The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (56 page)

Following the Queen’s handshake, the recipient must not ramble on but “turn to your right and walk to the door ahead of you,” for HRH is already busy picking up the next medal or brooch from a velvet cushion.
²⁵
It’s like a mass-production line, with one hundred recipients completing the routine, five every three minutes. When the garrulous, dilatory Prince of Wales substitutes for his mother, the ceremony runs on interminably, but Queen Elizabeth dispatches it in one hour and ten minutes flat.

“Ladies,” they were finally told, “we’ll take handbags off you.”
²⁶
Instructed to proceed to the Ballroom, they were escorted by Gentlemen Ushers, a court ser vice begun in the fifteenth century and now carried out by retired soldiers, who didn’t leave their sides until their names were called. The Ushers lined them up according to rank—Knighthoods and Damehoods coming first except on the rare occasions when the Queen presents the senior decorations, the Victoria Cross and the George Cross, awarded for gallantry.

The magnificent gilt-and-white ballroom—48′ × 111′ × 59′—was built for Queen Victoria in the midnineteenth century and used for state banquets, receptions, and investitures. It was the largest room in the Palace and one of the largest in London. The audience, including members of Elizabeth’s family, sat in red-and-gilt chairs, perusing their programs. Overhead loomed chandeliers weighing half a ton each, five feet six inches in diameter, eleven feet tall, with five thousand pieces of English lead crystal and 120 bulbs. Elizabeth had been there before, in 1970, when Richard was honored at age forty-five. “Oh, how I wish he were here,” she murmured. “I miss him so much.”
²⁷
The Coldstream Guards military band in the Musicians Gallery at the back of the room struck up a medley from Julie Andrews’s Disney classic
Mary Poppins
, the movie that brought her an Oscar. Finally, at precisely three minutes after 11 a.m., Queen Elizabeth entered the ballroom, surrounded by Gurkha orderly officers, and strode to the dais, where five members of the Queen’s Body Guard of the Yeomen of the Guard were already in place, resplendent in red stockings and uniforms of ruff and gold. The band played “God Save the Queen”—America’s “My Country ’Tis of Thee” with different lyrics—and HRH stood immobile, a small woman, as petite as Elizabeth Taylor, staring into space. Something deeply encoded in the audience’s genes stirred spine-tingling emotions and tears as they sang in their monarch’s presence: Save her, send her victorious, happy and glorious, may she reign long over us.

When Julie’s name was called, she rose and proceeded to the dais with all the aplomb she’d radiated as Maria von Trapp in the grand wedding procession in
The Sound of Music
, and accepted her insignia for ser vices to the entertainment industry. Then, when Elizabeth’s name was pronounced by the Lord Chamberlain, she got out of her wheelchair
²⁸
and, despite hip and back problems, slowly made her way to her sovereign. Though Elizabeth looked elegant in her frock coat, she also appeared a bit lopsided, possibly owing to a body brace required by her injured spine. “My body is a real mess,” she’d admit a few years later, describing her shape as “convex and concave [like] a poor little woman bent sideways.”
²⁹
Greeting Elizabeth with a warm smile, the Queen appeared to be delighted and was obviously having a jolly good time. Elizabeth bowed her head slightly, in deference and respect, as the Queen pinned the Dame Commander brooch on her jacket, citing her for “ser vices to acting and charity.”
³⁰
Then they stood smiling at each other, chatting and laughing like old friends.

