So why do millions of people from Melbourne to Manhattan follow her every move with such utter fascination? Taylor's TV work during the '80s included Poker Alice (1987), in which she starred with her good pal George Hamilton, and a TV remake of Sweet Bird of Youth (1989), which was interesting only because of the inevitable parallels drawn between her character, a fading actress and superstar who can't bear to look at her own close-ups, and Taylor herself. Taylor is the world's most famous movie star, yet she hasn't made a film in years. Whoever said, "In America there are no second acts," overlooked the superstar who has rewritten the rulebook. She is a new wife, a cosmetics mogul, an international philanthropist and a crusader against AIDS. Now Taylor begins another chapter in the incredible drama that has been her life. "She's unique, and there will never be anyone like her." "Elizabeth is a fantastic lady," says her longtime pal Roddy McDowall, who has known her since both were child stars at MGM studios during Hollywood's golden years. An unshakable belief that life is good and will get better. "All things considered, I'm damn lucky to be alive," she told Life magazine. In typical Taylor fashion she wittily sent a message to those gathered outside the hospital: "I'd come out and wave to you, but I'm not wearing my balcony attire." Cards flooded in at the rate of 400 a day.įinally, doctors told Taylor's fans what they wanted to hear: "She's a great fighter." Everything from AIDS to cancer was being whispered, and the paparazzi staged a death watch outside the hospital.īut the public didn't believe it for an instant. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, Calif., gave Taylor a less than 30 percent chance of surviving her near-fatal bout with both viral and bacterial pneumonias. The ultrafeminine, soft-spoken ingenue with "the whim of iron" could close down production and bring megamillionaires to their knees with a quiver of her full upper lip. The Taylors were tough, and the studio moguls who tried in vain to bend Elizabeth to their will learned early that she came from a long line of strong-willed people. "Not many people know (that) my great-grandparents were pioneers who crossed the country in a covered wagon," she says. Much has always been made of Taylor's British origins, but she prefers to dwell on the more rugged side of her ancestry. One of Taylor's male friends once compared her with Marilyn Monroe, whom he had also known, saying, "Monroe was a victim of the system. John Warner are alive to tell their tales, and one barely remembers that their lives were ever actually warmed by the glow of the legendary Taylor even for a brief shining moment. The editor who printed it is long dead himself, as are four of Taylor's husbands. In England in the late '50s just before her famous tracheotomy _ "the cut heard around the world," as one wit described it _ one London newspaper actually went so far as to proclaim her dead in a foot-high headline. "Elizabeth uses hospitals," her urbane second husband Michael Wilding once recalled, "the way other people use resorts." There were the illnesses _ more than 30 operations, plus so many hospitalizations, for everything from life-threatening pneumonias to hemorrhoids, that it's hard to keep track. There were two well-publicized suicide attempts: one in Munich, with Eddie Fisher another while filming the gargantuan Cleopatra (1963), when it looked as if Richard Burton would never leave his then-wife Sybil for her. Given her history, Taylor should have been dead years ago _ drowned in a sea of booze, weighted down by too much living, too many pills, near misses, lovers, husbands, brawls and nights without end. But I've paid for that luck with disasters." Sitting in her art- and antique-filled Bel Air mansion with her construction-worker husband Fortensky nearby, Taylor recently told Life magazine: "I've been lucky all my life. What is it about the trials, travails, traumas and triumphs of this woman that have kept us glued to her every move for more than four decades? Now seems as good a time as any to ask ourselves why the world is so fascinated by Taylor. If Taylor could bottle her survival skills she could sell them for a lot more than her perfumes, her weight-loss secrets or anything else marketing geniuses can come up with. Taylor is the sole survivor of an era when a female movie star was a creature from a different solar system _ a fantastical, beautiful creation of our dreams. Instead, scores of famous faces from far-flung corners of the world will fly to Southern California to sing happy 60th to La Taylor, the movie star to top all movie stars. The whole thing could have turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. Taylor had hoped to rent the fabled Orient Express to take her pals on a luxurious train ride across Europe, but she discovered even she was not immune to customs and frontier regulations.
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