“I’ve been through it all, baby. I’m Mother Courage.”
“What’s the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? Just stayin’ on it, I guess.”
In 2007, my blood boiled as “Entertainment Tonight” gushed ghoulishly over the possibility that 75-year-old Elizabeth Taylor had a “new boyfriend” — referring to the gay black gentleman who escorted the actress to an AIDS benefit. The interviewer had to kneel to get right in the face of the wheelchair-bound movie star, resplendent in jewels of her own design and a sequined gown just slipping off her shoulder. “Are you ready to be a bride for the ninth time? Would you accept a proposal of marriage?,” baited the blond ditz.
“Marriage?!” shrieked Taylor, her face a mask of mock horror. And then the diva threw back her head and howled like a banshee.
Viewers, of course, were being invited to enjoy the spectacle — and sound — of a blowsy old dame, veteran of so many soap-opera scandals, acting dotty. What could be funnier than pretending the sedentary septuagenarian might be up for connubial hanky-panky?
There was a time when the star of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) would have cut the belittling ditz off at the knees. Her character, Maggie the Cat, would have narrowed her great violet eyes, thinned those lush lips and, wasp-voiced, nailed her victim as a “no-neck monster.” Still, I loved that unabashed banshee howl.