The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (48 page)

Two hours late, Elizabeth made her entrance on Calvin’s arm. “The sight of the two stars together caused such a commotion that the crowd and press began to stampede them, nearly knocking Elizabeth Taylor off her feet,” wrote Calvin’s biographer Steven Gaines. “As the mob grew in ferocity, a human circle of security police had to be formed around the frightened couple to prevent them from being trampled.” “To Care Is to Cure” raised $300,000 for AmFAR, and Calvin later raised $1 million at the Hollywood Bowl.

In May 1986, Elizabeth testified before a congressional subcommittee, trying to get more money for emergency AIDS care. It was still an uphill battle. Despite Rock’s coming out, other prominent homosexuals with AIDS remained secretive, quite realistically fearing loss of reputation and career. Both Halston and Freddie Mercury of the rock band Queen were dying of AIDS, but neither came forward to help the cause. Nor did Elizabeth pressure them. As a champion of gays, the last thing she wanted to do was harm them. She disagreed with Mathilde Krim over AmFAR’s use of famous AIDS sufferers. As soon as Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive, Mathilde wanted him on the board of directors. Elizabeth thought that was indiscreet and said, “I don’t want to use him . . . It’s the same with Arthur Ashe . . . The way [somebody] chooses to die is their own goddamn business.”

Like a gigantic karmic payoff for her good works of the 1980s, Elizabeth hit the jackpot as a businesswoman when her perfume took off like a rocket. For years she’d been playing around with the idea of licensing a fragrance line, and in 1986 the Parfums International division of Chesebrough-Pond’s asked her to lend her name to one of their scents. An inveterate experimenter with perfumes throughout her adult life, she’d always layered four or five different ones to create the floral/Oriental fragrance she loved. She assured Parfums International that she’d find the right blend for them, one producing a violet aroma, and she was adamant about being involved “all the way with choosing the scent.” Perfume is one of the cheapest items to manufacture in the fashion industry, and one with the highest markup and profit. The chief ingredient is alcohol; the liquid in the bottle accounts for only 5 percent of the retail price. The smell of the fragrance is less crucial to its success than the bottle and the box it comes in and the image created by the advertising campaign. Six out of seven perfumes bomb in the stores and quickly disappear, so Chesebrough-Pond’s was counting heavily on the clout of Elizabeth’s fame. When the company went looking for a name for her product, she said, “I have a passion for love, food, children, and animals. I have a passion for life in everything I do.” The perfume became known as Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion, and it was packaged in containers in varying shades of purple.

Before the fragrance could be manufactured, she had to settle her old agreement with Wynberg stipulating a sixty-forty split in his favor. Inviting him to her home in Bel Air, she served him dinner, and they spent the night together in her bed. Although they didn’t have sex, they did agree on a fifty-fifty split. The deal eventually came unraveled, and they ended up in court, where a settlement was finally hammered out.
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Chesebrough-Pond’s launched Passion with a $10 million promotion campaign. When Elizabeth made the TV ad, she’d evidently been drinking the previous evening and looked hung over; Ogilvy & Mather, the advertising agency, spent $40,000 retouching the video to make her look ravishing.
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She worked hard for the success of Passion, also posing for an alluring aquatic still photo that became Passion’s trademark.

She cited January 14, 1987, as “one of the major high points of my life—the announcement of my perfume, Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion, in New York.” In a fur hat and a fur-trimmed tweed coat, she introduced Passion at a press conference attended by five hundred reporters, but the journalists were more interested in whether she was going to marry George Hamilton, who was in attendance. “I just married ChesebroughPond’s,” she said. “You don’t want to make a bigamist out of me!” At $200 an ounce, Passion became the fourth largest-selling women’s perfume in America, grossing $70 million annually and raising Elizabeth’s net worth to nearly $100 million.
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She treated herself to a historic bauble, purchasing the late Duchess of Windsor’s 1935-style plume-and-crown diamond brooch for $623,000 at auction. The price she paid was donated to a leading AIDS research center, the Pasteur Institute in Paris. “It’s the first time I’ve ever had to buy myself a piece of jewelry,” she joked. Though she’d occasionally lost her patience with the Reagans for being derelict in recognizing the AIDS crisis, she was pleased on April 1, 1987, when the President at last announced, “We declared the war against AIDS public priority No. 1.”

