The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice (2 page)

Artists, I realize, are rarely as interesting as their art. Yet as writer Walker Percy observed in his 1961 novel,
The Moviegoer
, stars of Taylor’s magnitude possess “an aura of heightened reality” that moves with them, and “all who fall within it feel it.”

The aura has a dark side. We view film stars with “a kind of possessiveness, in which they both submit to and evade our goggle-eyed wonder,” critic Leo Braudy said in
The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History.
Most stars harden in response to this attention. They have to. They must withstand the projections of a million strangers.

Nor do such stars inhabit anything resembling the real world. I grasped this when I interviewed the actor Kevin McCarthy, who was still matinee-idol handsome at age ninety-four in 2008. (McCarthy died in 2010.) He had known Taylor through his close friend, Montgomery Clift. In 2002, McCarthy and his wife, Kate, were guests of Liza Minnelli at her wedding to David Gest. Taylor and actress Marisa Berenson served as matrons of honor. But the ceremony had to be delayed for an hour. Because Taylor had
forgotten her shoes.

Taylor has had many biographers. Yet their books often reveal more about their authors than about her. Some dish; some fawn; few paint a nuanced picture. To the scandal-mongers, for instance, Elizabeth’s mother, Sara Taylor, was a failed actress who morphed into a monomaniacal stage mother. But Kate Burton, Richard’s daughter, a Broadway actress who remained close to her former stepmother, tells a different story: “Elizabeth was very devoted to her mother, who lived to be very elderly. And she was
absolutely
devoted to her father.”

Other biographers fixate on Taylor’s anatomy, as if that alone explained her. Ellis Amburn, for example, treats her breasts as if they were independent entities—like children or pets. After charting their arrival during her teens, he tells how Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio where Taylor was under contract, dealt with them: hiring “Bust Inspectors” to patrol the sets. To determine whether a neckline was too revealing, an inspector placed an orange in the space between her breasts: “If the cameraman could see the orange, he had to move the camera back.”

Not all of Taylor’s biographers have admired her. Brenda Maddox, an American-born, Harvard-educated writer who now lives in England, took on Taylor in 1977. Maddox is known for two probing, judicious books:
Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom
, about James Joyce’s wife, and
Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
, about the scientist whose premature death from ovarian cancer allowed biologists Francis Crick and James Watson to claim credit for her work. But Maddox’s take on Taylor is, well, unhinged. Her collection of damning details—to the exclusion of anything positive—makes the 1981 biography of Taylor by renowned hatchet-wielder Kitty Kelley look like a mash note. In fairness, Maddox doesn’t just hate Taylor, she hates every artifact of American popular culture that doesn’t “indict” some aspect of American life.

When a biographer attacks a subject who is in midlife, the biographer risks generating a flawed book. The subject’s identity can change dramatically in the final four or five decades of life, as it did with Elizabeth Taylor. In 1985, she began fund-raising for AIDS—when so much fear and mystery surrounded the disease that doors were slammed in her face. “Elizabeth did something when it required real courage,” Elton John told an interviewer in 2007. “She didn’t just put her name to a cause or speak from an ivory tower: She lobbied, she got out on the streets, she formed her own foundation.”

Similarly, early in her career, Taylor may not have noticed the feminist content that undergirded some of her roles. Like the beautiful somnambulist in Harold Lloyd’s
High and Dizzy
, who sleepwalked onto an upper-story ledge, Taylor strode unconsciously into risky territory, unaware of just how “out-there” she was. Somewhere along the line, though, I think Taylor woke up.

Taylor’s 1987 diet book,
Elizabeth Takes Off
, repeatedly makes feminist points—exploring ideas about women and body image that English therapist Susie Orbach first brought to widespread attention in her groundbreaking 1978 book,
Fat Is a Feminist Issue
. Taylor professes her admiration for Gloria Steinem, particularly the way Steinem handled an oft-heard comment on aging: You don’t look forty. “This is what forty looks like,” she recalls Steinem saying.

