Elizabeth Taylor and Postwar England

Elizabeth Taylor and Postwar England

Nicolaus Mills: Elizabeth Taylor and Postwar England

If, like me, you were a kid at the time of Queen Elizabeth II?s 1953 coronation, then the Elizabeth Taylor movies that your parents allowed you to see while you were growing up were two 1940s chestnuts, Lassie Come Home and National Velvet. In both films Taylor shares the spotlight with a wonder animal?in one case, a collie determined to get back to the home he has known since a pup; in the other case, a race horse with the capacity to beat the odds and win the Grand National.

What distinguishes Taylor in these movies is the pluck she shows in doing the right thing by a dog and horse who need her help. As a child growing up in post-Second World War America, the pluck I saw in Elizabeth Taylor, who was just eleven and twelve when Lassie Come Home and National Velvet were made, was the same pluck I associated with England. In our Midwestern home, all Brits were brave and plucky. They had endured the Blitz and stood up to the Nazis when nobody else would.

In school we raised money through paper sales to help send food and clothes to children in England, and I always imagined that the children receiving the goods our school paid for were versions of the Elizabeth Taylor I saw in film. By contrast, the Laurence Olivier of Henry V, which I only saw long after the war ended, was too grand for me to identify with.

Years later in writing a book on the Marshall Plan and 1947, the year Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton called England?s ?Annus Horrendous,? I would realize that my feelings about the direness of life in postwar Great Britain were not exaggerated. After the sacrifices of the Second World War, it took enormous resolve to continue make sacrifices in peace time. As Britain?s Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin observed in an August 1947 speech in the House of Commons, ?It is frightfully difficult to get people to turn out a hard day?s work when they are fed below 1,000 calories.?

By the time I was old enough to go to movies on my own, the plucky Elizabeth Taylor of my childhood had become a Hollywood star. In 1958 in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in 1960 in Butterfield 8, and in 1963 in Cleopatra, she showed herself a true screen siren. She was not much of an actress?although she did get an Academy Award for her role as call girl Gloria Wandrous in Butterfield 8. But who cared? Just looking at her was reward enough.

I enjoyed watching Elizabeth Taylor during this period?indeed, preferred her to Marilyn Monroe?but only near the end of her life did I take the kind of interest in her that I had while growing up. What drew me to her the second time around was her willingness to speak out on behalf of the gay community and raise as much as $100 million to find a cure for AIDS. The pluck?the willingness to buck the odds?that was part of her early life in pictures had returned in real life. The older she became, the easier I found it to admire her again.

As for the seven men she married, that was for me a dismaying number, but by the end of Taylor?s life, it was not an obstacle to admiring her. Who but someone with pluck and true romantic readiness thinks that after so many failures she is going to make the right choice the next time?