Elizabeth Taylor's "Elizabeth Takes Off"

God, it's been so long.

I forgot how to do this with you.

Isn't it super fucking weird?

I don't like it.

I don't like it either, Michael.

I don't like taking it.

I'm so glad to be able to talk in a sustained way.

Talking.

I like it.

It's good, comma, actually.

Okay, I've had like a month to think about this fucking tagline, and all I could come up with is still bad.

Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that has been married nine times, but continues to hope.

Is that a thing that I know about her?

Am I thinking of someone else?

Eight times.

You were so close.

Eight times to seven dudes.

Oh, really?

One of them was a...

a repeat offender?

I didn't know that.

Yeah, Richard Burton.

It's the big one for her.

You know, it's the big one.

I am Michael Hobbs.

I am Aubrey Gordon.

If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenancephase.

You can also buy t-shirts, mugs, tote bags, all manner of things at TeePublic.

Both of those are linked for you in the show notes.

You can also subscribe on Apple Podcast.

You'll get the same audio content as you get on Patreon.

Same stuff.

And Michael.

And Aubrey.

Today, we're talking about a diet book written by none other than Elizabeth Taylor.

We're doing it.

We're doing all the Hollywood royalty.

We've done Gwyneth Paltrow.

We've done Elizabeth Taylor.

We've done Ed McMahon.

Michael, tell me what you know about Elizabeth Taylor.

It sounds like you know generally that she was married a lot.

What else do you know about Elizabeth Taylor?

Literally, an actress who was married a lot.

Great.

We've reached the limits of my knowledge.

I should also say before we sort of dig in all the way that this episode includes some really gnarly abuse stuff and some extra gnarly anti-fatness in it.

So like really, really take care.

It's an extra gnarly one.

It's worth noting that Elizabeth Taylor is like an incredibly incredibly complicated person.

She received incredible scrutiny for her appearance in the press from her loved ones across the board.

And she was also repeatedly referred to as the most beautiful woman in the world.

So, in other words, a famous woman.

She was famous and had the audacity not to be a man.

This is what I wanted and a living nightmare.

She's also a white person who played Cleopatra in one of the most famous and foundational cases of whitewashing African history, right?

Like off the charts.

She's a Democrat, a lifelong Democrat who married a Republican elected official and started hosting fundraisers for Republicans on the eve of Reaganism.

She was disabled.

She had scoliosis and was scapegoated in the press constantly for these sort of costly production shutdowns.

Okay.

Some of which are the result of her being sort of of a frivolous rich lady and being like, I wanted to go to Greece this weekend or whatever.

Yeah.

And some of which are like, I'm in the hospital for complications from my disability or I'm really sick.

And that all got read through the lens of like, she's wasting everybody's time.

Right.

This is the beginning of like the difficult woman industrial complex.

There is a lot of difficult woman sort of foundational material showing up here for sure.

Right.

But it's also worth noting that she was well ahead of most other folks, an outspoken advocate for people with HIV and AIDS in the 1980s.

Oh, interesting.

When the CDC and the Reagan administration were still sort of studiously ignoring the AIDS epidemic, and she established her own foundation to reduce stigma around HIV and AIDS.

This is back when it was controversial to be like, wow, this lady's sticking up for people who are dying.

Yeah, dude.

What a weird thing for someone to do.

Courageous, radical, dangerous question, Mark.

Yeah.

should we dig in on some like a little touch of 101 elizabeth taylor bio stuff i like that you've uh you've made me feel weird about this person already we gotta know what the weird tension is because the tension michael i don't want to spoil it except i'm on a spoiler the tension is only going to get tenser and weirder oh good okay so elizabeth taylor was born in february 1932 to american parents in london

her father owned and operated an art gallery, and her mother had acted on Broadway when she was younger and really felt like she sort of missed an opportunity for herself to continue her career path in acting.

So we've got a Nepo baby on our hands.

We've got Nepo baby.

Part of the current discourse.

Elizabeth Taylor moved with her family straight to California at age seven.

And her mother immediately started preparing her for what she saw as sort of Elizabeth's inevitable child stardom.

She was just like, oh, wow, I have this kid.

She is unbelievably, strikingly beautiful, even as a child.

I'm going to make the most of it.

So Elizabeth was expected to be immaculately dressed all the time

in case they ran into any power players when they were out and about in LA.

Oh, God.

But also because, and her mom was very explicit with her about this, that when she was a star, this would be expected of her.

You have to look impeccable all the time.

Holy shit.

So this was like preordained?

Yes, age seven is when these conversations are happening.

She and her mom spent hours every day working on her look, her manners, her posing.

God.

In grade school, her mom talked about Elizabeth having a job and her job was to become a star.

Oh my god, this is like bumming me out so much.

Oh, Michael, it's gonna get bleaker before it gets better.

I just consider fame to be like a form of abuse.

It's awful.

It's Prepping somebody for this.

Like, you're going to be scrutinized for your looks your whole life.

It's just like, oh.

You and I talk about being uncomfortable with our level of whatever.

I have never been an Elizabeth Taylor.

I will never be an Elizabeth Taylor.

This is like all we talk about, Aubrey.

We get on this book we record and we're like,

here's what I'm feeling weird about this week.

Here's everything I'm saying no to because it makes me uncomfortable.

Yeah, totally weird.

Yeah.

So her mother spoke about Elizabeth's quote-unquote responsibility to the family as a breadwinner before she turned 10.

Oh my God.

She is very young and is being sort of piled on with all of these adult responsibilities.

She's taught specific responses to how to receive a compliment.

She's supposed to curtsy, look down, and demurely thank the person while she's not making eye contact with them.

Ooh,

a lot to unpack there.

How much time do you have?

How long is the episode going to be?

Not only that, but her mother expected her to practice her facial expressions for that process and responses to compliments in front of a mirror.

Oh my gosh.

So Elizabeth did that every day.

