The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (44 page)

When
Foxes
opened in March, the London critics, less indulgent than their American counterparts, demolished Elizabeth. “She made an entrance worthy of Miss Piggy, trailing mauve lingerie,” wrote the
Express
critic. Nonetheless, she was the toast of London, holding a press conference at the Palladium. She received Princess Diana, pregnant with Prince William at the time, backstage at the Victoria Palace. Princess Margaret invited her to dinner at Kensington Palace, and she met with Princess Michael of Kent for supper. Richard wanted to catch her performance, but Sally Hay was understandably reluctant, and plans for Richard to go to London were twice scuttled. “Sally pulled every trick she could think of to stop him from coming,” Jenkins said. Finally, they saw the play at the end of the run. After the show, Elizabeth was gracious to the terrified Sally
⁶
and told Richard, “What do you say to having some fun and making a pile of money on Broadway?” She assured him that they could each clear $60,000 a week. Intrigued by her proposal, Richard recalled that Noel Coward had once said they reminded him of Elyot and Amanda in
Private Lives
. The stinging romantic comedy portrays the reunion of a couple once married to each other, who are now bored with their current partners, and are considering having another go at love.

Sally later suggested that Richard was duped by a “very clever” Elizabeth into doing
Private Lives
. She accused Elizabeth of presenting the project to him first as a taping instead of a long-running play. “Had the deal been: ‘Do you want seven months on tour with
Private Lives
,’ Richard would have fled,” Sally claimed. “But it only came to that when he was too far in.”
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“According to Richard, Elizabeth was on something” and sometimes “crocked” when she attempted to begin rehearsals with him and director Milton Katselas for
Private Lives
in Manhattan in March 1983. Sally was with Richard, and it was humiliating for Elizabeth to watch him become increasingly attached to his fiancée. After seeing his daughter Kate in an off-Broadway play, he called on Elizabeth at the Beresford, accompanied by Maria and her baby, Elizabeth Diane Carson. She was staying in Rock Hudson’s apartment, and the place was “horrid,” Richard recalled, adding that it had “little or no library.” Elizabeth, he wrote, was “OK but figure splop! Also drinking. Also has not yet read the play! That’s my girl!” She told Richard “twice an hour,” he related, “how lonely she is.” Bloated on pills and booze, she no longer appealed to him.

Opening on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne on May 8, 1983, the show was a disaster, getting what Sheilah Graham called “the most devastating reviews I have ever read.” When Richard married Sally Hay during the run, Graham Jenkins asked him if he missed Elizabeth. “Of course,” Richard replied. “All the time. But Elizabeth can’t look after me. I need Sally. She takes care of an old man.”
⁸
The play toured cross-country until November. By the time it finally folded in Los Angeles, critics had dubbed it “The Liz ’n’ Dick Show.” Elizabeth was so bored that in the third-act breakfast scene, she threw her biscuits at the audience. HBO dropped its plans to tape the play, which closed on November 6, 1983. Many who saw the production liked it better than the critics and still remembered it fondly when interviewed in 1999. “My daughter and I saw it in New York and loved it,” recalled Joanne Cates of Key West. “Liz and Dick let the audience in on the big joke, reliving every minute of their marriages. It was like a visit with them, a big party—they were adorable.”

At the end of the run Elizabeth was in a state of physical and mental anguish, suffering back pains and filled, she later wrote, with “self-pity and self-disgust.” Lonely and friendless, she retreated to her home and shut the door on life, surrendering to her alcohol and pills. In late 1983, she landed in the hospital at her lowest bottom ever. Chen Sam and Dr. William Skinner alerted her family, and an intervention was held in her hospital room. In view of its later impact on contemporary society and particularly on the disease of alcoholism, the scene should be the subject some day of a heroic canvas by a modern super-realist such as Alfred Leslie—the distraught screen goddess surrounded by her brother, Howard Taylor, her children Chris and Mike Wilding and Liza Todd, her oldest friend Roddy McDowall, and Dr. Skinner, the facilitator-healer. In one of the key moments in the history of modern recovery, they made Elizabeth face the fact that she was killing herself. One of them picked up the phone, dialed 1-800-854-9211, and made reservations for her at the Betty Ford Center, which had opened the previous year at the Eisenhower Medical Center at 39000 Bob Hope Drive in Rancho Mirage, California. Unlike many alcoholics who adamantly deny their problem and refuse help, Elizabeth thought, “It’s time to change before it’s too late.”

