Dear Elizabeth Taylor

Dear Elizabeth Taylor,

"These have always brought me luck," you said in your White Diamonds 30-second spot, as you removed your famously gaudy earrings and handed them over to some ambiguous men in an ambiguous black and white Moroccan watering hole. When I first saw this commercial, I didn't know anything about you, this voluptuous woman in a white dress with the iconic mole, other than that you seemed very different from most of the women I ran across on a daily basis. I hadn't yet seen Cleopatra or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I didn't know the story of your relationship with Richard Burton, or the seven other people you were married to. I didn't know of your friendship with Michael Jackson, or your championing of AIDS research. I didn't realize you were the same person I'd seen when my parents and I watched National Velvet. I didn't understand that your fragrance was the least famous thing about you.

But I always remembered that commercial, especially as it was revived now and again around the holidays. I remember its foreignness, its glamor serving as a taste of a lifestyle incomprehensible to an 8 year-old from Massachusetts who, as a treat, got to eat dinner in front of the TV once a week.

My relationship with you never really changed, per se, even after I saw your movies, watched you on 20/20, or saw on TMZ that you'd dropped in again at the Abbey in West Hollywood in a wheelchair. But, I would wager, it was the allure of that White Diamonds commercial that summoned so many, and perhaps, in part, myself, to pursue something your aura conjured up-- something exciting, accomplished; summoned to this strange, phantasmagoric city of angels, the narrative and soul of which your life and career have formed an indelible part.

"That stuff smells like bug spray," I remember my mother saying once, the commercial airing as she passed through the room. "Don't dump on Elizabeth Taylor!" was my inexplicable, knee-jerk response, "whoever she is." I smelled the perfume, years later, and it sort of does. But that wasn't important to me as I sat, munching on my fish sticks at the coffee table in the dim light of the den, watching whatever my nerdy, effete 8 year-old self saw fit to program my evening with. It is this childhood frame of reference, one among many for aspirants across the world, that will continue to bring us luck.



Best Regards,
Dear Crabby