My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Elizabeth Taylor (1932): The

119 Elizabeth Taylor The Über-Diva Scott F. Stoddart RuthRobeline:Nowthere’sastoryforyou.Sheisatortured, twisted soul—her whole life has been an experiment in terror.. . . I have to tell you, when it comes to sufferin’ she’s right up there with Elizabeth Taylor! TruvyJones(DollyParton)toAnnelleDupuy(DarylHannah), “SteelMagnolias”(1989) It seems as though Elizabeth Taylor is forever suffering. Maybe it was those violet eyes (enhanced with mascara and shadow) that 120 defy belief in most of her sixty-five films—haunting, tragic, yet divine. Maybe it was those marriages—eight in total—each one ending tragically, leaving La Liz turning to her public for sympathy . Or her battles with weight, begun when she gained thirty pounds to play Martha to Oscar-winning glory in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? (1966)—becoming a punch line for many latenight comedians. Just as Truvy contends, Taylor has become an icon for suffering in public. However, let’s return to those famous violet eyes; under their gaze, I believe Elizabeth Taylor was the patron saint of my own household in coastal Maine. She was always my mother’s favorite actress, and on Sunday afternoons we would sit together through her early movies: watching National Velvet (1944), Jane Eyre (1944), Father of the Bride (1950), we saw the British-born actress mature from a precocious girl to a responsible young woman. I know that I, as a young gay boy, first recognized her mature power through the pages of a Look magazine from 1972: in a photo essay, she romps through the surf with her husband-to-beredux , flaunting her famed sixty-nine-carat diamond. Reading of her divorces and her desire to find love, I knew that I had found a connection—I was suffering turmoil as a child of divorced parents and fraternal abuse, and Liz’s willful spirit reflected in those violet eyes guided me through many a week of high school where I was subject to the usual verbal abuse heaped on gay teens. The first Taylor film I saw on the big screen was in college: Suddenly Last Summer (1959). By then, I was unhappily sleeping with women and happily (though secretly) sleeping with men; wrestling with coming out, I empathized with her story of queer cousin Sebastian’s death. While my friends had no understanding of what really happened to Sebastian—I did. Dealing with my own sexuality in a small college town, I knew that the fearful attitudes of these friends prevented me from disclosing my true desires—I felt Catharine/Liz was speaking right to me about the dangers of letting others control you for their own selfish vanity. When Catharine confronts the extraordinary Violet Venable (Katharine Elizabeth Taylor 121 Hepburn) with the truth, she became my own personal diva— confronting falsity at every turn. In her fifty-two-year career as an actress, Taylor has made an indelible stamp on Hollywood films, and her roles define her progress from playing the ingénue to playing the lead. In George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951), her first film with friend Montgomery Clift, the nineteen-year-old Liz is accorded the star entrance . Stevens’s camera follows the gaze of George (Clift), a poor relation encountering the splendors of his rich relatives. He escapes a well-heeled cocktail party to shoot billiards, and as he ponders (and then makes) a difficult shot, a blur of white frothy chiffon floats by the open door; in walks Angela Vickers (Taylor), soon to be the object of his desire, and in close-up she utters one word, “Wow!” While it is appropriate to give Stevens credit for the progression of the sequence, once Taylor enters the room, the scene is hers, and she becomes more than an object of young lust—she embodies all the possibilities of capitalist success/excess as she gracefully takes control of the conversation, soon falling for the simple desire of George. The dress, designed by Edith Head, was immediately copied on Seventh Avenue, and hundreds of them were sold to adoring fans. Under further guidance by Tennessee Williams, Liz matured into her role as Maggie “The Cat” Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1957). Williams always said that she was his favorite Maggie, and her sexual energy captures a reading of the character that is now considered iconic. Kneeling on a brass bed in only...