Feast of Sapience - Remembering Dr. McShane

Last year one of my favorite professors died.

To honor the life he lived and the lessons he taught, I wanted to write about him.

As with Dame Elizabeth Taylor (with whom he probably shared very little, other than perhaps a generous spirit and certainly my esteem), this is not a hymn to an idol: in this case, it is a reflection to honor a man who guided many with wisdom.

I chose a sequence that does not follow a strict chronology, for in life, one does not always remember lessons in a precise succession.

Phil The Fan

Picture this: Spring Semester, 1993. It is the early weeks of the semester and all still have their winter coats. The classroom in the English building is full of several dozen students, watching the professor at the front and center.

“Does anyone here know what a Thyestean feast is?” the professor asked the class. A solid man wearing a jacket and tie, his receding white hair hovers about his temple and ears, his Celtic blue eyes piercing with both curiosity and delight. His voice is eloquently grand with authority, as erudite as William F. Buckley Jr., but with only the faintest hint of the Mid-Atlantic in his vowels and his tone is gentle and soft spoken: he has a talent for the mimicry of accents, an asset that he uses for tales of instruction and humor. If he could exude kindness and warmth that the real C.S. Lewis had rather than the cold Oxford don that he played in Shadowlands, Sir Anthony Hopkins could ideally be cast to play this professor.

“A Thyestean feast comes from the tragedy of Thyestes, who was tricked by his enemy into eating his children,” I answered. I usually sat in front of the class, by choice, because grades were important and I loved the subject matter. The class was Children’s Literature and the semester started with reading fairy tales by the Grimm brothers, from English translations that were, well, grimmer than the most of the tales that Disney adapted. After the fairy tales came Homer’s Odyssey, followed by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; The Wind in the Willows; The Princess and the Goblin; The Hobbit; The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe; A Wrinkle in Time; and The Book of the Dun Cow.

With the reading of The Odyssey, I demonstrated an advantage I had over most of my classmates: not only had I read this epic in during the Fall Semester of my Freshman year, two and half years before, I had just taken (to meet my Minority studies requirement) Greek Literature in Translation, which meant that I read Homer’s Iliad, some lyric poetry, plus a comedy from Aristophanes, as well as tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides: hence, my familiarity with the Thyestean feast.

While we were only a few weeks into the semester, Children’s Literature was my favorite class. This was not because the readings were “easy” (I mean, the original readership for most of the texts were children) but because they were all fantasy, which had long been my favorite genre. Decades before the Peter Jackson films, I had been a fan of Tolkien and had looked forward to joining a Tolkien club when I got to college. Sure enough, my first week at university, I joined the Tolkien club, where I heard about the Children’s Literature course. The Tolkien club’s sponsor, a bioethics professor, spoke with affection for the one of the professors who taught the course and reverence for the other professor, whom he said was one of the few people on campus that had wisdom. It was this latter professor who was the instructor of this Children’s Literature class that I attended: he was Dr. James McShane, who passed away on July 5, 2013.


Part of Dr. McShane’s style was that he’d read aloud passages from the text and then share observations on the content. For instance, one of the first stories we read was a translation of the original Grimms’ Cinderella, which had no fairy godmother or glass slipper (these, Dr. McShane explained, were found in the Charles Perrault version of the fairy tale, written for the French court and later used as a resource by Walt Disney), but had the evil stepsisters mutilate their feet to fit in the fabled shoe, only to be exposed by the birds which sang to the prince’s party: “Backwards peep! Backwards peep! There’s blood in the shoe!” The birds were symbolic agents of the girl’s dead mother, who on her deathbed reminded the child to be pious.

“What does it mean to be ‘pious’?” Dr. McShane asked the class. Many of us provided answers like “sanctimonious” and “holy” and to these answers Dr. McShane responded politely but then related an episode from Virgil’s Aenid, how during the fall of Troy, the heroic Prince Aeneas led to safety his young son Ascanius while he carried his decrepit father Anchises. “Aeneas represents the present, and he leads the future in the person of his son and carries the weight of history and tradition of the past in the person of his father. When scholars speak of ‘Pious Aeneas’, it is with this image that they have in mind. To be ‘pious’ is to carry tradition for the next generation.”

Again, after the fairy tales we read The Odyssey, one of the greatest stories in the Western canon. It begins with Odysseus stuck on the island with Calypso: many of us thought he was trapped and a prisoner. No, Dr. McShane explained: there is little in the text to indicate that Calypso has used all that much force to keep Odysseus her captive: on the contrary, he obviously enjoyed the nymph’s company…carnally. However, when pressed by the gods to leave, he finally begins his journey back to Ithaca.

While Odysseus is back on the sea, his son Telemachus goes on his own to seek information about his father. In Book IV, Telemachus comes to the halls of Menelaus and Helen, where they both relate to the prince stories about Odysseus. First, Helen relates how during the siege on Troy, she recognized a disguised Odysseus working as a spy and then explains how she helped him. Her story is followed by one by Menelaus, who relates that when the Greek warriors were inside the Trojan horse, they hear Helen suggest that the Trojans pierce the horse with spears to ensure that it was safe.

“What are we to make of these two?” Dr. McShane asked the class. He then shared a story of a sad young woman whose parents argued all the time: she thought that they hated each other, but he knew her parents and their relationship and explained to her “No child: they were two very passionate people whose relationship was quite physical. When you grew up, you only saw the dark side of their marriage.” He then brought attention back to Helen and Menelaus, noting that sometimes it is better for two unhappy people to have each other, lest there be four miserable people.

That lesson has stayed with me over the years. I would watch various relationships people have come and go, marriages begin with beautiful weddings and end in acrimonious divorce; I would also see couples stay together, complaining about each other one minute and then indulging in each other’s pet games. Years after college, I’d watch The Oprah Winfrey Show where she would have Dr. Phil McGraw as a guest delve into the lives of troubled couples, and then I would see McGraw do that on his own show. Through all that dysfunction, be it in gay bars or on daytime television or among friends, it was the wisdom in Dr. McShane’s insight on the not-pretty but well-suited pairing of Helen and Menelaus that would echo in my head.

These days, I rarely ever feel too sorry for people in “bad” relationships: I will feel sorry for their children, but beyond that, I am grateful that these people have each other and are thereby sparing the rest of us the hazards of dealing with such unhappy souls.

I will confess to having some difficulty in reading The Wind in the Willows: I found the idyllic pastoral setting in the English countryside to be…boring (in fact, I remember writing in my journal entry that I wanted the Queen of Hearts to appear and shake up the scene). I was annoyed by Toad’s antics and am convinced that today he would’ve been diagnosed with manic-depressive bipolar disorder. Fortunately, McShane’s lectures rescued the story from my criticism, as certain features of Victorian society were explained. For instance, when the rabbits would misbehave and annoy the other animals, the other animals would shout “Onion sauce!” at the lapines: onion sauce was a traditional condiment served with rabbit meat in England in the 1800's, so by shouting it at the reckless rabbits, the other animals were taunting them with death.

The following Fall Semester I had Dr. McShane for another class, this time for Irish Literature. Here I was no longer on that firm and familiar foundation of Greek Literature and fantasy: the works from the poets and storytellers of the Emerald Isle were a new menagerie. Gone were the glories of high fantasy, for now came the tales of suffering and sorrow.

Some of the bleakness was revealed when McShane relayed the time that he and his family stayed in Ireland, in a seaside town called Skerries. Apparently the people in Skerries were not especially friendly by American standards, so when the local priest asked McShane how he liked Ireland, the response was “It would be nice if people said ‘hello’ to my wife!” to which the priest replied (as relayed to us by McShane using his excellent talent for mimicry, realizing a lovely Irish brogue) “You best not be judging all of Ireland by Skerries: Skerries was settled by the Danes, and the Danes are a dour people.” As I had felt proud of my Danish heritage since I was a child, it was striking to hear the Danes dismissed as a dour people (I mean, really—Hans Christian Andersen and pornography—fairy tales and sex—what’s so dour about that?). Still, given that the Viking raids (which provided the Danes to settle Skerries, and in fact, many of the towns in Ireland, including Dublin, were established by Danes) ended many centuries ago, it is striking that these ancient memories lingered and haunted the Emerald Isle.

McShane also took time to explain more about the history of Ireland, the domination by the British, but noting the Irish successes along the way, and how during the 1700’s, Dublin became the second largest city in the British Empire; in fact, the former Parliament building in Dublin became the Bank of Ireland, a place that the professor recommended to see for its fantastic Georgian architecture. The professor also relayed an anecdote in the 1800’s about a Catholic politician from Ireland who won a seat in Parliament and would have taken the Oath of Supremacy (which affirmed allegiance to British monarch as the Head of the Church of England): when challenged that doing so would be a lie, the politician countered, “No, for it to be a lie, it must not only be an untruth, it must also have the intent to deceive: as I intend to deceive no one, I am not lying.” Over the years, I find myself correcting people when they misspeak and unintentionally give misinformation and say “I’m sorry, I lied,” to which I respond, “No, you only misspoke; for you to have lied, you must have also have had the intent to deceive.”

Of course, much of Irish history was not so cheery. Ireland lost home rule in 1801, when its parliament merged with Westminster, and several decades later, the Irish suffered the Potato Famine. Prior to McShane’s lecture, I did not understand the extent of the tragedy of the famine. The professor explained that potatoes were an easy crop for the Irish people, one that did not need much tending and one not likely to be taken from them by their British overlords. Also, despite the poverty, the Irish were very “pro-sex”, he explained, and being Catholics, they enjoyed big families: indeed, sex gave people something to do while the potatoes grew.

Then came the famine. Their major source of food, wiped out. (A cruel twist is that it only affected the potato: other crops did very well at the time, but those benefited the British which actually owned the land and could sell the crops, rather than the Irish who worked in the field). I remember how transfixed we were in class, hearing him relate the horror of people dying, and explaining how this event allowed for celibacy and late marriages to enter the Irish Catholic character. “When you see your children eat grass because they are starving,” he explained, “but then watch them die anyway, you change your mind about sex.”

It was at this point where McShane reflected on an exchange that he had with a church official regarding celibacy: the professor came to understand that this man’s religious views were steeped in the celibacy of Irish Catholicism, one that witnessed the horror of children starving after eating grass. In contrast, McShane’s own perspective was more pro-sex, in line with an Irish Catholicism before the famine. He had a big family and he and his wife were known to want some reform in the local diocese, in line with how they understood Vatican II. Contrary to how some factions presented them, the McShanes did not want to turn the Catholic Church into some New Age cult: they expressed their Catholic faith by opening their homes to unwed teenage mothers, thereby living a life of gracious Christian charity rather than of a scowling and shaming judgment. Over the years, I encountered even conservative Catholics who may have disagreed with the McShanes politically, but certainly respected how they lived their faith through grace and generosity.

A year after I took the Irish Literature course, Dr. McShane was gracious and generous enough to have me for an independent study, which enabled me to sit in another series of lectures for Children’s Literature. One lecture which I remember from the class for The Wizard of Oz: McShane only spent one lecture on that story, and in it, he related the 1939 film as well as the book (Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West would not be released for another year). When discussing the film, the professor mentioned that when he was in Atlanta, he saw Judy Garland in concert: she was more than an hour late for the show, and when she finally appeared, she looked like “the wrath of God”, but after a few minutes, she had the unruly and impatient crowd “eating from her hands.” It was very much like the closing scene from I Could Go On Singing.

