Elizabeth Taylor’s most dramatic health moment occurred half a century ago. While filming the epic flop “Cleopatra” in Rome, she contracted pneumonia and underwent an emergency tracheotomy so she could breathe.
Six weeks later, on April 17, 1961, she was well enough to attend the 33rd Annual Academy Awards at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. The scar on her neck faintly visible, Taylor accepted the Oscar for Best Actress for “Butterfield 8.” She fainted in a backstage restroom. Later she would acknowledge that the Academy probably bestowed its honor on her more out of sympathy than for her performance.
For Taylor, who died Wednesday morning at 79, health crises became as large a part of her persona as her acting talent or her well-chronicled romantic troubles (eight marriages to seven men).
A paragraph in the Times’ obit by Elaine Woo outlines the staggering travails Taylor endured throughout her life:
According to one chronicler, she suffered more than 70 illnesses, injuries and accidents requiring hospitalization, including an appendectomy, an emergency tracheotomy, a punctured esophagus, a hysterectomy, dysentery, an ulcerated eye, smashed spinal discs, phlebitis, skin cancer and hip replacements. In 1997, she had a benign brain tumor removed. By her own count, she nearly died four times.
The author William J. Mann, in his 2009 biography of Taylor called “How to Be a Movie Star,” writes that Taylor milked her struggles, including her illnesses, “for every last dollar of their commercial value.”
Those of us who are too young to remember Taylor in her prime, when she was one of the most gorgeous actresses to appear in the movies (fellas, rent “A Place in the Sun” from 1951 and tell me it ain’t so) mainly recall the tabloid headlines she generated — for her fluctuating weight, marriage No. 8 (to construction worker Larry Fortensky) and her friendship with Michael Jackson.
But she was also a survivor who was never afraid to own up to her mistakes and poke fun at her misfortunes. Even now, reading her pithy quotes from the past makes one long for the days before celebs hid behind layers of PR insulation and infantile Twitter musings.
Taylor actually wrote a diet book, published in 1988, called “Elizabeth Takes Off.” In an interview with the great Hollywood scribe Aljean Harmetz, she described how she went from being a lonely wreck who abused pills and alcohol (during a five-year stint as a Washington wife, when she was married to the senator, John Warner) who got sober and dropped 60 pounds after leaving the Betty Ford Clinic.
”I craved the sugar the alcohol had been supplying,” she said. ”I’m not an elitist. I ate Mars bars, Snickers and Godiva chocolates. At the center, they don’t encourage you to diet or give up smoking or stop drinking coffee; only to get off the addictions that brought you there. I got myself cleaned up inside, but my outsides didn’t match my insides.
”For somebody like me who is obsessive, it’s amazing I was never a gambler,” she said. ”I could have become anorexic. I got to a size 4 and said, ‘Why not a size 2?’ Then I slapped myself and went from 118 to 122, which is the right weight for me.”
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