‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes’ find her talking about the MGM years

In 1953, Elizabeth Taylor made the forgettable melodrama “The Girl Who Had Everything,” which also is an apt description of her life and her career. Over her 79 years, she segued from a stunningly beautiful child star to a va-va-va-voon sex symbol to a two-time Oscar-winner to a pioneering AIDs activist.  Taylor was more than a star. More than an icon. Even a dozen years after her death, cinephiles are still obsessed with the violet-eye actress.

But a new HBO/MAX documentary “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” illustrates she didn’t have “everything.” In the 1960s, Taylor gave interviews to celebrity journalist Richard Meryman who died in 2015. Forty hours of their interviews were recently discovered in his archive and are the anchor for this compelling piece. (There is also an interview from the 1980s with Dominick Dunne).

Wrote the New York Times: “For the Taylor enthusiast, the film is unlikely to reveal much new information. But that’s not really the point…Taylor’s narration focuses largely on her feelings at the time. As she talks about her feelings at the time…the result is almost like the behind-the-scenes track, a fresh disclosure of the disjunction between what we think we know about stars-who they are, how they feel-and what’s going on inside.”

Taylor spent 17 years at MGM before she left the studio to be the first woman to earn $1 million to play “Cleopatra” in the troubled 1963 production in which she fell in love with and married her costar, Richard Burton. Here’s a look at some of her films she made at the studio.

After making her film debut in the long-forgotten Universal 1942 screwball comedy “There’s One Born Every Minute,” she found a home and stardom at MGM first appearing opposite Roddy McDowell, who would a BBF, and Pal the collie in 1943’s “Lassie Come Home.”

She became a star with 1944 “National Velvet” directed by the estimable Clarence Brown who proclaimed “there’s something behind her eyes that you can’t quite fathom-something Greta Garbo has. I really hate to call her an actress. She’s much too natural for that.”  Initially, Louis B. Mayer and producer Pandro S. Berman thought Taylor was too small and short to play the role of a girl who loves a spirited horse; disguised as a male jockey she rides the horse to victory at England’s Grand National. Undaunted, Taylor changed her diet, exercised including hanging from a bar to stretch her spine.  Over two months she grew three inches and proclaimed to the head of MGM talent that “I now have boobs.” She got the role. The New York Times loved the movie especially Taylor’s joyful performance: “Her face is alive with a youthful spirit; her voice has the softness of sweet song and her whole manner in this picture is one of refreshing grace.”

The studio certainly wanted her to grow up quickly on the screen. She was just 15 when she made the hit 1948 Jane Powell musical “A Date with Judy.”  Though Powell, who was nearly three years older than Taylor, was still playing the wholesome girl-next-door type, Taylor wasn’t. TCM.com noted: “The role of sultry-bad girl Carol gave her the opportunity to show the world she was no longer a child but a beautiful young woman. This movie would prove valuable to Taylor’s career, she rapidly became one of the screen’s enduring sex symbols.”

Sporting blonde locks, Taylor played Amy in 1949’s box office smash adaptation of “Little Women.”  That same year saw the release in Europe (it opened in the U.S. in 1950) of her first adult role in the dreadful “Conspirator.” Taylor was just 16 when she began filming this thriller in which she plays the naïve wife of British army major (Robert Taylor, over 20-years her senior) who learns he is a spy for the Commies. According to TCM, Robert Taylor would later admit that “young Liz’s beauty and sexuality would drive him crazy on the set, causing the actor to become so aroused that re-takes would be necessary, let some sharp-eyed censors took note of unsightly bulges in the trousers area.” TMI, Bob.

She was a sweet bride-to-be in the original, cherished version of 1950’s “Father of the Bride,” starring Spencer Tracy in his Oscar-nominated performance as the harried pops, And real-life coincided with reel-life. MGM gave Taylor a stunning wedding dress for her first nuptials with Nicky Hilton, which took place 12 days before the film premiered, And the following year, everyone reunited for “Father’s Little Dividend.”  But by the time that film opened in April 1951, she and the allegedly abusive Hilton, whom she doesn’t want to talk about in the doc, were divorced.

Taylor talks about her desire for MGM to give her decent roles. In the early 1950s. They didn’t but she got her wish working at Paramount with George Stevens on the 1951 classic drama “A Place in the Sun,” in which she more than held her own with Montgomery Clift, who became another BBF, and at Warner Bros. for 1956’s “Giant,” opposite Rock Hudson, whose death of AIDS was the catalyst for her activism, and James Dean. Taylor admitted that though she and Stevens, who won best director for both films, got on like a house on fire in “Place” but were at odds during “Giant.”

Taylor earned her first Oscar nomination for MGM’s ultra-lavish and lengthy 1957 adaptation of Ross Lockridge Jr.’s historical epic “Raintree County” set in the Antebellum South and during the Civil War. Taylor plays an emotional unstable Southern Belle who believes she’s half-black; she marries a midwestern teacher/poet played by Clift. The film is best remembered for Clift’s near fatal car crash which drastically changed his appearance,

Far superior is her Oscar-nominated turn as Maggie the Cat in 1958’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Though the director/co-adapter Richard Brooks’ had to water down Tennessee Williams’ 1955 play because the Production Code wouldn’t kindly to the fact that Maggie’s boozy husband Brick (Paul Newman in first best actor nomination), who has spurned her affections for a lengthy time, was more than just a close friend his football buddy Skipper who recently committed suicide. Taylor was going through a tragedy of her own during production. Her husband Mike Todd died in a plane crash. Devastated, she holed up in their rented house, while Brooks shot around her. Noted TCM.com: “Three weeks later, she visited the set and asked if she could start work that day claiming that ‘Mike would have wanted it this way.’ Despite her personal pain, Taylor dug into the role with a vengeance, turning on one of her best performances.”

She earned her third Oscar nomination in a row for the controversial Tennessee Williams’ 1959 melodrama “Suddenly Last Summer,” which reunited her with Clift and starred Katharine Hepburn.

Taylor ended her MGM contract with 1960’s drama ‘BUtterfield 8,” based on a John O’Hara novel. Taylor loathed the projected and even told the press that she hated the “girl I play.” Before the 1961 Oscar ceremony, she nearly died of pneumonia. Her health was so dire she had a tracheotomy. Taylor admits in the doc that she thinks she won her first best actress Oscar for “BUtterfield” because of the trach. Variety, though, was far less critical. “The picture’s major asset is Taylor. It is a torrid stinging portrayal with one or two brilliantly executed passages within.”

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