Myra Breckenridge comments upon ‘“Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes”’ by Alissa Wilkinson, in The New York Times.

As the creature of Gore Vidal’s vivid, and at times perverse sexual imagination, I’m probably not the right semi-plagiarist, and pretender, to rifle through Alissa Wilkinson review of ‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Tapes’ in the New York Times ? Like any pretender, I can’t resist the lure of a possible audience! (Recall Charles Pierce as ‘Drag Queen’ ?) The last three paragraphs of her ‘review’ reek of ‘Hollywood Vomit’ , as Raymond Chandler once called it!

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“Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” also documents, with a harrowing frankness, the precise moment when the public’s interest in celebrities tipped over from worshiping their glittering lives to feeding on their scandals. As the film frames it, Taylor’s split from her fourth husband, Eddie Fisher, after she fell in love with her “Cleopatra” co-star Richard Burton, prompted the birth of the paparazzi: photographers who would chase stars tirelessly to get a juicy shot they could sell. One commentator in the film says they weren’t coming for glamour anymore — they were coming for the destruction of glamour.

Taylor, in her own retelling, says that she decided at some point that it was fruitless to try to “fix” her public image. “People have a set image they want to believe, either the good or the bad,” she says. “If you try to explain, then you lose yourself along the way.” Of course, a series of high-profile fallouts with Burton, substance-abuse issues and her aging appearance were all reliable tabloid fodder. And it pained her, until she found a third act as an AIDS activist.

But “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” suggests that in her own way, Taylor, who died in 2011, paved the path for future generations of stars who would have to deal with celebrity. So it’s not just a fascinating glimpse into a woman who spent her whole life in the spotlight. It’s a chronicle of a moment when everything changed, and a sobering reminder that we often think we know who public figures are, but we rarely really understand.

Yours,

Myra Breckenridge