Her friends and family had a hard time accepting her death. “She’d come back from the brink so many times. We all expected her to do it again. So in that sense it really was a shock when she didn’t,” says her friend and final publicist, Sally Morrison, about Elizabeth Taylor’s death, in Los Angeles on March 23. Elizabeth had been in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for six weeks, suffering from complications caused by congestive heart failure, which was first diagnosed in 2004. Hampered throughout her life by a series of health woes—crippling back pain, osteoporosis, respiratory illness, scoliosis, a brain tumor, a stroke, more than 100 hospitalizations—she had valiantly soldiered on through her last years, and had taken to Twitter to reassure her hundreds of thousands of fans that she was still in this world, despite what they might read in the tabloids. “Dear friends, my heart procedure went off perfectly,” she tweeted in October of 2009 after doctors repaired a leaky valve. “It’s like having a brand new ticker.”
For her final six months they had managed her condition, carrying her from bed to wheelchair. Her mind was still sharp, but she had been robbed of her famed, outsize joie de vivre. She became so frail that the decision was made to hold her 79th-birthday party a month early, in January 2011. For the occasion, her house in Bel Air was filled with her favorite flowers—gardenias and lilies of the valley. When her guests—her large extended family and close friends—raised their glasses to toast her, she summoned the strength to remark, “I’m not dead yet!”
But she was worn out and refused further cardiac surgery. Two months later she died.
Once again, Elizabeth Taylor was front-page news. For an actress who hadn’t made a significant film since A Little Night Music, in 1977, the outpouring of grief and attention was staggering. Suddenly people were wondering: Who was this most famous of actresses during the last 10 years of her long, slow escape from the public gaze?
Perhaps because she had been a child star—National Velvet made her famous at the age of 12—she outlived many of her co-stars, including Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, Rock Hudson, and Laurence Harvey, and five of her seven husbands: hotel heir Nicky Hilton, actor Michael Wilding, producer Mike Todd, singer-actor Eddie Fisher, and actor Richard Burton. Hollywood could easily have become a ghost town for her, and she could have become a latter-day Norma Desmond, sequestering herself in her mansion, avoiding the company of all but a few old Hollywood friends. But Elizabeth had always embraced thrills and people and fun. “You might as well live” was one of her favorite sayings.
It’s true that in later years she preferred to see visitors and her large family of four grown children (Michael Howard Wilding, 58; Christopher Edward Wilding, 56; Elizabeth Frances Todd, 54; Maria Burton, 49), 10 grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren in the privacy of her home, on Nimes Road, which winds its way through tortuous curves banked by oleander. Her privacy was protected by a team of Israeli security guards, who would lead visitors into her gemtlich mansion, where paintings you’d expect to see in museums (including works by van Gogh, Manet, Rouault, Hals, Cassatt, Matisse, Modigliani, and Pissarro) hung in ornate, spotlighted frames. Her two gleaming best-actress Oscars (for BUtterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) shared space with tchotchkes and memorabilia, such as a life-size, signed poster of Michael Jackson and a stained-glass portrait of her beloved Maltese dog Sugar. In her upstairs bedroom—and you were invited upstairs only if Elizabeth was really fond of you—DVDs of her favorite television show, Law Order, sat among more mementos, dozens of amethyst crystals, photographs, and porcelain figurines. There she would watch the Home Shopping Network with Sugar, or display her vast collection of jewels to her dog, describing the provenance of each dazzling piece. “I’ve never loved a dog like this in my life,” she said about Sugar. “Sometimes I think there’s a person in there.” When Sugar died, in 2005, she was replaced by Daisy, another fluffy white Maltese, whom Elizabeth equally adored. Daisy slept on a silk cushion on Elizabeth’s bed, when she wasn’t on Elizabeth’s lap.
There was no such thing as a typical day for Elizabeth. Her devoted personal assistant of 25 years, Tim Mendelson, confided that “she had a genius for creating chaos around her. A typical day was whatever occupied her attention at the moment. That’s what was so great about working for her. One day it might be something having to do with the dog, or a friend who needed help. Or she might just decide to spend a few days in bed watching television.” She loved to blast the music of the unlikely Scottish singing sensation Susan Boyle—she adored big voices—and in her Maybach she often played CDs of Andrea Bocelli, the blind Italian tenor.
