Taylor makes common cause with the sick. She steps away from her privileged community—the white Texas ranching elite—to serve a community of outsiders, their Mexican workers. Although she is warned not to enter the Mexican homes, she does so anyway. And when she finds an ailing child, she cradles him. She doesn’t pull back, fearing contagion—just as Taylor herself did not recoil from people with HIV. She demands medical attention from the privileged community’s physician.

Her husband scolds her. “He’s
our
doctor,” he says. “He don’t tend those people.”

Although frustrated, Leslie holds her temper. Decrying his prejudice would not help the child. Gently, through persuasion, she forces both her husband and the doctor to transcend their bigotry: to acknowledge the humanity—and the suffering—of the outsiders.

“Darling, I don’t think you quite understand,” Leslie says sweetly. “There’s a child who’s very sick.” Then she turns to the physician: “You’ll go, won’t you doctor?”

And in that brave moment, Leslie leads the doctor—as Taylor herself led a callous nation—to do the right thing.

Acknowledgments

I did not watch Elizabeth Taylor’s movies alone in the dark. I watched them many times with different friends, all of whom offered valuable insight. Robin Swicord and Nick Kazan inadvertently got the project rolling—by giving me a boxed set of Taylor DVDs. Robin repeatedly weathered
Cleopatra
with me, as well as commented on my drafts.

The movies I highlight are a pleasure to watch. Not all Taylor’s movies, however, can be described this way. Thanks to Robert Ladendorf for enduring many less-than-beguiling films with me. Robert also tracked down Production Code memos in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library and gave me thoughtful notes on my every draft. (At last a use for that master’s in film!) In the Herrick Library Special Collections, thanks to Barbara Hall, research archivist, and Jenny Romero, coordinator. Thanks also to Faye Thompson, coordinator of the Herrick Library’s Roddy McDowall Photo Archive. I also benefited from the assistance of Robert Montoya in the Department of Special Collections in the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA and Susan Halpert at the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

For their careful readings of the manuscript, thanks to Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum, Brighde Mullins, and Ellen Handler Spitz. For Memorial Day in Palm Springs, thanks to Hayes Michel. For joining me in study hall, thanks to Nan Cohen, Tim Kirkman, and Tom Rastrelli. For their perspective on
Giant
, thanks to Lindsay Doran and Rodney Kemerer. Thanks to Jonathan and Rita Lynn for introducing me to Austin Pendleton, who was generous with his time and wit. Thanks to David Francis, Judith Freeman, and Marion Rosenberg for an intriguing off-the-record conversation. For recollections of the early days of the AIDS epidemic, thank you to Dr. Michael Gottlieb, Dr. Francine Hanberg, Brenda Freiberg, and Barry Krost. Thanks to Kathy Lu for introducing me to Dr. David Ho.