RIP Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor died Wednesday at 79. But suppose she had died in 1960? She could have. You could look it up. She was suffering from pneumonia that year, after starting filming on "Cleopatra." It was serious enough for her to have been declared dead.

Those who remember hearing the news -- my mother and her friends among them -- swear that the whole world stopped at that moment. That's how dominant, how unavoidable Taylor had become. And she wasn't yet 30 years old.

By 1960, Taylor was as pervasive a presence in American culture as President Eisenhower, Mickey Mantle, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, who that same year -- though no one knew it at the time -- would make her last movie, "The Misfits," before her own death two years later.

Almost 50 years have passed since then, and they're still publishing cover stories about Monroe. If it hadn't been for the emergency tracheotomy that saved Taylor's life, the same would have been true for her.

Those articles would have chronicled in melancholic and rhapsodic tones how Taylor first came to prominence as the most beautiful child actress in motion-picture history. Watch her breakthrough role, at age 12, in 1944's "National Velvet," and maybe you'll understand why even such grown film critics as The Nation's James Agee fawned over her "with the peculiar sort of adoration I might have felt if we were both in the same grade of primary school."

Her rise from MGM ingénue to an actress of such caliber that she'd been nominated for the best actress Oscar in 1957 ("Raintree County"), 1958 ("Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"), and 1959 ("Suddenly, Last Summer") would have been framed in the context of great promise on the precipice of fulfillment.

Inevitably, those eulogies would have given as much space to her star-crossed, some might say "untidy," romantic life. She had four marriages up till 1960, the last to her "BUtterfield 8" co-star Eddie Fisher who, tabloid gossips contended, was "stolen" by the dark-haired widow of producer Mike Todd from a happy marriage to golden gal Debbie Reynolds. The mythologists would have had quite a time sifting for meaning in all that mess.

For the full story click here.