Seeing Stars: Part Six

Things are beyond crazy down here in The Underworld, what with an ongoing plumbing issue, home internet problems and the virtual loss of my laptop for anything beyond a game of solitaire. Thus, I cannot access anything from that for use on the blog at this time. To build a bridge in the meantime, I give you this sixth installment in a series of posts on televised tributes to movie stars who've been deemed worthy of a hospital wing or floor named in their honor by Variety Clubs International. Recent posts featured Ingrid Bergman and Burt Reynolds and today's is all about La Liz, Miss Elizabeth Taylor. This originally aired on CBS December 1st, 1977 when Taylor was 45 years of age. 

Those of us used to the typical setting of foliage greater than The Garden of Eden are in for a surprise here. There is a set reminiscent of Taylor's home country of England as well as a sizeable chunk of Egypt, she having inhabited the role of Cleopatra in 1963.

These events typically kick off with the prior year's honoree and this one is no different. John Wayne emerges to present Taylor to the glittering array of attendees.

Apart from Wayne, the first star Liz will lay eyes on will be... Florence Henderson?! Okay Carol Brady, you go!

Out she comes, accompanied by her then-husband Senator John Warner of Virginia. Her dress reads purple here, but most of the time it looks more like a deep sapphire blue.

At this point, Warner and Taylor had been married not quite one full year. She had limited the amount of acting she was doing on screen in order to live a simpler life on his Virginia farm (when not out and about helping to campaign for him or attending Washington D.C functions.) This was not exactly one of the decidedly-beautiful Taylor's peak periods, though worse was to come when her weight ballooned and she became the go-to for countless "fat jokes" by Joan Rivers and other comics. 

First up is Taylor's costar from Giant (1956) and a lifelong friend, Rock Hudson.

Following Hudson's death from AIDS a scant 8 years after this, Taylor would emerge as an outspoken fundraiser for and warrior against the deadly disease.

Hudson leads into introductions of those seated at the honoree's table. Behind Taylor can be seen famed director George Cukor along with her mother, Sara Taylor.

Taylor's daughter Liza Todd was in attendance and was a strikingly apt combination of her two famous parents, looks-wise.

The very eclectic collection of guests at the table include baseball great Jackie Robinson and Spencer Segura, a not exactly amazing tennis player whose father Pancho was a force to be reckoned with on the courts from the 1940s to the 1960s.

John Warner has a pretty good reputation as far as senators go, but he was super-annoying on this occasion. He was forever standing up to take a bow or running interference on people approaching his famous wife. It may have been a version of southern chivalry, but in time it worked my nerves. Sara Taylor was 82 at this point and would live to be 99!

I really don't know if her other three children were there, perhaps at a different table, or, if not, why they wouldn't be. Liza was the only one introduced.

Bob Hope delivered some pretty good jokes on that night. True, many of the attendees had enjoyed a belt or two of booze, but he had them chortling pretty well as he went on.

All good things must come to an end, though... His task was to introduce a surprise guest to the festivities.

We're treated to the delightful presence of Billy Carter, then-President Jimmy Carter's brother - at the time launching a brew called "Billy Beer." (The product was discontinued within a year's time.)

Few things wore as thin as Carter's awkward, flash-in-the-pan notoriety as the Podunk younger brother of the Commander-in-Chief.

During his endless glances at cue cards, the audience was lucky he could say "Hello" without prompting.

But I guess on some level even Billy Carter is a better guest than a (future) murderer! Robert Blake, then starring on the undercover detective hit Baretta, stands up to declare how he had a childhood crush on Taylor when they were both child stars at MGM.

Always hell-bent on appearing hip and cool, he stumbles through his piece with various incomplete sentences. It fell to him to reference several young stars who were in attendance that night...

We see John Travolta, then at the dawn of his film career, having scored a TV success with Welcome Back, Kotter. Saturday Night Fever (1977) had come out and Grease (1978) was on the horizon.

Next we find sibling teen stars James Vincent (Jimmy) McNichol and Kristy McNichol. Jimmy was then on a short-lived show called The Fitzpatricks (which I did watch and enjoy as a kid myself) and Kristy was ensconced on the hit drama Family.