No examination of Taylor would be complete without the Hollywood institutions that she grew up under, clashed with, and ultimately helped to defeat. One was the Production Code Administration, a group of ruthless and astonishingly powerful men who between 1934 and 1966 routinely bowdlerized scripts and excised logic from plots to prevent films from criticizing religious authority or the institution of marriage. Another was the so-called studio system, which locked actors into long-term contracts, requiring them to work for flat fees, and denying them a choice in their roles.

In exchange for job security, actors signed away every aspect of their lives. Studio publicists invented fictions to conceal behavior that might hurt a star at the box office: drinking, drugging, philandering, or any activity modified by the adjective “homosexual.” Sham marriages were commonplace. In 1955, actor Rock Hudson wedded his agent’s secretary to banish rumors of his gayness. Some stars delivered their best performances in their counterfeit lives. In
Kate
, his provocative biography of Katharine Hepburn, writer William Mann offers convincing evidence that the legendary extramarital affair between Hepburn and Spencer Tracy was, in fact, a cover-up for both stars, who, in their truly private “private lives,” were gay.

As a young woman Taylor, too, played the duplicity game. But in 1962, after two men in sequence very publicly ditched their wives for her, she stopped hiding. And far from suffering at the box office, she became Hollywood’s highest-paid actress. Not even the Vatican could hold her back. When its weekly newspaper,
L’Osservatore della Domenica
, accused her of “erotic vagrancy,” she blithely quipped, “Can I sue the Pope?”

In mining Taylor’s films for their feminist content, I could start out on a safe path with
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, a blue-chip movie securely ensconced on many respected critics’ top-ten lists. What I discovered, though, was that some of Taylor’s so-called turkeys were anything but. This is especially true after 1961, when she chose her own projects, rather than having them imposed by MGM. These later films often had ahead-of-the-curve messages that made people squirm. It was easier to sneer at a film than to come to grips with its prescient subtext. Or as Clement Greenberg famously observed, “All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.”

I hope this book will move readers to watch the movies it highlights with an open mind, to see if they, too, perceive the feminist content. I especially hope the Millennial Generation will watch, catching a glimpse of a recent past in which rights they take for granted—abortion, interracial marriage, and certain sexual acts in private between consenting adults—were illegal.

Inspired by the retrograde gender roles in such popular TV shows as
Mad Men
, some males born long after the bad-boy days have begun to express nostalgia for them. Just once, they’d like to harass a female co-worker with impunity, or force a gay man who criticizes their clothing back into his soundproof closet. The rights hard-won by second-wave feminists might still be taken away. Abortion, for instance, remains a hot-button issue, and given the allegiance of some Supreme Court justices to patriarchal cults,
Roe v. Wade
may not be the final word.

Taylor’s films show the bad-boy days as they really were—which was not so great if you happened to be female. Or as Laura Reynolds, Taylor’s character in
The Sandpiper
, laments: “The man is a husband and a father
and
something else, say a doctor. The woman is a wife and mother
and
… nothing. And it’s the nothing that kills her.”

2

National Velvet
, 1944

Velvet Brown! Who do you think you are?

—Mickey Rooney as Mi Taylor, a horse trainer in
National Velvet

Why, I am the owner of the Pie.

—Elizabeth Taylor, confidently, as Velvet Brown

And does that give you leave to go poking your head out amongst the stars?
Mi continues,
believing you could take the richest grandest prize a horse ever won?… You’re just a wisp of butcher’s daughter in a cold stable late at night when you’d better to be in bed with a doll.

TO APPRECIATE THE SLY SEDITION in Enid Bagnold’s novel,
National Velvet
, one must know how women were treated in the time and place where it is set: England between the two world wars. To glean such knowledge swiftly—as one might from CliffsNotes—one can read Virginia Woolf’s
Three Guineas
, a blistering, book-length essay published in 1938.

