All The Queen's Men

ROBERT HARDY: “At her best, she was immensely impressive. The color of her eyes was enough to turn a saint into a devil.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Movie stars – like automobiles, airplanes, and apple pies – are quintessentially American commodities. When we measure what we’ve given the world, the product of Personality – used to inspire, entertain, endorse, titillate, preach, stoke the flames of our imaginations, and sell, sell, sell – may prove more influential than the Model T. Elizabeth Taylor – for her performances both good and bad, for her innocence, sexiness, rebellion, honesty, and sheer life force – has been called the greatest movie star of all… Taylor stood apart, reveling in her ability to fascinate, to scandalize, to provoke. Swathed in mink, sailing aboard yachts, discarding husbands nearly as frequently as she changed her diamond earrings, Elizabeth dominated the headlines for three glittering decades, rewriting the rules as she went along, inverting paradigms, defying conventions, beating expectations, and in the course of it all laying down the yardstick by which celebrity has been measured ever since.”

CAMILLE PAGLIA: “At her best, Elizabeth Taylor simply is. An electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens. It is an extrasensory, pagan phenomenon.”

ELLIS AMBURN: “The first thing you noticed about her when she was still in her twenties was that, despite the beauty she displayed on film, no camera had ever done her justice. Her skin was unbelievable. She had on a simple sundress, and I remember her shoulders being velvety and iridescent. Her coloring made me think of a rose at dusk. Her manner was appealing demure - typical 1950s ladylike poise. Being in her presence, at the height of her beauty, was an almost religious experience. She was an example of nature perfecting itself, a once-in-a-generation phenomenon.”

 

 

BARBARA STANWYCK: “No woman has the right to be that beautiful at five a.m. with her hair up.”

 

SHIRLEY MACLAINE: “She’d flop into any chair that was vacant, eating a cheese Danish, looking ten years younger with no makeup, and plopping her feet up on the table in front of her. The hairdresser would light her cigarette and she would draw the smoke long and deep into her lungs with the same low-down basic oral gratification she lavished on the cheese Danish.”

SARA DAVIDSON: “‘Let’s get acquainted,’ Liz said. ‘We’re going to be playing husband and wife for the next six months.’ They ate and drank and when Rock was smashed, he said to Elizabeth, ‘How can you stand being so beautiful?’ ‘Beautiful? Beautiful! I’m Minnie Mouse.’ She went to her bedroom, pinned her hair back and put on a little red skirt and black pumps. When she came back into the living room, Rock said, ‘It was true! There stood Minnie Mouse.’ They stayed up drinking and laughing until four in the morning, and Rock and Elizabeth had to be at the studio two hours later, at 6 A.M. They had to shoot the wedding scene, where Elizabeth has to run home to Virginia and is matron of honor at her sister’s wedding. Rock arrives, and without saying a word, goes and stands behind Elizabeth until she becomes aware of his presence, turns, and runs into his arms. It would become one of the most powerful scenes in the film. When Rock screened the movie for friends, he would stop the projector and explain: ‘In between takes, Elizabeth and I were running out and throwing up. We were both so hung over we couldn’t speak. That’s what made the scene.’”

DENNIS HOPPER: “We were working on Giant, and we’re out in the middle of Texas. It was a scene that takes place just before Dean discovers oil on his land, where Elizabeth Taylor comes by and he makes tea for her. It’s the first time Dean has ever acted with her. But even though we’re out in the desert in Marfa, there are a thousand people watching us film behind a rope. It’s a scene where Dean has a rifle on his back. He brings her in and makes her tea, and then, suddenly, he stops. And he walks a couple hundred feet away to where these people are watching us, and in front of all of them, he pisses– facing them, with his back to the set. Then he comes back in and does the scene. So, later, we’re driving back to Marfa, and I said, ‘Jimmy, I’ve seen you do a lot of strange things, man, but you really did it today. What was that all about?’ He said, ‘It was Elizabeth Taylor. I can’t get over my farm-boy upbringing. I was so nervous that I couldn’t speak. I had to pee, and I was trying to use that, but it wasn’t working. So I thought that if I could go pee in front of all those people, I would be able to work with her.’”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “As the sun sank past the horizon and stained the desert red, [‘Giant’ producer] Tom Andre watched with a mixture of concern and amusement as Elizabeth hauled out the booze. With George Stevens having called the last cut of the day, she and Rock Hudson were playing their daily game of ‘Prince of Wales,’ chanting at each other as they chugged down beer after beer. Their drinking had become legendary. When a freak thunderstorm hit Marfa and dropped hailstones all over town, Elizabeth and Rock ran around collecting them in buckets to use as ice in their Bloody Marys. Another night they devised a chocolate martini – vodka and Hershey’s syrup – and proclaimed it perfection, at least until they woke up with monumental hangovers the next day. Though they were never late to the set, Stevens couldn’t have been too pleased when his two stars kept running to the ‘honey wagons’ – the portable toilets – to throw up between takes.”

RICHARD BROOKS: “First, she’s a beauty. Then, she’s a combination of child and bitch. Third, she wants to love passionately and to be loved.”

ROBERT STACK: “You’re a star at an age when you should be in school. It’s all tinsel and moonlight. And the fact that any of them survive it at all is remarkable. I take my hat off to Elizabeth.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “[Acting opposite Montgomery Clift in ‘A Place in the Sun’] was the first time Elizabeth saw an actor on fire with his own artistic convictions and not docilely dependent on screenwriters and directors. Shivering under blankets with him as the crew readied a scene, Elizabeth became entranced by the charismatic Clift. At twenty-eight, Monty wasn’t fond of Hollywood and was openly disdainful of the culture of stardom – like the kind of build-up that Elizabeth was getting at the moment… Elizabeth found Monty delightful. She loved his rebellion and hipness. Hiding out in his dressing room, they snuck sips of brandy and made up silly names for everyone on the set.”

BOB WILLOUGHBY: “During the production of Raintree County] Elizabeth and Monty decided to have a party. I was already in bed when the phone rang. It was Elizabeth inviting me over to have a drink. Naturally I got dressed and went. When I arrived, Hank Moonjean, one of the assistant directors, was there and we were the party. I guess Elizabeth picked us since we were the youngest in the crew. The music was going, and the first thing I saw was Monty trying to put ice cubes down Elizabeth’s blouse, and there was screaming, and running around this rented house they were in. Obviously they had had a few drinks before we arrived. Hank and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders and poured ourselves a drink. I don’t remember much more, except Hank and Elizabeth doing the “Lindy” and Monty scrambling around on the floor, but it was one of the best parties I’ve ever been too.”

ED FOOTE: “We all got totally soused somewhere on the West Side — and I remember Monty shouting to Liz, ‘You are the only woman I will ever love,’ and Elizabeth slumped in a chair staring at him with those magnificent violet eyes and crooning, ‘Baby, oh baby,’ over and over again.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “As much as he adored her, Clift was very conscious of the fact that Elizabeth was just seventeen years old; it would be a while before their friendship deepened emotionally, at least from Monty’s perspective. For now, it remained a happy, sometimes childlike association. Monty’s gayness fostered a deeper and safer intimacy than she would ever have with most men. When Elizabeth spent a weekend with Monty and Roddy McDowell at the Park Plaza in New York, there was not hanky-panky or sexual tension, just good-natured (if somewhat out of control) fun. They drank lots of martinis, pelted each other with chrysanthemums, turned the paintings on the walls upside-down, and stole bathroom fixtures. And no one seemed to worry too much about a teenaged girl developing such a fond taste for vodka.”

