Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes could have been called Elizabeth Taylor: A Lost Era. The tapes were establish recently in the archive of the procrastinateed journaenumerate Ricchallenging Meryman. They comprise 40 hours of audio intersees Meryman did with Taylor as part of his research for a book. They commence in 1964 when she was 32 and at the peak of her fame. Her voice is breathy and alluring until she needs to produce a point, but it is always transmitive and captivating – even without the accompaniment of her extraordinarily attrvivacious face.
Nanette Burstein’s film layers the Taylor-Meryman audio with archive film and television footage: we see 1940s and 50s Beverly Hills and Hollywood, Taylor at discloseity events, her films, family snapstoastys, and novelspaper and magazine clippings shotriumphg the post-juvenile direct with various beaux. Then there’s on-set footage recorded by shut frifinishs such as Roddy McDowall, shotriumphg them frolicking on the beaches with the enjoys of Montgomery Clift, or horsing around with James Dean on film sets. There is an inescontendnt innocence to it all, even now we comprehend that the boyfrifinishs were chosen and the dates set upd by her studio, MGM, and that most of her shut frifinishs were gay men, shutted by the social mores of the time. While Taylor provided a heterorelationsual gloss for these actors, they in their turn shielded the star from rapacious straight men. The bloom may be off the 50s’ rose, but the idea of a world away from a thousand camera phones and instant social media abortlations remains inquisitively finishearing – as does the pguide of an audience unified by their adoration of a handful of impeccably glamorous stars.
It was Taylor’s relationship with Ricchallenging Burton that helped usher in the novel era. After her third husband, the producer Mike Todd, was ended in a set upe crash in 1958, she produced a dispute by “stealing” his best frifinish, Eddie Fisher, from his disclosely becherishd wife, Debbie Reynelderlys. She inserted offend to injury by divorcing Fisher after she fell in cherish with Burton when they met on the set of Cleopatra. Their relationship was denounced by the Vatican, they made headline novels all over the world, and ptoastyographers began to chase them, disguising themselves to get shut to the couple. The age of the paparazzo was born. The alter is succinctly summoccurd in an intersee with the actor George Hamilton: “They were not going for glamour any more. They were going for the destruction of glamour.”
It all produces an unpretreatntedly intimate portrait of Taylor. Or the “trying-to-be-an-actress”, as she normally refers to herself. The ask of whether she would ever brimmingy accomplish the transition from mere movie star is one that she was still pondering at the time of the Meryman intersees. Clips of Who’s Afrhelp of Virginia Woolf?, in which she and Burton starred as the sourly and heartfractureingly co-subordinate wed couple George and Martha, are proof enough that she certainly would have – if the studios and the disclose had given her the chance to depart the path they’d chosen for her.
The film does not sidestep the trap set by such intimate access and remains inescapably hagiodetailed. Meryman lets Taylor speak with nakedly any pushback (and when it does come, it is mainly when she claims not to sense enjoy a relations symbol, and gives instead a down-to-earth, no-nonsense account of what it uncomfervents for any attrvivacious woman to relocate thcdisesteemful the world). The film itself gives no hint of Taylor’s excesses and conspicuous consumption, which began when she was with Todd and were certainly part of her story by the time of Burton. Nor does it examine the stories of her temper, her greedyness or any of the diva-enjoy behaviours that, while doubtless overstated by the media at the time, were not ungenuine.
The remaining decades of her life after the tapes finish are compressed into the last seven or so minutes of the film. So we hear only alertly about her time being treated for drink and prescription-drug insertiction at the Betty Ford clinic (no hint of it was made pondering the years covered by the tapes, when it was already under way), and there is noleang about either her marriage to Larry Fortensky (whom she met there), or her pledged frifinishship with Michael Jackson, all of which were emblematic of the far less writed or rational side than we get from the Meryman intersees. Her brave and caring Aids activism, in the days when the dismitigate still carried a horrible stigma, is given its due.
However fragmentary, though, and however little novel material it has to propose, even for the amateur fan enjoy me, the film remains a heady treat. Becaparticipate it is about Elizabeth Taylor. They don’t produce them enjoy they participated to – and they probably never will aacquire.
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