Behind the swimming pool, Elizabeth’s secluded garden bloomed with gardenias, lilies of the valley, and birds-of-paradise, amid lush palms and bamboo. Orchids were cultivated in a small greenhouse. Elizabeth held her annual Easter parties for her extensive family by the pool, but by 2004 back pain, which had plagued her for most of her life, as well as three hip-replacement surgeries, made it too painful to walk. She had to abandon strolling in the garden, one of her favorite activities.
As she found it increasingly necessary to rely on a wheelchair, Elizabeth still made forays into West Hollywood. Wearing cowboy boots, dressed in resplendent colors, and ablaze with diamonds, she favored deep-coral-red lipstick and nail polish and wore her hair coiffed high and dyed Liz Taylor black.
Living with constant pain and having to rely on prescription painkillers—after two stays at the Betty Ford clinic to be rid of pill and alcohol addictions—would have dampened most spirits, even one as feisty and vital as Elizabeth’s. But that was not what happened. Her third act would turn out to be a worthy coda to a life so extravagantly lived, and her legacy may finally rest as much on the accomplishments of her last decade as on the fiery years of her early film stardom. With her fabled beauty and her film career behind her, she could at last turn her attention to humanitarian and creative ventures.
The Great Escape
The last, strange decade of Elizabeth’s life began with one of the most cataclysmic events in American history, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Michael Jackson was in New York, where he’d just given two concerts, on the 7th and 10th of September, at Madison Square Garden, to which he had brought two of his closest friends and idols: Marlon Brando and Elizabeth. His original idea had been for them to sit onstage like two great Easter Island figureheads flanking the show, but instead they sat in the audience. All three found themselves trapped in the city after the Twin Towers fell. Michael had gotten a call from friends in Saudi Arabia who warned that America was under attack. He hollered down the hallway of his hotel for everyone in his entourage, and for Brando, to leave immediately. Elizabeth was staying at another hotel, the St. Regis, a few blocks away. Now here’s where the story gets complicated. In one version, these three towering icons of American pop culture planned their escape, afraid that they would be the next target. Michael and Brando had trouble leaving their hotel garage because fans kept banging on the car windows, following them down the street, screaming. Unable to fly, they drove out of the city.
The actor Corey Feldman, whom Michael had befriended when Feldman was a child star, remembers that he and Michael had quarreled the previous night at Michael’s show, in Elizabeth’s dressing room backstage at Madison Square Garden. “Elizabeth hadn’t arrived yet, and then 9/11 happened. But I remember that [the next day] Michael was trying to get Elizabeth out! He was at first looking for a private jet,” Feldman recalls. “He wanted permission to fly out—but everything was surreal. I didn’t go with him.”
A former employee of Michael Jackson’s says that Michael, like General Washington, led his entourage to a temporary safe haven in New Jersey, before the three superstars took to the open road. “They actually got as far as Ohio—all three of them, in a car they drove themselves!” he recalls. Brando allegedly annoyed his traveling companions by insisting on stopping at nearly every KFC and Burger King they passed along the highway. One can only imagine the shock their appearance caused at gas stations and rest stops across America.
But one of Elizabeth’s close friends and assistants, who asks to remain anonymous, insists that Elizabeth did not flee New York with her two companions. “Elizabeth stayed behind,” he insists, “where she went to a church to pray, and she went to an armory where people were who couldn’t get home or who’d stayed behind to look for the missing. She also went down to Ground Zero, where she met with first responders. Eventually, the airports opened and she flew home.” She may well have done some of those things, though no reports surfaced in the media of sightings of Elizabeth Taylor ministering to the frightened and wounded or showing up at Ground Zero. But it was during and after the crisis that Elizabeth’s relationship with Michael—whom she already adored—deepened.
Their friendship was based, in part, on their both having been child stars, on their youth bartered away by their parents and the studios and managers who handled them. “He had one of the worst childhoods ever,” she once said about Michael. “I think I had the second.”
