The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (51 page)

In July 1992 Elizabeth attended the Eighth International Conference on AIDS in Amsterdam. When demonstrators from the radical gay organization ACT UP saw her, they began yelling, “Act up, Liz. Act up.” She thought, “Well, you’ve got the right girl. Worry not, I
will
.” At a crowded 11 a.m. press conference, after only two hours’ sleep and suffering from flu, she denounced the U.S. government for imposing immigration restrictions on AIDS victims, slamming into President George Bush. “I don’t think President Bush is doing anything at all about AIDS,” she said. “In fact, I’m not even sure if he knows how to spell ‘AIDS.’” According to
Vanity Fair
, “It was the A-I-D-S shot heard round the world, front page news from Tokyo to Washington.” At a press conference the next day, the medical reporter from CNN told her that the Bush administration would not be “browbeaten by movie stars or anyone else on their AIDS policies.” Elizabeth asked, “Who said that?” The reporter replied that the announcement had come from Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan. “I wasn’t addressing my remarks to him,” she said. “I was addressing my remarks to the President.”
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From late July to the end of September 1992, while on the road promoting White Diamonds, she put on twenty pounds, and when she returned to Bel Air, she added another four pounds. Part of the problem was her kitchen staff. Her longtime chef Penny Newfield had departed over the summer of 1992, and Elizabeth had hired Ladoris Jackson, a middle-aged whiz at rich Southern cooking. While Penny had been calorie-conscious and reluctant to give Elizabeth fatty foods, Ladoris served fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, lobster dishes, pork roasts, and peach cobbler with whipped cream. After Elizabeth’s weight gain, Larry ordered Ladoris to start preparing low-cal, low-fat dishes, but Ladoris explained she wasn’t trained in lean cuisine. The Fortenskys let her go and hired a new cook, Derick Duke, a nonfat specialist who gave them soybeans, tofu, fish, and eight glasses of water a day. Soon Elizabeth was on her way to the trim 110 she’d weighed on the day she’d married Larry.
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On June 19, 1994, she had her left hip-replacement operation. Later, to her horror, she realized one of her legs was shorter than the other, and she had an exaggerated limp. She would have to undergo a total of three hip operations. “I learned to walk as a baby,” she said. “Why did I have to learn all over again—in my sixties?” As she attempted to recover from surgery with the help of a physical therapist, her life was one of unrelieved domestic strain. A friend noted that her marriage went on the rocks after the first hip replacement, when she began “picking fights.” Larry was equally responsible, bitching that she was sick all the time, couldn’t have sex, and generally was “too much trouble.” Observed one friend, “They shout first and think later.” When she’d told David Frost after Richard’s death, “We had a ball fighting,” she seemed to forget that their fights were so unbearable they divorced each other twice. Her arguments with Larry grew even more vitriolic after the second hip operation in June. Her only source of comfort now was the serenity she found on the outdoor walking trail at 700 Nimes Road.
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Though she was months recovering in physical therapy, it was difficult to get doctors to prescribe painkillers, due to drawn-out investigations into her drug use. As she struggled to learn to walk again, Larry was not supportive and even poked fun, calling her a “cripple.” He spent his leisure time with hardhat friends, giving up any pretense of trying to fit into her Bel Air life. According to Kelly Matzinger, Elizabeth turned “moody and stopped having sex with him . . . She even remodeled the guest room and moved him in there alone for three years.” There was so little contact between them that she finally resorted to leaving Post-It notes at strategic points in the house, asking, “Did you shave today?” “Are you going to get up this morning?” “Please spend time with me today?”
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Sexually stymied, she began a dangerous eating binge at his fortieth birthday party, held at a soul-food restaurant, and started to regain all the weight she’d taken off.

