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 Spring is springing
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| A late evening run in Rverside Park. 7:00 PM. Photo: JH. |
March 25, 2011. Sunny and cold in New York after a night of snowfall, hailstones and windy rain.
It’s been quiet in my neighborhood all week and it seemed to me the city has been relatively quiet. It was explained to me yesterday: schools out. At least the private ones. |
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In Los Angeles, they buried Elizabeth Taylor at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale which is about a 45 minute drive from Beverly Hills. There is more than one celebrity cemetery in Los Angeles, and there is something “impressive” about each place where A LOT of famous people are buried. Forest Lawn, which is almost a century old, is the “final resting place” of some of the most famous names of the last century, especially movie stars.
Gable, Lombard, Harlow, Bogart, Pickford, Burns and Allen, Tom Mix, Sammy Davis, Walt Disney, Alan Ladd, Norma Shearer, Chico Marx, Nat King Cole, Ethel Waters, Errol Fynn, Spencer Tracy and authors such as Louis L’Armour, Theodore Dreiser and L. Frank Baum who wrote “The Wizard of Oz.”
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| Elizabeth, almost 30. She had won an Oscar for "Butterfield 8" and would soon enter into her most important relationship of her lifetime. |
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Elizabeth Taylor came of age on screen in “A Place In the Sun,” based on Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy.” Notice how the Studio changed the title to something more upbeat than a “tragedy.” However, when that decision was made to change it, the value of Taylor’s name and public image in selling the film was as important as, if not more important than the title of the film (which often ran under the name of the star).
These matters explain the differences between a movie star today versus a Movie Star like Elizabeth Taylor. In the days of the Studio system, stars were products, or as we would say today: brands. This has been borne out with Taylor in the longstanding popularity of her fragrance White Diamonds, which has been a top seller for two decades. They were buying Elizabeth Taylor, the brand. Thank you Mr. Mayer.
The studios had their own brands, with their own looks. And MGM, where Elizabeth Taylor became star (having first been signed by Universal as an 11-year-old), was the Tiffany of the Studios. In their heyday, when almost half the population of the country went to the movies every week, people went to see a Bogart picture, or Pickford (“America’s sweetheart”) or Gable and Lombard, or Errol Flynn on a Saturday matinee. They knew what an MGM picture looked like, versus a Warner Brothers, or 20th Century-Fox. They knew the stars attached to those studios. The stars' images and studios cross-referenced each other with these “star brands,” adding prestige and box-office. Elizabeth Taylor was quintessential in this process which is one reason why she ended up so rich and so admired and adored. The pause that refreshes.
It was a business model that went out of fashion like a lot of business models over the past century. In the days of the Studio movie, for example, a star or an aspiring star never left the house unless he or she looked like their screen image. It was only after the Studio system dispersed with contract players that the public began to see their stars looking like “real” people, unshaven, stressed out and indifferent to how he or she looks. A Star knew never to do that. They knew they were a “brand,” that they were “marketable.” They knew that looking good was money in the bank. Hollywood was a business, not a fantasy. In Hollywood, public life was always an audtion: you had to do your best. Or lose out. Women like Taylor knew the score when it came to business, right down to how to light themselves for the best results on film. They were pros, and working for a living. |
| "National Velvet" and 20 years later in "Cleopatra." |
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It’s a strange life. Its reality is based on illusion and lighting. Movie stars get a kind of attention that three-year-olds get, except the Stars get it 24/7 for as long as they can stay in the public eye. It goes with the territory. The attention they attract and even create could drive most ordinary people crazy because it is often by its nature intrusive.
I once had a conversation about this with Edith Mayer Goetz, a daughter of the aforementioned Mr. Mayer, a woman who had grown up in the film industry almost from its inception in the 1910s, and lived her entire adult life (she died in 1987) in what we call Hollywood (she called it Beverly Hills, Holmby or Bel Air or Santa Monica). We were talking about an old friend of hers, a famous star who later in her life drew speculation that she was a lesbian because she always had a female companion wherever she traveled. And one of those longtime companions happened to be Sapphic by nature. Mrs. Goetz liked the dishiness of the speculation but didn’t believe it. “You have to understand darling,” she said to me, “she is a movie star. Movie stars need that attention. They’re used to it.” |
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| The beautiful and spurned in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." |
| To the alcoholic harridan in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" |
This is especially true of the female stars who wear their egos often with more charm (like accessories) than do the men. It explains why they often marry men who take advantage of them: they need that male presence, as if to assure their position in the “community.”
Elizabeth Taylor was surely one of those girls. She bore many of the traits and characteristics of this special category of person. However, she was also blessed with the charm of a good and gregarious nature. She evoked so much affection when people talked about her. Although I recall many years ago when Richard Burton’s “Journals” were first being considered for publication, the publisher’s interest was in the wife. Burton, as you may know, aspired – at least in his dreams – to be a writer. |
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He first undertook his objective by keeping journals. Some of his entries about life on the yacht Kalizma with Elizabeth were not exactly about a dream come true. He’d refer to her “in the other room” (or next cabin) as often interrupting or erupting or dramatizing. It was never a dull moment and there were also always the children, and the animals, and the maids, and assistants and visitors and whew. You could see there were many moments when it drove him to exasperation. Yet no way, in his words, did it dispel his affection for her.
A force went out of the lives of many many people and it was marked yesterday at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. She will be deeply missed for many and for many reasons. Life indeed was a banquet for this woman; and she lived it feeding as many as she could with her magic and her largesse. Meanwhile, if you wish, you can and will always be able to enjoy the 12-year-old in “National Velvet” or alluring and powerful young woman in “Cleopatra” or Gloria Wandreous in “Butterfield 8” or dozens of other wonderful roles the woman played and played out herself for us to know. |
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