Elizabeth Taylor by Donald Spoto

Elizabeth Taylor by Donald Spoto

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have been having feelings, I think, about how women are written about in biography and in particular, about female movie stars. There is something that I’m yet to quite tease out about how their body becomes the centre of attention and how this is kind of appropriated (perhaps?) through the act of biography until the woman herself becomes marginalised and somewhat othered from her own story. I’m not even sure if that’s the best way to express it but for now, it will hopefully serve to indicate how bothered I am by this process, this small-making thing, and I am not even entirely sure that I can pick out one title which bothers me more. All I know is that I am finding it again and again in biographies, and especially those about iconic and big and definitive actresses, and I find a connection in the way that the studio treated them and I wonder, perhaps, if there is an avowedly and deliberately feminist biographer of classic Hollywood that I am yet to find.

That is not the best way to open this review and yet it is the only way I can open it for this is the story of a remarkable life and it is well told but there is still that little edge underneath it all for me. Elizabeth Taylor lived in a way that none of us can possibly hope to understand and experienced things that can only be imagined and the effort to capture all of that in a biography, albeit one which fizzles to something of a sudden and unexpected halt, is something to be praised. She was a remarkable woman living a remarkable, hypnotic experience. Her private was public, her public was private, and in the middle of all of that, is a story of love and of tenderness and of fear, I think, at it all suddenly becoming something else.

Spoto is good at what he does and this is a fiercely well-researched and documented thing and I don’t want to sound as though I am castigating this book in particular because I don’t think I am. Admittedly I am slightly castigating the meticulous detail of Taylor’s weight gain in her later career (and the mention of ‘zaftig’ which, honestly, no) and I think I am also slightly castigating the lightness of touch about Taylor’s brilliant activism work in the eighties and nineties but they are the only castigations for now. There is something slightly odd in this final section for me as a whole because (and I think it is this: Taylor does not obey the rules of narrative. She does not do what the book wants her to do and I kind of love her for that).

A remarkable, detailed, complex experience this, then, and I am yet to unpack it completely. But then that does seem to have been a common experience for those in the wake of this brilliant woman and indeed, herself.

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