I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

For any who want more, complete list of all posts by month since 2011

  • She Was Hotter than a Two Dollar Pistol


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    Maggie the Cat in famous lingerie

    The stuff that dreams are made of

    My love affair with Elizabeth Taylor has lasted longer than any of my real-life relationships and all of her eight marriages.  Liz and I go way back.

    We started in 1956 with Giant which I got to see because my mother heard it was a historical movie about West Texas oil.  I was ten years old at the time she took me to see it at the Miller’s Theater in Navasota, and I decided right then and there if this was how history looked, I was all about yesterday.  I fell in love with the heroine who was married to Rock Hudson but wild for James Dean.  She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

    The following year Raintree County was released, and it was then and is today my most favorite silver screen experience with this Golden Age of Hollywood icon.  She was “hotter than a two dollar pistol and the fastest thing around…” as George Jones sang twenty years later.  For two and a half hours, I lusted after Liz who played Susanna the Hottie southern belle who stole Johnny Shawnessy from boring whiny Nell.  I never understood why two women would be in love with Montgomery Clift anyway, but I certainly knew why he was taken with Liz.

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    “Look at the birdie, look at the tree…my gal’s the prettiest in the whole county.”

    from Raintree County

    I’ve seen that movie countless times with its Gone With the Wind wannabes and celebrated flaws, but I truly don’t care.  For some of her fans, Liz will be remembered as Maggie the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the sexy slip or Catherine in the white bathing suit in Suddenly, Last Summer or the scandalous affairs with co-stars Eddie Fisher and Richard Burton on the sets of Butterfield 8 and Cleopatra, respectively.  Others will see her as the child star in National Velvet and the Lassie movies or the deranged middle-aged Martha in 1966 in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  for which she won her second Oscar.

    She will be remembered by many for her notorious marriages and divorces – all eight of them – think Debbie Reynolds, for example.  Then think Richard Burton and Cleopatra.  If you remember the hullabaloo from those torrid days, you must also remember the  Voting Rights Act of 1965…an act that the Supremes struck down this year.  But don’t get me started on that.

    Why Liz?  Why now, you ask?

    I visited a friend this week and saw the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof poster  (a poster he bought from me at one of our downsizing yard sales!) and was reminded of the time fifty years ago when I fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor and wrote her a fan letter and received a glossy 5 x 7 “autographed” photo of her from MGM.  Love, Liz, she signed.

    And I do.

  • Where Do I Put Those Memories?


    Country music legend Charley Pride sang about a lost love many years ago and asked a question that haunts me today as I gaze at the signs of autumn around me:

    Where do I put her memory?

         I can’t chase it, erase it, I just have to face it…It’s gonna be there a long, long time.

    The days grow shorter, the pinestraw falls freely from the ancient tall pines that surround our house in Columbia, the red and gold and brown leaves from the dogwood trees mingle with each other in the straw on the ground in the back yard, the magnificent oak that hovers over the patio pummels the bricks with acorns that make Chelsea sick when she eats them, the temperature drops fifteen degrees from the scorching summer highs and the humidity decreases to a reasonable level.  Football fever takes over the weekends and wins and losses affect moods in our home.

    Autumn has arrived.  There’s no doubt about it.  The days will now be a blur through the end of the year.  Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s.  The holidays propel us to another year faster than a speeding bullet.  Hide and watch.

    The losses in this year have been enormous for my family both here and in Texas, and it’s the second year in a row for these life altering events.  So many are gone that I feel like The Rapture occurred and I was left while all the good ones were taken.   I’m looking for a place to put those memories – those reminiscences of  my times with the lost ones.  I’m grateful to have them, but I’d like to have a box to put them in so that I could control when I wanted to release them into my mind.  Today the memories control me instead.

    I can’t chase them, erase them, I just have to face them.  They’re gonna be with me for a long, long time.