San Francisco Sentinel
April 26, 1990
Street Talk
Liz Taylor Week
By Doris Fish
Sentinel Arts Writer
It’s not really, or at least not officially Elizabeth Taylor Week, except at my boyfriend’s house where we spent Earth Day watching Liz’s sixties environmental epic, “The Sandpiper”. What a great movie! My boyfriend thinks she’s badly miscast, but I think she was wonderfully miscast as Laura Reynolds, the back-to-nature artist. (Even better miscasting was her role as a six-foot, leggy, skinny showgirl in “The Only Game in Town”.)
Anyhow, Liz is this unwed mother of a ten-year-old boy, and she tries to keep him out of school until the cops drag him off to this Christian school where Richard Burton is not only the headmaster and some kind of priest, but married to Eva-Marie Saint, who wears more beige than I ever thought possible. Irene Sharaf gets credit for the costumes, but I suspect that Liz sneaked in a few horrors from her own closet when Irene wasn’t looking — and even when she looks hideous, she still looks like Liz Taylor and better than anything else in the movie, including the California coast.
She lives in this fabulous shack made out of recycled timber or driftwood and decorated with cow skulls, which she must have found on the beach and restaurant-quality dried flower arrangements. She has no electricity and apparently does her make-up by the light of a hurricane lamp. She also walks everywhere in spike heels and a lavender cashmere sweater. Her reason for living this way is, “All my life men have stared at me. They always want to rub themselves up against me,” which is movie talk for “And these are my breasts,” (which for some reason reminds me of Jacqui, my friend in Paris, who would answer the inevitable question the big brutes would always pose with a guileless, yet sophisticated, “Yes, I suck. Why do you ask?”
However mindless the story is, one can never tire of that face or the voice or keep from thinking about rubbing up against that well-upholstered body, in a cozy, sisterly sort of way, of course. And you know the little sandpiper bird of the title, whose life she saves, is really in love with her and not just trained to fly into her hair while she’s kissing Richard Burton. I’m sure all animals love Liz. She has a strong connection with all creation; there’s a feeling that despite her years as a famous Movie Goddess, she is still some kind of rare and exquisite wild animal, reminding us that we are really just another animal species, albeit “the only animal that kills for fun.”
That quote from “The Sandpiper” reminds me what week this really is: Laboratory Animals Liberation Week. How unfortunate that we have to have such an event. How ironic that knowledge and progress require the torture of voiceless innocents.
When I first heard about testing cosmetics on animals, I pictured queens in lab coats putting cute little dogs in drag, painting their toenails and gluing false lashes on their big brown eyes and somehow getting the lipstick to stay put. (There is real doggie nail polish — my friend Ambi Sextrous turned me on to it. She apparently gets her beauty secrets from the dog grooming industry. Doggie nail polish is great stuff. I used it a lot in my early years, when I spent a few nights crawling in and out of gutters — and I never got a chipped nail!)
Now I know there’s nothing cute about the lives of laboratory animals, they lead lives of unmitigated horror. Researchers may learn from the torture, just as Nazi doctors gained knowledge from the medical experiments they conducted on the Jews. Let us not sit back and permit another Holocaust to continue unabated in our midst. Let’s not have progress at this price.
One day I hope to live as Liz does in “The Sandpiper” (though I’ll have a solar-powered make-up mirror), just me and my breasts on a lovely beach somewhere with a few arty boyfriends dropping in, but in the meantime, I’ll be joining hundreds of others this Sunday, April 29 at 10 a.m. at Mt. Zion Hospital at Divisidero & Sutter to march and rally for our brothers and sisters.