 DIANA LYNN: “The combination of their beauty was staggering.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “On May 12, 1956, a particularly foggy night, Elizabeth and Michael Wilding, still keeping up the pretense of their marriage, hosted a dinner party at their house. The guest of honor was to be Father George Long, a man of the cloth so modern, Elizabeth gushed to Monty, that he actually said ‘fuck.’ Elizabeth was planning quite the gathering for the good father. In addition to Monty and his friend, the actor Kevin McCarthy, who was then making ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers,’ Elizabeth had invited Rock Hudson and his new wife, Phyllis Gates. At first Monty declined. Lately he’d been feeling uncomfortable by the awkward middle ground he occupied in the Wildings’ marriage. Undeniably fond of his beloved ‘Bessie Mae,’ he’d also grown close to Michael, who frequently showed up at Clift’s house on his own for long heartfelt talks. But finally Monty agreed to attend the dinner and drive himself up the long winding road to the Wildings’ house in Benedict Canyon in a leased sedan.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “The party wasn’t quite what any of them had expected. Father Long never showed. Soon after midnight Monty decided to head home. Standing in the driveway, he shared with McCarthy his dissatisfaction with the way Edward Dmytryk was directing ‘Raintree Country,’ shooting nearly everything in giant close-up and chopping the actors’ hands out of the frame. Then they bid each other good night, got into their respective cars, and drove off down the hill that Elizabeth called a ‘cork-twister.’ McCarthy was in the lead. Within moments, he was back at Elizabeth’s house, ringing her doorbell frantically. Wilding answered the door, and McCarthy blurted out that Monty had had a serious car accident. McCarthy told Elizabeth that Clift’s car had struck a utility pole as he’d rounded one of the hairpin turns on the dark, foggy street. Elizabeth shrieked, demanding that McCarthy take her to the scene of the crash.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Monty’s car was demolished, an ‘accordion-pleated mess,’ Elizabeth said. A 4,800 volt transformer, knocked off the pole by the impact, had narrowly missed hitting the car. McCarthy thought that his friend was dead. ‘The doors were so jammed that we couldn’t get to him,’ he said. Without any hesitation, Elizabeth climbed in through a back window, heedless of the broken glass. Hauling herself over the bloody front seat, she steeled herself to the carnage. At first Clift didn’t move, but after a few moments he began to react to the sound of Elizabeth’s voice. He indicated that he was choking. Several of his teeth had been broken and were now lodged in the back of his throat. Reaching in with her fingers, Elizabeth pulled the teeth out, one by one. Otherwise, Monty would have choked to death on his own blood and teeth. The ambulance got lost and took nearly an hour to get there, so a handful of photographers had made their way to the scene by the time Monty was being lifted onto the stretcher. McCarthy confirmed the oft-repeated stories that Elizabeth positioned herself protectively between Monty and the photographers’ cameras and told them that if they so much as took one picture of her wounded pal, she’d never allow them to take another picture of her.”

JACK LARSON: “I firmly believe, and the doctors agreed, that Elizabeth saved Monty’s life that night.”

TRUMAN CAPOTE: “I was surprised how well-read Taylor seemed to be – not that she made anything of it, or posed as an intellectual, but clearly she cared about books and, in haphazard style, had absorbed a large number of them. And she discussed them with considerable understanding of the literary process; all in all, it made me wonder about the men in her life – with the exception of Mike Todd, who had had a certain flashbulb-brightness, a certain neon-savvy, her husbands thus far had not been a whiplash lot: what on earth did this very alert and swift-minded young woman find to talk to them about? ‘Well, one doesn’t always fry the fish one wants to fry. Some of the men I’ve really liked really didn’t like women.’”

 

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “Mike Todd’s courtship was like being hit by a tornado. It swept you up and carried you away. I was on location in Kentucky, making ‘Raintree County,’ and somehow he found out where I’d be almost every minute of the day. He’d phone at all hours, and at night we had long conversations. Then presents would arrive, and huge bundles of flowers. I like presents, I like pleasant surprises—we have our share of unpleasant surprises. But with Mike it was one pleasant surprise after another. His tenderness, his consideration, his enormous sensitivity—that came as a surprise. I had two weeks off from Raintree County, and Mike sent a charter plane to pick me up and bring me to New York. He met me at the airport and that was that. From that moment on we were getting married.”

 

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Elizabeth and Mike Todd were married in Puerto Marquez, Mexico, on February 2, 1957, less than forty-eight hours after Elizabeth’s divorce from Michael Wilding was final. Given the bride’s delicate condition, there was no time to waste. Best man duties were shared between Cantinflas, the Mexican star of ‘Around the World in Eighty Days,’ and Eddie Fisher, whom Todd had taken under his wing. Fisher’s wife, Debbie Reynolds, was Elizabeth’s sole attendant, chosen because Mike had wanted her, not because of any fondness Elizabeth had for her. In fact, Elizabeth regarded Debbie – she of the chipmunk-cheeked smile – as overly ambitious and a little too hungry for fame. She knew that the Fisher marriage, regularly hyped in all of the fan magazines, was as phony as the MGM backlot.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Guarded at every turn by Mexican soldiers, the newlyweds were saluted by fireworks at the estate of former Mexican president Miguel Aleman. Since Elizabethh was still recovering from a painful spinal fusion to treat a herniated disc, Todd carried her up to the balcony so that she could watch the pyrotechnics exploding in the night sky. She was glittering in diamonds from her head to her hands. Mike had given her a matching bracelet-earring-ring set as a wedding gift, reported to have cost $80,000.”

MILES WHITE: “She was like the jewel in Mike Todd’s crown. He liked having her on his arm because she was a living, breathing, gorgeous symbol that he had made it to the top of the Hollywood pack.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “When Mike gave me the rubies I was pregnant with Liza. We had rented a villa, La Fiorentina, just outside Monte Carlo near St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, about 3 months into our marriage. I was in the pool, swimming laps at our home, and Mike came outside to keep me company. I got out of the pool and put my arms around him, and he said, “Wait a minute, don’t joggle your tiara.” Because I was wearing my tiara in the pool! He was holding a red leather box, and inside was a ruby necklace, which glittered in the warm light. It was like the sun, lit up and made of red fire. First, Mike put it around my neck and smiled. Then he bent down and put matching earrings on me. Next came the bracelet. Since there was no mirror around, I had to look into the water. The jewelry was so glorious, rippling red on blue like a painting. I just shrieked with joy, put my arms around Mike’s neck, and pulled him into the pool after me. It was a perfect summer day and a day of perfect love.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “When Mike gave me this tiara, he said, ‘You’re my queen, and I think you should have a tiara.’ I wore the tiara for the first time when we went to the Academy Awards. It was the most perfect night because Mike’s film Around the World in 80 Days won for Best Picture. It wasn’t fashionable to wear tiaras then, but I wore it anyway, he was my king.”

