Objectively beautiful

I saw a picture of her that my girlfriend Heather had taken in the early 1980s. Heather had been walking past a New York hotel when this woman came out and gave her a  big smile and Heather, who never went anywhere without her Nikon F asked if she could take a picture and the woman agreed. And I was shown the photograph and the woman was beautiful. She was old and quite overweight at the time but she was beautiful.



Heather said, "What did you think?" I said I'd never seen such beautiful eyes. But it wasn't just the eyes. She was just beautiful the way the pyramids are beautiful.

And then Heather said, "You never think something like that will happen to you." And I said, "Something like what?" And she said, "Seeing Elizabeth Taylor."

This will seem crazy but at the time I don't think I'd ever knowingly seen a picture of Elizabeth Taylor before. I must have seen her on TV and so forth but I couldn't have picked her out of a police line up.

Vanity Fair, who never disappoint in these matters, have a slide show of Taylor up and I dutifully looked at the pictures. She was beautiful, exceptionally so but despite all that beauty I look at her and feel nothing even remotely sexual about her. She appealed to men who loved women but didn't much want women—Tiny Tim, Michael Jackson. Perhaps this is just too typically me but I don't think anyone ever looked at Taylor and thought ....