Ben Mercer, an Oxford scholar, comes to Greece to escape a wrecked marriage; his wife describes him as “a danger to her, body and soul,” for reasons not immediately revealed. Running low on money, he gets a job at a greasy spoon in an Athens suburb, where barely submerged resentments between native Greeks and Albanian immigrants seem about to brim over into violence. Then Eberhard, a college acquaintance, turns up at one of his tables and mentions working at an excavation in Laconia, otherwise known as Lacedaemonia, the location of the ancient city-state of Sparta. Although Eberhard tries to discourage him, Ben’s imagination has been ignited. The severity of Sparta’s ethos has always fascinated him, as has the elusiveness of its material remains. Unlike the Athenians, “the Spartans left nothing behind that reflected their greatness. They had become no more than rumors of rumors in the histories of others … Each outsider contradicting the next, a chain of Mediterranean whispers.”

Archaeologists like to dig stuff up, of course, dragging to the surface of the earth things that have lain beneath it for centuries. Some of those things, Hill suggests, might be better left buried. Having finagled his way into a job at the dig, Ben finds his curiosity further inflamed by a clique among the site’s workers, three men (including Eberhard) and two women who form a seemingly impenetrable social unit. Deflecting the friendly overtures of other team members, Ben yearns first to be included and later to know just what this little group is hiding up in the hills.

The story of Ben’s gradual insinuation into the clique alternates with the notes he’s writing “towards” his thesis. The theme of these notes drifts from the enigma of the Spartans, whose refusal to speak for themselves permitted a thousand stories about them to flourish, to ruminations on the connection between love and ruthlessness (exemplified by the unparalleled unity of the Theban Sacred Band, a military force made up of 150 homosexual couples), to, finally, the riddles posed by his new friends. He begins an affair with one of the women and joins the group on a midnight jackal hunt, but never feels as if he’s penetrated to the heart of their mystery.

What’s really going on with Eberhard & Co. turns out to be just barely plausible … well, maybe not quite that, but what Hill does with it and the ancient history it invokes is hypnotic. The policies of the Spartan elite — who annually declared war against the captive majority of their population (called helots) so that these serflike non-citizens could be murdered at will without any loss of honor — feeds into questions of modern-day political expedience, extremism and the power of fear. What crimes can be justified in the pursuit of a noble ideal? Odd anecdotes — about a discarded doll ripped open to reveal a music-box “heart” and a fetal chicken found in a cracked egg — mirror disturbing discoveries at the site and in a cave, which in turn echo the descent into the underworld made by so many mythical heroes. Do monsters await in the bowels of the earth, or in ourselves?

Novelists have been attempting this sort of thing since John Fowles’ “The Magus”; what distinguishes “The Hidden” is both a clarity of purpose (the resolution is not excessively coy or ambiguous) and radiant prose. Hill’s style is the opposite of the description-clogged, obscurantist verbiage that most poets produce when turning to fiction. Instead, he brings to this novel the kind of metaphor so good you don’t savor it so much as shiver with instantaneous recognition. “There was a delicacy to his sanity he had never acknowledged before,” he writes of Ben at one point. “It was as frail as water tension.” How is it, I thought after reading this line, that we don’t already compare the stability of a fragile mind to the thin skin of water that keeps a teardrop together?

A pity then, that — no doubt due to the expediencies of paperback publication — “The Hidden” shows signs of lax editing (the novel could easily lose 30 pages and be strengthened by the cuts) and sloppy copyediting (multiple typos and unconverted British spellings like “realise”). Still, the same criticisms could be leveled at Irving’s interminable “Last Night in Twisted River,” a book that evidences far less thought and artistry. In a season of high-profile novels, “The Hidden” is in danger of living up to its name, and that would indeed be a crime.