SAM KASHNER: “One of Elizabeth’s early chroniclers, the literary biographer Brenda Maddox, speculated that Elizabeth’s attraction to diamonds was a kind of atavistic need to deflect the rapt gaze of her admirers. Her penchant for jewels was not lost on Andy Warhol, who believed that women live longer than men because they wear diamonds, which – because of the mystical powers of crystals – intensify and protect the life force.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Her friend, the producer Hank Moonjean, remembered being sent to Switzerland to look for a house for her. ‘Where the fuck are you?’ the star demanded when she reached him on the phone. She wanted him back in time for a game of hearts she was setting up for the next day. Moonjean told her he’d found a house and that it cost $400,000 (a king’s ransom then). ‘Buy it!’ she commanded. But didn’t she need to see it? ‘No, just fucking buy it!’ Should he try to negotiate down the price? ‘No,’ she cried, ‘just buy the damn thing so you can get back here and we can play fucking hearts!’ What was fame if she couldn’t play cards when and with whom she wanted?”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “I love him madly, passionately. Why do I love him so much? Because the first time he made love to me, I think my heart stopped beating.”

MIKE TODD: “Every minute this broad spends outside of bed is a waste of time.”

BILL SLOCUM: “I don’t profess to know what makes ladies fall for guys, but if it’s virility, unpredictability, generosity, an utterly magnificent sense of humor, and the gall of a successful second-story man, then Miss Taylor had found herself an ideal man.”

TRUMAN CAPOTE: “Often, when couples make oozing displays of themselves, always kissing, gripping, groping – well, often one imagines their romance must be in serious difficulties. Not so with these two. I remember them, that afternoon we met, sprawled in the sun in a field of grass and daisies holding hands and kissing while a litter of six or eight fat Newfoundland puppies tumbled over their stomachs, tangled in their hair.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “We were just sort of window shopping, when I found the perfect window and I said, ‘Mike! Oh God, oh Mike, couldn’t I please please please? I can’t go home without them! Couldn’t we at least go in and look at them.’ In we went and I tried on these long earrings. Mike was just smiling at me, “Of course you can have them.” he said. They were beautifully done. I was smitten with them and wore them whenever could. A couple of months later we were back in New York, and I went to put on the earrings. They were in a different box, but I didn’t give it much thought, I opened the box, and the earrings looked all polished up, and I put them on. But there was something different about how they fit. And I said, ‘Mike, there’s something wrong with my earrings. They’re not quite the same.’ Well, he just chuckled, and told me he had taken the paste ones and had them made up with real diamonds! Mike was so incredibly inventive and loved to surprise me in so many ways. We were a bit late to the party.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “We scream at each other all the time, using those Latin gestures. Actually neither of us is inhibited, so we speak frankly to each other. We have more fun fighting than most people do just making love.”

MIKE TODD: “Sure, we had a hell of a fight.  This gal’s been looking for trouble all her life.  She’s been on a milk-toast diet with men, but me, I’m red meat.”

DEBBIE REYNOLDS: “Mike really hit her. Elizabeth screamed and walloped him right back… He dragged her by her hair – while she was kicking and screaming at him. The next thing I knew, they were wrestling on the floor, kissing and making up.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “For New Year’s, the Todds, with Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds along for the ride, had planned to see Judy Garland and Harry Belafonte perform in Las Vegas. Elizabeth was still not all that keen on Debbie, but she’d come around to liking Eddie okay; he made her laugh, and there was something about the way his eyes lit up every time he saw her that she just couldn’t help but find amusing. As they hustled on board the ‘Liz’ with the champagne already flowing, no one thought to tell the pilot their destination, so it was taken for granted that they were headed to their home in Palm Springs. Not until they’d touched down and recognized the San Jacinto Mountains did the group let out a collective shout of surprise, and soon the plane was zooming back up into the air. The foursome welcomed midnight with a burst of bubbly somewhere over the Nevada desert.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “A reported 102-degree fever kept Elizabeth from flying with Mike on March 22 to New York, where the Friars Club was planning to roast the showman at the Waldorf-Astoria. Instead of his wife, Mike took along the writer Art Cohn, then penning the authorized Todd biography and working on a script for ‘Don Quixote.’ Dick Hanley drove them to the Burbank airport, where the ‘Liz’ took off at 10:41 p.m., helmed by pilot Bill Verner, a forty-five year old major in the air force reserves, and copilot Tom Barclay, thirty-four, a last-minute replacement for Verner’s regular copilot. Setting into their seats, Todd and Cohn smoked cigars and sipped brandy as the plan rose into the clouds over Southern California.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “The investigation would disclose that the plane had lifted off carrying 20,757 pounds – a ton more than the maximum allowable weight for a Lockheed of that size. Mike Todd never traveled lightly. Just four months earlier he’d been charged for excess baggage on a commercial flight. Had his excess finally been his undoing? Dick Lane reported that all that was left of the ‘Liz’ were ‘the outer portions of the wings and a small portion of the tail.’ And one other thing: a red cloth napkin with the words THE LIZ embroidered in gold.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “I don’t go about breaking up marriages. You can’t break up a happy marriage. Debbie’s and Eddie’s never has been.”

EDDIE FISHER:“Although Liz and I have been cast in the villains’ roles, with Debbie as the heroine, there are just a few things wrong with all the reports that have come out about us and the picture created in the public’s mind. The legend that Debbie and I were the ideal couple was to blame more than anything else for what happened when Elizabeth and I announced that we were going to get married. I’m just a guy whose marriage was at an end. I knew it. Debbie knew it. Our friends knew it. The public didn’t know it. Debbie’s studio wouldn’t admit it. So I was happily married, as far as the public was concerned, long after I was unhappily married.”

HEDDA HOPPER: “What do you suppose Mike would say to this?”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “Well, Mike is dead and I’m alive.”

WILLIAM J. MANN:“Aboard the ‘Olnico,’ a two-hundred-ton chartered white yacht, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher sailed up the northeast coast of Spain on a very public honeymoon. Their cabin was decorated to look like Christopher Columbus’ berth on the ‘Santa Maria,’ and a chef prepared a daily smorgasbord of meats, fish, cakes, and pies. Dropping anchor off the coast of Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera, Elizabeth left the yacht to sashay into the resort town and buy armloads of new clothes. The newlyweds gambled at the casino in Cannes until the early hours of the morning, drinking champagne and winning enough to pay for their suite at the exclusive Carlton Hotel.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Elizabeth dove into ‘Suddenly, Last Summer’ with gusto. It was wild stuff, way over the top. Her character, driven mad by the cannibal murder of her cousin, screams and cries and pulls at her hair. At Shepperton Studios in London, Elizabeth emoted her way through a painstaking recreation of a New Orleans garden, complete with Venus fly-traps. She was solicitous of Clift, who was drinking heavily and a far cry from his once handsome self, and worshipful of Katharine Hepburn, who played her overbearing aunt. She liked the crew, too, sharing their bawdy humor. ‘Come here, you asshole!’ became her own personal term of endearment.”

 

SAM MARKS: “She’s like an eclipse of the sun, blotting out everyone.”

TRUMAN CAPOTE: “A prisoner’s dream, a secretary’s fantasy; unreal, unattainable.”