Despite his piety and respect for the text, Dr. McShane was not above questioning certain received notions and conventional wisdom. I remember hearing how in school he challenged the teacher about the idea of the “topic sentence” in paragraphs: he directed the class’s attention to the fact that in the course book discussing paragraphs and topic sentences, the paragraphs themselves did not include topic sentences.

What especially stands out in my mind happened during that first semester for Children’s Literature, when we finished Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The story closes with Alice telling her sister about her adventures, and how they made Alice a better mother. “How could what she endured make Alice a better mother?” McShane asked the class. Another student, with whom I had taken a logic class the previous semester and with whom I would also take Irish Literature, commented on how demented the story was; and I added that it was also not a sentimental story. So, with the dementia but without sentiment, how could Alice’s adventures make her a better mother? I gained respect for Alice and her adventures, although perhaps I had lost some affection for them as well.

Another challenge to a text came when we read A Wrinkle in Time, where the character Calvin O’Keefe, who was of obvious Irish descent, related how he came from a large family and no one would miss him. Falling back on his own Irish Catholic family life, McShane countered this, noting that the book’s author Madeleine L’Engle was an only child and did not know much about what it would have meant to have siblings and growing up in a large family. “There isn’t less love,” he explained: “There is more love, and the older children help raising the younger ones.”

I remember that in one of his lectures, the professor reflected on the word “sap”, which is often used as an insult. “It is short of ‘sapience,’” he explained, “ which means ‘wisdom’, and has nothing to do with what happens in a maple tree.” For me, Dr. McShane had been a great resource of wisdom, of sapience, as well as generosity. He wrote a letter of recommendation for me to attend summer school in Oxford. When I graduated from University in 1995, I had the honor of Dr. McShane appearing at my reception. When I struggled with graduate school, I emailed him and listed him the options that I was considering, asking for his advice: his response was frank in that he could not recommend any of the options that I was considering. After that semester, I did not return to graduate school and while I sometimes miss the exchange of ideas in literature, history, philosophy, and religion, I am glad that I did not become a parasitical fixture of those ivory towers that the academic world all too often is.

I maintained contact with the professor, often sending him St. Patrick's Day cards in mid-March. Sometimes we would meet at his office, but we would also meet for lunch, most often at a Chinese restaurant close to campus. Sometimes we would reflect on current events: I remember he found the gross emotionalism over the death of Princess Diana to be “ghastly”. In 2003, after the Lawrence v. Texas decision from the Supreme Court, he reflected how the Court generally options to expand liberty to more people rather than restricting it from others. I recall in one conversation that he shuddered when I mentioned reading about Swedenborg, but gasped a sigh of relief when I said that I was also tackling Edmund Burke.

Sometimes gifts were exchanged at Christmas: I remember giving him a copy of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and explained to the professor that while I abhorred the Pullman’s philosophy (which could be understood to “anti-Narnian”: essentially, republican atheism in society and the universe), I liked his story-telling abilities and when I explained that Pullman described C.S. Lewis as a Protestant Ulsterman (which is technically correct, given that Lewis was born in Belfast and after a stint as an atheist returned to the Anglican church), McShane was intrigued but commented with a chuckle (no doubt thinking of someone like Ian Paisley), “Well, that’s hardly fair to Lewis.” He in turn gave me a copy of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, a very thoughtful gift, for he knew that I wanted to be a fantasy novelist.

In one of our meetings at his office, I mentioned the Harry Potter books. Here he gave such a literary challenge: he was unhappy with them. “Harry Potter told a lie,” he said to me. I realized that this was true, that Harry Potter told many lies, and that rarely did Harry suffer much serious consequences for lying. McShane’s revelation to me was a slap in the face, as I did not recognize Potter’s dishonesty or appreciate it as much as the professor did. It underscored for me what a highly ethical and moral man that Dr. McShane was. To be a man of such strict principles meant that life for him was a challenge.

Of course, Dr. McShane did more than challenge texts and literary figures: he and his wife challenged the Church. Being a fairly liberal couple (in fact, McShane was the first avowed liberal that I actually respected and his wife remains the only Democrat candidate whose campaign I had ever helped), they found themselves at odds with the very traditionalist hierarchy of the local diocese. Indeed, so reform-minded were the McShanes that they were viewed as enemies of the bishop and were no doubt major targets of the mass excommunication that occurred in 1996. As I was not Catholic and didn’t even read the newspaper, I was only vaguely aware of what was happening. I had heard rumors that the local diocese was considered one of the most conservative in the United States, if not the world, and knowing that McShane was a liberal Democrat, I could imagine that there would be some friction.

Still, remembering that Dr. McShane believed that words mattered, it must be said that the Church is called “catholic”, that is to say “universal.” Before issues like abortion and homosexuality became such divisive subjects in society at large, thereby enabling Catholic officials to unite with their old rivals, evangelical Protestant ministers, many Catholics were Democrats, often blue-collar workers from several ethnicities. Decades before the prosperity gospel, many Catholics were very much engaged in social justice, and while some clergy and laity would gladly ally with Franco in Spain against the godless communists under Stalin, many nuns and priests would minister to the suffering and poor: as she is a Catholic or Universal Church, she provides a home for all.

Such concern for the poor and unfortunate did Dr. McShane reveal when in Children’s Literature he provided to the class a photocopy of the original introduction to George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, published in 1872. In this first introduction, the author stressed that while one of the main characters in the book was a princess, in a sense, all little girls were princesses and all little boys were princes.

“Who here knows about a cross of gold?” Dr. McShane asked the class, providing a question that stumped me. The answer came from the student who sat next to me, a gentleman of Irish and Italian descent (I would later discover that he had worked in Washington, D.C. on behalf of interests for the Democrats, as either a lobbyist or an activist) who said, “‘You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’” McShane nodded with affirmation and said “Yes!” and explained that the student was quoting a speech from William Jennings Bryan, which was memorialized at the Nebraska State Capitol. Bryan was a Nebraska Democrat made famous in part by his three failed attempts at the presidency as well as his fight against the teaching of evolution in the Scopes trial, the latter which was popularized by the historically inaccurate play Inherit the Wind. While Bryan’s “cross of gold” speech from 1896 was about the gold standard and in fact was two decades after The Princess and the Goblin was first published, McShane explained that the opposition of many religious people to the teaching of evolution was not simply because evolution came in conflict against a literalist interpretation of the Genesis creation account in the Bible (something not a problem for Catholics, who are not obligated to view Scripture with a literal interpretation), but because many took Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” notions and used their interpretations and applied them to the social sciences (i.e., Social Darwinism) to justify not only (at best) laissez-faire capitalism but also eugenics: in short, they used Darwin’s teachings to de-humanize their fellow man, whereas Christians like MacDonald and Bryan did not want society to forget that human beings were children of God, and that all God’s children are princes and princesses.

Dr. McShane once said that his hero was Saint Thomas More, “a man for all seasons” and a beacon of personal integrity. With that sort of example and application of Christian charity and Catholic belief, it is not quite so difficult to imagine that Dr. McShane maintained his Catholic faith as well as his left-of-center politics, or that he would come at odds with certain church authorities. Several months ago, I found at Barnes and Noble a book that detailed in part the struggles in which Dr. McShane and his wife fought. Reading this after the professor died, I was again reminded of his strength of character and eloquence of language: how he found goodness in opponents and even prayed with them, but would not permit them to lie.

For me, perhaps the most important but yet a quiet lesson that lingers deeply comes from another lecture in Children’s Literature. As I had previous mentioned, I had difficulty with The Wind in the Willows, and failed to appreciate the appearance of the god Pan in the chapter “Piper at the Gates of Dawn”. Fortunately, the Greek literature was still fresh in my mind during the lecture, so when Dr. McShane asked, “What is a goat song?” I could say “a tragedy”, and when he pointed out passages like “a capricious little breeze”, which would bring to mind “goat spirit,” I came to see the richness of the author’s vision: after all, “Pan” means “All” in Greek, but it also sounds like “pain”, which is French for “bread”, which in itself is a rich image, for not only is it a staple of the human diet, it evokes religious imagery, in not only the Lord’s Prayer (“give us this day our daily bread”) but also the Eucharist.

McShane found the closing of the chapter puzzling: why would this mystic experience be forgotten? Over the years, I can say that it makes a sort of sense to me. While I cannot say that I have ever witnessed a profound numinous moment, like Moses on Sinai or Saul en route to Damascus, I can say that I have had events, fleeting perhaps, times in which I sensed an expansion of life, of life that was beyond my scope and vision. Acts of kindness. Moments of beauty. Those experiences do not prove that God is real, but having had such experiences, I do not find God to be an idea expressed in words from an alphabet, but rather a lingering fascination that evokes hope and love, a resource for comfort (which, as Dr. McShane said more than once, means “with strength,” as in, you are being strong with someone). I can appreciate the fear that secular humanists feel when they hear a religious person (often an evangelical Protestant) speak as if on behalf of God Himself and I contrast that with the quiet gentleness of Pan in The Wind in the Willows. One cannot explain God any easier than one can explain falling in love, or the faith one has in a faithless lover, and sadly, not everyone experiences moments of God or committed love, but life continues regardless. I think of the wise insight from Confucius, when asked about ghosts and spirits: they might be real, but for now, we need to live a good life on earth. That would be something I think that even if Dr. McShane couldn’t fully accept, he would graciously let it be explained.

Dr. McShane has been gone for a year and I no longer send St. Patrick’s Day cards to his address. However, I cherish the memory of his kind voice, his expressive eyes, and the majesty and humanity of the thoughts that he shared: the wisdom, nay, the sapience of those lessons that I received from lectures in classrooms at the English building, the grandness of the gesture by which he accepted a plastic glass of Asti spumante from my father at my graduation reception, or over mu shu shrimp at a Chinese restaurant that no longer exists. Lessons about ugly relationships, the definition of a lie, and the challenge of integrity: these are only a part of his great legacy.

Auntie Mame declared that “Life is a banquet!” but Dr. McShane revealed that with a great teacher, one can find in life a feast of sapience.

Apple of Discord, 2014

This is post is a partial revision a blog from last year, in honor of the late Margaret Thatcher.

Most of the original content remains intact.


Classical mythology tells a story that when the goddess of discord was not invited to a wedding banquet, she tossed a golden apple marked “For the Fairest” in the midst of the party. Soon, it came down to three goddesses vying for the prized fruit: their Greek names were Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera, but later poets would use the names Pallas (or Minerva), Venus, and Juno. The feud between these three led to the Judgment of Paris, the Trojan War, and the founding of Rome. However, I find that these goddesses also made appearances on the world stage in the person of one woman, the late Margaret Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher is easily one of the most polarizing figures in British politics, not only despised by the left, but dismissed and a source for embarrassment by members of her own party, especially the Establishment. In America, so longing for courageous leadership of quality, the icon of the Iron Lady makes for an easy subject of hagiography (far more so on the right than on the left, for obvious reasons). Of course, the legend of Thatcher is sustained by the historic details of her story, but when we talk about heroes, saints and goddesses, the details include symbols that become part of the myth.

