STYLE:A photo-essay on the life of Elizabeth Taylor captures the fashion blunders as well as her beauty, writes EDEL MORGAN
ELIZABETH TAYLOR: Her Life in Styleby Susan Kelly is largely a book of luscious images of a young Taylor with rosebud lips, a nipped-in waist and, as her star rose, dripping in diamonds. Many of the photos in the book of her early career were meticulously stage-managed by MGM and will already be familiar to Taylor fans. What Kelly doesn't mention in the title of the book, is that Taylor, who died earlier this year aged 79, also committed a few crimes against style in her time, and they became more frequent as her weight yo-yoed and the studios exerted less control over her career. There's a photo of her emerging from a plane at Kennedy Airport in 1968 looking like Mrs Claus arriving at the North Pole, with a three- quarter length ermine coat with a fur-trimmed hood and white leather boots. Less is more wasn't a rule she lived by, as the image of her at the 1968 Paris premiere of A Flea in her Ear –wearing a feathery fascinator and boa, an embroidered lemon dress and a Bulgari emerald and diamond necklace – testifies. There's also a questionable 1970s crochet poncho and trousers combo that Kelly captions as "pure relaxed Hollywood glamour".
In a way, these are the most interesting photos in the book. While the images of her as a young fresh-faced star are lovely, and Kelly provides a basic description of each outfit, you can’t help feeling she’s clutching at straws. Do we really need to be told Taylor is wearing a “full-skirted, sleeveless white dress” when we can see it? While Taylor was regarded as a great beauty, she was never a style icon in the way Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn were. Her appeal lay more in her earthy, lush beauty, her extravagant lifestyle and her soap-opera private life.
What purports to be a book about style works better as a photo-essay of her life and there are some interesting tidbits, including that she was born with a rare condition called distichiasis, which gave her a double row of eyelashes andheart problems. It summarises her long career, starting when she was 10 in the 1943 film Lassie Come Home to her Oscar-winning performances in Butterfield 8and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, her conversion to Judaism, her addictions, illnesses and work as an Aids campaigner.
Of the early photos, it’s the ones of the off-duty Taylor that are most compelling, such as the one where she’s on a shopping trip with her mother Sara in 1948, or at an event in 1958 with third husband Mike Todd, who’s talking to her mother as her father Francis stands behind. There’s a photo of her and Richard Burton in 1967 with children, Michael jnr and Christopher Wilding, Elizabeth Todd and their child Maria Burton – who, to her credit, were rarely photographed – in 1967 and one of her first meeting with David Bowie in 1968.
Her fifth (and sixth) husband Richard Burton, who indulged her insatiable appetite for diamonds, described their first meeting on the set of Cleopatra: “She was unquestionably gorgeous, she was lavish. She was a dark, unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much . . . ”
Elizabeth Taylor: Her Life in Styleis out on July 27th (AC Black, £19.99)