EDDIE FISHER: “She was a woman who loved men as much as they loved her and was not shy about it… She had the face of an angel and the morals of a truck driver.”

SAM KASHNER: “His career as a pop singer in trouble, Eddie Fisher was kept on salary by 20th Century Fox as a producer, really just another factotum hired to make sure Elizabeth showed up on time. His own plans to produce films starring his wife were not catching fire. So he hung on, picking up after Elizabeth’s several dogs and sliding into the role of ‘Mr. Elizabeth Taylor.’”

DEBBIE REYNOLDS: “Somewhere deep inside, I think Eddie always felt South Philly, the little boy who sold vegetables, who sang on the radio on Saturday mornings."

EDDIE FISHER: “Believe me, I was probably more surprised that Elizabeth was this crazy about me than the rest of the country would be when they found out about us. I’d always felt she was beyond me, definitely out of my league.”

WILLIAM J. MANN:“One night at the Tropicana lounge, Eddie introduced Elizabeth to Dr. Max Jacobson – ‘Dr. Feelgood’ to celebrity clients like Anthony Quinn, Tennessee Williams, Frank Sinatra, and Truman Capote. Jacobson’s ‘vitamin injections’were, in fact, at least thirty milligrams of amphetamines combined with steroids, hormones, placenta, and bone marrow. For Eddie, Jacobson’s injections had provided limitless energy as he bounded across the stage to shake the hands of hundreds of shrieking girls. But the German-born doctor with the quirky accent could offer the opposite, too: barbiturates that induced sleep or a dreamy euphoric wakefulness, and it was just such an injection he gave to Elizabeth that night at the Tropicana. She was thrilled and grateful to Eddie for the introduction.”

EDDIE FISHER: “She became addicted to every pill on the market. Pills to help her sleep, pills to keep her awake, pills to dull her pain, pills and more pills. Elizabeth’s problems in 1960 were basically the same as they were in 1990.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “At Eddie’s nightclub shows, she sat front-row center, her head held high, her neck and ears sparkling in diamonds. Audiences came to see her as much as they did Eddie. Eddie, no doubt, was grateful. His television show had been canceled just weeks earlier. Now his fame depended less on any Vegas act than on the lovely, glittering bride who dazzled from the front row. Not without reason had the judge who’d handed them their marriage license suggested that Eddie sign first. ‘It will be the last time you will be first for a long time to come.’”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “In the end, the only one who would ever pay any real price for the scandal that had so transfixed the public for two years was its lone male player – poor, luckless Eddie. That July, he opened an act as the legendary Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It was to be his big comeback, and Elizabeth’s first outing since she’d had plastic surgery on her neck to remove the tracheotomy scar. Rex Kennamer, Elizabeth’s doctor, sat solicitously by her side. The whole audience glittered. In attendance were John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Lucille Ball, Kirk Douglas, Danny Thomas, Groucho Marx, Yul Brynner, and Jerry Lewis. And the Rat Pack, with whom Eddie was supposed to be pals: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Joey Bishop.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Maybe the star-studded crowd intimidated the kid from South Philly, because he forgot the words to several songs. ‘Come on, Eddie!’ Martin shouted from the audience. Sinatra put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. Eventually Eddie dared them to come up onstage if they thought they could do a better job, and they did, cocktails in hand, singing a couple of songs and bantering jokes back and forth. Retreating to the bandstand, Eddie smiled gamely, but he was clearly embarrassed to be upstaged by the Sinatra ‘clan.’ The next day, the reviews of the show were snarky. Eddie Fisher had become a joke, and his wife, his friends, and his public knew it.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “Eddie and I had drifted way apart. It was only a matter of time for us. The clock was ticking.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “I thought I could keep Mike’s memory alive, but I have only his ghost.”

EDDIE FISHER: “To keep Elizabeth happy, you had to give her a diamond before breakfast every morning.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Eddie tried his best to act like Mike Todd, showering Elizabeth with emerald earrings and diamond-studded evening bags – but they were paid for from their joint account, which these days was being filled more by Elizabeth’s earnings than by his own. It’s not surprising then that when Eddie gave her gifts, Elizabeth didn’t gush quite the way she had done with Mike. After receiving one diamond necklace, she turned it over in her hands and asked how much it had cost. ‘Fifty thousand dollars,’ Eddie boasted. Giving her husband a withering look, Elizabeth said, ‘There’s not a decent stone here. You’ve been taken.’ So much for filling Todd’s shows. Eddie didn’t even know how to buy good diamonds.”

SAM KASHNER: “Having learned always to get her way and to indulge her enormous appetite for life, in all its forms – food, love, sex, jewels, booze, attention, drama, joy – what Elizabeth needed was someone who could say no to her. Or at least stand up to her. Or at least knock her down a peg or two. Or match her in her Rabelaisian joie de vivre. Fisher just couldn’t do it.”

DAVID KAMP: “Physically and spiritually, the Eddie Fishers were not a healthy couple by the time ‘Cleopatra’ began. Fisher missed the singing career he’d largely forsaken for Taylor, and knew the $150,000 he was being paid by Fox for vague junior-producer duties was really for being Taylor’s professional minder. Furthermore, he was strung out on methamphetamine, having gotten hooked in his grueling touring days on ‘pep’ shots administered by Max Jacobson, the notorious Dr. Feelgood who provided similar services for John F. Kennedy. Taylor was in a continual funk because of her ill health, residual grief over the death of Mike Todd, the grim English weather, and the correct intuition that she’d lent her star power to a doomed, disorganized production. In response, she took to drinking and taking painkillers and sedatives.”

EDDIE FISHER: “She could take an enormous amount of drugs. She’s written up in medical journals somewhere – that’s what she’s always told me, and I believe her.”

TRUMAN CAPOTE: “Some years went by before we met again, on this occasion in London, where she was biding time before heading for Rome and the start of the doomed ‘Cleopatra’ production. She and ‘The Busboy,’ as Mr. Fisher was called by many of Mrs. Fisher’s friends, were living in a penthouse at the Dorchester. The Busboy sat on the couch rubbing his eyes as if trying to rouse himself from a nap. She said to him, ‘What’s the matter? Why do you keep rubbing your eyes?’ ‘It’s all that reading!’ he complained. ‘All what reading?’ ‘That thing you tell me I gotta read. I’ve tried. I can’t get through it somehow.’ Her gaze disdainfully glided away from him. ‘He means ‘To Kill A Mockingbird.’ Have you read it? It just came out. I think it’s a really lovely book.’ Yes, I’d read it; as a matter of fact, I told her, the author, Harper Lee, was a childhood friend. We’d grown up together in a small Alabama town, and her book was more or less autobiographical, a roman a clef; indeed, Dill, one of the principal characters, was supposed to be me. ‘You see,’ she told her husband, ‘I may not have had a particular education, but somehow I knew that book was true. I like the truth.’ The Busboy regarded her oddly. ‘Oh, yeah?’”

