Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes could also have been called Elizabeth Taylor: A Lost Era. The tapes were recently found in the archives of the late journalist Richard Meryman. They contain 40 hours of audio interviews that Meryman conducted with Taylor as part of his research for a book. They begin in 1964, when she was 32 and at the height of her fame. Her voice is breathy and seductive until she needs to clarify something, but it is always expressive and captivating – even without the accompaniment of her extraordinarily beautiful face.
Nanette Burstein’s film overlays the Taylor-Meryman tone with archival footage from film and television: we see Beverly Hills and Hollywood of the ’40s and ’50s, Taylor at publicity events, her films, family snapshots and newspaper and magazine clippings showing the post-adolescent leading lady with various suitors. Then there is footage of close friends like Roddy McDowall showing her frolicking on beaches with the likes of Montgomery Clift or fooling around with James Dean on film sets. There is an inescapable innocence to all of this, even now we know that the friends were chosen and the dates arranged by her studio, MGM, and that most of her close friends were gay men who did not reveal themselves due to the social mores of the time. While Taylor gave these actors a straight appearance, they in turn protected the star from predatory straight men. The rose of the ’50s may have faded, but the idea of a world without thousands of cellphone cameras and instant social media logoffs still has a strange appeal – as does the appeal to an audience united by the adoration of a handful of impeccably glamorous stars.
It was Taylor’s relationship with Richard Burton that ushered in the new era. After her third husband, producer Mike Todd, died in a plane crash in 1958, she caused a scandal by “stealing” his best friend Eddie Fisher from his popular wife Debbie Reynolds. She then added the finishing touches by divorcing Fisher after falling in love with Burton during a meeting on the set of Cleopatra. Their relationship was denounced by the Vatican, they made headlines around the world, and photographers began to follow them and disguise themselves to get closer to the couple. The age of the paparazzo was born. The change is succinctly summed up in an interview with actor George Hamilton: “They no longer sought glamour. They wanted to destroy glamour.”
All of this makes for an unprecedentedly intimate portrait of Taylor, or the “actress looking for a job,” as she often calls herself. The question of whether she would ever fully make the transition from being a mere movie star was still on her mind at the time of the interviews with Meryman. Excerpts from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, in which she and Burton played the bitter and heartbreakingly codependent couple George and Martha, are proof enough that she certainly would have made it – if the studios and audiences had given her the chance to leave the path they had chosen for her.
The film does not escape the trap posed by such an intimate approach, and remains inevitably hagiographic. Meryman lets Taylor speak without resistance (and if there is, it is mainly when she claims not to feel like a sex symbol, and instead gives a practical, matter-of-fact account of what it is like for any attractive woman to go through the world). The film itself makes no reference to Taylor’s excesses and conspicuous consumption, which began when she was with Todd and which were certainly part of her story in Burton’s time. Nor does it explore the stories of her temper, her egotism, or any diva-like behavior that, while undoubtedly exaggerated by the media at the time, were not untrue.
The remaining decades of her life after the recording ends are compressed into the last seven minutes or so of the film. For example, we learn only briefly of her time being treated for alcohol and drug addiction at the Betty Ford Clinic (nothing about this is mentioned in the years covered by the recording, as treatment was already underway), and there is no mention of her marriage to Larry Fortensky (whom she met there) or her devoted friendship with Michael Jackson, all of which represent a far less serene or wise side than we learn from the Meryman interviews. Her fearless and compassionate advocacy for AIDS in the days when the disease still had a terrible stigma is given due recognition.
As one-sided as the film is and as little new as it has to offer, it remains an intoxicating treat even for amateur fans like me. Because it’s about Elizabeth Taylor. She doesn’t exist in the way she used to – and probably never will again.
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