Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood
"Close the gates!"
Elizabeth Taylor finally lands a replacement role in the movie Lassie Come Home with Roddy McDowall who will become her friend for life. McDowell says she is breathtakingly beautiful but completely unaware of it.
She gets small parts in Jane Eyre and The White Cliffs of Dover. But her mother really wants her to play Velvet Brown in National Velvet with Mikey Rooney. But the studio thinks she's too young for the role, so she eats her way to the part with big farm breakfasts every morning, growing three miraculous inches.
Elizabeth Taylor is a natural with a horse but during a scripted fall, she injures her spine.
After the film is completed, she asks for the horse and gets him. 'What Elizabeth wants Elizabeth gets," people say of her even as a young kid.
"What does it feel like to be in love with a horse?"
Everyone is enchanted with Elizabeth Taylor. She's a star at 13. Little girls around the world now desire horses. Her mother is on MGM's studio payroll where Elizabeth is under contract. Audiences respond to both her beauty and vulnerability. She develops a signature look with her arched eyebrows.
Martha's being a cyclops.
She begins to believe all life is an acting role. Friends don't last longer than the shoot of a movie. Everyone has ulterior motives. She's disinterested in school and the studio is constantly tinkering with her weight and face. But producers and directors fight to get her into their movies. And Howard Hughes is reportedly in love with her and offers to buy her a movie studio.
The studio thinks she should start dating so she goes out with a young football player and her mother and the studio orchestrate a fake engagement. This confuses the young football player greatly. It's Elizabeth Taylor's first melodrama and it's suggested she might view men as disposable players in a living movie.
She decides she likes animals better than people.
Richard Burton on The Stage
In school, Richard Jenkins has some success in the performing arts. His drama teacher Philip Burton understands Richard Jenkins has talent but no means to escape the Welch mines. So Philip Burton officially adopts him in order for Richard Jenkins to continue in school. Richard Jenkins changes his name to Richard Burton in honor of his "second father."
Philip Burton would be a mentor to Richard Burton for his entire life.
Richard Burton attends Exeter College on a six month scholarship and learns Shakespeare. He gets small parts on stage and in films.
He meets and marries Welch actress Sybil Williams.
They have a good marriage, even though Richard is unfaithful. They have two daughters.
His big break is the play The Lady's Not for Burning directed by John Gielgud.
He does a lot of plays by Christopher Fry and some Shakespeare: King Henry IV Part I, King Henry IV Part II, The Tempest.
His is finally recognized as a talent of note and begins his historic career with films like My Cousin Rachel with Olivia de Havilland, who will not sleep with him, and Look Back in Anger with Claire Bloom, who will.
He earns a reputation as a man who sleeps with his leading ladies.
Goddamn you!
Sybill knows he'll always return to her.
The Poem
We were mythologies of horse-star-mesa-mine,
what the movies say, what the moving say,
the incantations of ballerinas on small rocks
preaching to the horses. We were birds
with mirror and comb, nothing but gusto,
cowboys-Indians-dancers-jockeys.
We were the mines of myth, diamond promise
behind the veil, behind the blind,
around the bend. We were the bare feet
of the girl at the start of the trail.
How can we see that far?
Joao Gilberto Interlude
