Longtime Sen. Warner dies at 94

Republican was wed to Elizabeth Taylor

John Warner served for 30 years in the U.S. Senate, much of it as chairman of the powerful Armed Services Committee, and as a centrist Republican he established himself at the center of American politics. But before all that, Warner, who died Tuesday at 94, became famous as the sixth man to walk down the aisle with violet-eyed movie star Elizabeth Taylor. The two met on a blind date in 1976 when the British ambassador asked Warner to escort Taylor to an embassy party honoring another Elizabeth, the Queen of England, who was visiting Washington. They married that December on Warner’s farm near Middleburg, Virginia. “Well, I thought we would get married, live on the farm, raise horses,” Taylor told Larry King on his show in 2001. “And I thought it would be all very sort of farmish, and jobby, horsey, and I could have animals, and I would go out and brand the cattle.” But soon after they wed, Warner set his sights on an open U.S. Senate seat. And Taylor, a former Democrat, campaigned with her new husband, drawing huge crowds. “It’s no question being married to Elizabeth Taylor increased interest in him,” said Donald W. Huffman, who once led the state Republican Party.

“She traveled with him, and people turned out.”

Years later, Taylor laughed at how she was told not to dress ostentatiously during the campaign.

“I ended up in a tweed suit,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2006. “Me. Little tweed suits. What I won’t do for love.”

When Warner got to the Senate in 1979, he was the butt of some jokes, including being immortalized as “Sen. Elizabeth Taylor” in the “Doonesbury” comic strip. And once he established himself as a senator, Taylor rarely got involved.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so alone in my life as when I was Mrs. Senator, and I don’t blame my ex-husband,” Taylor wrote in her 1987 book “Elizabeth Takes Off.” “He never pretended to be anything but a man devoted to public service, and once that service began in earnest, I had to take a backseat to his constituency.”

The two grew apart, though, and, after a 14-month separation, divorced in 1982.

The Associated Press file Former Secretary of the Navy and Sen. John Warner, R-VA., and his then-wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor, attend the 1977 New York Film Critics Circle Awards dinner.