“Liz,” by Georgina Howell, originally appeared in the June 1991 issue of Vogue. For more highlights from Vogue’s archive, sign up for our Nostalgia newsletter.
Elizabeth Taylor will grant an interview, but she won’t discuss scandal. Her private life is strictly off-limits. So when I ask if I can see her bedroom and her clothes, those mascara-rimmed eyes, the color of mauve moonstones, turn on me as if I were a spider that had crawled onto her pillow.
Still, her small, lively voice shows no hostility. “Oh-o,” she says with that famous little gulp, “you don’t want to do that! Actually, that’s my floor, and I don’t let anyone in.”
She studies me for a moment and adds kindly, “I’ve just finished a den there. It’s really funky and terribly sweet. Would you like to see that?”
She rises with the queenly bearing that belies her five-foot-six frame and tip-taps in high heels across the pleasant tile-and-brick expanse of her two-million-dollar house, which spreads comfortably over ten thousand square feet in Bel Air. Her teased, spiky black hair lifts proudly from the Hamlet collar of a cream silk shirt. Round hips are jazzed up with a belt over tight black jeans. Bracelets chime, earrings wink, brassy things jingle, and clouds of scent trail behind her. Her whole presence is ridiculously, endearingly feminine. We pass a table of photographs showing her with the Queen of England, President Ford, Marshal Tito, Richard Burton, and Noël Coward.
She throws a door open with an air of triumph and… “Ooops!” she exclaims in a low, ironic voice.
I stop in the doorway of a small library, flickering with light from the television, and follow her gaze. A bubble-permed golden head rests on one arm of the sofa, large bare feet on the other. Heavy jaws work on something crunchy.
She gives a little shrug and giggle. “Well, here’s Larry.”
There is a pause.
“Larry. Larry! This is Georgina.”
The blond head lifts an inch and a half off the cushion, turns forty-five degrees, utters, “Hi!” and falls back like a stone. The big right hand of Larry Fortensky, the forty-year-old ex-trucker she met at the Betty Ford Center a couple of years ago, dips into a bag and carries something to his mouth.
We back out, whispering respectfully, and make our way past the Frans Hals, the Monets, the Rouault, and the Van Gogh—which was bought by the Burtons for their yacht and failed to meet its reserve at Christie’s in December—and all the while, Elizabeth Taylor is laughing. Amusement is written all over her. She’s grinning like someone caught eating chocolates without sharing the box. These days, good humor has returned. Obesity, alcoholism, and Percodan addiction have been packed away and left behind. Life is, touch wood, okay.
A year from sixty, she is the Helen of Troy of our time, a survivor like her great-grandparents, who crossed America in a covered wagon, or like her screen-struck mother, Sara, now ninety-five and living in Palm Springs. Elizabeth Taylor has only just stopped marrying the men she loves, saying, “At my age you don’t have to tidy up.”
She has always been the kind of full-blooded lover and liver who could say of her explosive marriage to Mike Todd, “We had more fun fighting than most people have making love.” Are men still scared to enter her zone of irresistible, earth-mother sexuality? Do they fear getting close?
Her eyes widen. “I hear that they do, and”—the shiny pink lips give a small gasp—”it a-ston-ishes me. It is true. With any famous woman, men can feel intimidated.”
She makes two tiny fists and pulls them to her chest.
“I’ve matured, I’ve grown up, I’ve gone through phases, but I haven’t changed. I’ve always been what they call a liberated woman. To me, it was just being me. I’ve always had my equal rights.”
She chuckles.
“I haven’t wanted to be dominated, but I’ve never wanted to wear boxer shorts either. I enjoy being feminine. I don’t think you have to bu—””I like bras if they’re pretty, and I love lace underwear!” she says with a soft voice that breaks into the kind of warm, tired laugh you hear at the end of a wonderful, late-night party.
She has been married seven times to six husbands, four of whom died young. She has four children—one adopted—and five grandchildren. As Hollywood’s most sought-after guest, her driveway is constantly filled with the cars of friends and her entourage.
“‘A man’s woman?'” says her old friend Sheran Cazalet Hornby with a smile. “Of course. And a woman’s woman, a child’s woman, a horse’s, a parrot’s, a goat’s, a dog’s, and a cat’s woman. Mostly, she’s someone who wants to stay home with family and eat bangers and mash.”
As if to prove the point, a pale cat grooms itself on the table between us, and if you listen, you can hear faint cackling, bleating, yapping, and barking coming from all over the house.
“When I was a child, I tried to make friends my own age and desperately hoped my brother’s friends would ask me out. But no—they didn’t. Whenever I tried to fit in, I stuck out like a sore thumb. I was already famous and looked much older than I was. By fifteen, I was playing eighteen-year-olds and dating men in their twenties or older. Though I’m reversing that now!” She lets out a loud laugh, her voice dropping two notes at a time. “My friends are still the same age.”
