Born On This Day- February 27th... Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky

She came into my focus as my mother sat me down at 5 years of age & explained the entire Elizabeth Taylor + Eddie Fisher – Debbie Reynolds = scandal equation. I got it. She remains my mother’s favorite star; they are the same age & were born in the same month. She is a favorite of mine & I think she is the last of the truly great Hollywood Royalty, & very possibly the most beautiful woman of all time. I love her deeply.

Taylor has been a trusted friend to the gay community, & we have loved her right back. She was very close friends & a confidant of gay men: Roddy McDowell, Rock Hudson, George Cukor, Noel Coward, James Dean & most famously to Montgomery Clift. Were there ever any 2 actors at the apex of their beauty, more stunning than Taylor & Clift kissing in A Place In The Sun?



Elizabeth Taylor is a conundrum: truly classy, but perfectly campy, deeply kind, but shamelessly embarrassing, perennially lonely, & serially monogamous. Pills, coke, booze, men, the commercials, the mascara, Studio 54, the guest appearances on soap operas… Elizabeth Taylor & I got through the 1970s together. She gave audacious performances in film adaptations of “gay” plays as Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer & Cat On A Hot Tim Roof, & Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I met her once, at the 50th Anniversary of MGM Ball. I was thrillingly treated to a 7 minute conversation. She amazingly asked about me. I explained that I was a Theatre major at Loyola Marymount University & Taylor quizzed me on my curriculum & my stage roles. I told her was a huge fan of her work. She touched my arm & looked at me with the famous violet eyes & murmured: "I always thought that I was a fine actress, but I spent a lifetime feeling that I was held back because I have such a terrible speaking voice. The coaches at MGM attempted to help me & I did improve, but I will never shake the fact the dreadful small voice was what stopped me from being truly great..." She was only in her early 40s, wearing a beautiful canary yellow mini-dress with yellow flowers in her hair. She was smoking a cigarette with a holder. She was faultlessly beautiful. I nearly fainted.

I appreciate that, like me, she has had a taste for expensive pharmaceuticals, rich fabrics & rich men. I tremble at the thought of her 8 tumultuous marriages & the public denunciation by the Vatican as a home wrecker. I love her for her dramatic tracheotomy scar, of which she was never ashamed. I appreciate her love affair with jewelry that inspired a book simply titled My Love Affair with Jewelry… it looks handsome on the shelf with my own volume- My Love Affair with Whiskey. I admire her unswerving devotion to her friends, to gay people, & for gay activism & attention to fund raising for HIV/AIDS. My feelings are simpatico with Elizabeth Taylor. My mother loves us both, we have both lived with incidents replete with slurred speech, jokes about weight gain, inelegant gestures of elegance & displays of dignity in the face of devastation.


On Oscar day today, the Oscar winning actress turns 78  & she is hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for for treatment of congestive heart failure. I send her love & healing white light. A world without Elizabeth Taylor will not be a good place.