In 1987, Malcolm Forbes, perhaps the world’s richest closet homosexual, began pursuing Elizabeth. Though it was rumored that the sixty-seven-year-old billionaire’s personal preferences ran to boys, leather, chains, and bikers, he loved publicity and saw Elizabeth as a way to turn himself into a household name. For Elizabeth, Malcolm was another of her a-sexual, loving partners, as well as a potential AIDS benefactor. His business-oriented magazine,
Forbes
, published fortnightly since 1917, profiled leaders in industry and analyzed the nature and effect of management policies. Founded by Malcolm’s father Bertie Charles Forbes, who died in 1954, the magazine flourished under Malcolm’s management, reaching a circulation of 735,000. One day Malcolm rang the AmFAR office to invite Elizabeth to an upcoming party for the seventieth anniversary of
Forbes
. A staffer told him Elizabeth was in Japan raising money for AIDS. Malcolm volunteered that he’d make a donation if Elizabeth would come to his party. The staffer informed him that Elizabeth “doesn’t go for less than a million dollars.” No problem, said Malcolm.

The party was held in May 1987 at Timberfield, Forbes’s seventy-five-acre New Jersey estate. He presented Elizabeth with a $1 million check for AmFAR. She called him her “million dollar baby,” and he said, “What I do, I do to enjoy life and to promote my business. The $1 million contribution to the campaign against AIDS was given to give
Forbes
magazine’s celebration more significance.” Though George Hamilton was present, Elizabeth stayed by Malcolm’s side, holding his hand as he greeted eleven hundred guests. Later in the evening she kissed him. “It was one of the most beautiful parties I’ve ever been to,” she said. One hundred bagpipers marched over the hills toward a thirteen-foot-by-twenty-foot replica of a Scottish castle surrounded by artificial fog. After a lavish feast served by 302 waiters, the guests enjoyed a fireworks display to the music of Gershwin and Beethoven. Sun-tanned and soignée, Elizabeth wore a Dior dress and a white stole with her red Legion of Honor ribbon. Teasing her, Henry Kissinger said, “Your laundry tag is showing.” Dancing in a circus-sized tent, Elizabeth and Malcolm “got on like a house afire,” Chen Sam recalled.

Elizabeth and Malcolm started going out together, and the press—still in the dark regarding Malcolm’s alleged homoeroticism—soon regarded them as an item. In addition to Kissinger, Forbes’s social circle included Donald Trump and Walter Cronkite, who often joined him and Elizabeth for motorcycle rides or excursions in hot-air balloons shaped like a Normandy chateau, a light bulb, or a pair of jeans. When Malcolm gave Elizabeth a purple Harley-Davidson with “Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion” sprayed on the fuel tank in amethyst, she told Nolan Miller, “I need motorcycle clothes.” The designer tried to explain, “That’s not me,” but she insisted, saying, “Do elegant motorcycle clothes.” Subsequently, the black-lace-over-leather motorcycle jacket he ran up for her went into his couture collection. Malcolm made at least one play for her. Taking her home one evening to the Plaza Athenee in Manhattan, he said at the elevator, “What would it take to get you to let me come upstairs?” She told the tycoon, “A big thing in a little blue box—from Tiffany’s.” She went upstairs alone.

Malcolm dined her at “21” and Le Cirque and entertained her at his château in France, his ranch in Colorado, and his Tangier palace, and aboard his 150-foot yacht,
The Highlander
. He took her on a fifty-mile Harley ride around his New Jersey property. They flew to Rome on a private jet in the summer of 1987 for a meeting with Zeffirelli, who later costarred her in his film
Young Toscanini
with Brat Packer C. Thomas Howell in the title role and Elizabeth as his opera-diva muse. Metropolitan Opera star Aprile Millo recorded the aria from
Aïda
that Elizabeth’s character sings in the movie, and when Elizabeth went to Aprile for help in interpreting the scene, Elizabeth asked, “Who is
Aïda
?” Elizabeth had known Arturo Toscanini in the 1950s when Mike Todd was planning to film his life, and she recalled that the maestro was the biggest flirt she’d ever met. When the film later premiered at the Venice Film Festival, the prescient Elizabeth, divining disaster, refused to attend. Zeffirelli was booed, and the picture never went into general release. Malcolm offered consolation in the form of a diamond-and-amethyst necklace and matching bracelet.

