Taylor's fall from grace

Though it may come as a brutal shock to her millions of fans around the world, Elizabeth Taylor, now 71, the eight times married movie star who epitomised the greatest years of Hollywood, is now reduced to demanding sex from her 'butler' - according to legal papers lodged in a Los Angeles court last week.

Suddenly, the truth about the life of this once startlingly beautiful actress, whose raven hair and violet eyes lit up the silver screen for a generation, has apparently been exposed for the world to see. It is not a pretty sight.

The court papers allege that Taylor is an overweight, crippled, mentally confused insomniac, obsessed by sex and sustained by painkillers. She lives in an extraordinary private fantasy world in her great house on the Bel Air estate in Los Angeles, in an alarmingly similar fashion to the fictional Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's classic film Sunset Boulevard.

Unlike Desmond, Taylor hasn't got a dead pet monkey in a casket yet, but it can only be a matter of time.

Her 14-year- old white Maltese terrier, Sugar, which accompanies her everywhere, even to the bathroom, is deaf, almost blind and extremely frail. And Taylor has already insisted on burying her dead parrots and cats outside her window so that, in the words of one former staff member, 'they can be near to her'.

But the parallels between the film and Elizabeth Taylor's current life don't end there.

In Sunset Boulevard, the once famous star takes a young, hard-up screenwriter and pays him to have sex with her, while her real husband acts as her butler.

In Taylor's case, it is the 'butler' who is now alleging that he was forced to have sex with her, while all the time describing his sexually demanding boss to other staff members as 'the old trampoline'.

There could be no more tragic decline for a once great actress who made 56 films in a career spanning six decades, was twice the winner of an Oscar and was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1999.

The tawdry reality of what actually goes on behind the walls of what was once Frank Sinatra's great house only came to light after Taylor's landscape gardener Willem Van Muyden filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles this week.

Van Muyden, who was ordered to create a theme-park-style 'tropical jungle' in one part of the grounds, complete with banana trees and loudspeakers blaring out monkey and bird noises, claims that Taylor owes him £200,000 for the work.

He has also claimed damages for unfair dismissal after rejecting the homosexual advances of the star's 33-year-old 'butler' Jean-Luc Lacquement, in a joint lawsuit with his exwife Manon Cooper, who also worked at Taylor's house.

Van Muyden has refused to comment since the suit was filed, but his wife insisted this week: 'Elizabeth is addicted to sex. She thinks she is Cleopatra.'

Van Muyden alleges that Lacquement was, as part of his job, expected to have sex regularly with the star and suggests that the butler confided to him that he was having a 'difficult time getting sexually aroused in order to service Taylor's sexual needs'.

Van Muyden, who is in his 50s, says he suggested that Lacquement take Viagra, upon which the butler replied that he had already, and that it had indeed helped his arousal problems.

He also claims Lacquement told him that shortly after his sexual encounter with Taylor, she had given him a $25,000 (£15,500) watch and a BMW car.

But on July 27 last year, the gardener insists that the butler also made a homosexual approach to him, even though earlier that night he says he had had to 'jump the old trampoline' - a reference to having sex with Taylor. Other members of the staff at the $12m mansion are reported to have referred to the butler as Taylor's 'sex slave'.

But how can one of the most famously voluptuous women in the world, whose passionate marriages became the stuff of legend, be reduced to such utter tawdriness?

The answer, claim friends of the actress, lies in the fact that Taylor refuses to accept that she is no longer one of the most alluring women in the world.

'Elizabeth just cannot cope with not being a star any more,' one of her oldest friends told me privately this week. 'She's created a bizarre, private world where she can convince herself that she's just as beautiful and attractive as she once was.'

Certainly the star, who officially announced her retirement from acting in March this year to 'concentrate on my work for AIDS charities', has surrounded herself with an utterly loyal and discreet staff with gay sympathies.

Indeed, Van Muyden also alleges he was told by one of Taylor's secretaries that he wasn't being paid because he wasn't a homosexual, and that 'it would be easier to get paid if he was gay'.

Van Muyden's ex-wife, who is in her late 30s and was employed to create an English-style garden at the Taylor mansion, was also dismissed.

She maintained this week that 'Elizabeth likes gay people because they aren't a threat. Elizabeth promised Willem that he would be rewarded because of the value the jungle added to the property'.

The star told him she was the 'Queen of Dignity' and would keep her word about paying him. 'But he never got the money,' says Cooper.

This week, according to a close friend, Taylor was privately dismissing the claim as 'a ridiculous attempt to extort money from me'.

But there is no denying that she is worried about the damage it has done to an already damaged reputation.

In the six years since Taylor underwent surgery to remove a benign brain tumour, she has descended into evergreater mental confusion.

As her biographer Ellis Amburn puts it: 'She has never been the same since. Her functions and her speech are just not what they were'.

But it is not just the brain surgery that has affected the woman who won Oscars for her performances in Butterfield 8 in 1960, and Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? in 1967, as well as nominations for Raintree County, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer.

