Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes could have been called Elizabeth Taylor: A Lost Era. The tapes were found recently in the archive of the late journalist Richard Meryman. They include 40 hours of audio interviews Meryman did with Taylor as part of his research for a book. They start in 1964 when she was 32 and at the peak of her fame. Her voice is breathy and seductive until she needs to make a point, but it is always expressive and captivating – even without the accompaniment of her extraordinarily beautiful 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 publicity events, her films, family snapshots, and newspaper and magazine clippings showing the post-juvenile lead with various beaux. Then there’s on-set footage recorded by close friends such as Roddy McDowall, showing them frolicking on the beaches with the likes of Montgomery Clift, or horsing around with James Dean on film sets. There is an inescapable innocence to it all, even now we know that the boyfriends were chosen and the dates arranged by her studio, MGM, and that most of her close friends were gay men, closeted by the social mores of the time. While Taylor provided a heterosexual gloss for these actors, they in their turn shielded the star from predatory 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 cancellations remains curiously endearing – as does the appeal of an audience unified by their adoration of a handful of impeccably glamorous stars.
It was Taylor’s relationship with Richard Burton that helped usher in the new era. After her third husband, the producer Mike Todd, was killed in a plane crash in 1958, she created a scandal by “stealing” his best friend, Eddie Fisher, from his publicly beloved wife, Debbie Reynolds. She added insult to injury by divorcing Fisher after she fell in love with Burton when they met on the set of Cleopatra. Their relationship was denounced by the Vatican, they made headline news all over the world, and photographers began to follow them, disguising themselves to get close to the couple. The age of the paparazzo was born. The change is succinctly summarised in an interview with the actor George Hamilton: “They were not going for glamour any more. They were going for the destruction of glamour.”
It all creates an unprecedentedly intimate portrait of Taylor. Or the “trying-to-be-an-actress”, as she often refers to herself. The question of whether she would ever fully accomplish the transition from mere movie star is one that she was still pondering at the time of the Meryman interviews. Clips of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which she and Burton starred as the bitterly and heartbreakingly co-dependent married couple George and Martha, are proof enough that she surely would have – if the studios and the public had given her the chance to leave the path they’d chosen for her.
The film does not sidestep the trap set by such intimate access and remains inescapably hagiographic. Meryman lets Taylor speak with barely any pushback (and when it does come, it is mainly when she claims not to feel like a sex symbol, and gives instead a practical, no-nonsense account of what it means for any attractive woman to move through 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 selfishness or any of the diva-like behaviours that, while doubtless exaggerated by the media at the time, were not untrue.
The remaining decades of her life after the tapes end are compressed into the last seven or so minutes of the film. So we hear only briefly about her time being treated for drink and prescription-drug addiction at the Betty Ford clinic (no hint of it was made regarding the years covered by the tapes, when it was already under way), and there is nothing about either her marriage to Larry Fortensky (whom she met there), or her devoted friendship with Michael Jackson, all of which were emblematic of the far less composed or wise side than we get from the Meryman interviews. Her fearless and compassionate Aids activism, in the days when the disease still carried a terrible stigma, is given its due.
However partial, though, and however little new material it has to offer, even for the amateur fan like me, the film remains a heady treat. Because it is about Elizabeth Taylor. They don’t make them like they used to – and they probably never will again.
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