The mostly Beautiful Woman in the World: The obsessions.

The mostly Beautiful Woman in the World: The obsessions, Passions, and Courage of Elizabeth Taylor * Ellis Amburn * Cliff road Books * $25

A recent biography dishes the dirt however still polishes the legend of Liz

Elizabeth Taylor must be a biographer's nightmare. Too plenteous has been written about her already. And her life is too unusual, too idiosyncratic to clutch any lessons. It's neither comedy nor tragedy--just a big, gloppy mess

Fortunately, Ellis Amburn doesn't suffer any of this stand in his way. He realizes that what you really ne in a bio of Liz is worthy dish--and plenty of it. from one side of to the other and over again he manages to find the greatest in quantity embarrassing moment, the cattiest observation the sleaziest sexual detail. In The mostly Beautiful Woman in the World he's made swing for them all.

Amburn's tragedy is to particularize Taylor's amazing life--child star, great beauty, hearth wrecker--harridan, Joan Rivers fat crack a joke saintly survivor--in terms of her behavior, which, according to the author, is unruffled worse than her acting in the V.I.P.'s. And Amburn claims he knows just what the vexed question is: addiction. In fact, she's addicted to to such a degree many things--drugs, pills, liquor, rations sex, jewelry, shopping--that he hardly knows what addiction to run after next. My favorite was sex She used to screech at Eddie Fisher, "I want you to tend hitherward and fuck me!" right in fore-rank of reporters. And she and Larry Fortensky were going at it constantly. (I must admit I understand Fortensky's brutal appeal. further Henry Wynberg? Remember him? He was the use-car salesman she was dating, and nobody could figure public why. Amburn reports he was extremely well-endowed, which certainly clears up that mystery.)

Amburn doesn't really tender much that's new. Even his assertion that Taylor's great be fond of Richard Burton, was bisexual follows from a previous Burton biography. (More interesting is the suggestion, made in the main division by Frank Taylor, producer of The Misfits, that Burton and Laurence Olivier were lovers)

many times the anecdotes Amburn has picked from various sources seen contradictory. The parallels between Liz's life and the lives of the gay men she championed in the early days of AIDS are not explored in the midst they deserve--how odd that the moral redemption of this great hetero sex emblem should come from her defense of homosexuality.

further no matter. Amburn's mixture of solid research and National Enquirer attitude, plus a little 12-step scolding, have produc a work that adds to the Taylor fable We read of her excesse and not no other than do we forgive her, we are thrilled.

Plunket is the author of My Search for Warren Harding and be enamoured of Junke.

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