In a conversation with Elizabeth a few years ago, I confided that one of my favorites of her many movie roles was her luminous appearance, at age 11, in Jane Eyre as the little orphan Helen Burns, who has her beautiful hair cut off by the evil Mr. Brocklehurst, and who then heartbreakingly dies of consumption. “That’s Michael’s favorite role, too!” she shrieked in delight, and it made sense: the image of a lost and abandoned child dying beatifically on-screen. Michael Jackson had tried to re-do his childhood, in the fantasy world of Neverland Valley Ranch, in Los Olivos, California, and with his dangerous and foolish “sleepovers” with young boys. Elizabeth, who wed her seventh (and final) husband, construction worker Larry Fortensky, on the grounds of Neverland, in 1991, seemed to understand Jackson’s troubles, and she defended him throughout his salacious child-molestation trial.
A person close to Elizabeth recalls that “the only time I ever saw her put her foot down about Michael was when Marlon Brando’s son Miko, who was working as one of Michael’s bodyguards, was rounding up kids for Michael’s sleepovers. Elizabeth got wind of it, and she really came down hard. She knew it wasn’t right—she had grandchildren of her own—and that, even if they were the innocent little sleepovers Michael claimed, he was still on dangerous ground.”
Elizabeth agreed to be part of the television extravaganza called Michael Jackson: 30th Anniversary Celebration, which aired in November 2001. Enthroned onstage between the Gloved One and Macaulay Culkin, another child star whom Michael had taken under his wing, Elizabeth watched Liza Minnelli sing “You Are Not Alone.” One year later Michael and Elizabeth traveled to New York to attend the wedding of Minnelli to theatrical entrepreneur David Gest. Elizabeth was Liza’s co-matron of honor, but she kept the entire bridal party waiting for 45 minutes because she had left her shoes in the hotel. “We waited, of course,” Minnelli recalls with a laugh. “It was always worth the wait.”
Michael, in turn, worshipped Elizabeth. “She was like a wife and a mother to me,” he confided to Corey Feldman. His shrine to her at Neverland Valley Ranch was “like something you’d see in a church. She knew how opportunistic some people can be and how innocent about certain things Michael was, especially about sex,” says a friend and adviser. When Michael was called upon to give a public kiss to Lisa Marie Presley on the announcement of their ill-fated marriage, he came to Elizabeth to ask her the best way to kiss a girl. “He called Elizabeth,” a friend of the family recalls, “and asked her how she liked to be kissed.”
“As if you wanted to climb into the other person’s soul,” she answered.
Not only was he grateful for her loyalty and her support, Michael was also her biggest movie fan. “To Michael, Elizabeth was a saint, a goddess. And it’s tragic—all those surgeries [Michael had]. If you look closely, in the beginning, he’s trying to look like Elizabeth. His ruined face, his appearance, was a tribute to Elizabeth gone terribly wrong. I think he wanted it to be the greatest fan letter ever written.”
They called themselves “the House of Taylor.” They were a group, mostly of men, who saw to Elizabeth’s affairs and her well-being in the last decade of her life—Jason Winters, Erik Sterling, Stephen Roseberry, and Tim Mendelson. She and Mendelson were so close that when his mother was dying of liver cancer last year Elizabeth virtually turned part of her home into a hospice for her. Jason and Erik are the founding executives of Sterling Winters Management, a personal-management company that represents, among other people, Janet Jackson and Kathy Ireland. In fact, Ireland, a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, formed a friendship and business alliance with Elizabeth through Sterling Winters. The two women designed and sold costume jewelry for the House of Taylor. Elizabeth had always loved designing and creating beautiful things, and jewelry was an aphrodisiac for her.
The born-again, 48-year-old Ireland, married to a doctor since 1988, seemed an unlikely business partner for Elizabeth, who loved to swear and was known for her eight marriages. But Ireland adored her nonetheless. “She’s the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met,” Ireland said before Elizabeth’s final medical crisis. “She was always trying to get me to loosen up!” Once Elizabeth offered to donate $10,000 to the charity of Ireland’s choice if she would just say the word “fuck.” (She did and she did.)
