The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (49 page)

On an AIDS fund-raising junket to Japan in 1988, Elizabeth was invited aboard Malcolm Forbes’s yacht,
The Highlander
, where she was greeted by bagpipers and, to her surprise and dismay, the entire crew of Robin Leach’s television show
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
. She never appeared on television without pay, but the publicity-mad Malcolm had set a trap. She adroitly sidestepped it by refusing to let Leach’s cameramen near her until he’d agreed to give her an Erte painting.

During the summer of 1988, Elizabeth hurt her already damaged back, propelling her into another cycle of pain-painkillers-addiction. Then came her return to BFC in October 1988, following a relapse somewhat provoked by the promotional effort for her huge bestseller,
Elizabeth Takes Off
, in which she bragged about overcoming her addictions. The book is a genuine, if misguided, attempt to help readers gain self-esteem and conquer compulsive behavior such as overeating and substance abuse, but its emphasis on dogged willpower as the key to self-improvement was irresponsible and reckless. In BFC she had been taught that self-will is useless in changing one’s life, and that recovery depends on a willingness to ask for help. In her book she espoused the opposite tack. “You and only you can take charge of your self-image,” she wrote. Instead of crediting the help she got from others, she crowed, “I finally worked my own miracles.” Her message was essentially an empty one, and the book unwittingly revealed that she had not really changed.

In
Elizabeth Takes Off
she blamed her fat on John Warner rather than taking responsibility for her own eating habits. She propounded the same false values that had always gotten her into trouble, quoting the adage, “You can never be too thin or too rich,” and observing, “I subscribe wholeheartedly to the latter and not at all to the former.” She was still addicted to money although it had never brought her happiness. Her confusion was poignantly obvious in the slack-jawed, open-mouthed photograph of her on the dustjacket, in which she appears lost, vulnerable, and stoned.

“I had the arrogance to think I could be a social drinker,” she said after her relapse, “and I was addicted to painkillers.” One of her biographers blamed her relapse on her promotional tour for G. P. Putnam’s Sons, publisher of the book, pointing out that in July 1988, when she came home from touting
Elizabeth Takes Off
, she was exhausted, overeating, and drinking alcohol. She entered BFC for the second time on October 25, 1988, looking puffy and confined to a wheelchair after having“wallowed in booze, pills, and food,”she confessed.
³⁶
If she had deliberately planned to destroy herself and Larry Fortensky, the rough-hewn thirty-six-year-old truckdriver she met at BFC, she could not have found a surer way than “thirteenth stepping” him in rehab. In recovery lingo, “thirteenth stepping” means romance, and experience has shown that it usually produces disastrous results. Newly sober couples too often codepend on each other rather than draw on the stunning breadth of the program and its pool of wisdom to achieve a measure of stability within themselves before taking on the challenging complexities of a relationship.

Elizabeth later discussed the danger of thirteenth stepping, telling Oprah Winfrey, “We were friends for a year before we got ‘together’ in that sense,” but elsewhere she admitted, “They tell you in recovery not to get romantically involved for a year at least. But Larry and I did not wait a year.”
³⁷
According to Kelly Matzinger, a close friend of Larry’s sister and later one of Larry’s lovers, Elizabeth and Larry fell in love on sight and he was “living with” Elizabeth and “sharing her bed” within sixty days of their first date following rehab.
³⁸

They’d met in group therapy at BFC. “We were at our most vulnerable,” Elizabeth recalled. “They knock you down [verbally], kick the shit out of you, then give you the tools to build yourself up. Larry felt very protective toward me. He told me later there were times he wanted to kill the counselor.”
³⁹
Obviously, she and Larry had immediately fallen into a dangerous codependency when they should have been working independently to find their own individual answers. She was still looking for a man to lead her life for her, but this particular man couldn’t even lead his own. Larry had been remanded to seek help after numerous DWI arrests. “I drink and do a little coke now and then, but I don’t smoke marijuana,” he told a policeman who’d just chased him down.
⁴⁰

