Elizabeth Taylor, an Icon

An icon is an image, a representation of a sacred person that itself becomes sacred. A living breathing human being becomes an icon when she represents some aspects of the human condition that once we see them, helps us to better understand ourselves. Such knowledge allows us to live life knowing that we are not alone in our joys, passions, loves, grieves and struggles to leave some small mark on the world. The icon becomes sacred because the humanity she represents is sacred.
Elizabeth Taylor was and is such an icon. The stunningly beautiful actor and humanitarian died March 23, 2011, age 79. However, she will live as long as her motion pictures live. She will live as long as the history of HIV-AIDS is told. She will live in the lives of every woman, every human being who finds herself/ himself, winding through life’s labyrinth of triumph and defeat, of adoration and abuse, of acceptance and ridicule, of fame and shame, of love and loss.
Yet, there was an ordinariness about this extraordinary woman. She was married eight times to seven different men. She married Richard Burton twice. No judgment. Extraordinary. She loved within and beyond marriage vows. Ordinary. She was considered one of the great beauties of her era. Extraordinary. Still, she struggled with the quotidian struggle of managing her weight. Ordinary. When her husband, Mike Todd, was killed in an airplane crash, making her a widow at 26, she returned to work and finished a movie. Many of us find ourselves in this place. We go to our jobs in tears. Some days the work is a blessed distraction; some days not.
For years she did not consider herself a free woman because of her 18-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. When she was no longer under contract, she was paid a million dollars for her work in the movie Cleopatra. The role of the beautiful, powerful yet tragic queen was only one of a wide range of parts. In the movie Butterfield 8, the role for which she won her first Oscar for best actress, she plays a woman involved with a married man. The character she plays is haunted by the experience of being raped as a child. This was a subject hardly spoken of in 1960, and is not much spoken of today. How many women have lived and still live with such a secret?
In her role in Suddenly Last Summer she plays a woman who faces the threat of a lobotomy to wipe away her memory of the facts of her homosexual cousin’s death. How many people have been called insane because of an inconvenient truth that they know? As Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof she plays a beautiful woman fighting for the physical affection of a husband grieving over the death of his male friend. The movie’s heterosexual happy ending dulls the sharp edges of the male same-sex love implied throughout the story. No one knows the numbers of women who have lived their entire adult lives, grown old and died in marriages to homosexual men.
Elizabeth Taylor was not trapped in her beauty. She purposefully gained twenty pounds to play Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the role for which she won her second best actress Oscar. Her ugliness in the movie reflects the ugliness of human disappointment and regret. In her various roles, she reflected both beauty and ugliness. Both reside in each of us. She was able to do this because she was a powerful actor, more than holding her own with actors as compelling as Montgomery Clift, Spencer Tracey, James Dean, Rock Hudson, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando and Richard Burton.
As her movie career waned and her friend Rock Hudson was diagnosed and died of AIDS, she took up the cause. She raised millions of dollars for and raised awareness about the disease. She was fearless in her friendships, standing with Michael Jackson through his trial for child molestation. Moreover, she did it all with elegance and with determination.
Elizabeth Taylor’s life was not flawless. No human life is. She lived large, for all the world to see. She faced all that life brought her way, including sickness and her own misjudgments, with a grace that represents the divine impulse that lives inside every human soul.