In Miami, during a 1987 AIDS benefit advertised as “An Extraordinary Evening with Elizabeth Taylor and Friends,” she charmed another philanthropist into donating $1.2 million for AmFAR. As the foundation’s new national chairperson, she persuaded President Reagan to speak at the AmFAR Awards Dinner in the capital in 1987. Reagan was cautioned by AmFAR about the danger of mandatory testing, a controversial issue at the time, one smacking of totalitarianism and police state tactics. According to Mathilde Krim, mandatory testing was not advisable “scientifically, legally, or medically.” AmFAR wrote the first half of Reagan’s speech, the thrust of which was the need for compassion, care, and justice, but the President gave the manuscript to his White House staff, and it was radically revised.

The awards dinner was held in a tent during a heat wave, and there was no air-conditioning. “Let’s talk about warm,” Elizabeth recalled, and added, “The President mentioned mandatory testing and people jumped out of their seats. Then they started heckling him.” She leaped into the fray and scolded the crowd, telling them, “Don’t be rude. This is your President and he is our guest.” No one dared defy her, and a nasty incident that could have set AIDS back many years was averted.

After taking acting lessons in England and L.A., Mike Wilding Jr. played Jesus Christ in the television miniseries
A.D
. He attributed his success, such as it was, to his male parent, Wilding Sr., and stepfather Richard Burton.
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With his wife, Brooke Palance, an actress and producer, he visited Elizabeth often, “but not often enough,” she complained. ”My only regret is that I don’t get to see Michael’s daughters, my two oldest grandchildren, Laele and Naomi, as frequently as I’d like.” Christopher was working in L.A. behind the scenes as a movie and TV editor. His sons, Caleb and Andrew, often visited Elizabeth, allowing her to play granny. Chris inherited her sweet tooth, but followed a diet included in the book she was writing,
Elizabeth Takes Off
, and lost twenty-five pounds. Maria Carson was still living in New York and raising her daughter, Eliza.

By 1987, Elizabeth’s old party crowd was scattered and decimated, some of them dying from AIDS or substance abuse. Warhol expired after gallbladder surgery at New York Hospital on February 22, 1987, and Elizabeth immediately called his friend Francesco Clemente, anxiously inquiring about Warhol’s taped conversations with her about her sex life and her husbands’ reproductive organs.
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Steve Rubell died at forty-five of drug- and alcohol-related illnesses including hepatitis and kidney failure. After founding a fragrance called Eternity, Calvin Klein checked into a rehab, the Hanley Hazelden Center at St. Mary’s for Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation. Quipped Robin Burns, president of Calvin’s cosmetics division, “I hope that it does for Eternity what Elizabeth Taylor in BFC did for Passion.”
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Not quite—Eternity grossed $35 million at the end of its first year, while Passion was earning twice that much.

Nolan Miller made the stunning gown Elizabeth wore to the Oscar ceremony in March of 1988. Though she hadn’t been a contender for the award in years, she continued to lend her inimitable glamour to the occasion as a presenter. The female nominees had been sporting bizarre creations in the past decade, so Elizabeth told Nolan, “I want to wear something they would not expect of me.” The dress he designed featured a low Edwardian neckline, puffed shoulders, and long sleeves, and it gave her a perfect hour-glass figure. Like Poker Alice, she often dressed like Belle Watling, the cathouse owner in
Gone with the Wind
, but she was also, as on this occasion, capable of elegance, and she more than held her own, fashion-wise, with the new generation of superstars, including Cher, who won the best actress Oscar for
Moonstruck
.

Early in 1988, Elizabeth was svelte and pretty at 122 pounds, and her face appeared young and fresh. She admitted, “I did have a chin tuck because there was some loose skin. And that is all!”
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But columnist Erma Bombeck thought otherwise, writing that Elizabeth’s hands were “probably the only part of Elizabeth Taylor left over from
National Velvet
.” Michael Jackson was on his
Bad
tour from April until December 1988, and Elizabeth and Sophia Loren greeted him after his show in Switzerland, where sixty thousand attended his concert. Later, in London, influenced by Elizabeth’s humanitarian activities, Jackson gave Prince Charles and Princess Diana a check for $450,000—the proceeds from his Wembly concert—for redevelopment of the Great Ormand Street Children’s Hospital. Under fire for his alleged activities with young boys, he was desperately trying to salvage his reputation by projecting an impression of normalcy. During the song “Leave Me Alone” in his ninety-minute video
Moonwalker
, he even poked fun at his Neverland shrine to Elizabeth.
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