R.I.P. Elizabeth Taylor

Liz Taylor is dead.

She was an icon, a legend, a true queen/diva of celebrities, a multi-married beauty as famous for being herself, if not more so, than anything good she accomplished.

She was also a talented actress, hardworking businessperson, and caring philanthropist.

But I will let all the other biographers and obituary writers go into those details. I suppose I was “always” aware of Liz, she being the celebrity she was. I’ll bet nary a week went by in which her name was not in the paper, somewhere, several times, even when a movie she was in was not playing somewhere.

My first awareness of her as a “current” personality (as opposed to simply someone who was in a lot of old movies) was when the Weekly World News ran a photo of her walking down the street titled “Look Who’s Looking Good!” It seems she had recovered from a period of corpulence and dissolution and was now fit and happy. This must have been a rare example of WWN actually reporting a true story, for shortly thereafter, she starred in the TV movie “Malice in Wonderland.”

This film was heralded as a sort of “comeback” for here. My mom watched it, and commented with astonishment at how good she looked.

The glow of that moment stuck with me, and from then on, whenever her name came up, I always thought of that WWN article.

It was that article that I thought of just yesterday when I stumbled across an article in the National Enquirer in which it was reported that her latest ex-husband was having financial troubles, and how it was unlikely that Liz would be able to help, being that she was 79 and in the hospital. Of course they ran an unflattering picture of a gaunt, tired-looking Liz with an oxygen tube in her nose. I wondered how she had been doing since she was reported “looking good.” Now I know.