Thursday Thirteen #293

A dose of glamor on for a gray winter's day. When I was a kid, I thought Elizabeth Taylor was silly. Always with a cigarette and/or drink in hand, wearing loud caftans and gaudy jewelry, getting off planes or boarding yachts. Then I got into classic film and came to appreciate her as an actress, rather than a celebrity. I also understand now that much of the over-the-top public behavior she exhibited had to with addiction to pills and alcohol. Her much publicized trip to rehab may have saved lives. The same for her AIDS advocacy. And so I consider these 13 facts something of a tribute.

1. Her full name was Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Warner Fortensky. She was married 8 times, divorced 7, and widowed once. She outlived five of her seven husbands and had four children and 10 grandchildren.

2. While I'm an unabashed fan, it's true not everyone was. In the early 1960s, the Vatican denounced her for "erotic vagrancy."

3. She was 10 when she made her first movie, There's One Born Every Minute. She made more than 45 more. She was nominated for four Oscars and won two. 

My favorite Liz movie moment

4. Her first Oscar was for Butterfield 8, a movie she hated. I think she was fabulous in it. During the first 10 minutes, not a word is spoken. Her character, Gloria, wakes up in a strange bedroom. She wanders around in her slip, trying to remember how she got there. She comes upon her torn dress on the floor and is alternately disgusted and turned on by the memory of what she did last night. She's about to slip into a coat she finds in the closet so she can go home when she spots an envelope with her name on it. It's filled with cash and the note says, "Is this enough?" She's furious. Gloria may be a slut but she's no prostitute. She takes her lipstick and scrawls "NO SALE" on the bedroom mirror. We learn that Gloria is self destructive and has poor impulse control and makes bad decisions, just by watching her facial expressions, how she moves and what she does. No dialog. I believe Elizabeth Taylor was an underrated actress.

5. She became a published author at age 14. Nibbles and Me was about her pet chipmunk. She wrote it herself and in longhand.

6. She was the first actress to earn $1,000,000 for a single film. One million in 1961 would be $9.5 million today.

7. The money she made from her films was dwarfed by the profits made from her fragrances. The first actress to introduce her own perfume line, she was the most successful by far. One of her scents, White Diamonds, remained one of the world's best sellers for 20 years.

8. The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation has donated nearly $40,000,000 to patients living with AIDS. Today, 25% of the profits her estate collects for her likeness goes to the foundation.

9. Before she started her own foundation, she worked extensively with AmFAR, an organization devoted to AIDS research and prevention. In 1990, she testified before Congress on behalf of the Ryan White CARE Act.

10. In 1992, she appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair holding a condom. Today it looks quite tame, but at the time it was controversial. The press coverage it received got people talking about safe sex, which was exactly what she wanted.

11. She was born with an extra set of lashes and very thick eyebrows. Cinematographers attributed her beauty to those lush lashes and brows.

12. She helped get rid of pay toilets. She first encountered them while campaigning with then-husband, Sen. John Warner, in the late 1970s. When she learned they were quite common all over the country, more often in ladies room than mens, she convinced Warner to sponsor a law banning them in airports and bus and train stations.

13.  She began taking pain killers for chronic back pain in the 1950s when she was in her 20s. She went into the Betty Ford Clinic in 1983, where she admitted she was addicted to pills and alcohol. She was the first celebrity, after the former First Lady herself, to publicly discuss her rehab at length. In 1988, she relapsed and returned to the Center. She hoped her candor would help educate the public.

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