Opinion

Vixen, lush, nut … icon

“My troubles all started,” Elizabeth Taylor once theorized, “because I have a woman’s body and a child’s emotions.”

The line from La Liz to LiLo is short.

A common gripe about Lindsay Lohan, Chris Brown, Kanye West, Charlie Sheen and the rest of our celebrity monster posse is that they’re immature brats whom genetic fortuity gave riches but not brains, morals or character. They are.

But so were the stars of the ’50s. If their serene glamour persists, it’s in part because the movies are still on TV but the scandal sheets that chronicled their misadventures have crumbled to atoms. Liz Taylor, who died on Wednesday at 79, married eight times, was a vigorous serial adulteress, conceived a child out of wedlock, and flitted in and out of rehab for booze and painkiller abuse. When one husband died in a plane crash, she grabbed the nearest one to hand — Debbie Reynolds’. (Eddie Fisher, his and Reynolds’ daughter, Carrie, later wrote, “consoled [Taylor] with flowers, and he ultimately consoled her with his penis.”)

Taylor’s adulterous, drink-fueled hookup with Richard Burton on the set of “Cleopatra” inspired a letter published in a Vatican newspaper that condemned her for “erotic vagrancy.” When the lovers were out of the country, Rep. Iris Faircloth Blitch of Georgia called for them to be denied re-entry into the US “on the grounds of undesirability.”

Katharine Hepburn, the Camilla Parker-Bowles of La La Land, carried on with a married (and Catholic) Spencer Tracy for decades. Errol Flynn probably had sex with two underage girls, yet avoided conviction when his lawyers smeared the victims by bringing up their past sexual histories in a statutory rape trial that gave us the phrase “in like Flynn.” Flynn was also an anti-Semite who wrote to a friend, “A slimy Jew is trying to cheat me . . . I do wish we could bring Hitler over here to teach these Isaacs a thing or two. The bastards have absolutely no business probity or honor whatsoever.”

Robert Mitchum did a couple of months in prison for marijuana possession. Ingrid Bergman was denounced on the floor of the US Senate as “a powerful influence for evil” after walking away from her husband and daughter for the (also-married) Italian film director Roberto Rossellini. That’s not as hurty as Kanye West being called a “jackass” by President Obama, but it’s at least up there with Candice Bergen being attacked by Dan Quayle for playing a fictional single mom on a sitcom.

Giving us all something to be outraged about is a side benefit of celebrity sin. Politicians often fret that star behavior trickles down to the masses, which was the basis of Quayle’s point about Bergen. (For decades movies and TV shows depicted married couples sleeping in separate beds. That habit didn’t seem to catch on.) But art has to keep up with social changes to be relevant, and Bergen’s pregnancy on “Murphy Brown” reflected mores more than it shaped them.

So when you start scolding celebrities you may sound like . . . a scold. Proving that it is not impossible to model your career on Dan Quayle’s, Mike Huckabee followed up Quayle by calling it “troubling” that “People see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, ‘Hey look, you know, we’re having children, we’re not married, but we’re having these children, and they’re doing just fine.’ ” Huckabee is even more troubled by abortion, so presumably Portman’s only Huckabee-pleasing option would have been not to have sex at all.

Hollywood is enduringly outrageous, but outrage rarely endures. Chris Brown smashed a window? It was less than 20 years ago that cuddly manchild Johnny Depp — today so Mom-friendly that he headlines kids’ movies — smashed an entire New York hotel room.

If comedy equals tragedy plus time, grande dames and silver foxes are simply bad girls and boys who survived. (Those who don’t survive climb even higher up Mt. Posterity: Take a bow, Car and Driver man of the year for 1955, James Dean.)

Twenty years ago, you could barely get through a comedy monologue without mentioning the one-man tempest that was Sean Penn, who pointedly didn’t deny he ran around firing a gun in the air as airborne paps buzzed his wedding to Madonna. “I would have been very excited to see one of those helicopters burn and the bodies inside melt,” he declared. “They were non-people to me. I have never shot a firearm at anything I considered a life form.”

Today Sean Penn is a two-time Oscar winner, a beacon of gay rights, savior of New Orleans and Haiti’s unofficial ambassador of hope. Tomorrow? Maybe he’ll be flying to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. (Just don’t try to take his picture.)

The great old screen sensations weren’t any greater. Faded movie stars brighten our spirits because they remind us of our younger, prettier selves, days when our hair was bountiful and our cellulite was not. Eventually even the most ardently scandalous celebrities quiet their internal clamors, and eventually we forgive the transgressions that sweetly coincided with our own.