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ELIZABETH
TAYLOR'S LEGACY OF AIDS ACTIVISM
"So Much to Do"
Screen legend Elizabeth Taylor lends her support to a program to endow the CARE Center and ensure its future
Elizabeth Taylor has always been there. At the very beginning
of the AIDS epidemic, before we knew what caused the terrible
dying, before we could do much more than stand by and watch
it happen, she was there. It was 1985, and Rock Hudson,
her co-star in “Giant,” was not only dying,
he was dying transformed: this Hollywood paragon of masculine
beauty appeared to have aged two decades in the two years
he had been out of the public eye. He was gaunt, hollow-eyed,
tottering, spectral.
Elizabeth Taylor, UCLA's Michael Gottleib, and Mathilde Krim announce the founding of amFAR.
The effects of Hudson’s illness
were new to us then, and they were heartbreaking. Within
a few years they would become horrifyingly familiar, but
in 1985 they were simply horrifying. Some shied away, but
Taylor was not one of them: she took Hudson’s hand
when they appeared in public, and she took up his cause
with Congress.
She spoke with passionate conviction
about the need for a crash program to develop effective
treatments for all those suffering from this mysterious
affliction. She called for a massive research effort to
extinguish this modern plague, and she reminded her listeners
that blunt talk would be a necessary part of any program
to teach people about how to avoid contracting
this sexually-transmitted disease. “It’s bad
enough that people are dying of AIDS,” she declared, “but
no one should die of ignorance.”
Taylor’s testimony was received
with respectful deference, and afterwards pictures were
taken: the legendary star with this Senator and that Congressman.
Autographs may have been signed that day… but no
legislation was signed—not that day, or that year,
or that decade. Indeed, Ronald Reagan made no public reference
whatsoever to the burgeoning epidemic during his first
term as President.
Someone needed to fill that leadership
vacuum—and that someone was Elizabeth Taylor. As
the national chair of the American Foundation for AIDS
Research, she spearheaded a global fund-raising effort
that has, to date, raised more than $233 million in voluntary
contributions from individuals, foundations, and corporations—funds
distributed in the form of research grants to more than
2,000 investigators worldwide.
amfAR, as the foundation is universally
known, came into being shortly before Rock Hudson died,
through the amalgamation of two slightly older foundations,
the New York-based AIDS Medical Foundation, headed by Dr.
Mathilde Krim, and the National AIDS Research Foundation,
incorporated in California. Taylor’s longtime friend
Dr. Arnold Klein presided over the creation of this bicoastal
entity, and he recollects that the birth of the new foundation
was not an altogether easy one. The first major grant to
amfAR came from Hudson himself—who made a quarter-million-dollar
gift to NARF shortly before the merger, and who died shortly
before the first amfAR research grants were distributed.
By the time Hudson died, in October
of 1985, it had been slightly more than four years since
Dr. Michael Gottlieb, a young researcher at UCLA, first
described the syndrome that we now know as AIDS. In those
four years, what had first seemed to be a novel cluster
of cases of profound immune suppression in young, otherwise
healthy gay men had metastasized into a global epidemic,
with a total of 15,527 confirmed cases of AIDS reported
in 51 countries. Grim as those statistic were, another
was grimmer still: all but 3,002 of those patients had
died, and the expectation was that the rest would soon
follow them.
The medical establishment quailed at
these figures. AIDS appeared to be what epidemiologists
call a “slate-clearer”—a plague that
kills everyone it infects, that is as deadly as it is unstoppable.
It was easy to become disheartened in those days, and in
some ways it is a bit surprising that Taylor never did,
given how intensely involved she was from the first. Then
again, she once said, “Ever since I was a little
girl, I believed I was a child of destiny.” And it
soon became clear—to Taylor herself, and to all those
around her—that leading the crusade to conquer AIDS
was her destiny, every bit as much as those twin Oscars
had been. “AIDS is both my passion and my obsession,” Taylor
declares. “I was there at the beginning, and I pray
I’ll be there at the end.”
Taylor is indelibly associated with
amfAR, but she is equally committed to the Elizabeth Taylor
AIDS Foundation, which has distributed more than $10 million
to AIDS organizations around the world. You might say that
she has rallied support and raised money at both ends of
the continuum of need: amfAR funds medical research, and
Taylor’s own foundation funds on-the-ground care
for people living with HIV. If her involvement in the long
campaign to contain the AIDS epidemic ended there, she
would be, quite simply, the most successful AIDS activist
in the world.
But fortunately for us, her involvement
doesn’t end there. When Taylor learned through Dr.
Arnold Klein, a Professor of Medicine and Dermatology at
the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, that the CARE
Center needed to find a new home off campus, and needed
to establish an endowment to ensure its future, she
unhesitatingly agreed to lend her name to that effort.
If Taylor has a life philosophy, it may perhaps be summed
up in something she said many years ago, in another context: “So
much to do, so little done, such things to be.”
That is an activist’s haiku, and
it explains why Dame Elizabeth has entered the lists again,
this time on the side of the Clinical AIDS Research and
Education Center. As its name implies, the CARE Center
is much more than an HIV clinic. It conducts crucial tests
of new therapies, new treatments for the infections that
are associated with advanced HIV disease, and groundbreaking
new approaches to eradicating the virus from infected individuals.
In a way, Elizabeth Taylor’s commitment
to ensuring the CARE Center’s future—and continuity
of care for the Center’s thousands of patients—is
another exercise in bridgebuilding. In the same way that
amfAR linked research efforts on the East and West coasts,
the work being done by the CARE Center links laboratory
research to community-based clinical care. The Center’s
new quarters are southeast of UCLA, but the clinical studies
that are being conducted by the staff of the CARE Center
will potentially affect the lives of people living with
HIV in every corner of the globe.
It isn't really fair to quote a character
that an actor has portrayed, as if the actor and the character
spoke with one voice--and it is probably especially unwise
to quote Gloria Wandrous, the no-better-than-she-ought-to-be
party girl that Taylor played in "Butterfield 8," because
Taylor is on record as despising that particular film,
even though she won her first Academy Award for it. But
Gloria Wandrous and Elizabeth Taylor do have one thing
in common--a conviction that they are absolutely unique
individuals. And so when Gloria says "I'm not like anyone--I'm
me," it's easy to imagine that the declaration, as well
as the voice, is Elizabeth's. She's not like anyone else.
When no one else was there, she was there... and we are all
better off for that.
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