The next bright young star to be introduced is one Debby Boone, then at the pinnacle of her brief career as a pop singer. (She would later achieve success in inspirational music as well.)

"You Light Up My Life" was Boone's cover of a song used in a 1977 movie of the same name (sung therein by another vocalist and lip-synced by the star of the movie, Didi Conn.) Such a staggering hit was this that the song is considered the biggest hit single of the 1970s. For comparison's sake, Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" was a #1 Billboard hit for two weeks (albeit with incessant radio airplay.) "You Light Up My Life" topped the chart for ten weeks! The record wasn't matched until Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" came out in 1985.

Proud parents Shirley and Pat Boone were on hand to witness their 21 year-old daughter slay the crowd with her rendition of the song.

Where it gets a little awkward is that the song was chosen to honor Elizabeth Taylor, who lit up movie screens and fans' lives for decades. But Boone had made it clear to all that whenever she sang this song, she was singing it about GOD... So she only looked heavenward and never so much as glanced at Taylor until it was all over! LOL

Carroll O' Connor, a TV legend thanks to All in the Family, steps up (with cigarette in hand) to recall his time (and there was surely plenty of it!) on the set of Cleopatra and how he longed to make a play for Liz, but she was otherwise occupied...!

Then come the comic stylings of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, who'd previously enjoyed success on Laugh-In. Amid their verbal shenanigans came a welcome event, a cast reunion. This is something I am always interested in.

The gents proceed to introduce three former MGM actresses...

Yes, it's June Allyson, Janet Leigh and Margaret O'Brien, three of the four Little Women who costarred with Taylor in that 1949 version!

Taylor enthusiastically runs up the aisle to greet and hug each one, but then the gals are shooed off to their individual tables without even a proper pose together. A great photo opportunity missed...

Now this was something of a rarity indeed, for Paul Newman, Taylor's costar from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) was never much of an attendee at events like this.

At this time, Newman had just starred in a hockey flick called Slap Shot (1977), which was noted for its proliferation of four-letter words. Newman had a bit in which a prerecorded message to Taylor was filled with bleeps.

They're all smiles here while listening to it, but it took Joanne Woodward a while to break a frown she'd been sporting beforehand. I recently read a downright scandalous (and also not particularly reliable) bio of Newman which, among many other outrageous things, claims that he and Taylor made love in her bed right after Mike Todd had perished in a plane crash. You know... she needed "comforting," according to the tome. I dunno...

It took Paul turning around and looking directly at her for his wife to break a smile.

Next on the list of performances comes actor and impersonator Frank Gorshin. He pops up in several guises. First he does his best Broderick Crawford.

Then (a very good) George C. Scott.

Next Burt Lancaster (which tickled Christopher George no end!)

He closed with a spot-on Anthony Newley, singing "The Windmills of Your Mind" from Taylor's movie The Sandpiper (1965.)

As was the tradition, Monty Hall appears in order to announce the dedication of the honoree's hospital locale. In a strange departure from the norm, he is never shown mentioning what or where it is! (In a later broadcast, it is described as "The Elizabeth Taylor Retardation Floor at the Flower 5th Avenue Hospital in New York City." (We can all bet that that name was changed along the way...!)

As last year's honoree and this year's were eagerly awaiting the announcement, no specifics were ever revealed during this broadcast. Considering that her adopted daughter Maria underwent 20 hip surgeries for a genetic defect, it's surprising that her hospital wing wasn't more closely associated with that type of challenge.

The festivities aren't quite over yet. In later instances, the dedication would come at the very end, but this time the party winds up with Henry Fonda, Taylor's costar in Ash Wednesday (1973), providing some flattering remarks.

As part of his presentation, Fonda declares that he has another surprise in store for Taylor.

He escorts her to a cocktail table where several glasses of champagne are present.

Then one by one she is confronted with three of her past costars.

