My hands-down favorite Liz Taylor — when her womanhood reached its full ripeness, like a peach at its sweetest, right on the verge of rot — was as Gloria Wandress in Butterfield 8.


Like Sinatra circa "My Way" or Elvis circa "Moody Blues" Liz Taylor only became really interesting after the bloom was off the rose.  Beauty is a lot of things, but it's not all that interesting.  We can't help but be drawn to beauty, to symmetry — but by nature we set to, seeking out the flaw.  Beauty compels, but it's static.  It's the flaw that fascinates, and motivates. 

The bloom was fleeting, but Liz Taylor endured as Female energy incarnate.  Not feminity — which is a myth anyway — and in fact, her power on-screen as she blossomed into full and fulsome womanhood came from the friction between the female and the feminine. 

And then came The Flintstones. 

No, Liz Taylor did not grow old gracefully, exactly.  I can never banish from my mind that macabre image of walking, singing corpses...

So, so wrong.

But then it's that much harder when you're beautiful when you're young.  I think part of the punishment for beauty and youth in our culture is having to endure accusations once they're spent of having squandered them.  It's akin to the disdain we feel for lottery winners who end up destitute two years down the line.

We have very little sympathy as we watch beautiful people struggle in vain against the ravages of gravity and time.  In fact, we seem to delight in their descent.  Because beautiful people, especially, seem to illustrate for us the cruel justice of Time and Fate.  Corpses are all equally exquisite.

But back to Miss Taylor's oeuvre.  My two other favorites are Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, both of which when I first encountered them spoke to the peculiar and extremely idiomatic language of dark secrets, a language gay men and women of my generation still recognized immediately, regardless of dialect. 

In fact, my interest in language is probably inseparable from my experience of sexuality.  This was at a time and in a place — hard to imagine now just twenty or so years on — where meaning was still implied, and a rich language of euphemism and metaphor — visual and literary — was still in currency. 

The only place in gay culture you find this now is camp, where it is often a stinging rebuke to the past.  Part of the humor in it is the lengths to which we once had to go to shout and sing about something there was no voice and no public language for.  But the exhilarating challenge of infiltrating the popular culture — of getting middle America to sing along on the Radio to "YMCA" or embrace a sitcom like "The Odd Couple" — is gone now, too, in the age of Glee.  That's a subversive culture that's been completely assimilated. 

And a lost language.  The "edging" of a Tennessee Williams play — the almost-said-it-but-didn't-say-it moments that keep piling up and causing so much agony in everyone until climax and collapse we all understood.  Now gay jokes are de rigueur in every bromance and buddy movie Hollywood poops out and men are swapping spit on daytime TV.

But something remains in Liz Taylor's boozy, fulsome, fading beauty in those films.  A nostalgia for serious secrets in an age when they've become ridiculous.