Taylor Elizabeth - Elizabeth Taylor: the lady, the lover, the legend, 1932-2011: a new biography

ELIZABETH TAYLOR WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY FOR making more turkeys than acclaimed films, for having an on-screen voice that more than frequently grates and for rarely maintaining the acting standards of her co-stars. Additionally, she will be recalled as one of three Hollywood creations who made the successful transition from precocious child prodigy to adult movie star the others were Judy Garland and Natalie Wood not by talent alone, but by maternal push. Not that this constant surveillance and carping from the wings fashioned lasting success for these women. Judys mother was an ogre who actively endorsed the enforced feeding of uppers and downers to keep the show on the road a selfish action that directly contributed to the early demise of her daughter, something that Ethel Gumm was not around to witness. Maria Gurdin, Natalie Woods mother, was considerably worse, possessed of an overwhelming ego and diminished mental capacity, which caused her to genuinely believe that her machinations were for her daughters good. Sara Taylor was a combination of the two. And who may deny, sifting through the evidence, that she was more than partly responsible assisted by the negative elements of the Hollywood dream factory for her daughters instability, which threw open the floodgates to a whole catalogue of calamities, suicide attempts, collapsed marriages and sabotaged relationships?

Although one cannot doubt that without these ubiquitous Svengalis none of these young women would have made it to the top so quickly, if at all, one cannot ignore the irreparable damage they inflicted on their fragile charges, whose whole lives would be dragged out under enormous clouds of impending gloom. Montgomery Clift, Joan Crawford, Errol Flynn and Elvis Presley may also have endured monster mothers, but they knew how to fight back. Elizabeth Taylor never found the strength to.

The film critic Alexander Walker called her a born survivor, but, as will be seen, this was only partly true. Despite the many genuine concerns about her health, she alone orchestrated the weapons of self-destruction throughout her entire life, deliberately aggravating situations brought about by her own recklessness and folly, often solely for the purpose of contenting the media and keeping her name in the headlines. This she did better than anything witnessed on the screen.

Elizabeth Taylor derived some sort of ghoulish pleasure from home-based drama and self-inflicted adversity, and, as such, remains the prima donna of the worlds show-business elite. Her story all too often makes for grim reading, but it is nevertheless a fascinating one, from which absolutely no punches have been pulled.