That evening, December 5, 1983, she entered the Betty Ford Center (hereafter referred to as BFC), feeling “lonely and frightened,” she recalled. In withdrawal, she was “stuttering, stumbling, incoherent.” An assigned “buddy” usually takes newcomers to their rooms, where their luggage is gone through to make sure nothing with alcohol is in it. At some point, they undergo a physical, including an EKG, at the Eisenhower Center hospital. The next morning they are awakened at 6:30 a.m. After breakfast, they walk 1.5 miles around the compound. Then comes clean-up detail. Treated like any other person in recovery, Elizabeth was instructed to take out the garbage and hose down the patio. Referred to as an “inmate,” she was “terrified,” she recalled. “I had never felt alone in my entire life.” For the first time, she was without her entourage, that band of yes-men and enablers that had cheered her down her long road to hell. She at last had an opportunity to undergo ego-deflation at depth—to renounce the sham of a pride-driven existence and join the human race.

Clean-up detail is followed by group therapy, which routinely begins with the reading of a daily meditation aloud, such as, “Happiness cannot be sought directly; it is a by-product of love and service.” After the reading, each patient talks about the meaning of the meditation. Later there are lectures and nightly AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) or NA (Narcotics Anonymous) meetings. Sober alcoholics come in from the outside community and tell their stories, and patients also share, receiving candid feedback from the meeting. “This group experience,” according to BFC, “provides a mirror which helps each person to look at themselves with honesty and courage.” The recovery program’s emphasis on personal humility and placing principles above personalities undoubtedly proved deeply unnerving to the movie queen, who was far from humble and whose entire life had always thrived on fame. When a friend sent Elizabeth five hundred roses, she proudly displayed them in the rehab. “Those must have been sent to Elizabeth Taylor,” her counselor said. “Nobody else suffers from that kind of grandiosity.” Stung, Elizabeth fired back, “Look, I didn’t send them to myself.” But the counselor was right: the five hundred roses symbolized a glamorous life that had brought her nothing but misery, finally dumping her in AA. She was perhaps too willful to submit to the ego deflation essential to the process of achieving sobriety.

She made a stab at working AA’s famous Twelve Steps, which suggest reviewing one’s life honestly and sharing the results with a sponsor who has racked up enough sobriety to assist a newcomer on the rocky road to recovery. “I was fortunate to have Betty Ford herself as my sponsor,” Elizabeth recalled. For the first time, she was able to see that she had been an abused child. “I didn’t understand how deeply it affected me until years later, when I went to BFC,” she said. “There, I thought through my early experiences in order to live the rest of my life in the healthiest way possible . . . When I derailed in Washington, I had no idea that my real problem was a lack of self-worth and that all the food in the world would not fill up my inner feelings of emptiness.”

At BFC, the staff told Elizabeth not to diet, since it was dangerous to undertake too many changes at once, and nothing was as important as getting clean and sober. Nevertheless, she lost eleven pounds of bloat “simply because I stopped drinking,” she related. She didn’t stop smoking, according to the shopping lists that fellow inmate Peter Lawford read to Patricia Seaton on the phone. “Liz wants you to stop at the Rexall Drug Store in Palm Springs,” he told Patricia. “She wants pancake makeup and deep olive eyeliner by Max Factor and two cartons of Salem.”
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Elizabeth’s busy days in rehab included time for reflection and study. She was allowed four thirty-minute telephone calls during twenty-nine days, and occasionally a movie was shown in Firestone Hall. She had to be in bed by 10:30 p.m. Family visits were permitted on weekends. The third week was devoted to family therapy, and one family member was allowed in free (the total BFC bill was $12,000). Elizabeth checked out in January 1984 despite Dr. Skinner’s recommendation she stay another week to complete detoxification. She became impatient and screamed she’d had enough, though in the coming year she would continue to participate in BFC’s outpatient program.