This is a woman who can’t remember a time when she wasn’t famous. At twelve, she starred in National Velvet—her fifth film—and was already earning three hundred dollars a week. At eighteen, thanks to her first husband, Nicky Hilton, she owned stocks, minks, a Cadillac convertible, and a ring worth fifty thousand dollars. At twenty-four, thanks to Mike Todd, she had a cinema named after her, a gift every day—a big one on Saturdays, the day they met—a Rolls-Royce, a thirty-carat diamond measuring an inch and a half across, and paintings by Degas and Vuillard. At thirty-one, thanks to Richard Burton and 20th Century Fox, she earned a million dollars per film; owned the Krupp diamond (“Thirty-three and a third carats—don’t forget the third”), Shah Jehan’s diamond, the Peregrina pearl given to Mary Tudor in 1554; houses in Mexico and Gstaad; the penthouse at London’s Dorchester Hotel; and a yacht.
“Richard was generous,” she murmurs. “Not to a fault, but to a glorious degree.”
This is a woman who had food delivered to her from other continents. Chili con carne from Chasen’s in Los Angeles followed her to Rome; traditional English pork sausages from Fortnum & Mason found her in Leningrad. The night before she traveled, a British Airways executive would camp out in her drawing room to ensure she didn’t miss her flight. When she moved from Geneva to Paris, she took the train with four children, two nannies, five dogs, two secretaries, a budgerigar, a wildcat, a turtle (which had to be kept in water), and one hundred forty pieces of luggage.
At a mutual friend’s wedding, Princess Margaret asked if she could try on the Krupp diamond.
“She said, ‘How very vulgar!'” Elizabeth Taylor recalls in her sweet voice. “I said, ‘Yeah, ain’t it great!'” Then she adds, “By the way, I’m not unique. My circumstances were unique.”
These days, she drives herself around Los Angeles in her $153,000 Aston Martin Lagonda and channels her star power into fundraising for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), where she serves as founding national chairman. Dressed in emeralds and black lace, she helped raise one million dollars in a single evening this past winter.
“I do it 100 percent with my heart and soul, and hours of work,” she says. “I’m always thinking of ways to ask people for money. We’ve made progress, but some still act as if it’s not happening, as if they don’t want to be associated with it because it’s”—her lips curl, her soft voice tinged with disbelief—”dirty or something, and these people…”She’s interested in a new film that would require her to age, which she thinks “would be kind of fun,” but she has asked the producers to delay it for a year until she fulfills her demanding 1991 AmFAR commitments.
She has always quietly done good deeds. Many know how she helped a crippled child she saw limping on a film set, arranging for an operation that led to a full recovery. They also know how she and Richard Burton adopted Maria, a physically handicapped child who grew into a loved, strong, and attractive young woman. “She adores the miracle-working power of money,” says her friend Norma Heyman. “Did she tell you what she did just the other day? About the AIDS patient who didn’t have long to live and wanted a birthday party? Elizabeth didn’t just pay for it—she hosted the party at her house.”
Heyman also notes Elizabeth’s generosity to friends, mentioning airline tickets sent to close friends who were ill or depressed, with a scribbled note saying, “Join me — Elizabeth.” She recalls a particular Taylor AIDS gala in L.A.: “When my escort, Dominick Dunne, arrived, the dress I wanted to wear hadn’t come back from the cleaners. I called Elizabeth, who said, ‘Come on over. Borrow a dress, a necklace, whatever you want.’ I rushed over and tried on all her gowns. They looked terrible on me, but finally I found a black dress with a tight pink top and hurried off to dinner. Elizabeth came over to my table—every time she stood up, the band stopped and played a fanfare—and the moment she saw what I was wearing, she doubled over laughing. She was convulsed! When she could speak, she said, ‘You’re wearing my nightgown!'”
Her perfume, Passion, is one of the top fragrances in the country. Along with Passion for Men—”to be worn anywhere a man wants to be touched”—it has created a company already worth over one hundred million dollars. In August, a second Elizabeth Taylor scent for women, White Diamonds, will debut. “If Passion was velvet, White Diamonds is blue denim. Sparkly and pretty. And you can count on it—I’ll be wearing diamonds in the ads.”
She has always understood a star’s dual role, comfortably inhabiting her on- and offscreen personas. When Richard Burton, the last great love of her life, would pontificate after dinner, reciting Shakespeare, she would say, “Well, I don’t know anything about the theater, but”—flinging one arm over her head—”I don’t have to. I’m a star!”
“I know I’m vulgar,” she once told friends, “but you wouldn’t have me any other way, would you?” She was right. The public wanted her larger than life, and she fit perfectly into the role of the fatal brunette, playing Odile to the blonde Odettes of Grace Kelly and Monroe.
