Fag hag
Richard Burnett
rburnett@hour.ca
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Taylor: The last great movie star?
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It's true that back in the 1960s Montreal was a pretty glamorous city and celebrities and regular folks from the world over still came here to let the good times roll.It's during this era that my British banker dad (who managed the CIBC branch at Expo 67 before becoming known locally as the "King of Chabanel" at the height of Montreal's schmatte business) and my Mauritian mom (whose Robin Hood politician father not only refused an ambassadorship in Washington, D.C., but was forced into exile by the British) got married in Montreal.
Their wedding contract was drawn up by the renowned Montreal notary Lionel Segal, who a couple years later notarized the wedding contract of yet another Brit and glamour girl, Welshman Richard Burton and Hollywood superstar Elizabeth Taylor.
The Burton-Taylor wedding was held March 15, 1964, at Montreal's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, in suite 810, and was "the climax of a red-hot, two-year romance that had left two continents scorched in its wake," writes author William Mann in his just-published biography of Taylor, How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood. "The beaming bride, her hair braided with white Roman hyacinths, wore a gown of yellow chiffon designed by Irene Sharaff, who'd done her costumes for Cleopatra."
Like my mom, whose best childhood friend Jackie committed suicide because he could no longer bear living as an out gay man in Africa, Taylor's best friends were also gay men - iconic actors Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson and Roddy McDowall.
"Elizabeth
Taylor wasn't a fag hag, but in a beautiful way she was," Mann told me this week as his book shot up the New York Times bestseller list. "She loves camp and bigger-than-life personalities. She's always been ahead of her times. At 18 she told Monty Clift, 'You will find a man to love someday.' That was in 1951!"Five years later, Taylor cradled Clift's bloodied and broken body after he smashed his car into a telephone pole after leaving her Beverly Hills home during the filming of Raintree County.
"History has always tried to imply they were secret lovers, but that's bullshit," says Mann, who also wrote the awesome 2004 must-read book Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood. "From the start they were close friends. Remember, she was 14 when they met and he was this hero to her. He was a rebel. He taught her you didn't have to be a slave to the Hollywood studios."
About Taylor's relationship with her gay Giant co-stars James Dean and Rock Hudson, Old Hollywood starlet Noreen Nash recently claimed Taylor and Hudson had a bet on who could seduce Dean first.
"I don't know if it's true," says Mann, who for this book got access to the private letters of famed gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, the personal papers of director George Stevens, Mike Todd's FBI files, as well as the ear of Taylor's inner circle.
"At first Elizabeth didn't like Dean at all because he was a method actor. She thought he was ruining her takes and was full of himself. And there was a rivalry between Dean and Rock Hudson. But by the end of the shoot they had become friends."
When Taylor filmed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Paul Newman, she understood the gay subtext because, Mann says, "Her second husband Michael Wilding was gay. So she knew exactly what Maggie was dealing with."
Of Taylor and Roddy McDowall, Mann says, "They were girlfriends."
How much did Liz love Rock Hudson?
Well, when Rock died of AIDS in 1985, at the peak of AIDS-fuelled homophobia, Taylor threw caution to the wind and, as Mann tells me himself, "became the single greatest force in the fight against AIDS... Unlike so many celebrities today - today every celebrity has to have a cause - Elizabeth stood up because someone had to."
Taylor has since been dubbed the "Joan of Arc of AIDS" and she pulled it all off - the Oscar-winning career, the tabloid scandals, the eight weddings and her controversial AIDS activism - because she has been more famous than any other human being, ever, alive or dead. "In 1961 Elizabeth Taylor was bigger than Princess Diana," Mann says.
The Burton-Taylor wedding in Montreal made the front page of newspapers around the world. "Nobody was bigger," Mann says.
But in Hollywood, another town where drag queens have venerated Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbra Streisand, Cher and Bette Midler for decades, Taylor asks, "Why don't the drag queens do me?"
"I don't understand it either," says the openly gay Mann, 43. "More than any other star Elizabeth Taylor is immersed in the gay culture."
So much so that today, when Taylor - now 77 - goes out, it is to Mann's favourite gay watering hole in West Hollywood, The Abbey, where Taylor enjoys a reportedly "sizable" martini.
"Friends will send me text pictures of her whenever she's there," Mann says. "The people around her are in large part gay, so they know [that] when she wants to get out of the house, they take her to friendly territory.
"And at The Abbey she's treated like a queen by all the queens."
