Facing Up to Celebrity

Her legs are too short for the torso, the head too bulky for the figure in toto; but the face with those lilac eyes, is a prisoner’s dream, a secretary’s self-fantasy. . . .

When Truman Capote wrote those words about Elizabeth Taylor, he could have been talking about Carol Reed of Laguna Hills.

Like La Liz, Reed is a little stocky, a little disproportioned, but those eyes magnetize, even if they are lavender lenses over brown retinas.

And like Taylor, Reed has that little-goddess-lost quality that makes men want to rush over with a footstool, a goblet of champagne, a rose.

It’s a problem.

There’s the problem with men, the problem with loneliness, and the problem with landing a job that doesn’t capitalize on looking like Elizabeth Taylor.

“Men fall in love with the fantasy,” sighs the 48-year-old Reed, who is sitting in her tiny condo wearing a Liz get-up--plunging purple gown, glitzy pumps and a phony rock the size of Texas. For instance, “one guy told me he just couldn’t get past the mask. I said, ‘What are you talking about? I’m me!’ ”

She has come to accept the fact that men can’t handle her two identities. But it rankles. “I get mad at them,” she says, her heavily penciled eyebrows knitting a little. “It happens immediately. And I’m not exaggerating. Right away they ask, ‘Can I call you Liz ?’ ”

Sometimes men get so gaga, it makes her laugh, she says. “They slam into walls and bump into elevator doors when they see me coming.”

But most of the time, life is lonely. “I’m so tired of no one taking the time to know me as an individual. All they want is to be seen with me, have me on their arm. They don’t care about who I really am.”

It’s such a problem being Taylor’s look-alike that Reed is going to appear on the Sally Jessy Raphael television show today to talk about it.

The show’s executive producer, Burt Dubrow, says the episode is bound to be a hit “because at one time or another, everybody gets stopped and told they look like somebody else.”

Landing a job as Liz’s double hasn’t been a problem in the two years that Reed has been on the circuit. The demand is substantial, netting the divorced mother of two grown children up to $2,000 per month.

There are fashion shows where she wears the clingy white number Taylor sported in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” And there are photo shoots, theme-park appearances, corporate banquet engagements and television spots. There was even a Star magazine cover last year. Reed was featured lying in a glass coffin dubbed “Michael Jackson’s Eternal Youth Machine.” The headline: “How Liz Would Look in Michael’s Wacky Glass Box.”

But finding work at a department store’s cosmetics counter has been impossible.

“I have the qualifications because I worked in cosmetics for years,” Reed says. “Employers see I have the qualifications, but when they see me I don’t get hired.” Reed looks too much like a walking advertisement for Taylor’s Passion perfume line. Ironically, she hasn’t been able to land a job peddling Passion either. “I look too much like Elizabeth,” she says, woefully.

Meanwhile, she’ll keep on doing what she has come to believe she was meant to do--appear in public as Taylor’s “celebrity double,” as she likes to call it.

The Taylor thing started in Canton, Ohio.

As a young woman, Reed would get admiring, sidelong glances in the town where she grew up. People acknowledged her resemblance to Liz when she worked at J.C. Penney Co. But she didn’t create a sensation. “There, people don’t put an emphasis on that kind of thing the way they do here,” she says.

Things changed in 1979 when she came to California after her marriage began to unravel.

“I needed a rebirth, a new beginning,” she says of her decision to open a shop in Laguna Hills. Almost immediately she noticed that her customers would stand outside and stare.

Then, one day two years ago, Reed says, “a lady from Beverly Hills purchased some cosmetics--she was visiting a friend in Mission Viejo--and the two of them were carrying on so much about me looking like Elizabeth that I couldn’t write up their receipts.

“The woman from Beverly Hills asked if I belonged to a look-alike agency, and I told her I didn’t even know what that was . “ The woman sent Reed an agent’s name. Reed submitted photographs, was interviewed and was hired.

“Carol is absolutely the best Elizabeth Taylor I have,” says Randy Callahan, an agent with PSA--Producers and Artists Services in Los Angeles. “And I have seven of them in the Los Angeles area. Reed is a dead ringer. She just naturally looks like Taylor. The others put on wigs and add specific makeup to get the look. But Carol doesn’t have to.”

Booking celebrity look-alikes is a lucrative business, Callahan says.

“I have 130 registered look-alikes and access to 1,000 nationwide.” An Elizabeth Taylor double is always in demand, he says. There is also a big demand for Michael Jackson and Madonna look-alikes. “Right now, I happen to be getting a lot of calls for Gorbachev and the Pope.”

The best part of her job is the pay and the perks, Reed says. She has raked in $1,000 per day, $250 per hour. And there is limousine service for her whenever she appears, free vacation offers, frenzied autograph signings (she signs her name), restaurateurs inviting her to dine carte blanche, and free makeup and hairstyling sessions.

Almost as good as the freebies, though, is the chance to thrill the oglers, make them feel as if they’ve spent time with Taylor. There are the cocktail-party crowds whose heads collectively spin when they get a gander. And there are the sick children Reed has managed to cheer up. And the priest who was so shocked to see her he spilled his coffee all over the floor.

While she is busy traipsing around fulfilling fantasies, Reed’s own fantasy--meeting Elizabeth Taylor--has yet to be realized. But she’s working on it. She has sent letters to Taylor’s fan club, her lawyer, her publicist--all in the hope of precipitating a rendezvous with the woman she so resembles.

So far, no luck. “At least they’ve written me back and haven’t said anything negative,” she says, hopefully.

Meanwhile, Reed will keep on stepping into glamour gowns to thrill the masses. It’s enough for now.

And what if Elizabeth Taylor were to die? “Oh, I’ll become extremely popular then,” Reed replies evenly. She has thought this through.

“Elizabeth is a legend--like Elvis,” she says. “She’ll live forever. People will want to see her even more after she’s gone.”