She made us forget she was an upper-crust girl who grew up with a weekend home in the English countryside, a pony, paintings by Augustus John on the walls, and dance lessons at Madame Vacani’s, where the other Elizabeth, the queen, also went. Hanging from a pillar in her office as proof are her first white satin pointe shoes, right next to boxing gloves given to her by Sugar Ray Robinson.
She is known for walking through rehearsals, barely going through the motions, then delivering a powerful performance when the cameras roll. “I just can’t turn on my emotions unless I know the audience is there,” she says slowly and painfully, “because it costs… too much. When you act from your gut, your body doesn’t know you’re playacting.”
Sometimes directors have forced great performances out of her by confronting her just before filming, as George Stevens did before a crucial scene in Giant, accusing her of holding up the entire production through laziness and vanity. She played the scene trembling with rage, fighting back tears. But she says the hardest role was in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof because Mike Todd was killed two weeks into shooting. “I developed an awful…”I had a stutter, and the only way I could speak clearly was by using Maggie’s voice, with that southern accent. Otherwise, I would just stammer—”ug, ig, um”—and my jaw would jerk.
Maggie was a perfect role for her, yet there was a persistent Hollywood rumor that she hadn’t understood the character. People claimed she failed to realize that her screen husband, played by Paul Newman, ignored her advances because he was gay. The screenplay had deliberately obscured Tennessee Williams’s central theme, but even so, could they really believe she was confused, when her own heart had nearly been broken by Montgomery Clift for the same reason?
That impression was started and spread by an irritated executive with whom she was arguing over the choice of director for her next movie, Two for the Seesaw. “I won’t have him!” she said of the studio’s pick.
Exasperated, the executive shot back, “I don’t think you should make this picture. I don’t see you as a little Jewish girl from New York who can’t get a date and falls in love with a traveling salesman who goes back to his wife.”
She looked at him for a moment from under her famous double row of eyelashes. “But, Sam,” she said softly, “I’ve just made a picture in which my husband wouldn’t sleep with me!”
It’s Elizabeth Taylor’s humor that reveals how intelligent she is beneath the sensual, silken manner that comes with great beauty. Many have missed her wit, and that has gotten her into trouble time and again with people less sharp than she is.
When she was devastated by Mike Todd’s death and quickly rebounding with Eddie Fisher, she was grilled by the prudish, long-divorced gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Carelessly, she fired back with irony, “What do you expect me to do—sleep alone?”—a remark that only remarriage and another brush with death finally erased from public memory. Similarly, when she wrote, “I was told the Russians are very hospitable. If you admire something, they give it to you… so I admired and admired the crown jewels, but nothing happened,” it was cited as an example of her greed.
Her smooth public demeanor hides a will of steel—the boxing gloves beneath the satin slippers—that has brought entire studios to their knees. She says it was willpower that allowed her, at twelve, to prove the power of mind over matter—growing three inches in three months to win the part of Velvet Brown. At thirty-three, she lowered her voice for her greatest, Oscar-winning performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
“Mike Nichols, the director, suggested I go to a coach and make my voice kind of raspy,” she remembers. “And I said to Mike, ‘You know, I’ve been acting so long and it’s always been instinctive; now I feel like a natural golfer who stops to take a lesson. It might throw off my swing.’ And I asked if he would let me think my voice down, which I did.”
It was one of the most painful portraits of a marriage ever filmed, but the tears and ranting on-screen marked an eerie calm in her volatile partnership with Richard Burton. “Going at it all day and night like that for six months… well, Richard and I had a ball, but we decided that for the sake of our marriage we would have to leave those characters behind at the studio like two old overcoats. We lived at fever pitch and got all that energy out on the set, and when we came home we were”—she purses her lips—”pussycats!”
She had to age seventeen years to look fifty. She put on twenty pounds. Twenty years later, she used the same willpower to force her weight down from 180 pounds to 122 pounds, a painful battle she entertainingly recorded in the book she wrote in 1987, Elizabeth Taylor Takes Off.
Whenever she set her heart on a man or a film role, a diamond or a racehorse, it had to be the only one in the world, forever and ever. Once she had it in her sights, her hold on it was tenacious.Total and irreversible. “My focus?” she reflects. “It was a gift from God. You have to be aware of that gift to keep from losing it. In this business, so many things can cloud your vision—flattery, how easily fame can be maintained, the way things seem to come effortlessly. And I say ‘seem.’ I’ve watched so many people lose their focus.”