Jason Winters became Elizabeth’s closest friend in the last years, so much so that rumors abounded in 2010 that he was going to be her eighth husband. Not so. “The rumors regarding my engagement simply aren’t true,” she tweeted in the spring of 2010. “Jason is my manager and dearest friend. I love him with all my heart.”
A few years before at an H.I.V. charity event, with Jason pushing her wheelchair along the red carpet, she was filmed howling an impassioned “Nooooo!” when asked if the two were engaged. It was played endlessly—on Entertainment Tonight and YouTube—but the undignified nature of the clip was a source of pain within the House of Taylor.
Winters’s story is remarkable, and Elizabeth herself was touched by it: born in the American South, Winters, now 51, is a completely self-made and highly successful business executive. His living room in his Palm Springs home is dominated by one of Andy Warhol’s famous silkscreens of Elizabeth. His deep voice and his considerable charisma remind one of the actor James Earl Jones, another friend of Elizabeth’s.
After the failure of her marriage to Fortensky, in 1996, Elizabeth was deeply discouraged. Jason and Tim, and José Eber, her hairdresser of 28 years, helped bring her out of her depression, flirting with her, making her feel loved, and making her laugh. “Let’s face it,” one of Elizabeth’s friends and a frequent visitor to Nimes Road told Vanity Fair, “gay men helped keep her alive for the last 10 years. And the gay community kept her stardom alive. They made her an icon at a time when a lot of people didn’t care.”
Elizabeth often traveled to Hawaii with Jason and Erik, staying at their home. That’s where Elizabeth was introduced to a pastime that she described as one of the most thrilling in a life crowded with thrills: swimming with sharks. Not satisfied with six decades of tangling with the sharks of the movie industry, Elizabeth decided to go face-to-face with the real thing, a testament to her fearlessness. In August 2006, at age 74, she had herself lifted from her wheelchair and lowered into a Plexiglas shark cage. Before taking the plunge into the Pacific, Elizabeth, clad only in a white T-shirt over a one-piece bathing suit, and wearing lots of bangles, spat into her goggles like a pro and bit onto her snorkel. When the tour guide cautioned her to remove her jewelry because their flash and glitter would drive the sharks into a frenzy, Elizabeth reportedly answered, “Isn’t that the fucking point?”
While it’s now de rigueur for celebrities to launch their own signature scents, Elizabeth was one of the first, in 1987. Since its introduction in 1991, White Diamonds has earned more than $1 billion in revenue.
“The garden was her inspiration,” recalls Tamara Steele, senior vice president of global fragrance marketing at Elizabeth Arden, where Elizabeth developed her perfumes, including the best-selling White Diamonds, Black Pearls, Violet Eyes, and several others. “Her home was her fragrance headquarters.” Steele, who worked with Elizabeth for 12 years, would be ushered into the living room to sit at the round table and discuss designs for the packaging. “She was a savvy and astute businesswoman, a delight to work with,” says Steele. “She knew her jewels, and the palettes and the colors were the basis of the design of her bottles.”
In the last years of Elizabeth’s life, Steele closely collaborated with her on Violet Eyes, which was launched in 2010. But Elizabeth was at first reluctant to use the name, because it had been one of Richard Burton’s private names for her, so she asked her fans on Twitter. They loved it, and so she agreed.
José Eber remembers accompanying Elizabeth on the first of her press tours, in 1987, to launch Passion. “It was beyond what you would see in your life,” he recalls. “Five to ten thousand people in department stores! It was unbelievable. It was like rock ’n’ roll.” One thing she insisted on keeping from the press, however, was that at every stop on the tour Elizabeth slipped away to visit a hospice for H.I.V./AIDS patients. “It was never done for the wrong reason. Nobody knew about it,” says Eber.
From Actress to Activist
The transformation of Elizabeth Taylor, movie star and breathtaking beauty, into Elizabeth Taylor, humanitarian and AIDS activist, began in 1985 with the death of her good friend Rock Hudson. Heartbroken and furious that the Reagan administration was ignoring this mysterious, blood-borne disease, Elizabeth began to speak out. One of her friends noted, “When Rock Hudson died, we all knew it was AIDS, but it was painful to watch him deny it. And I think Elizabeth got that. She sensed his shame and thought it was wrong.” That year she founded the National AIDS Research Foundation to raise funds to find a cure for H.I.V.
