Elizabeth Taylor 1932-2011

When Elizabeth Taylor was 17 and I was 16, I thought I was in love with her, captivated by her porcelain beauty, her perfect features, and her impossibly beautiful violet eyes. I think I was just in love with the idea and the aesthetic pleasure of beauty.

She had quite a life -- both over-rated and, occasionally, under-rated as an actress. A few fine jobs of acting out of about 60 films in a long career that gleaned her two Oscars for Best Actress (Butterfield 8 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). But her film characters were no more colorful than her life. At 18, married and divorced in the same year to young Conrad Hilton, then married Michael Wilding at 19, which lasted 4 yrs and bore two sons. Divorced him and married Michael Todd, who was killed in a plane crash; then married his best friend Eddie Fischer, who was at the time married to Debbie Reynolds. Then she and Richard Burton made beautiful scandal together while making Cleopatra, and they married and divorced twice. Then a future senator, and finally a construction worker whom she met while at the Betty Ford Rehab Center. Life imitates art?

And then there was the jewelry: flashy, big, and very very expensive. By then she had developed the zaftig figure that could wear such heavy jewels. She even wrote a book titled, "My Love Affair With Jewelry."

Elizabeth Taylor was not pretentious. She liked what she liked, without apologies, even if it was a bit vulgar; and she pursued her passions. She was devotedly loyal to her friends, including Michael Jackson, Montgomery Cliff, and Rock Hudson.

But her crowning contribution, in my opinion, was her early championing of the fight against AIDS, helping to found and for twenty years raise funds for the American Foundation for AIDS Research. She was not just a celebrity lending her name -- she was serious about it, and she did a great good.

Thanks, Liz, for the memories and for your humanitarian spirit, your compassion, and your work to find a cure so that today's young men don't have to endure the fate of your closeted gay pal, Rock Hudson -- that hunk of countless romantic comedies, America's heartthrob, who startled the uncomprehending world by dying of AIDS early on in the epidemic.

RIP

Ralph