She accepted what came easily, and she paid the price. Few have endured so much loss. The list of deaths is devastating: her adopted “godfather,” Victor Cazalet; friends like James Dean, Gary Cooper, Rock Hudson, Halston, Laurence Harvey, and Malcolm Forbes; the beloved Montgomery Clift; her husband Mike Todd; her ex-husband Richard Burton; and, most recently, a longtime assistant who had become almost family, who took his own life rather than reveal he had AIDS.
Some observers, reflecting on her Christian Scientist upbringing, believe she may have punished herself with what one doctor once described as “a chaos, a symphony of illnesses.”
“I don’t consider myself neurotic,” she says pointedly. “But then, I suppose most neurotic people don’t.”
Countless publishers have asked her to write her autobiography, “but I’m too busy. I’m living whole chapters right now… right now.” She adopts her best prim manner, like a lady with a parasol on the veranda of a grand plantation house.
There’s a man named C. David Heymann, who wrote a scandalous book about Jackie O. “He has researchers calling everyone, claiming to be my best friend, and of course no one will talk.”
These days, she shares life’s lessons more with her grandchildren than with the press. She’s said to be especially close to her eighteen-year-old granddaughter, Leila Wilding. What do they talk about?
“Boys!” says Elizabeth Taylor, smiling. “Oh, yes, we talk about our boyfriends.”
“It’s true,” says Wilding, a liberal arts student at the University of Oregon. “I get stressed, and she makes me laugh. We talk in the kitchen after breakfast and in her dressing room while she does her makeup. Advice? Recently, she said something I’ll never forget. I was feeling down about breaking up with my boyfriend, and she gave me a new perspective. She said, ‘Of course you’re sad. You’re not just leaving a relationship behind. You’re losing love.'”
Those close to her have always noted her lack of vanity. Widely considered the most beautiful woman in the world, she never hid her flaws like Garbo or Dietrich, nor was she shattered by an unflattering photo, as Monroe was. All her life, she faced the cameras radiantly—hair messy, wearing only sunscreen, hand in hand with her latest love. Even when significantly overweight, she rarely avoided the lens. The world was amazed to see her campaigning for her sixth husband, John Warner, facing crowds after an overnight Greyhound bus trip in a wrinkled coat, without a hairdresser, eating a hamburger for breakfast.
Elizabeth Taylor looks great, but her newfound independence from drink, drugs, and overeating has left her emotions raw and close to the surface.
“Once you accept that you might be dying, life becomes sweet,” she says quietly. “I’m very glad I made it.”
Asked, for the umpteenth time, who the great loves of her life were, she fights back tears before murmuring, “Mike and Richard.” Could two such different men have known the same Elizabeth Taylor?
It has been thirty-three years since Mike Todd died in the crash of his chartered plane, Lucky Liz, but she still often quotes Richard Burton.
“Richard said I’d be late for the Last Judgment.”
“Richard said I wasn’t accident-prone, I was incident-prone.”
“Richard helped me understand poetry so much better and not be intimidated by it. He said, ‘Just read it as if it were Tennessee Williams; speak it for the meaning, not the rhythm.'”
If she still devours “the kin…I ask for her favorite poem, and after a moment of thought, she names Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo.” I’m not familiar with it, so I ask if it holds a special meaning for her. It takes her a long time to answer, and when she finally does, her voice is barely a whisper.
“Yeah,” she says softly, then begins to recite: “How to keep—is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep / Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?”
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about the article or exhibition titled From the Archives Elizabeth Taylor Now at Peace Returns to Her Best
General Beginner Questions
Q What is this about
A Its a curated look back at the life and legacy of actress and icon Elizabeth Taylor likely featuring archival photos personal items film clips or writings that highlight her most iconic and authentic moments
Q What does Now at Peace Returns to Her Best mean
A It suggests the presentation focuses on celebrating her enduring legacy and greatest achievements moving past the tabloid drama of her life to honor her talent philanthropy and timeless style
Q Where can I see this Is it an article a museum exhibit or a documentary
A The format isnt specified here From the Archives often refers to a special feature in a magazine an online gallery or a physical museum exhibition You would need to check the source for exact details
Q Why is Elizabeth Taylor still so famous
A She was a legendary film star a fashion icon a passionate humanitarian and led a famously dramatic public life Her influence extends far beyond her old movies
Content Focus Questions
Q What time period of her life does this cover
A While it may touch on her entire life the phrase Returns to Her Best implies a focus on her peak professional years and her impactful humanitarian work later in life
Q Will this show her famous jewelry like the Krupp Diamond
A Its very likely as her jewelry is a legendary part of her image An archival exhibit would almost certainly feature photos or replicas of her most famous pieces
Q Does it talk about her marriages and scandals
A Given the respectful tone it probably acknowledges them as part of her story but doesnt sensationalize them The focus is more likely on her resilience and achievements
Q How does it highlight her AIDS activism
A It would likely feature archival footage of her speeches letters and photos from her work with amfAR emphasizing