More than beautiful

It's hard to believe that anyone was ever as gorgeous as Elizabeth Taylor was in Butterfield 8. She's so lusciously proportioned and her hair and lashes are so thick and her face is so flawless that you can't not look. So it would be easy to dismiss her as an actress and just regard her as a force of nature.

That would be a mistake.

During the first 10 minutes of the movie, she barely speaks. Her character, Gloria, wakes up alone in a strange bedroom after a one-night stand, and wanders around in a sheet, slowly remembering how she got there. When Gloria finds the torn remnants of her dress on the floor, she's alternately disgusted that it's destroyed and turned on by the memory. She's about to go home in the nice cloth coat with a fur collar she finds in her absent, married lover's closet when she sees an envelope addressed to her. Inside is cash and a note: "$250. Enough? L." 

$250 in 1960 would be $2,200 today.

Gloria may be a slut, but she's not a hooker. She went to bed with "L" (Weston Liggett) because she dug him, and she's furious that he treated her like a prostitute. She scrawls "No Sale" in lipstick on the bathroom mirror and switches the sensible pale coat for the far more expensive, full-length mink. That'll teach him!

All this with no dialog. 

By the end of the segment, when she gets into a cab and tells the driver she'll double the tip in exchange for a cigarette, we already know a lot about our very feisty, very tarnished heroine. And we like her. We get that she's self-destructive, has poor impulse control, and now we're worried about her.

Sure, Elizabeth Taylor was beautiful and controversial. There have been many gorgeous movie stars (from Lana Turner to Angelina Jolie) with equally tumultuous private lives, but there's only ever been one Liz. She was genuinely gifted. Especially when it was just her and the camera. She knew how to communicate with us through the lens.  

She won her first Oscar for this part. Hollywood legend has it she won for surviving a near-fatal bout of pneumonia. Look close at that LIFE cover and you can see her tracheotomy scar. That all may be true. But it all happened before I ever saw Butterfield 8 so it doesn't affect my assessment of the film. It's a messy, far from perfect movie, but she is perfect. I appreciate her more every time I see it.