There are many reasons why Elizabeth Taylor was amazing and none of them are anything whatsoever to do with Michael Jackson. She was, in essence, the first rock star movie queen. She was more beautiful, more talented and more capricious than, well, anyone really. She also drank more, took more pills and slept with more unsuitable men. But whatever Taylor did, up to and including getting progressively older and more ragged, she did with incredible style. This, after all, is a woman who famously once ate a steak and kidney pie with one hand while wearing a 39-carat sapphire on the other.
In the summer of 1963, north-west London girl Liz – she was born in Hampstead to American parents – made a film about her home city for a coast-to-coast American TV broadcast. Called Elizabeth Taylor in London, the film was shot over five weeks and featured Liz wandering everywhere from the Albert Memorial to Limehouse docks wearing box-fresh Yves St Laurent, with amazing hair ("by Alexandre of Paris", no less) and ruby-rich lips a-quivering, reciting Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Queen Victoria, Elizabeth Browning, Pitt and Churchill.
A critic at the time noted how viewers "saw a lot more of Miss Taylor's architecture than London's", but, what architecture! Oh yes, and she got $500,000 – equivalent to $3.5m (£1.8m) today – for doing it, which is the largest salary ever for a TV performance.
Interestingly, the hour-long film has an utterly brilliant soundtrack, with a score written by a 29-year-old John Barry and arranged by the awesome Johnnie Spence. Emmy-nominated on its release, Elizabeth Taylor in London is a truly fantastic record that pitches Barry's innate jazz cool up against Spence's super-lush orchestrations. A piece such as The Fire of London sounds more like a dapper-suited, Bond-in-peril moment than some (tinder) dry attempt to recreate the music of the 17th century, while London Theme, 48 years on, still trips, swings and sways (with a neat nod to Greensleeves) in a way that makes you feel glad to live in England, and a little sad if you don't.
A few years ago, a copy of this tremendous record would have cost serious money. Now, thanks to the restorative powers of internet technology, it'll cost you either nothing on Spotify, or next to nothing (it was recently re-released by Él Records).
If you're wondering how to honour the passing of one of the true greats (if not the two of them), then Elizabeth Taylor in London may be a good place to start. I'm listening to it right now while eating a delicious steak and kidney pie.
