Product Description

DESCRIPTION: Elizabeth Taylor is known internationally as one of the most beautiful and talented women to ever grace the silver screen, starring in over 60 films and winning two Oscars. She is just as well-known for her tempestuous personal life, marrying eight times and triumphing over innumerable health problems. She has been written about many times before...but never like this. This moving book traces, for the first time, Elizabeth's journey through the dark and often lonely world of fame unparalleled in the 1960s and 1970s, during which alcohol and drugs played a major role in her life. It would be with her fifth (and sixth!) husband, actor Richard Burton, that she would learn the life-changing lessons about love and loyalty that finally rescued her from alcohol in the 1980s. This book also details her philanthropic work as an AIDS activist in the 1990s, as well as her stunning success as a businesswoman today. This is not just a star's biography...it's one unforgettable woman's storied journey through life, including many never-before-published photographs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #236440 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-29
• Released on: 2006-08-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 560 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Ordinarily, readers might question the logic of a new tome on a celebrity who already has at least six full-length biographies (and four self-penned books) devoted to her life, but Elizabeth Taylor has never been ordinary. Readers will easily understand why tabloids have chronicled her escapades for six decades: her roller-coaster life could easily read like a high-sheen soap opera (the eight marriages, two Oscars, suicide attempts and innumerable life-threatening illnesses that led to years of alcohol and prescription drug addiction before she became the first celebrity to check into the Betty Ford Clinic). But Taraborrelli, a sympathetic biographer, rescues the subject by looking for psychological and emotional motives behind her actions. Taraborrelli can be overprotective of Taylor (he notes her reviews for Cleopatra were "so vicious that they are not even worth memorializing here") but more often, he's a superb storyteller who is also an enthusiastic fan. The book is a fitting tribute to a woman who has lived and loved with abandon but who found real passion and purpose when she embraced AIDS activism in 1985, helping to destigmatize the disease and creating her own AIDS foundation. Taraborrelli's chatty prose (and bite-size chapters) perfectly complement Taylor's glamorous life of highs and lows to create an irresistible and inspiring tale. Photos not seen by PW. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
The scene is straight out of the "X-Men" franchise. A beetle- browed physician calls a pair of young parents into his office and, in the gravest of cadences, informs them that their newly born daughter has -- a mutation.

"Well, that sounded just awful," the girl's mother later recalls, "a mutation. But, when he explained that her eyes had double rows of eyelashes, I thought, well, now, that doesn't sound so terrible at all."

No, indeed. In fact, it is more evidence, as if any were needed, that the greatest camera subjects are, in strict biological terms, genetic freaks. Or as pal Roddy McDowall later put it: "Who has double eyelashes except a girl who was absolutely born to be on the big screen?"

And if Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor had any doubts on that score, she had a ferociously focused mama to set her straight. Herself a forestalled actor, Sara Taylor took advantage of Great Britain's wartime diaspora to plant her young daughter as quickly as possible in the Hollywood firmament. When small roles in "Lassie, Come Home" and "Jane Eyre" failed to turn the trick, Sara and Elizabeth executed a double press on MGM exec Pandro Berman and snagged the lead in "National Velvet" (1944), the story of an equestrienne who dons boy-drag to enter the Grand National Steeplechase.

Has there ever been a less convincing male than Elizabeth Taylor? No matter. From that steeplechase, it is a more or less straight trajectory to "Liz," the first actor -- male or female -- to earn a million clams a movie and, along with Marilyn Monroe, the first to become a reality show in herself. Yes, it's Liz TV, 24-7, and we don't miss a minute, do we? The husbands and the hospitalizations and the good movies and the bad and the Krupp diamonds and the nervous breakdowns and the Betty Ford Center and Michael Jackson and the chicken bone in the throat and -- well, it's no wonder, really, that author J. Randy Taraborrelli can announce, without a trace of irony: "It has never been easy being Elizabeth Taylor."

Not as easy, anyway, as being an Elizabeth Taylor biographer. When I checked the Library of Congress catalogue, I found 52 books written about her, which puts her slightly behind Elizabeth Blackwell (69) but well ahead of Elizabeth Dole (16), Elizabeth Montgomery (3) and Elizabeth Hurley (0). It also quite dwarfs the well-regarded British novelist who had the misfortune of sharing the same name (2).

Right about now, the churlish critic will ask if 52 equals 51 too many. No question that Taylor, in her prime, was a luscious raven-haired vision; no question she possesses the kind of fame granted to few mortals. It's equally apparent that she is a timid and rather unintelligent woman whose deepest aesthetic impulses are reserved for the baubles on her fingers and whose idea of morality was to marry every man she slept with. ("Always a bride," quipped Oscar Levant. "Never a bridesmaid.")

None of this has stopped Taraborrelli from delivering the 53rd volume. His timing may charitably be called curious. Taylor's last movie was the 1994 live-action classic "The Flintstones," and poor health has kept her even from making appearances on behalf of her beloved AIDS charities. To most people under 30, she is at best a name attached to a few stills. Taraborrelli labors on as if the eyes of the world are upon him, and as he goes, he heaves up stone after stone of fanzine prose: "Elizabeth and Richard were led by something bigger than both of them. . . . This truly was her shining moment. . . . She belonged to Hollywood. She belonged to the world." Nothing, though, quite tops the author's endorsement of Husband Number 7, Sen. John Warner: "He genuinely seemed to want to contribute to mankind, or at least to the state of Virginia."

