The Accidental Feminist
By MG Lord( Walker)
For successive generations of cinema-goers, Elizabeth Taylor represented a dazzling variety of enviable qualities. There was her extraordinary beauty – the astonishing body and the notorious violet eyes with their thick row of lashes.
Soon more ambiguous characteristics would emerge: a prodigious appetite for jewellery, food and alcohol; a cavalier way with other people’s husbands, and an endearing blowsiness.
She was wayward, but brave enough to stand up to the Hollywood studio system, and to offer personal and practical support to Aids sufferers when that was a very unfashionable thing to do.
Mike Nichols, who directed her in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, praised her “democratic soul”. She was a great star.
But you probably wouldn’t think of her as a feminist icon. That, however, is the role claimed for her by the American journalist M. G. Lord.
“Feminism,” Lord writes, “may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name Elizabeth Taylor.” But it might if you share your definition with writer Rebecca West: “I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist when I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
This is a definition broad enough to include almost anyone who isn’t a fully paid-up surrendered wife, but Lord admits that when she first met Taylor, ‘no link between her and feminism had yet crossed my mind.
“I did see a vast disconnect between her shallow tabloid persona and the seeming depths of her real-life self. Intelligence flickered behind those lilac eyes.”
Soon afterwards, the connection between Taylor and feminism dawned on her and the idea was born. “Early in her career,” Lord speculates, “Taylor may not have noticed the feminist content that undergirded some of her roles. Somewhere along the line, though, I think [she] woke up.”
In support of her theory, Lord argues that “Taylor’s 1987 diet book, Elizabeth Takes Off, repeatedly makes feminist points - exploring ideas about women and body image that English therapist Susie Orbach first brought to widespread attention in her groundbreaking 1978 book, Fat Is A Feminist Issue”.
The idea of Elizabeth Taylor as a cheerleader for Susie Orbach is thought-provoking, but Lord goes on to discovers intimations of feminism even in her more doubtful films: “I discovered that some of Taylor’s so-called turkeys were anything but. The later films often had ahead-of-the-curve messages that made people squirm.
“I hope this book will move readers to watch the movies it highlights with an open mind, to see if they, too, perceive the feminist content.” It is an invitation too enticing to resist.
Lord begins her survey of Taylor’s films with the proposition that National Velvet, the 1944 movie in which Taylor portrays Velvet Brown, a 12-year-old girl jockey who wins the Grand National on a piebald gelding, is “as fierce a polemic as Three Guineas”, a “blistering book-length feminist essay” by Virginia Woolf, published in 1938.
A preoccupation with her theory at the expense of revealing anecdotes is a feature of her book. She gives just half a paragraph to her interview with the urbane and amusing Gore Vidal, who wrote the script for Suddenly, Last Summer and could tell bitchy stories about absolutely everyone, and she whizzes over the assorted marriages and the friendship with Michael Jackson, yet lingers over the most peculiar details.
Many books have been written about Elizabeth Taylor, and there is certainly room for many more. As a great star, a complex personality and an actress with a talent that she never fully explored, she is a fascinating subject. Reading Lord’s book does make you want to go back and watch Taylor’s movies, so to that extent she has succeeded in her aim.
But as for revealing a secret feminist subtext - I remain more convinced by the argument of Lord’s fellow cultural critic (and far superior writer), Camille Paglia, who argued that Taylor “wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain”. - Daily Mail