Being Sick, and Liz and Dick

I was wrong about the cold.

Some time yesterday morning, I started sneezing. Thirty times in a row? Forty times in a row? A lot.

When I stopped, I felt like a wraith, and there was nothing to do but crawl back into bed.

One of my great fantasies, actually, is to spend endless guilt-free days in bed watching rilly, rilly baaaaaad TV.

As it turns out, though, the fantasy does not live up to the reality.

For one thing, even though I have access to every single streaming service ever created, either because I pay for them or because some pal has kindly gifted me the password, there is very little I actually want to watch. Law & Order SVU only has about 500 episodes, you know! Eventually, you run out.

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I ended up watching a biography of the actor Richard Burton.

I don’t know why.

Maybe illness made me regress. I grew up reading movie magazines after all. It’s the family curse! For years and years and years, I bought the holy trinity of sleazy tabloids—The National Enquirer, The Star, and The Globe— every week.

Other people sneaked guilty peeks on the supermarket line.

But I actually paid good money!

And, of course, I worked for People Magazine.

I remember the Liz and Dick scandal most vividly. I was 10 when Cleopatra was shot.

In the days before cosmetic surgery made beauty a commodity and therefore accessible to anyone with enough cash, Elizabeth Taylor was just the most beautiful woman you could possibly imagine.

Anything anyone that beautiful does is always fascinating.

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The documentary intersperses scenes from Burton’s movies and theatrical performances with the biographical interviews. We learn Burton had a hardscrabble life and was kind of a bully when it came to the stage.

Thing is Burton wasn’t a particularly good actor if by “good actor” you mean someone who can channel a different personality. Watching Burton, you never forget that you are watching Burton. His much-heralded Broadway Hamlet? Ham-fisted. Cleopatra is an embarrassment. Even The Spy Who Came in From the Cold would have been vastly improved had Burton toned down the Lawrence Olivier elocution.

There’s a clip from an early Burton film, Look Back in Anger, the seminal post-WWII kitchen-sink drama by John Osborne. Burton is actually pretty good in this. Possibly because all his character had to do is insult his wife.

There were multiple clips from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, another adventure in toxic misogyny. Here, Burton almost rises to excellence.

I suppose two movies is not a representative enough sample to advance the theory that Burton really hated women, but one is tempted.

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Anyway.

Burton died in Switzerland, more or less in obscurity. Sounds like he developed Korsakoff Syndrome in his declining years, hardly surprising given his enormous alcohol intake.

Liz Taylor also holed up far from the public’s eye for the last 20 years of her life, growing immensely fat and dying her hair all sorts of unflattering colors. I’m always kinda puzzled that in death, she’s not marketed as zealously as, say, Marilyn Monroe or Elvis, but I guess her heirs don’t need the money.

One of her heirs—her daughter Liza—is a Hudson Valley local. I've seen her around. She’s more beautiful at this age than her mother managed to be and reputed to be a talented sculptor.

I think it would be kind of fun to write a novel about the declining years of Liz Taylor. A kind of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane where the Blanche and Baby Jane characters are merged.