Was she even acting at this point?

Like, what were people complimenting her on?

Or was this just prep?

I think this was mostly prep.

And also, there is, look, in a lot of Elizabeth Taylor biographies, there are a bunch bunch of deeply fucking uncomfortable descriptions where they're like, She was a strikingly beautiful eight-year-old, and you're like, Nope, no, no, no, no, no.

Yeah,

this is maybe not the time to mention this, but can I can I look up a photo of her

as a child?

Sure, go for it.

Elizabeth Taylor child?

Oh, you know what?

The earliest one you can definitely find is age 12.

She was in national velvet.

That's her first name.

Velvet.

Oh, she just looks like a nice girl.

She's got a dog in one of the photos, like a little tiny, like, Wizard of Oz dog.

It is a really cute dog.

She looks so much older than 12.

Yeah.

So this is also sort of part of her story a little bit.

In 1944, at age 12, is when she starred in National Velvet, which was sort of the film that kick-started her career, it was a huge hit, and it earned her a seven-year contract with MGM, which was one of the most powerful studios at the time.

Oh, and this is part of the studio system where it's like you just have to do what they tell you to do, basically.

Yeah, you sign on, and then your career is in their hands, period, right?

She, at age 12, starts earning a weekly salary of $750.

In today's dollars, that's $12,700-ish.

A week?

A week.

So she's she's earning $660,000 a year, just about.

Wow.

And this is the point at which she becomes the family breadwinner, sort of officially.

That's a lot of bread.

That's a lot of bread.

And she is a middle schooler.

Yeah, Jesus Christ.

So she never really has a childhood to speak of.

And by the time she turns 14,

her mother starts dressing her in much tighter and much more revealing clothes.

Oh.

And starts setting up photo shoots with a brief to the photographer to shoot this 14-year-old seductively and in a bathing suit.

Oh, so it's like as soon as she has like boobs and hips, they're like already being like weaponized, basically.

As soon as puberty hits, she is being portrayed by her mother

as like a teenage seductress.

It is then unsurprising that her first marriage is at 18.

As we mentioned, she was married eight times to seven different different dudes.

As I sort of read about these relationships, many of them were profoundly and like explicitly abusive.

God.

Some of those husbands were physically abusive.

Most were verbally abusive.

Almost all of them picked at her body.

Oh, Richard Burton's nickname for her was Tubby.

Fuck off.

Another one of her husbands, there's this sort of anecdote in the book that she talks about where another one of her husbands thought it would be funny to introduce her to his friends for the first time under a different name.

And one of the friends says to her face, oh my gosh, you look like a heavier Elizabeth Taylor.

Jesus Christ.

And then her husband starts laughing and says, I told you you were getting fat and smacks her ass.

Bad news all the way down.

And on top of all that, she's like a working actor, right?

So agents and casting directors and everybody ever is just like openly giving her notes on her body and her face and how she should look different and all that kind of stuff.

Right.

I wanted to talk a little bit about her marriage to her first husband, who is Conrad Hilton Jr., the heir to the Hilton fortune.

Oh, he's like a Hilton Hilton.

This was sort of seen as a mutually beneficial relationship at the time for sort of social climbing purposes.

Elizabeth Taylor was a young, promising actor who didn't really have a foot in the door with high society.

The Hilton family at this point is frustrated with being seen as sort of quote-unquote new money, and they think a Hollywood marriage will help them be seen as more established.

Big problems.

We're rich, but people think we're the wrong kind of rich.

Yeah, totally.

What a shame.

What you must have been through.

At the time that they get married, Elizabeth's mom is aware that Nikki Hilton was very big into drinking and gambling.

And it was much more important to her that the Hiltons had sort of the wealth and cachet that she was after.

I love that this is the time in Hollywood where it was like, yeah, the fact that he's like a huge piece of shit is like, eh, is that really that big of a deal?

But she gained two pounds over the course of the last year.

Like the moral standards applied to men and women are just completely upside down.

So over time,

and not even over that much time, like in a matter of months, Nikki Hilton's like extremely dark side sort of starts to come out in their relationship.

He becomes increasingly just furious that he is being

overshadowed by his young wife.

Oh, God.

That fury starts to manifest more and more as like extraordinarily brutal physical abuse.

I'm not going to tell the details of this one, but at one point she becomes pregnant and he becomes so abusive that he causes a miscarriage for her.

Oh, fuck.

And she leaves immediately.

She calls her mom and is like, I'm out of there.

I can't do it.

And her mom tells her that she should have tried harder to stay together.

Jesus Christ.

It's grotesque.

As soon as they break up, Nikki Hilton starts going to the press and talking like horrific shit about her.

Oh, of course.

This piece of shit move where you're like trying to preempt any of the rumors and you're like, she was difficult and crazy.

She's going to say stuff like, I used to hit her.

It's not even that, Mike.

Horrible.

At one point, she's photographed at different points with different men,

including like she has a number of like good friends throughout her life who are like gay men, who are sort of famously closeted gay men, men, right?

Oh, Rock Hudson.

That's like the only other thing I know about her.

Rock Hudson is a good friend of hers.

Montgomery Clift is a good friend of hers.

Like there are a number of these, right?

So she's like photographed with men from time to time.

And Nikki Hilton goes to the press and says, quote, every man should have the chance to sleep with Elizabeth Taylor.

And at this rate, every man will.

Oh, he says that publicly?

He says it to, he calls a reporter to tell a reporter this.

And then that reporter is like, good point, and prints it.

He's like, look, I have the most horrifying zinger you've ever heard.

Let me tell you the most fucked up shit anyone has ever said about their ex-wife.

Please put this in the newspaper.

The other relationship that seems worth naming here, if we're doing like a highlights reel, is the one man that she married twice, Richard Burton,

whom she met while she was filming Antony and Cleopatra.

It made big headlines in part because both of them were married to other people at the time and they were filming a movie about a scandalous affair.

