If we had to pinpoint the beginning of the 1960s—or the counterculture revolution—there are two events that almost everyone agrees were the formative earthquakes of the era. The first was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The second (the real spark that lit the fuse of the crisis) was the Beatles’ first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” which occurred just eleven weeks later, and in response to the assassination, they said, “Here’s joy. Here’s hope. Here’s a new way of being.”
But there was another global media phenomenon that happened over a slightly longer period of time, and it was this one that defined the new energy of the era. That was the scandalous love story between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. We tend to think of this saga as simply the pinnacle of celebrity gossip. But when we look at it in Nanette Burstein’s fascinating and comprehensive documentary, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, we see how much more this love story was than that. It was legendary.
But why? For decades, movie stars had been having adulterous affairs. Taylor and Burton were the first to have their private lives exposed in the new international media; the idea of “the paparazzi” literally grew up around them. (They were hounded for miles, and photographers posing as priests or plumbers would watch them.) But it wasn’t just the unprecedented exposure. Liz and Dick’s story was set at the dawn of a new age of divorce, and it was the story of an age. Taylor had been a movie star since the early 1940s, and she had an otherworldly beauty on a par with Vivien Leigh or Marilyn Monroe. She was from that larger-than-life place; that’s partly why she was the first actress in history to be paid $1 million for a role in “Cleopatra.”
The fact that she left her husband, Eddie Fisher, to be with Burton, her “Cleopatra” co-star, was treated as the height of sin (and was denounced by the Vatican). However, what was also presented in a bold new way to the public was the passion that fueled that sin. As the documentary reveals, Taylor actually had a somewhat conservative side, which is one of the reasons she married eight times; she wasn’t flitting from boyfriend to boyfriend—instead, she was getting serious and getting married. What made the Liz and Dick saga a harbinger of a new era was that it became a projection of Taylor pursuing her own happiness, leaving her marriage because she felt satisfied. That was what the 1960s were all about, and in that period of infamy at least, Taylor became an iconic singer of the pleasure principle.
There’s now a whole genre of celebrity documentaries, which revolve around playing back old analog tapes, originally recorded as interviews. The Capote Tapes was made that way (I don’t think you’d see The Feud: Capote vs. the Pelican without that excellent documentary); so was Kubrick on Kubrick. Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes is based on interviews Taylor conducted with journalist Richard Merryman, beginning in 1964, for a book he was researching. In them, Taylor’s voice is uniquely expressive—sassy, sad, sexy, angry, dripping with perverse joy, and always candid. Her words lend even the most mundane events a revealing intimacy.
These words made me see how crossing Her beauty is. The film is filled with stunning clips of Elizabeth Taylor in private and in public, and though she always looked the same—the incomparable eyes (on the set of “National Velvet,” she was asked to remove her mascara, but she was wearing none, of course), the mouth like a Greek statue at rest, the flexible, modern, but exquisitely chiseled smile—she always looked different, with a dizzying range of moods. Born in London to American parents, she never lost that aristocratic tone of speech; it gave her anger the elegance of her whip.
The lost-tapes school of documentary gives Burstein’s film a personal vitality. We hear Taylor recall the confessional conversations she had with James Dean late at night while filming Giant. She was close to many of the era’s gay stars (Dean, Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson, and her former youth co-star Roddy McDowall), and she says the comfort she felt with them had a lot to do with escaping the predatory zone of Hollywood. She talks about her abusive first husband, hotel heir Nicky Hilton, who kicked her in the stomach until she miscarried. She describes the films the studio forced her to make in the 1950s as “things you could choke on.”
She describes how Mike Todd, the legendary producer, called her into his office the day after her divorce from Michael Wilding and told her he wanted to see her. He told her he loved her and was going to marry her, and by the end of it she believed him. “He can trick you into pulling the gold out of your teeth,” she says with admiration. There’s also her constant admission that she can be a cunning and treacherous companion. “I know myself,” she says, “and I know I’m going to try to get away with murder.”
During her marriage to Todd, she took on a garrulous quality; his death in a plane crash drove her mad with grief, recalibrating her life model. Her marriage to Eddie Fisher was a rebound, an act of survival (she says she loved him but never loved him), then swept away by her passion for Burton. The Lost Tapes does not overemphasize the TV specials at the expense of art. But the documentary, like Liz herself, is frank about the ways she was underused as an actress. She was, of course, a charming child star, perfect in A Place in the Sun and Giant , but in many ways she was as much a martyr for the candy films of the 1950s studios as Brando was.
But what makes Taylor angry? She has nothing but contempt for Butterfield 8, the thriller that won her an Oscar after she nearly died of pneumonia while filming Cleopatra. Here’s her honesty: “I won the Oscar for my tracheotomy… It must have been some sort of sympathy, because I think the movie is so embarrassing.” Yet if Taylor truly recognizes that Butterfield 8 was reckless and morally wrong (her portrayal of a tragic character fell between the cracks of sympathy and the remnants of Hays Code dogmatism), she admits that she did it all out of anger—anger at the movie itself—and when you watch Butterfield 8, you’re in the middle of Butterfield 8. He is It's a cathartic rage to her performance. It's the bridge that connects her to her extraordinary work in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Her description of meeting Burton is priceless. He came to the set of Cleopatra, “and I had never seen a gentleman so hungover in all my life. He was shaking from head to toe.” He couldn’t even hold the cup of coffee he’d asked for, so Liz carried it for him. “I fed him the coffee, and he was so nervous and so sweet and shaking, and that made me love him so much.” He had never seen her in a film until she was a child star, and went in thinking she was “just a star” who couldn’t act at all. But he recognized her talent. As Burton later said, “It’s the inaccessibility of Elizabeth that makes her so exciting.”
They saved each other and caused each other great harm, largely through bouts of excessive drinking. According to observers, they became like George and Martha. Just as the media, in a sense, created them, the media colluded in their depletion. We hear a wonderful quote from George Hamilton, who says that the press “was no longer seeking to glamorize, but was seeking to destroy glamor.” The latter part of Liz Taylor’s life and career, as seen in “The Lost Tapes,” touches on this destruction, but it also speaks to how Taylor regained her power through her heroic fight for people with AIDS. This was a reality that also had a role to play: to criticize the world for not doing enough. And when you see her in those years, you realize that Taylor, after all she had been through, had lost nothing of herself except the divine innocence that she had replaced with something equally regal.