Lynch would like us all to calm down, please, and recognize that “proper” English is a recent and changeable institution. “The Lexicographer’s Dilemma” recapitulates the long argument between two schools of thought: the prescriptive — which holds that the job of language experts is to lay down the law by telling us how to speak and write — and the descriptive, which holds that compilers of dictionaries and other guides are in the business of describing, not dictating, how the language is used. The latter group includes most professional linguists and lexicographers, but the former — self-appointed pundits like the late William Safire and Lynne Truss, author of the bestselling rant about punctuation errors, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” — know that the real money lies in validating the ire of purists.

According to Lynch, the very notion of correct English is only 300 years old; in the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the idea that native English speakers could be accused of using their own language improperly would have seemed absurd. The advent of printing — and, especially, the growth of general literacy — led to efforts to establish authoritative standards of spelling and usage in the 18th century. Scholars known collectively as “the 18th-century grammarians” have, in some accounts of the language’s history, been set up as “dastardly, moustache-twirling villains and mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging morons,” who attempted to impose a lot of arbitrary restrictions on English grammar. Their most notorious crime was the prohibition against split infinitives.

Lynch takes a more temperate view of these “bad guys,” as he does of most matters discussed in “The Lexicographer’s Dilemma.” While he leans decidedly toward the descriptivist camp, he believes experts ought to acknowledge the public’s need for guidance on how to speak and write standard English — that is, the lingua franca of official, public and commercial life in the English-speaking world.

Which brings us back to those split infinitives, the most famous of which is spoken by William Shatner in the opening credits of the TV series “Star Trek”: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” The infinitive form of any English verb almost always consists of two words: “to go,” “to eat,” “to walk,” etc. The idea that those two words ought to be treated as a single, inseparable unit derives from the fact that in Latin the infinitive is one word. The imposition of Latinate grammar on English — the edict against ending sentences in a preposition is another example — is what the 18th-century grammarians have been condemned for by more liberal-minded linguists.

Lynch does think that English speakers should be taught to avoid splitting infinitives in certain situations, not because splitting them is incorrect, but because other people, people in a position to judge and exclude, have been taught it’s incorrect. The ability to speak and write standard English gives students “access to power,” he writes. It’s a membership card required for participation in the culture’s important conversations. But that doesn’t mean that standard English is necessarily superior to, say, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE or, to use a more notorious moniker, Ebonics), or that deviations from it constitute the downfall of civilization as we know it, as popular curmudgeons of Safire’s ilk like to proclaim.

“Correct” English, as Lynch characterizes it, is basically “the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.” And sure enough, the first guides to English usage promised to teach people to write and speak with greater “elegance” and “politeness,” not greater correctness. These manuals, born of an age of increased social mobility, were intended for “a newly self-conscious group of people who were no longer peasants but still were excluded from the traditional aristocracy.” The suddenly rich children of merchants and manufacturers needed instructions on the elegant grammar (and manners) of the aristocracy in order to blend in with their social superiors. Tellingly, the 300-year history of fulmination against improper usage is marked by diatribes against those “inferior” and upstart groups supposedly most prone to transgression: women, young people, racial and ethnic minorities and, of course, Americans.

To protests that the language police are only protecting the accuracy, precision and clarity of our tongue, Lynch lifts a skeptical eyebrow. Many of the most roundly deplored “debasements” of English are nevertheless perfectly comprehensible: I didn’t confuse you by writing “Ain’t it the truth?” in my opening paragraph, did I? The only truly unbreakable rules of grammar and usage are the ones that, when broken, result in a genuine failure to communicate. The rest is a form of covert class warfare, and today’s usage reproofs constitute a status-protecting thump on the head delivered by the upper middle class to uppity members of the lower middle.

Thinking of the grammar wars in this light helps explain why they provoke such rage. Much as some people might detest seeing the noun “impact” used as a verb, if a lot of people say it and almost everybody understands it when it’s said, then a coup has been effected. The “verbing” of nouns (or the creation of “nerbs”) has been a flashpoint for the past four or five decades with the growth of business management lingo. Complaints about this point to a particularly American social fissure: between the cultured sensibility of the liberally educated and the can-do utilitarianism of striving MBAs.