The only way a movie-star bio can attain lasting value (and virtually none of them do) is to document the actor's intersection with some lasting work of art, as Lee Server accomplished in his take on Robert Mitchum. For Taraborrelli, self-appointed chronicler of the Kennedy women and Princess Grace, the movies are just coffee breaks in the full-time disinterring of ancient gossip: Nicky-Mikey-Eddie-Dickie. We learn that Taylor's most lauded performance, in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," was fueled by alcoholic marital rages with Richard Burton, but we learn next to nothing about her best work, which, in my opinion, came 15 years earlier, before Burton ever infected her with the desire to be an ektress.

Check her out sometime as the wealthy love interest in "A Place in the Sun," George Stevens's film transcription of the Theodore Dreiser classic An American Tragedy. You'll find a pitch-perfect study of an entitled young woman undone by desire. Her love scenes with Montgomery Clift are almost painful in their eroticism, and a biographer who was curious about such things might wonder why Taylor could generate more on-screen heat with a gay man than she ever did with Burton. There's something to be said here about artifice yielding truth and truth yielding artifice and the drowning of a small talent in the shoals of high culture and the pitfalls of having double eyelashes. There is, yes, a book to be written about Elizabeth Taylor and the cultural phenomenon she represented. It's just not the book that J. Randy Taraborrelli has written. Or had any intention of writing.

Reviewed by Louis Bayard
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
The breathtaking photograph on this book's cover makes it clear why no one will ever forget Elizabeth Taylor. And if her sheer beauty isn't enough, there are the details of her wild, flamboyant, and excruciatingly painful life. Taraborrelli, known for his unauthorized biographies of such celebrities as Diana Ross and Princess Grace, has done his research (or from his acknowledgments, his researchers have done their research). Certainly, there are what seem like fresh tibits of information here from a wide variety of surprising sources--family friends, guests at the Taylor-Nicky Hilton wedding (her first), and even Debbie Reynolds, from whom Elizabeth stole Eddie Fisher. But the saga of Elizabeth Taylor is practically myth at this point, so it's hard to add anything new except around the edges. Moreover, Taylor has written two autobiographies of her own, and without the cooperation of so many key figures--Taylor herself, her children, Sybil Burton--Taraborrelli isn't able to generate any insider feel to his account. (He does thank Taylor for not actively deterring people from speaking to him.) Still, despite all those built-in shortcomings, it's hard not to keep turning pages when the story you're reading is so filled with larger-than-life loves, scandals, tragedies, and, of course, stars, stars, stars. As with Lee Server's recent Ava Gardner (2006), Taraborrelli's take on Liz reminds us what movie stardom is all about. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

REQUIRED READING FOR LIZ TAYLOR FANS
I have been a fan of Elizabeth Taylor's since I was 8 years old, and still learned more details about her life that I had not known. [...] This book is highly entertaining, well written, and excellent reading for any Elizabeth Taylor fan.

Can't even cut and paste accurately
The Washington Post got this book right: This is a shallow, gushy, cut-and-paste puff piece posing as biography.

Author J. Randy Taraborrelli seems unable, even with a team of researchers, to quote accurately from the books from which he cribs his material ("Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair With Jewelry," in particular, from which he lifts many anecdotes without attribution).

Taraborrelli's insight, if you can call it that, on Taylor is that she is not too introspective (no!) and that fame corrupts (how deep!).

He gives a superficial account of early Taylor's life. Her childhood and first four marriages whiz by like the unspooling of an outdated filmstrip. Given Taylor's assertion that her father "batted me around a bit," the book's omission of this aspect of her childhood is glaring. As Taylor's life progresses, Taraborrelli adds more detail as source material becomes easier to find. The reader then is treated to all kinds of meaningless vignettes about Taylor's last three marriages, and torturous detail about her recurring addictions and multiplying health problems (though details seem to conflict with other sources).

Taraborrelli gushes over Taylor's beauty, the (questionable) talents of her many spouses, and how miraculously well-adjusted and normal her children are. Some of these descriptions are obsequious enough to induce a cringe. Other descriptions make one wonder just how much research he did for this book. For instance, he never explored references to one of Taylor's sons having joined a cult in his youth, and descriptions elsewhere of her children being dirty and neglected while she drank and partied.

The book makes clear that Taraborrelli or his staff did interview people, probably a lot of people. But the quality of the interviews and the insight they offer is lacking. Taraborrelli quotes a flip and brittle Eddie Fisher offering nothing of substance. Taraborrelli even asks rhetorically why Taylor still bears a grudge against Fisher, not realizing the irony that this is the kind of question he should theoretically be trying to answer. He also interviews a bevy of people ancillary to the action, such as the son of a film director describing one of what must have been one of many Burton-Taylor makeout sessions on the set of "Cleopatra."

This isn't the first Taraborrelli celebrity bio in which he buries the reader in an avalanche of meaningless gossip-mag minutiae, easily culled from readily available books and magazines, but fails to do any enterprising research of his own. For instance, in the 576 pages of excruciating detail in "Call Her Miss Ross," Taraborrelli neglected to mention that Diana Ross and Berry Gordy had a child together (beyond coyly stating that her oldest child didn't resemble her then-husband).

I'm sure this book will make money hand over fist, which is all that matters to Taraborrelli (that and maybe getting to brown-nose the celebrity in person). But if you want to respect yourself later, flip to the photos, then put this book back where you found it.

Don't even bother................
I've been a fan of Elizabeth Taylor's for almost longer than I can remember, and there isn't a book about her that I don't have, but this is one that even I could have done without.

There is nothing new here, and some things - the dynamics between Taylor and her parents, for example - are analyzed for what feels like several thousand pages. The book is a difficult read as well, due to the oddly florid and sophomoric writing by author Taraborelli.

For anyone who's curious, the best book about the actress is still Brenda Maddox's "Who's Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor?", published back in 1978. Admmittedly out of date now, it's still remarkably insightful and well written, and worth searching for.