Taylor’s death ensures an eventual torrent of books about her life. “The Accidental Feminist,” one of the first in the stream, offers a glimpse of the daunting task biographers will have: In death, as in life, people will find that slapping a label on Elizabeth Taylor that will stick is pretty difficult to do.
BY CHRIS FORAN | MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL
“The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice.” By M.G. Lord. Walker & Co. $23.
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We love to graft Big Ideas onto Big Stars. John Wayne is America, Elvis Presley is The King, Marlon Brando is The Rebel, Bob Dylan is The Prophet.
Elizabeth Taylor is so big we keep adding ideas onto her. She’s been The Beauty, The Star, The Great Actress, The Husband Collector.
But The Feminist?
So argues M.G. Lord, in “The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice.”
There’s an interesting idea lurking here, but it’s obscured by insights that are simultaneously thin and overreaching. Which is kind of a shame, since anything that gets you past the glitter and into Taylor’s movies isn’t a bad thing.
Lord, the author of the cheeky and smart “Forever Barbie,” argues that Taylor carried the banner of feminism, on screen and off, sometimes without knowing it but always without apology.
And Lord has Taylor carrying that banner from childhood. “National Velvet,” Lord says, is based on a fierce, gender-bending polemic of a children’s novel, with Taylor — all of 12 years old at the time — taking a stand for equality by posing as a male jockey to win the big race.
The 1944 movie helped make Taylor a star, and, according to Lord, started her on a path of movies that celebrated not just her beauty but her independence and intelligence.
Let the quibbles start right there.
As a contract employee with MGM, the biggest and best studio in Hollywood, until 1960, Taylor had little control over what movies she made and how they were played. She was not taking a stand for something; she was just working.
Second, for every movie in that period of her career in which she played a strong, independent woman — “A Place in the Sun,” “Giant” — there are a couple where she’s the opposite (“Father of the Bride,” “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” “Raintree County”). Lord solves that little problem by ridiculing and dismissing the movies that don’t fit her idea and celebrating the ones that do.
Once Taylor was in firmer control of her career, she did pick some roles that fit Lord’s feminist mold: Cleopatra (“Cleopatra”), Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Regina in a touring production of “The Little Foxes.” But in that “independent” phase of Taylor’s career, she also picked some parts that are anything but feminist, playing exiled idealists (“The Sandpiper”), cougars (“The Only Game in Town”) and desperate women defined by the men in their lives — not exactly Gloria Steinem material.
In other words, Taylor was, again, just working.
More problematic in “The Accidental Feminist” is Lord’s squishy idea of what constitutes feminism. She acknowledges it’s a tricky term to pin down, but uses that to give her license to bend the concept to her needs. So, characters as far-ranging as Angela in “A Place in the Sun” — simultaneously an ideal of romance and a mother figure (“Tell mama, tell mama all”) — and Gloria in “Butterfield 8,” a “working” girl who pays for her principles, are equally models of female empowerment and identity.
Still, Lord does use her device to open up some of Taylor’s more interesting movies. Her takes on neglected movies such as “The Sandpiper” and “Reflections in a Golden Eye” make you want to see them (or, if you’ve seen them before, see what you were missing). I found myself wishing Lord had included more movies — she gives just a brief mention, for example, to the boisterous and fun screen version of “The Taming of the Shrew,” with Taylor as Kate and still-then-hubby Richard Burton as Petruchio — in the mix to bolster her argument.
Lord even folds Taylor’s AIDS activism — which came with courage and conviction and no small threat to her career — into her feminism. It’s not entirely off the mark, but it feels like she’s got things in reverse order: Taylor’s passion for fairness and humanity made her in tune with feminism, not the other way around.
Taylor’s death ensures an eventual torrent of books about her life. “The Accidental Feminist,” one of the first in the stream, offers a glimpse of the daunting task biographers will have: In death, as in life, people will find that slapping a label on Elizabeth Taylor that will stick is pretty difficult to do.