Does it help to know that the foremost Victorian grammar cop regarded “donate” as “utterly abominable” and “inaugurate” as “high-flying nonsense”? It is in the nature of language to change, and while teaching people to use standard English may help get them into a boardroom or cabinet chamber, chances are they’ll teach English itself a few new tricks by the time they get out, not necessarily for the worse. For every groaner like “mentee” (i.e., “protégé”), there are awesome coinages like “aerobicized,” “blowback” and “crunk” — all recently added to the “Concise Oxford English Dictionary.” Also, I rejoice to learn that “whom” (the objective case of the pronoun “who”) may soon vanish from written English just as it has nearly vanished from casual speech, and students will have one less tedious rule to memorize. But dangling participles? Those I’ll fight ’til the bitter end.

“Chronic City” features one hapless Chase Insteadman, a former child actor adrift in New York as his fiancée, an astronaut, hovers above, prevented from returning to Earth by an orbital minefield. He soon falls under the mad spell of Perkus Tooth, a writer and inveterate cultural critic-obsessive, who becomes friend and Svengali, sharing with him his love of all things Brando and an increasing paranoia.

Lethem stopped by the Salon New York office to discuss his new novel, his Brooklynite  critique of Manhattan, his MacArthur “genius” grant and the dark side of cultural obsession.

Most anyone with a deep love of film, books, movies has had a Perkus Tooth in their lives at some point, sort of tutoring them on the good stuff. I read that Paul Nelson was an inspiration.

Sure, Paul Nelson was part of that image for me. I mean, Paul Nelson was not frantic, actually. And he wasn’t a dandy, and he wasn’t a pot smoker, so there’s a lot of ways in which if you knew Paul Nelson you’d never associate the two. But something about Chase’s innocence meeting Perkus’ cultural worldliness comes from the fact that as a 20-something — 21, 22 — I kind of fell into Paul’s sphere for a little while and he gave me this instant education in his version of American vernacular culture. Ross Macdonald, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Chet Baker. And it was this flood of references for me to sort out and absorb and he became very important. A lot of the things that Paul taught me to value are still really the center of my sensibility.

But there was also something poignant about the amount that Paul depended on the power of his cultural searches and what they unearthed for his sustenance. It was like they were his oxygen, and I adored it and I think I identified with it at the same time as it can’t help but serve as a kind of warning … just so many people I know who have at some point become voracious about cultural collecting, cultural searching — their identification tips over. I’ve done it. And it’s, to me, so human and so poignant and so compelling and also terrifying to go into that place. And you know, at the same time it’s just finally a metaphor for what anyone does, which is search for meaning, constantly trying to ask yourself if you can find in the environment somewhere, the natural world, your family tree, some version of politics or culture or in this case pop culture, a description that makes you understand why you’re here. So in that sense it’s not culturally specific at all.

What do you mean by a “warning”?

Well, just as critical theory, critique, tips into paranoia — finding patterns that don’t exist — collecting can cross that line from being the quest for value into being the quest for the subterranean, impossible artifact that will somehow validate all of your existence … You know, I used to know, I still do know, a lot of [Bob] Dylan collectors, and he’s begun demystifying a lot of the secrets by issuing them himself, but these things used to circulate as talismanic objects. And there was always the myth of the song that was even better, the musician who’d come out of some session and say, “Well, yeah sure, you heard ‘Blind Willie McTell’ because you’ve got a tape of it, but there was another song that he debuted in the studio that day that was never written down and we all begged him to play it again and he never did.” And it’s sort of like, “Well, if that song’s even better than ‘Blind Willie McTell,’ then what about the song that Dylan wrote but didn’t play that day, or what about the song that Dylan never even wrote! That might be the best one!” It’s a path of madness, and certainly I wanted to portray that terrifying descent to some extent.

