Elizabeth Takes Off: On Weight Gain, Weight Loss, Self-image and Self-Esteem, Americans like their movie goddesses larger-than-life, and Liz Taylor, ever since she was twelve years old, has obliged. “Let’s face it,” she says, “I was a freak.” Today, however, the star of our tabloid fantasies is back— in a daring new role—activist in the fight against AIDS, sober alcoholic, entrepreneur, author, single woman, and a radiant beauty, even more so at fifty-five than ever before.
The question is, are we ready for Liz Taylor, feminist heroine? Elizabeth Taylor is amused at the new perception of herself as a heroine. Not unflattered, she says, but amused. Once dismissed as a caricature of the grande dame lurching self-destructively from man to man and movie to movie, she is now luminously rejuvenated, respected for her openness about her private fight to be sober and slim, and her public commitment to the fight against AIDS.
Taylor’s transformation has been dramatic and hard-won; along the way, she has made rooters of us all. She has the uncanny knack to make us forgive her appetites, her flagrancies—almost grudgingly admire them because they’re so big, so broad, and because they remind us that, icon or not, her life is no less messy than the rest of ours. And when she feels good, as she does now, we feel good, charmed by her survival and by the palpable, almost girlish enthusiasm she evidences at being in one piece and back on top.
Here is no victim, no dupe of m.