I Want To Be Rich When I Am Dead

I admire the way dead celebrities continue to make more money than ever. Elvis Presley was one of the highest paid entertainers of 2010, & he has been gone for 24 years, yet he made $60 million last year.

Andy Warhol knew that he would one day be the stuff of legend. Warhol: “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.”

Last week, another dead celebrity was the toast of NYC. At Phillips de Pury & Company, Elizabeth Taylor stole the show. The 1963 painting, one of 13 made of Elizabeth Taylor in various colors, was titled-Liz #5 (Early Colored Liz), & it sold to the bidder for $24 million, or $26.9 million including Phillips fees.

The price was not far off the $23.5 million that the actor Hugh Grant got for his turquoise Liz at Christie’s in 2007.

How much can I get for my old jockstrap?

Because

Photo by Beaton

It Is A Sad Day At Post Apocalyptic Bohemia

She was a voluptuous violet eyed actress who lived a life of luxury & love, heartbreak & hurt, & for 6 decades she was one of world's most well known women with 50+ films, 2 Academy Awards, 8 marriages, ravaging illnesses & work raising money for HIV research, when doing so was a career risk.

When she had the chance & when the piece was her equal, she was mesmerizing, holding the screen like so few can.

She is my mother's favorite Hollywood star. I met her once.  This happened in the early 1970s, & she was a stunning beauty in her 40s. She was warm, open & funny. I have been a very lucky man.

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.

Born On This Day- October 17th... Beautiful & Tragic Montgomery Clift

He made his Broadway debut at 13 in Fly Away Home, & continued to work on the Broadway stage for the next decade before being lured to Hollywood. He was friends with & an inspiration to James Dean & Marlon Brando. They were the trio of brooding & intense young actors that were trying on a new style of naturalistic acting personified by The Actors Studio in NYC. Montgomery Clift thought he was under-valued as an actor, but was, in fact, extremely accomplished & well regarded by critics & fellow actors. He would receive 4 Oscar nominations, 1 for his 2nd film- The Search. Clift was also an isolated & tortured, closeted gay man who used drugs & alcohol to escape his pain. Although he was gay, he maintained close relationships with several actresses, the closest of which was with Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor & Clift were both passionate & vulnerable people who felt a bond immediately. They worked together on several films, beginning with George Stevens' A Place in the Sun in 1951 (his 2nd Oscar nom), & remained best friends until the end of his life. He was teased & ridiculed by Frank Sinatra for being gay during the making of From Here To Eternity (his 3rd nomination).

On May 12, 1956, after leaving a party at Taylor's, Clift drove his car into a telephone pole (8 months after his friend James Dean died in a similar accident). The crash caused scarring & partial paralysis of his beautiful face. He continued to act, & gave some of his most memorable performances after the accident: Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (an Oscar nomination for a 7 minute role) & John Huston's The Misfits in 1961, but his expressive acting & his personal life were never the same. Clift made 16 films before the crash, & 16 films after.

Clift plunged more deeply into drug & alcohol abuse & wild sexual behavior. He began to be considered unreliable by studio bosses. By the time his lover Lorenzo James found him naked & dead of a heart attack at their home in Greenwich Village, on July 23, 1966, he was virtually unemployable. He was just 45 years old.

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

Elizabeth 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, but serially monogamous. Pills, coke, booze, men, the commercials, the mascara, Studio 54, the guest apperances 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 appreciate that she has had a taste for expensive pharmaceuticals, rich fabrics & rich men. I tremble at the thought of 8 tumultuous marriages & a 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 as Elizabeth & I both have lived with incidents replete with slurred speech, inelegant gestures of elegance & displays of dignity in the face of devastation & ruin. She turns 78 today.