What’s fascinating about a character like Perkus is there’s no echo chamber, it’s all in his head. He’s coming up with his own fictions, really, without any enablers.

In that way it relates really strongly to a book like “The Fortress of Solitude,” which is overtly nostalgic. I mean, Perkus is his own fortress of solitude. He’s trying to keep a diorama of the version of New York City that means the most to him alive. And for him the Tompkins Square riots are still fresh news and Tom Verlaine breaking up Television is like a fresh tragedy. It’s all at the edge of his nerves, the world that means the most to him, and he’s trying to bring other people into that system of values.

Chase Insteadman is such an unformed thinker about culture, the world. Do you think you were like that at 21?

I probably wasn’t very like Chase Insteadman when I was 20 — I might be more like him now in a funny way. Or let’s say that the ways in which I identify with Chase as a character have to do with the peculiar fate of being slightly known, and an author is by definition not a famous person. In our culture, where fame is a currency and we see it awarded on television in all sorts of strange ways, authors never register, they’re not even a blip. But in a tiny kind of weird, subjective version of my own experience, the world I wander through, in a bookstore or just now going into the offices of the New York Times Book Review, people are like [looking over his shoulder in surprise ] — and I’m about to be on tour and play this part inevitably. Ian McEwan has a great line where he says, “Book touring is like being an employee of your former self.” But it’s an acting role, you have to authenticate — yes, I’m the writer who wrote that book — nightly for people, and it’s kind of silly and I’m not an actor, I’m no good in any sense except that I have backed into by necessity the ability to play myself. And the moment you do that, you develop this very obscure, uncomfortable double sense of self and that can be very haunting. And that’s what I wanted to capture when I wrote about Chase’s sort of mediocre celebrity. The way he’s still remembered for something he himself can barely remember doing is something I feel a strange degree of identification with.

You feel like you’re acting?

There are times when someone wants to talk to me about Tourette’s syndrome — well, “Motherless Brooklyn” was published 10 years ago. It means I wrote it 12, 13 years ago, I conceived it longer ago. The person who got excited about that isn’t very close to the surface for me anymore. So I have to do this strange, polite kind of acting bit where I reinhabit the role of the author of “Motherless Brooklyn.”

You’ve said “Chronic City” came from your distinctly Brooklyn point of view. What kind of critique, do you think, is it of Manhattan?

Of course I shudder if I think I made a deliberate social critique, because it’s not mostly a great path for a storyteller to take. But rather than a social critique or especially one of any particular present moment, I felt what I was doing was exploring some of the ambivalent power of Manhattan. And I think it’s always resided there, as long as I’ve been alive and lived next door to Manhattan — it is a kind of virtual reality. There’s something unreal about Manhattan, it’s a creation of will and aspiration and money. And unlike most places on earth it’s not rooted in its past, it’s rooted in its possibilities and its future, and it’s always being remade and revamped.

Now, having said that, what makes Manhattan, what makes NYC, what makes the world more complicated than any description, than the one I’ve just offered, is that it’s also real — people go on living their lives in buildings, eating food, wearing clothes, trying to pay the rent. And I wanted to find a way to put this doubleness into the book. This fact that a place can be a virtual reality and still be so stuck in our world, our real world, that’s what I really cared to say about Manhattan.

When I first moved to Manhattan “Motherless Brooklyn” had just come out. In that book, Brooklyn is grounded in this kind of firmament, whereas Manhattan is much more sketchy, changing, fast-paced …

The compression you’ve made, I’ve offered a similar description a few times, and I always look from the Brooklyn point of view that what I find so nourishing of Brooklyn is that it wants to be the big city, but it falls short — it’s always half-renovated, and half-gentrified. So you see these lumps of the future lying alongside the past, the recalcitrant chunks of the past that won’t go. And they’re just side by side and everyone has to just live with this kind of awkwardness. And whereas Manhattan often tries to remake itself and succeeds, startlingly this crazy new building will come up or crazy new neighborhood will exist and everyone seems to believe in it and move in right away, and it’s like, OK, now TriBeCa is a good place to go for food. What? Yes? Really? OK.