Dr. Mathilde Krim, the eminent research scientist at Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York, who had already launched the AIDS Medical Foundation, recognized that “you cannot have two competing AIDS networks,” recalls Susan Martin, an arts publicist who was then a press liaison for Dr. Krim’s foundation. “So Elizabeth merged her foundation with ours, and suddenly everything changed. At the time, Dr. Krim couldn’t get arrested! She couldn’t get a major magazine to cover us. Newsweek? Time? Nothing! They were still calling it the gay plague.’ But when Rock Hudson died and Elizabeth Taylor started to speak out, it changed everything. I remember Dr. Krim saying, I can’t get my friends to write a check with the word “AIDS” on it!’ With Elizabeth Taylor, we suddenly had funds, media coverage, and understanding.”
Spencer Cox, an activist who worked for the combined organization, AmFAR, in 1990 and 1991, recognized that “Elizabeth Taylor was one of the few things we had we could leverage for support. She was deeply committed. She knew what she brought to the table: People will pay good money to see how much I weigh or what color my eyes are,’ she said.”
As Cox says, “At a time when no one was helping, just to see her appear on national TV, embracing Rock Hudson,” changed the game. “This was when people were afraid to touch or be near people with AIDS, such as Ryan White,” the teenage hemophiliac from Indiana who contracted H.I.V. through a blood transfusion and was banned from attending middle school. In 1990, Elizabeth testified before Congress to raise awareness of the disease and to help pass the Ryan White Care Act, which prevented discrimination against people with H.I.V. Congressmen and senators who were opposed to taking on such a controversial subject left the hearings completely persuaded—and dazzled—by Elizabeth Taylor. Orrin Hatch, the staunch Republican from Utah, left the hearings grinning like a schoolboy who had just been kissed by the prom queen. He voted for the bill.
Michael Iskowitz, who was Senator Edward Kennedy’s chief counsel on H.I.V. from 1986 to l992, says, “You could explain to the senators who Angelina Jolie is—but no one had to explain who Elizabeth was. She was it for them,” he recalls. “I’ve seen many celebrities come to the Hill to appear before Congress, but absolutely no one had the effect that she did. No one wouldn’t take a call from her. She also followed through on the bills and even all the amendments. Other celebrities come to the Hill to initiate legislation, and you never heard from them again. Not Elizabeth.”
She relied on every trick she’d learned in her long, storied career as a femme fatale. She’d call the Republican cloakroom, and senators would pass the phone to one another “just to hear her voice,” says Iskowitz. She courted recalcitrant legislators with lavender-scented notes saying, “I think you should see this”—“this” being detailed information about H.I.V. that ordinarily they’d never read.
Queen of West Hollywood
Just as her younger team at the House of Taylor had introduced Elizabeth to Twitter, with their help she also began frequenting the gay bars of West Hollywood, particularly the Abbey, on North Robertson off Santa Monica Boulevard, which became her favorite watering hole. Elizabeth began going to the bar about five years ago, showing up at dusk “before the scene got too crazy.” The first time, the club’s official greeter, Jesse Davis, called the bar’s owner, David Cooley, and said, “ You won’t believe it, but Elizabeth Taylor is here!’ ” recalls Cooley. “So I shaved and showered and came down to the pub. Sometimes she came in with only her nurse and her driver, and sometimes with the guys.”
Elizabeth had always been drawn to gay men, since developing a close friendship with Montgomery Clift, in 1949, on the set of George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun. The press gushed at the possibility that these two incomparably beautiful beings might marry—but even as an 18-year-old, inexperienced with men, Elizabeth sensed instinctively that Monty “knew that he was meant to be with a man, not a woman.” She later said that, had they married, she would have had a “massively broken heart.”
Years before, Elizabeth had begun a lifelong friendship with Roddy McDowall, who co-starred with her in Lassie Come Home and The White Cliffs of Dover, and she was there for Roddy as he came to a full acceptance of who he was. With Rock Hudson, whom she got to know well on the set of the George Stevens movie Giant, she shared a love of chocolate martinis. Such intimate friendships were, perhaps, the only way that Elizabeth, the object of so much desire, could relax in the company of men.