TRUMAN CAPOTE: “She’d finished her champagne, I poured her another glass, and when she spoke again she seemed, essentially, to be addressing herself. ‘Everyone wants to live. Even when they don’t want to, think they don’t. But what I really believe is: Something is going to happen to me. That will change everything. What do you suppose it might be?’ ‘Love?’ ‘But what kind of love?’ ‘Well. Ah. The usual.’ ‘This can’t be anything usual.’ ‘Then perhaps a religious vision?’ ‘Bull!’ She bit her lip, concerned. But after a while she laughed and said, ‘How about love combined with a religious vision?’”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “I really don’t remember much about 'Cleopatra.' There were a lot of other things going on.”

 

EDDIE FISHER: “I began to look at my life, and I saw a tough situation. In the hospital all the time – I mean, I became a nurse. I was giving her injections of Demerol. I didn’t want the doctors to come. I felt sorry for the doctors. I did it for two nights, and whooo-ee… After two nights I said, ‘This is crazy.’ I actually faked appendicitis to get away.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “At twenty-nine, Elizabeth, the mother of three, still had the figure of a goddess – or at least the attitude and experience to convince just about everyone that her attributes were divine. Her beauty was real, but it was maximized by her performance: her walk, her talk, her clothes, her jewels all announced, ‘I’m here. Aren’t I grand?’ – which would be followed by another eruption of ebullient laughter and a sip of something, then a flash of those magnificent eyes. Elizabeth Taylor made beauty warm and approachable – if expensive.”

TOM MANKIEWICZ: “No one – and I mean no one – has ever had that kind of fame quotient. And no one has ever handled it quite so well.”

CAMILLE PAGLIA: “Elizabeth Taylor is pre-feminist woman. This is the source of her continuing greatness and relevance. She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy.…Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliché. But the femme fatale expresses women’s ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all men’s relations with women.”

 

TOM MANKIEWICZ: “It’s impossible to exaggerate how beautiful Elizabeth Taylor was back then. She was so beautiful that my teeth hurt.”

MIKE NICHOLS: “She said a startling thing to me one time during those days in Rome. We were at some horse show in the middle of the city and everyone was walking past her to stare at her. I asked her if it was ever a pain in the ass being so beautiful. And she looked at me and said, ‘I can’t wait for it to go.’”

GAWIN LAMBERT: “I think the Bad Girl image was finally starting to lose its stigma. After the studios started fading away, the public seemed to change its outlook somewhat toward its movie stars. They could see through manufactured public images… The remarkable thing about Taylor was that she was very authentic, and the public came to admire that about her, no matter how many marriages she had.”

EARL WILSON: “It seemed the thing to do… was to create such an outlandish personality for yourself that the public had to grant your every exigency. Eventually you would get away with holy hell.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “Since I was a little girl, I believed I was a child of destiny, and if that’s true, Richard Burton was surely my fate.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “Everything was such a nightmare that it is difficult even to know where to start. It had some curious effect on just about every person who worked on it. The whole thing was sick: people spying, spying on each other, unseen factions… The first day I saw Richard Burton on the Cleopatra set… he sort of sidled over to me and said, “Has anybody told you that you’re a very pretty girl?” And I said to myself, Oy gevaldt, here’s the great lover, the great wit, the great intellectual of Wales, and he comes out with a line like that. I couldn’t believe it…”

RICHARD BURTON: “It had been a hell of a year. Three big movies; drinking with Bogie; flirting with Garbo… I was enjoying this small social triumph, but then a girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me. She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud… she was unquestioningly gorgeous… she was lavish. She was a dark unyielding largess. She was, in short, too bloody much, and not only that, she was totally ignoring me. She was the most astonishingly self-contained, pulchritudinous, remote, removed, inaccessible woman I had ever seen… Was she merely sullen? I thought not. There was no trace of sulkiness in that divine face. Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “He was kind of quivering from head to foot and there were grog blossoms – you know, from booze – all over his face. He ordered a cup of coffee to sort of still his trembling fists and I had to help it to his mouth, and that just endeared him to me. I thought, ‘Well, he really is human…’ so vulnerable and sweet and shaky and terribly giggly that with my heart I cwtched him – that’s Welsh for ‘hug.’ If it had been a planned strategic campaign, Caesar couldn’t have planned it better.”

DAVID KAMP: “Right through the end of January, the only suspicion that Fisher held was that Burton was encouraging his wife to drink too much. In his self-described capacity as a nurse, Fisher took exception to the influence the Welshman’s prodigious boozing and peaty joie de vivre were having on Taylor, who had grown tired of her husband’s predilection for dining in. ‘Remember,’ says someone who worked on the production, ‘Elizabeth was a very self-indulgent person at that time, a sensualist who’d just been confronted with possible death, and was probably rebounding from it by tasting as much life as possible.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “It was hard not to like Richard Burton. At thirty-six, a bit slouchy, craggy-faced, and pockmarked, he possessed an allure, a twinkle in his eyes, a lilt to his magnificently deep voice that drew people to him. Wry, dry, bombastic – sometimes all at once – and a master storyteller, Richard was the quickest wit on the lot and fiercely smart. Reacting to a typically grandiose Burton statement that no German had ever produced an original idea, the eager Yale student Tom Mankiewicz had shouted out a challenge. What about Goethe? Hegel? Marx? ‘Son of a gun,’ Mankiewicz said, ‘if he didn’t trace every idea of their back to somebody else. He was an extremely literate man.’”

HANK MOONJEAN: “Richard oozed sexual charm for both men and women. It was very powerful. And he could turn it on and off like a faucet.”

SAM KASHNER: “In Rome, Taylor lived in Cleopatra-like luxury, insisting that all the beds be made daily with fresh linen. For each meal, full place settings were provided by the maids - complete with a glass for white wine, one for red, one for champagne, and one for water. When she wasn’t dining luxuriously, she made sure Hanley had her favorite chili flown in from Chasen’s. For dinner parties, the table settings were color-coordinated with Elizabeth’s outfit (no doubt to bring out the violet hues in her changeable, blue-violet eyes). Fisher watched his wife’s drinking, instructing their servants to stop serving her after five drinks. But the first time Burton dined with them at the villa, the actor surreptitiously refilled her glass. ‘I adore this man,’ Elizabeth thought at that moment.”

DAVID KAMP: “As February dawned, rumors were swirling so madly around Rome that Fisher could no longer ignore or brush off the gossip. One night early that month, as he lay in bed beside Taylor, he received a heads-up telephone call from Bob Abrams, his old army buddy and Jilly Rizzo-like amanuensis. Fisher hung up the phone and turned to his wife. ‘Is it true that something is going on between you and Burton?’ he asked her. ‘Yes,’ she said softly. Quietly, defeatedly, Fisher packed and spent the night at Abrams’ place. The following day, he returned to the Villa Papa, and for about two weeks slept by Taylor’s side, hoping that the situation would somehow resolve itself.”

EDDIE FISHER: “Elizabeth desperately needed excitement and our relationship had settled into marriage.  There was no possible way she could have given up what she found with Burton.”

