Liz Biz : Through Sick and Thin, the World Watches Taylor

Her movies now are few and far between, but when she is ill, the world still stands at attention. Liz Taylor’s latest bout with pneumonia has drawn the kind of intense scrutiny normally accorded presidential polyps. It has inspired a raft of rumors and handed up a field day for the giddy tabloids. And today, yet again, everyone is talking about La Liz.

But then Liz Taylor, 58, has always lived a life of extremes. If she has enjoyed the most brilliant career and the glare of fame, she has also survived seven rocky marriages to six men, the frailest health and the most frightening bouts with addiction to booze, drugs and food. And through it all, there have been armies of press recording each divorce, each hospital stay.

It was partly to still the gossips that Taylor’s doctors called a press conference Wednesday at St. John’s Hospital and Medical Center in Santa Monica. No AIDS, they said. No cancer. For the tabloid press had been humming with rumors that Liz Taylor had AIDS virtually since she was checked into Daniel Freeman Hospital in Marina del Rey April 9 with a high fever and sinus infection.

And when Taylor’s publicists first issued flat denials, the press went on to speculate about the speculation. Did the AIDS rumors start because of Taylor’s ballyhooed friendship with publishing titan Malcolm Forbes, whose recent death touched off reports about his alleged homosexuality? Or was it because of her reputation as a major fund-raiser for the disease? Or because one of her doctors, Michael Roth, was a renowned AIDS specialist--even though Roth was supervising her treatment for drug and alcohol addiction as early as 1983?

“Liz is a national treasure and when she entered the hospital, I thought it was as important as the President of the U.S. going in and we treated it as such. Liz is as close to American royalty as you can have, and our readers . . . in the heartland . . . they’re living and dying with her,” said Barry Levine, Hollywood bureau chief of the Star, which featured a cover photograph of Liz, hooked up to an intravenous tube and oxygen mask, being transferred from the Marina del Rey hospital to St. John’s. Levine declined comment on a rumor circulating among reporters that the tabloid had paid $50,000 for the pictures.

Some press coverage has bent over backwards to tug at the bounds of credibility; the National Enquirer has Liz communing with the ghosts of Forbes and one-time husband Richard Burton.

In all, Liz’s current illness has drawn the most attention yet, according to her publicist, Chen Sam. More than 100 reporters, photographers and cameramen converged on St. John’s, many of whom had flown in from around the country for the 15-minute press conference. Behind a chorus line of video cameras--representing the major networks, the local stations, CNN and the tabloid shows--reporters peppered the doctors with pointed and sometimes testy questions about Taylor’s treatment and drug use.

“I heard some guys talking behind me, saying, ‘I can’t believe they’re hounding her like this.’ I felt like saying, ‘Are you offended reading about her?’ ” sniffed Val Richardson, a reporter from the Washington Times who’d flown in that morning.

At any rate, the news was good. Taylor was off a respirator and breathing with the help of an oxygen mask. She had apparently rebounded from a bad weekend, when doctors feared she might die. Although Taylor’s physicians are still trying to identify the virus, they are treating her for pneumonia with antibiotics. And she remains in the intensive-care unit, but she continues to improve and is expected to move to a regular room this weekend, Sam said Thursday.

Meanwhile, her own security guards keep watch over her private room in intensive care. She has received her four children--Christopher and Michael Wilding, Maria Burton-Carson and Liza Todd-Tivey--friends Roddy McDowall and Carole Bayer Sager and Liz’s younger, ex-trucker boyfriend, Larry Lee Fortensky, 38.

“I saw her yesterday and I was really pleased,” Sager said Wednesday. “I thought her color was good. She couldn’t speak because she had the respirator. Her eyes were clear and she definitely understood what I said and motioned, made me know she understood.”

If Liz’s public is fascinated by her frailties, perhaps reassured somehow by the knowledge that even the gods are vulnerable, their interest is also piqued by the public face she puts on her relentless brushes with illness and addiction. The Taylor wit shone through even Wednesday’s press conference, when doctors passed on the actress’ desire to “come out and wave at you, but she wasn’t in her balcony attire.” “I think she’s extraordinarily brave,” Sager said. “She just has an enormous reservoir of inner strength that she calls on when she has to. All of us were encouraged and optimistic.”

She has needed it. Taylor’s respiratory ailments alone have been a recurring problem. Bronchitis and laryngitis brought down the curtain on numerous performances of “The Little Foxes,” which Taylor starred in on Broadway in 1981, and Noel Coward’s “Private Lives,” which toured the country in 1983. The cancellations prompted the play’s co-producer, Zev Bufman, to declare, “Bronchitis has plagued Elizabeth all her life.”

In fact, Taylor has been plagued by health woes ever since her 1945 film debut in “National Velvet”; her fall from a horse triggered a lifetime of back trouble. And when Taylor retired from films to marry the Republican senator from Virginia, John Warner, her well-being continued to make headlines; she choked on a chicken bone and wrenched her back after slipping on a carpet at a reception honoring former President Gerald R. Ford. Over the years she has endured about 20 major operations on her back, appendix, eyes and teeth; when the Asian flu threatened Taylor’s life, doctors made a hole in her throat so she could breathe.

But it has been her wrestling matches with weight and addiction that have consistently lured the world’s curiosity and, at times, admiration. Taylor’s unhappy stint as a politician’s wife prompted her weight to balloon to 180 pounds. When she emerged a born-again beauty in 1985 after shedding 60 pounds, and wrote a beauty book to boot, she was applauded by many--including comedian Joan Rivers, who had made fat-Liz jokes the mainstay of her act.

“For somebody like me who is obsessive, it’s amazing I was never a gambler,” she said at the time. “I could have become anorexic. I got to a size 4 and said, ‘Why not a size 2?’ Then I slapped myself and went from 118 to 122, which is the right weight for me.”

But her battles against addiction have played havoc with her fight against the bulge. And her persistent back problems have nurtured her dependence on pills. Her addictions have even been linked to a criminal investigation by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office; last week, prosecutors announced that no charges would be filed against Taylor’s doctors, who had been accused of over-prescribing dependence-forming drugs.

Taylor, the first celebrity known to enter the Betty Ford clinic in Rancho Mirage, made a public example of her willingness to take on her addictions in two heavily publicized stays there.

When Taylor first checked in, in 1983, she admitted to 35 years of addiction to pain killers and sleeping pills. She kept a diary that poignantly described that stay as “probably the first time since I was 9 that nobody’s wanted to exploit me. Now the bad news. I feel like hell. I’m going through withdrawal. My heart feels big and pounding. I can feel the blood rush through my body. I can almost see it, running like red water over the boulders in my pain-filled neck and shoulders, then through my ears and into my pounding head. My eyelids flutter. Oh God, I am so, so tired.”

But the Betty Ford clinic encouraged Taylor only to fight the good fights that had brought her there, rather than take on all addictions--to drugs and food--at once. And the late ‘80s had found Liz, hobbled by back pain, returning to those two sources of comfort. Taylor regained much of the weight, even though she took her drug problems in hand once again in a second stay at the Betty Ford clinic in 1988.

But through her ordeals, she has remained the same charmingly vain Liz who once declared her hobbies to be clothes and jewels. She never budged from her room at Betty Ford without her trademark darkened eyebrows. And even when she was ambushed recently by a Star photographer, Liz couldn’t help being, well, Liz.

Says the Star’s Levine: “No matter how sick she was, when someone down on the ground told her she was being photographed, she put on sunglasses, even though she had an IV in her arm, as if to cover herself up. Typical Liz Taylor. It was sad and sweet, at the same time.”