How Taylor’s Life Became a Parable

If you had to pinpoint the start of the 1960s — that is, the counterculture revolution — two events are almost universally agreed on as the era’s formative earthquakes. One was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The other (the real spark to the tinderbox) was the first appearance of the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan,” which happened only 11 weeks later, and which all but answered the assassination by saying, “Here is joy. Here is hope. Here’s a new way to be.”

Yet there was another global media phenomenon that took place over a slightly longer period of time, and it was one that was just as defining of the era’s new energy. That was the scandalous romance of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. We tend to think of that saga as, simply, the apotheosis of celebrity gossip. Yet as it plays out in Nanette Burstein’s luscious and enveloping documentary “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes,” we see how this love story was bigger than that. It was mythological.

Why? For decades, there had been adulterous movie-star romances. Taylor and Burton were the first to see their private lives played out in the new international mass media; the idea of “paparazzi” literally came into being around them. (They were chased for miles, and photographers would pose as priests or plumbers to stake them out.) But it wasn’t merely the unprecedented exposure. The Liz-and-Dick story happened as the new age of divorce was coming into being, and this saga had one foot in each epoch. Taylor had been a movie star since the early ’40s, with an otherworldly beauty comparable to that of Vivien Leigh or Marilyn Monroe. She was from that larger-than-life place; that’s partly why, for “Cleopatra,” she had become the first actor in history to be paid $1 million for a movie role.

The fact that she abandoned her husband, Eddie Fisher, to be with Burton, her “Cleopatra” costar, was treated as the height of sin (it was denounced by the Vatican). Yet what also played out in a bold new public way was the passion that fueled it. Taylor, as the documentary reveals, actually had a rather conservative side, which is one reason she was married eight times; she didn’t hop from boyfriend to boyfriend — instead, she would get serious and get hitched. What made the Liz-and-Dick saga the herald of a new age is that it became a projection of Taylor following her bliss, leaving her marriage because it felt good. That’s what the 1960s would be all about, and for that period of infamy, at least, she became an iconic diva of the pleasure principle.

There is now a whole genre of celebrity documentary built around the playing of old analog tape recordings, originally done as interviews. “The Capote Tapes” was made that way (I don’t think you would have had “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” without that arresting documentary); so was “Kubrick on Kubrick.” “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” is based on interviews Taylor did with the journalist Richard Meryman, starting in 1964, for a book he was researching. On these tapes, Taylor’s voice is singular in its expressiveness — she is insolent, mournful, sexy, outraged, dripping with debauched delight, and always casually candid. Her words invest even the most familiar events with a revealing intimacy.

Those words cued me to see how expressive her beauty is. The film is filled with astonishing clips of the private and public Elizabeth Taylor, and while she always looked like her — the incomparable eyes (on the set of “National Velvet,” she was told to remove her mascara, but of course she wasn’t wearing any), the mouth that looked like that of a Greek statue in repose, the smile so elastic and modern yet gorgeously etched — that she always looked different, with an astonishing array of moods. Born in London to American parents, she never lost that aristocratic inflection of speech; it’s what gave her anger its whiplash elegance.

The whole lost-tapes school of documentary gives Burstein’s film a personal anecdotal vibrance. We hear Taylor recall the confessional conversations she would have with James Dean late at night during the shooting of “Giant.” She was close with many of the closeted gay superstars of the era (Dean, Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson, her former youth co-star Roddy McDowall), and she says that the comfort she felt with them had a lot to do with escaping the predator zone of Hollywood. She talks about her abusive first husband, the hotel heir Nicky Hilton, kicking her in the stomach so that she’d have a miscarriage. She also calls the movies the studio forced her to make in the ’50s “shit you could choke on.”

She describes how the day after her divorce from Michael Wilding was finalized, Mike Todd, the fabled producer, called her over to his office and said that he wanted to see her. He told her that he was in love with her and was going to marry her, and by the end of his spiel she believed him. “He could con the gold out of your teeth,” she says with rapturous admiration. There’s also her ongoing admission of what a playfully devious and even treacherous mate she could be. “I know myself,” she says, “and I know that I will try to get away with murder.”

During her marriage to Todd, she acquired a streak of his bluster; his death in a plane crash drove her mad with grief, resetting the paradigm of her life. Her marriage to Eddie Fisher was a rebound, an act of survival (she says that she liked but never loved him), which got washed away by the tidal wave of her passion for Burton. “The Lost Tapes” doesn’t overemphasize private soap opera over art. But the documentary, like Liz herself, is frank about the ways she was underused as an actress. She was, of course, a beguiling child star, and perfect in “A Place in the Sun” and “Giant,” but in many ways she was martyred by the confectionary studio fodder of the ’50s the same way that Brando was.

She has nothing but contempt for “Butterfield 8,” the lurid tale that won her an Oscar after she’d nearly died from pneumonia during the shooting of “Cleopatra.” Here’s her bluntness: “I won the award for my tracheotomy…It must have been some kind of sympathy thing, because I think the film is so embarrassing.” Yet if Taylor recognized, rightly, that “Butterfield 8” was slapdash and moralistic in a trashy way (the whole depiction of her tragic prostitute character fell between the cracks of empathy and a leftover Hays Code puritanism), she admits that she acted the whole thing out of anger — anger at the film itself — and when you watch “Butterfield 8,” there is a cathartic anger to her performance. It’s the bridge to her extraordinary work in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

Her description of meeting Burton is priceless. He came onto the set of “Cleopatra,” “and I’ve never seen a gentleman so hungover in my whole life. He was kind of quivering from head to foot.” He couldn’t even hold the cup of coffee he ordered, so Liz held it for him. “I fed him coffee, and he was terribly nervous and sweet and shaky, and it just endeared me so to him.” He had never seen her in a movie except when she was a child star, and he went in thinking that she was “just a star” who couldn’t act at all. But he came to understand her gift. As Burton says later on, “It’s the inaccessibility of Elizabeth that makes her exciting.”

They saved each other and caused great damage to each other, largely through alcoholic binges. According to observers, they would become like George and Martha. And just as the media, in a certain sense, had created them, the media colluded in their burnout. We hear a great quote from George Hamilton, who says that the press was “not going for glamour anymore, they were going for the destruction of glamour.” The last part of Liz Taylor’s life and career, as seen in “The Lost Tapes,” touches on that destruction, but it’s also about how Taylor reclaimed her power through the heroism of her fight for people with AIDS. It was a reality that was also a role that needed to be played: her excoriating of the world for not doing enough. And when you see her in those years, you realize that Taylor, after all she’d been through, hadn’t lost a thing about herself except for the divine innocence that she replaced with something just as regal.