RICHARD BURTON: “I had driven E from Rome to Stefano Harbor in the small hours in a rented car – a small two-seater Fiat as I remember – in order to escape the paparazzi.  The town was a grave at that hour and in the bar-café there were only a couple of people and a boy and a dog and a waiter.  All the world press were searching for us.  We thought we had got clean away.  One of the anonymous gentlemen in the bar was a newspaper man on a humdrum assignment to cover the arrival of Dutch royalty.  And lo and behold there in front of his eyes were the hottest and most scandalous couple in the world.  We left the place after a coffee and cognac apiece or perhaps we had two and drove in smug blissfulness to the hotel who had set aside for us a half-finished and small villa which was half a mile from the hotel, looked stupendously over the sea and was completely isolated.  We gamboled like children, scrambling down the rocks to the sea and enjoying ourselves as if it were the last holiday.  We found out soon enough that every bush – and there were hundreds of them – contained a paparazzo.”

RICHARD BURTON: “At seven-thirty just at dusk a Mass began at the church on the hill the other side of the road.  The Church of the Madonna of the Divine Love.  The voices of the choir drifted on the air like an invisible mist, like unseen tumbleweed, like a dream.  We stopped eating our raw kidney beans and rough cheese and we stopped drinking the vin de pays to listen.  It was one of those moments which are nostalgic before they’re over.  The two men had gone, the tramp monk maybe to the Mass and the other who knows where.  We drove home feeling holy and clean while the moon bright as I’ve ever seen her and with a whisp of chiffon cloud around her throat (E’s image not mine) shone on us from the cloudless night.”

EDDIE FISHER: “Elizabeth lived by her own rule: She wants what she wants when she wants it.”

RICHARD BURTON: “Both Elizabeth and I agreed solemnly that we never want to work again but simply loll our lives away in a sort of eternal Sunday.  Quites right too.  We are both bone-lazy.  And enjoy it.”

EDDIE FISHER: “She just wasn’t there anymore. She was with him. And I wasn’t there. She talked to him once at the studio, in my office, with all kinds of people around. And she was talking love to him on the telephone. ‘Oh, darling, are you all right?’ With this new British accent.”

 

JOE HYAMS: “Eddie always took the position that this is an evil man, and he had to stand and protect Elizabeth when she was misled by this terrible guy. He wanted to hold his family together.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “We arrived exactly at the same moment. The top of his car was down, he was terribly sun-tanned and his hair was cut very short. I hadn’t seen him since Cleopatra. I was sitting in the back seat with my parents and he didn’t see us right away. He looked nervous, not happy, but so marvelous. His eyes were like bright blue bulbs, and he was looking around. And all of a sudden I got like first-night fear — I couldn’t get out of the car. I grabbed one arm of my father and one arm of my mother and I said, “Oh, doesn’t he look wonderful? Oh, I don’t know what to do, I’m scared.” I didn’t know how to get out of the car. My mother put her arms around me, and said, “Have a lovely day, baby.” My father put his arms around me and kissed me. By that time, he’d seen us and he walked up to the car and said hello kind of shyly. I said hello, and began to stammer. My father gave me a shove, and I got out and we shook hands. Finally, Richard gave me a peck on the cheek. We stood there looking at each other. I had just washed my hair and I had on a brand-new dress. He’d just washed his hair and it was all shiny. And we said at the same moment, “Well you look marvelous.” And everything we said for about an hour, was you know, at the same moment and the same words. Then there’d be these awful silences when we couldn’t say anything. It was like my first date when I was sixteen, and it was as though he’d never seen a girl before. At last we began to relax and we had lunch at a place overlooking the lake. Then he drove me home. We didn’t even kiss. “

RICHARD BURTON: “She is like the tide, she comes and she goes, she runs to me as in this stupendous photographic image. In my poor and tormented youth, I had always dreamed of this woman. And now when this dream occasionally returns, I extend my arm and she is here…by my side. If you have not met or known her, you have lost much in life.”

RICHARD BURTON: “I fell in love at once. She was like a mirage of beauty of the ages, irresistible, like the pull of gravity. She has everything I want in a woman. She is quite unlike any woman I have ever known. She makes me not want to know any other woman, believe me, sincerely. I think of her morning, noon, and night. I dream of her. She will be my greatest happiness—forever, of course.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “I was, I suppose, behaving wrongly because I broke the conventions. I felt terrible heartache because so many innocent people were involved. But I couldn’t help loving Richard. I don’t think that was without honor. I don’t think that was dishonest. It was a fact I could not evade.”

DAVID KAMP: “Fisher discovered that Taylor was in an apartment accompanied by Burton, who was enraged that the singer had meddled in his marriage to Sybil. Burton took the telephone. ‘You nothing, you spleen,’ he said to Fisher. ‘I’m going to come up there and kill you.’ Instead, Burton summoned the courage to tell Taylor their affair was over, and left for a short trip to Paris, where he was playing a small part in Darryl Zanuck’s Normandy epic, ‘The Longest Day.’ That night, Hanley called Wanger to say that Taylor would be unable to work the next day. ‘She’s hysterical,’ Wanger wrote in his diary. ‘Total rejection came sooner than expected.’ The following day, February 17, Taylor was rushed to the Salvator Mundi Hospital. The official explanation was food poisoning. Wanger, who cooked up a story about some bad beef she had eaten, had, in fact, discovered Taylor splayed on her bed in the Villa Papa, groggy from an overdose of Seconal, a prescription sedative.”

 

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “It wasn’t a suicide attempt. I’m not that kind of person, and Richard despised weakness. It was more hysteria. I needed the rest, I was hysterical, and I needed to get away.”

RICHARD BURTON: “We drank to the point of stupefaction and idiocy. We couldn’t go outside. We were not married… We tried to read. We failed. We couldn’t go out. We made a desperate kind of love. We played gin rummy. E. kept on winning and oddly enough out of this silly game came the crisis. For some reason – who knows or remembers the conversation that led up to it? – E. said that she was prepared to kill herself for me. Easy to say, I said, but no woman would kill herself for me, etc. with oodlings of self pity… out of it all came E. standing over me with a bottle or box of sleeping pills in her hand, saying that she could do it. Go ahead, I said, or words along those lines, whereupon she took a handful and swallowed with gusto and no dramatics.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “In Rome, Richard wouldn’t ever let me read what they were saying about us in the newspapers. It was wise, because no matter how much of a façade you put on, it hurts desperately, especially when they add untruths… The Vatican had written a horrific denunciation of me. I had recently adopted little Maria in Germany, and they said I was certainly unworthy to adopt a child. Not only that, I was such a vile human being that my own children should be taken away from me… I really could have done without Cleopatra except for meeting Richard.”

MELVYN BRAGG: “The Sixties was to pride itself on being a decade of honesty, of openness, an end to hypocrisy. The brave flaunted it and Taylor and Burton were the first of the brave. Older generations may have envied them in secret; younger generations openly applauded.”

