ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: On the occasion of Christie’s spectacular sale of “The Collection of Elizabeth Taylor” that begins Dec. 13, this CityArts package (available online only) takes an admiring and inquiring look at the legacy of the great film star and humanitarian. Caroline Birenbaum surveys the collection at auction and spotlights sights and buy-ables. Editor Armond White connects this auction collection to Taylor’s most memorable screen iconography, the 1954 The Last Time I Saw Paris. This is a one-of-a-kind combination of Fame, Art, Sensuality and History.
For the Liz Legacy article, please click here.
Liz Taylor’s Most Sensual Artifacts
By Armond White
That color chalk mural objectifying Taylor (in a role based on F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s “Babylon Revisited”) is a studio-created artifact like many of the Christie’s auction items. But The Last Time I Saw Paris is most notably the peak of Taylor’s on-screen representation. In the mid-1950s, as Taylor entered her 20s, her preternaturally mature youthful beauty took on its first adult ripeness. That irony had been unforgettable in George Stevens’ 1951 black-and-white A Place in the Sun opposite Montgomery Clift in the famous “Tell Mama” close-up kiss; Stevens photographed Taylor as a virginal ideal, an image of impossible desire.
It took director Richard Brooks to bring out Taylor’s sensuality in The Last Time I Saw Paris. Not normally known as a filmmaker of particular finesse, the blunt dramatist Brooks created the Liz Taylor image that would later be hijacked by paparazzi–Liz the worldly sensualist. In Paris, she portrayed a woman who attracted men indiscriminately and whose appetite for living destabilized her marriage (reflecting Fitzgerald’s autobiography while also thinly veiling Taylor’s own life).
Seen today, in a vibrant new Warner Archives DVD, Paris features Taylor at her most expressively lush stage. It is Brooks and cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg’s creamy, chalk-like lighting effects that make Taylor’s inimitable dark-haired, violent eyed, red-lipped and pale contrasts so staggeringly alluring. Each scene in Paris studies her erotic radiance beyond the simplified, tear-jerking melodrama that the script made of Fitzgerald’s bitter tale.
This exploration of Taylor’s blooming, intimidating womanliness and ascending movie stardom is so powerful it gives the film an unearned tragic dimension. (The story equates glamour and death but Brooks deepens the impossibility that Stevens first hinted at.) The sorrow of modern sexual experience became a major 20th century theme, especially among European directors like Michelangelo Antonioni. In his 1982 Identification of a Woman, Antonioni revisited the “Eros is sick” theme of his pinnacle masterwork L’Avventura but in a story specifically about a film director intent on finding meaning through art and love. “It’s a feeling, a feeling in female form,” says protagonist Tomas Milian. “It’s hard to explain.” But in the new Criterion DVD release, it can be perfectly visualized whether in the scene where Milian tapes a still of Louise Brooks onto a window (a silent movie icon placed in real-world context) or the way Richard Brooks’ hyper glamorized Liz became a profound image of erotic and spiritual destiny.
Taylor herself challenged the world’s sense of destiny through the force of her fame and personality, constructing new standards of balancing personal behavior and social responsibility. Fittingly, the Christies show resembles a King Tut exhibition, as if her already public tomb had been opened and put on display. It features jewelry, art works and industry memorabilia including identifiable film costumes: Cleopatra (1963), Boom (1968), Hammersmith is Out (1972), X,Y and Zee (1973), A Little Night Music (1978). One of the most sumptuous is from Liz’s cameo appearance in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) described as “a black velvet medieval style gown with long slashed sleeves and elaborate cream chiffon trim with gilt embroidery, deep neck with four pearls and gold applied detail, open skirt embellished with gilt beads with cream and gold embroidered petticoats.”
Ordinarily a minor artifact, this example of Taylor’s taste (a costume she felt worth keeping) moves a viewer closer to an identification of a star as an individual. That’s overlaps the mystery Antonioni pursues through his director-surrogate’s candid sexual encounters with compelling androgynous women (Daniela Silverio, Christine Boisson). Taylor’s femininity was always voluptuous and unambiguous. Brooks and Ruttenberg were to polish the sensual images of Paris four years later when they all reunited for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) where Taylor’s Maggie the Cat sported the startling short bob from the second half of Paris.
Maggie, of course, is Taylor’s most famous sexual icon and a private poster from that film is also included in the Christie’s show. It’s part of the eternal Liz pop identity as her famous Warhol portrait suggests. Yet, it’s The Last Time I Saw Paris that best captures Taylor’s magnetism and puts it in a mortal context–from that chalk mural to her heavy-breathing, light-voiced entreaties–that transcends mere celebrity and makes her sensuality ineffable.
