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25 YEARS OF CARING
What Becomes a Legend Most?
In Dame Elizabeth Taylor’s case, the answer is: two decades of
unwavering commitment to advocating on behalf of AIDS research,
AIDS care, and people living with AIDS
Dame Elizabeth Taylor, flanked by the directors of the CARE Center, Dr. Judith Currier and Dr. Ronald
Mitsuyasu. Dr. Irvin S.Y. Chen, the director of the UCLA AIDS Institute and Dr. Margrit Carlson, a member of the CARE staff, stand behind Dr. Currier.
In the wider world, Elizabeth Taylor is recognized
as one of the last of a vanishing species—the
larger-than-life Hollywood star. She rode the crest
of Moviedom’s golden age, and although she played half a
dozen of the most memorable characters in film history—
including Maggie the Cat and Martha the Harridan—her
own personality was always larger than that of any woman
she ever embodied on the screen, including Cleopatra, the
immortal temptress of the Nile. The same can be said of
her personal life, which has contained more drama than
any screenplay she ever brought to life.
In our world, Elizabeth Taylor is recognized as the
Joan of Arc of AIDS activism. It has been twenty years
since Dame Elizabeth took the hand of the dying Rock
Hudson—on camera, before the whole world—and,
through that single, simple, humane and heroic gesture,
brought the agony of AIDS into the light. She has kept the
world’s attention focused on the HIV pandemic ever since,
by turning the public’s insatiable curiosity about her into an
immensely effective vehicle for her essential message—
which is that the epidemic will not end until there is a cure.
Elizabeth Taylor with her friends Tom Petty and Carrie Fisher at the ribbon-cutting
ceremony.
Dame Elizabeth Taylor attended a ribbon-cutting
ceremony at UCLA’s Clinical AIDS Research and
Education (CARE) Center on November 4, 2005.
The purpose of that short ceremony was two-fold: to
inaugurate the new, off-campus quarters of the CARE
Center, the UCLA AIDS Institute’s HIV clinic, and to
announce that Dame Elizabeth has lent her name—and,
as she pointedly observed, “her heart”—to a campaign to
raise an endowment that will enable the CARE Center to
continue its crucial work. Elizabeth Taylor the Hollywood
legend arrived as legends legendarily do—with a retinue,
and bathed in a the sort of light that follows great stars
everywhere, and is achieved all on its own, without so
much as a key light or follow spot. And yes, she was
wearing a diamond as big as the Ritz on her ring finger—
and diamond bracelets of her own design, from the
House of Taylor, from wrist to elbow. She didn’t need all
that ice to dazzle the assembled crowd, which included
the Chancellor of UCLA, Albert Carnesale, and his wife,
Robin; the director of the UCLA AIDS Institute, Dr.
Irvin S.Y. Chen; the directors of the CARE Center, Drs.
Ronald Mitsuyasu and Judith Currier; and a number of
Elizabeth’s oldest friends, among them Tom Petty and
Carrie Fisher ... but it didn’t hurt.
Elizabeth Taylor the legendary AIDS activist used the occasion to do what she always does: she
artfully refracted the light that was shining on her—onto
the cause that is closest to her heart. In a very real sense,
Dame Elizabeth said, the CARE Center at UCLA is the
bridge between amfAR—which she helped found 20 years
ago, and which has, to date, raised more than $233 million
for research—and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation,
which has provided more than $10 million to improve the
lives of people living with AIDS.
The motive force behind the Taylor Endowment is
Dr. Arnold Klein, an innovative dermatologist who helped
to found amfAR in 1985 and enlisted Dame Elizabeth
to serve as that pioneering organization’s spokesperson.
It was Klein who proposed creating an endowment to
ensure the future of the CARE Center, and it was Klein
who recognized that this fund-raising effort could also
serve as a means of honoring Dame Elizabeth’s own efforts
to assist people living with HIV/AIDS. (For further
details on Dr. Klein’s crucial role in launching and guiding
this all-important initiative, see How
It All Began.)
We have come a very long way, in the quarter-century
since the very first cases of what we now know as AIDS
were described by UCLA physicians, in treating people
infected with HIV—and the CARE Center is rightly
proud of the fact that its staff is still seeing patients who
came to the clinic in the earliest days of the epidemic. But
our objective, at the UCLA AIDS Institute, is to remain
as focused on finding a cure as Dame Elizabeth is—so
that one day we can describe the very last cases of AIDS.
You can help us achieve that common objective by
making a donation to the Elizabeth Taylor Endowment
for the CARE Center at the UCLA AIDS Institute.
See How You Can Make a Donation for information on how to do so.
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