Lifelong friend Roddy McDowall (of Lassie Come Home, 1943), Jimmy Lydon (of Life with Father, 1947) and Tom Drake (of Raintree County, 1957) proceed to "sing" a song called "Elizabeth" to her as complimentary photos from a couple of years before flash on screen. Only the fact that he wasn't as famous as Howard Cosell could explain why no one ever picked on his horrible wig...!

It was now time for Miss Taylor to take the floor and she was introduced by a surprisingly amusing John Wayne, who managed some well-handled jabs at himself in the process.

Somehow, for reasons unknown, her husband was by now nowhere in sight! By this time I was completely over his endless interference and helicoptering, so I don't know if a pressing political matter happened or what, but it was fine by me.

In her remarks, Elizabeth mentioned how Roddy & Co.'s sing brought a tear to her eye... but that sour notes do that! She did thank them for trying, though. (And she should've been careful. She wasn't exactly Gogi Grant herself!!)

While this was one of Taylor's most memorable nights to that point (in a group setting, as she declared), happy days were not ahead. In time, she missed her career, was bored of politics and the accompanying rituals and wound up with serious addiction to booze and pills, also gaining significant weight along the way.

Her union with (sixth) husband Warner was kaput by 1983. A final five-year marriage occurred in the early-1990s.

This widely-circulated photo (with Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell) was probably around the nadir of her downward spiral.

However, after a highly-publicized stint at The Betty Ford Clinic, she stunned the world by reemerging as an impossibly tan, slim, bejeweled movie goddess, just as the glitzy designs of Nolan Miller were being embraced all over. The greater part of her acting career was behind her, but, as mentioned earlier, she had bigger things on her mind now. Taylor passed away in 2011 at the age of 79, having survived, literally, countless illnesses and ailments with heart failure ultimately deciding her fate.

We end, as always, with some candid shots of the stars in attendance. After all, this is an "All-Star" tribute which we've dubbed "Seeing Stars," so you never know who is going to be nestled in the various tables on set.

Miss Angie Dickinson offering up applause. Police Woman was then still on the air.

Jean Stapleton, welcoming the chance to leave her Edith Bunker from All in the Family persona at home.

Hal Linden of the hit police sitcom Barney Miller.

LeVar Burton, who'd recently made a huge splash in the groundbreaking miniseries Roots.

Harvey Korman, recently departed from The Carol Burnett Show in order to headline a sitcom (The Harvey Korman Show), which only lasted five episodes before being axed.

Monty Hall, Jayne Meadows and Jimmy McNichol enjoying Bob Hope's antics. Meadows' wig isn't much better than Tom Drake's.

A rather rare chance to see Fernando Lamas and his wife Esther Williams. Lamas was a Taylor costar, too, in 1953's The Girl Who Had Everything.

Johnny Carson's sidekick on The Tonight Show, Ed McMahon.

One of our favorite people ever to walk the planet, Miss Betty White. In the wake of the cancellation of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, she headlined The Betty White Show in the '77-'78 season, but it only lasted that long.

I don't know if she was that rapt with attention or bored out of her skull, but this was Cheryl Ladd's expression for several moments...!

Veteran actor Dick Van Patten (seen here with his wife Pat. Yes, Pat) was just beginning a successful run with Eight Is Enough.

Former costar on The Andy Griffith Show, then a regular on Hee Haw, George Lindsey.

I don't know the man on the left, but there in the center is handsome John Gavin, reacting to some remarks of Rowan & Martin.

The late John Ritter of Three's Company with Roscoe Lee Browne behind him.

Joanne Woodward.

Mr. Bob Hope.

June Allyson and her pageboy.

Here's another rather rare one. Martha Hyer, onetime movie actress who retired in 1974 at age 50 and was the wife of producer Hal Wallis for twenty years prior to his death.

I try to end with something hooty whenever I can and this seemed to fit the bill. It's Mary Ann Mobley, Chad Everett and Gary Collins as they listen to "You Light Up My Life" for what was probably the fiftieth time. The way they were situated and all looking in different directions reminded me of those 1960s TV publicity shots for moody shows.

Say, for example, The Mod Squad...

See what I mean? The End!