A LASS UNPARALLELED

Here are two stories about Elizabeth Taylor. (How hard it is really to think of her as Dame Elizabeth; much harder than Dame Julie Andrews, Dame Shirley Bassey or Dame Dorothy Tutin, all honoured in the same millennial list). Both these anecdotes date from my own school days. Do bear with me; they are indeed eventually about Elizabeth Taylor.

They knew how to do posters in the '60s

At my (all-male) school, there was an annual tradition called The School Show, a raucous entertainment put together by the boys to celebrate the end of the year. By the time my chum Tony and I were in the VIth Form, we had become the leading lights of the school’s Dramatic Society as well as its chief exponents of the latest trends in the arts/entertainment nexus, in particular the anti-establishment climate of the early 1960s that expressed itself in satire. So it naturally fell to us to put together the School Show.

During our brainstorming sessions that purportedly led to the writing of the script, it occurred to us that we had an amusing combination available to us. One of the younger boys in the DramSoc was called Philip Harrison. He was a sweet-natured, charming and rather self-effacing boy, slight and pallid but determined. He needed some courage to go on the stage, which he did whenever he could, because he was afflicted with a lisp which inevitably drew some unsympathetically pointed responses from schoolboy audiences.

Burton & Taylor dominated the magazines of the day

Then there was a lovely guy from our own year, one of nature’s carpenters and tinkerers who therefore had, almost since his arrival at the school, been the DramSoc’s stage manager of choice. He was called Tony Burton. Short, chunky and rather attractively introspective, he couldn’t act to save his life, nor wished to do so.

Finally, there was Fryer’s House. All the school’s houses had their particular character and Fryer’s – certainly for the whole of my time at the school – was the home of psychopaths. When I had first arrived, puny and bespectacled, I had been singled out by Fryer’s gangs for menaces. Being heedless, mouthy and capable of being quite funny, I usually escaped these confrontations with my life (or at least all my teeth) but the fact that I amused them no doubt prolonged the life of these rather worrying features of each day.

One of the ringleaders of our year’s generation of Fryer’s psychos was a flabby, noisy, paradoxically rather likeable slob called Taylor. With some trepidation, my pal Tony and I approached Taylor and asked whether he wouldn’t mind making his stage debut prancing about in drag consisting of swimming trunks, an improvised bra and various bits of wispy tulle. Naturally, he agreed at once. Securing the other two was then the work of a moment and so, as the climax of the School Show, we were able to announce a mighty exclusive: Taylor, Burton and Harrison in scenes from Cleopatra.

Taylor with Rex Harrison as Caesar in Cleopatra

Our script, which owed a great deal to the style of the wireless comedies to which we were then devoted, particularly Round the Horne and Beyond Our Ken, was a killer combination of witty, silly, surreal and extremely vulgar. Though we didn’t consider it at the time (maybe Tony did but I certainly didn’t), we could well have been setting out to illustrate the prediction that Shakespeare has the serpent of Old Nile make in Antony and Cleopatra: “the quick comedians/Extemporally will stage us, and present/Our Alexandrian revels; Antony/Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see/Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness/I’ in the posture of a whore” [Act V scene ii). Our own Taylor was more roaring than squeaking but otherwise Cleopatra’s nightmare came true on our school stage. Needless to add, it brought the house down.

Rehearsing the closing number of the School Show: Taylor wears the horizontal stripes, Harrison is to his right

I hope that Harrison, Burton and especially Taylor have found in the memory of this nobly entertaining escapade an occasional anecdote to set their respective tables on a roar. For it to have been quite the hit it was, our model (the disastrous movie Cleopatra, of course) needed to be what it was – indeed quite as silly, surreal and vulgar, if nothing like as witty as our own version – and that it was so is in no small measure due to the barely disguised disdain that was clearly held back in Elizabeth Taylor’s performance only by her sulphurous passion for her leading man.

Which brings me to my second yarn. Chief among the thespian successes that Tony and I enjoyed on the school stage was the time when, celebrating our well-established double act as witty intellectuals, we gave respectively our Faustus and Mephistopheles in a production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. When, shortly after, the Oxford University Drama Society announced the great coup of securing former member Richard Burton to play Faustus in their otherwise student production, we naturally booked our seats.

The pivotal moment in the play, when Helen of Troy walks across the stage, is always a directorial headache, as Kit Marlowe must have known and relished when creating it. The most recent Stratford revival before the OUDS version had opted for a totally naked Helen, still a sensational gambit in the early (pre-Hair) 1960s. Our own director cast the prettiest boy in the school. Neither of these solutions quite achieved Marlowe's required frisson.

The Burtons on the Oxford Playhouse stage in Dr Faustus

OUDS, with its star's help, was able to summon real magic in having Burton's wife appear as the legendary beauty. Imagine: the first stage appearance anywhere in the world of the most famous movie star in the world. Only Cassius Clay, Chairman Mao and the Beatles could then rival Elizabeth Taylor’s universal fame. And – surely unprecedented on any occasion – she never uttered a word.

At lunchtime on the day of the performance for which we had booked, Tony and I sloped along to the Randolph for an appetiser. Just as we got to the entrance, a limo drew up and out stepped the Burtons, breezy, chatty and self-absorbed. We duly followed them into the hotel. While her moment as Helen was truly heart-stopping, it is the memory of Dame Elizabeth's derrière, encased in figure-hugging canary yellow slacks, that will stay with me most vividly for the rest of my life.

Taylor in her Helen costume for the later movie of Dr Faustus

I have sent this second tale to the obits page of The Guardian but I suspect that they are not going to use it. A pity. I think it evokes rather neatly the particular combination of appeals that made Taylor so celebrated. She was a stunning presence, game for any challenge and absolutely conscious of her own worth. But withal, she had the woozy, sloppy, blowsy heart of a barmaid. No wonder so many gay men were her friends.

Andrea Teuber as Mephistopheles with Helen and Faustus

That’s why George Stevens' A Place in the Sun is her abiding memorial and such a remarkable movie, so un-Hollywood, more like a great French or Italian masterpiece. Loosely based on Dreiser’s huge novel, An American Tragedy, it pits Taylor against Shelley Winters for the hand of Montgomery Clift. That both Taylor and Winters seemed, throughout their respective careers, forever poised on the lip of metamorphosing into a Mediterranean fishwife (Winters was about to acquire an Italian husband) explains something of the movie’s tensions. Taylor, as usual (though not in Virginia Woolf or The Taming of the Shrew) is poised between the important dignity of tragedy and the absurd bawdy of comedy. So is Winters. Squeezed between the two is Clift, ever the wracked, self-conscious (and gay) poet. It’s mesmerizing.

Winters, Clift in A Place in the Sun