Born Margaret Hilda Roberts, the future Prime Minister had an austere childhood in which the values of thrift and frugality were instilled by her strict Methodist parents. Much has been made out of her relationship with her father, a green grocer, Methodist lay preacher, and local politician, particularly in that her mother is hardly mentioned at all (it was even deftly addressed in the film The Iron Lady): many think this is important, although few specify how. We know that Mr. Roberts took his daughter to the library every week and instructed her in politics in life in ways that fathers usually do with sons rather than daughters. His daughter would later go to Oxford and study chemistry and we also know that after age sixteen, Margaret had little say to her mother, or of her mother in the following years.

What seems to be implied is an Electra Complex, the daughter’s equivalent to Oedipus, but I see a daughter who springs from her father’s accomplishments in a way that eclipses the mother, just as Pallas Athena sprang from the head of her father Zeus rather than from the womb of her mother Metis. We know little about Metis, but we do know that Pallas practically became lieutenant for her father, keeping his shield and thunderbolt safe, and that she also devised practical things, such as the spool and spindle, the bridle, the olive tree, as well as law, technology, and war strategy.

Indeed, Margaret Roberts the chemist graduate from Oxford would later take great satisfaction of being the first Prime Minister to have been trained as a scientist (far more in fact than being the first woman Prime Minister). Much was later made that the British economy, under her government, was treated as a series of monetarist experiments, not unlike experiments conducted in a laboratory: again, Pallas was a goddess of technology.

Margaret married Denis Thatcher and studied law, and after giving birth to twins Carol and Mark, took the bar examination. Law, much like chemistry, is a subject in which a command for details and facts is essential, and again, Margaret, excelled here. While critics have scorned her final marks as lackluster, the fact that she still attained them ought not be dismissed, particularly when one views footage of Margaret, now Mrs. Thatcher, as a Member of Parliament (MP) which she became in 1959, representing the constituency of Finchley in north London: her confidence and carriage, while in the early years certainly lacking the leonine command for which she became infamous in the 1980’s, are nonetheless intriguing.

As the film The Iron Lady portrays, Thatcher had to work to change her voice, deepen it for gravitas and authority, lest she sound too shrill. As professed Thatcher admirer Joan Collins observed during her studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, many acting students from places like Manchester and Liverpool had to lose their accents and attain the respected Received Pronunciation or BBC English; in contrast, today many British leftists and provincials take pride in how they never lost their native regional accents. Regardless, politics is a theatre, and to be a good player, one must speak with a voice that carries respect, and in the class-conscious circles of British society (both left and right), that was not the voice of a middle class matron.

While Thatcher’s voice deepened, she adjusted her attire and hair to suit her role as leader. She was known for always traveling with her hairstylist, something in stark contrast with German Chancellor Angela Merkel or Hilary Clinton, the latter who seemed to take particular pleasure in the freedom of no-nonsense hair. Also contrasting with Clinton, as Prime Minister, Thatcher reportedly only once wore a pant suit, and that was when she was on an oil rig and for the purposes of dignity did not think a skirt would be sufficient. Yet, this need for dignity need not be dismissed as prudery or Victorian modesty so much as a maintenance of authority: her hair was her helmet; her makeup, war paint; her wardrobe, armor.

Martial armor was certainly on the mind of Thatcher in early spring 1982, when Argentina seized the Falklands Islands, a remote outpost in the South Atlantic. Here, the macho Argentine junta, desperate for some popular goodwill, invaded the isles that the British had held since 1830. One might not fault the junta too much, for not only had the Thatcher government’s tight budget necessitate a cut in defense of the Falklands, a recent nationality law in Parliament stripped the islanders of British citizenship, and the British had even discussed the possibility of a leaseback option, by which sovereignty of the islands would inevitably go to Buenos Aries. However, for a rightwing military junta to take those islands by force was utterly unacceptable: even the leftwing politicians in Parliament would not countenance this sort of aggression. With some unofficial strategic help from the U. S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (but no official help from the Secretary of State, Alexander Haig) and as well as Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Britain was able to win back the Falklands.

The overt act of aggression of the Argentines might remind one of Poseidon attempting to take Attica, and the Atticans then turning to Pallas Athena. Athena countered Poseidon and bested him: Attica is now known as Athens, so named for the goddess whose images populated the city. (There is a twist of history that heralds correspondence and synchronicity: at the time of the former prime minister's death, there was talk about about renaming the Falklands's capital Port Stanley after Margaret Thatcher.) Commanding from her base of civil authority in London, taking messages from Washington, New York, and all over the world, Thatcher was the Pallas of Westminster, a goddess of war by strategy, and she was able to defeat the blustering bully in the South Atlantic. So her regime was secured and a second election victory the following year was assured.

Of course, sometimes the weapons of Athena can be enhanced by the tool of a goddess of love, namely charm, often dismissed as a frivolity. While dealing with world leaders, ranging from King Hussein of Jordan, Danish Prime Minister Poul Schlüter, and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Thatcher often charmed her foreign counterparts, certainly even flirting with them. To most Americans today and but also to her contemporary critics and enemies, the idea of Thatcher as a Marilyn Monroe figure is absurd, which is why François Mitterrand’s observation that the Iron Lady had the mouth of Monroe is so memorable. And yet, there are several anecdotal stories in which after a long day in the Commons or during a private meeting in Downing Street, Thatcher would kick off her shoes and curl them up on the couch and have a drink: very confident, rather informal, this is certainly flirtatious behavior. Even those with whom she had little political agreements, such as Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, spoke of her charm. By thinking of her as a love goddess, we do not think of her as a divine courtesan like Cleopatra on the Nile, but as a proper and engaging coquette, well groomed, quite decorous and upright with a touch of the ribald but never the vulgar: she was Venus on the Thames and her Cyprus was the House of Commons.

Charm was certainly lacking in many characters among the women’s movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Gloria Steinem might have been articulate, appropriately dressed, even groomed, but she was bland and plain, bordering on dowdy, even ugly. Photographs of Hillary Rodham show a similar looking woman: to wear makeup, to do anything cosmetic, even with the hair, was a heretical affront to the feminist cause in the years before Farah Fawcett instigated an explosion in curling iron sales. At the time, beauty and glamour were dismissed as misogynist tools by which patriarchy repressed women. Also when a man would do so much as open a door for a woman, something for which he was instructed from early boyhood to do in order to be grown up and civilized, his act of decency and gallantry would receive savage and scathing responses. Good manners were injured in those years and memories of those uncouth harridans no doubt inspired the image of the “Feminazi”; when a modern woman insists on pay equal to a man’s but does not think of herself as a “feminist”, she is thinking of that type of humorless woman.

In contrast, Margaret Thatcher enjoyed and even exploited her femininity. As a woman, she utilized the gender roles and a gentleman’s deference to a lady’s dignity to her advantage: she would let the men who served her stand when she entered or left a room. Outside of the Cabinet and on the world stage, we think of the cordial friendship between Thatcher and Reagan, two political soul mates, in which she enjoyed his plainspoken vigor, warmth, kindness, and personal passiveness that bordered on masochism and he honored her intelligence and spirit, as well as her demanding presence that bordered on sadism: in many ways, it was a chaste romance, as there is absolutely no evidence that either of them were improper or disloyal to their spouses. Beyond Reagan, we again look to Mitterrand, who confessed to finding her in part appealing, and he had to disagree with her not only as a Frenchman to her English womanhood, but also as a socialist to her conservative. Her femininity and charm worked with Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom she certainly disagreed with more than Mitterrand, but still found him to be a man with whom she could do business.

However, not all of Aphrodite is dulcet and bright. In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia described a woman with great verbal strength and will and connected her with the Bald or Bearded Venus. Paglia pointed to Bette Davis’s performance as Margo Channing in All About Eve and Elizabeth Taylor’s as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: the quips, arguments, the chewing of scenery—Thatcher did all that and would have done Margo or Martha proud. Many political enemies and rivals like Neil Kinnock were immune to Thatcher's feminine charms and brutalized by her language, but looking to the classics, one finds that some could resist the power of Aphrodite and that her powers, both dark and bright, were not absolute, but they provided the social lubrication of manners, charisma, flirting, even verbal combat, which carry a message and mission closer to success.

The classics hold that the queen of the gods was not Zeus’s daughter-lieutenant or sex goddess but was the jealous Hera, whom the Romans called Juno. A force of regal rage, Juno was a character bent on revenge, as when she was denied the Golden Apple and when she visited troubles upon Aeneas on his quest that would eventually lead to the destruction of her city Carthage. There are stories of Thatcher’s pettiness and vindictiveness, such as against her school headmistress that almost succeeded in preventing young Margaret from taking the necessary Latin that would get her to Oxford. “You are frustrating my ambition!” young Margaret protested, but with her father’s help, she got her Latin and years later, adult Margaret no doubt took great pleasure in correcting the Latin of that same teacher at a public event. Oxford itself became a target of Thatcher’s revenge: previously, standing Prime Ministers that were Oxford graduates would receive honors from the revered University, but due to opposition to her budget cuts, the university establishment refrained from honoring her for years, despite it being her alma mater. Her response: she gave her papers and archives to Oxford’s ancient rival Cambridge.

However, Juno was not merely an angry woman slighted: she was a queen. In the case of Margaret Thatcher, as Prime Minister, she deferred to her own Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II. Much speculation has been made about the relationship between these two powerful figures of the British state: their love for their fathers and the impact their respective relationships with these men seem to be what little they shared in common. While Thatcher was a product of her class and generation and was fiercely loyal to the monarchy as an institution, there are rumors that she dismissed the Queen as one that would vote for the Alliance (of Social Democrats and Liberal Party, the predecessor to the current political party of the Liberal Democrats). Being very correct and patriotic as a monarchist (and reputedly curtseying lower than anyone), Thatcher said little about her relationship with the Queen and only mentioned the monarch a handful of times in her memoirs.

As for Her Majesty herself, being ceremonial head of state and society, the Queen’s role was made easier during times of political consensus, and in postwar Britain, consensus indeed ruled the country: Butskellism was the unofficial system by which successive Conservative governments did not undo the advancement of socialism put in place by the previous Labour governments. Thatcher’s defiant shredding of that consensus certainly rocked the boat by which much of the Queen’s reign had sailed since 1952.

Despite Thatcher’s own assurances, we can be fairly certain that the two did not agree in matters pertaining to the Commonwealth, specifically on the approach to addressing Apartheid in South Africa. As Liberal Democrat peeress and Thatcher contemporary Shirley Williams had noted in a documentary for the Telegraph, there is no evidence that Thatcher was herself a racist. She was, however, quite indifferent to anti-colonial liberationists and revolutionaries, yet after the Second World War, most revolutionaries were Marxists, and she was explicitly anti-Marxist. The Queen, though no Marxist herself, enjoyed her role as unifier of disparate countries that were formerly part of the British Empire that was now the Commonwealth of Nations, an entity which included successful Western democracies like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, also bizarrely included many single-party countries under the yoke of Marxist despots, and several among whom the Queen often enjoyed a friendly rapport.

