The diva of all divas arrived on the set. She let the photographer know that he had 15 minutes to take his picture, not a minute. Fine, he replied, unimpressed. That was ten more than he needed anyway. She smiled. You can see, she said, the two of them would get along well. The diva was Elizabeth Taylor, the photographer Greg Gorman. He had done it again: won the star for himself, relaxed the atmosphere, communicated on an equal footing. It was the same with Taylor, it was the same with other megastars, with Michael Jackson, Al Pacino, Marlon Brando. Capacitors who constantly scratch the highly explosive limit of hypersensitivity. And not infrequently exceed it.
“She had a good sense of humor,” says Gorman of the Taylor, “we got along well.” On the occasion of her film “Sweet Bird Youth”, he staged her own, past youth as an invisible guest in the room at the dressing table in front of a mirror cabinet, with hair up to the top and behind a thick layer of make-up, with a piercing gaze ripped out of a purgatory of vanities. And to be seen in his new book “It’s Not About Me”, a retrospective of his best portraits from 50 years of work. “You can’t just photograph the surface of a person,” explains Gorman, “you have to break through it to get to the core”. If necessary in ten minutes.
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