The Common Rituals of Elizabeth Taylor and Lady Gaga

Well, Elizabeth Taylor has died (I’m resisting the urge to add “finally”), and every major news source has now—finally—filed the obituary they’ve had in their drawers for at least a decade.  In a morbid, amusing twist, the New York Times noted that the original contributor to Taylor’s NYT obit, Mel Gussow, died in 2005.  Ironically, Taylor managed to outlive even those who might have sought to chronicle her passing.

The media still can’t get enough of how beautiful Taylor was.  Countless paparazzi shots and movie stills will circulate this week, posthumously cannibalizing Taylor’s gorgeous, fleshy vitality, idolizing her former youth with a few obligatory nods to her appearances in more recent years.  “Could anyone as lovely as Elizabeth Taylor also be talented?” the Times asked and answered (“yes”). The assumption implicit in such a question—that beautiful women are brainless, ambitious, sex climbers—is disturbing but hardly surprising.

And indeed, Taylor presided as icon over an era in which women still went to the salon to have their hair set once a week, changed their nail colors to match their outfits, and drove an unprecedented marketing surge of creams and potions money-back-guaranteed to preserve or even restore youthful beauty.  I’m reminded of my grandmother, born just over a decade before Taylor, who implored us to find a mobile nail service to replace her acrylics during her final two weeks of dying in hospice.  She loved Elizabeth Taylor.  Beauty—not just genetic good looks, but aggressively maintained put-together-ness—was a premium in our grandmothers’ generation to a degree the women of mine might never fully understand.  Or might we?

I saw Lady Gaga in concert for the first time this week (this is connected to Elizabeth Taylor’s death in only the most purely autobiographical way, I disclaim this from the outset).  Gaga is influential, groundbreaking, wholly original—this much is agreed upon.  But the question of her beauty has never reached such a consensus.  Is Lady Gaga, the former Stefani Germanotta, beautiful?  Does it matter whether she is or not?  Only insofar is it might be the most remarkable fact of all if an American woman has managed to become famous and successful in the entertainment industry without being beautiful.

Gaga turns 25 this week, a fact she bemoaned onstage at Oakland’s Oracle Arena.  She is artificially blonde, strikingly thin, and the bearer of a distinctive face that probably wouldn’t appear in magazines without the talent attached to it.  Unlike Taylor, she is a chameleon, constantly self-mutating, iconic not for her adherence to a beauty standard but for her aesthetic deconstruction of it.  Gaga treats her own physical presence not as a commodity in and of itself, but as a template upon which to perform innumerable mutations and convolutions; Gaga’s body is her own primary mannequin for the half-fashion, half-fetish feats of art that she and the Haus of Gaga enact.  She aggressively maintains a new brand of put-togetherness, one no doubt rife with creams and potions, but aimed toward a totally new result.  Lady Gaga and Elizabeth Taylor could never have shared a closet, but they might have spent about the same amount of time getting ready.

Gaga portrays herself as the patron saint of outsiders, allegiant to her queer audience and to the general principles of being a self-appointed Freak, capital F.  “I was really bullied in high school, and in junior high,” she told her Oakland audience, her tone warm and confidential.  “I used to say to my mother, ‘Mommy, I don’t want to go to school,’ and she would say, ‘You were born a superstar, and one day you will sing and dance onstage for all those who bullied you.’” After this, Gaga sung an acoustic version of “Born This Way.”  I’m not too proud to admit I got choked up.  But this, too, though it seems genuinely meant, is a construction: Stefani Germanotta was not born in stilettos and liquid liner.  Those tools became part of an arsenal from which she would draw to construct the persona of a superstar, who would later reach back and affirm her fans’ natural state of being.  Gaga’s is, probably intentionally, a very mixed message about beauty and conformity.

By this point, it’s probably become clear to my reader that I care a lot more about Lady Gaga than I do about Elizabeth Taylor.  That’s partially generational—Gaga is my peer, and Taylor my grandmother’s—but also because Taylor reminds me of how nauseated I get from the media’s jerking my attention between worshipping beautiful women and indicting their substance and motives (“Could anyone as beautiful as Elizabeth Taylor also be talented?”).  Gaga, by contrast, seizes that attention and smashes it like a sacrificial wine glass at a Jewish wedding.  By revealing the very intricacy of its construction, she shines light on the illusion of female “beauty” and challenges at least some of its arbitrary standards—though I certainly still wish she’d eat a sandwich already.  Stef, if you read this next time you auto-Google, your next meatball sub is on me.

What reifies the unlikely connection between Gaga and Taylor the most, though, is that they have in common an uncommon work ethic.  Taylor made over 50 films in her lifetime. Lady Gaga has been touring continuously since November 2009, or for 483 days.  She’s got another 42 to go.  Too little attention is afforded to this: the work it takes, the sheer amount of time required not just to perform, but to produce an appearance as performance.  Every time Elizabeth Taylor put on her face in the morning, every cigarette Lady Gaga inexplicably glue-guns to a pair of sunglasses, requires a modicum of effort as specific and demanding as building a set or wiring a soundboard.  We expect it of women every day of their lives, on- and offstage alike, and of men hardly at all.

So we bid farewell to a faded icon and usher in newer ones; we honor the contributions from each.  Elizabeth Taylor deserves to rest in peace.  She must have been exhausted.