Kate Andersen Brower - Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon

For Senator John Warner,

who wanted this story to be told

&

For Charlotte,

my very own fierce and exuberant girl

FILMS

Theres One Born Every Minute (1942)

Lassie Come Home (1943)

Jane Eyre (1943)uncredited

White Cliffs of Dover (1944)uncredited

National Velvet (1944)

Courage of Lassie (1946)

Life with Father (1947)

Cynthia (1947)

A Date with Judy (1948)

Julia Misbehaves (1948)

Little Women (1949)

Conspirator (1949)

Father of the Bride (1950)

The Big Hangover (1950)

Fathers Little Dividend (1951)

A Place in the Sun (1951)

Quo Vadis (1951)uncredited extra

Callaway Went Thataway (1951)uncredited cameo

Love Is Better Than Ever (1952)

Ivanhoe (1952)

The Girl Who Had Everything (1953)

Rhapsody (1954)

Elephant Walk (1954)

Beau Brummell (1954)

The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

Giant (1956)

Raintree County (1957)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

BUtterfield 8 (1960)

Holiday in Spain (1960)uncredited

Cleopatra (1963)

The V.I.P.s (1963)

Becket (1964)uncredited extra

The Sandpiper (1965)

Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

The Taming of the Shrew (1967)

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)

Doctor Faustus (1967)

The Comedians (1967)

Boom! (1968)

Secret Ceremony (1968)

Anne of the Thousand Days (1969)uncredited extra

The Only Game in Town (1970)

Under Milk Wood (1971)

X, Y and Zee (1972)

Hammersmith Is Out (1972)

Night Watch (1973)

Ash Wednesday (1973)

The Drivers Seat (1974)

The Blue Bird (1976)

A Little Night Music (1977)

Winter Kills (1979)uncredited

The Mirror Crackd (1980)

Genocide (1982)narrator

Young Toscanini (1988)

The Flintstones (1994)

AWARDS

Golden Globe Award (1957): Special Achievement Award

Golden Globe Award (1960): Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Suddenly, Last Summer

Academy Award (1961): Actress in a Leading Role, BUtterfield 8

Academy Award (1967): Actress in a Leading Role, Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Golden Globe Award (1974): World Film Favorites Award

Golden Globe Award (1985): Cecil B. DeMille Award

American Film Institute (1993): 21st Life Achievement Award

Academy Award (1993): Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award

Designated Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Millennium New Year Honors List (2000)

GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) Vanguard Award (2000): Elizabeths stepdaughter Carrie Fisher presented her with the Vanguard Award at the 11th Annual GLAAD Media Awards

Presidential Citizens Medal (2001): Honored by President Bill Clinton for her groundbreaking and disruptive HIV and AIDS activism

Kennedy Center Honors (2002): Recipient of the nations highest award for achievement in the performing arts

HUSBANDS

Conrad Hilton Jr. (19501951)

Michael Wilding (19521957)

Mike Todd (19571958 [his death])

Eddie Fisher (19591964)

Richard Burton (19641974)

Richard Burton (19751976)

John Warner (19761982)

Larry Fortensky (19911996)

CHILDREN

Michael Wilding Jr., b. 1953

Christopher (Chris) Wilding, b. 1955

Liza Todd Tivey, b. 1957

Maria Burton, b. 1961

There are no coincidences and nothing happens without a reasonI will find it.

LETTER FROM ELIZABETH TAYLOR TO RICHARD BURTON

R OME

1987

T he most photographed movie star in the world stood alone on the terrace of the Villa Papa, a ten-thousand-square-foot Roman mansion at 448 Via Appia Pignatelli. The early afternoon light lit up her raven hair, and those legendary blue eyesthat some swore were actually an otherworldly shade of violetpeered out onto the villas eight acres, with its lush gardens, crystal clear pool, and tennis court. Elizabeth knew the houses current occupant, the celebrated director Franco Zeffirelli, very well. This was the home where she had lived during the filming of the 1963 epic Cleopatra, where she began her passionate, all-consuming romance with her costar Richard Burton. At that moment, as she leaned over the balcony railing, she wished she could be standing anywhere else in the world. But something kept her there.

Her friend Aprile Millo, an opera singer who was in Rome with Elizabeth helping her prepare for her role in Zeffirellis latest film, assumed that Elizabeth was reveling in technicolor memories of Richard Burton, the man she had married twice. Richard had died three years earlier, and even though they had divorced long before his death, the two talked almost every day on the phone.

Elizabeth walked through the primary suite and out onto the terrace. She turned back toward Millo and asked, Can you give me a second, please? After a few minutes, she walked back inside and seemed lost in her thoughts. Millo did not realize that this was also the home Elizabeth had shared with the singer Eddie Fisher, whom she was married to before Richard, and the place where she and Richard had been hounded by the press at a time when much of the world viewed her as a homewrecker. The house represented a time in her life before the darkness gave way to the light.

In the 1960s, Elizabeth and Richard had practically invented the paparazzi, the term for the aggressive Roman freelance photographers who became famous in Federico Fellinis La Dolce Vita. Everyone knew the story: Elizabeth stole Eddie Fisher away from his wife, the actress Debbie Reynolds, and then she set her sights on Richard, whom she stole from his wife, Sybil Burton. Of course, it was not quite as simple as that.

Images flashed through Elizabeths mind of being trapped inside the villa and hearing the photographers ladders hitting its outside walls as they tried to get a photo of her through a window. She thought of the day when a photographer knocked on the front door pretending to be a priest, or another time when a photographer posed as a plumber. There were death threats against her children. One paparazzo punched her in the stomach to try to get a reaction and a higher price for the photograph. Nothing, it seemed, was sacred. One of their dogs was even stolenand later returned.

Eventually, plainclothes officers guarded the villa whenever she was there and uniformed police officers walked the grounds as though she were living in a fortress. And no one, it seemed, was deserving of trust without proving themselves first. A publicist on Cleopatra used to wear her hair in an elaborate updo until it was discovered that she was hiding a small camera in her chignon when she visited the set. Before the police got involved, one of Elizabeths assistants had opened the front door and slammed it shut as soon as they saw a camera lens trained on them. Determined, the photographer on the other side tried to break the door down, and several people inside the house had to throw their backs against it to keep it shut. Memories of her children using rakes and water hoses to chase the paparazzi out of their garden came rushing back as she stood inside the house for the first time in two decades. Back then, she and Richard had tried to turn it into a fun game of cops and robbers so they could mask the reality that they were actually being hunted. In the years that followed, Elizabeth had tried not to dwell on the damage done to her familyand to herself.