ELIZABETH TAYLOR
Her best friend reveals new details of the star’s personal life and search for happiness.
Big girls need big diamonds,” Elizabeth Taylor once said, and they were indeed some of her favorite things. “My mother says I didn’t open my eyes for eight days after I was born but when I did, the first thing I saw was an engagement ring. I was hooked!” she winkingly joked of her lifelong weakness for jewelry and husbands.
Behind the glitz and glamour, though, was a much different Elizabeth that only those in her inner circle truly knew. “Fame and beauty were not important at all. She didn’t even look at herself in the mirror,” Vicky Tiel, Elizabeth’s longtime best friend, tells Closer of the largerthan-life actress whose lonely childhood in front of the cameras led her to long for acceptance and companionship in her personal life. “What was important was having a great meal at a table with 20 people around it and everybody gossiping, everybody happy. If she could have anything, that’s what she’d want.”
LITTLE GIRL LOST
Elizabeth moved from the U.K. to the States at age 7, when her American parents — father Francis, an art dealer, and mother Sara Sothern, a former actress — fled Europe at the start of the second World War. “When I arrived in Hollywood, they called me ‘little refugee,’” Elizabeth said of feeling ostracized, adding that as a child she’d “always preferred animals to little girls or boys.” J. Randy Taraborrelli, author of the biography Elizabeth, tells Closer, “She was always just a little bit different.”
By the age of 9, Elizabeth’s captivating looks started landing her film work, all under Sara’s watchful eye. “My father had made my mother quit the stage when she was 29, and she lived her life vicariously through me,” Elizabeth explained. While she enjoyed performing, the pressures were great. “I paid the bills [from] the minute I started working,” she said, confessing to Barbara Walters in 1999 that her financial success was so hard for Francis to accept that he’d sometimes “bat me around a bit” when he drank. “When I left home and had my own child,” she said, “I started thinking about my father and how it must have felt for him to have his 9-year-old daughter making more money than he was.”
Elizabeth catapulted to stardom at age 12 with 1944’s National Velvet and her fame
brought more work demands in the coming years, leaving little time for fun. “I wasn’t allowed to date. As a result, I had no real inner self-confidence,” said Elizabeth, who tried to spread her wings by marrying hotel heir Conrad “Nicky” Hilton at the tender age of 18. “I left home as soon as I could. When I had to swear in front of the archbishop to be a good wife, I had my fingers crossed behind my back because I didn’t know. I was still a child.”
Their 1950 marriage lasted less than a year and sent Elizabeth off on a desperate lifelong search for love and happiness that would find her marrying eight times, twice saying “I do” to Richard Burton. It was shortly after her first marriage to the Welsh actor that he introduced her to Vicky, the designer of the miniskirt, after Elizabeth admired her innovative new fashion in Paris. “He said, ‘Can you please make a dress for her like that?’ ” Vicky recalls of that fateful meeting. “So I measured her and we became best friends. We were family!”
“I was 9 when I made my first films. I was used from the day I was a child.”
— Elizabeth
LETTING LOOSE
The 1960s were a heady time for Elizabeth. She’d always longed for companionship, and she surrounded herself with friends. “Elizabeth wanted people around, and she got them. She invented the entourage,” says Vicky, who now sells her Vicky Tiel Paris for Highgate Manor bedding line on HSN. “At times there were 12 of us all hanging out together,” she adds of the funfilled girl talk and Scrabble sessions the actress adored.
Elizabeth seemed to be making up for the free-spirited teen years she never got to experience. “Maybe a half-hour conversation would be, ‘Where are we going to eat?’” Vicky recalls with a laugh, adding that with Elizabeth’s bank account the sky was the limit. “We’d be in France and we’d have food flown in from England because Elizabeth had to have shepherd’s pie!”
The joy of those around her was paramount to the star. “She was interested in equality,” Vicky says. “She had a black personal assistant — Robert Wilson — and he went everywhere with her. That was unusual for the ’60s, and she would make sure stuckup movie stars had to sit next to him at lunch.” Her driver, Gaston Sanz, was a former karate champion. “He was this tiny guy with big muscles — not
sophisticated,” Vicky adds. “She would have him sit next to Princess Margaret because she liked the grand people to mix with the regular people.”
Her passionate, albeit tumultuous, romance with Richard had a lot to do with her happiness. The two fell in love on the set of 1963’s Cleopatra and wed in 1964 when Elizabeth was 32, co-starring 11 times on the big screen during their relationship. (Having divorced in 1974, the duo remarried in 1975 for nine months.)
In the time they were together, Elizabeth was on top of the world: She was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars after winning her second Oscar for 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and she’d finally found the man who completed her.
“Richard was a real man, and he treated Elizabeth beautifully. To see them together, you couldn’t find a match like them,” photographer Gianni Bozzacchi, author of My Life in Focus: A Photographer’s Journey
With Elizabeth Taylor and the Hollywood Jet Set, tells Closer.
And even though their fairy-tale romance ultimately came to an end when Elizabeth was 44, she never got over him. “When I visited Elizabeth years later in Bel Air, there was a platform around her bed with antique silver frames,” says Vicky. “They were all of her and Richard.”
Still, Elizabeth found solace in her three children, Liza Todd Burton, 60, Christopher Wilding, 62, and Michael Wilding Jr., 64. She fought selflessly to give them and her 10 grandkids a normal life out of the spotlight. “Despite the fact she had such a high profile, you can count on one hand the people who really know who her children are,” Taraborrelli marvels. “She was able to shield them from her huge stardom.”
What Elizabeth did share with her family — and the legacy of hers that they are most proud to continue — is her willingness to give back. “She became impassioned about activism,” granddaughter Laela Wilding, 45, says. “I can’t think of anything more inspiring than our grandmother’s compassion and determination for other people.” The former lost soul, finally fulfilled, chose to focus on helping others whom she saw
as underdogs. “Elizabeth turned her hand to fighting AIDS. She was ahead of her time, and we were both on the board of the first AIDS organization,” famed columnist Liz Smith says of her friend’s advocacy, which started in the ’80s and continued to thrive up until Elizabeth’s death at the age of 79 in 2011. Adds Taraborrelli, “She realized the biggest difference she could make was to use her name and stardom for something bigger and better — for the world, rather than just for herself.”
In the end, the lost little girl had grown to be one of the most confident and unforgettable women that ever lived. “Follow your passion, follow your heart,” Elizabeth said, “and the things you need will come.”
— Reporting by Katie Bruno
“I’ve always admitted that I’m ruled by my passions.”
— Elizabeth