Back to Perkus, I kept thinking that, especially in the current climate, what a dying breed that sort of cultural critic is.

You’re right, it’s always a dying breed. One of the things I’m very devoted to in Perkus is the joke, seems like just a running joke, “I am not a rock critic.” In the end he kind of makes this tormented confession: “I am a rock critic!” I feel like there’s something very moving to me about the pioneer generation — [Robert] Christgau, Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Paul Nelson, Greg Shaw — who by force of will said, “We’re going to write seriously about this thing that everyone thinks is a joke.” It was like founding a school of criticism on bubblegum wrappers. The culture did not believe that rock ‘n’ roll could sustain analysis. The records were supposed to blow away and disappear after they fell off the charts, no one was even supposed to care who made them after awhile. They were just pop. And they located the connection between this material and American culture at large, between this material and art. And by doing so they created a language for themselves — that was an act of bravery. I really think it was as bold a gesture as a lot of art making itself. They made something that now of course can be quite complacent and automatic.

We all feel almost that there’s a wearisome familiarity with the inside language of music criticism, at least when it’s used in a received way. But that didn’t exist, so I think of Perkus as — of course the dates are off, he couldn’t have been one of the founders — but he conveys some of that spirit of trying to say something that no one thinks you’re even allowed to try to say. This book is partly about the emotion that accompanies trying to name unnamable things that you see in sets around you. Whether it’s conspiracies or facts about the city that somehow are inexpressible facts. It’s tormenting not to have the language to put it across and Perkus is tormented by that. But he’s also very dedicated. To look at him very generously he’s very dedicated to the idea of secret knowledge, to the mastery of secret knowledge. And the Internet and the reissue age is one that is very humbling to masters of secret knowledge — everyone’s a master of secret knowledge now.

You know, when I met Paul Nelson, this can be very hard I think for someone younger than me to understand anymore — if you get curious about Howard Hawks, if you hear someone saying “Oh, god, you don’t know what you’re missing,” you can go and see “Red River” tomorrow. You can see 30 Howard Hawks movies tomorrow. When Paul Nelson said to me, “You need to know about this,” what he then did was pull out of his apartment, which was an archive, these VHS tapes with his hand-lettered labels on them all recorded off PBS or “The Million Dollar Movie,” commercials intact, with him fixing the vertical hold in the middle of the big scene — all recorded for posterity — that was how this meaning was transmitted to me. It was something rarefied and almost impossible to explore. He wanted me to see obscure Orson Welles movies — “F for Fake” or “Mr. Arkadin.” There’s no Criterion Collection, there’s no way to get from here to there unless Paul Nelson was up that night recording it with his television. But that’s all gone. We’re drowning in archival culture.

Are we richer or poorer for that?

I think it’s OK. I’d rather have it around.

Have everything available rather than relying on these kind of guides …

Yeah, I guess in a way there is that sense in which Perkus Tooth is a commemorative character. I had to make these guys naive about the Internet — you know, the joke about them not even knowing how to bid on eBay, and still having a dial-up computer — because a lot of the meaning that is so precious and so fragile for them evaporates in the instantaneity of Internet communication.

So what was it like creating after you got the genius grant?

Well, the first thing to say is that I’ve been a very lucky writer, a very lucky artist, and the luck began before the MacArthur. The MacArthur didn’t arrive in the hands of someone sleeping on couches. I found my way mercifully to very, very — I have a very, very good editor at a very strong publishing house who supports me brilliantly and has now for more than a decade. So, that’s something — forget the MacArthur — that’s something any writer should dream of. I had a lot of opportunities that came with being capably published, brilliantly published. The MacArthur did free me, especially given that it came at a moment when I was — you know, I’m 45 now, I’m married now, I have a 2-year-old — I was starting to not want to live the scrappy, year-to-year, no health insurance kind of life. I needed to outfit myself with a few more middle-class amenities just to be able to look my wife in the eye. So it was kind of a perfect time.