So they were like the OG, Brad, and Angelina.

This is their Mr.

and Mrs.

Smith.

Yes, absolutely.

I remember when that happened, I was like, why is everybody speculating?

These people are clearly just friends.

Michael Hobbes on the right side of history.

I know.

I really was not clued into this.

I was like, it's so mean.

Everybody should stop talking about these two extremely attractive people spending time together.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor have a famously, incredibly chaotic relationship.

He repeatedly told her, quote, you're much too fat, love, but you do have a pretty little face.

That's like a neg.

He's like negging her.

He's Mystery the Pickup Artist.

He's got a top hat.

The criticism about her appearance is not just coming from her husbands and her relationships.

It also shows up in the press.

a lot and much earlier in her career than I would have anticipated.

One critic famously described Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra as, quote, overweight, overpaid, and undertalented.

That's the cultural script about Elizabeth Taylor at this point is like, she's unbelievably beautiful and also, what a piece of shit.

I'm looking at photos of this on Google now and like, she has like an hourglass figure.

She's like extremely conventionally attractive.

Right.

Her eyeshadow is deranged, but I don't think that

that's her.

The makeup is bananas.

The hair, trying to give a white lady black hair is

an adventure all its own.

I have other comments.

So many.

So many.

We're going to talk about her marriage to U.S.

Senator John Warner.

They got married in 1976.

She was 45.

She is getting more and more and more scrutiny for her body because she is back in the public eye in a new way.

And she's in her mid-40s.

And she looks like a woman in her mid-40s, right?

She's like put on a little bit of weight.

She looks a little bit older.

After her marriage to the senator, she checks herself into Betty Ford for a dependency on pain pills, which is where she meets her final husband, Larry Fortensky.

Later in her life is actually where the bulk of her wealth comes from.

That's when she starts endorsing products, including first a perfume called Passion,

and then White Diamonds.

White diamonds.

She was just this lady on TV

talking about perfumes.

That's like when I was a kid, that's like all I knew of her.

Same here.

Yeah.

Okay, are you ready to watch White Diamonds?

Wait, really?

I sent you the link, dude.

Yes, yes, yes.

Oh, the editing, it's like MTV cribs.

It's like porno music.

These have always brought me luck.

The intriguing fragrance from Elizabeth Taylor.

These have always brought me luck.

Oh my god, I just got...

What's like the good version of a heart attack?

I just got something that is like so much nostalgia.

Isn't it wild?

I have seen this ad like 400 times and have not thought about it since.

It sort of like activated the same part of my brain as like the Vienetta commercials.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Where they're all getting Vienetta.

Yes.

I am like watching this ad, I am homesick with like the chicken pox in like elementary school and I'm watching TV at like 11 a.m.

Yeah.

Where they have the weirdest shows and the weirdest ads and like this is just always on.

That is my entry point like sort of chronologically in my life to Elizabeth Taylor stuff, right?

Yeah.

Is seeing her as this like sort of coded as glamorous lady in 80s terms, which means a wild look.

And also, as a young person, you never see like quote-unquote glamorous people who are older than like 23.

Certainly not in the 80s.

You're like, what is this woman in like a normal age being on television?

Yeah.

And during this sort of cash grab era, during this extremely profitable era for Elizabeth Taylor is when she writes her diet book, Elizabeth Takes Off.

We've circled back to the title of the show.

This is where we would put our first ad break if we were like an intro

and sell some mattresses.

So I just sent you the cover of Elizabeth Takes Off and I would love it if you would describe it.

Ooh.

This photo is amazing.

Tell me what you are seeing.

Okay, this is like a super glamour shot.

It looks like a marketing image for actual, for the place glamour shots, for the service of glamour shots.

it's the like target photo studio like poster that they have outside yes

and yeah it says elizabeth takes off on weight gain weight loss self-image and self-esteem by elizabeth taylor and the whole thing is just like super like old money glamour lady she has like pearl earrings the size of like golf balls and then her makeup she's like airbrushed but like in the pre-Photoshop era so she just looks like sort of blurry and like washed out she really does she looks um gorgeous in an extremely 80s way those giant pearl earrings are surrounded by a huge gold braid yeah yeah yeah that big like clip-on earring kind of look from the 80s she's wearing this like bubblegum pink kind of lipstick she's got this like sweetheart neckline dress that is white.

She looks like resplendent.

And then the background looks like a driver's license background.

It's just like flat blue in a way that it's really funny to me.

So she looks like amazing on this.

And it's totally like, buy this book from a movie star.

So this is like end of career.

This is like her looking back on her career and her legacy.

This is not a mid-career book.

This is a retrospective.

Right.

The author here is listed as Elizabeth Taylor, but this is a time when her top priorities are like making money and doing her advocacy work.

So it is ghostwritten.

It was written by a writer named Jane Scoville.

According to The Washington Post, this is as reported by The Washington Post.

Scovel also ghostwrote for Ginger Rogers, Tim Conway, and Kitty Dukakis, among others.

Dude, when I was a kid and dreaming about becoming a writer, I dreamed of two things.

One, becoming a ghostwriter for celebrity memoirs, and two, writing novelizations of movies.

Those were like my peak pinnacle goals as a writer.

When I was a kid and I dreamed of being a writer, I dreamed of being a speechwriter.

Oh, yeah.

And then I realized that's like mostly not a job.

And when it is, you have to be like

on a presidential campaign or some like absolutely hellacious scenario that I absolutely don't ever want to be part of.

And I was like, I used to do like speechwriting.

background stuff for like various UN people.

And there would be times when like they would be having a debate where they were like fighting each other about something and I would be writing both of their speeches doing like what my colleague doesn't understand.

Like they're both feeding me lines.

It's like your version of like a stuffed animal tea party.

Just like acting out like the Lincoln Douglas debates.

So when Elizabeth Taylor releases this book, Her press, like the quotes that she gives to the press around this book are so fucking rough.