Though Elizabeth is not reflective and abhors analyzing feelings and relationships, she found herself, as Mrs. Larry Fortensky, dragooned into going to a marriage counselor. “I thought, ‘Why not? I’ll try anything,’” she recalled. But she was at a distinct disadvantage: Larry knew the counselor well, having sought help during marital crises with previous wives. “They had a conversation which had become a sort of code,” Elizabeth said. “I felt left out. But we did it. Got into the car. Did it. Then we wouldn’t speak until the next appointment.”
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Her marriage having soured, she proved to be particularly testy and even litigious when she discovered that a new biography was portraying her as a battered wife, the victim of male abuse. Though it was true, she feared that anything but a romantic image of herself would jeopardize her perfume line. She lodged a $10 million lawsuit against the Carol Publishing Group, publisher of David Heymann’s
Liz
; against the author himself; and against Lester Persky and NBC, who were planning a miniseries based on her life. She had vanquished ABC a dozen years previously when the network announced a Taylor biopic. Heymann’s book alleged that she’d been beaten by Nicky Hilton, Mike Todd, and Richard Burton. Despite her later admissions of abuse at the hands of her father and Nicky, she charged that such allegations would damage her business enterprises and diminish the worth of the rights to her life should she decide to sell them herself. After all, she said, she was her own “commodity.” An L.A. Superior Court judge ruled her case “unconstitutional.”
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For once in her life, she came out of a clash with the establishment looking bad. Obviously, when the principles of a free democracy came into conflict with the Elizabeth Taylor industry, she was willing to sacrifice those principles, but she was proved wrong.

It was a timely reminder to a public ready to canonize her as AIDS’s Mother Theresa that she was, after all, only human. Producer Ed Ditterline recalled, “I was setting up an entertainment connected with one of her perfume lines. She is a complete control freak right down to the last detail, and I went to her suite at the Plaza to discuss some promotional point or other. She had been on a huge binge and looked like a Moroccan whore. She was wearing a sheer lavender nightgown, and I could see huge, horrendous scars, horrifying. The suite was a shambles, incredible squalor—dog shit everywhere, and what looked like dinner trays and leftovers for about eight meals because she wouldn’t let the maids in until she was ready to. Though pets are not allowed in the hotel, they would let her do anything she wanted to, bring a horse in if she liked, just to have Elizabeth Taylor as a guest. Liz screamed at me over a minor issue. I hadn’t been given proper instructions about how a glass of water was to be positioned on the podium, and she exploded and called me a ‘motherfucking asshole.’ I burst into tears. She was so shocked by my reaction that she stopped and walked away.”

Since she had begun her career with Alfalfa Switzer in a 1942 screwball comedy, it made an odd kind of sense, despite three Oscars, for her final film to be
The
Flintstones
, a spin-off of the popular cartoon strip, starring John Goodman and Rosie O’Donnell. Elizabeth played Fred Flintstone’s cranky mother-in-law, Pearl Slaghoople, and hard-core Elizabeth Taylor fans cringed when John Goodman’s character called her “a dried-up old fossil,” but the film grossed a whopping $130 million.
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Part of her deal stipulated that proceeds from the premiere go to ETAF. Rosie told Elizabeth, “I love your perfume.”
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She continued to take on occasional TV assignments, doing a voice-over on
The Simpsons
and playing herself in the CBS sitcoms
The Nanny
and
Murphy Brown
, mostly in an effort to promote her sluggish new fragrance, Black Pearls.

Sara died on September 11, 1994, in the Rancho Mirage condo that Elizabeth had given her. Her last years had been spent playing bridge with Zsa Zsa Gabor’s mother Jolie and being escorted by numerous gay men, mostly actors she’d met at MGM who were now retired and living in the same complex at the Sunrise Country Club. Elizabeth had always provided generously for her mother, hiring a family to look after her and installing them in an adjoining condo. Sara was buried next to Francis in Westwood. Though Sara had driven her too hard in her youth, Elizabeth was grateful for the sturdy stock she sprang from, remarking, “My mother lived to be ninety-nine. I have good genes.”

