The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (46 page)

Valerie was also against Elizabeth’s coming and said, “Her appearance here would be inappropriate . . . What does she think she’s up to?” According to Valerie, the funeral had to be held in Switzerland “for tax reasons,” and she insisted, “Elizabeth must be told not to come.” When Graham objected, Valerie said, “Sally’s not going to like it.” On the day before the funeral in Celigny, Elizabeth told Graham on the phone that she wouldn’t be there but asked if the family wanted her at the Wales memorial. Graham said, “Of course, but—” Sally was listening to the conversation, and he couldn’t go on.
³³
Later, Sally told Graham, “Can’t you get it straight? I don’t want Elizabeth here or at the service in Wales.” Graham said, “You have no right to make demands of the family or of Elizabeth.”

The funeral was attended by Liza and Hap Tivey and Maria and Steve Carson. According to Graham, “Neither Christopher nor Michael Wilding put in an appearance, which surprised me.” Brook Williams and Kate Burton read from Richard’s favorite works, a friend played the organ, and Sally placed a poem on the coffin, enclosed in an envelope. Later she said to Graham, “Tell Elizabeth . . . that you don’t want her to come to Wales.” Graham defiantly replied, “She’ll be welcome.” Sally rejoined, “Unless you ring the woman, I’ll do something desperate.”
³⁴
In a subsequent telephone conversation with Graham, Elizabeth said she naturally wanted to come to Wales but added, “I don’t want a fight with Sally. Do you think she will do something stupid?”

Sally finally relented at the last moment and told Elizabeth that ex-wives would be welcome, but by that time Elizabeth couldn’t make it to Wales from L.A..
³⁵
“The press would have gone mad,” Sally told Elizabeth, but later she admitted, “I regret that now.”
³⁶
The Wales memorial was held in the gray stone Bethel Chapel just thirty yards from the home of one of Richard’s sisters. Five hundred Welsh voices were joined in song and prayer.

Eight days later, Elizabeth knelt and prayed at Richard’s grave in Switzerland, and two days after that she went to Pontrhydyfen on her own, flying to Wales in an executive jet. A crowd of one hundred cheered her at Swansea Airport, and later Richard’s neighbors serenaded her, singing, “We’ll keep a welcome in the hillside.” Wearing pink silk and flashing the Krupp diamond, she told them, “I feel as if I’m home.” She stayed with Richard’s sister, spending the night in the two-bed front room next to the chapel where the memorial had been held. When David Frost later asked her if she was sorry that she and Richard had not been reunited, she replied, “Well, I’m sure we will be, some day.”

There were other memorials as the theater and movie worlds woke up to the fact that they’d lost one of their most talented actors. Of his wives, only Susan Hunt attended the L.A. memorial, and Sally was the only wife in attendance at the New York ceremony. Elizabeth at last had her day at the best of the memorials, attended by fourteen hundred mourners on August 30, 1984, in the heart of London, at St. Martin’s in the Fields on Trafalgar Square. Dressed and beturbaned in black silk and looking, according to one observer, “like a queen in mourning,” she led the procession into the church arm-in-arm with Cis James. Susan followed, and Sally, the widow, brought up the rear. “Sybil was not there,” Graham recalled. “For her, I guess, it was all too long ago.” Sally was angry that Elizabeth sat with the Jenkins clan, and she objected to Emlyn Williams’s making many references to Elizabeth in his eulogy without once mentioning Sally. Elizabeth bore no animosity toward the widow, having seen Richard’s women come and go. She said she would gladly have walked “hand in hand” with Sally at Celigny.

Chapter 13
Lesions, White Diamonds, and Rough Trade

It began when Chen Sam noticed that many of Elizabeth’s friends were sick with AIDS, and that Elizabeth was getting increasingly frustrated that the United States, and the world, seemed indifferent to their plight. In January 1985, Chen Sam convinced Elizabeth to see Bill Misenhimer, a pioneering AIDS activist, and Bill Jones, a prominent L.A. caterer, who were seeking Elizabeth’s support for AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA), a service organization offering hands-on help to AIDS patients. “Everyone wanted to get Elizabeth,” Misenhimer recalled, “because there are three big draws in the world: Elizabeth II, the pope, and Elizabeth Taylor.” Together with five other gay men, Misenhimer and Jones persuaded her to become chairperson of the first major AIDS benefit, the Commitment to Life (CTL) dinner, with proceeds to go to APLA. At the time, no other celebrity had been bold enough to help in the AIDS crisis, fearing loss of stardom and possible smearing as a gay or a gay sympathizer. A date for the CTL dinner was set almost a year away—September 1985.