It is a real indication of how much shit people talked about her body throughout her career and also

how effectively that trained her at talking about other people's bodies in those same terms too.

Right.

So in the Washington Post piece, they say, quote, she doesn't buy the theory that as people age, a bit more weight fills out their faces attractively.

I think that's bunk.

I think that's a cop-out is what she says about about that.

And she

talks throughout this book almost constantly about cop-outs.

She imagines these whole narratives that people who are fatter than her have about their bodies.

And she summarily dismisses all of them as excuses or cop-outs.

It's like a portrait of how bias gets reproduced, right?

Because it's not only adopted by the majority, it's also adopted by minorities themselves.

So you have her like internalizing all this like anti-fat shit.

Like the terrible treatment that she's gotten, she's like, yes, you're correct about that.

Like

you were right to criticize me for my looks.

And now she's like criticizing other people.

It's really bleak.

I think it's also like to your point, in addition to sort of showing how bias operates, it also shows how abuse operates, which is that we like experience abuse and take it on.

And that causes a number of like really hard and horrific outcomes in our lives.

And one of those hard and horrific outcomes is that it trains us to be abusive toward other people.

Ultimately, it's like, well, if I hadn't been so fat, they wouldn't have said those horrible things to me.

Right, absolutely.

That's just another way of defending that treatment, which is totally indefensible.

That is essentially the thesis of this book.

Oh, God.

Jesus Christ.

The hard thing is, like, I hear what you're saying about like

part of how bias operates is that people on the downside of power take it in too.

Elizabeth Taylor is not at any point in this book, someone that I would consider to be a fat person.

In all of the photos that I have seen of her, in all of the everything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She is not on the downside of power, but she is in an industry where her body and sort of scrutiny of her body is going to happen at a fever pitch, and that will make her feel like she is on the downside of power.

Right.

Even though she remains this like famously beautiful, famously wealthy, famously everything woman, right?

It is kind of fascinating, right?

Because by Hollywood standards, I guess, she like is fat, but by literally any other standard, she isn't.

It's really fucking weird.

And it mirrors, I've had at this point, a number of conversations with people who are also, who are like actors now,

who will sort of toe a really careful line in their conversations with me and be like, I understand that I'm not a fat person.

And I also understand that I'm in an industry where I'm being treated like a fat person.

It is kind of fascinating to me that like you've become a person who celebrities come to when they feel weird about their bodies.

Not that many, but, like,

there have been a handful.

And I'm like, this is a part of this work that I did not anticipate.

I'm a famous person with feelings.

Let me let me call Aubrey.

Yeah, totally.

Aubrey going to tell me.

Totally.

So the book is divided into sections, and we're just going to take it section by section.

Section one is titled, How It Happened, A Personal View.

The it happened here is how she gained weight this entire section that is roughly a hundred pages of this book is just a little bit of her life story mostly focused on her adult life

through the lens of here's how i allowed it to happen that at one point i was fatter than at another point this is what we were talking about last episode about how like fat people are called upon to explain the origin stories of their bodies yeah explain it right write a book of like you're calling me fat and I'm going to tell you how I got this way.

Yeah, totally.

And you're right.

Yeah.

You're right, but you shouldn't have said it is sort of the vibe, right?

The narrative that she offers of her own body feels really to me like an encapsulation of like very 80s sort of thinking about bodies and diets, which is that for her, her weight gain is both a reflection of her own low self-worth and a cause of that low self-worth.

Okay.

She says at one point, point, quote, in my late 40s, weight gain became a primary factor in my feelings of self-worth.

And when I finally had the courage to do something about those added pounds, I was forced to acknowledge that loss of pride played a large role in the reasons I put on weight in the first place.

So she's sort of describing this like symbiotic relationship that again, feels not dissimilar from like what you would have heard at Weight Watchers meetings at this time.

So it's like basically everyone was terrible to me.

And I started to internalize that criticism where it became part of my self-worth.

And the solution to that is I should have lost weight.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

She also talks at this point about how this wasn't just happening in the press.

It was also happening in her personal relationships.

And she brings this up in sort of a sunny, chirpy way as part of the narrative.

And I don't find it sunny or chirpy.

I'm sending you a quote about her friends.

She says, recently some of my friends have told me how flabbergasted they were by the amount of food I could pack away.

The awful part is I wasn't even aware of some of my gastronomic feats.

It makes me wonder if it might motivate fatties to diet if someone filmed every meal and snack they ate in a day.

The subject could then watch the movie and see firsthand just how much she was consuming.

Ah, so what we're learning here is that Brian Wonsank plagiarized this by trying to install cameras in cafeterias cafeterias and showing you how fat you'd become.

I forgot about that particular wrinkle in the Brian Wonsink legacy.

Thank you for that reminder.

Too bad this was published before TED Talks.

She could have given one with that little microphone.

But, like, again, this is like one of sort of countless quotes in this book where you're like, oh my god, your friends are horrific.

Why are your friends telling you as soon as you become thin again that they're like, man, you were really packing it in?

It was gross, right?

Is essentially

what this quote is.

Does she use the term fatties throughout the book?

A lot.

She uses it a lot.

She also sort of talks about how this behavior shows up in the entertainment industry.

There are a couple of longer quotes in this episode.

This is one of them, but I think it's worth.

I'm like, I don't actually want to paraphrase it because the way she writes it is so.

It would sound like I was exaggerating.

Okay.

So I just sent it to you.

She says, not so long ago, I was at a benefit with Joan Rivers, who had been foremost among the entertainers who made my weight the butt of their jokes.

When I was ready to leave, she took my hand, saying, Elizabeth, you look wonderful.

I just want you to think about why I said those things when you were heavy.

Okay, I'll certainly do that, I answered, and tried to get away.

She held onto my hand and repeated, no, no, I mean it.

I want you to really think about why I did it.

