A look at a life lived in excess

Barbara Kay, National Post · Mar. 24, 2011 | Last Updated: Mar. 24, 2011 4:04 AM ET

Itook drama lessons as a child. I also knew how to ride a horse, and my drama teacher had connections. As a result, I was called in to audition for a CBC (if I remember correctly) rendition of National Velvet, the 1944 film classic of a young girl and her beloved horse, which child actress Elizabeth Taylor dominated with her stunning beauty and fervid acting. The Canadian TV series never got off the ground. But ever since that day, I always have felt I had a glimmer of a personal connection to that Hollywood star of stars, whose turbulent, erotically charged on-and offscreen theatrics mesmerized our generation.

She was unnaturally beautiful. A goddess, too dazzling to lead a normal life. Her beauty was a curse. It overshadowed her great talent and good mind, her big heart and lively sense of humour. She was smart enough to know that beauty is only skin deep, so she tried desperately not to take her unearned endowment seriously. But how could she not, when moonstruck cameras made love to her every day, and nobody ever let her forget it for a second?

Her beauty made her insecure. She never knew if men wanted her for her face or for her "self," whatever that might have been if it had not been incinerated by her fame and appearance. If her temperament had been more moderate, her appetites more shallow, she might have been spared much heartache and embarrassment. But she was always hungry, and she was prone to greediness that got her into trouble.

She loved men, too well and not at all wisely. She knew men saw her as a trophy, but she was a woman of her time, and she didn't feel demeaned in the role of the bejewelled consort on the arm of wealth or power or genius. She went for complex, creative men. (Conrad "Nicky" Hilton was a youthful mistake, and weak Eddie Fisher was an anomaly, a mourning rebound after Mike Todd's death.) Her real soulmates were Todd and Richard Burton. Both were charismatic, virile and dominant. They were fascinated by her beauty, but they weren't slaves to it. She was a firecracker, but her sparks bounced off them. She wasn't exactly a shrew, but she enjoyed the sturm und drang of being tamed.

In her last decade, Taylor became strange and irrelevant and pathetic. Goddesses are not supposed to grow old. Her rouged ruin of a face was a parody of her former loveliness. From the gorgeous wife of manly geniuses, she became the raddled playmate of androgynous boys. Her friendship with the weird, surgically Taylor-ized Michael Jackson was downright surreal. Did she know how frightening they looked together?

Excessive is the word that best sums up Elizabeth Taylor: excessively beautiful, excessively passionate, excessively romantic, excessively tasteless, excessively giving, too. Goodbye Liz. I am imagining you as you were in your glory days, but now up on Mount Olympus, lounging comfortably on a golden divan, sipping a nectar martini and watching reruns of Cleopatra, while Venus sulks in her boudoir because Zeus has eyes for no one else but you. And by the way, Zeus is just your type.

bkay@videotron.ca