Wasn’t she lovely?

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Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will remember the life and career of two-time Academy Award®-winning actress and beloved humanitarian Elizabeth Taylor on Sunday, April 10. The 24-hour memorial tribute, which is set to begin at 6 a.m. (ET/PT), will include both of Taylor’s Oscar®-winning performances, with Butterfield 8 (1960) at 8 p.m. (ET) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) at 10 p.m. (ET). The full schedule is here.

I spent some time today reading the articles about her.  One of the more interesting? A reprint of  TIME Magazine’s 1949 issue.

At 17, 5 ft. 4½ in., 112 Ibs., Elizabeth Taylor is a great beauty. She is a perfect type of the Black Irish. She has heavy black hair and brows that are also black and thick, but not a whit too thick to frame her large, luxuriantly lashed blue eyes, which darken into violet in the least shadow. Her complexion has been described by an ecstatic publicity man as “a bowl of cream with a rose floating in it.” Cameramen have paid her Hollywood’s ultimate compliment to beauty: “She doesn’t have a bad angle.”

A Burning Glass. In Hollywood, which has long since proved its theory that even a flea can be taught to act a little, Elizabeth Taylor is a sure star of the future. Never has there been a time of such opportunity. For as age has dulled dozens of bright stars, custom has staled scores more. The public — though still attentive to such screen personalities as Robert Taylor, Hedy Lamarr, Errol Flynn, Irene Dunne, Greer Garson, Myrna Loy, Walter Pidgeon, Mickey Rooney, Loretta Young — no longer rushes by the millions to see a picture merely because one of them is in it.

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School & Sodas. Eye-filling Elizabeth Taylor is no such problem. In fact, she is no problem at all. Elizabeth has only a little temperament and almost no side; she pretends to no more learning than she needs, reads little besides movie magazines, hates school, loves ice-cream sodas, convertibles and swimming pools, and admires big strong men.

Elizabeth’s womanly beauty usually makes strangers forget that she is, after all, only a youngster, but her behavior quickly reminds them of it. Beneath her breath-taking façade there is scarcely a symptom of sophistication. But Elizabeth, for all her youngish ways, is a purposeful girl in a way that Hollywood admires: she is feverishly ambitious to make a success in pictures.

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The reason for this driving ambition baffles many a jaded Hollywood operative. Elizabeth has had just about everything that a moderately prosperous family with good connections could give her. Her father, Illinois-born Francis Taylor,* is an art dealer who used to be a European buyer for his uncle’s art business, Howard Young Galleries. Her mother, Sara Sothern Taylor, once had a good part in a 1922 Broadway production of Channing Pollock’s The Fool. Elizabeth grew up to seven in a handsome London house, and in a 15th Century lodge in Kent. Her family got around in art, literary and political circles.

Lassie & Velvet. With the war coming on, the Taylors returned to the U.S. and settled in Beverly Hills, where father Taylor opened an art gallery. Cinemagnate J. Cheever Cowdin, a friend of the Taylors, wanted to sign eight-year-old Elizabeth for Universal almost as soon as he laid eyes on her. The Taylors said no. Elizabeth said yes, and carried her point.

After an almost idle year under contract to Universal, Elizabeth switched to M-G-M where she played opposite Roddy McDowall in Lassie Come Home. National Velvet followed a year later. For three years of “awkward age” she had only minor roles, went to the studio school, rode horses, and played with her turtles, fish, mice, rabbits, cats, dogs, ducks and chipmunks. She wrote a little story about one of the chipmunks, called Nibbles and Me, which was published under her name but shows the toothmarks of some careful editorial nibbling.

Biology Wins. Then one day a Metro photographer walked up to Elizabeth and said: “I thought you’d like to know that the boys have voted you the most beautiful woman they have ever photographed.” “Mother!” gasped Elizabeth, “did you hear what he said? He called me a woman!”

Biologically, she was — and biology is good enough for Hollywood any time. Elizabeth soon got her first screen kiss in Julia Misbehaves and returned it charmingly; her fan mail climbed. Some Annapolis midshipmen were suddenly moved to vote her “The Girl We’d Abandon Ship For.” Some Harvard boys added: “The Girl We’ll Never Lampoon.”