I didn't have to think about it.

I knew what she was implying.

She was taking credit for my losing weight.

But I don't think you can justify cruelty and turn it around into a benediction.

Jokes were made about my weight because they got laughs, period.

Joan Rivers, in this particular anecdote, popping out of a fucking trash can to be like, you're welcome for making fun of you because now you're thin.

Yeah, like making fun of you to a bunch of other people, like making fun of you publicly to like humiliate you.

Yeah.

You're welcome, bestie.

Yeah, it's terrible.

There is also a moment at the time that she is at her fattest.

She gets a chicken bone stuck in her throat and has to be rushed to the hospital to have it surgically removed.

Wow.

This story starts to make the rounds and it makes an appearance on Saturday Night Live.

Of course.

And we're going to watch a little clip of that.

Oh, fucking hell.

You're going to make me watch Fucking Saturday Night Live?

Can I tell you, this episode, musical guest, The Grateful Dead.

What?

That's how 70s it is.

They're playing Casey Jones.

I didn't even know that was like a thing.

I didn't know they were ever famous enough to be on SNL.

Oh, for sure.

For sure, for sure.

Buck Henry was the fucking host?

It's wild.

This cheap politician, John Warner's wife, is none other than perhaps the greatest actress that's ever lived and whose face has set the standard for screen beauty for so many years.

Of course, I'm talking about Elizabeth Taylor.

Oh, God.

Liz, welcome to Celebrity Corner.

It's John Lelushi.

Thanks, Bill.

It's so nice to be here.

Liz, how does it feel to be Mrs.

Almost?

Too soon to tell Senator-elect Warner, anyway.

It's very exciting, Bill, but I'm looking forward to becoming a Washington hostess.

Liz, tell me this.

We heard that you promised if John won the election that you would go on a diet from your present weight of 167 pounds down to your Butterfield 8 weight of 120.

Is that true?

That's right.

I'm going to start on a strict diet, nothing but chicken.

That sounds great, Liz, but to me, I don't care how much you weigh, just so your cheeks don't puff up over those beautiful violet eyes that I've been in love with since National Velvet.

Oh.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Twelve.

Can we be done now?

We're done.

Oh.

That was excruciating.

Right.

It's not, there's not even really a joke.

No, there's not a joke.

That's what my notes say.

She's being played by a man.

Yep.

And he's fat.

Yep.

Like the joke is that she chokes on a chicken bone, I guess, but like that's not even like, that's not even a joke.

It's just a thing that happened.

Yeah.

You're just acting out like a factual thing, but you're like laughing at it.

It's not funny.

There's not a setup.

There's not a punchline.

There's nothing that is recognizable as a joke structure.

That's really bad.

There's not...

even enough plot to recognize it as any kind of sketch structure, right?

It's also fucked up because you know she must have known when she was choking on the chicken bone that like this would be a joke.

I'm sure she did.

Right.

There's like this whole circular thing of like anything humiliating that happens to you.

You're like, oh, great.

This is going to be a story.

And like, because there's been decades of speculation about my weight and like I now have a sort of injury that is like in some way adjacent to food.

Yeah.

Like, oh, good.

Months of discourse about this like really awful thing that's happening to me.

So in the book, she writes, quote, naturally, I've been asked if I saw the Saturday Night Live television skit that featured a coal-eyed John Belushi dressed in drag doing a takeoff on the accident.

Yes, I saw it, and I laughed.

Oh.

He was very funny.

Oh.

How ironic and sad that that gifted young man satirized my excesses and then died of his own.

Oh my God.

She's just like reproducing the worst parts of that fucking sketch.

She's writing this after being in treatment for her own addictions and then is like, I'm a dunk on this guy for doing the same thing.

Like, it's just like, wow, you really had the upper hand there, and you just like happily threw it away.

You keep showing me media, and then I feel bad for her, and then you read me quotes from the book, and then I stop feeling bad for her.

It's a real roller coaster.

The whole book is a real roller coaster.

Like, these terrible things happened, but it also made you like kind of a terrible person.

Like, I don't know what to do with that.

She is all over the place, and like I say, like a really complicated character heading in a bunch of different directions.

She in this section often describes sort of her own body in the same breath that she describes her theory of fat people's failings.

Okay.

So I'm going to send you a little quote.

It says, for a long time, I closed my eyes and saw what I wanted to see.

I fooled myself by looking at my body with what I call obese eyes.

I truly think that some fat people perceive themselves with the same distorted image as anorexics.

No matter how skeletal the latter see themselves as fat, I admit I could never totally deceive myself.

Oh, so wait, she's saying like, I thought I was thin, but I was actually fat and that's bad?

Is that what she's saying?

Right.

And then she's comparing that to her own definition of anorexia, which I think she's just talking about body dysmorphia, which is different than anorexia.

Right.

But like, yeah, she's essentially just like i thought i was thin even though i was so fat that's how fat people think about themselves and i'm like no that was you yeah so you're literally not fat that's why you didn't think of yourself as fat but also like this whole god this whole thing is so dark totally how dare i felt okay about my body and also like she is then seamlessly segueing into a proposal of like a worldview that's just like right here's what I did, and that's the real problem with fat people.

And you're like, wait a minute, wait a minute, you made like seven leaps.

Go back.

She's generalizing to other fat people from her own experience, which is that of like a movie star.

Yes, totally.

It's like, kind of by definition, there's only like 20 of those in the country at this time.

So like most people are not being brutally scrutinized by the media because most people are not movie stars.

Just like you, I am no longer haunted by my images in national tables.

Oh, it's like this.

The last time I was on the the cover of a magazine.

Elizabeth.

Yeah.

So that's section one is essentially like she is both sort of like defending her body and telling all of these absolute horror stories about how she's been treated.

And then again, in the same breath, is turning it around and going, and here's how you should think about fat people.

God, we're only a quarter of the way through this book.

