To Glamour Born

By Frank Bruni

October 25, 2009

HOW TO BE A MOVIE STAR

Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood

By William J. Mann

Illustrated. 484 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28

She demanded a different holder for each of the many cigarettes she smoked daily during the filming of “Cleopatra,” and the holder’s color couldn’t clash with the cloth on any table at which she smoked.

Quick to the scene of Montgomery Clift’s near-fatal car crash in 1956, she crawled into the vehicle and, with her fingers, pulled out the smashed teeth lodged deep in his mouth, an intervention that may have saved his life.

And when she and Richard Burton commenced their affair, he discovered “the most voracious lover he had ever known.”

These are the sorts of details a reader craves from a celebrity biography, and “How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood” doesn’t skimp on them. Some seem fresh and some are clearly recycled, but all are rendered with a verve and fluidity that keep the book moving along in a fleet fashion. Its author, William J. Mann, has clearly done his research and just as clearly adores his subject. “How to Be a Movie Star” reads like a labor of immoderate love. It also, annoyingly, reads like an act of moderate disingenuousness.

Mann, who wrote the widely praised biography “Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn,” insists time and again, on page after page, that his subject is broader and deeper than Taylor herself — that he’s investigating the very nature and stamina of stardom. Quoting the writer Maureen Orth’s hilarious observation that Taylor was “the Madame Curie of fame extension,” he casts his biography in part as an investigation into the chemical formula behind her enduring command of the spotlight.

He announces straight off that his purpose “is not a traditional biography,” adding, “I take instruction from the book’s title.” But the academic tone of that clunky declarative statement is belied by much of the breathless garden-variety voyeurism to come. “No one — except the two parties involved — can ever be absolutely sure when flirtation became fornication,” Mann writes of the initial Taylor-Burton coupling, then proceeds to hazard the guess that the moment transpired in Burton’s trailer on the “Cleopatra” set.

Mann may be telling himself that he’s engaged in critically important cultural commentary, but this tonally jumbled book doesn’t ultimately play that way. It plays like a rapt fan’s scrupulous reconstruction of a life so tumultuous and packed with glamour that it doesn’t need a moral. The melodrama suffices.

Stardom didn’t come to Taylor haphazardly or after decades of struggle; it was a matter of plotting and grooming by a mother intent on seeing her daughter’s name in lights. Little Liz was among a whole subculture of Southern California children whose parents tucked them into the perverse bosom of the entertainment industry, though few flourished the way Liz did. “National Velvet” was just the start of it. There were bigger horses and grander arenas to come.

The book presents her story in segments defined by the prominent men she chose to favor (and marry) and the prominent roles she took, and it casts romantic and professional choices as almost equally strategic, and in some senses intertwined. Taylor’s tenacious grip on the spotlight was partly a matter of sensing which mate at which moment could help her most. She comes across as calculating, selfish and maybe a little soulless.

It’s startling, in fact, to be reminded that she has four children, one of them adopted, because they figure so little in her legend and so little in this book. Her globe-trotting, fur-draped, diamond-bedecked adventures seem to leave limited room for mothering. As she yet again takes a new lover or yet again takes to her sickbed, a practiced patient aware of the manipulative power of a well-timed malady, the effect on her children is seldom mentioned or explored.

Mann has more interest in building her up than in tearing her down, and he credits Taylor with a great deal of influence. He entertains suggestions that she had a hand in bringing about the end of the old studio system, and that she had a part in bringing about the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

He also makes a wholly convincing case that for too long she got too little credit for her talents as an actress and for her willingness to take big risks. In “A Place in the Sun” and then “Giant” and then “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and then “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” she dug deeper than expected, with better results than even her most loyal admirers had hoped for. Mann’s account of the making of “Woolf” is the most engrossing passage of the book. He sympathetically describes her jitters as she let herself be made up to appear older and harsher than she really looked, a surrender of vanity that preceded by decades Nicole Kidman’s in “The Hours” and Charlize Theron’s in “Monster.”

And his descriptions of her collaboration with Burton on the project are surprisingly moving. Burton was the more conventionally trained thespian, Taylor the factory-made starlet, and yet he set aside ego to exhort her toward — and then marvel at — a performance that ultimately overshadowed his own. It’s a gorgeous example of real love and real partnership for a woman more accustomed to facile, fraudulent versions of each.

Once the second of her two marriages to Burton is over, “How to Be a Movie Star” sputters rather quickly to its conclusion, the most recent decades of Taylor’s life getting short shrift. That makes thematic sense: by this point her stardom has finally dimmed, and Taylor, married to the Virginia senator John Warner, is spending much of her time alone, eating bowl after bowl of chili from a refrigerator in her bedroom.

It’s impossible to say how much she is bothered by this fate, because for all of Mann’s consistently energetic reporting, she remains an aloof and somewhat inscrutable figure, her attachment to her own celebrity never satisfactorily explained.

“How to Be a Movie Star” works less well as an excavation of Taylor’s character than as a highlights reel of her cinematic triumphs and a romp through Hollywood during a certain era, when Hedda Hopper wielded thunderbolts from her typewriter, virile stars like Clift and Rock Hudson (both friends of the open-minded Taylor) carefully veiled their sexual orientation, and marriages were arranged for the sake of headlines. Taylor was at the furious center of it all, and provides as handy and captivating a guide through it as any star of the 20th century could.

Frank Bruni is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and the author of “Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater.”