We had a glimpse of Elizabeth Taylor with Richard Burton as they were coming out from rehearsal at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater in New York City sometime in the last week of April 1983. They were starring in the stage production of Noel Coward's Private Lives of divorced couples due for opening on May 8 that year.
We were curious of the big crowd milling at the theater gate, and asked about the excitement in the air. Liz Taylor's coming out anytime! Our only regret was that we didn't bring our camera, another photo-op missed.
We knew of Richard Burton and the other men in the life of Elizabeth Taylor. We saw them together in the expensive but disappointing Cleopatra movie. We don't remember anything much else of the film except her iconic Cleopatra still pictures and the scandal surrounding her relationship with Burton during the making of the film.
But we loved Liz Taylor as the rich, shrewish Katharina against Burton's brutish Petruchio in Franco Zafirelli's cinematic version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (1967). Until today we can still hear her Marta in her bitter, drunken word war with Burton's George in Mike Nichols' movie of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). We came to know more of Liz the actress through the portable digital copies of her classic films: as the socialite Leslie Lynnton, wife of the wealthy Texas rancher Jordan Benedict portrayed by her friend Rock Hudson in Giant (1956), as Maggie the Cat with Paul Newman as Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and as the high-class 'slut of all time' Gloria in Butterfield 8 (1960).
Movie lovers everywhere will remember her for her Martha and Gloria, for which she won two Oscars for best actress. The world will not forget her for the friends she kept till their deaths--Rock Hudson and Michael Jackson--and her humanitarian spirit, in her commitment to and support of the AIDS campaign.
Hers was a "timeless beauty". She of the legendary violet eyes was glamor up to the day she checked in at the hospital to bravely wait for death to claim her. She had already willfully rejected all further medical remedies. After all she has survived pain and immobility through her 79 years brought about by "hundred surgeries and interventions of different types (including five back), which have been cured (and in some cases cause) of a long list of serious physical conditions such as brain tumor, skin cancer, diabetes, pneumonia,
osteoporosis, stroke and chronic scoliosis."
Her parting words were from Gerald Manley Hopkins' The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo that she recited through her friend Colin Farrel at her graveside: she is returning her beauty to God, "beauty's self and beauty's giver" (full text below).
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.
The Leaden Echo And The Golden Echo
(Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)
The Leaden Echo
How to keep — is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?
Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, ranked wrinkles deep,
Down? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there’s none; no no no there’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.
The Golden Echo
Spare!
There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
One. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace —
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then whý should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept. — Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where. —
Yonder. — What high as that! We follow, now we follow. — Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.
[Highlighting ours.]
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| As a politician's wife. |
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Source: PrimeraFila of Las Ultimas Noticias (11 February 2011), Santiago, Chile
Still as glamorous as ever when she checked in at the hospital. She was brave, the paper reported, bored of doctors and medicines, rejecting further medical treatment.
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