Thatcher’s early encounter with revolutionaries happened when her government took to rectifying the problem of Rhodesia, a former colony whose Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) made it both an international pariah and diplomatic embarrassment for the British. Under Ian Smith, Rhodesia attempted to keep white minority rule while allowing limited representation for the native African people: it was not Apartheid as practiced by the South Africans, but it was not a native majority rule that was favored by successive British governments, both Labour and Tory. The British, while successful in keeping other countries from recognizing Rhodesia’s independence—only South Africa and Portugal engaged with the wayward colony—UDI was an embarrassment for London. The Bush War continued, with fighting that entangled neighboring Commonwealth countries of Zambia and Botswana, and later former Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique, now independent with the death of Salazar. Despite such odds, Rhodesia also had fairly successful lobbyists among the Conservative MP’s that were sympathetic to imperial nostalgia and generally hostile to revolution. It was assumed that Margaret Thatcher would be receptive to overtures from the Rhodesian lobby, but instead took very seriously Britain’s imperial role as colonial overseer of the elections by which the former pariah state became Zimbabwe and the revolutionary Marxist Robert Mugabe became leader of the new independent country.

There is little doubt that Thatcher disliked Mugabe and she appears to have been concerned that Nelson Mandela in South Africa would be a similar character; in fact, for a long time she insisted the latter be labeled a terrorist. History now shows that while his successors might have more in common with Mugabe, Mandela himself proved to be a man of extraordinarily magnanimous character, a fact to which Thatcher readily conceded, despite obvious political disagreements with him (dismissing his politics as outdated collectivism). However, during the 1980’s, many figures on the Right, including President Reagan, accepted the notion that while Apartheid was abhorrent, the revolutionaries fighting the white minority government were Soviet tools in the Cold War: in this, the South African lobbyists were more successful than their Rhodesian counterparts. Denis Thatcher also had business ties with South Africa and he convinced his wife that sanctions, which were sought by the Commonwealth, would be unsuccessful. Additionally, anti-apartheid politician Helen Suzeman, a lone Jewish woman in a South African Parliament dominated by Calvinist men, expressed opposition to sanctions and disinvestment, pointing out that many black South Africans were employed by foreign interests, an important consideration in a country that did not offer a safety net or welfare for blacks. Accordingly, Margaret Thatcher would resist attempts for sanctions at Commonwealth meetings, reportedly even crying to protest that she was being mistreated, not only by the African leaders from Nigeria and Zambia, but also those from Canada and Australia: these are details which do not quite mesh with the Iron Lady legend or a Pallas of Westminster myth, but one can imagine a Venus on the Thames shedding tears when she would not get her way.

The Queen, always present at Commonwealth summits, would be concerned that this organization, dismissed by some Thatcherites as merely an ornament of the past, would split. In fact, in 1986 there was a leak from someone on staff at Buckingham Palace that the Queen was upset with how the Thatcher government was handling the matter of South Africa and the Commonwealth. Much ink was spilled in the press over this controversy, since the monarch must always be seen as apolitical and above party politics. In time, the matter was smoothed over in the papers, while for the rest of Thatcher’s time at Number 10, both HM and PM maintained what appeared to the cameras to be a perfectly correct Constitutional relationship.

It has been speculated that the Queen did not appreciate how as the years went on, Thatcher became more regal in bearing. In 1982, after the Falklands War, Thatcher received a victory salute, an honor considered reserved for the Sovereign rather than the political head of government. The Royal Family was also said to be irked when Thatcher announced to the press that her son’s wife gave birth to a child: “We have become a grandmother.” Some argued that Thatcher merely said “we” rather than call attention to herself by saying “I”, but using regalia is a way any woman calls attention to herself, and for a politician with a mission and message, it must be serious attention indeed.

One thinks of the Prime Minister in Poland and the Soviet Union, attired with spectacular furs and smart clothes that made her a striking contrast to the drab world of communist Eastern Europe: there she was, decked in queenly glamour, a confident beacon of Western liberty and free enterprise. No male leader could do that, not even Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan. Certainly no female leader could do that either: it is absurd to think that Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, or Gloria Steinem would so much as use lip gloss, much less a sable cap, as part of her regalia in the court of world opinion, be it the shipyards of Gdansk or on the streets of Moscow.

In the matters of statecraft and diplomacy (in fact, in all human relations), one is wise not to completely dismiss this usage of wardrobe and cosmetics as superficiality: by presenting herself as this modern queen (with due apologies to Her Majesty), Thatcher elevated her cause and her country, as Juno Britannia. It was a well dressed and well-spoken Thatcher whose negotiations with Deng Xiaoping led to the Sino-British Joint Declaration for Hong Kong, a settlement that enabled the former colony to continue to be one of the most successful economies in the world: a politician dressed like an American feminist from the 1970’s or a grunge rock poet from the 1990’s could have participated in negotiations on the world stage, but would not have spoken well for cause or country. Was Thatcher always so prim and proper? Absolutely not and we have anecdotal stories and video footage showing that she was not always pristine, but the record leaves us with those regal images illustrating the symbolism by which history and mythology often intersect.

All three goddesses had favorites, those for whom they were fond and graced with attention and favors: Aphrodite favored her son the Trojan prince Aeneas and his cousin the lecher Paris; Hera favored the heroic Jason; and Athena favored the wily Odysseus. Likewise, Thatcher had her favorites, including as her own son Mark, as well as dashing and handsome men like Cecil Parkinson. Thatcher also greatly admired intelligence and talent and accordingly surrounded herself with intelligent and talented men. Many have noted that among those she favored were, like Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, Jewish. During the Victorian era, there had been in the person of Benjamin Disraeli a Tory Prime Minister of Jewish descent (Disraeli had converted to Anglicanism as a child), but few other Jews had advanced very far in British politics. Speculation regarding Thatcher's Jewish sympathy has been written off as political good sense, since her constituency Finchley had a sizable Jewish community, but it is also known during the 1930's, her sister Muriel had a pen pal in Austria named Edith, a Jewish girl who thanks to the efforts led by Mr. Roberts, the local Rotary club was able to get the child out of the Continent and escape before it was too late. Whether it was political pragmatism or not, over the course of her eleven years in power, Thatcher appointed five Jewish men to her Cabinet; in a country of 60 million people with less than 400,000 that are Jewish, that is a striking figure. In fact, Thatcher's apparent philosemitism was so striking that even in the early years of her time in power, the former Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan quipped that under her leadership there were more "old Estonians in the Cabinet than old Etonians." It is also said that Thatcher appreciated the self-help preached by the Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits; this certainly was in contrast with the criticism that the bishops from the Church of England had for her Government's social and economic policies (bizarrely, it is reported that when asked by the Queen if he thought that Mrs. Thatcher was Christian, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that he thought the Prime Minister's religion was more Hebraic) and the Iron Lady was so grateful for the Chief Rabbi's support that she saw to it that he was elevated to the House of Lords in 1988.

Like Athena rescuing Attica from Poseidon, or the verbal Bearded Venus shredding the scene, or Juno bent on revenge, the combative Thatcher is the image most associated with the late Prime Minister. Argument, garish assertiveness, bombast: the 1980’s was the bold decade of New Wave music and Andrew Lloyd Webber, with synthesizers blaring and cymbals crashing. Looking at the materialism and consumerism of the time, one can see evidence of aspiration and opportunity, but also notes how they fueled leftist critics who point to the unemployment and civil unrest of the Eighties: Britain’s manufacturing industry and mining towns were casualties of Thatcher’s policies. Countering this criticism, Thatcher would argue that the welfare state must no longer burden the taxpaying citizen and that individuals had to take responsibility for themselves.

Consider the basket case Britain was in the 1970’s: the grainy film footage of the three day work week and the Winter of Discontent does not show a country that stands impressive against the glitzy Britain of Culture Club, privatization, and the Big Bang of 1986. The glitz and Technicolor glamour came at a price, with years of high unemployment and damaged industries that never recovered: certainly parts of England prospered, but much of Wales and Scotland suffered. Could mining towns have recovered, without the mines? Growing up near a town that was dependent on a major employer (the railroad) whose departure would have devastated the community, I can easily imagine the difficulty mining towns suffered during the infamous miners’ strike of 1984-1985, and ponder what it would mean to the town if the mine closed. After closure of the mines, these towns received subsidies from the British government and later from the European Union, but those payments were only temporary and rather than use the money to start up new industries, the money was spent elsewhere (the local pubs, mostly), so when the payments ceased, there was nothing to show for it. It is easy to be judgmental with townspeople for not investing or starting new companies to update the communities for the service-based economy that was the Thatcherite goal, but as critics of Thatcher would say, society is not a laboratory for experiments and those mining townspeople were not the type to think of starting new companies, or think to become that type that would. The desolation and bitterness of the pit closures endures, and perhaps one might understand the glee with which many people celebrated the news of Thatcher’s death, but one is also correct in saying that other opportunities were available but apparently were not recognized: compassion (scathingly dismissed by Thatcher as patronizing) insists that we appreciate that others have suffered, but discerning judgment and hindsight suggest that had other choices been made, prosperity would have resulted.

When Thatcher resigned from the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1990, she was replaced with the relatively affable John Major. A milquetoast compared to Thatcher’s virago, Major maintained much of Thatcher’s legacy while trying to be himself, just as George H. W. Bush maintained the successes of Ronald Reagan while trying to be his own man. The 1990’s were not as loud or brash as the 1980’s, but they also did not revert to the dark years of the 1970’s. Even when Labour came back to power in 1997 (under the banner “New Labour” and stripped of much of its native socialism), Tony Blair did little to alter the course of Thatcherism: neither Blair nor his successor Gordon Brown even so much as restored free milk to schoolchildren, a policy which Thatcher had ended in 1971 when she was Secretary of State for Education and Science, for which she earned the name “Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.”

When she left Number 10 Downing Street in November 1990, Thatcher stated that Britain was a much better place than when she became Prime Minister in 1979. Much of Britain had improved, but as indicated by the malicious pettiness expressed from nameless yobs, disgruntled unemployed miners, washed up actresses and pointlessly asexual musicians, hers was not an unambiguously successful legacy. The acquisition of things, which demonstrated middle class aspirations and spurred economic growth, instead all too often illustrates banal materialism and empty lives. In many ways, the rugged individualism celebrated during the Thatcher years did not instill a sense of personal responsibility but seems to have bred a feeling of entitlement that lacks a sense of community that had been part of British society in previous generations. When Thatcher said “There is no such thing as society,” it was a call for people to take care of themselves and not expect support from the taxpayer; instead, those words are now viewed as a symptom of social ills like apathy and greed rather than a condemnation of sloth. Thatcher wanted her revolution to be moral and by her own admission, economics was merely "the tool" for that revolution. Unfortunately, Thatcherism started at the close of the decade of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, so while it certainly did not invent selfishness, it readily provided more outlets and excuses for it.

