Like her namesake, the late Queen Elizabeth II, Elizabeth Taylor was often regarded more as a public institution than a human being.
Her fame on the post-war stage is perhaps rivalled only by the late Queen, yet while there have been many biographies of the legendary actress, Kate Andersen Brower’s account is the first to be authorised by Taylor’s family.
Like many others before it, this book promises “unpublished letters, photographs, and private reflections” , yet offers few groundbreaking revelations.
Brower’s non-chronological approach aside, she takes the well-trodden narrative of the scores of previous biographers, including Taylor herself.
Like many other chroniclers, Brower’s regard for Taylor the talent is but a passing footnote to Taylor the celebrity.
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Taylor playing Cleopatra (Universal)
Taylor’s whirlwind succession of divorces and affairs took place in an era that may have been considerably more permissive than those that came before it, but her love life —which included eight marriages and seven husbands — still garnered her a reputation as a “home wrecker” on a par perhaps only with Helen of Troy.
At the dawn of the Sixties, she was slammed as a seductress when Eddie Fisher betrayed Debbie Reynolds for her. Within a handful of years, her affair with Richard Burton left the pair pursued by paparazzi and cast them as an unrepentant Francesco and Paolo in the popular imagination.
By the mid-1970s, her marriage to a Republican Senator led her into a brief stint as “an obedient Washington wife”. Following the death of Burton she married the construction worker Larry Fortensky, whom she met in rehab, and reinvented herself as the patron philanthropist of an unpopular cause — Aids.
While some speculate that Taylor’s championing of Aids charities was nothing but vintage virtue signalling, this ignores the thousands offered medical and moral support because of her work, which Brower rightly spotlights.
Her conversion to Judaism in 1959 was yet another dimension of her complex character. It came a year after the death of her producer husband Mike Todd (her third), the son of a rabbi, in a plane crash.
While Brower suspects the conversion “was a way to keep him close” as she grieved, Taylor, raised by a staunchly Zionist Christian Scientist, had “felt a deep connection to the Jewish faith and its people”, recoiling at accounts of antisemitic persecution during the 1940s.
What’s more, Brower presses home how Taylor stuck to her guns. When she was banned from most Muslim countries due to her public support for Israel, she made no apology. Brower recounts the extraordinary 1976 episode when Taylor offered to exchange herself for the 100-plus Jewish and Israeli passengers held hostage when terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked an Air France plane and took it to Uganda.
The exploration of the cinematic siren’s twilight years makes captivating reading, not least the mise-en-scene of a geriatric Taylor sipping watermelon martinis in rhinestone sunglasses and knee-high boots in a West Hollywood gay bar.
Despite Taylor’s down-to-earth humour and affection for decadent desserts and fried chicken, Brower cannot avoid conveying her amusing isolation from day-to-day drudgery. One Foundation for Aids Research board colleague, Bill Misenhimer, recalled her saying “So this is what a bank looks like,” during a board meeting at the Bank of Los Angeles.
Still, given the access the author was given, this biography feels like a missed opportunity. This exploration of the Taylor epoch is an enjoyable romp, but it won’t reshape your opinion of its protagonist.