For a person like Elizabeth, who loved change and excitement, the exuberant, theatrical scene at the Abbey was a tonic. When her spirits flagged, she’d bask in the adulation of her most ardent fans. Stepping into the bar for her must have been like stepping into her glamorous past. Even wheelchair-bound, she managed to table-hop. “She’d take her straw out of her watermelon martini and stick it in your drink, and in that flirty little-girl voice she still had, she’d say, What’s that you’re drinking? May I taste that?’ ” Cooley remembers. “Or she’d say, You’re so handsome—come sit with us.’ And she’d ask personal questions. She’d ask if you were seeing anyone, if you had any love in your life.”
She had wanted to go for Halloween one year, but Cooley discouraged her because “there were just too many people. The Abbey was wall-to-wall. I said, Elizabeth, it’s just not safe. If you show up, there may be a riot. And, anyway, there are six of you here already!’ It was true. The patrons had come dressed as Cleopatra, as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and even Martha from Virginia Woolf. So she didn’t show up.”
Elizabeth bonded with Jesse, the exuberant “ambassador of the Abbey.” As her health worsened, Jesse recalls, she stopped drinking alcohol and they would drink tea when she summoned him to Nimes Road. “Once she said, Well, let’s go into my jewelry closet,’ ” and she dressed Jesse up in her diamonds and rubies. “She’d call Tim to bring certain jewels in, because obviously there was a security issue there. She’d dress me up in a couple of million-dollar rubies one day, and she’d go, Oh, you look exquisite!’ We had such a good time.” Another time she brought out about 30 jeweled crosses and took delight in explaining each piece and who had given it to her.
“You don’t think of someone being a true lady throwing the F-bomb’ or talking dirty,” Jesse says. “I’d ask her all kinds of things, like Who had the biggest dick?’ and she would say, ’Jesse, I can’t believe you asked me that—but I’m so glad you did.”
To the end Elizabeth was a perfectionist when it came to her hair and makeup. “She was brilliant in applying her makeup, a true artist,” says José Eber. “The way she would do her eyes, the way she would blend those different colors of eye shadows, the different blending of lipsticks. She was very passionate about it. She’d been surrounded by the best in the business, and she’d learned amazing tricks from them.”
She also loved to cut hair—her own and others’ as well. “She got so much joy out of it, I ended up giving her professional scissors,” José recalls. She had loved cutting Richard Burton’s hair, and one of her favorite photographs, kept in her makeup room, was Henry Grossman’s shot of her trimming Burton’s hair backstage during the Broadway run of Hamlet.
Few people knew that Elizabeth “started to go prematurely gray very, very young,” according to José. “When it grew back [after surgery for a benign brain tumor, in 1997], her hair was snow white. It was the most stunning thing. At first she decided to keep it—the color was striking, and 100 percent natural. Again, like everything else, she was in command of her own style, in charge of her own appearance. And why shouldn’t she be? After all, she’s Elizabeth Taylor!” But then she saw a photograph of herself and thought, I look like a snowball! She called José and said, “I think it’s time to do something with my hair.” That’s when, for a time, she went blond.
Just after the brain surgery, she suffered a small stroke, and medication left her at times sounding fuzzy and disoriented. As a presenter at the 2001 Golden Globe Awards ceremony, she looked wonderful but seemed confused. She went right for the envelope to announce the winner, forgetting to read the names of the films nominated for best drama. Dick Clark, the master of ceremonies, darted onstage to help her. “I’m new at this,” she said, laughing at herself and completely winning over the audience. But her appearance did lead to speculation that she was drunk or perhaps in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. In 2004 she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and she was seen in public only twice that year—for a party, and for a dinner at Spago.
As she retreated more into her private life, she had to deal with two lawsuits. In 2003, her gardener, Willem Van Muyden, filed a nasty lawsuit against her in Los Angeles Superior Court, seeking damages for “emotional distress” after being fired, he claimed, for rebuffing the sexual advances of Elizabeth’s butler at the time, Jean-Luc Lacquement.
