C. David Heymann - Liz: An Intimate Biography of Elizabeth Taylor

ALSO BY C. DAVID HEYMANN

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The Quiet Hours (poetry)

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Copyright 1995, 2011 by C. David Heymann

Originally published in 1995 by Carol Publishing Group

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ISBN 978-1-4391-9188-0
ISBN 978-1-4391-9190-3 (ebook)

To Kent Bruce Cunow

19451989

Very simply, my best friend

Her legs are too short for the torso, the head too bulky for the figure. But the face, with those lilac eyes, is a prisoners dream, a secretarys self-fantasy: unreal, non-attainable, at the same time shy, overly vulnerable, very human with the flicker of suspicion constantly flaring behind the lilac eyes.

Truman Capote

Will you walk into my parlour? said the Spider to the Fly,

Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;

The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,

And Ive many curious things to show when you are there.

Oh no, no, said the little Fly, to ask me is in vain,

For who goes up your winding stair can neer come down again.

Mary Howitt

The Spider and the Fly

E lizabeth Taylors eyes surveyed the surroundings of white tile and porcelain inside the main residential unit at the Betty Ford Center for drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Set on fourteen acres in a desert bowl ringed by jagged mountains, the institution at Rancho Mirage, California, had been founded in 1981 as part of the Eisenhower Medical Center by , former United States ambassador to Belgium and a recovering alcoholic, and by former President Gerald Fords wife, Betty, after her recovery from drug and alcohol abuse. Elizabeth Taylor, a victim of decades of multiple addictions to alcohol and narcotic drugs, had entered the facility of her own volition on December 5, 1983.

The decision to commit herself to treatment had come about while the then fifty-one-year-old Taylor languished in a bed at St. Johns Hospital in Santa Monica, California, ostensibly because of a bowel obstruction. While she lay there, her children, her brother and sister-in-law, and her closest friend, actor Roddy McDowall, visited her to initiate what has become known as a family intervention.

I was assured of their love while at the same time I was told how my behavior had altered them, and of their real fears that I was killing myself, the actress later wrote in Elizabeth Takes Off, an autobiographical meditation on weight loss and self-awareness. I listened in total silence, she continued. I remember being shocked. I couldnt believe what I had become. At the end, they said reservations had been made for me at the Betty Ford Center and they wanted me to go.

She went and soon found herself involved in a program as strict and rigorous as it was ascetic. They assigned her to a small bedroom with two single beds, two desks, two high-intensity desk lamps, two chairs, two dressers, and one female roommate. She wasnt pleased.

When she entered the institution, Elizabeth thought she would receive special treatment, said Barnaby Conrad, a professor of English literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a patient at the Betty Ford Center. When they told her she had to share a room with another woman, she said, Ive never in my life shared a room with another woman, and Im not about to start. The powers that be at the center quickly cut her down to size. They made her spend the next night or two in the swampa room shared not by two but by four women. Finally, they agreed to let her room with just one woman.

The boot-camp mentality of the Betty Ford Center did not exempt Taylor. Patients were barred from leaving the hospital grounds except under the direct supervision of a clinic-appointed chaperone. Use of telephones was prohibited during the first week of a patients stay; thereafter patients were permitted a maximum of ten minutes on the telephone each evening. Visitors were banned during the first five days and were then permitted for only four hours each Sunday. Attendance was required at all meals, at evening lectures (the center sponsored an extensive drug-and-alcohol-education program), as well as at group therapy sessions in which participants were expected to confess to their faultsand to any wrongs they had done to others while under the influence. For good reason, Elizabeth described her initial reaction to the regime as one of dread and loathing.

before, she subsequently informed an interviewer at Vanity Fair. The counselors told me later, they didnt know what to do with me, whether they should treat me like an ordinary patient or whether they should give me sort of special isolated treatment. They decided to lump me in with everyone else, which of course was the only way to do it. (At the time of Elizabeth Taylors 1983 stay at Betty Ford, the center housed forty-five patients divided among three glass-and-mortar residential units. Patients in one unit were not allowed to fraternize with patients from another.)

Part of being lumped in with the others entailed participation in a daily regimen that began at 6:00 A.M. with a meditation walk and ended fifteen hours later with an evening meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. More demanding still had to be the requirement that all patients maintain and clean their own living quarters, including bathroom facilities, public rooms, and outdoor areas. Denied the servants that had always been such an integral part of her life as a major star, Elizabeth for once became her own maid, making her own bed, vacuuming her own room, washing her own laundry, carrying out her own garbage, sweeping and scrubbing, cleaning up sinks and hospital lounges.

At first, Elizabeth and her bunkmates accepted their fate with abject resignation. But within a few weeks of their projected five-week stay they began to register complaints about nearly everything, including the fact that their residential unit, North House, received but a single copy of the daily newspaper and by the time it reached them the paper would usually be crumpled beyond readability. Nor did they enjoy having to fill out forms; yet within their first week at Camp Betty, they filled out nothing but forms. There were additional hardships. They had been body-searched during their first day and finally had their mouthwash confiscated because it contained an alcohol base. Their aspirin had been taken away because Betty Ford personnel considered it a mind-altering medication.