Elizabeth Taylor the woman

Does Elizabeth Taylor's Death Signify the End of Big Romance?

Beings I was born in 1943, I grew up in the era where there were still movie star magazines. They were called things like Photoplay and confidential something or other. They ran the gamut from scandal sheets to publicity stills the studios wanted out. My aunt subscribed to some of them which were handed off to me when she'd finish them. I absolutely loved the stories, the photos, the glamor even if it was posed. Some of the magazines sought the star missteps (if the studios couldn't buy off the reporters) but this was before hoards of paparazzi became so much a factor in revealing every misstep or suggestion of cellulite.

Those were the days when most of the movies on television were late night fare and began after the late evening news-- before Jack Parr and then Johnny Carson changed nighttime network television forever. I saw so many movies that way-- many with Elizabeth Taylor. One of my favorites from when she was young was Elephant Walk which isn't really all that talked about when considering her big films. I liked her character in that film and the complexity it revealed about life and our choices. She was so beautiful but then she always was for her whole life and frankly I don't think she had surgeries to do it. It didn't look like she had.

My experience with glamor was not in my personal life, growing up on a farm, but from stories from my parents' lives (they did have more 'glamorous lives before children and farms), old movies, and those magazines. Elizabeth Taylor was a part of the last two. I grew up knowing about her life on a movie star magazine level. She seemed much older than me and only later did I realize she was only 12 years older which seems like nothing now.

Except it was a lot given the differences between our life experiences-- mine being very sheltered and hers out in the world where she was a movie star from childhood. Everything about her was bigger than life. She was, however, a prime example of those to whom much is given much will be asked.

There were marriages that didn't work out. One that seemed it had; then her husband was killed and the public grieved with the young widow who would birth his child only after his death. Then came the first scandal. How could she take that innocent young woman's husband? Oh wait, Elizabeth nearly died, all is forgiven. Oh wait, another husband into her snare or was it her into his? Not forgive. Forgiven. Interest through it all never died.

Personally I found her more interesting as her life appeared more complex. It didn't make me angry that she took another woman's husband. First I wasn't that sure a woman could do that without the man being in on the deal. Second, I was high on the idea of the kind of love that broke all the rules.

Most of what fascinated me weren't the stories about a movie star. They weren't about her extreme wealth and all that jewelry. They were about a life and how it was being lived to the hilt on every level. And that is the appeal of it today. The fancy photos around a swimming pool, pfffft, but a woman who lives life fully, with no apologies, now that's a story worth following and many of us did right to the end.

Truman Capote on Elizabeth Taylor

A line from that article, one said by Taylor, probably puts best what I felt about her and that love affair with Burton, a love affair that never ended even though they really couldn't work out the happily ever after part. Capote was tying it together from an earlier time before she had met Burton where she had told him she wondered what she would find, what was waiting out there that would change her whole life.

This meeting with Capote came after she had been married to Burton about five or six years. She knew how it was with him, the good and the bad. She also knew he had fulfilled that question she had asked. She said--

“Well, what do you think?” But it was a question with an answer already prepared. “What do you suppose will become of us? I guess, when you find what you’ve always wanted, that’s not where the beginning begins, that’s where the end starts.”

Great love affairs are often not really happy ones, at least not of the happily ever after sort. I can think of many such examples, but Burton and Taylor, well it's the one that fascinates still.

The end of their physical relationship wasn't the end of their love nor of her passionate approach to life. Not for Elizabeth would be sitting in shrouds and waiting for the end. She went on with a continued desire to practice her art, nurture her children, her pets, work on causes that mattered to the world, like recognition of AIDS, take risks in life and love, and continue to love him to the end as he apparently would her. Perhaps that love affair, those fiery years with him, perhaps those were the fuel for the rest.

To me, above all the rest, was that woman who gave it all up for love but didn't let it ruin her life and was willing to walk away when it wasn't healthy. That is such a life example. She was capable of risking it all to reach out but also to know when to let it go. That's the woman I find most fascinating.