The news streaks rapidly, repeatedly, to news of this Arab upheaval to that putative Republican candidate who also doesn’t seem to have any traction to an American government that can’t even pay its own people to the decidedly vacuous Kim Kardashian. But I’m still thinking about the quiet death of a true star in the sky, the indomitable Elizabeth Taylor, who left this world and took a lot of class with her on March 23.
She had curves, eyes, hair, and she was not servile to men or stigmas.
Yes, she married a lot, but never as anyone other than herself. She coped with booze and weight (like a lot of us) but in breathtaking contrast to the vast majority of us blowhard gossipers, she actually did not care what people thought and she withstood withering and cruel criticism with an unyielding character and dignity. She gave a whole lot of herself to the eradication of the HIV plague even while most of us were callously unfeeling when AIDS first became widely known. We shunned its victims and degraded their humanity and we still act like it’s not a real contagion just because Magic Johnson (thankfully) has survived it for so long.
The writer Benjamin Ivry reminded us in The Forward that Taylor was trying to eradicate HIV exactly at the same time when the American folk-hero, President Ronald Reagan, gave us “a lethal example…by simply ignoring the AIDS pandemic, thereby condemning its early victims to silent death.”
Liz Taylor was cool, truly cool, and—unlike the bicycles that stand-in for “stars” today such as Jennifer Aniston and the cosmically laughable Lindsay Lohan—Taylor was a real presence. She had curves, eyes, hair, and she was not servile to men or stigmas. A gifted, lithe actress who could panther-tame both Paul Newman and her real-life, love-nemesis Richard Burton, who could caress a horse in National Velvet or arm-wrestle an empire in Cleopatra, Liz Taylor’s violet windows could reflect every subtle human condition known to women, from lust to fear to resentment to the most sizzling sexuality.
This solar woman, in a class by herself, also examined her soul and fulfilled her convictions. She chose Judaism in 1959 and took the Hebrew name Elisheba Rachel. According to her biographers, she closely identified with the travails of the Jewish people and was drawn to our eternal predicament of suffering and redemption. It was reported that in 1976 she secretly offered herself as a substitute hostage for the Air France hostages who had been skyjacked and cruelly held by Palestinian terrorists at Entebbe, Uganda.
The world was not a stage for Elizabeth Taylor; it was the world.
(This article is a year-end chosen reprise)
Ben Kamin’s next book, ‘ROOM 306:The National Story of the Lorraine Motel,’ will be published in 2012 by Michigan State University Press
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