What is your luxury food of choice? Before settling down with William J. Mann’s wickedly entertaining biography of Elizabeth Taylor, buy an obscene mountain of it, then take the phone off the hook. Besides the gossipy tone and wonderful stories, How To Be A Movie Star has a convincing thesis: from a young age on the MGM lot, Taylor knew — or her handlers knew — the value of publicity and how to engage the fascination of the cinema-going public.

Her guardians long since departed, Taylor still captures the headlines. Before the world premiere of Michael Jackson’s This Is It on Tuesday night Taylor had a private screening at MGM. “Sources” revealed she thought it was “pure genius and the most magnificent film”. In early October she announced via Twitter that she was to have heart surgery and subsequently tweeted news of her recovery.

The likes of Jennifer Aniston, Lindsay Lohan and Miley Cyrus may have long superseded her in the gossip rags, but Taylor is an enduring, now sadly almost solitary, link to the golden age of Hollywood. Despite all that has been written about her an aura of mystery surrounds the 77-year-old actress.

Mann cleverly forsakes a conventional biography and instead deconstructs a series of chapters of Taylor’s life, deploying both well-known and freshly uncovered tales. He evokes the moment she rushes to friend Montgomery Clift’s aid after a car crash, saving his life. When he and Taylor are photographed in Rome in 1962, in the blaze of their affair, Richard Burton exclaims: “How did I know the woman was so fucking famous? She knocks Krushchev off the front page.”

Mann is sensibly circumspect on how much publicity is deliberately generated by Taylor and her entourage. He shows how Sara, Taylor’s mother, determinedly propelled her daughter towards the limelight, within the MGM of the 1940s.

Hedda Hopper, the legendary gossip columnist, recurs in many chapters as a frightful harridan, clucking possessively over Taylor as an ingénue, then judging her a scarlet woman when her affairs (with Eddie Fisher and Burton) contravene Hopper’s moral code. The denouement sees Hopper utterly broken after trying unsuccessfully to prove that one of Taylor’s husbands was gay (he may well have been, Mann says, but Hopper couldn’t get the story to stand up).

Mann details Taylor’s globe-trotting, shopping and demanding behaviour, alongside — this carefully emphasised — her dedication to acting. One husband abuses her, then dies in a plane crash. Burton, of course, emerges as the love of her life. In 1961, a rumour spreads that she has died in London (there are crowds outside the hospital). But she is alive and the crowds almost rip the doors off the Rolls-Royce when she is discharged. Months later, she collects the Best Actress Oscar for BUtterfield 8.

Mann has a dramatist’s eye, well suited to Taylor’s grand entrances, exits and set-pieces. My favourite is a courtroom scene in which she humiliates a lawyer trying to unbalance her. Now we think of Taylor ravaged by illnesses and infirm, but Mann captures a vivacious, determined actress who fought successfully to live in the public eye on her own terms. The reader is left in little doubt how bruising — as well as immensely fun and dripping in diamonds — the rollercoaster has been. Today’s cosseted, risk-averse celebrities simply pale in comparison.

How To Be A Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood by William J. Mann
Faber & Faber, £20; 496pp Buy the book

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