There is also Section 28, a law passed by Parliament which stated that a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” As MP, Margaret Thatcher had rightly voted to decriminalize homosexuality, something which certainly helped put an end to blackmail and extortion, but her Government’s passing of Section 28 in the late 1980’s, when AIDS was spreading and so much ignorance was still prevalent, is not something that I can celebrate. From the perspective of gay advocacy, Section 28 was an active sin of commission, unlike the sin of omission for which the Reagan administration has been accused for its lack of response to AIDS in the early years. However, one must remember that the great enemy for both Thatcher and Reagan was not gay people or even gay activists but the tyranny from Moscow. In the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, too many people tend to forget how uncertain the defeat of Stalinism was thought to be and that at the time, not many believed that the Western allies would survive. The communist leaders of the old Soviet Union, while certainly opposed to most organized religions and moral traditions espoused by those that practiced them, were no friends to gay people: while the early Bolsheviks decriminalized homosexuality, Stalin made it a crime again in the 1930's, declaring homosexuality to be the disease of the bourgeoisie and accordingly, had gay men imprisoned, just as Castro put them into camps. Today, the haggard Bolsheviks and their Stalinist bastard successors are no longer in charge at the Kremlin, but their replacements have enacted legislation similar to Section 28. Any competent gay activist can win a debate about the injustice of Section 28 and perhaps even one about the negligence of Reagan's slow response to AIDS, but I also like to imagine how a right-leaning gay politician would be as a Thatcherite, and while such an Iron Lad (whom I imagine to be a bit like the late Pim Fortuyn, but more composed) would not pass a Section 28, he would know that his liberty had been more secure thanks to the efforts of the Cold Warriors Thatcher and Reagan and that he has himself excelled in a country with liberty and a free enterprise economy, because as Andrew Sullivan pointed out in his obituary for Thatcher, the affluent gay scene of modern Britain is a part of Thatcher’s legacy, and I say that is definitely in spite of Section 28 but continues to exist (even thrive) because London does not (yet) bow to Putin.

I think also of personal betrayals by Thatcher. When the ousted Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his family were seeking a place to settle, as leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher had purportedly promised asylum to the exiled emperor, but after winning the 1979 election and becoming Prime Minister, she did not keep her promise to the dying Shah. A few years after the Shah’s death, it was Thatcher’s American counterpart and ally Ronald Reagan who would let the widowed Shahbanou settle with her children in the United States.

Another person betrayed by Thatcher was Freddie Laker, the airline mogul who revolutionized air travel in the 1960’s. The commendable entrepreneur was certainly someone that Thatcher wanted in a service industry economy, but Laker was at odds with the state-run British Airways and took them to court in the United States: rather than help a man who supported her politically, Thatcher kept her eye on privatization and wanting British Airways free of legal troubles, she reportedly got President Reagan’s Justice Department to throw out Laker’s case. Laker was ruined, but British Airways was privatized in 1987.

However, an ally that Thatcher did not betray was Augusto Pinochet, who in the early years of the Blair government had been arrested in London and whose case for extradition to Spain was argued among the Law Lords in the House of Lords (at the time, Britain did not have a Supreme Court). Herself no longer in the Commons and her party no longer in Government, Thatcher tried to sway sympathy on behalf of a brutal man whose legacy in his country is as divisive than Thatcher’s is in Britain. For a century that included the likes of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin, Pinochet might not make the top five list of mass-murdering scum of the twentieth century, but there is also no dispute that atrocities occurred during his rule in Chile, which began with a 1973 coup supported by the CIA; indeed, before he died, Pinochet himself admitted that he had responsibility for those atrocities. However, there is also no dispute that Chile under Pinochet had helped Britain in the Falklands War and it was out of respect for that help that Thatcher argued on behalf of this man whose rule over Chile was perhaps as brutal as that of the Argentine junta from which she liberated the Falkland Islands. That Thatcher chose to be loyal to a dictator to whom she owed political favors rather than a dying head of state in exile or a struggling businessman seeking an honest deal indicates her pragmatism as a politician. It also indicates the ugliness and cold-bloodedness of politics: it is an arena not for the faint of heart or a person of lesser mettle.

If one dares to look closer to home and hearth, one sees Thatcher’s twins Mark and Carol. Mark, evidently his mother’s favorite, seems to have fallen short of his mother’s dynamic persona and even lacks his father’s quiet decency as a businessman: involved in a failed coup, he was deported from South Africa and has been barred from settling in the United States and Monaco. Carol, overlooked by her mother in favor of her brother, managed to make something of a career for herself, but unlike Nigella Lawson, who succeeded at coming out of her political father’s shadow, she will never be free of her mother. One pauses and considers the children of Ronald Reagan, and how his older son Michael, a respected figure in conservative media, and daughter Maureen, who took part in Republican politics while her father was in the White House, contrasted with younger son Ronald Jr., who hosted Saturday Night Live in 1985 and wrote for Playboy, and Patty, who wrote a Mommy Dearest-type book about her parents and posed for Playboy: Thatcher’s children seem to be in the middle, of trying to honor their parents and succeeding at embarrassing them. Comedian Russell Brand expressed pity for the Thatcher children, but I think Carol’s philosophical observations about her family are more useful for us: the marriage of her parents was a parallel partnership and after years of working on their careers it would be nonsensical to expect their roles as grandparents to make up for their years of being distant sometimes even absent parents. It is quite sad to reflect on that, when one considers the human cost children pay when their parents’ focus on careers. This is not an attack on working women so much as a consideration of the human price that is paid for ambition and success.

When Sarah Palin came on the national scene in 2008, many American conservatives were eager to think of the Alaskan governor as a modern-day Maggie: this indicates a longing for that sort of confident leadership which Margaret Thatcher provided rather than any affirmation of Palin’s political aptitude. However, before one dismisses Palin, we ought to think again of Thatcher’s children versus Palin’s children: in contrast to Mark and Carol, it can be readily believed that the Palin children will not be so decidedly distant from their mother when she dies.

Let us again consider the legacy and example of Margaret Thatcher. The woman’s life was impaired by a series of strokes and she died in a suite at the Ritz hotel in London and her family was not at her side. Nigel Lawson noted that the Prime Minister was not “clubbable”, that outside of reading on subjects like religion, she did not have a hobby. Tory MP Edwina Currie mentioned how Thatcher once said that “home was a place where you go when there’s no work left to be done”, but for Margaret Thatcher, there was always work to be done. Many biographers discussed how she hated to go on vacations; visiting the Queen at Balmoral in the Scottish countryside was always dreaded. Her focus was on work, and when she was ousted from party leadership, that focus was taken from her. Watching interviews she gave just months after leaving power, one is struck by how shaken she was; interviews she gave years later, the anger and bitterness are quite evident. Sometimes people who have lost their focus turn to hobbies or recreation, but as both Lawson and Currie observed, she was not capable of trying either. Being practical, she wrote her memoirs and then went on the lecture circuit, a lucrative option worthy of a world leader whose politics helped others to become millionaires, but one that also allowed for wounds to fester.

Of course, to be bitter and hold grudges are usually things done by people prone to look back on the past: this does not seem to quite fit with the Margaret Thatcher portrayed in the first volume of her authorized biography, written by Charles Moore and published in Britain just weeks after her death. In those pages, we saw the evolution of the girl that rose from the lower middle class, a woman of aspiration and talent, and of determination that helped, in part, to overcome whatever native insecurities she had. I have observed that ambitious people are not prone to reflect on past failures and ask "what if" questions: they move forward with an eye on the future. Such people are not above shearing themselves free of the past, even if that means distancing themselves from old friends, even family. These people are often labeled "cold", but that is only part of it: they are focused, and what is not their target risks being dismissed as distraction and may well be left in the cold. Without the goals and targets of a career, then much for Thatcher may have seemed cold; hence, the bitterness, and again, the human cost for ambition and success. I hope that Moore will shed further light on this matter in the authorized biography's final volume.

Thatcher’s legacy provides an example of conviction and confidence, her utilization of charm and glamour, and her strength of character: I want to honor all these and if possible, try to replicate them in my life. However, her life was also a lesson in caution: just like Andrew Breitbart did not take care of his health, Margaret Thatcher did not take care of hers and to fight as long as she did, and to be as angry, frustrated, and embittered as she so clearly was, it need not be a surprise that she suffered a series of strokes. When one takes up the fight in life, whatever cause to which we commit, one cannot ignore recreation, hobbies, or family. Snide leftists, generally prone to ridiculing matters like family values, are quick to point out that the Iron Lady died a sick and lonely woman: while I deplore their sanctimony, being mindful that such sentiments come in part from those envious that Thatcher achieved power as a Tory and without the sisterhood of women (she was not, as Currie observed "a sister") and that she was middle class, I can acknowledge their observation. Rather than condemn the late Baroness Thatcher, which I will not do because I admire her character and her politics, I will thank her for her exemplary good fight and public life and for the cautionary example of her bitterness and private death.

Over the past year, I mourned Margaret Thatcher's passing, but life is for the living, and now more than ever, I also grieve the lack of obvious successors to her greatness, both in Britain and in America. I still hope that we will soon see a time for a new era of leadership in the cause of liberty; of sound law and order for the protection of life and property; to honor tradition and piety but reject snide sanctimony and hypocrisy; for the celebration of art and beauty; and for the advancement of human heroism. As a gay man with right-of-center political sympathies, I must be ready to expect there to be discord and I take satisfaction in knowing that the Apple of Discord is the fruit which Margaret Thatcher, as Pallas of Westminster, Bearded Venus on the Thames, and Juno Britannia, left for us to claim.

Icon of Violet Eyes, 2014

This is a re-post of a blog from May 2011: I’m revisiting it to the mark the third anniversary of the passing of Elizabeth Taylor.

This is not an elegy or a lament: it is closer to a hymn about a star's life and her impact on mine. While that might sound like idolatry, I counter in the text that for me she is an icon, not an idol.

I have made only a few minor alterations (e.g., the diamond that was seen on Here’s Lucy; Colin Farrell; some purging of comments of a lesser quality which seem to be nearly permanent fixtures of my style): all the themes and more than three quarters of the original text remain.

Also, as there is a lot of Elizabeth Taylor footage to be found on the web, especially in YouTube, I have cautiously put of a few links throughout the text.

“Life is for the living” I try to say, but some legends are larger than life, even after they are gone.

Here’s to you, Dame Elizabeth.

Phil The Fan

Three years ago, the death of Elizabeth Taylor was one of the biggest stories in the world, even trumping events in North Africa and the Middle East (i.e., the so-called “Arab Spring”). For many not well versed in Hollywood history, this might have been a surprise, because before her death, Taylor had become best known for being an AIDS activist and the eccentric friend of the late (and more eccentric) Michael Jackson: now, we see the likes of Irish actor Colin Farrell participating in her legacy (which I find endearing and welcome). For older generations and movie buffs like myself, the magnitude of Taylor’s death was no surprise. However, I should explain that when it comes to the late Dame Elizabeth Taylor, I’m not simply a movie buff. As I have told others, I studied her.