It was not easy to put together a benefit with the double stigma of homosexuality and AIDS. “Nobody in this town wanted to know or be a part of it,” Elizabeth recalled. Three notable exceptions were Michael Jackson, Barry Manilow, and Betty Ford, who agreed to be the guest of honor, thus lending a respectability and status to the enterprise that far exceeded Misenhimer’s wildest dreams. Sinatra turned her down, warning, “Oh, Elizabeth, this is one of your lame-duck causes. Back away from it. It’s going to hurt you.” Instead, she redoubled her efforts. “Without homosexuals there would be no Hollywood, no show business,” she said. “Yet the industry was turning its back on what it considered a gay disease.”
¹

The major obstacle she faced in de-demonizing AIDS was overcoming the secrecy and shame that had always surrounded homosexuality. Famous, powerful people suffering from the disease, including Rock Hudson, Liberace, Tony Perkins, and Brad Davis, had never come out as homosexuals, and now that they were dying of AIDS they insisted on remaining in the closet. As a compassionate person who valued privacy, Elizabeth was in no position to “out” anyone, but if only one gay celebrity stricken with AIDS would go public, the disease would lose some of its stigma, opening an avenue to public acceptance, research moneys, and a possible cure.

After the breakup with Victor Luna, Elizabeth had her pick of suitors, but she began declining dates, suspecting that most men only wanted to brag they’d been with her. Dennis Stein seemed an exception. Solicitous in a fatherly way, barrel-chested and gray-haired, he struck her as “the best-looking man,” and, even more important, he was “even
available
.”
²
Nor did it hurt that he was solvent. An entrepreneur for tycoon Ronald Perelman of MacAndrews & Forbes, the holding company that owned Technicolor and Revlon, Stein surprised her with a twenty-carat diamond ring. Occasionally they trysted in the Waldorf Towers suite that Frank Sinatra had lent to Stein. A tall, heavyset man, Stein was having as much trouble keeping off pounds as Elizabeth was, and they both looked pretty hefty the day Peter Lawford’s wife, Patricia Seaton, walked in on them making love in Elizabeth’s bedroom in Bel Air. Stein was on top of Elizabeth, and her pet parrot Alvin was hanging on to a window screen, screeching, “Help me! Help me!”
³

Among Elizabeth’s presents from Stein were a white Pekinese puppy, a mink coat, and a pair of amethyst-yellow, sapphire-and-diamond earrings. According to Seaton, Stein was not very attractive, looking like someone who should be pushing a cart down the street. Elizabeth thought him funny and sexy. She liked it that he didn’t drink, take drugs, or smoke.
⁴
He was “almost a mistake,” she later told
Vanity Fair
.
⁵
She also dated Carl Bernstein, the Watergate journalist, who’d divorced his wife Nora Ephron and was about a dozen years younger than Elizabeth. Bernstein stayed with her in her duplex suite at the Plaza Athenee whenever she was in New York. Her room service waiter Kirk Kerber told an interviewer that she was not abusing alcohol and liked to chat about Alcoholics Anonymous while drinking mint tea. One night at the Palladium disco in downtown Manhattan, Bernstein and Dennis Stein came close to squaring off with each other after Stein said, “You have to answer to me about Elizabeth.”
⁶
Bernstein kept his hands in his pockets, and the expected fisticuffs never materialized, though Stein later bragged that he could easily have taken the writer.

In January 1985, Elizabeth attended President Reagan’s second inauguration with Stein and Frank and Barbara Sinatra. She urged Nancy to lend her support to the AIDS battle, but the First Lady turned a deaf ear.
⁷
Though the Reagans’ son Ron was a ballet dancer, a profession largely populated by gays, the President had never uttered the word “AIDS” in public, not even when he spoke to his old friend Rock Hudson on the phone. Rock was still in denial, though lesions were clearly visible on his neck, and President Reagan always referred to Rock’s disease as hepatitis. To the consternation of the First Couple, Elizabeth continued to nudge them about AIDS every time they met. Fortunately, Elizabeth was too much of an American icon to be brushed off indefinitely.

She dissolved her six-month engagement to Dennis Stein after the inauguration, in February 1985, and sent him on his way with a gold watch, the traditional retirement present for those who have hung on valiantly but never quite made the grade. “I will marry once more, but
only
once more,” she told writer Dominick Dunne. She still did not know that Rock had AIDS when he went to Paris for injections of the experimental drug HPA 23 in the belief it could inhibit the deadly virus. On July 25, 1985, his representative in Paris, Yannou Collart, announced that Rock was suffering from AIDS. The impact was immediate and seismic, and it ended public indifference to the disease. Elizabeth immediately sent word to Rock that by coming out he’d saved “millions of lives.” He seemed puzzled by her statement and asked, “Why?” When congratulatory and sympathy messages poured in from Madonna, Gregory Peck, James Garner, Ali MacGraw, Jack Lemmon, and Ava Gardner, Rock at last realized the magnitude of what he’d done.
⁸
On leaving the Ritz lobby in the Place Vendôme, he fainted, and was returned to America on a stretcher.

