The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice by M. G. Lord
Authors: M. G. Lord
Tags: United States, General, Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Biography, Performing Arts, Film & Video, Television, Motion Picture Actors and Actresses, Motion Picture Actors and Actresses - United States, Taylor; Elizabeth
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caused injuries. But her shooting schedule didn’t permit adequate leisure for them to heal. In 1957, after accidentally tumbling down some stairs, she underwent a four-hour surgery at New York’s Harkness Pavilion to fuse the crushed disks in her spine. Her then-consort Mike Todd did his best to make her stay pleasurable. He installed himself in the room next door and purchased a Renoir, a Pissarro, a Monet, and a Frans Hals to liven up her joyless hospital walls. So blissful, in fact, was her doctor-ordered sojourn that within the year—and not long after delivering her daughter, Liza, by cesarean section—Taylor arranged for an unnecessary appendectomy. This time she booked Todd into the adjoining suite and forbade him to leave until she had recovered.
In his memoir, Eddie Fisher writes with odd wistfulness of his time with Taylor and its glamorous backdrops: a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a suite at the Park Lane in Manhattan, quarters designed by Oliver Messel at the Dorchester in London—as well as emergency rooms on two continents. As I read his descriptions, I began to understand. When I needed a break from this manuscript, I stayed at a hotel. But when you live in a hotel, where do you go to escape? To the hospital.
This is only half-facetious. As a child, Taylor supported her parents financially. After Todd’s death, she supported her children—by herself. To survive, her family depended on her; and to support them, Taylor depended on her appearance. She couldn’t look puffy or haggard on screen. She had to look fantastic—or in any event, thin. If her director told her to smile, she had to radiate sunshine. She had to dredge within herself to play a scene with feeling. She was always going, going, going. But if she became really sick—sick enough to die—the carousel stopped. A dead star could derail a film and cost a studio money. In sickness, she could escape her burdens. In sickness, she could rest.
Fisher recounts one harrowing near-death experience after another. While shooting BUtterfield 8 , Taylor fell prey to pneumonia and could barely breathe. Passed out from cold medication, she was whisked on a stretcher from the Park Lane to Harkness Pavilion. As the ambulance approached the emergency room, however, Fisher recalls, Taylor sat up, rummaged for a compact, and handed Fisher her purse. “Get me my lip gloss,” she ordered.
As soon as Taylor recovered from pneumonia, she again went to a hospital—this time as a visitor to Fisher’s ailing mother in Philadelphia. But the pull of the ER proved irresistible. Before returning to New York, Taylor slipped on some ice, sprained her ankle, and received emergency treatment. She left Philadelphia on crutches.
After many illness-related delays, BUtterfield 8 finally wrapped. In September 1960, Taylor and Fisher settled in London, where Cleopatra was to be filmed. England was good for Taylor’s financial health. For tax reasons, she had demanded that the movie be shot there. But the damp air was bad for her lungs. Almost as soon as she moved into the Dorchester she got sick.
Taylor was not popular in London. Tabloids continued to blame her for Fisher’s divorce. Worse, she offended the British hairdresser’s union, which staged a strike on the set of Cleopatra . She had demanded that Sidney Guilaroff, her MGM stylist, be permitted to arrange her hair for the movie. The Brits were furious. What was so special about her hair that they couldn’t comb it?
Nor, as Rouben Mamoulian, Cleopatra ’s director, discovered, was London in winter a plausible substitute for Alexandria, Egypt, at any time of the year. Wanger had palm trees flown in from Hollywood to make Pinewood Studios resemble Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, but he could do nothing about the bitter cold and fog. Peter Finch, who had been cast as Julius Caesar, and Stephen Boyd, who had been cast as Mark Antony, shivered beneath their metal breastplates. Taylor coughed and wheezed in
In his memoir, Eddie Fisher writes with odd wistfulness of his time with Taylor and its glamorous backdrops: a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a suite at the Park Lane in Manhattan, quarters designed by Oliver Messel at the Dorchester in London—as well as emergency rooms on two continents. As I read his descriptions, I began to understand. When I needed a break from this manuscript, I stayed at a hotel. But when you live in a hotel, where do you go to escape? To the hospital.
This is only half-facetious. As a child, Taylor supported her parents financially. After Todd’s death, she supported her children—by herself. To survive, her family depended on her; and to support them, Taylor depended on her appearance. She couldn’t look puffy or haggard on screen. She had to look fantastic—or in any event, thin. If her director told her to smile, she had to radiate sunshine. She had to dredge within herself to play a scene with feeling. She was always going, going, going. But if she became really sick—sick enough to die—the carousel stopped. A dead star could derail a film and cost a studio money. In sickness, she could escape her burdens. In sickness, she could rest.
Fisher recounts one harrowing near-death experience after another. While shooting BUtterfield 8 , Taylor fell prey to pneumonia and could barely breathe. Passed out from cold medication, she was whisked on a stretcher from the Park Lane to Harkness Pavilion. As the ambulance approached the emergency room, however, Fisher recalls, Taylor sat up, rummaged for a compact, and handed Fisher her purse. “Get me my lip gloss,” she ordered.
As soon as Taylor recovered from pneumonia, she again went to a hospital—this time as a visitor to Fisher’s ailing mother in Philadelphia. But the pull of the ER proved irresistible. Before returning to New York, Taylor slipped on some ice, sprained her ankle, and received emergency treatment. She left Philadelphia on crutches.
After many illness-related delays, BUtterfield 8 finally wrapped. In September 1960, Taylor and Fisher settled in London, where Cleopatra was to be filmed. England was good for Taylor’s financial health. For tax reasons, she had demanded that the movie be shot there. But the damp air was bad for her lungs. Almost as soon as she moved into the Dorchester she got sick.
Taylor was not popular in London. Tabloids continued to blame her for Fisher’s divorce. Worse, she offended the British hairdresser’s union, which staged a strike on the set of Cleopatra . She had demanded that Sidney Guilaroff, her MGM stylist, be permitted to arrange her hair for the movie. The Brits were furious. What was so special about her hair that they couldn’t comb it?
Nor, as Rouben Mamoulian, Cleopatra ’s director, discovered, was London in winter a plausible substitute for Alexandria, Egypt, at any time of the year. Wanger had palm trees flown in from Hollywood to make Pinewood Studios resemble Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, but he could do nothing about the bitter cold and fog. Peter Finch, who had been cast as Julius Caesar, and Stephen Boyd, who had been cast as Mark Antony, shivered beneath their metal breastplates. Taylor coughed and wheezed in
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