Donald Bogle - Elizabeth and Michael: The Queen of Hollywood and the King of Pop—A Love Story

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To Emery Wimbish and Grace Frankowsky

To Marie Dutton Brown

To the memory of Marie Kanalas Bogle

To the memory of my agent Bob Silverstein

And to my parents, Roslyn and John; my brother John; and Carol Bogle

IN SOME RESPECTS, it was just another Hollywood night, another of those big affairs with a gallery of glamorous stars, overeager publicists, agents, managers, and immaculately groomed industry executivesas well as a surge of pushy photographers and reporters who snapped pictures and shouted out questions. Barricaded on the sidelines were the fans, pumped up with excitement at seeing so many famous faces. On such occasions, everyone was accustomed to the star glow, the sparkling jewels, the designer gowns, the brilliant smiles, the air kisses, and the funny chatter that didnt mean much of anything. On such nights, it was almost hard for anyone else to be really impressed. Glamour was, of course, valued, appreciated, held to high standards. Yet glamour in Hollywood was almost second nature.

But then in the midst of all the expected fanfare, all the lights and cameras and cries of joy, all the gilded chaos, there was a hush in the air. Something miraculous seemed to have happened. Suddenly, they were there. Exiting from a limousine was Elizabeth Taylor, perhaps the greatest movie star of the twentieth century, and there wasnt one person who did not strain to see her. She still elicited the kind of awe that was seldom seen, the kind that had vanished long ago with the demise of the classic Old Hollywood and the old studio system. But no sooner had the great Liz come into view than another wave of excitement roared through the crowd as a second star, the elusive Michael Jackson, no doubt the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century, stepped out of the same limousine.

Elizabeth and Michael. A dazzling pair. Every eye was on them. Michael and Elizabeths combined celebrity was just so incredibly intense, Carrie Fisher once recalled. And in a way it may have been comforting for each of them to have found someone with equivalent unimaginable celebrity. A rare speciesendangered, protected, shiny.

The event that night was ABCs televised tribute to Elizabeth Taylors sixty-fifth birthday. In a short time, she was scheduled to enter the hospital for brain surgery. Doctors were optimistic, but no one could say for sure how the operation would go. Because the tribute had been scheduled long before she knew shed have the surgery, Elizabeth Taylor decided to go ahead with it. And Michael Jackson knew he wanted no one else to escort her but himself. So there they were.

Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson were hooked on each other. Not too long after their first meeting, a deep friendship had blossomed: a true kind of love affair, frankly unlike any relationship either had had before. They were eager to share secrets, to express their ways of looking at the world, to enter a private realm all their own. At his Neverland Valley Ranch in Los Olivos, California, Michael constructed a room in Elizabeths honor. Taylor, in turn, saw that he was one of those misunderstood, sensitive souls to which she had long been attracted.

But, frankly, what added to the crowds fervor at seeing the two together on this special night in February 1997 was the fact that no could quite figure them out. Both within and outside the entertainment industry, among the public at large and among other stars, some thought the relationship was flat-out weird. Incomprehensible. What went on with these two? What was this friendship all about? They were Hollywoods Odd Couple. Old enough to be Michael Jacksons mother, Elizabeth Taylor was a woman of the world who had been on the scene for decades, from the time she was a little girl, then through her youthful reign as the towns dark-haired princess until her ascension as Hollywoods Queen Elizabeth (and eventually, Dame Elizabeth). Why was a woman who looked as if she had been everywhere and done everything spending time with him ? He was something of a strange bird, an asexual enigmatic Peter Pan, also on the scene since his childhood, now looking fearful of growing older, forever in search of finding the childhood he believed he had lost.

In essence, Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson couldnt be considered a couple at all. Each was too bright and bold to ever really complement the other. No one could ever imagine them as two halves that now completed a whole. Her husbands had often been consorts, all of them there at the service of the queen, bending to her will, absorbed into her world and reflecting her glow and glory as best or powerfully as they could. At times even Richard Burton, despite his power and charisma, knew deep down that partly what had made him Richard Burton, in the eyes of the public, was the fact that she had chosen him. But that never seemed the case with Michael, who was always the king of his own universe, never a consort to anyone, never standing in the afterglow of someone else. His brothersand his onetime manager father, Joseph Jacksonhad realized this early on, accepted it, and were as magnetized by his star power as anyone else.

So Taylor and Jackson were always separate entities that somehow clicked without one ever being at the service of the other, even though Michael appeared to love playing the part of the gentleman escort during their public outings. This separateness in a sense made them all the more a compelling pair, all the more a duo that puzzled, intrigued, and ignited the imagination. When they were together, it was admittedly something special, something wondrous to behold. Always he looked at her with adoring eyes and a smile that signaled some secret joy she brought him. Always she glanced at him in a protective, loving way.

How they really came together or why may always be baffling. But Michael Jacksons devotion and devotion is the only word to describe his feelingsto Elizabeth Taylor was different from those past relationships and friendships with Brooke Shields, Tatum ONeal, and even the woman who had first fascinated him, Diana Ross. He had pursued and courted Elizabeth Taylor, and she had been resistant to his pursuit, perhaps asking herself what on earth this young man wanted. But, gradually, he won her over, and she succumbed to his attention and to his vulnerability. For her, nurturing doomed souls, like actors Montgomery Clift and James Dean, was a part of who she was, at the core of her DNA. Jacksons onetime publicist Bob Jonesclearly surprised by the relationship as it built and took shapefelt that Michael usually didnt want many women around. There was at least one exception: Elizabeth Taylor, recalled Jones, who was aware of the undeniable fact that she captured Michael Jacksons imagination.

Something drew them together, bound them, may even have puzzled them as much as everyone else. Their backgrounds, seemingly so different, made theirs often a seemingly paradoxical union. But those separate backgrounds, those past histories, set the stage for their relationship, provided its exposition and backstory, and established the first and second acts of their individual lives. During what unexpectedly turned out to be act three of each of their lives, they met and began the friendship. But so much had come beforefor each of them.

ELIZABETH TAYLORS CHILDHOOD reads like something of a fairy tale, albeit with its requisite dark side. The second child of a dreamy-looking American couple living abroad, she was born on February 27, 1932, in London. Her mother, Sara Viola Warmbrodt, born in 1896 in Arkansas City, Kansas, was the daughter of an engineer. Ambitious, lively, and outgoing, with large eyes and a friendly smile, Sara met a handsome young dark-haired man with piercing blue eyes named Francis Lenn Taylor, who had been born in 1897 in Springfield, Illinois, and whose family lived in Arkansas City. From the very start, girls were all over Francis, falling into a swoon within minutes after seeing him. One classmate recalled that he was the first boy I was ever aware of. I could have eaten him like ice cream on a stick.