I must first consider the cruel but hilarious jokes that Joan Rivers made, starting in the late 1970’s and into the 1980's, when Taylor was married to John Warner and had ballooned in weight, especially after he became a Senator representing the state of Virginia in Washington, D.C. Rivers furthered her career with those jokes at Taylor’s expense and while they were not “kind”, I still chuckle at them today and reflect upon the observation that most (if not all) humor is based on pain. (Before one gets sanctimonious, reflect that even after she makes public service announcements against bullying, Kathy Griffin still jokes about Clay Aiken; she made fun of him before he came out and she makes fun of him after he came out. I do laugh at Kathy Griffin, but I always remember that she’s a bully.) And since those Joan Rivers’ jokes were so on target at the time, I could not understand why Taylor was so often declared the most beautiful woman in the world.


However, by the mid-1980’s, Taylor had lost the weight and regained her beauty, albeit in a more seasoned and mature incarnation. She appeared on television in commercials for her fragrance, Passion, the first in a series of scents that would vastly increase the film star’s wealth. She was no longer a ready target for Joan Rivers. It was also around this time that Taylor was assuming the role of AIDS activist. Most of her obituaries kept mentioning that it was the failing health and death of Rock Hudson, Taylor’s co-star in Giant and The Mirror Crack’d, which got her involved in fighting AIDS. That’s not quite true: Taylor was fighting AIDS before the news of Hudson broke, and her former daughter-in-law Aileen had also contracted the disease. With family and friends stricken, this made the fight personal for the film legend.


It was also in 1987 when I seriously tried to write my first fantasy novel for a school project and was contemplating making a favorite character have violet eyes: I wasn’t sure that I could do it, as I was worried that it would wreck the suspension of disbelief which I felt was necessary for my story. Then I read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia for sophomore English and noticed that a Norwegian character had violet eyes and so I discussed this with my art teacher, the project’s sponsor. My teacher said, “Yes, there are violet eyes: Elizabeth Taylor has violet eyes.” Here was the beginning of my interest in the star.


The following year I heard about the Debbie-Eddie-Liz biz, which happened thirty years prior to that. Anytime any of those three stars were mentioned, I would leap to hear more: even taping an episode of The Today Show that was doing a series on Taylor, including an interview with her fourth husband, Eddie Fisher. Looking back on that interview, what I remember most is Fisher denying that his two ex-wives were ever friends: an episode taped during the final season of The Oprah Winfrey Show indicated that Fisher was wrong, as both Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher were Winfrey’s guests and revealed that Taylor and Reynolds were in fact friends. One clearly has the impression that Taylor regretted her association with Fisher. I think of Jackie Kennedy commenting that America would always think the best of her, “even if (Jackie) eloped with Eddie Fisher”.


In 1991, Elizabeth Taylor entered what would be her eighth and final marriage. In a ceremony held on Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, the Oscar-winning movie star married construction worker Larry Fortensky, whom she met at the Betty Ford clinic. A few years later I would encounter an essay of the event written by William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of the conservative magazine National Review. The right wing wit was devastatingly acerbic in his observations of the event. People left of center might begrudgingly acknowledge Buckley’s command of the English language but would bewail his verbal attacks on the wedding. The wedding’s celebrant was Marianne Williamson, who was just months away from appearing on Oprah to promote her book A Return to Love, where she provided commentary and observations on the New Age text, A Course in Miracles. With words utilized much in New Age and New Thought circles and in A Course in Miracles, Williamson spoke of love and eternity between the star and her new blue collar spouse (not that anyone could hear them over the din of helicopters trying to crash event--such was the circus of the ceremony), sentiments that could not be taken seriously by the devoutly Catholic Buckley: if Taylor was meant to be forever with Fortensky, so ordained from before their births, before time, then what about all those other marriages prior to this ceremony? Lest one dismiss Buckley as judgmental (which he was, but he also appeared on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In), observe that he married his wife Patricia the same year that Elizabeth Taylor married her first husband Conrad “Nicky” Hilton: Bill Buckley’s first, last, and only marriage would endure until he was widowed by Pat’s death in 2007, whereas Liz Taylor’s eighth and final marriage would last five years and end in divorce eleven years before by death actually did the Buckleys part.


Elizabeth Taylor turned 60 in 1992 and she did a several appearances on television that year, including Oprah and The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. I saw the latter, which was in its final months of having Carson as its host, and it was entertaining to see her banter with him, although wearing a cross and a black leather outfit seemed a bit out of place for a Jewish convert turning sixty. A month or so later she appeared on the Academy Awards broadcast with her Cat on a Hot Tin Roof co-star Paul Newman to announce the nominees for Best Picture: I remember her breathy voice, described as part Beverly Hills, part British, saying “and last, but not least, a Beauty and the Beast.” While Silence of the Lambs won that year, I supported the Disney film, and enjoyed hearing Elizabeth Taylor mentioning it, even if she was reading someone else’s words.


That year I became a junior at the state university and during the Fall Semester I discovered Camille Paglia. I eagerly bought Paglia’s two books then in print, her magnum opus Sexual Personae and a collection of essays, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays. The latter included “Elizabeth Taylor: Hollywood’s Pagan Queen”, which Paglia originally wrote for Penthouse magazine, and in her delightfully transgressive style, she celebrated Taylor’s part in the so-called “Scandal of the Fifties,” because for Paglia, this movie star represented the elemental power of woman, something that the professor and critic argued current feminism ignored, and as a descendant of Italian immigrants from Naples, Camille despised what the 1950’s blonde ideal which Debbie Reynolds represented (recently, Paglia has admitted coming to appreciate Reynolds’ comedic talents, but when she reflects on the 1950’s, wow, what a grudge!) and felt that Taylor was bringing in a new wave of sensuality into American culture, prefiguring the 1960’s. (Perhaps less sensual but more wholesome was Elizabeth Taylor’s two appearances on The Simpsons that season: first as baby Maggie—just in time for November sweeps—and later in the season finale as herself, missing out on appearing in Krusty’s comeback special—just in time for May sweeps.)


Over Christmas break that year, I was staying at my parents’ place and saw Elizabeth Taylor’s star-making performance in National Velvet, where she dazzled with her passion and determination, her violet eyes made intensely sparkling by the magic of Technicolor. She was only 12 when she made that film, but you could see this was the girl that would grow up to do the White Diamonds commercials, “These have always brought me luck.” A few months later I would see Taylor sit with Larry King for a special interview on TNT, where she discussed, among many things, her fight against AIDS, saying something like “Without homosexuals, there would be no art, there would be no literature, there would be no poetry, there would be no Broadway, there would be no Hollywood.”


Also at this time, I purchased Beautiful Loser, a biography on Montgomery Clift. I was 21 and seeking a role model, a hero, and thought that Clift would be ideal, as he was always well represented in those lists of “famous gay men” and was like myself, born in Omaha. However, in reading that book, I found that while Clift was a sympathetic figure for sure, he was not especially comforting or heroic and not someone to be my role model icon. In contrast, his friend and co-star in A Place in the Sun and later Raintree County and Suddenly, Last Summer, Elizabeth Taylor, she came across as this amazing force of nature, much in line with star that was the subject of Paglia’s essay in Penthouse. Taylor saved Clift’s life after his 1956 car accident, pulling out his teeth from his throat, cradling his head on her lap, and covering his face with her scarf, and as they waited for the ambulance, she yelled threats and profanities at the press to leave him alone: that was a fierce and beautiful example of loyalty and friendship, and to my mind, a Hollywood pietà that foreshadowed her fight against AIDS, a disease which probably would have killed Clift if he had lived into the 1980’s.


Nineteen ninety three was also the year that Elizabeth Taylor won her third Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, which she shared with Audrey Hepburn, who died a few months before the telecast. It was Angela Lansbury, a fellow World War II English evacuee and Taylor’s co-star from National Velvet and The Mirror Crack’d, who introduced the film star, saying that yes, Elizabeth’s eyes were indeed violet. Taylor, dressed in bright yellow gown which accentuated her much celebrated bust, gave an acceptance speech in which she not only discussed her own fight against AIDS, she also honored the late Hepburn, who had fought on behalf of malnourished children, especially those in war torn parts of the world: Hepburn was now in heaven working against children suffering, Taylor said, but Elizabeth herself promised to remain here on earth fighting against AIDS. She kept that promise for another 18 years.


That summer, I started seeing more Elizabeth Taylor movies: I loved Suddenly, Last Summer and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? These two films were black and white and did not showcase how beautiful she looked in color (although the photography in Suddenly, Last Summer seemed to sizzle with silver and gave the star’s fair complexion and black hair a burning glow): one merely has to look at publicity stills from the 1950’s and 1960’s, even the 1980’s after she lost that weight, to see how beautiful she was. The glossy red lips, the porcelain skin, the raven hair, and those eyes: think the song “Close to You”—not just golden starlight in eyes of blue, but just enough green, amber, and hazel to make the eyes evoke hues found in petals of lilacs and African violets, with the dazzle of a Cartier necklace of sapphire and amethyst (the latter fittingly Taylor’s birthstone) laid on deep purple velvet. Seeing the stills and watching films like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I now could see why she was considered the most beautiful woman in the world.


Also in the summer of 1993, one of Ted Turner’s cable networks started a show called Bad Movies We Love, and the first film it featured was BUtterfield 8, the one for which Taylor won her first Academy Award, but one that she also hated (fittingly, Camille Paglia and my mother love it) and readily admitted that she won the Oscar due to her nearly fatal bout with pneumonia and that Shirley MacLaine should have won that year. I sat through it, and while I found it to be nearly as bad as its reputation, the opening scene of BUtterfield 8 did have some entertainment value that was not all camp. Taylor, playing a call girl, wakes up alone in a client’s apartment, starts strutting around in a shimmering white silk slip, tries to smoke a cigar, brushes her teeth with liquor, refuses the money left to cover her torn dress (ruined, no doubt, during the previous night’s transaction) and writes “No Sale” in lipstick on the mirror, leaving the New York penthouse wearing a fur coat belonging to her client’s wife: not a single line is spoken until she gets into a cab and offers to double the driver’s tip for a cigarette.


During that summer, in the gossip portion of an episode of Joan Rivers’ daytime talk show, an exchange that occurred at a recent showbiz event was related. Hungarian-born Zsa Zsa Gabor, a socialite and actress who married more times than Elizabeth Taylor did, was spewing insults about the latter, who had yet to arrive: at separate times, Gabor and Taylor had each married into the Hilton family. Then the room went silent when Elizabeth did appear and walked past Gabor: Taylor spoke not a word, but apparently knew full well that Gabor had been insulting her just minutes earlier. Fuming with Magyar wrath, Gabor threw a crystal ashtray at Taylor, which missed the actress and shattered on the floor. Elizabeth stopped walking, turned to see the shards of glass on the floor, and then left the room, always remaining totally quiet. For me, that represents an example of Taylor’s strength and confidence as evidenced by composure.


During these months, I also went to the library and checked out several books on Elizabeth Taylor, later even her own memoir at the university library, and during the Fall Semester, I added Cleopatra and a few others to the list of Taylor films to see (these were the days before Netflix, when one was limited to whatever Blockbuster and the local rental stores could offer). I was even able to tape her A&E Biography: it was before Biography had its own channel, and this 1993 edition was just one hour long, while a later version would be two hours long. Clearly, despite the fact that my official major in the College of Arts and Sciences was English, I was really studying Elizabeth Taylor and my slogan at the time was her flippant reply in 1958 to Hedda Harper, “What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?” (Honestly I nearly always do sleep alone, but I really resent those who expect me to do that).