In California, he was taken to the UCLA Medical Center. The news that Rock was gay—let alone suffering from AIDS—continued to astonish a largely homo-phobic public, and even Elizabeth seemed surprised. “Oh, God, yes, I knew he was gay,” she said, “but I thought he had cancer.”
⁹
She visited him at the hospital, entering by the back door. Though AIDS had been discovered at UCLA, the administration was nervous about having Rock on campus. “Rock Hudson will die at home, won’t he?” inquired a nervous UCLA doctor. “He won’t get readmitted to UCLA?”
¹⁰
Before entering Rock’s room, Elizabeth met with his own physician, Dr. Michael Gottlieb, and asked a number of questions. Her manner was “very down-to-earth,” Gottlieb recalled. “She wanted to know what she could do and I said, ‘Just be there.’” Like everyone at the time, she was anxious about catching the disease. “Is it safe to touch and kiss?” she asked. Although nothing definitive was yet known, Gottlieb gave her his opinion that nonsexual contact was harmless. “She kissed his cheek,” Gottlieb said, “hugged him, and sat on the bed . . . A visit from Elizabeth Taylor could be a cheerful thing.” Rock was gaunt and withered and didn’t know where he was, but when he saw Elizabeth he laughed about the chocolate martini cocktail they’d invented during
Giant
.

While working on the CTL dinner, Elizabeth decided to establish a national AIDS foundation to finance scientific research and hands-on care for persons with AIDS. Together with Gottlieb and Misenhimer, she held a summit conference over dinner at a French restaurant in Santa Monica. “[Elizabeth] and I were crying,” Misenhimer remembered. He tried to warn her of the difficulties ahead. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve been through a lot.” Later she told a reporter, “We decided that night we were going to make a difference. God-damn, we would!” She visited the AIDS wing of San Francisco General Hospital, chatting with patients and touching them. “I find being ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ really boring,” she told a reporter. “Giving is one of the reasons that we are put on this earth.” After a meeting with her core AIDS group at the Occidental Petroleum Building, she “popped in to see Armand Hammer and got him to give $10,000,” Misenhimer recalled.

Again, she took her involvement with the AIDS crisis to the White House. On July 23, 1985, she was a guest of the Reagans during the state visit of President Li of China. “Liz Taylor was at the table, looking lovely,” recalled Nancy Reagan.
¹¹
Though the President had just had two feet of cancerous intestine removed from his body, Elizabeth never let him forget that she expected him to face reality and do something about AIDS. Thanks to her fund-raising trip to Japan, philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa became the first $1 million AIDS donor.

As she continued to promote the September 1985 CTL dinner, Rock was barely holding on, his body covered with rashes. The situation at his house, known as “The Castle,” at 9402 Beverly Crest Drive in Coldwater Canyon, could not have been more complicated. The group around him included Marc Christian, a blond surfer type who’d moved in with Rock in 1983; Rock’s lover Jack Coates; Tom Clark, a white-haired, blue-eyed man who’d lived with Rock for ten years before Christian; and gay 1950s matinee idol George Nader, a friend of Rock’s for thirty-five years, who lived with Rock’s secretary Mark Miller.
¹²
Christian was contemplating a lawsuit charging that Rock continued to have sex with him until February 1985, exposing him to AIDS.
¹³
Rock told friends that it could have been Marc who’d brought the AIDS virus into his house. After losing interest in Marc in 1984, Rock fell in love with Ron Channell, his straight personal trainer, a tall, strapping youth who wanted Rock to pay for his dancing lessons so he could become a Las Vegas hoofer, but Ron successfully kept the relationship on a friendship basis.
¹⁴
In the midst of sexual intrigue and palace revolutions, Rock was delighted to hear that Elizabeth’s CTL dinner had to be moved to a more spacious venue following his coming out. “Before your announcement,” Miller told him, “they’d sold 200 tickets. Now they’ve sold 2,500, and they’ve raised $1 million.” Rock said, “All that because I said I have AIDS?” George Nader reminded him that he was the first celebrity to come out, and that if AIDS could strike Rock Hudson, anyone could get it.