Show Business: A Hurricane and Two Survivors

Three new books tell all about Liz, Dick and Eddie

Where would gossip be without Elizabeth Taylor? Barely breathing, obviously. Probably no one in the past 30 years has provided better copy or set more tongues wagging. Now, by a curious coincidence, three books have just been published that should give her a permanent place in the Gossip Hall of Fame. The first, Kitty Kelley’s Elizabeth Taylor is about the lady herself. The second, Eddie: My Life, My Loves is the autobiography of her fourth husband, Eddie Fisher. The third, Paul Ferris’ Richard Burton, is a biography of her fifth and sixth husband. But all are really, at least in the good parts, about Liz.

Kitty Kelley subtitles her book The Last Star, but she might just as well have said The Last Vamp. Taylor probably is the end of a line that stretches back to Clara Bow: flamboyant, outsize and so self-absorbed and utterly beautiful that anyone who comes near is likely to be drawn into her orbit by force of gravity. As Fisher puts it somewhat less kindly, “Elizabeth liked to collect trophies.”

Fisher, the teen-age singing crush of the ’50s, was of course one of her trophies—though it is hard to fathom why she bothered. But bother she did. Half the nation professed to be outraged when Fisher left sweet, unaffected Debbie Reynolds for the widow of his best friend, Mike Todd. Or was that a case of several mistaken identities? Reynolds, says Fisher, was neither sweet nor unaffected, and he had been unhappy with her almost from the beginning. He soon discovered that life with Liz, however, was an adventure for which he was unprepared: “Children, pets, servants, minor problems transformed into major tragedies, confusion, chaos, everything at fever pitch . . . Living with her was like living with a hurricane; each storm built in intensity, then subsided into an eerie calm as the eye passed, only to begin all over again.”

Yet even when she was busy with Fisher she was seeking other trophies, according to Kelley’s complete but rather mean-spirited account (Simon & Schuster; $14.95). Perhaps the oddest head on Taylor’s wall is that of Columnist Max Lerner. A professor of American civilization at Brandeis University and the distinguished author of numerous heavy tomes, Lerner was 57 when they began their romance. He was clearly nattered out of his Ph.D.s by finding that he was attractive to a creature like Taylor—”She said I was her intellectual Mike Todd,” he brags to Kelley—and the most amusing part of all three books is listening to Lerner burble on and on and on about things that civilized men are supposed to keep to themselves. Perhaps the second greatest amusement is Fisher’s apparently straight-faced comment: “The attention of a man like Lerner, a renowned intellectual, was proof that she had a brain.”

In fact, from all the evidence here, Taylor—not to mention Burton and Fisher—spent much of the time proving just the opposite. She desperately tried to get out of a picture, Butterfield 8, that eventually won her an Academy Award. When the film was first shown to her and the ever compliant Fisher, they thought it was so bad that they threw their drinks at the screen. She felt more at home in Cleopatra, but off-camera she quickly fell under the spell of Burton, her Antony. He, in turn, held her in contempt, at least at the beginning. As Fisher—not the most objective source, to be sure—tells the story, Burton was mainly interested in latching on to the international fame that Liz so abundantly had. “You don’t need her. You’re a star already,” Burton supposedly told the then husband. “I’m not. She’s going to make me a star. I’m going to use her, that no-talent Hollywood nothing.”

These books are full of silly superlatives, but here is one they forgot: not since 390 B.C., when the sacred geese warned that invading Gauls were climbing to the top of the Capitol, had Rome heard so much cackling as it did over the Taylor-Burton affair. Taylor worked and played with Burton during the day, then came home to Fisher at night, all in full view of paparazzi. One day, Fisher recounts, “she brought Burton to the villa. Burton immediately went into some kind of act. He turned to Elizabeth and growled, ‘Who do you love?’ Terrified, Elizabeth looked at me and then at him and said, ‘You.’ ‘That’s the right answer,’ Burton said, ‘but it wasn’t quick enough.’ ” Adds Fisher: “It was such a bizarre scene that I was speechless. Maybe I should have busted Burton in the mouth and thrown him out of the house.” Maybe, but if Taylor was the Face, and Burton the Voice, Fisher was the Wimp.

Still, Fisher’s, or his ghostwriter’s, analysis of Liz is acute. She loves combat, he says, and the more Burton insulted her, the more determined she was to bring him to heel: “I had forgotten that Elizabeth never did anything halfway. Her commitments were total. If she saw something she wanted, she went after it until it was hers for keeps.” She succeeded, for a decade anyway, with Burton, before they both went on to other marriages. Meantime, Fisher, now 54, has never managed to rekindle his career to the glow of the ’50s, and his autobiography (Harper & Row; $14.95) is poignant in its chronicle of his rise and fall. Burton, 56, plagued by a spine ailment, also seems at a standstill; the same could be said of Ferris’ plodding biography (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan; $13.95). But Taylor, 49, a U.S. Senator’s wife who overwhelmed Broadway and is breaking house records in Los Angeles with The Little Foxes, seems capable of keeping the tongues wagging for another 30 years.

—By Gerald Clarke