Subject: E. T. at Home:  Megastar Confronts Destiny at 61 
Date: Published: 7/6/93 (139 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    LEISURE & ARTS:
    E. T. at Home:  Megastar Confronts Destiny at 61
    ----
    By Raymond Sokolov

    Bel-Air, Calif.  -- "Shmucko," she said, with an amused glint in
 her legendary violet eyes.  "You know I'm not going to answer that."
    Absolutely.  I knew I wasn't going to find out whether she slept
 in the nude or get her to compare her eight marriages or to give me
 the lowdown on how she manages to look so young at the onset of her
 seventh decade and her fiftieth-something year as a major Hollywood
 star.  But somehow it didn't seem sporting to spend two hours at home
 with the woman nobody calls Mrs. Larry Fortensky without showing a
 normal, healthy interest in invading her well-kept privacy.
    But let's not exaggerate.  Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor has not
 surrounded herself with goons and barbed wire.  The discreet
 sheet-metal gate to her driveway is no more forbidding or
 unbreachable than many other closed entryways in this opulent
 community of mansions and high hedges west of Beverly Hills.  Ms. 
 Taylor does have four dogs, but three of them are lap dogs, and one
 of those, a snow-white Maltese named Sugar, can intimidate the
 German shepherd Mr. Fortensky brought to their marriage.
    To be sure, the couple were married in one of the world's most
 closely guarded private domiciles, Michael Jackson's ranch near
 Santa Barbara.  Even there the media's whirring helicopters made it
 hard for bride and groom to concentrate on personal business.
    Here in Los Angeles, however, they sometimes venture out like
 other newlyweds.  No driver.  Just them.  And her adoring public.
 Recently they "went out shopping for tiles, on Robertson, you know,
 where all those stores are.  Cars honked, tires squealed, someone
 shouted, `Hi, Liz.' It was all very friendly."
    Here at home, the mood is casual, secure without benefit of
 visible hardware.  Out the window, a work crew is finishing up a
 green-tiled pool patio.  And in this comfortable but unostentatious
 '50s house that once belonged to Nancy Sinatra, some very pretty
 things are, quite casually, on view.
    Under the rectangular, beamed, recessed ceiling, amethyst geodes
 cover a big coffee table -- some 15 scrumptious violet clusters and
 a delicate antique amethyst lady's flask, a gift from Chen Sam,
 loyal friend and publicist.  Does Ms. Taylor collect amethysts
 because they match her eyes?  Oh, no.  "They're my birthstone."
    Other treasures include various art-deco and art-nouveau objets,
 Lalique glass and such, tucked away at one end of the room,
 haphazardly, on shelves.  Behind the couch, skyed in several tiers
 and scrunched together with a studied lack of theatricality, are
 some wonderful paintings.  The ground rule is one can't say who
 painted them.  Most are by French impressionists, some only routine
 pictures by great artists.  Three or four are stunners, including a
 male self-portrait, and a languorous, mannerist face of a woman by a
 painter active in Paris between 1906 and 1920.
    Perhaps the most affecting work of all is a big drawing of three
 figures by one of the major artists of the century.  It is
 sensitively hung between two windows, where the California light
 won't hit it in full force.  One of the faces is done in a much
 darker line and jumps out of the picture plane.  Ms. Taylor points
 this out.  She comes by her eye naturally; her father was an art
 dealer in London.
    That was "long ago in a spinning world," as it says on the
 opening intertitle of Ms. Taylor's first major film, "National
 Velvet."  It was that gently feminist fable of a pubescent British
 girl's plucky near-win riding her horse while disguised as a man at
 England's Grand National steeplechase that vaulted the petite
 actress into perennial celebrity in 1944.  None of her other movies,
 not even the two she won best-actress Oscars for ("Who's Afraid of
 Virginia Woolf?" with her then-husband Richard Burton and
 "Butterfield 8"), have stuck so permanently in the public mind.
    Ms. Taylor did all the horseback riding in the film herself,
 except for the race.  It took two weeks of repetitive shooting to
 film that, and 38 men ended up in the hospital.  She got to keep the
 horse, which became her main consolation in a cloistered childhood
 as a cinemoppet.  She went to school at the studio, with other
 starlings, none of whom were her age.  "I had no pals, no one to play
 with at recess."
    When did she first know she was a star?  "I saw my intrinsic value
 at 15, when I told L. B. Mayer to go to hell.  He had sworn at my
 mother, and used language I'd never heard before.  I was not
 reprimanded.  I refused to apologize.  When nothing happened, I
 realized it had to be for some monetary reason, since they weren't a
 bunch of sweethearts.  It was the beginning of a cynical streak in
 me."
    Lately, though, Ms. Taylor has thrown off the cynicism, sobered
 up with a second stint at the Betty Ford center (where she met her
 husband, a construction worker) and stepped out into the world
 militating for AIDS research, developing a line of perfumes with
 Elizabeth Arden and, most recently, designing costume jewelry with
 Avon.
    For a famous wearer of big diamonds, she is discreetly
 accessorized with bracelets and hoop earrings during my visit.  Only
 one of the Avon designs will be based on her jewelry collection, but
 that piece is amazing.  Would I like to see it?
    I would.
    She picks up the phone and moments later a young man appears with
 a gray case the size of a CD jewel box.  This is the real thing.  It
 contains a diamond pendant created for Shah Jehan, who built the Taj
 Mahal.  The diamond is flat and pale, the size of a quarter, set in
 rare gray jade that is inscribed in Persian.
    Ms. Taylor holds it up and talks about the excitement of gems
 with a history, all the while holding herself stiffly because of
 constant back and neck pain.  This is nothing new for her.  It has
 kept her off horses and pushed her into addictive use of
 painkillers, one of the reasons she went to the Betty Ford center.
 Hers has been a life of chronic illness, many operations, two close
 brushes with death.  In 1985, she decided to do something about major
 illness by co-founding the American Foundation for AIDS Research
 (AmFAR).
    All these new activities get her out in the world much more than
 ever before.  She pitches perfume.  She will soon be hustling her Avon
 products.  Millions heard her speak about AIDS at the Oscars this
 spring.  Now she is planning to take her message to South Africa, at
 the invitation of Nelson Mandela.  "It will be very hard for me, as a
 white woman, to talk about it.  It's a very different situation
 there."
    Into these serious thoughts jumps Sugar.  And from the next room
 squawks the voice of Max, an African gray parrot with many words in
 his vocabulary and the ability to mimic everyone in the household.
 He shares this house not only with dogs and other parrots, but with
 a spectacular saltwater fish tank.
    Ms. Taylor, who used to prowl earnestly through Edward G. 
 Robinson's art collection, can now prowl playfully among her own
 familiar possessions.  This famous clotheshorse meets the press in a
 waggish yellow jersey that reads:  "Kissing a Smoker Is Like Licking
 an Ashtray."  When reminded that Ronald Reagan is a neighbor on one
 of Bel-Air's winding roads, she quips:  "Yes, he is round the bend,
 so to speak."
    Asked why the very large copper bird cage in the living room is
 empty, she says, with a wild-eyed grin:  "Because it's for ME.  When
 I'm bad, they put me in it.  And I say feed me, feed me."
    But she is not bad now.  Liz is good, and she is feeding herself
 very prudently, to stay in fighting trim for the serious working --
 and fun ahead.

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