She has also become dependent on super-strength painkillers to mask the agony of her back and hips. 'They tend to make her confused and giddy,' comments one friend.

An insomniac who now finds it almost impossible to sleep in a bed, not least because of the crippling pain of her arthritis (she has had two hip replacements in recent years) coupled with osteoporosis, Taylor has struggled with a dependency on drugs for years.

Hoping to get her addiction under control, she checked into the Betty Ford Centre at the Eisenhower Medical Centre in Palm Springs on December 5, 1984, and left seven weeks later.

In a television interview shortly afterwards, she said: 'I'm an addictive kind of person. It's a disease. I was a stuttering, stumbling incoherent,' she went on. 'I needed sleeping pills for 25 years. I had learned to rely on them. I thought I could control it.

'There's been a lot of genuine pain in my life,' she added.

In the same interview, she even claimed she didn't realise she was an alcoholic until she entered the clinic. But the actress, whose career in Hollywood began in 1942 in a movie called There's One Born Every Minute, knew she could drink. 'I had a hollow leg,' she maintained in her 40s. 'I could drink everyone under the table. My capacity was terrifying.'

The tragic truth is that drink, drugs and sex steadily came to haunt her life.

Born in Hampstead, North London, in February 1932 to an American art dealer and a former actress, it was her mother who launched Elizabeth Taylor's acting career.

Famous at the age of 12, she was one of the world's biggest stars by 25 and the first woman to be paid $1m for a film role - as Cleopatra in 1963. Even in 1994, she could still command $2.5m for her role as Pearl Slaghoople in The Flintstones.

But as the world knows, it was men that became her passion, and her downfall. She married eight times, remarking on the eve of her fourth marriage, 'What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?'

Her fifth husband, actor Richard Burton, doubled as her sixth - they divorced in 1974, only to marry again in 1975, and divorce again in 1976. Later that year, she married her seventh husband, American Senator John Warner, divorcing him six years later.

Her eighth and final marriage, to Larry Fortensky, a construction worker 20 years her junior, took place in 1991, but ended in divorce in 1999.

As her marriages have dissolved around her, so Taylor has steadily retreated into her own fantasy world in her Bel Air mansion.

She gets up between 11am and noon, and her maid has instructions never to open the green velvet drapes in her bedroom without being told to do so. She dresses at around 2pm, then answers her fan mail and checks her investments.

Once a great party-goer, she now surrounds herself with a tiny group of ageing actors and homosexuals. Many of her old friends are dead, including Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson, Rod Steiger and Roddy McDowall. But Taylor does not dwell on memories.

There is not a single photograph of any of her husbands in her house. She cannot bring herself to speak to Fortensky. Her staff are under strict instructions never to put him through to her if he rings.

'She hates the guy and once went berserk when she picked up the phone to find him on the end of the line,' says one former employee.

It was in the wake of the Fortensky divorce that she hired Lacquement as her 'butler'.

Her most frequent companions now are singer Michael Jackson and dentist Dr Cary Schwartz.

Jackson visits Taylor in the afternoons and stays for a 'lunch' that is usually taken at around 5pm and consists of wafer-thin egg salad sandwiches. Jackson hosted her marriage to Fortensky at his Neverland Ranch, a place that Taylor loves. 'We have such fun together, just playing,' she has said. 'There is something about him that is so dear and childlike.'

For his part, Jackson worships the once great screen goddess. Taylor takes no heed of the singer's eccentric reputation, for he remains her greatest fan.

In the past, they styled themselves as a kind of Peter Pan and Wendy, taking secret visits to the cinema and sitting in the back row, holding hands. As another of her biographers, Donald Spoto, put it:

'Elizabeth has a lifelong habit of befriending outsiders.'

Dr Schwartz is her dinner companion. Her chef either prepares something for them or they dine at the nearby Bel Air Hotel.

When Schwartz isn't there, she eats a light supper of fish or chicken and retires to watch a movie, secretly indulging her passion for fried chicken and barbecued ribs while no one watches.

Then it is back into the spiral of painkillers, sleeping pills and her 'house manager' - who reportedly told Van Muyden in the early hours of that fateful July morning in 2002 that he was 'still stoned and a little drunk' after spending the night with her.

Taylor craves constant attention. But she doesn't want people to see how far she has descended into confusion and ill health, and takes elaborate pains to prepare herself for any public outing.

She does not like the world to know, for example, that she can only drink through a straw, or that she has a tendency to dribble.

In particular, Taylor goes to immense lengths not to be seen in her wheelchair, even ensuring that whole corridors are blocked off to keep her from the Press's prying eyes. But in spite of the sycophants, the staff and the 'house manager', the sad truth is that Taylor is very much alone.

That is why her dog Sugar accompanies her everywhere. He goes with her to Cedar Sinai for her medical check-ups, and if she has to stay overnight, she books a room for him and an aide.

As she once put it: 'Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses.'

The tragedy may come when Sugar finally dies. But, given Elizabeth Taylor's style, she will no doubt bury him in a bowler hat, exactly as Norma Desmond did her monkey in Sunset Boulevard.