HOW TO BE A MOVIE STAR
HOW TO BE A MOVIE STAR; Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood By William J. Mann
“How to Be a Movie Star” reads like a labor of immoderate love. Mann, who wrote the widely praised biography Kate: The Woman who was Hepburn, insists time and again, on page after page, that his subject is broader and deeper than Taylor herself - that he’s investigating the very nature and stamina of stardom. Quoting the writer Maureen Orth’s hilarious observation that Taylor was “the Madame Curie of fame extension,” he casts his biography in part as an investigation into the chemical formula behind her enduring command of the spotlight.
“No one - except the two parties involved - can ever be absolutely sure when flirtation became fornication,” Mann writes of the initial Taylor-Burton coupling, then proceeds to hazard the guess that the moment transpired in Burton’s trailer on the “Cleopatra” set.
Taylor’s tenacious grip on the spotlight was partly a matter of sensing which mate at which moment could help her most.
Mann has more interest in building her up than in tearing her down, and he credits Taylor with a great deal of influence. Mann’s account of the making of Woolf is the most engrossing passage of the book.
Once the second of her two marriages to Burton is over, How to Be a Movie Star sputters rather quickly to its conclusion, the most recent decades of Taylor’s life getting short shrift.
“How to Be a Movie Star” works less well as an excavation of Taylor’s character than as a highlights reel of her cinematic triumphs and a romp through Hollywood during a certain era, when Hedda Hopper wielded thunderbolts from her typewriter, virile stars like Clift and Rock Hudson (both friends of the open-minded Taylor) carefully veiled their sexual orientation, and marriages were arranged for the sake of headlines. You could have the book here.
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