The ultrafeminine, soft-spoken ingenue with "the whim of iron" could close down production and bring megamillionaires to their knees with a quiver of her full upper lip. The Taylors were tough, and the studio moguls who tried in vain to bend Elizabeth to their will learned early that she came from a long line of strong-willed people. "Not many people know (that) my great-grandparents were pioneers who crossed the country in a covered wagon," she says. Much has always been made of Taylor's British origins, but she prefers to dwell on the more rugged side of her ancestry. One of Taylor's male friends once compared her with Marilyn Monroe, whom he had also known, saying, "Monroe was a victim of the system. John Warner are alive to tell their tales, and one barely remembers that their lives were ever actually warmed by the glow of the legendary Taylor even for a brief shining moment. The editor who printed it is long dead himself, as are four of Taylor's husbands. In England in the late '50s just before her famous tracheotomy _ "the cut heard around the world," as one wit described it _ one London newspaper actually went so far as to proclaim her dead in a foot-high headline. "Elizabeth uses hospitals," her urbane second husband Michael Wilding once recalled, "the way other people use resorts." There were the illnesses _ more than 30 operations, plus so many hospitalizations, for everything from life-threatening pneumonias to hemorrhoids, that it's hard to keep track. There were two well-publicized suicide attempts: one in Munich, with Eddie Fisher another while filming the gargantuan Cleopatra (1963), when it looked as if Richard Burton would never leave his then-wife Sybil for her. Given her history, Taylor should have been dead years ago _ drowned in a sea of booze, weighted down by too much living, too many pills, near misses, lovers, husbands, brawls and nights without end. But I've paid for that luck with disasters." Sitting in her art- and antique-filled Bel Air mansion with her construction-worker husband Fortensky nearby, Taylor recently told Life magazine: "I've been lucky all my life. What is it about the trials, travails, traumas and triumphs of this woman that have kept us glued to her every move for more than four decades? Now seems as good a time as any to ask ourselves why the world is so fascinated by Taylor. If Taylor could bottle her survival skills she could sell them for a lot more than her perfumes, her weight-loss secrets or anything else marketing geniuses can come up with. Taylor is the sole survivor of an era when a female movie star was a creature from a different solar system _ a fantastical, beautiful creation of our dreams. Instead, scores of famous faces from far-flung corners of the world will fly to Southern California to sing happy 60th to La Taylor, the movie star to top all movie stars. The whole thing could have turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. There, on page 49, is what looks like one of the shoes on stilts that EA Overnell snuck on to that Quiver magazine page in 1914! Also, on the opposite page of the double spread entitled ‘High & dry’ about shoes offering protection from elements, is a caption showing that the idea of metal hoop platforms goes back at least to the 1820s in Nova Scotia.Taylor had hoped to rent the fabled Orient Express to take her pals on a luxurious train ride across Europe, but she discovered even she was not immune to customs and frontier regulations. The book, published by Bata Limited, is linked to the company’s shoe museum in Toronto, with its displays covering 4,500 years ‘ranging from Chinese bound-foot shoes and ancient Egyptian sandals to chestnut-crushing clogs and glamorous platforms’. … than Dr Patricia Thomas of Massey University in New Zealand sent me an email showing that these mini stilt shoes really did exist! She supplied a link from Google Books to All About Shoes: Footwear through the Ages. The magazine aimed itself at a middle-class audience and took a very religious line, though this softened over the years, particularly after it switched to a monthly format, and again after Cassell’s death in 1865. It was the brainchild of John Cassell, who was an Evangelicalist and proponent of the Temperance movement. The Quiver was founded as a weekly in 1861 and only closed in 1926. The illustration by EA Overnell (the wife or a relative of TJ Overnell?) looks straightforward enough, but take a look at the woman’s shoes – she is wearing tiny stilts!Ī good idea no doubt, but did such things ever exist? This illustration for the title page of a 1914 issue of Quiver magazine hails February days by citing an 1871 poem by William Morris, leader of the Arts and Crafts movement:įebruary days and now at last, might you have thought that winter’s woe was past! The William Morris poem is illustrated by EA Overnell Crop of the frontispiece from the February 1914 Quiver magazine.
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