Taylor Made

In one of those bizarre coincidences that seem to characterize my life, I was just introducing my daughter to Richard Brooks’s 1958 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Sunday night, and discussing leading lady Elizabeth Taylor at some length.  Today, while The Winter from Hell reasserts itself as The Winter That Wouldn’t Die (with a second snowfall since the start of so-called spring), Liz has left us at 79 after suffering from congestive heart failure for years.  While it would be disingenuous of me to present myself as one of her bigger fans, there are enough of what I consider high points in her career to merit attention, not least of them Cat.

If I was slow to come to what appreciation I do have for La Taylor, it should be noted that in the year I was born, she was entering the most notorious phase of her marital merry-go-round, about to dump hubby #4, Eddie Fisher, for #s 5 and 6, Richard Burton, her co-star in Cleopatra (1963).  Mind you, this was after she’d already stolen Eddie—who “consoled” her while she mourned #3, showman Mike Todd—from Debbie Reynolds (doubtless earning the eternal enmity of daughter Carrie Fisher).  As I grew up, she got older, and heavier, and more often wed and divorced, and Cleopatra went on to symbolize Hollywood excess at its worst, so I didn’t take her too seriously.

Then, somewhere along the line, I saw Cat for the first time, and started to understand what all of the fuss was about; as I told my daughter, the story really doesn’t work unless you take one look at Maggie and say, “Brick, man, what the hell’s wrong with you?”  Alexandra, who has read the play and is often very critical of what she considers miscast stage roles onscreen (e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow in Proof [2005], a show she herself has directed), said Taylor was the perfect choice, and had been somewhat softened for the film.  Fine by me, since Williams’s work is often downbeat, and I found the relatively hopeful ending of Cat, or at least the cinematic one, a pleasant surprise.

Time went by and I discovered even earlier examples of the young and luminous Liz:  striking at only 11 in Jane Eyre (1943); holding her own opposite a canine superstar in Lassie Come Home (1943) and Courage of Lassie (1946); and as the object of the exercise in the original Father of the Bride (1950) and Father’s Little Dividend (1951).  In all fairness, I’ve never seen most of her movies, and through no fault of her own, many of them simply aren’t my cup of tea.  During the 1950s, she made three consecutive films epitomizing why that remains my least favorite decade in cinema history:  The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), Giant (1956), and Raintree County (1957).

Several good ones teamed her with Burton (who, you’ll recall, starred in my #1 favorite, Where Eagles Dare [1969]), including Mike Nichols’s dazzling debut, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1967 version of The Taming of the Shrew.  I don’t remember The Comedians (1967) that well, but it reunited Graham Greene and Alec Guinness from Our Man in Havanah (1959), so how bad could it be?  And, having just seen Olympia Dukakis onstage in the Williams flop The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, I’m dying to see Liz and Dick’s take on it, Boom! (1968), so as we mark her passing, I look forward to discovering more of her work.