Rapt fan breathless about voracious star
By Frank Bruni |
October 25, 2009, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
She demanded a different holder for each of the many cigarettes she smoked daily during the filming of "Cleopatra," and the holder's color couldn't clash with the cloth on any table at which she smoked.
Quick to the scene of Montgomery Clift's near-fatal car crash in 1956, she crawled into the vehicle and, with her fingers, pulled out the smashed teeth lodged deep in his mouth, a move that may have saved his life.
And when she and Richard Burton commenced their affair, he discovered "the most voracious lover he had ever known."
These are the sorts of details a reader craves from a celebrity biography, and "How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood" doesn't skimp on them. Some seem fresh and some are clearly recycled, but all are rendered with a verve and fluidity that keep the book moving along in a fleet fashion. Its author, William J. Mann, has clearly done his research and just as clearly adores his subject. "How to Be a Movie Star" reads like a labor of immoderate love. It also, annoyingly, reads like an act of moderate disingenuousness.
Mann, who wrote the widely praised biography "Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn," insists time and again, on page after page, that his subject is broader and deeper than Taylor herself -- that he's investigating the very nature and stamina of stardom.
Quoting the writer Maureen Orth's hilarious observation that Taylor was "the Madame Curie of fame extension," he casts his biography in part as an investigation into the chemical formula behind her enduring command of the spotlight.
He announces straight off that his purpose "is not a traditional biography," adding, "I take instruction from the book's title." But the academic tone of that clunky declarative statement is belied by much of the breathless garden-variety voyeurism to come.
"No one -- except the two parties involved -- can ever be absolutely sure when flirtation became fornication," Mann writes of the initial Taylor-Burton coupling, then proceeds to hazard the guess that the moment transpired in Burton's trailer on the "Cleopatra" set.
Mann may be telling himself that he's engaged in critically important cultural commentary, but this tonally jumbled book doesn't ultimately play that way. It plays like a rapt fan's scrupulous reconstruction of a life so tumultuous and packed with glamor that it doesn't need a moral.
Stardom didn't come to Taylor haphazardly or after decades of struggle; it was a matter of plotting and grooming by a mother intent on seeing her daughter's name in lights.
Little Liz was among a whole subculture of Southern California children whose parents tucked them into the perverse bosom of the entertainment industry, though few flourished the way Liz did. "National Velvet" was just the start of it. There were bigger horses and grander arenas to come.
The book presents her story in segments defined by the prominent men she chose to favor (and marry) and the prominent roles she took, and it casts romantic and professional choices as almost equally strategic, and in some senses intertwined.
Taylor's tenacious grip on the spotlight was partly a matter of sensing which mate at which moment could help her most. She comes across as calculating, selfish and maybe a little soulless.
As she yet again takes a new lover or yet again takes to her sickbed, a practiced patient aware of the manipulative power of a well-timed malady, the effect on her children is seldom mentioned or explored.
Mann has more interest in building her up than in tearing her down, and he credits Taylor with a great deal of influence.
He entertains suggestions that she had a hand in bringing about the end of the old studio system, and that she had a part in bringing about the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
"How to Be a Movie Star" works less well as an excavation of Taylor's character than as a highlights reel of her cinematic triumphs and a romp through Hollywood during a certain era, when Hedda Hopper wielded thunderbolts from her typewriter, virile stars like Clift and Rock Hudson (both friends of the open-minded Taylor) carefully veiled their sexual orientation, and marriages were arranged for the sake of headlines.
Quick to the scene of Montgomery Clift's near-fatal car crash in 1956, she crawled into the vehicle and, with her fingers, pulled out the smashed teeth lodged deep in his mouth, a move that may have saved his life.
And when she and Richard Burton commenced their affair, he discovered "the most voracious lover he had ever known."
These are the sorts of details a reader craves from a celebrity biography, and "How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood" doesn't skimp on them. Some seem fresh and some are clearly recycled, but all are rendered with a verve and fluidity that keep the book moving along in a fleet fashion. Its author, William J. Mann, has clearly done his research and just as clearly adores his subject. "How to Be a Movie Star" reads like a labor of immoderate love. It also, annoyingly, reads like an act of moderate disingenuousness.
Mann, who wrote the widely praised biography "Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn," insists time and again, on page after page, that his subject is broader and deeper than Taylor herself -- that he's investigating the very nature and stamina of stardom.
Quoting the writer Maureen Orth's hilarious observation that Taylor was "the Madame Curie of fame extension," he casts his biography in part as an investigation into the chemical formula behind her enduring command of the spotlight.
He announces straight off that his purpose "is not a traditional biography," adding, "I take instruction from the book's title." But the academic tone of that clunky declarative statement is belied by much of the breathless garden-variety voyeurism to come.
"No one -- except the two parties involved -- can ever be absolutely sure when flirtation became fornication," Mann writes of the initial Taylor-Burton coupling, then proceeds to hazard the guess that the moment transpired in Burton's trailer on the "Cleopatra" set.
Mann may be telling himself that he's engaged in critically important cultural commentary, but this tonally jumbled book doesn't ultimately play that way. It plays like a rapt fan's scrupulous reconstruction of a life so tumultuous and packed with glamor that it doesn't need a moral.
Stardom didn't come to Taylor haphazardly or after decades of struggle; it was a matter of plotting and grooming by a mother intent on seeing her daughter's name in lights.
Little Liz was among a whole subculture of Southern California children whose parents tucked them into the perverse bosom of the entertainment industry, though few flourished the way Liz did. "National Velvet" was just the start of it. There were bigger horses and grander arenas to come.
The book presents her story in segments defined by the prominent men she chose to favor (and marry) and the prominent roles she took, and it casts romantic and professional choices as almost equally strategic, and in some senses intertwined.
Taylor's tenacious grip on the spotlight was partly a matter of sensing which mate at which moment could help her most. She comes across as calculating, selfish and maybe a little soulless.
As she yet again takes a new lover or yet again takes to her sickbed, a practiced patient aware of the manipulative power of a well-timed malady, the effect on her children is seldom mentioned or explored.
Mann has more interest in building her up than in tearing her down, and he credits Taylor with a great deal of influence.
He entertains suggestions that she had a hand in bringing about the end of the old studio system, and that she had a part in bringing about the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
"How to Be a Movie Star" works less well as an excavation of Taylor's character than as a highlights reel of her cinematic triumphs and a romp through Hollywood during a certain era, when Hedda Hopper wielded thunderbolts from her typewriter, virile stars like Clift and Rock Hudson (both friends of the open-minded Taylor) carefully veiled their sexual orientation, and marriages were arranged for the sake of headlines.
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