He was a husky construction worker who operated an off-road Caterpillar dirt compactor. At BFC, he operated Elizabeth’s wheelchair, pushing her around the rehab when her back acted up. Using his Teamsters Union insurance to cover his BFC bill, Larry came from Stanton, California, an Orange County working-class community of thirty thousand. He’d already been married twice, and his first marriage of eighteen months produced a daughter. His second wife said he attempted to strangle her during an altercation.
⁴¹
Kelly Matzinger said Larry was “a total nightmare.”
⁴²
Matzinger was careful during a 1998 interview to point out that he did not abuse Elizabeth, but he “beat me like crazy,” she said. “He blackened my eyes, kicked me and pounded my head with his fists. And when he hit me, he didn’t hold back, even though I’m just 5’6’ and weigh 132 pounds while he’s 6’2’ and weighs over 200 . . . He drank and popped pills all day long. He smoked pot. He was drunk every day. And he’s a mean drunk.”
⁴³

In 1999 George Hamilton recalled, “I saw her and Larry in BFC, and already there was a humor going on between them. Imagine his situation—trying to keep your day job in construction and handle a famous woman.”
⁴⁴
Her relationship with Larry at first struck most people as ridiculous, but eventually everyone accepted his presence in her life, figuring that she’d stay sober if she was with someone from Betty Ford. She and Larry both left the rehab just before Christmas 1988, and she asked him to come to her home for a holiday meal. “It didn’t take long for him to realize that Liz had the ‘hots’ for him,” Matzinger said, “and after that dinner they were hooked on each other.”
⁴⁵
Larry recalled that he accepted her invitations to Bel Air “mostly on weekends. I didn’t think I fitted in, but I kept on coming.”
⁴⁶
They were sleeping together regularly by the spring of 1989. Before the new year, he was living at 700 Nimes Road, Elizabeth’s Bel Air home, while still holding down his job. As Elizabeth explained to
Life
, he needed his job to “maintain [his] balls.”
⁴⁷

Understandably, Larry must have been uncertain how to entertain such a world-class celebrity as Elizabeth, finally taking her on a series of ordinary outings. She thoroughly enjoyed herself on a picnic and at McDonald’s, her first fast-food restaurant. On his work days, she awoke at four in the morning and had breakfast with him. After he left the house, she went back to sleep. When she finally got up much later in the day, she dressed in her motorcycle outfit—leather jacket and jeans—and went to Larry’s construction site, wowing the hardhats with her trim figure. “Then he would come home,” she continued, “and it was wonderful—he was sweaty, he had dirty hands, he was beautiful, and he played with his [homing] pigeons. I was so proud of him for working.”
⁴⁸

Sober and drug-free, they had a fairly good relationship, though one likely based on lust and opportunism—about as stable as a house built over a sinkhole. He described her as an “extremely passionate kisser,” but added that she had a condition called TMJ, a jaw disorder, and that the affliction on occasion interfered with “intimate moments.”
⁴⁹
Kelly Matzinger said Larry told her Elizabeth was “a wild woman in bed. She loved passionate sex with him,” and they “did things that he’d never experienced before.”
⁵⁰
Despite their twenty-one-year age difference, they were at first quite compatible sexually.
⁵¹
“Larry never thought of Liz as an old woman,” Matzinger said. “He loved Liz’s big breasts.”
⁵²

When Elizabeth resumed her AIDS work, she tried to involve Larry, but as a typical hardhat, he needed to adjust to gays. “He probably never met a homosexual until he moved into this house,” she said, “and now, as the saying goes, some of his best friends are.” For a start, she invited some gay pals to Bel Air to meet him, including interior designer Waldo Fernandez. “She wanted to see [Larry’s] reaction,” Waldo recalled. “And he was very easy . . . Now he is our best buddy.” Eventually, Larry became the godparent of Waldo and longtime partner Trip Haenisch’s adopted son Jake. At first, Waldo only asked Elizabeth and Larry to be the baby’s aunt and uncle, but Elizabeth said, “What’s this aunt-and-uncle thing?” and insisted on being godparents. Larry worked with an AIDS community group, Project Angel Food, taking meals to AIDS patients. Two times weekly he cleaned the project’s large commercial ovens while Elizabeth read a book, waiting for him.
⁵³