Jesus Christ, this is abysmal.

It's so rapid.

This is like so bleak, dude.

This goes into the same category as many episodes that you and I have tried where I was like, we'll just do a diet book and it'll be Elizabeth Taylor's diet book and it'll be fun and frivolous and fizzy and fluffy and it's not.

Remember how I was going to do the Minnesota starvation experiment and then I was like, Aubrey, I can't.

Yeah.

This is worse.

This is so bad.

Okay.

We're now heading into section two, which is called Gearing Up for Taking Off.

Some favorite tips.

Okay, now we're into weight loss stuff.

Okay, now this feels like it could be slightly happier.

Have you listened to our show?

Okay, fair.

This is where she talks less about herself and more about other people and more about like the mechanics of like how it's done, right?

Okay.

One of her diet tips is that you should make bribes.

What?

Incentivizing weight loss.

This is a thing that comes up for a lot of dieters.

I will say, as a kid, I heard from a number of adults that I should like get myself clothes that I really wanted that were like a size too small and that would be like my motivation.

Oh, or like you put a photo of yourself on the fridge being thinner, and then you like, won't eat the yogurt or whatever.

Well, that is also one of her tips.

She actually suggests at one point, she's like, I did that for me.

I put my photo of my fattest self up on the fridge.

And then she's like, for you, I'd suggest using a photo of yourself and not me.

And I'm like, Elizabeth, who was going to use a photo of you?

That would be so weird to have a photo of Elizabeth Taylor on your fridge.

So she talks about the importance of quote-unquote making bribes.

And then she tells this

horrifically gremlin anecdote that she frames up as like, I did a good deed.

Let me tell you about a young woman I met a couple years ago.

She was one of the most appealing girls I've ever known, with fair haired, blue-eyed, good looks.

She was bright, vibrant, and intelligent.

She was also obese.

She told me she was getting married in six months and was trying to lose weight.

Although I normally don't go around poking my nose into other people's business, there are, as you know by now, occasions where I can't keep from interfering.

On impulse, I handed this girl a mimeographed copy of my diet and said, follow this, and if you lose 50 pounds, I'll buy your wedding dress.

You should have seen the expression on her face.

She took the diet home with her, and for a few weeks, she was afraid to begin.

She had been trying to slim down since she was a child.

Her parents had taken her to nutritionists and clinics and special summer camps until she just couldn't bear to even hear the word diet.

She might never have started mine had her fiancé not stepped in.

He told her at least to give it a try.

She did.

Later, she told me it was the first time in her life she had actually enjoyed eating while on a weight reduction plan.

By the time her wedding day rolled around, she'd lost 45 pounds.

I still bought the dress.

I can't say that the promise of the dress alone did the trick, but rewards do help.

Oh, so it's somebody who's like tried losing weight her whole life and like nothing has worked, but here's my dumb celebrity plan.

And also like, thank God her husband told her to lose weight before the wedding.

Right.

And also, trash.

Elizabeth Taylor carrying around copies of her diet for

just such a moment.

On the off chance a fat person says anything in my presence.

Be like, have you tried this piece of paper?

Right.

And then it's like, I took care of a major wedding expense for this person by essentially like coercing them into dieting.

The other version of this story is like, I either gave somebody an eating disorder or made their existing eating disorder worse.

You're welcome.

The best thing about being rich is lording money over people and making them do things for you, like a train seal.

It's wild to me that this is presented as like totally unbidden good feedback where she was like, she really liked the diet.

We're like, what did you think she would say to you?

Yeah.

Wedding dresses are expensive.

Are you ready for another diet tip?

No,

but okay.

Okay, well, you're right not to be ready because the next diet tip is use threats and shame.

Oh, God, of course, of course.

She talks about how you also need to use negative incentives, like a husband who said this to his wife, hold on.

I always play the terrible husband on this show.

Darling, I know I can't keep nagging you about your eating habits, so I've decided this will be my last word.

The day your weight goes higher than your IQ,

I'm leaving.

Dude,

the average IQ, by definition, is 100.

Yep.

So unless your wife is like hella super genius, this is a fucked up thing to say, I mean, it's a fucked up thing to say regardless.

It's a fucked up thing to say regardless.

You're comparing two famously fraught garbage measures, IQ and weight.

Right.

I want to do a eugenics twice in this conversation.

I want a wife that's thinner than she is smart.

What?

Usually that trade-off is not this explicit.

She also talks about sort of another dieting tip of hers being that you should write down everything you eat, but that you shouldn't be weird about it socially.

So you should be like obsessive about writing it down.

But quote, when you're dieting, be discreet.

You don't have to report to your acquaintances as though they were the commanding officers of your great war against fat.

Even your most supportive friends can become bored.

Look, I don't disagree, right?

Like talking about diets is profoundly boring most of the time with people who are on diets.

And also,

she's fully like, be neurotic, but don't let other people know that you're being totally neurotic.

It's like the French Women Don't Get Fat thing where it's like, have a secret eating disorder.

Yeah.

Like, don't tell people how much you are fixating on your physical appearance and your diet.

She talks about this whole thing of being like, don't let on.

And like, you know, your friends might get bored.

And then she immediately turns around and writes this.

Eventually, I learned to take an

Pass up the wrong foods as if they were stepping stones to hell and let the no thank yous fall like rain.

Ugh, so like ostentatiously be like, no, I'm not having a brownie.

Yes.

This could have been a quote that we could have used in our our last episode where we talked about sort of like i don't like gaining weight but i don't treat fat people differently this feels like a great example of like be discreet about your diet but also make sure everyone else hurts because you're doing so well another hallmark of these like self-help books is just totally contradictory advice just like back to back her next diet tip is don't count calories reasonable stuff which sounds queen like a really good idea but then she explains her reasons why i sent you a quote oh no i hate it when I see little dots in the chat.

I'm really glad that I've given you some Pavlovian conditioning to be afraid of when I text or DM you.