Good genes or bad, she was back in St. John’s Hospital in 1995, this time for treatment of arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat. Alone at Nimes Road, Larry called up masseuses and enjoyed total body rubs, including sex. “He told me it was the greatest thing in the world,” said Matzinger, “and Liz paid for it.”
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When Elizabeth returned, he holed up in his bachelor’s quarters to escape her carping. A bundle of contradictions, Larry readily accepted Elizabeth’s gifts of a motorcycle and a sport car, but objected to the public’s perception of him as a kept man, though that was precisely what he’d permitted himself to become. In August, after he went out without Elizabeth and didn’t return until the next afternoon, she at last kicked him out. He stripped his quarters bare, including carpet and curtains, and drove away. Elizabeth was sixty-three, Larry forty-three. When their trial separation was announced in mid-September 1995, L.A. socialite Wendy Goldberg said, “We were all surprised that she would marry him.”
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Filing a divorce action in L.A. Superior Court, Elizabeth cited “irreconcilable differences.” Larry returned to construction work but also got himself a lawyer, New York attorney Raoul Felder, later emerging from the marriage with more money than he’d ever seen in his life, $2 million.
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Elizabeth emerged with something she probably loved more than any man she’d ever known: Sugar, the adorable white Maltese pooch Larry had given her. She said she’d never marry again, but added, “I expect to fall in love again.”
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Despite illnesses and marital wars, she had worked hard to keep Passion and White Diamonds near the top of the fragrance industry, and by 1994 her perfumes had grossed $500 million. Only one of them, Black Pearls, proved disappointing, perhaps because she and her associates, in an overconfident mood, alienated department stores by refusing to grant the usual discount. On a typical Passion promotional trip to Houston’s Galleria, she visited the sales staff briefly and then told the clerks, “Okay, girls, enough of this chitchat. Now I want you to get busy and really push my perfume.” Eventually, Passion sales slowed down, but White Diamonds remained popular. In frail health, Elizabeth was overextending herself and the effort began to show. According to Ditterline, “The greatest loss was the death of her friend and assistant Chen Sam. After that, Liz went straight downhill.”

By the end of the year Elizabeth was at a low point. “These last couple of years have been hard,” she said. “My marriage to Larry had come undone, and I lost Chen Sam . . . Truly, she was my sister—for more than twenty-five years. She died of cancer, here in my house. I had gone to her room to say good night and found her breathing laboriously. I kissed her and held her and talked to her. After a while, I left. Five minutes later she was gone.”
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Like the rest of the world, Elizabeth was mesmerized in the mid–1990s by the O. J. Simpson murder trial, following it daily and avidly on television. Every Sunday, Dominick Dunne, covering the trial for
Vanity Fair
, was invited to Nimes Road to give her the inside scoop. Apart from having worked together in
Ash Wednesday
, Elizabeth and Dominick had a special rapport, both having survived hideous alcohol and drug bottoms. Carrying marijuana back from Mexico, Dominick was busted and strip-searched at Los Angeles airport. “Stoned again,” he wrote, “a crazed psychopath, whom I’d invited over for some cocaine, beat me up, tied me up, put a brown bag over my face, and dropped lighted matches on the bag.”
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Dominick sobered up in a cabin in the wilds of Oregon, and in the following years wrote five best-selling novels and an account of the Simpson trial,
Another City, Not My Own.
“This whole police-conspiracy thing is ridiculous,” Elizabeth told Dominick. “One minute they’re accusing the LAPD of being inept, incompetent, and careless, and the next they’re saying that they’re all part of a brilliant conspiracy to frame O. J.” Like a yo-yo, Dunne ran back and forth between Elizabeth and Nancy Reagan, who also expected him to provide a behind-the-scenes account of the trial. Elizabeth was using a walker at the time, due to hip-replacement complications, and she told Dunne not to reveal her secret use of the walker to anyone. “One leg came out shorter than the other,” she explained. “That’s all the tabloids need to hear.”
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In 1996, though she now had metal hips, she led a procession as grand marshal of the National AIDS Candlelight March, from the Capitol in Washington, D.C., to the Lincoln Memorial. “I was sick for two years and had my hips fiddled around with,” she remarked. During this period of physical difficulty she became particularly impatient with any sign of complacency in the fight against the AIDS virus and stunned the National Press Club by advocating blunt safe-sex talk to teens.
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She read aloud from the NAMES Project Memorial Quilt, at the quilt’s last full display in the capital.