For all her talk of being in love with Larry, when she felt like spending time with someone else, she did not hesitate to regard Larry as disposable. According to Malcolm Forbes, who thought Larry “strange,” Elizabeth and George Hamilton flirted “like mad” in front of Larry, who adopted an “anything goes” attitude.
⁵⁴
Though Larry was not invited, Elizabeth was Malcolm’s hostess at his seventieth birthday party in August 1989 at his Palais Mendoub in Tangier, where, in oppressive summer heat, she greeted six hundred guests including Cronkite, Kissinger, Robert Maxwell, Barbara Walters, Cindy Adams, and Beverly Sills, who’d been flown in to sing “Happy Birthday.” Elizabeth attempted to conceal an embarrassing weight gain beneath a green-and-gold caftan. Hoping to dissuade her from marrying Larry, Malcolm gave her a set of diamond earrings and condescendingly referred to Larry as “a nice fellow” but hardly a suitable one for Elizabeth. Malcolm reminded her that Larry hadn’t wasted “too much time in giving up the construction business” after moving in. Larry’s sole qualification was that he “had all the time in the world to devote to her,” Malcolm said.
⁵⁵

His Moroccan birthday bash set Malcolm back $2 million and was replete with acrobats, jugglers, belly dancers, camels, and chandelier-lighted tents on the palace grounds—a tasteless affair that was sordid at the edges. Some guests were bothered by the presence of his young Arab friends and S&M leather types who circulated among the guests, smoking marijuana and hashish. Afterward Elizabeth joined Larry, who was at her home in Gstaad (the flight from the United States marked his first time in a plane). Within months Malcolm Forbes was dead of a heart attack. Elizabeth attended his funeral at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan. Swathed in diamonds and mink, she sat next to former President Richard Nixon, who rose to greet her. Steve Forbes, Malcolm’s son, would be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.

Elizabeth launched a new fragrance, Passion for Men, and another perfume for women, White Diamonds, attending promotional parties in New York, Paris, and London in 1989. White Diamonds couldn’t miss; it was manufactured by the $450 billion Dutch-based corporation Unilever Company NV, which sold soaps and detergents worldwide. Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, a sometime beau who’d entertained her at his homes in Cannes and Marbella, escorted her to the New York Stock Exchange for a publicity appearance, and she attended a party at his Olympic Tower duplex. She added Khashoggi to her AmFAR millionaires’ club. His nephew was Dodi Fayed, who later died with Princess Diana.

Making her fourth appearance as a Tennessee Williams heroine, Elizabeth filmed her last major TV movie,
Sweet Bird of Youth
, in October 1989. Lucille Ball had turned down the role of the aging film star, Alexandra del Lago, played to perfection on Broadway and later in a Hollywood film by Geraldine Page. Elizabeth’s weight fluctuations made the shoot a difficult one. She looked drawn in some sequences, puffy in others. British director Nicholas Roeg wanted her to perform topless in a love scene with costar Mark Harmon, cited by
People
as the most beautiful man in the world, and she supposedly refused.
⁵⁶
As Chance Wayne, Harmon played a good-for-nothing drifter, a role originated on Broadway by Paul Newman and repeated by him on film. Elizabeth’s relationship with Harmon was prickly; he objected to filming delays brought on by her back problems and her determination to make a perfect film. “Mark hasn’t paid his dues yet,” she said. “He has to earn them, like I have over the years. I want this movie to be a success, and I’m doing all I can to make it work.” Happily she was able to get her son Michael a bit part. He played a producer, a precipitous comedown from Jesus Christ. Elizabeth held the wrap party at home, serving barbecued ribs, hot dogs, hamburgers, corn-on-the-cob, and salads. The show received bad ratings. Critic John Leonard confessed he could no longer judge her. “She’s a palimpsest of all the revisions we’ve made of our fantasies about her over the decades,” Leonard wrote.

After years of alcohol and drug abuse, Elizabeth’s body had taken such a beating that she could no longer fight off infection. In March 1990 she contracted a simple sinus infection, and a month later she was in Santa Monica’s St. John’s Hospital and Health Center. For the next three months, she valiantly struggled to overcome a pulmonary virus. During this period, Larry had the run of her house and it was rumored that he threw noisy bashes that disturbed her sedate neighbors on Nimes Road. On May 29, 1990, she told a friend, “I’m dying.” The Aaron Diamond Institute’s Dr. David Ho saved her life, opening her chest surgically and inserting catheters. She not only had a virus, but a fungal infection called candidiasis, better known as thrush, a condition common among AIDS sufferers. Fortunately, she was not HIV-positive. “All those tubes coming out of your nose, your mouth, all sorts of places, and the tubes are full of little pieces of you,” she remembered, “swimming by like little fishes.”