“I became so incensed and personally frustrated at the rejection I was receiving by just trying to get people’s attention. I was made so aware of the silence, this huge, loud silence regarding AIDS, how no one wanted to talk about it and no one wanted to become involved. Certainly no one wanted to give money or support, and it so angered me that I finally thought to myself, Bitch, do something yourself. Instead of sitting there getting angry. Do something.”
In 1987, Taylor launched her first perfume, Passion, and followed it up in 1991 with White Diamonds, another enormous hit. She traveled around the country visiting the department stores that sold her perfume, and she vowed to visit AIDS hospices in every city that she could. But there were two caveats: She did not want any press to interrupt those private visits, and the perfume company and the department store would have to donate money to each of the hospices she visited. She vowed to match their contributions.
At the Coming Home Hospice in San Francisco’s Castro District, nurses were told in hushed tones that Taylor was on her way. She stopped in each of the hospice’s 15 small rooms, and she spent several minutes talking with each patient. She asked them if she could arrange to have their dogs walked; she asked if she could call their mothers for them or write letters for them.
Some patients cried when they saw her, said Guy Vandenberg, a health care worker and AIDS activist who was at the Coming Home Hospice when she visited. After she met with patients, he said, Taylor sat with the handful of staffers in their tiny kitchen and asked them how they were taking care of themselves. “How do you support each other?” she wanted to know.
They averaged three deaths a week in the 15-bed hospice, he said. “Sometimes I would get off my three-to-midnight shift and I would come back the next day, and one or two people might have died during the night,” Vandenberg said, his voice cracking. “The need was so great that the bed would not be empty more than a day at most; sometimes the bed would be filled right away. We didn’t have time to process the volume of death.”
Even amid all the darkness, there was joy. “A majority of our patients, as they were dying, were quite capable of laughter and gallows humor, and to an outsider that often felt really strange or inappropriate. When the hospice was taken over by a more corporate hospital, we got disciplined for too much laughter, and we were eating with the patients and that was not allowed,” Vandenberg said through tears. “She fit right in, she knew that was good. She joked with them. She hugged and kissed every single one of us, the patients and the staff.”
After one of her hospice visits, a patient woke up and said, “I had a vision that Elizabeth Taylor came to me in my sleep!”
“No, she was actually here,” a nurse told him.
Taylor wanted to look perfect for every visit (“I hope I haven’t overdone it!” she’d joke), so she always arrived with full hair and makeup and the famous 33.19-carat Asscher-cut Krupp diamond on her left ring finger. She wanted the patients to see her the way they had imagined her to be.
She told her assistant Jorjett Strumme, who would get emotional, that she could not come into hospices with her because she would start to cry if Strumme cried. She had to keep things light and happy, she said, but she’d get back in the car and she would bury her head in her dog’s soft white fur and be unusually quiet for a while.
Ed Wolf was a counselor in San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 5B in the 1980s. San Francisco was second only to New York in the number of AIDS cases, and 5B was the world’s first revolutionary inpatient unit for people with AIDS. It was created in 1983 and run by registered nurses who specialized in caring for AIDS patients. In 5B patients were treated with compassion.
In the beginning nurses and doctors wore so much protective gear that they looked like astronauts. Food trays piled up outside of hospital rooms because no one wanted to touch them. But in 5B things were different. Nurses were not allowed to wear protective medical gear, including gowns and masks. They believed that physical touch was an important way to honor each patient’s humanity. They did seemingly little things, like re-creating the decor of patients’ living rooms in their hospital rooms, allowing their pets to visit them, and, of course, allowing their partners to stay with them. They even used Champagne glasses for water.
Kate Andersen Brower
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