Lives of the Unsinkable Liz

Taylor is 68. Poor Monroe capitulated at 36. Judy Garland wore herself out and died at 47. Two sex goddesses and a gifted waif, all of them addictive messes at one time or another. Taylor had eight marriages--the doggedly repeated triumph of hope over experience. The great beauty went from man to man like Mr. Toad in his short-lived passions for boats, for the gypsy caravan, for motorcars.

It's fun, even sometimes hilarious, to have these lives of old stars (especially Taylor's) to carry with us into the new millennium. Gerald Clarke has done a fine, if sad, job on Judy Garland (Get Happy; Random House). Esther Williams has published an unexpectedly spirited memoir (The Million Dollar Mermaid; Simon & Schuster) in which she reveals, among other things, that she did not marry the ripple-jawed Jeff Chandler in the '50s because he liked to dress up in women's clothes ("You're too big to wear polka dots," she told him).

My favorite is the autobiography of Lana Turner, published some years ago. It is a strangely affecting work--eerily earnest, humorless and literal-minded--in which a certain Southern California, film-noir, '40s bleakness persuades the reader, after a hundred pages, that in a former life Lana Turner and Richard Nixon may have been the same person. It is a very spooky experience.