Like, here comes something fucked up.

She says, it's too easy to become fixated on calories, too tempting to say to yourself, I can have 20 potato chips for 230 calories or 6 ounces of chicken for 310 calories.

And then go for the potato chips.

That's no way to lose weight.

If you must know the number of calories you'll be getting on my diet, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand a day.

God, she's playing the hits, huh?

Don't count calories because you're not going to go low enough.

Because you're going to be hungry and grumpy all day.

On the maintenance plan, oh, she was so close.

The calories vary between 1,200 and 1,500 daily.

So starvation diet and then the quote-unquote maintenance phase in which you

regain all the weight.

You're actually going to get fatter if you count your calories.

Right, because you're going to go for the potato chips rather than the chicken.

Gross.

This felt to me like a really good example of why sort of anti-diet work is necessary but not sufficient, right?

If your analysis stops at diets are bad, you can end up in weird places like this.

Right.

Diets are bad because you actually don't diet well enough when you're on them.

Right, right, right.

It feels to me related to sort of like how folks are currently invoking the phrase diet culture to describe kind of everything.

Diet culture is a term that allows thin folks to recenter themselves in conversations that are often about anti-fatness or maybe about classism or maybe about racism or maybe about like a bunch of different things.

But we call it diet culture so that it provides a softer entry point for folks.

But also, when you call it diet culture, it doesn't require any further analysis of folks.

So, again, in this case, right, you've got Elizabeth Taylor ostensibly saying a good thing, like, don't count calories, and then being like, the reason is this.

It's because you won't be like, right, essentially restrictive enough with yourself, right?

I'm glad that this book allowed you to say something on the show that you've said to me off the show numerous times.

Yeah, there we go.

The show doing what it's supposed to do.

So there are more diet tips than that.

Those are some of the sort of high points, but it's worth noting that this entire section is powered by this explicit disdain and distrust for fat people.

She is constantly sort of batting off these sort of imagined excuses, quote unquote, that her readers might have for not losing weight.

She has a whole section where she sort of repeatedly brings up like, unless you're one of those rare people with a bona fide medical condition, please refrain from using your thyroid as an excuse.

Yeah, there's always a little section where it's like, oh, well, there are some people that have an excuse, but then they never like lean into that.

Well, maybe it's just none of my fucking business how big other people are.

Right.

It's essentially paying lip service to

some people might have a reason that I approve of for being fat.

And I'm still going to assume when I'm out and about that every single fat person I see doesn't have an excuse.

Right.

Despite knowing nothing about them.

Absolutely.

But like, yeah, I'm just going to treat everybody like shit anyway, just in case.

I wanted to close out this section with another like absolute gremlin anecdote.

Oh, God.

Some fat people will only pick at their food in public.

Whenever I went out with a certain friend of mine, she would never touch the bread or rolls, would order sensible entrees, and would never ask for any dessert except fruit.

Meanwhile, she weighed over 200 pounds.

For a long time, I bought the story that her metabolism was so screwed up she couldn't lose weight no matter what.

Maybe not, but one night after a dinner party at her house, I saw what she really ate.

She had cleared the dishes into the kitchen and after she'd been absent for a while, I decided to go and see if I could help with anything.

I found her standing over the sink scraping plates.

But before she threw away the scraps, she was shoving the choice pieces into her mouth.

I felt so sorry for her.

All the time she was blaming her metabolism, she had to live with this monumental lust.

I ducked away before she saw me, but I have never forgotten the sight of her putting garbage into her mouth.

This is like a super fucked up thing to put in your book, because that person must know who they're talking about.

That's the unwritten part of this story is like, she never saw me, and I never said anything about it to her.

I just wrote about it in my giant book that I did a full court press about.

Put it in my best-selling book.

The function of this anecdote is if you mistrust fat people and their narratives of their own bodies, you're right.

There's probably something else going on.

Fat people are liars is the moral of this story.

And like anyone who says like, I have a slow metabolism, they're really just like binge eating every night.

Also, like, it is very strange to me that she reconfigures like the meal they just ate as garbage.

You were just eating that off of a plate, and then when the plate gets taken into the kitchen, you decide that this is now garbage.

What?

It's also so fucked up to act as if thin people don't have occasional binge-eating behavior, right?

Like sometimes I will have like a box of Oreos in the house and I'll eat the whole fucking box.

Right.

And it sort of is a reverse-engineered justification for the way that Elizabeth Taylor describes herself treating fat people throughout this book.

Right.

Is she's like, aha, I was right all along, right?

Genuinely, maybe this is a one-off.

Genuinely, maybe this is something most people do when they're clearing plates is go, oh, there's still like little piece of steak that looks pretty good on there.

Yoink chunk.

Yeah.

The inclusion of this passage is only to be like.

Gotcha to all fat people

at the expense of her friend of years and years by her own account.

Also, not to like tell you how it feels to read this as a fat person, but isn't this also also the thing that fat people are afraid of that like their thin friends are fucking surveilling them all the time?

I don't think it's something that I'm afraid of.

I think it's something that I'm aware of that it's happening all the time.

That is like literally happening.

It's really interesting to me.

There is this sort of whole line of rhetoric around

anti-fatness that usually comes from thin people that's like, no one's paying as much attention as you are.

And like you're probably just imagining their judgment.

And I'm like, you need to walk through this world as a fat person because it's not imagined when people just go, I've been noticing that you're eating this garbage.

And maybe if you ate this other garbage that I think is good, you would be a thin person like me.

People just like say it outright to you.

This is why it feels like, especially in sort of like fat activist-y spaces, like fat people are oftentimes pretty slow to trust thin people.

Yeah.

Which like makes sense to me.

Right.

Like, so this is also like, an instruction manual to anti-fatness sort of throughout this book.

She's telling these little parables about, like, here's how you should treat fat people.

Here's what's really going on with them.