What was likely going through the minds of both women were the experiences they’d shared over the past six decades, beginning with the night a tiny Elizabeth danced before Margaret Rose and Lilliet. “At the age of three I was picked out to be in a [command] performance for the Royal family,” Elizabeth remembered. “I was so enthralled by the applause that I couldn’t stop my butterfly curtsy and taking a peak through my hair at the Royal box. They were all laughing and smiling.”
³¹
When the two Elizabeths met again, at a Bicentennial dinner in Washington, D.C., on July 8, 1976, they were photographed beaming the same big smiles at each other.
³²
The Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, let it be known that he fancied Elizabeth Taylor’s breasts; seeing her in a receiving line he said they reminded him of two pillows and invited his aide to “hop in.”
³³
Both Elizabeths, the Queen and the actress, had survived numerous scandals—adultery, husband-stealing, home-wrecking, booze, and drugs in Elizabeth’s case and, in the Queen’s, the adulteries of the Duke of Windsor, Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, Princess Diana, Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, Camilla Parker Bowles, and Fergie.
³⁴
No wonder Elizabeth Taylor and Queen Elizabeth II appeared to get on so well—they had a lot in common, or, to paraphrase Elizabeth’s step-daughter Carrie Fisher, they were related by scandal.

Following the investiture, Elizabeth decided, unsurprisingly, to defy Royal tradition, later explaining, “When the Queen pins you with your medals, you are allowed to wear them to your seat, but then you are supposed to remove them and return them to their very nice little case.” Instead, she walked out of Buck House still sporting her red ribbon and brooch, and later wrote, “This day will never happen again, so . . . forget protocol!” She went outside to meet the press “with the proof of my investiture for all to see.”
³⁵
The Palace press office had roped off areas for newsmen, TV interviewers, and cameramen to photograph or talk with the celebrity contingent. Elizabeth posed in the Central Courtyard, then departed with her four children, explaining, “We’re going to go and have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

At last, back home in LA, she invited her family, including her brother Howard, and a few close friends to dinner, where she became emotional while speaking of Richard Burton, saying, “Why is it I always have this Goddamned feeling that Richard Burton is going to walk right through that door at any minute and start giving me hell about something?”
³⁶
Then, raising a glass of sparkling cider, she proposed a toast. “There’s a woman who deserves our deepest appreciation, because if it weren’t for her we’d all be somewhere else right now. She taught me how to be a different kind of dame. Let’s all drink to my mother, Sara Taylor.” Correcting herself, she added, “No. Let’s drink to two things. To my mother. And forgiveness.”
³⁷
Elizabeth was still in the process of forgiving her mother for robbing her of her childhood and subjecting her to an abusive work ethic.
³⁸

In early 2001 Elizabeth rocked Hollywood by announcing on the
Larry King Show
that she was looking for a live-in lover. In their one-hour chat, she assured Larry she’d never marry again but added, “I’d live with someone if he were cute, intelligent, compassionate, adorable, and had a good sense of humor.”
³⁹
Her old datemate Rod Steiger, who’d helped her battle isolation and depression, and showed up regularly at Nimes Road to play parlor games, qualified on most counts, but cute he emphatically wasn’t. Tall, lean Jeff Goldblum more than fit the bill and became a friend and target for rumors of romance with Elizabeth in the summer of 2001.
⁴⁰
The star of
The Big Chill, The Fly
, and
Jurassic Park
, Goldblum was born in 1952, the year Elizabeth turned twenty and married for the second time.

Always good for a laugh and a roll in the hay, George Hamilton resurfaced in her life around the same time, but unfortunately on that occasion she’d just suffered a health setback. While hospitalized for pneumonia, she underwent tests that reportedly showed she had an enlarged heart.
⁴¹
George Hamilton had left for Madrid, where he was filming
Off Key
, but he sent his son, Ashley Hamilton, to Cedars-Sinai, where Ashley presented Elizabeth with two dozen violet roses and a batch of her favorite brownies.
⁴²
Why George Hamilton’s romance with Elizabeth failed to work out was at last explained, at least from his vantage, in his 2008 memoir,
Don’t Mind If I Do.
“Nobody on earth is better company, more lively, more fun,” he wrote, remembering how he and Elizabeth checked into the Dorchester at midnight in 1986. Elizabeth settled into the Oliver Messel suite and ordered her usual, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. When advised the kitchen was closed, she said, “Don’t worry. Just call Anton,” referring to Anton Mosimann, the Dorch’s chef. “Call him at home.” At 3 a.m., Anton and retinue arrived at the suite with a trolley, a bottle of 1945 Lafite Rothschild, and a bowl of crème brulée. “Anything else?”