LIZ SMITH: “On the face of it, Elizabeth Taylor was just totally arrogant. She’d walk out in capri pants and her Cleopatra makeup and her kerchief and go off to whatever local restaurant and drink up a storm with Burton. That’s part of what excited the public: her vulgarity and her arrogance and the money. Oh God, their love story had everything.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Elizabeth was fully conscious of her ability to set the vogue. Sitting beside Burton in the front seat of her Cadillac, her chin held high, her exotic Egyptian eyes undisturbed by the popping of flashcubes all around her, she looked every inch the queen.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “They were so different from each other in many ways, yet the attraction of opposites is a mighty force. Richard would load himself down with old volumes from obscure bookshops in Rome and London while Elizabeth was off buying furs and shoes. He was an Oxford man, she a graduate of the MGM Little Red Schoolhouse. In terms of acting, she knew that the movies had taught her: that sometimes a look or a turn of the head said it all. For Burton, language was everything. A put-down from Burton was always framed in irony. When the despised director Tony Richardson wanted him for a project, Burton said that he ought to have been ‘scared witless to approach me to play Scrabble.’ Elizabeth, on the other hand, just said ‘Fuck you’ when someone ticked her off. Not that Richard didn’t resort occasionally to such mundanities himself. He once screamed ‘Fuck!’ at the top of his lungs in the middle of a hotel lobby because ‘To scream ‘fuck’ in the lobby was the only possible way to meet the justice of the day,’ he wrote in his diary.”

RICHARD BURTON: “In the middle of the early night Elizabeth and I exchanged insults in which I said that she was not ‘a woman but a man’ and in which she called me ‘little girl.’  A lovely charming decadent hopeless couple.”

MIKE NICHOLS: “They were two fatally glamorous people who became each other’s lives.”

RICHARD BURTON: “She is a wildly exciting love-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody’s fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and willful, she is clement and loving… she tolerates my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when I am away from her, and she loves me!... And I’ll love her till I die.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “Richard is a very sexy man. He’s got that sort of jungle essence… When we look at each other, it’s like our eyes have fingers and they grab ahold. There’s no way of encapsulating it, it would be like trying to describe a sunset. It’s every changing but it’s beautiful. It’s too large to make a cliché of it. I don’t know how to explain it but it’s the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me. Each day is better than the last day.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “It was so intense. There is something very mystic about all Welsh people. And that sense of poetry and wildness was where I had always wanted to be. I had wanted to be free, running in the rain on the grass, and just nothing to tether me. I just wanted to go.”

RICHARD BURTON: “The enemy is insidiously attacking again.  E read in the papers that Aristotle Onassis had given Jackie half a million pounds worth of rubies surrounded by diamonds.  Now Missy already has, as a result of former battles against useless yours-truly, one of the greatest diamonds in the world and probably the most breathtaking private collection of emeralds surrounded by diamonds also in the world.  Now the Battle of the Rubies is on.  I wonder who’ll win.  It will be a long attritive war and the idea has already been implanted that I shouldn’t let myself be out-done by a bloody Greek.  I can be just as vulgar as he can, I say to myself.  Well now to get the money.”

RICHARD BURTON: “Prince Rainer and Grace [Kelly] and Grace’s sister and a friend are coming to lunch today and Rainier is bringing either a tiger or a panther as a present for E.  That’s all I need.  What the hell are we going to do with a PANTHER or a TIGER?  It means that we can never work in Britain again.  Imagine a tiger or a panther in quarantine or on a yacht in the Thames?  Many sailors would be eaten a day, several vets would be munched for lunch; I may be nibbled myself.  Dead dogs and cats in Gstaad and Johann Sebastian will be prostrate as he tries to water the flowers, and Raymond will be forced to play ping-pong with him.  Brook Williams may tell the animal a joke or two but I bet the animal won’t laugh.  The only two persons who will survive it are going to be Elizabeth Taylor Burton and Liza Todd Burton.  Liza will saddle him and ride him, and Elizabeth will insist that he sleeps in the bathroom, which means she has slept with me for the last time – it’s the atom-bomb shelter for me!  I’m sure that I’m going to love him or her but I insist it’s by telephone.  ‘How big,’ I said to Rainier yesterday at lunch, ‘does a panther grow?’ ‘About this size,’ he said, with a gesture that indicated something cosmic.  I nearly struck him, but didn’t because it would have been impolite, and also he might have struck me back.  He had that look on his face which I can only describe as ‘smug,’ that total assurance that the man to whom he is talking is absolutely terrified.  I love the Prince and I love his wife and I love Monaco but if, every time we come here, we are going to be given a lion, I’d rather write bad books at home.  And play with enormous jewels.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “With Richard Burton, I was living my own fabulous, passionate fantasy.”

RICHARD BURTON: “Well, first of all, you must realize that I worship you. Second of all, at the expense of seeming repetitive, I love you. Thirdly, and here I go again with my enormous command of language, I can’t live without you.”

RICHARD BURTON: “E’s delight in cooking is lovely and I think she has a natural gift for it… She’s frantic when she cooks.  Quite incoherent, poised in the dark over the barbecue like a fury.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “I cannot imagine life without him. I love him. I adore him. Our love is so deep that I don’t give a goddamn what people think or say about us. If you have a real relationship with your lover, you can do anything and make it magic.”

RICHARD BURTON: “A French deep sea diving ship pulled alongside the Kalizma and moored.  It was the French Navy and discovering E was on the next ship they immediately began to get drunk and started to dive into the harbor with all their clothes on.  The Captain was in despair but tolerant.  Eventually we went on board and E charmed the Captain out of a large fragment of a vase which, the Captain guessed, was about 2,000 years old.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “I am glad that I knew the wildness, glamour and excitement when I was in my prime. The parties, the yachts and the private jets and the jewelry – the whole thing was so exciting. It was a great time to be young, alive and attractive.”

RICHARD BURTON: “Sitting on the deck with my infinitely beloved wife who has acquired an even greater weight of love.  I keep on mentally looking around to make sure she’s there.  For why this new and massive re-affirmation of adoration and worship and a promise to myself that I shall never be nasty to her ever again?  I will tell you for why.  For because for about three minutes this afternoon I thought that I was about to be killed instantaneously and at once, without time to re-tell her how much I love her, to apologize for breaking my contract to look after her forever, for letting her down with a bang, and for having no time to tell her the million things yet to be told and for not realizing and demonstrating my full potential as husband, provider, lover and all.”

GIANNI BOZZACCHI: “You see, she didn’t care about being a star. She cared about living a certain way. It was what she was used to. And she lived that grand life with Burton and thought they’d have it forever. That’s what was most important to her: to have a great companion in her great life. With Burton she felt she’d found her soul mate. It was all about being with him. That’s all that really mattered.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Elizabeth smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and never used the same holder. Fresh ones – at least ten a day – always had to be at the ready, and they had to be color-coded. A green dress called for a matching holder – and Madame changed outfits quite frequently as her moods shifted. Every morning her butler Oates prepared a box of cigarette holders based on what Elizabeth would be wearing throughout that day and evening, and not only did the holders have to match her outfits, they couldn’t clash with the tablecloth… And for Madame’s baths, her faithful secretary Dick Hanley always made sure that there were plenty of Murano candles on hand – not only because the power often went out along their remote road, but also because Elizabeth insisted her two daily baths, one at 7:30 a.m. and the other at 8:00 p.m., be taken by candlelight.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Elizabeth liked to say that she was merely a temporary ‘custodian’ of her jewels. ‘You can’t own a thing of such rare beauty,’ she said, flashing the Krupp diamond on her finger to Helen Gurley Brown, ‘and I take good care of it.’ But Brown pointed out that when she’d walked through the kitchen earlier that day, she had seen the ring sitting by the sink. ‘There were people there!’ Elizabeth declared defensively.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “I’ve never thought of my jewelry as trophies. I’m here to take care of them and to love them.”