Van Muyden claimed that he was fired without ever having been paid for 10 years of work on the garden that Elizabeth so loved. He believed Lacquement had persuaded Elizabeth to fire him because he was not gay. He also claimed that the butler had been “servicing” Elizabeth but was having trouble in that department, so Van Muyden suggested he try Viagra. He claimed that Elizabeth gave her butler a $25,000 watch and a BMW. The suit was dismissed in June of 2004, with Taylor’s representatives calling Van Muyden’s claims “complete fiction,” and the whole sordid mess was settled out of court.
That same year, on October 13, she was sued by Andrew Orkin under the Holocaust Victims Redress Act in an attempt to recover View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Rémy, by van Gogh, a painting she loved that had been bought for her by her father, an art dealer, for $257,500 in 1963. Orkin and three of his relatives claimed that their great-grandmother had been forced by the Nazis to sell the painting, but Elizabeth prevailed in the lawsuit. It was a low blow for her, however, as she was proud of her Jewish identity and was a lifelong supporter of Israel, having converted to Judaism to marry Eddie Fisher in 1959.
By 2006 her ongoing health woes and a dearth of public appearances fueled tabloid gossip that she was again near death. She went on The Larry King Show on CNN that year, in part to dispel those rumors. At one point she said, “Oh come on, do I look like I’m dying? Do I look like or sound like I have Alzheimer’s?”
In December 2007, Elizabeth made her last theatrical appearance, in A. R. Gurney’s epistolary play, Love Letters, with James Earl Jones, in a charity performance to raise funds for mobile AIDS units (similar to the ones she had donated to New Orleans for H.I.V./AIDS patients in the wake of Katrina). When she was wheeled onstage that night, she was met by a thunderous standing ovation. Liz Smith, the syndicated columnist and Elizabeth’s longtime friend and champion, noted that if the crowd at first cheered her “for her history and courage,” by the end of the play their standing ovation was for Elizabeth the actress.
Michael Jackson’s sudden death in June 2009 affected her deeply. Her household had been packing her bags for a trip to London, where she was going to appear at the opening of Michael’s world tour, when the terrible news reached her. Shrieks could be heard from her upstairs bedroom. She later wrote to her fans on Twitter, “My heart … my mind … are broken. I loved Michael with all my soul, and I can’t imagine life without him.” She was invited to speak at Michael’s memorial at the Staples Center, in Los Angeles, but she demurred, telling her fans, “I just don’t believe that Michael would want me to share my grief with millions of others. How I feel is between us … and I cannot guarantee that I would be coherent to say a word.”
Although she didn’t attend his public funeral, she did go to his private burial at Forest Lawn. “I only met Elizabeth once,” remembers Corey Feldman, “at Michael’s funeral. I’d heard how she’d reacted to his death, how she’d gone off, crazy with grief. But she had flowers in her lap that she was going to place on the coffin, and she seemed very composed.” Waiting in line to use the ladies’ room, Feldman’s then wife, Susie, found herself waiting next to Elizabeth. “You’re Elizabeth Taylor,” she said. “You don’t have to wait.” “Honey,” Elizabeth replied, “if there weren’t so many people around, I’d go in the sink.”
Giving Beauty Back
After Michael’s death, the spirit seemed to go out of Elizabeth. She told her closest friends, “My life feels so empty.” In April 2010, she flew to London for the last time, accompanied by Tim Mendelson and several of her children, in what would turn out to be a farewell visit. She stayed at the Dorchester hotel, where at the height of their scandalous affair she and Burton had become the world’s most infamous lovers. She threw a celebratory dinner in her suite, at which she drank several glasses of Louis Roederer Cristal champagne.
But the central purpose of her trip was to attend a royal gala at Buckingham Palace honoring Richard Burton, on the naming of the Richard Burton Theatre at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, in Cardiff, Wales. Elizabeth appeared in her wheelchair in a sparkling, fire-engine-red, loose-fitting gown, a guest of His Royal Highness Prince Charles. Wiping away tears, she honored Burton with the words “Richard would have been deeply touched by this great honor, as am I.”