And they are based on just like aggressively terrible behavior from her that is also learned.

It didn't come from nowhere.

It comes from her own trauma.

And then she is unleashing that trauma on the rest of the world, whatever fold.

I'd love to read a memoir from her fat friend being like, my, my messy ass friendship with Elizabeth Taylor.

Like, I tried to be nice to this lady, but like, it was rough.

She made it hard sometimes.

Day 27 of knowing Elizabeth Taylor, she's told me for the 4,000th time while she stares at me, at least I'm not that fat.

Here's how I feel when I hang out with Liz.

So section three is called the Taylor-Made Diet, which is a cute title.

Okay.

T-A-Y-L-O-R, like her last name, Taylor-Made.

Fair enough, Liz.

We're giving this to you.

The diet itself is frankly very underwhelming.

Yeah.

It is straightforwardly a low-fat, low-calorie diet.

She advocates for like aerobic exercise, quote-unquote, which she's just like, try stretching.

And I'm like, is that aerobic?

But okay.

Yeah.

And her recipes.

Oh, no.

Oh, my God.

Now we come to our favorite thing to do on the show.

Talk shit on recipes in diet books.

She has a dessert where she's like, you're going to love this dessert.

And I'm going to send it to you.

It's the most 80s shit.

It's going to have cocaine and shoulder pads.

That would honestly be more interesting than what it is.

It says chocolate fantasy, four servings, One envelope dietetic chocolate pudding mix, half cup evaporated skim milk, evaporated skim milk, one and one quarter cup black coffee, one egg yolk.

Combine pudding mix, milk, and coffee in a saucepan and cook, stirring over moderate heat until thickened.

Remove from heat, add egg yolk, stirring constantly.

Return to heat, pour into individual bowls.

What?

So it's like a pudding.

It's jello pudding plus black coffee and an egg yolk.

And she's like, check out my amazing diet recipes.

The only thing that's making this a quote-unquote diet recipe is the...

quote-unquote dietetic chocolate pudding mix, which just means like 80s language for low fat.

Oh, yeah, this doesn't, this is like the opposite of decadent.

Totally.

It's like air and wishes in the way that so much like 80s diet food is, right?

Where you're just like, oh, it's like some kind of powder.

Right.

There's like a memory of the flavor of chocolate.

Right, right, right.

So then I'm going to send you also one of her suggested meal plans for the day.

Okay, diet day 10.

Breakfast, passion fruit, and then one slice of dry toast.

Dry toast.

Yep.

Lunch, cold crab salad.

Affordable for the everyman.

Snack crudites.

Oh, she's eating with Dr.

Oz.

Uh-huh.

With dip.

Just dip.

Yep.

Dinner is grilled lamb chops with rayita sauce, pureed summer squash, and brown rice.

Anytime during the day, a half a cup of skim milk.

That's your like snack.

That's your treat.

Ooh, man, that really hit the spot.

Sorry, breakfast is passion fruit, lunch is crab, and dinner is lamb chops.

Yeah, yeah.

She has like multiple recipes for lobster in this book.

Yes.

And she keeps doing the like, if I can do it, anyone can do it.

And you're like, Elizabeth, this is like cartoon rich people food.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And also, someone else is making this for her too.

I mean, she's not making her own grilled lamb chops, I presume.

She's not putting tweezers with gold leaf on top of her lamb chops.

There was a piece in the cut where someone talked about trying the Elizabeth Taylor diet.

Okay.

At one point, this person tries out one of the recipes in the diet and says, quote, for dinner this evening, I am supposed to cook a piece of steak, then sandwich it in peanut butter and bread.

Oh, what?

Despite Despite being so hungry, I could eat my hand.

I cannot handle this concoction.

I have three bites, then throw the rest out.

But at least I've also declared bankruptcy from buying all the lobster.

I bought a $40 ribeye and then slathered it with jif.

But then she goes on to say some really good things in the conclusion.

One of her pieces of advice is she says that you should give of yourself, where she's just like, I just was sitting around one day going, you know, people really need to ease up on people with HIV and AIDS and people are just being awful to them and somebody ought to do something.

And then she was like, and then I realized I have the time and resources to do something.

Oh, yeah.

I'm a famous lady.

I'm a famous lady with a lot of money.

What if I spent some of that money on doing the thing that seems like a problem to me?

Yeah.

But also at the same time, in the back of my head, I'm like, Bray, but you were also raising funds for Republicans during the era where they were shutting the shit down.

I don't know, man.

Yeah.

And then in the conclusion, she has one quote that I found much more useful than almost the entire rest of the book.

She says, in overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, I learned that my oversized body wasn't the biggest barrier to my self-esteem.

To regain a healthy sense of self-worth, I first had to break down old fears and doubts and anxieties.

Only then was I able to reshape my image successfully.

It's funny how these diet books include like some fairly prudent and nice advice, but you just have to ignore the like 97% of the book that just totally negates them.

Right.

Where she's like, it turns out that in order to fix my self-esteem, I had to work on myself and fix my self-esteem, not lose weight.

And I'm like, Elizabeth, why didn't you write that book?

And she also could have pushed some of this anger outward too and been like, you know what?

It's really fucked up for the National Inquirer to put another photo of me in the magazine and be like, how dare this lady be fat?

Fuck you.

I look great.

Right.

There's no point in this book where she's like, you know what a good answer would be here is the same kind of approach that I'm taking to my work around like HIV and AIDS, which is like, we need to reduce stigma.

We need to like lay off of people who we're like all too eager to pile on to, right?

Like there are places where she's taking that note in her life and there are places where she is not.

And her politics around like, fatness and body size and weight loss are a place where she is not taking that note.

I don't know if she would be able to, given the upbringing that she had, but I do think she could like let this opportunity to just like write a book about how craven fat people are.

She could just like let that opportunity pass her by.

What you're saying is why couldn't Liz be Lizzo?

I think that's a fair question.