Culturebox: The Bawdy and the Beautiful

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doonan The Bawdy and the Beautiful Elizabeth Taylor's delightful vulgarity. By Simon Doonan Posted Wednesday, March 23, 2011, at 1:24 PM ET Elizabeth Taylor was wild and beautiful and unpretentious and insanely glamorous. When I was a kid the papers were filled with cascading images of her scandalous trials and fabulations: Liz in Capri pants clutching poodles and waving drunkenly from the deck of her yacht; Liz deathly ill; Liz back from the dead, suntanned and buying ever bigger bijoux; Liz and Eddie; Liz and Monty; and, most importantly, Liz and Dick. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were the Brad and Angelina of their day, minus all that the earnest actor-ish stuff. A movie actress her entire life, she was so confident about her ability to deliver her lines that she never descended into all that gobbledygook--it's about "the craft" and "the work"--which spouts from the mouths of contemporary actors. Dick always claimed that his wife, with her just-shut-up-and-say-the-bloody-words attitude toward acting, relieved him of the burden of his Shakespearian provenance and taught him how to just do it. To continue reading, click here. Simon Doonan is the creative director of Barneys. (Photo by Roxanne Lowit.) Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Bizarre Yoga-Store Murder: The Latest Proof That Most Homicides Aren't Random What Your Cellphone Will Be Like in 2016 How Much Sex Did Victorians Actually Have?	Advertisement
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