Liz Taylor: ‘Butterfield 8,’ ‘Cat On A Hot Tin Roof,’ And Her Timeless Screen Goddess Thing

It is not entirely accurate to call Elizabeth (Liz) Taylor the Drew Barrymore of her generation. For one thing, Elizabeth Taylor never stood on top of talk show host David Letterman’s desk and flashed her breasts at him. That wasn’t the sort of thing she would do, necessarily.

But Liz, like Drew, was a child actor and product of Hollywood whose subsequent adult life and career would be marked by a turbulent personal affairs, struggles with addiction, and a kind of iconhood that was both hard to bear and the source of some not-inconsiderable privilege.

Taylor, born in Britain to American parents, won over American audiences in the equine evergreen National Velvet in 1944, as a twelve-year-old; in 1950, she was old enough to wed in Father of the Bride, the Vincent Minnelli-directed film starring Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett that’s one of the most graceful domestic comedies of the American cinema. (The Steve-Martin-starring remakes are amiable but quite a bit clunkier by comparison.)

When this America’s Sweetheart had to grow up, she did so in style: Her role in George Stevens’ 1951 A Place In The Sun (opposite Montgomery Clift, the great actor and tragic Hollywood figure who would be a lifelong friend) was, as Stevens put it, that of “the girl on the candy-box cover, the beautiful girl in the yellow Cadillac convertible that every American boy sometime or other thinks he can marry.” As the decade continued, she sought out less idealized characters. The two Taylor films that recently debuted on Netflix, 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and 1960’s Butterfield 8, were box-office hits that earned critical plaudits — well at least the former did. The latter earned Taylor her first Best Actress Oscar. Each film is in a sense its own melodrama.

Cat is of course adapted from Tennessee Williams’ play about an unhappy Southern family — “mendacity!” — and its particularly challenged young married couple. Maggie The Cat, Taylor’s role, has been portrayed on stage subsequently by a host of divas ranging from Elizabeth Ashley to Scarlett Johansson. None of them can erase the image of Taylor herself in that white slip, restlessly stalking the bedroom in which she and impotent husband Brick (Paul Newman) haven’t been making a lot happen. (That image instantly made a sex symbol of Taylor, whose figure filled out more than a little after Father of the Bride.) This being 1958, the gay themes of Williams’ play have been stuffed in the closet, and the hint of a potentially happier future for Maggie and Brick is made more pronounced.

For all that, and for all the respectful-to-the-point-of-stodgy direction by Richard Brooks, it’s a compelling movie, almost wholly thanks to Taylor’s controlled seething, which barely masks her character’s yearning vulnerability and tenderness. It was a horrible picture for Taylor to make. Two weeks into shooting her second husband, showbiz entrepreneur and perennial big spender Mike Todd — who, among other things, had sunk a lot of money into the widescreen film technology he called “Todd AO” — died in a plane crash. Taylor was devastated. MGM, the studio to which Taylor was under contract, was rather less moved. And Todd’s estate was a mess. Taylor was obliged to go back to work only three weeks after Todd’s death.

Never a man to ignore the power of a voluptuous woman in skimpy clothing, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz put Liz in a white one-piece bathing suit for 1959’s Suddenly Last Summer, another Williams adaptation, the utter bonkersness of which could not be wholly contained by Hollywood censorship. The gothic material, featuring cannibalism and threat of a forced lobotomy, is somewhat resistant to genuinely convincing acting, but Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Clift, are game in their gestures.

There was some rather cruel calculation on MGM’s part when it cast her in Butterfield 8. Early on, the studio had cultivated a convincing “good girl” image for Liz. Now she was on her third marriage, to Eddie Fisher, the popular singer whose most significant contribution to art was discovering Scott Walker. (The Scott Walker of The Walker Brothers and Tilt, not the politician. How galling it is to have to make that clarification.) Fisher had been married to wholesome singing and dancing starlet Debbie Reynolds, a friend of Taylor’s. (Fisher and Reynolds had a kid you may have heard of, Carrie.) While Eddie was an utter dawg and always would be, at the time blame for the breakup of this particular couple — another studio-sustained pair of “America’s Sweethearts” — was laid solely at the feet of Taylor.

Butterfield 8, a largely bowdlerized adaptation of a 1935 John O’Hara novel, treats the sad life of an upper-class call girl. Taylor was about to leave MGM for 20th Century Fox (where she would star in the legendary bomb Cleopatra, in which she at least looked great and is as a whole a more interesting picture than it’s often given credit for); casting her as the call girl was MGM’s pointed parting gift to her.

As a result she always hated the movie, even after winning the Best Actress Oscar for it. It’s a considerably less distinctive film than Cat. The script’s attempt to turn O’Hara’s nuanced novel into a bad-girl-turns-good tale is less than credible (and also awash in sexist conventions, of course). Taylor’s insistence that the film be shot in New York would have panned out better in the hands of a director more inspired than Daniel Mann. And her insistence that her then-husband Fisher appear in a supporting role did not pan out at all. But Taylor’s performance is not just disciplined but genuinely sensitive — she’s really trying to figure out what would make a more convincingly conceived character than the one she’s shoehorned into here tick.

In the run-up to the 1960 Oscars in March 1961, Taylor was felled with pneumonia and, among other things, had to get a tracheotomy. Hence, there was a lot of speculation that her win was the result of a sympathy vote. “Hell, even I voted for her,” scorned woman Debbie Reynolds cracked.

Taylor’s tumultuous romantic adventures continued on the set of Cleopatra, where she met Welsh Master Thespian Richard Burton; together they would soon inadvertently coin the ubiquitous ’60s moniker “Liz and Dick.” Her marriage and professional alliance with Burton would reignite what became a perpetual, and perpetually dumb, question about her: Can she act? With Cat and Butterfield 8, she had indisputably proven that she always could.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream Butterfield 8

Where to stream Cat on a Hot Tin Roof