Just before she left for London, Elizabeth sat for her last photo shoot. Firooz Zahedi, a friend of 25 years, was there to take her portrait for Vanity Fair. Zahedi had first met Elizabeth when she was romantically involved with his cousin Ardeshir Zahedi, the Iranian ambassador in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s. Elizabeth had encouraged Firooz to pursue his interest in art, against his family’s wishes, and took him with her to Hollywood when she resumed her acting career after her seventh marriage, to Senator John Warner, ended.
In the last years, Zahedi and Elizabeth would dine out occasionally in Beverly Hills. At Le Dome, on Sunset Boulevard, they once noticed a party of diners seated nearby—two older men and a woman plus two very young blonde women, “dressed a little too scantily,” recalls Zahedi. “We were trying to guess what their story was, and Elizabeth said, O.K., so those guys are from out of town, and that woman has found them those two girls, and you can figure out the rest of it …’ ”
One of the men suddenly got up and approached Elizabeth’s table. “Oh, shit, they’ve heard us!” Elizabeth whispered. The man said, “ Hi, Elizabeth. You probably don’t know me, but you were married to my uncle [Conrad Hilton Jr.].’ The two young girls were Paris Hilton and her sister, and those were her parents and a friend of theirs!”
Elizabeth did not relish the idea of her last photo session. “She was not comfortable in sittings anymore, she didn’t like getting all dressed up and made up for a photo shoot,” Zahedi recalls, but she said, “Vanity Fair is doing an article about Richard and me, so I’ll do it. I’ll do it for Richard.”
They planned to do the shoot in her living room, just before she had to leave for the airport to attend the commemoration in London of the Richard Burton Theatre. But when José Eber was delayed, Elizabeth decided to cancel the shoot. Tim Mendelson came downstairs to give Zahedi the bad news.
The photographer had brought Elizabeth a gift, knowing that she liked tributes from her friends and admirers. He went upstairs to give it to her—it was a rare Jean Howard photograph of Richard Burton. He unwrapped it for her while she was applying her makeup, and she glanced over at it.
“It’s Paul!” she cried. “Paul Newman!”
“I said, It’s not Paul Newman’”
“Bring it closer.”
She looked at it and went back to doing her makeup. She then said, “O.K. I’ll come down and do the photo.”
She came downstairs “wearing jeans, rolled up, with her cowboy boots. She had her own style—either you got it, or you didn’t.” Zahedi shot about 10 or 15 exposures, with a digital camera and an old-fashioned film camera. “I thanked her, kissed her, and walked her to the car, and off she went.”
When Elizabeth died, she left a fortune estimated at $1 billion, much of it from her perfume empire. Her jewels alone are worth $150 million. Each of her four children stands to inherit $100 million. Elizabeth’s long-cherished wish to be buried near Richard Burton in Celigny, Switzerland, was not to be. Sally Burton, Richard’s widow, had already bought the gravesite next to his. To avoid a lengthy and expensive battle, she left wishes instead to be buried near Michael Jackson in the Great Mausoleum, in Forest Lawn Cemetery, in Glendale, California. She also lifted the spirits of her mourners by arranging to be 15 minutes late for her own funeral, ever true to her lifelong reputation for keeping people waiting. Years earlier, in 1965, Elizabeth had been late for her own wedding to Richard Burton. “I swear she’ll be late for the Last Judgment,” Burton had said.
According to Jewish custom, she was buried within 48 hours of her death, on March 23, 2011. Her casket was draped with gardenias, violets, and lilies of the valley. Among those at the gravesite was the 34-year-old Irish actor Colin Farrell, one of the chosen few who had visited Elizabeth in the hospital just before her death. She adored the rakish actor and once paid him the supreme compliment of saying he was the reincarnation of Richard Burton. According to her wishes, Farrell read one of Burton’s favorite poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” with the lines:
In a rare interview, with Vanity Fair, Elizabeth Taylor’s second-oldest son, Christopher, remarked that what he learned from his mother was “to be expansive with compassion and generosity, to be open-minded and fair. She taught this entirely by example. She was absolutely fearless in standing up, without hesitation, for those she felt were being treated unfairly, whether it was a close friend, a crew member on one of her films, or an entire class of people.” But perhaps Richard Burton said it best years ago: “You haven’t lived unless you’ve known Elizabeth.”