Elizabeth had successfully kept her alcoholism and drug abuse out of the press for decades, but several days after arriving at BFC, she rang Betty Ford and said she had a feeling the news was about to break. “I felt an unauthorized presence at the clinic and it turned out I was absolutely right,” Elizabeth recalled. A reporter had sneaked in with the help of Peter Lawford, who informed on Elizabeth to the
National Enquirer
for $15,000 and then followed her into BFC, bringing the reporter and passing him off as his cousin. The
Enquirer
also stationed photographers with high-powered lenses in the desert near BFC, but Elizabeth beat them all to the punch, authorizing BFC to release an announcement revealing her history of substance abuse.
¹⁰

The publicity surrounding her effort to get sober stirred worldwide interest in alcoholism as a genuine disease like cancer or tuberculosis and helped dispel long-held prejudices against alcoholics as spineless, weak-willed dregs of society. More than any film she’d ever made, getting sober was Elizabeth’s greatest accomplishment and gave courage to others to face their own alcoholism, beginning with Liza Minnelli. A month after Elizabeth went into BFC, Lorna Luft, Liza’s sister, decided to force an intervention on Liza. She called Chen Sam for advice, and Chen sent Lorna straight to Dr. Skinner, who helped stage the intervention that ultimately brought Liza to BFC. As a result, thousands of news stories appeared about Elizabeth and Liza in the press and on television, and recovery became one of the trendiest waves of the eighties and nineties. Hordes of celebrities came forward to admit their alcoholism and/or drug addiction, including Mary Tyler Moore, Eric Clapton, Carrie Fisher, Robert Downey Jr., Kelsey Grammer, Stevie Nicks, Chevy Chase, Don Johnson, Johnny Cash, Tony Curtis, Gary Busey, Andy Gibb, Bobby Brown, Matthew Perry, Shelley Winters, Eddie Fisher, Melanie Griffith, Christian Slater, Andy Dick, Tim Allen, Charlie Sheen, Lynda Carter, Mackenzie Phillips, Kate Moss, Julie Andrews, and Judd Nelson.
¹¹

Unfortunately, out of the ebullience of being newly sober—known by recovering alcoholics as a “pink cloud”—and perhaps out of the ego-driven desire to show her new self and spread the news far and wide, Elizabeth jeopardized her sobriety by going on
Good Morning America
almost immediately and talking about it. She was violating the principles of anonymity and humility that are the very underpinnings of a sober life.

Little did she know her celebration was premature, but she did appear to be making her most triumphant comeback. She was sober, she was lighter, she was beautiful, and she’d had a spiritual awakening. “I believe in a higher power,” Elizabeth said. “I believe in one God. I’m so glad I asked for help.” Her willingness to seek help from a power greater than herself would impact the rest of her life, changing her into the kind of person who’d help save others from drugs and alcohol and raise millions of dollars for people suffering from AIDS. AA’s big message is that one should give rather than take, understand rather than be understood, and love rather than be loved. Liberating one from unrealistic expectations, the program also liberates one from disappointment. “Finally, give of yourself,” Elizabeth wrote. “There are many organizations that need help . . . Nothing will raise your self-esteem as much as helping others. It will make you like yourself more and make you more likable . . . BFC changed my life.”

As the public woke up to the new Elizabeth Taylor—svelte, gorgeous, and evidently healthier both physically and emotionally—the world cheered her once again. They had their favorite movie star and world beauty back, and she looked great. In certain crucial ways, she remained unchanged, and therefore in danger of a relapse. “The new house I bought when I moved back to Los Angeles helped keep my emotions on an even keel and encouraged me to stick to my resolve,” she said, still looking to material comforts rather than inner meaning for stability. “Happiness,” as AA puts it, “is an inside job.” Possibly to avoid the tumult her attendance at regular AA meetings might cause, she held meetings in her home or at the homes of people she’d met at BFC. This exclusive approach deprived her of meeting the wide variety of alcoholics in the program who freely—and sometimes bluntly—share their experience and knowledge with one another, ignoring all differences in race, creed, and social status in favor of working together to stay sober. With input from only those she admired and who admired her and were not likely to talk candidly, she predictably fell back into her old thinking patterns and inevitably slid into a pain-painkillers-addiction-recovery-slip cycle. Her public statements indicated that her old negative attitudes were returning, full of rationalization and self-justification. “I get ill because I live too hard,” she said. “I give too much—out of a lust for life. I never back away. I relish life and face it head-on. Sometimes it’s almost more than I can face.” She was still in denial about her character defects—the drama, the overdoing everything, the greed, the lust, the love of fighting and arguing, overextending herself—and even, tragically, her drinking.