Even more monumental to me personally, in October 1993 I purchased a print of the famous black and white publicity shot that the star did for the film Suddenly, Last Summer. Utilized by the studio for film posters and trailers (often with the caption, “Suddenly, last summer, Cathy knew she was being used for something evil”: in the film, Taylor’s character Cathy was used for something evil) and celebrated in Paglia’s Penthouse essay, the photograph shows Taylor wearing a white bathing suit, sitting on the beach in a kneeling pose provocative for the late 1950’s, arms planted in the sand, breasts heaving forward, seemingly being offered but cloaked, her face looking at the camera with eyes that are commanding and enthralling: it is a captivating gaze that is part of a smoldering sensuality, which even as a gay man (or perhaps, especially as a gay man), I find fascinating. I purchased the photograph from a souvenir shop at Union Station in Washington, D.C., at a time before making such purchases on eBay could a daily occurrence; the photograph hangs in my bedroom, an icon of desire, as in desiring and being desired, and the desire to be desired.

Months later, after buying an issue of Us magazine (which was then a monthly rather than a weekly periodical) where Elizabeth Taylor was interviewed about her jewelry collection (nine years later, the actress would write a book about her relationship with jewelry, pages filled with color plates of dazzling baubles, including many given as gifts to her by Mike Todd, Richard Burton, and Michael Jackson), I found a tome that listed the mailing addresses for celebrities and got the address for Elizabeth Taylor (I also got the address for Ethan Hawke: more on that one later). I wrote to the star, praising her film and charity work and then asked for an autographed picture. The response to this letter came in the form of a sales catalogue for a line of jewelry that the star launched with Avon. Also included was a contemporary black and white photograph of the movie star holding her beloved Maltese dog Sugar: it was a mass produced signature, not signed by hand but a copy of an original. This photograph is presently in my living room. (I also wrote to Ethan Hawke and got a response from his grandmother, but, no disrespect to Hawke or his grandmother, that's just not as exciting as an autographed photograph from Elizabeth Taylor.)


Nineteen ninety-four was when the United States saw Elizabeth Taylor return to the movies after fourteen years: 1980’s The Mirror Crack’d was the last film American audiences had seen her, playing a part originally intended for Natalie Wood (Taylor actually did star in Franco Zeffirelli’s Young Toscanini, an Italian film from 1988, but it was not released in North America). This return would be the live action adaptation of The Flintstones, with Taylor as Wilma’s mother Pearl Slaghoople; it remains the only time that I have seen Elizabeth Taylor on the big screen and it was the last film for the cinema that she would make. In reading the promotional material for the motion picture, I discovered that the actress’s agent was Morgan Mason, son to the late actor James Mason, husband to recording artist Belinda Carlisle, and father of actor and gay activist James Duke Mason; Mason also played Taylor’s son in The Sandpiper. A year later, I wrote an article for the university’s newspaper, where I discussed Belinda Carlisle’s single “Summer Rain” and compared the song to Elizabeth Taylor’s performance in Suddenly, Last Summer. (Admittedly, it was something of a stretch: Suddenly, Last Summer had Taylor play a woman gone mad by the violent and mysterious death of her cousin; “Summer Rain” had Carlisle sing passionately with grief over her last memory of dancing with her boyfriend before he went to war). I also noted how Mason’s wife, like Taylor, was wrongly dismissed by critics and remembered more for physical beauty, charity work, and related how the press focused on the stars’ perceived “shrewish personalities” rather than their respective talents.


A few weeks after I saw The Flintstones, I went to Oxford for a session of summer school. Being an Anglophile, I found many things to do and see in England, but unfortunately I was unable to make it to the Hampstead part of London where the film star was born. However, I was able to purchase two books about her (Sheridan Morely’s Elizabeth Taylor: A Celebration, which followed Taylor as a film actress more than a celebrity and focused her English sensibility, and Alexander Walker’s biography Elizabeth: The Life of Elizabeth Taylor) at one of Oxford’s many used bookstores; again, at a time before eBay, such purchases were not as easy then as now. (Of course, remembering how strong the pound was compared to the dollar, and how expensive it was to ship books with other souvenirs and gifts, these books were not bargains, but remain beloved.) One night I was even able to watch the American Film Institute honor Elizabeth Taylor, a curious but wonderful thing to watch on British television: I remember laughing with a female Pakistani student at clip of the film star’s appearance with Richard Burton on Here’s Lucy, where the hapless Lucille Ball tries on a newly acquired diamond (usually identified as the former Krupp diamond, now known as the Elizabeth Taylor Diamond, but the pear shape suggests that it was the stone formerly known as the Cartier-Burton Diamond) and it gets the ring stuck on her finger, just in time for a press conference, so the pale Lucy hides behind the tanned Taylor and presents the diamond on a hand that obviously not the movie star’s hand.


Upon returning from the United Kingdom, I started the 1994 Fall Semester. It was a grueling time in many ways, with evening classes several nights of the week. It was also the time when I received a “Dear John” letter: without getting into the specifics, suffice it to say that my heart hurt and I read it right before I had to make a presentation for a class on Milton. In the midst of what was for me emotional devastation, I remembered Elizabeth Taylor’s performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, noting that she had been widowed during the film’s production, when third husband Mike Todd was killed in a plane crash (Full disclosure: I also remembered Katharine Hepburn’s performance in The Lion in Winter, which she did right after Spencer Tracy’s death, but I remembered Taylor’s Maggie the Cat more than Hepburn’s Eleanor of Aquitaine). Surely, not only could I rise above this pain, perhaps I could thrive because of it: in short, Elizabeth Taylor inspired me. Indeed, that night I read the opening lines of Book VII of Paradise Lost, in which the blind Milton invokes the muse Urania: I played a track from a CD from the Chapel at Hampton Court Palace, lit a candle, turned the lights off, and read the passages by a book light. In the friendly ambiance from the candle, the room was still as I, supported by sublime period music, read lines from the English classic. When I came to a key passage where Milton relates his darkness and desolation as a blind poet bereft of inspiration, I blew out the candle and stopped the CD, which rendered dark save the book light, while my voice, no longer supported by the glorious music but stirred by the text as well as my own heartache, continued to read the poem. It was magic: Milton struggled for Urania's inspriation, but I found an exemplary icon in Elizabeth Taylor, the heartbroken widow whose performance garnered an Academy Award nomination, to encourage me. I got an A for the presentation and for the class, thanks in part to Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the Cat.


At the above memory, I must stop to reflect the value of Elizabeth Taylor as an icon: I stress that I say “icon” and not “idol”. An idol simply stands on its pedestal and expects those below to worship it. In contrast, an icon is there for the mind, the heart, the spirit, and the imagination engage with its symbols, to take one in faith to lessons and truths beyond the physical world. An idol does nothing and we are expected to worship it; an icon is there to teach us and guide us. At a gay men’s discussion group in the 1990’s, I remember a graduate student in language dismiss the idea of gay men admiring female superstars, finding it silly to celebrate women who were mostly drug addicts (one thinks of Absolutely Fabulous, when Eddie slams her ex-husband and his gay lover for fawning over Patsy’s sister Jackie: “Any bitch an’ a drug habit and you’re anybody’s, aren’t you?”). As far as that goes, he might have made a point, but I found that by remembering Taylor’s agony (much worse than my own) and the Oscar nominated performance that she gave during her suffering, I could sustain myself and guide my actions through heartache, however juvenile and petty it was in contrast to the star’s widowhood. For me, that was Elizabeth Taylor as an icon, and that icon helped me at a painful time; that a cynical language grad student could not find any value from a female star as an icon is hardly a surprise.


Around the time of my graduation from university, NBC did a miniseries about Elizabeth Taylor, starring Sherilyn Fenn as the legendary star: aside from the pensive William McNamara as Montgomery Clift, it was a mostly forgettable production. As for the real Elizabeth Taylor, despite some painful hip surgeries and a final separation and divorce (Larry Fortensky was sent packing out of Casa Taylor), she had remained active enough to appear as herself in four CBS situation comedies on a Monday night in 1996, promoting her new fragrance Black Pearls. Months later she was interviewed for The Advocate magazine, where she talked about her fight against AIDS, discussed her thoughts about gay marriage and adoption, and even a little about her spirituality. I was so excited about the interview that I wrote an email to the magazine, expressing my admiration for the star, and it was then that I first used the name "Philip McNeal": "McNeal" is a Celtic variant to a very Scandinavian surname. When The Advocate published my email, I decided that "Philip McNeal" (later "Phil McNiel") was as good as any other literary name I could use.


By the end of the year it was announced that Elizabeth Taylor had a brain tumor that would need surgery, but before that would happen, a special celebrating her 65th birthday was recorded. Stars ranging from Hugh Grant, Elizabeth Hurley, David Schwimmer (Friends was still a big show at the time), Cher, Patti LaBelle, Carol Burnett, Shirley MacLaine, Christine Baranski (who had won an Emmy just over a year before for her supporting role on Cybil), Michael Caine, Kevin Bacon (Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was then a popular game for Generation X), Rod Stewart, John Travolta, Madonna, and Michael Jackson honored the legend. When ABC broadcast the special, one could see the icon was clearly ailing but was nonetheless sweet and appreciative of the kind words that people said. Months after the benign tumor was removed, Taylor would appear in the press again, now with white hair, and when she was interviewed by Barbara Walters in 1999, her speech slowed but her humor still earthy. In 2000, her royal namesake Queen Elizabeth II named the movie star Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (it was the same investiture in which Julie Andrews was also made a Dame)


The following year, Taylor would play an talent agent for the television movie These Old Broads, written by her former stepdaughter Carrie Fisher (who described her father's ex-wife in a 1995 episode of Lifetime's Intimate Portrait as "Black Beauty--no, the other horse--Liz Taylor!") and co-starring Carrie’s mother Debbie Reynolds along with Taylor’s other Hollywood lady friends Shirley MacLaine and Joan Collins: while funny in parts, given the cast and the writer, the show was not as campy as one would hope (prior to its broadcast, I told a friend about the show, to which she quipped that it sounded “gayer than Gay Gayerson”). However, it did enable Reynolds and Taylor, speaking lines written by Carrie, to play out the acrimony of the Debbie-Eddie-Liz biz for the public, where they discussed a ex-lover they shared, “Freddie Hunter” (get it? Freddie rhymes with Eddie, and a Hunter is something like a Fisher, but also nearly rhymes with it too. Get it?); while not likely to have been especially cathartic for either star, it meant something to the audience (and one would hope, something to Carrie also).


