I Want To Be Rich When I Am Dead

I admire the way dead celebrities continue to make more money than ever. Elvis Presley was one of the highest paid entertainers of 2010, & he has been gone for 24 years, yet he made $60 million last year.

Andy Warhol knew that he would one day be the stuff of legend. Warhol: “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.”

Last week, another dead celebrity was the toast of NYC. At Phillips de Pury & Company, Elizabeth Taylor stole the show. The 1963 painting, one of 13 made of Elizabeth Taylor in various colors, was titled-Liz #5 (Early Colored Liz), & it sold to the bidder for $24 million, or $26.9 million including Phillips fees.

The price was not far off the $23.5 million that the actor Hugh Grant got for his turquoise Liz at Christie’s in 2007.

How much can I get for my old jockstrap?

Because

Photo by Beaton

It Is A Sad Day At Post Apocalyptic Bohemia

She was a voluptuous violet eyed actress who lived a life of luxury & love, heartbreak & hurt, & for 6 decades she was one of world's most well known women with 50+ films, 2 Academy Awards, 8 marriages, ravaging illnesses & work raising money for HIV research, when doing so was a career risk.

When she had the chance & when the piece was her equal, she was mesmerizing, holding the screen like so few can.

She is my mother's favorite Hollywood star. I met her once.  This happened in the early 1970s, & she was a stunning beauty in her 40s. She was warm, open & funny. I have been a very lucky man.

Born On This Day- February 27th... Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky

She came into my focus as my mother sat me down at 5 years of age & explained the entire Elizabeth Taylor + Eddie Fisher – Debbie Reynolds = scandal equation. I got it. She remains my mother’s favorite star; they are the same age & were born in the same month. She is a favorite of mine & I think she is the last of the truly great Hollywood Royalty, & very possibly the most beautiful woman of all time. I love her deeply.

Taylor has been a trusted friend to the gay community, & we have loved her right back. She was very close friends & a confidant of gay men: Roddy McDowell, Rock Hudson, George Cukor, Noel Coward, James Dean & most famously to Montgomery Clift. Were there ever any 2 actors at the apex of their beauty, more stunning than Taylor & Clift kissing in A Place In The Sun?



Elizabeth Taylor is a conundrum: truly classy, but perfectly campy, deeply kind, but shamelessly embarrassing, perennially lonely, & serially monogamous. Pills, coke, booze, men, the commercials, the mascara, Studio 54, the guest appearances on soap operas… Elizabeth Taylor & I got through the 1970s together. She gave audacious performances in film adaptations of “gay” plays as Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer & Cat On A Hot Tim Roof, & Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I met her once, at the 50th Anniversary of MGM Ball. I was thrillingly treated to a 7 minute conversation. She amazingly asked about me. I explained that I was a Theatre major at Loyola Marymount University & Taylor quizzed me on my curriculum & my stage roles. I told her was a huge fan of her work. She touched my arm & looked at me with the famous violet eyes & murmured: "I always thought that I was a fine actress, but I spent a lifetime feeling that I was held back because I have such a terrible speaking voice. The coaches at MGM attempted to help me & I did improve, but I will never shake the fact the dreadful small voice was what stopped me from being truly great..." She was only in her early 40s, wearing a beautiful canary yellow mini-dress with yellow flowers in her hair. She was smoking a cigarette with a holder. She was faultlessly beautiful. I nearly fainted.

I appreciate that, like me, she has had a taste for expensive pharmaceuticals, rich fabrics & rich men. I tremble at the thought of her 8 tumultuous marriages & the public denunciation by the Vatican as a home wrecker. I love her for her dramatic tracheotomy scar, of which she was never ashamed. I appreciate her love affair with jewelry that inspired a book simply titled My Love Affair with Jewelry… it looks handsome on the shelf with my own volume- My Love Affair with Whiskey. I admire her unswerving devotion to her friends, to gay people, & for gay activism & attention to fund raising for HIV/AIDS. My feelings are simpatico with Elizabeth Taylor. My mother loves us both, we have both lived with incidents replete with slurred speech, jokes about weight gain, inelegant gestures of elegance & displays of dignity in the face of devastation.


On Oscar day today, the Oscar winning actress turns 78  & she is hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for for treatment of congestive heart failure. I send her love & healing white light. A world without Elizabeth Taylor will not be a good place.

Born On This Day- October 17th... Beautiful & Tragic Montgomery Clift

He made his Broadway debut at 13 in Fly Away Home, & continued to work on the Broadway stage for the next decade before being lured to Hollywood. He was friends with & an inspiration to James Dean & Marlon Brando. They were the trio of brooding & intense young actors that were trying on a new style of naturalistic acting personified by The Actors Studio in NYC. Montgomery Clift thought he was under-valued as an actor, but was, in fact, extremely accomplished & well regarded by critics & fellow actors. He would receive 4 Oscar nominations, 1 for his 2nd film- The Search. Clift was also an isolated & tortured, closeted gay man who used drugs & alcohol to escape his pain. Although he was gay, he maintained close relationships with several actresses, the closest of which was with Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor & Clift were both passionate & vulnerable people who felt a bond immediately. They worked together on several films, beginning with George Stevens' A Place in the Sun in 1951 (his 2nd Oscar nom), & remained best friends until the end of his life. He was teased & ridiculed by Frank Sinatra for being gay during the making of From Here To Eternity (his 3rd nomination).

On May 12, 1956, after leaving a party at Taylor's, Clift drove his car into a telephone pole (8 months after his friend James Dean died in a similar accident). The crash caused scarring & partial paralysis of his beautiful face. He continued to act, & gave some of his most memorable performances after the accident: Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (an Oscar nomination for a 7 minute role) & John Huston's The Misfits in 1961, but his expressive acting & his personal life were never the same. Clift made 16 films before the crash, & 16 films after.

Clift plunged more deeply into drug & alcohol abuse & wild sexual behavior. He began to be considered unreliable by studio bosses. By the time his lover Lorenzo James found him naked & dead of a heart attack at their home in Greenwich Village, on July 23, 1966, he was virtually unemployable. He was just 45 years old.