Julie Burchill (who seems oddly unaware that Taylor herself went to rehab…) writes:
From being denounced by the Vatican in the Sixties as “an erotic vagrant” (I think they meant it as an insult, but it sounds gorgeous to me) to being hailed by the director of the UCLA Aids Institute as the “the Joan of Arc of Aids activism”, Taylor lived her life according to her own rules – more Wife of Bath than untouchable ideal of feminine perfection. Looking at the insipid contemporary film-star likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, for whom eating half a cupcake seems a walk on the wild side, this cursing, drinking, swashbuckling goddess is a reminder of when hell-raisers didn’t automatically have to be as mad, bad and sad as Charlie Sheen and Mel Gibson.
When a famous man does what he wants, he’s a Bad Boy; when a famous woman does what she wants, she’s a suitable case for treatment.
Burchill also asks — thank God!
“Does everything we watch have to be ‘gritty’?”
