losing liz

Lord Byron was not speaking of Elizabeth Taylor when he wrote: "She walks in beauty like the night."


That would have been far too subtle for an actress who was literally a force of nature -- somewhere between the warmth of the sun and the destructiveness of a hurricane.  Whose face filled movie screens as fully as her bosom filled her bodice.


I had just crossed the border into teendom when I fell madly in love with her.  She represented everything I knew would get me into trouble for the rest of my life.  The woman whose beauty and presence would freeze frame any room she entered.


And then, of course, there was the obvious sexuality.  Which she wore as a tool of conquest.  For a boy raised on some very fundamentalist principles, she was the very temptress of Proverbs.


I did not know her when she was a young actress.  That would not come until the release of Cleopatra.


I have already introduced you to my rather eccentric younger self.  One Saturday afternoon, I put on my James Bond white dinner jacket and called a taxi to take me to the Paramount theater in Portland.  I was 13. 


When I got in the cab, the driver looked back at the house expecting an adult to accompany me.  To this day, I am convinced, I leaned forward and told him in a rather imperious tone: "Drive on."  Too many Leslie Howard movies, I fear.


In the movie, Cleopatra makes her first appearance when rolled out on the floor from a carpet.  Watching her transform from that rather ignominious entrance into the queen of Egypt addressing Julius Caesar was enough to set off my young testosterone.  I had bonded.


The movie is not a very good vehicle to show off acting skills.  Too many sets.  Too many costumes.  Way too much Roman Empire.


But none of that mattered.  The fact that she seemed to end up playing the same part with the same skills in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? or Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew did not register on me. 


She was Elizabeth Taylor.  The Woman.  The Earth goddess.  And no one would ever live up to her.


At some point, Hollywood started hiring actors rather than movie stars -- and she moved into that odd category of celebrity.  The world of Zsa Zsa Gabor and Paris Hilton, where talent is not important.  

Better yet, she received America's greatest accolade.  She was now known by a truncated version of her first name: Liz.  Universally.


She even took a short role acting as the wife of a United States senator from Virginia.  I can still see her at the head table of fund raisers lecturing her celebrity husband.


But supporting roles were not for her.  It was just one of her seven divorces.


I last saw her in the 1990s at a movie premiere.  She showed up in one of her trademark caftans looking like a ship under full sail.  But she still had the grace of her younger self.  Liz had arrived. 

 

It is far too easy to remember her in her odd stage.  As the defender and good friend of Michael Jackson.  Or acting as his date at the marriage of one-name Liza to the even-odder David Gest.  A photograph that still causes my spinal cord to suffer frost bite.


But none of those images are what I remember when I think of her.


She will always be the lonely figure at the top of a golden pyramid carried through the streets of Rome in triumphal entry.  A woman determined to take on the entire Empire to restore the power of Alexander the Great.


The perfect woman.  Strong.  Beautiful.  Independent.


And now -- gone.


Good-bye, Liz.  It was a good run.