Typical. You don’t wait years for an Elizabeth Taylor documentary and then two turn up at once regardless. Last month we had Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, a film built around the discovery of 40 hours of audio interviews the star recorded with a journalist in 1964. Now we have a three-part documentary executive produced by Kim Kardashian and furnishing us with more of the hagiographic same.
The new series differs from the former offering by being able to field a more impressive array of talking heads. George Hamilton is there again, of course, but this time her ex-boyfriend is joined by rarely seen members of the Taylor clan (son Chris and granddaughter Naomi), her goddaughter Paris Jackson (son of Michael), fellow child stardom survivor Margaret O’Brien, Anthony Fauci (for the public health activism years), Kim K herself (who conducted the last ever interview with Taylor before her death in 2011), Sharon Stone and – I do feel we need the triumphal Dynasty theme tune playing here – Joan Collins. God, Collins is wonderful. But we’ll come back to her.
Other than the calibre of guests, the experience is largely the same as it was with The Lost Tapes. The frustrated, pushy mother. The early years at MGM. The determination to grow tall enough for the part in horse-racing film National Velvet. The marriages. The beauty versus the longing to be taken seriously. The happy years with third husband Mike Todd followed by the scandal of breaking up Eddie Fisher’s marriage to Debbie Reynolds. The $1m for Cleopatra. The papal charge of “erotic vagrancy”, for the on–set relationship she began with Richard Burton while married to Fisher.
The years of excess and conspicuous consumption that didn’t play too well with what was still essentially a post-war crowd are not mentioned. We do hear about the changing nature of celebrity, at whose dead centre she and Burton were – with the world “paparazzi” virtually being coined to describe the photographers who swarmed the pair when they filmed the bloated epic in Rome. There’s the deserved Oscar for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The addictions to pills and booze are largely glossed over again. We do, however, get the customary praise for her later support for Aids patients and charities – born of her love and appreciation of the many closeted men she worked with (and was friends with) in Hollywood.
Rebel Superstar gives a bit more space to her business acumen – the 80s adverts for her perfumes are a joy to behold. Thanks to the presence of Naomi and Chris Wilding, there is also a little more sense of Taylor behind the scenes and the well-known set pieces. But like The Lost Tapes, it is consumed by the need to reinvent Taylor as a feminist pioneer and role model for all who came after her. But was she? Was she really?
For sure she withstood a lot, and like every other actor of her era was unfairly constrained and exploited by the men who ran the studio system – until she began to understand her own worth and stand up to some of their more egregious demands. But so, at some point in their careers, did most of her peers. If being a feminist means learning how to leverage your power to your own advantage and inadvertently “paving the way for so many women to live unapologetically” as Kim K claims, Taylor undoubtedly qualifies. If it means actively engaging with and lifting up the sisterhood, maybe not so much. Why her achievements have to be made to bear more than they need to, I do not know.
Collins, though, is there to cut through the BS whenever it threatens to overwhelm. She sprays the perfume and coughs delicately. “It ain’t Chanel No 5, is it?” While others bloviate about the passionate romance between Burton and Taylor, Collins recalls a dinner with Fisher in attendance looking “crestfallen, a beaten man … I don’t think [hurting people] bothered her too much”. When the definitive documentary is made – next month? – I expect Collins to be front and centre. Accept no substitutes.
• Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar aired on BBC Two and is available on iPlayer.
