Elizabeth frowned at this, gazing stonily at me. “I don’t remember saying that,” she said definitively, looking remarkably to me as though she actually did remember saying it. It also crossed my mildly ill-mannered mind that my father’s former wife maybe wasn’t all that accustomed to being spoken to about the possible inappropriateness of her behavior. Not that what she’d said had been that big of a deal. I just thought, you know, maybe it was time to revisit the nature of how Elizabeth viewed and/or discussed my mother in our ultimately not all that private of a life.
Elizabeth rose, her head held high, and imperiously disappeared back into the house, only to reappear a short time later. She made her way back over to the pool, where I’d returned to watch Billie and/or avoid Elizabeth.
“I’m going to push you in the pool,” she informed me. Not in a threatening way, but more as if catching me up on the afternoon’s upcoming events. I studied her. Was this a threat or a… threat?
“Do it,” I challenged her, causing her to tilt her head to one side, suspiciously, her eyes narrowing.
“No, you’ll just pull me in after you.” I shook my head, removing my non-waterproof watch and setting it on a nearby glass table. We studied one another in the hot sun.
“No, I won’t,” I assured her, in part because I’d recalled hearing that she’d had her hip replaced a while back, and I wasn’t anxious to rust any potential titanium additions she might now be sporting. So, with my watch now safely resting on the poolside table, I did my best to maintain my friendly—albeit respectfully challenging—expression. We continued holding each other’s gaze for the briefest amount of time, until, finally, she pushed me gleefully into her pool, causing the warm water to spray high into the air, wetting any guests who might have had the anecdotal luck to be in range. Then, with both my knees bent, I pushed my bare feet off the bottom of the pool, catapulting me back up through the water’s once-smooth surface. And, catching the fastball of my breath, I drew whatever amount of the available sunlight into my lungs and, gasping, broke free and was finally able to begin the friendship with my former stepmother. “Liz!”
I started laughing. I felt like an Olympic runner who breaks that white tape with her chest with everyone cheering wildly from the sidelines.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth stood there, clapping her bejeweled hands. Somehow this entire semi-event-ish moment made perfect sense, you know? For whatever totally weird and insane reason, maybe everything in our tragically well-documented relationship had been leading up to this moment, like we’d sort of had this date from the beginning. Elizabeth was still standing at the edge of her pool watching me while I splashed around, no doubt incredibly relieved to have fulfilled our destiny. Our team—Elizabeth’s and mine—had won whatever race or game it turned out we were playing! It was all over except for the sobbing. Elizabeth, who was now kneeling down, extended her arm to help me out of the pool and back into a world where we could now have a relationship that, though born out of an ultimate tabloid phenomenon, was so lifelike it almost had a genuine quality of love.
“Get her one of my robes!” E.T. called out to Tim. “Either the violet or the yellow, whichever. Oh, and a towel!” Tim nodded as he returned to the house to do her bidding while I, having hauled my wet black ass out of the pool, now stood bent over beside Elizabeth, laughing and gasping for air. When I stood up, we slung our arms over each other’s shoulders, laughing riotously—she largely dry, and me soaked to the skin. By then, people had begun to gather around us, cheering. Around us! Elizabeth Taylor and me. Us!
Soon after, a towel was magically produced and enclosed me in its white wings, while from stage left, a Coca-Cola materialized. Eventually Tim returned with Elizabeth’s yellow muu-muu, which made me look like a tent with a head. Soon after, the ever-present hairdresser José stood poised to one side, ready in case I needed a quick blow out.
Ever since then, she loved me and I her. Simple as that. This was how we neutralized anything that might have otherwise been toxic to our situation.
A few months after that, she invited me and my mom to lunch, and to round out the table, two-blonds-and-two-brunettes-wise, I brought Meg Ryan. So it was me, my mom, Meg and Elizabeth, and Elizabeth was giving Meg some romantic advice because Meg was with Russell Crowe at the time, and for whatever reason—maybe the hard-drinking-movie-star-with-a-British-Empire-accent aspect of him—Elizabeth equated Russell with Richard Burton. So we all went over to Elizabeth’s and it was—well, it was great. By then she and my mom had returned to that long-ago time in their lives when they got along really well—only my mother was now using words of the four-letter variety. We got together fairly frequently after that. Then presenting her with awards became a regular thing with us. For one of them I even thanked her for getting Eddie out of our house. Big joke, right?
But it was when we filmed These Old Broads—a TV movie I wrote—that she finally actually did apologize, for real, to my mom. I mean, she’d sort of apologized before, but now my mother told me that she’d said, “I hope if there’s any outstanding… you know… whatever… I…”
And as I watched I saw my mom following Elizabeth out of the trailer that day with tears in her eyes. It was a really nice gesture on Elizabeth’s part. I mean, you know, considering. And when Elizabeth discovered that my mother had become kind of a potty mouth, things became much easier between them. They could really be motherfucking friends again.
A few years before Elizabeth died, we were on the phone, and I asked her “Did you love my father?”
After the smallest of pauses she said, “We kept Mike Todd alive.”
The last time I spoke to Elizabeth, she called to get my father’s number because she was going to try to make amends with him or something. Apparently you get to a certain age and, if you’re still alive, you want to contact people from your past. I realized recently that Elizabeth and Eddie were married for the same amount of time as my mom and Eddie. And that whole clusterfuck of choices completely ruined his career. Just slaughtered it. Well, that and the fact that he shot speed for thirteen years—another distinction for me. I mean, who else in my class could say, “Dad, show everyone your tracks!”
The thing is, my parents weren’t really people in the traditional sense. I think this was partly because they were stars before their peopleness had a chance to form itself. The studio essentially designed my mom—they taught her to talk, had her ears surgically pinned back, shaved her eyebrows (which never grew back) and changed her name. Made her into this celebrity someone, new and improved. A STAR!