A year off sixty, she is the Helen of Troy de nos jours, a survivor like her great-grandparents, who crossed America in a covered wagon, or like her screen-struck mother, Sara, now ninety-five and living in Palm Springs. Elizabeth Taylor has only just stopped marrying the men she loves, saying, “At my age you don’t have to tidy up.”
She has always been the kind of full-blooded lover and liver who could say of her explosive marriage to Mike Todd, “We had more fun fighting than most people have making love.” Are men still scared to enter her zone of irresistible, earth-mother sexuality? Do they fear to get close?
Her eyes widen. “I hear that they do, and”—the shiny pink lips give a small gasp—“it a-ston-ishes me. It is true. With any famous woman men can feel intimidated.”
She makes two tiny fists and pulls them into her chest.
“I’ve matured, I’ve grown up, I’ve gone through phases, but I haven’t changed. I’ve always been what they call a liberated woman. To me, it was just being me. I’ve always had my equal rights.”
She chuckles.
“I haven’t wanted to be dominated, but I’ve never wanted to wear boxer shorts either. I enjoy being feminine. I don’t think you have to burn bras. I like bras if they’re pretty, and I love lace underwear!” Her soft voice broadens out into the kind of laugh you hear at the end of a late, good party.
She has been married seven times to six husbands, four of whom died prematurely. She has four children, one adopted, and five grandchildren. She is Hollywood’s most popular guest, and her parking lot is perpetually blocked with the cars of her friends and entourage.
“‘A man’s woman?’” says her old friend Sheran Cazalet Hornby, smiling. “Of course. And a woman’s woman, a child’s woman, a horse’s, parrot’s, goat’s, dog’s, and cat’s woman. And mostly someone who wants to stay home with the family and eat bangers and mash.”
Bearing this out, a pale cat preens on the table between us, and if you listen you can hear, from all over the house, a distant cackling, bleating, yapping, and barking.
“When I was a child I tried to have friends my own age, and I desperately hoped my brother’s friends would ask me out. But, no-o-o, they didn’t. When I tried to blend in, I stuck out like a sore thumb. I was famous and I looked much older than I was. When I was fifteen I was playing eighteen-year-olds and going out with men in their twenties or more. Mind, I’m reversing that now!” She gives a shout of laughter, descending the scale two notes at a time. “My friends are still the same age.”
This is a woman who cannot remember a time when she wasn’t famous. At twelve she made National Velvet, her fifth film, and she already had a paycheck of three hundred dollars a week. At eighteen, courtesy of her first husband, Nicky Hilton, she had stocks, minks, a Cadillac convertible, and a ring worth fifty thousand dollars. At twenty-four, courtesy of Mike Todd, she had a cinema named after her, a present every day—a big one on Saturdays, because that’s the day they met—a Rolls, a thirty-carat diamond measuring an inch and a half across, and paintings by Degas and Vuillard. At thirty-one, courtesy of Richard Burton and 20th Century Fox, she earned one million dollars a picture; the Krupp diamond (“Thirty-three and a third carats. Don’t forget the third”); Shah Jehan’s diamond; the Peregrina pearl given to Mary Tudor in 1554; houses in Mexico and Gstaad; the penthouse at the Dorchester in London; and a yacht.