“Breakfast!” Elizabeth said. “Don’t worry. I sleep late.” That afternoon, Valentino staged a private show of his current collection in the suite, replete with a dozen models. George Hamilton, an unregenerate playboy, loved traveling in high style with Elizabeth but could only take the heat for “a year or so.” Her demands on him seemed impossibly contradictory to Hamilton, who had the impression she expected him to be both subservient and dominant. “She was used to men catering to her, and for those men, she had no respect. But if you didn’t cater to her to a certain degree, you had no chance. It was a fine line to walk.” Moreover, Hamilton complained in his memoir, “An essential duty of any consort of Elizabeth is to play the part of her personal concierge.” He soon tired of doing her dirty work, like wresting topless photos from predatory paparazzi. And then there was her lateness. On one occasion, she kept him waiting so long as she got ready for a charity event that he got fed up and left her.
⁴³

Two other old boyfriends of Elizabeth’s, crooner Vic Damone and actor Robert Wagner, registered similar complaints when they published their memoirs in 2009 and 2008 respectively. In
Singing Was the Easy Part
, Damone tells how Elizabeth, then only eighteen but already the spoiled diva of the MGM lot, caught his roving—and ambitious—eye. He was around Metro working in musicals with Jane Powell and getting nowhere, while Elizabeth was burning up the box office. On their first date, they told her father they were going to the movies, but Elizabeth, riding shotgun in Damone’s car, directed him to the Taylors’ Malibu beach house, where they spent the evening making out on the front porch.
⁴⁴
After dating for half a year, Damone discovered she was also seeing LA Rams star Glenn Davis. “When you grow up, call me,” Damone said, and walked out. The next day, he was informed that if he wanted “to stay employed by MGM,” he should resume dating Elizabeth.
⁴⁵
Anne Strauss of the Metro PR department laid it on the line: “Mr. Mayer himself is telling me to tell you to have dinner with her to night. Louis B. Mayer. I suggest you tell her you’ll have dinner.”
⁴⁶
Strauss explained that Elizabeth was “upset” and staging a sit-down strike. “She says she won’t work unless you say you’re going to have dinner with her to night. We are in the middle of shooting, and she won’t come out of her dressing room.”
⁴⁷
Though Damone caved in and resumed seeing Elizabeth, she soon jilted him to marry Nicky Hilton.

In his autobiography
Pieces of My Heart
, Robert Wagner revealed he was another of Elizabeth’s short-lived boy toys. Before meeting her, he’d honed his erotic technique on Yvonne De Carlo, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Anita Eckberg, but Elizabeth trumped them all.
⁴⁸
“Being with Elizabeth was like sticking an eggbeater in your brain,” he wrote.
⁴⁹
“I loved her, and I think she loved me. But on the practical level, Elizabeth was not the woman I needed in my life. With Elizabeth, there was a great deal of maintenance. By the time she comes downstairs for breakfast, it’s time for dinner . . . Elizabeth’s life is built completely around Elizabeth, and she needs a man to ser vice her life.”
⁵⁰
There was also the matter of her delicate health; she was “illness-prone . . . [Just slamming a car door] blew out her ear drum. Just thinking about her physical troubles is exhausting. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have to live with them.”
⁵¹

As Elizabeth faced the onset of advanced age and its attendant maladies in the early 2000s, she found the only way “to live with them,” as Wagner put it, was to bite the bullet and soldier on. Though sometimes, according to one press report, she appeared “dazed and confused,”
⁵²
to her everlasting credit, she did not disappear into seclusion and isolation but continued to go before the public, unlike such fading divas as Maria Callas and Marlene Dietrich, who entombed themselves in their Paris apartments and drifted into madness.