But also I saw it as a kind of vote that I should do more of what I’d already been doing, but do it even better, do it more passionately, do it more deeply. I really do feel that this book is connected to the MacArthur in the sense that it’s an ambitious book and a big book, but it’s also, I’m not trying to please anyone but myself. It’s a very willful, very personal, I would agree if you said very eccentric book in a lot of ways. And that was what the MacArthur told me I should do. I believe I was right to take it as that kind of message.

The book dropped this week, reviews are coming up, the book tour’s going to start. Does the money free you from really having to worry about the stuff –

Let’s not exaggerate the good fortune. My MacArthur runs out in a year, and the really tragic thing about getting the MacArthur award is that the only person in the entire universe who will never get a MacArthur is someone who already got one. I’m on my own. It made the last few years so much easier, and it’s hard to know how I could have gotten this book done without it.

The funniest of these essays depict the author’s metamorphosis from a latent misogynist who takes himself too seriously into a serious man with feminist sympathies. “Cosmodemonic” is a brief portrait of the artist as “a little shit” — his 22-year-old head full of Henry Miller, recklessly lusting after his female classmates at the University of California at Irvine’s MFA program. “The Miller hero — my hero — does what he wants, when he wants, whether it makes sense or not,” Chabon writes. This pose is crushed after two years of exposure to “the hard-earned skepticism of grown women” in his workshops. Two decades on, in “William and I,” we see Chabon protesting the high standards of motherhood compared to the meager demands of being a good dad. And, as if to complete the transformation, “I Feel Good About My Murse” has the 45-year-old Mike proudly shouldering a suede man purse. “I seem every day to give a little less of a fuck what people think or say about me,” he confides.

Another of the book’s consistent motifs is the disappearance of childhood. With vivid access to his own, Chabon is able to contrast the ways in which his kids’ imaginations are imposed upon and pre-imagined by, for example, the “authoritarian nature of the new Lego” and “the orthodoxy of ‘Toy Story.’” To Chabon’s mind, these products lack the open-endedness of “crap” entertainment like the short-lived “Planet of the Apes” TV show of his youth, into whose shaky plotlines a child could more easily project himself. Still, he trusts in the innovative potential of the child psyche: “Kids write their own manuals in a new language made up of things we give them and the things they derive from the peculiar wiring of their own heads.” As a manual to Chabon’s own peculiar wiring, “Manhood for Amateurs” makes for an insightful and highly entertaining guide. 

According to William J. Mann, Taylor’s latest biographer, we probably shouldn’t have been. “How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood,” argues that, despite Taylor’s half-dozen or so legendary on-screen roles — including her Oscar-winning portrayal of a posh call girl in “Butterfield 8″ — the instrument she truly mastered was celebrity itself. That she’s nabbed a few more headlines by communicating directly with her fans using the latest technology only demonstrates that she hasn’t lost her touch.

Raised in the studio system at a time when stars’ images, careers and personal lives were approved and manufactured by potentates like MGM head Louis B. Mayer, Taylor, as Mann sees it, ushered in a new age of candor and independence. The studio had groomed her as an idealized, sensual but sweet beauty, and then she went out and stole Debbie Reynolds’ husband, Eddie Fisher, launching a scandal that obsessed the popular press for the better part of the late 1950s. (The infamy of that romantic triangle puts the Aniston-Brangelina soap opera in the shade.) Cast as “cruel and heartless as a black widow spider” (in the words of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, her one-time sponsor and later nemesis), Taylor didn’t entirely recover the public’s favor until 1960, when she was hospitalized with “Malta fever” in London and reportedly hovered near death.

