Good night Liz

Today and for the next few days, the public, ardent fans and writers will struggle to define Elizabeth Taylor, to try to explain who she was and why, and to peg her finest role. To me, this luminous actress — the last of the great movie stars — was simply Liz and her finest role was as Elizabeth Taylor.

I was an impressionable 14 when I fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor, watching her up there on the giant screen in the movie Giant. I went to see the movie the day it opened because I was a member of the teenage James Dean cult and came away from it knowing why Jett Rink, Bick Benedict and a host of others lusted after this dark-haired beauty. Looking back at the film today I see a magnificent actress in the making; back then, I saw only the knockout.

A year later I began studying drama, the same year I saw her in Raintree County, which she made seem like a far better film then than it comes across today. But the drama classes made me begin appreciating her as an actress as well as a beautiful movie star, an appreciation that grew immeasurably the following year when I saw her in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Watching that movie at that time was terribly confusing for me, a 16-year-old. Because of the censorship standards of the time, the picture skirted around the edges of the sexual orientation of the character played by Paul Newman. So when Liz stood in their bedroom clad in a slip — as wondrous a creature as these eyes had beheld up until that time — for the life of me I could not understand why Newman didn’t want to pounce on her immediately.

The following year had Liz in yet another Tennessee Williams script, Suddenly Last Summer, which attracted every red-blooded male by promising a scene in which Taylor, wearing a one-piece white bathing suit, was dragged into the ocean and when the water hit the suit, it became transparent. Of course, that didn’t happen, but it sure did fill the theaters at first with anxious fellas.

But it’s that quartet of films — Giant, Raintree County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer — that will always frame my Elizabeth Taylor portrait. The year of Suddenly Last Summer was also the year of Taylor’s first “shocking” headlines — her “stealing” of Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds. I thought at the time — I still do, in fact — the world was too hard on Liz for all of that.

I didn’t like the film BUtterfield 8 for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the feeling she was forcing Eddie Fisher on me in ways he hadn’t earned. I also didn’t think she deserved the Oscar for that part and won only because of sympathy and politics. (My choice would have been Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment.) BUtterfield 8 began the slow fade of Liz in my mind as a screen acting presence. After that to me she was famous only for being famous. I never ceased to marvel at her resolve, I just no longer admired the talent (although I will give her credit for de-glamorizing herself for Virginia Woolf — she was only 34 when she made that film).

When I learned of Liz’s death this morning, I didn’t so much feel a sadness as much as an emptiness. The Liz Taylor I knew, admired and, yes, loved disappeared 50 years ago. Her later marriages to John Warner and especially to Larry Fortensky seemed like macabre, twisted jokes on the illustrious life that came before. I will admit to respecting her battles on behalf of AIDs, especially her courage in undertaking them at a time when AIDs was regarded a dirty little secret, but I was not on her side in her defense of Michael Jackson.

But she gave me Giant, Raintree County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer (it would be later, on the television screen, that I would discover A Place in the Sun) and that was more than enough.