Black jacket-wearin’, Obama-hatin’ Reason honcho Nick Gillespie sends me an email “Me on Liz Taylor,” which turns out to be a link to a fun article, but not exactly what I was hoping for—period home video of a callow libertarian youth earning his erotic spurs astride mighty Liz.
Like me, Nick can’t quite get a grip on why people continued to give a damn about Liz sometime after the early seventies, around the time she stopped even trying to make films that weren’t entirely bullshit. From the mid-fifties through the mid-seventies, Liz lived a life of almost incomparable sexual melodrama, while occasionally making a decent film. And, of course, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, she actually made a great one. But at some point, doesn’t it make sense to stop looking?
My favorite Liz moment came about 19 years ago, in a television spectacle known as “Elizabeth Taylor’s Sixtieth Birthday Party.” Anybody’s sixtieth birthday party is going to be tough, but Liz had just gotten out of the hospital following treatment for brain cancer (yes, brain cancer) and she looked almost as bad as Liza Minnelli did without brain cancer at her infamous wedding/disaster to Judy Garland tchotchke collectin’ David Gest. The sight of hapless MC Paul Reiser gamely telling semi-comatose Liz over and over how beautiful she was, well, again, something not topped until Liza’s wedding.
The one thing that really sticks in my mind about Liz’s sixtieth, though, was the performance of Lily Tomlin guy-pal Tommy Velour. At one point, Tommy starts a number, stops, and says “Wait! Too much Anka!”
Tommy! How can you have too much Anka? Nineteen years later, I’m still wondering.