No sooner had she won back her fans than Taylor shocked them again by jettisoning Fisher and taking up with her married “Cleopatra” costar, Richard Burton, in Rome. This time, rather than lying low, as Taylor had at the beginning of the Fisher affair, she and Burton commenced “flaunting” their adultery on the Via Veneto, “seeming to revel in the headlines and round-the-clock publicity.” They received anonymous death threats, and a congresswoman from Georgia tried to have them barred from reentering the United States, but Taylor brazened it out. In a way, it was the beginning of the sexual revolution. “I try not to lie,” she told a reporter. “I can’t be hypocritical just to protect my public.” Long after Taylor and Burton married in 1964, the couple continued to draw mobs of fans and gawkers wherever they went, becoming among the first targets of the paparazzi’s new telephoto lenses.

Elizabeth Taylor books abound, and while Mann’s eminently yummy entry is pretty much everything you’d want in a Hollywood biography, it’s not a whole lot more, either. What does make “How to Be a Movie Star” distinctive is its focus on the changing nature of personal fame as embodied by a woman whose life has consisted of one superlative after another. Married eight times and enduring a string of health crises, Taylor was not only the last classic movie star and the first actress to be paid a million dollars a picture, but at various times regarded as the most beautiful and the most famous woman in the world. Mann has obtained some previously untapped material from the supporting figures in her spectacular life, making particularly good use of Hedda Hopper’s files as he casts the columnist as the embodiment of old Hollywood, alternately courting and denouncing “that slut” who defied it.

The most enjoyable chapters in “How to Be a Movie Star” describe the media circus of the Reynolds-Fisher scandal. Debbie Reynolds, working her girl-next-door image for all it was worth, played the abandoned wife and mother to Taylor’s shameless homewrecker, capitalizing on the barely submerged domestic anxieties of the 1950s. In reality, Fisher’s marriage to Reynolds had been arranged by MGM and had always been loveless. (Their daughter, Carrie Fisher, described the relationship as “basically a press release.”) Posing for photographers with diaper pins on her blouse and tears in her eyes, Reynolds gave the performance of a lifetime; as one columnist later observed, “Debbie has more balls than any five guys I’ve ever known. She pretends to be sweet and demure, but at heart she’s as hard as nails.” Refusing to submit to the studio’s management of the story, Taylor deployed her own press agent to portray her as a devotee of true love. It was the first Hollywood scandal in which dueling versions of the story were presented to the public for vetting, a recipe for endless coverage. Instead of poleaxing the release of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (with Taylor playing a sex-starved hussy in a lacy slip), as the studio had feared, the controversy made it a smash hit.

As a pioneer for the Madonnas and Lindsay Lohans of today, women whose personal lives occupy more of the public imagination than does their creative work, Taylor comes across as remarkably sympathetic and uncomplicated. For all her temperament, narcissism and hedonism, she was never driven or insecure. She didn’t seek applause as a balm for deeper wounds, like Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe; her fame was forged by others rather than the object of her own ambition. She didn’t much like making movies, though she’d occasionally pull out the stops when the project suited her whims. What she really wanted was to lounge around on yachts and in luxury hotels, chowing down on fried chicken with “lots of gravy” and waking up to a Tiffany’s box on her pillow on a fairly regular basis. Acting, fame and a few of her marriages were little more than means to those ends.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the less someone needs your love, the more lovable they appear, and so it has been with Elizabeth Taylor. The Wife of Bath wrapped in a mink coat, she was foul-mouthed and hard-drinking, addicted to diamonds and drawn to other women’s husbands, but she has a good heart, as both her respectful treatment of blue-collar film crew workers and her AIDS activism testify. “I don’t pretend to be an ordinary housewife,” she once said, mostly because she didn’t care enough about what other people thought to pretend anything. Yet, despite the CinemaScope dimensions of her life, in her red-blooded appetites she probably has more in common with the average American woman than many of the celebrities currently being touted as “just like us.” Endearingly, she devoted more of her Twitter feed to drumming up support for Kathy Ireland on “Dancing With the Stars” (“beauty in action and grace which is what that lady is all about”) than to her own surgery. And, as always, she survived.