TRUMAN CAPOTE: “Gradually, one became aware of an excessive tension between the two: constant contradictions in dialogue, a repartee reminiscent of the husband and wife in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ Yet it was the tension of romance, of two people who had made a physical, psychological commitment to one another. Jane Austen once said that all literature revolved around two themes: love and money. Burton, an exceptional conversationalist, encompassed the first theme (‘I love this woman. She is the most interesting and exciting woman I’ve ever known’), and the second (‘I care about money. I’ve never had any, and now I do, and I want – well, I don’t know what you consider rich, but that’s what I want to be’). Those two subjects, and literature – not acting, writing: ‘I never wanted to be an actor. I always wanted to be a writer. And that’s what I will be if this circus ever stops. A writer.’ When he said this, Taylor’s eyes had a particularly prideful glow. Her enthusiasm for the man illuminated the room like a mass of Japanese lanterns.”

ROBERT SELLERS: “During the filming of Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) Brando socialized with Liz and husband Richard Burton, the trio often getting thoroughly pissed together. ‘Brando is very engaging and silly after a couple of small drinks,’ Burton wrote in his diary. Brando presented the couple with two memorial antique silver goblets. The first was engraved: ‘Richard: Christ, I’ve pissed in my pants.’ And the second: ‘Elizabeth: That’s not piss, that’s come.’”

RICHARD BURTON: “Marlon’s and Elizabeth’s personalities, to say nothing of their physical beauty, are so vast that they can and have got away with murder, but Elizabeth – unlike Marlon – has acquired almost by proximity to the camera, by osmosis, a powerful technique.  Marlon has yet to learn to speak…  Deep down in his desperate bowels he knows that like Elizabeth and myself it is all a farce.  All three of us, in our disparate ways, know that we are cosmic jokes.  And all three know that ‘dedication’ to the idea of the performing arts is an invention of envious journalists.  I think essentially that if something comes too easily to you, you dismiss it as an accident.  Marlon made that mistake.  E didn’t.  I love Elizabeth.”

TRUMAN CAPOTE: “Burton left the room to uncork another bottle of champagne. She said, ‘Oh, we quarrel. But at least he’s worth quarreling with. He’s really brilliant. He’s read everything and I can talk to him – there’s nothing I can’t talk to him about. All his friends… Emlyn Williams told him he was a fool to marry me. He was a great actor. Could BE a great actor. And I was nothing. A movie star. But the most important thing is what happens between a man and a woman who love each other. Or any two people who love each other.’ She walked to the window and pushed back the curtain. It had started to rain and the rain was puttering against the window. ‘Rain makes me sleepy. I really don’t want any more champagne. No. No. Don’t go. We’ll drink it anyway. And then either everything will be wonderful or we’ll have a real fight. He thinks I drink too much. And I KNOW he does. I’m just trying to stay in the mood. Keep up. I always want to be where he is. Remember, a long time ago, I told you there was something I wanted to live for?’ She closed the curtains against the rain, and looked at me sightlessly – Galatea surveying some ultimate horizon. ‘Well, what do you think?’ But it was a question with an answer already prepared. ‘What do you suppose will become of us? I guess, when you find what you’ve always wanted, that’s not where the beginning begins, that’s where the end starts.’”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Not long before shooting wrapped on ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ wrapped, Richard showed Ernest Lehman a short poem he’d written about Elizabeth that, in the producer’s opinion, was ‘decidedly erotic.’ Lehman later asked Elizabeth, ‘How does your husband do things like that?’ She replied simply, ‘I inspire him.’”

RICHARD BURTON: “Elizabeth tries to be a shrew, wants to be an autocrat and unsuccessfully attempts tyranny in little things. She often tells me off in front of people when I upset her. She is also very jealous and doesn’t fancy my taking two looks at the same pretty girl. She gives me hard kicks under the table, but I go on looking because it does her good to feel a little uncertain at times. In our ménage, love is all right; honor is still intact but we don’t always obey. We never had any questions of who was the boss. She always realized I was to run the show. I do this by talking, talking, talking. My little shrew is inevitably tamed after a bit of talking. We nag each other a bit. As a housewife, Elizabeth is highly naggable and limited. She’s a good cook and makes marvelous breakfasts but she cannot brush a floor, for instance. I doubt if she can make a bed. When she cooks for an hour, it takes me four hours to clean up afterwards. I’m always cleaning up after her. I’m fantastically neat and tidy. The ash trays must lie square, straight and be clean. She just tears through all the rooms, leaving a shambles behind her. I think we were and still are very good for each other. My smattering of scholarship has darted off onto her and a smattering of her honesty onto me. The quality in her that appealed, and still appeals, to me the most is her total blazing honesty. She cannot tell a lie. The most important thing of our marriage is this continuous excitement, this wonderful creature called Elizabeth who fills me with spiritual and physical joy every time I see her. Her spirit bubbles with an inner force like life itself and not like champagne which goes flat after a while.”

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “Once, on shipboard, when he was walking through a dining room toward me… I sort of detached myself, as though I were floating upward and looking down with great clarity on the two of us – like in a Chagall painting. Then a shock, a thrill, goes through my entire body… It’s almost as if I were seeing him for the first time, falling in love with him again.”

 

RICHARD BURTON: “You asked me to write the truth about us… I suffer from a severe case of ‘hubris,’ an overweening pride. Prometheus was punished by the gods forever and is still suffering in all of us for inventing fire and stealing it from the gods. I am forever punished by the gods for being given the fire and trying to put it out. The fire, of course, is you…”

GIANNI BOZZACCHI: “In the beginning, Richard was fascinated by the whole thing. He liked being part of the big love story of all time. But then it became terribly distracting to what he was all about.”

MIKE NICHOLS:“The thing about Richard was that he was so much more generous to others than he was to himself. He beat himself up over what he thought was his failure as an actor. When he married Elizabeth and became a superstar, he saw himself in a much more cruel way than others did. I think he saw himself as having made the devil’s bargain, and you only make the devil’s bargain if that’s how you think of yourself. He wasn’t pleased with himself for the way he ended up as part of an international marriage scandal that was perpetual… And so the drinking took over and that was sad and awful to see.”

RICHARD BURTON: “Both E and I have a remarkable capacity of inculcating the idea of fear into people.  I have actually seen people shiver as they cross the room to be introduced to Elizabeth.  What the hell is it?  Who did it to us?  I know that we are both dangerous people but we are fundamentally very nice.  I mean we only hurt each other.  And we never hurt other persons unless they hurt us first.  Somebody once wrote that when Elizabeth walked into a room for a press conference which he happened to be attending, she gave the impression that nobody else was there.  She answered, as it were, from outer-space.”

RICHARD BURTON: “Don’t forget that you are probably the greatest actress in the world. I wish I could borrow a minute portion of your passion and commitment, but there you are – cold is cold as ice is ice… I shall miss you with passion and wild regret.”

SIAN OWEN: “She still says that had he lived they’d be back together once again - that it would have been third time lucky. They were mad about each other. They were soul mates. It was a great love story."

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: “After Richard, the men in my life were just there to hold the coat, to open the door. All the men after Richard were really just company.”