The movie was not well received by Eddie Fisher, who watched the show for some program like Entertainment Tonight and was very dismissive of it, finding the Freddie Hunter scene to be spiteful (but again, remember that over a decade ago, he denied that his two ex-wives were ever friends: I think this was something he believed so it was easier to live with himself, but I could be wrong). One may even find it more difficult to have much sympathy for the old crooner, as a year and a half before These Old Broads, he had wrote the autobiography Been There Done That, (his second autobiography—think about it, it was his second autobiography!) in which he gave sordid details about his sex life: not only did he talk about the women in his life, he related that during le Scandale at the Cleopatra filming in Rome, Richard Burton offered him oral sex (at least one reviewer noted that Fisher makes no mention as to whether or not he accepted the Welsh actor’s offer). Burton himself, who died in 1984, admitted that he had homosexual dalliances, which is hardly surprising for someone from the British theatrical world (folks, even British super Conservative hero Winston Churchill had gay sex!). In response to news of the book, Taylor is reported to have said, “Have you ever noticed that he is the only ex-husband I don't talk about?”


After the telecast of These Old Broads, we saw less of Elizabeth Taylor. Yes, she had a few more fragrances to release: in fact, over half of the millions of dollars of the actress’s estate came from her fragrance business rather than from acting residuals (and given her lavish lifestyle, especially in the 1960’s, it’s amazing that she still had $50 million dollars by the mid-1990’s: it makes a difference to make films in Italy and France while you retain Swiss residence when you have dual American and British citizenships—some might consider that tax evasion, but that's how she was able remain part of the 1% and still fight AIDS: it's not about what you earn, it’s about what you keep!). Aside from the occasional interviews on The Larry King Show and AIDS events, audiences were limited to appearances such as Taylor's getting honored at the Kennedy Center and a guest role as God's girlfriend Sarah on God, the Devil and Bob.


Just because she wasn’t in the news so much didn’t mean that she was a hermit. A few months after Taylor’s passing, Vanity Fair ran an article relating some of the star’s last adventures, which included swimming with sharks in Hawaii. Other adventures of course included men: some early evenings, before it would get busy, she would visit gay bars. Such nights she could be found sharing a watermelon martini (while one might say “So much for Betty Ford!” read on) with a twink or gym bunny and answer probing questions like “Which of your husbands had the biggest dick?” (to which, the article said, Elizabeth laughed heartily and exclaimed “I can’t believe you asked me that—but I’m so glad you did!” Sadly for the unseemly curious, the article did not reveal whether or not a husband’s name was given). Such episodes seem sad in contrast to the glories of the Mike Todd and Richard Burton years, but remembering the affection Taylor had for gay men (and many gay men had for her), I would like to think these outings gave her some levity.


Not only did the legend she spend time with patrons of gay bars, she also struck a friendship with Colin Farrell, whom she met when one of her many hospitalizations coincided with the birth of his youngest son. In fact, their friendship had become so close that the Gaelic star spoke at Elizabeth’s funeral (to which, by instructions in her will, her coffin was 15 minutes late). In the three years since her death, Farrell has been involved in auctions and fundraisers associated with The Elizabeth Taylor Foundation: Colin has become a worthy chapter in her legacy.


So, aside from a sad (and dare I admit it, pathetic) episode in my personal life, how has Dame Elizabeth Taylor been an icon for me? As any sensible reader can infer, I am not some red-hot lover and it is unlikely that I will get married eight times, even less likely get married to a hotel magnate’s spoiled son, two British bisexuals, two Jews, a Republican, and a construction worker (well, I could see myself marrying a few from that list—some bisexual Republicans actually do make great kissers). I did not pursue acting as a career, vocation, or hobby, nor am I particularly adept at sales or perfumery. I was born in Omaha, not London: as an Anglophile, I give her gets points for an English birth, but millions have been born in England and I don’t revere them. My physical features favor central and Northern Europe (meaning fair complexion and light eyes) rather than Black Irish (divinely smoldering features, some of which the fair Elizabeth shares with the dark Colin: I don’t share those features!): clearly my connection with her was not regional or ethnic camaraderie.


Could the connection be religious or spiritual? I was raised Lutheran and even before crossing the Tiber I had long enjoyed a rapport with many Catholics (devoutly observant, selectively observant, and even lapsed), while Taylor was raised Christian Scientist but converted to Judaism in her late 20’s. Now I’ve long admired the Jewish people and the state of Israel, but I am too attached to Christmas and Easter to quit the goyim: I’m not Jewish, I’m just cut that way. Many say that Elizabeth converted for third husband Mike Todd or for fourth husband Eddie Fisher, who were both Jewish, but she herself denied this. Her Jewish sympathies date as far back as her childhood in England, when the Conservative politician Victor Cazalet, a family friend, assumed the unofficial role of Elizabeth's godfather: Cazalet was not only a devout Christian Scientist, he was also a Zionist. Furthermore, in her memoir from the 1960’s, Taylor spoke about always wanting to be “a Jewess.”

Now consider that word: "Jewess". To the modern sensibility, conditioned by relentless P.C. propaganda, that word is dated, sexist and quite likely offensive, but Taylor’s selection of it underscores her pre-feminist perspective that men and women are different. To me the word also evokes the image of a pre-modern woman decked with jewelry in some North African or Near or Middle Eastern setting, a vision with lavish style and exotic glamour: that could be Elizabeth Taylor, just as the notion of always wanting to please the man in her life was Elizabeth Taylor.


Some have argued that being Jewish for the star was perhaps a matter more social than spiritual. In fact, I saw several messages posted online by professed Jews who insisted that the Taylor was not really Jewish because 1) the conversion rite was Reform; and 2) she was not what they would consider a practicing Jew. However, not only did Elizabeth clearly think of herself as being Jewish, the Arab League went so far as to ban her films because she was Jewish and supported “the Zionist entity” (i.e., Israel); in fact, the Nasser regime refused to let Cleopatra be filmed in Egypt. Some argue that she became Jewish to “fit in” with the Hollywood establishment and society better, but starting with Cleopatra, a production for the 20th Century Fox Studio (the one studio led by a WASP, the Nebraska-born Daryl Zanuck), most of her films after 1960 (when her MGM contract ended with the completion of BUtterfield 8) were done in Europe, not Hollywood. She also raised a lot of money for Israel and even offered herself for a possible hostage exchange during the Entebbe crisis in Uganda in 1976: the exchange never occurred, but she did play the mother of one of the hostages in the made-for-television movie Victory at Entebbe. In fact, even National Review praised Taylor for her support for the Israeli cause as well as the fight against AIDS. Still, I note that after she started fighting against AIDS in the mid-1980’s, Elizabeth did not seem to be as engaged in the Zionist cause, though she continued to identify herself as Jewish (or rather perhaps, as a Jewess).


When Elizabeth Taylor would discuss spiritual matters, I detected echoes of her Christian Science background: positive thinking; passionate conviction for health, beauty, and even love; a belief that G-d was everywhere and need not be worshiped only in a temple. These are not ideas exclusive to Christian Science, but could be suitable for a Christian Scientist embracing a tolerant and inclusive Reform Judaism, the movement that the actress embraced in her 1959 conversion. As one notes in her self-esteem and diet book Elizabeth Takes Off, the movie star believed that for change to occur, one must first take action. I found this to possibly incongruous with the 12 Steps, which stress the helplessness of the addict until he admits that he is powerless and turns to a Higher Power. To take charge, isn’t that the Buddhist teaching espoused by Tina Turner, particularly as portrayed by Angela Bassett in What’s Love Got to Do With It? Or the words by Harrison Ford when he said, “The Force is within you: Force yourself!” Perhaps, but I thought of another female star that converted to Judaism who also had a problem with addiction: Nell Carter. During an interview with Tom Snyder, Carter spoke about how many people in recovery would credit G-d for everything, but she argued something along the lines of “G-d is not going to do anything unless you do something.” I am not a theologian, but I find that to be a perspective more in line with Judaism than with 12 Steps or the more Calvinist forms of Christianity in which man is the helpless agent always dependent on the decrees and whims of an All-Powerful Deity. It could be an approach to recovery that worked for these two stars: one must take action before G-d or whatever Higher Power is invoked will act.


I think again of the Oscar acceptance speech in 1993, when Elizabeth Taylor spoke of Audrey Hepburn in heaven, fighting for children on earth, while she herself would remain on the planet to fight AIDS: I’ll readily admit this was sentimental and not really especially Talmudic, but I remember watching her on that stage, looking radiant and tall (despite being only 5’2”), speaking those words before a world-wide audience. Here was this film actress, commanding the cameras’ gaze and with her voice and eyes, she was evangelical, in a way a Protestant rarely is, with this heroic statement of faith and embattled courage in this life on earth: one may remember the dead, and it is good to honor those who are departed who did good deeds in this vale of tears, but life is for the living and the fight must go on. I might be an ignorant Gentile, but I think that night Elizabeth Taylor presented to us the example of a strong woman of passion and conscience, a credit to any religion or creed, but I give that credit to the religion and identity which the star chose, and she chose to be Jewish.


A few weeks after her death, I was able to purchase two Special Edition Elizabeth Taylor White Diamond Barbies: the first doll for display and the second doll for storage. I then purchased a White Diamonds fragrance gift set. Embracing my limited creativity, I went to a crafts store to gather a doll stand, an acrylic doll case, purple and blue marbles, silk violet and lilac flowers, and a big fake diamond. Now standing in my bedroom with Disney prints; Orthodox icons; Catholic statues; resin and alabaster replications of works by Thorvaldsen and Michelangelo; walls hung with frames displaying Lukas Ridgeston postcards, photographs, concert and newspaper advertisements, and publicity shots of Laura Branigan, Belinda Carlisle, Queen Elizabeth II, Lady Thatcher, Joan Collins, and even Elizabeth Taylor herself promoting Suddenly, Last Summer, is a kitschy shrine to that same woman whom Camille Paglia hailed as Hollywood’s pagan queen but I honor as a woman who by profession was a film actress then entrepreneur, an activist by conviction, and Jewess by choice: she is my icon of violet eyes. I might spray her shrine with White Diamonds; I might surround her with a menorah and desktop flags of Israel and the United Kingdom. I will look at her when I consider my own problems of health and heart. While she would not be the first Jewish woman to be made a saint, I will not pray to her, but I will reflect on her beauty, her passion and her conviction. I will remember her struggles and her furious fights on behalf of her friends and her composure that displayed beauty and telegraphed strength. I will see the doll and remember that like that Barbie’s prototype, I have a love for beauty and should have faith; I will remember that whatever changes need to happen in my life, they must begin with me.


Three years ago, Elizabeth Taylor’s death marked the end of an era, or so said many that follow pop culture. She was the last great star from the golden age of Hollywood: for millions (if not billions), Taylor evokes the legend and glamour of Movie Star, from the age of the studio system, through the Swinging Sixties, and even into the twenty first century, when in her seventies she was able to charm an Irish heartthrob four decades her junior. Long after she was in a blockbuster film or a show with high Nielsen ratings, people knew the name Elizabeth Taylor. Presently, I simply have a doll (ok, two dolls), some biographies, perfume, some photographs, and some books and DVD’s; but I also have an imagination and I imagine that with these visual tools, I might channel her values and virtues. I might offer prayers to G-d and His saints, but as I said before, I studied Elizabeth Taylor. This icon still reminds me of her life lessons, and by paying attention to them, they guide me through my life and its challenges to whatever joys may be had today and promises that await tomorrow.