In the essay, Woolf—best known for her modernist novels,
Mrs. Dalloway
and
To the Lighthouse
—rages against nearly every British institution that ever demeaned the intelligence or belittled the aspirations or crushed the soul of a woman. There were many—from the primogeniture laws (which precluded daughters from inheriting property) to the voting laws (which until 1928 kept women away from the polls) to the convention of educating sons instead of daughters (which prevented Woolf herself from obtaining a university education).

Sons needed formal schooling, the reasoning went, because they were expected to support their future wives and children. But what if wives themselves could earn a living? Woolf mocks the notion that wives and husbands share equally in a husband’s income—unless, of course, a wife is insanely altruistic. Otherwise, why would she devote thousands of pounds to “clubs to which her own sex is not admitted” or to “colleges from which her own sex is excluded” or—as Bagnold herself might have wondered—to “racecourses where she may not ride”?

This brings us to
National Velvet
—in which a girl jockey leaps over the racecourse gender barrier. Don’t be deceived by the book’s sweet colloquial language or its folksy village setting. It is as fierce a polemic as
Three Guineas
.

The actress Elizabeth Taylor was also a product of England in the 1930s. She was born in London on February 27, 1932. Her parents, Francis and Sara Taylor, were American. But until she moved with them and her older brother Howard to Los Angeles in 1939, Taylor’s world was Bagnold’s world was Woolf’s world.

National Velvet
was published in 1935 and sold well enough for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to option it—not necessarily to make a movie from it but to keep the property away from competing studios. Young Elizabeth read the book and loved it, or so she blurted to Clarence Brown, an American director who wanted to film it. The blurt appeared spontaneous—a bubbly remark made during a chance meeting with the director. But it was, in fact, calculated—part of a campaign that she and her mother mounted to cultivate Brown, which also included sending him handmade birthday cards and Valentines. The exchange occurred inside MGM, where Taylor, age eleven, had newly become a contract player.

After the Taylor family settled in Los Angeles, Taylor’s mother, a former actress, took Elizabeth to auditions, and the little girl bagged minor parts in
There’s One Born Every Minute
(1942),
Lassie Come Home
(1943),
Jane Eyre
(1944), and
The White Cliffs of Dover
(1944). But Elizabeth wanted more. She wanted to participate in the movie equivalent of the Grand National Sweepstakes. She wanted to portray Velvet Brown.

Elizabeth quickly charmed Pandro S. Berman, producer of
National Velvet
. When she came to his office, he admired her spirit. But he told her that she was too small. No audience would accept her as a world-class rider. So Taylor
willed
herself to grow. Months later, Taylor returned to Berman’s office. And in an incident that MGM publicity exploded into legend, Berman measured Taylor’s height and gave her the part.

Taylor’s biographers don’t agree on how many—or even whether—Taylor added inches. Whether Taylor truly grew—or her stage mother and MGM connived to create this impression—seems almost irrelevant. Given a choice between a great story and a true story, the 1940s movie press unhesitatingly went with great.

Fortunately for Taylor, screenwriters Helen Deutsch and Theodore Reeves crafted a script that was even stronger than Bagnold’s book. They pared out extraneous characters and confusing scenes. And they freighted the film with metaphor
. National Velvet
didn’t just inspire women who yearned to be jockeys. Nor did it merely foreshadow Title IX, the 1972 federal law that created opportunities for women athletes. It spoke to all little girls who refused to let their gender compromise their dreams.

Velvet Brown is a prepubescent avatar of Leslie Lynnton Benedict, Taylor’s character in the 1956 movie
Giant
. Even in childhood, Velvet is strong and centered, with a deep connection to nature. She loves horses enough to mold “the Pie,” her cherished gelding, into a champion. Velvet lives on the English seacoast—not a balmy surfside playground but a harsh, rocky landscape. A place where toughness and beauty coincide. And where the hills, as Bagnold describes them, tumble down to the ocean, “like the rumps of elephants … like a starlit herd of divine pigs.”