Imagine the conversation Elizabeth Taylor could have had with Taylor Swift; a generational tete-a-tete between the Cleopatras of their times (to name drop Taylor’s most famous role).
The impossible scenario (Taylor died in 2011) comes to mind as I’m discussing the new HBO documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes with its director, Nanette Burstein. We’re comparing the two icons: the musician behind the Eras Tour and the screen star featured in Burstein’s biography, whose “blinding” beauty was celebrated across eras.
Both command adulation, and blockbuster ticket sales, but also the kind of scrutiny that often tips over into frothing-at-the-mouth misogyny, which is especially pronounced when their romantic entanglements are discussed. The flack Swift got for dating – well, whoever – often echoes Taylor’s own infamy in tabloids as a serial bride.
At least Swift, Burstein points out, could speak out about what women faced, between the “slut-shaming” and the double-standards, on a song like The Man, expressing her frustration in a way that Taylor never could. “Taylor Swift”, says Burstein, “has the ability to say, ‘This is messed up.’ Elizabeth Taylor, in her time, could not do that.”
Burstein is speaking to me on a Zoom call about the limits on Taylor’s voice, explaining how the intensely glamorous actor, who appeared so fiery and unfiltered in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, would often bite her tongue or even internalize the repressive mores of the time. “She had to pretend like she was happy with the more traditional roles,” says Burstein. She refers to a period when Taylor entertained an exit from acting to devote herself to being a good wife. “Meanwhile, she went out and was a badass. She said one thing and did another.”
Burstein’s film, which counts JJ Abrams among its producers, is all about rediscovering Taylor’s playful, endearing, often complicated and passionate voice – and perhaps it’s also about saying the things that she couldn’t.
The film draws from 40 hours of interviews Taylor gave the Life magazine writer Richard Meryman, conducted as the basis for a book he never wrote. The never-before-heard conversations that took place during the height of her fame were collecting dust in an attic until Meryman passed in 2015.
These conversations contain obvious catnip for film fans, like hearing Taylor describe the sensitivity with which George Stevens directed her in A Place in the Sun, and how he was surprisingly hostile towards her stardom on the set of his western epic Giant. She also recollects her time with James Dean and how the brooding star toyed with her feelings by being incredibly warm and vulnerable one day, then act like he barely knew Taylor the next.
These candid insights are packaged with remarkable self-awareness and Taylor’s knack for therapizing, which is especially pronounced when she explains what emotional needs drove her to every relationship, good or bad. Burstein attributes Taylor’s self-awareness to growing up too fast. She was a child actor, after all, who was cast as a romantic interest at 16 in movies like A Date with Judy, and packaged in magazines as a bombshell. “I had to behave like a sophisticated woman,” says Taylor in the recorded interviews. “And in my own world I was a terrified little girl.”
Burstein points out that Taylor was only 22 when she made Giant. She was on her second marriage with two kids and had already been scarred by domestic abuse. “She lived so much life so quickly that I think it allowed her to have these kinds of revelations about her own life and self.”
The tapes apply that clarity to her relationship with the public. She describes, in pained but frank excerpts, how she is seen as “illicit” and “immoral”.
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“There was a part of her that felt she was deserving of that judgment too,” says Burstein, citing Taylor’s relationship with Eddie Fisher while he was married to Debbie Reynolds – and her subsequent affair with her future husband Richard Burton, while she was still married to Fisher. “I think she did have a lot of guilt and self-hatred for it. But it never stopped her from doing it. She still always followed her heart, consequences be damned.”
Burstein’s film is empathetic, and exhaustive, up to a point. With the exception of Taylor’s advocacy for people living with Aids in the 80s – a fitting bookend to her tender friendships with closeted gay actors like Rock Hudson and Roddy McDowall – The Lost Tapes sticks to the periods covered in the titular recordings.
The film essentially gives Taylor’s voice the space to reclaim her narrative. Up until now, Taylor’s story has mostly been framed by men: from the directors who cast her as an object of desire, to the reporters who would frame her as a sex symbol. In one clip, we hear a reporter ask Fisher, while Taylor is by his side on their honeymoon, if she can cook. Even Meryman’s questions lean sexist, as when he repeatedly refers to Taylor as a “sex goddess”, to which you can hear her snap back: “You [put] so bloody much emphasis on the sex goddess thing! I know I’m an actress and I know I’m female. And I’m very proud of being a woman.”
“It always helps to see these stories through the lens of the past,” says Burstein, when considering the relevance Taylor’s story has today. “Because it makes us feel like, ‘oh, we’re not as bad as that.’ But then it also makes you think about where we’re at now, and take measure of that.”
I suggest to Burstein that The Lost Tapes are in conversation with her previous work. She immediately offers up The Price of Gold and Hillary as comparative examples. The former is her ESPN 30 for 30 doc about the embattled figure skater Tonya Harding that influenced the movie I, Tonya. The latter is her Hulu docuseries about Hillary Clinton. Both challenge the cruel discourse surrounding the women they’re centered on. And, like The Lost Tapes, their narratives hang on to what Burstein calls “the arc of the feminist movement” – even if some of their subjects aren’t aware they have anything to do with that arc.