As Elizabeth ripened, M-G-M ripened her roles. In Conspirator, not yet released, Robert Taylor (no kin) made love to Elizabeth so fiercely (said Hedda Hopper) that one of her vertebrae was dislocated. Next year Elizabeth will get an even juicier part in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. She will co-star with Montgomery Clift.

Mother Watches. Metro’s publicity men have not missed many bets. In July of last year, West Point’s All-America Glenn Davis was brought by some friends to the Taylors’ house at Malibu Beach. When Infantryman Davis appeared, Elizabeth looked up “and I thought: O ye gods, no! … He was so wonderful!”

Cinema columnists duly reported the state of Elizabeth’s wonder, followed the romance play by play. Glenn gave her his gold football, his All-America sweater and finally, Elizabeth said, his troth, effective in three years, some time after his tour of duty in the Orient.

For months there was nobody quite like Glenn. Even Prince Philip, whom Elizabeth met in London, could not undo the gift-wrapping on her heart. “English girls think he’s so good-looking,” hummed Elizabeth. “I guess our standards are just different.”

Suddenly it was all over and Glenn was gone, deftly recovering his fumbled gold football. It seemed to friends of the family that Elizabeth’s mother felt no pain.

Mother is paid to watch things closely. To fortify her natural inclinations to protect her child, M-G-M pays Sara Taylor $250 a month (the usual fee for “movie mothers”) to guard its property, which one M-G-Magnate has spaciously valued at “$50,000,000, maybe even $100,000,000.” Elizabeth herself makes only $1,000 a week, which is raisins to the plums she should soon be getting. Next year her salary goes up to $1,500 under the present contract, which has three years to run. Bonuses may add to her take.

Mother goes to work with Elizabeth every day, sits quietly in a corner of the sound stage and instructs her daughter with nods and hand signals. Says she: “Elizabeth and I are so close, we practically think as one person. Elizabeth is now mature enough to make any important decisions herself, and I want her to do so, and when she does make a decision I always find it’s the same thing I would have done . . . We always seem to agree on everything.”

Bill Instructs. Mother & daughter agreed on William D. Pawley Jr., the 28-year-old son of the transit magnate and former ambassador to Brazil. Elizabeth met Bill last March in Miami while she and Glenn were still doing their gossip-column hitch. Every afternoon for a week Bill gave her driving lessons, every night he took her to a party. During the Easter holidays he flew to the Coast. Last June, after school was out, mother & daughter flew to Miami to stay at the Pawleys’. There Elizabeth and Bill announced their engagement.

Back in Hollywood, Elizabeth has refused to let a little thing like a continent come between them. She writes Bill every day and has little long-distance chats with him almost as often. Cost of one recent call: $145. At first they vowed to have no other dates, but Elizabeth felt like such a wallflower at one of Cobina Wright’s parties she had that rule made a little more flexible.

Elizabeth says she is quite certain that she and Bill will be married — someday. She refuses to be depressed by the fact that he is the vice president of a bus line in Florida, while her career is in Hollywood. They have not decided where to live, she says, but Bill is looking for a house in Miami, while she is scouting around California. “I’ve seen several houses,” she chirps, “and they’re all just the darlingest things.” Mother smiles, and watches.

“Oh, Brother!” The day is coming soon, say some Hollywood seers, when Elizabeth may get fed up with being watched. They already see signs that she is trying her wings: she is tired of her Cadillac and wants another; she wants a mink stole; in Paris last winter she went on a clothes-buying spree and overdrew her checking account; in London she snapped back at her teacher, “Wouldn’t it be nice if Miss Anderson dropped right through the floor!”

When Elizabeth talks about her future in the movies, her eyes flash sapphire sparks. “What I’d really like to play,” she gasps excitedly, “is a monster — a hellion.” MGM’s Billy Grady thinks she has the temperament as well as the beauty to become a great star — “And when she begins to show it — Oh, Brother!”

I don’t think Elizabeth Taylor ever took a bad picture.

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