Elizabeth Taylor is a legend of old Hollywood, starring in movies like National Velvet, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Cleopatra, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She’s equally well known for her tumultuous eight marriages to seven different men, including Richard Burton twice. A new HBO documentary, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, tells the actress’ story in her own words, using 40 hours of recently discovered footage recorded for a memoir in the 1960s. It includes candid thoughts on her career, love life, and feelings of inadequacy and insecurity — all captured at the height of her fame.
The tapes sat in the attic of late journalist Richard Meryman, the ghostwriter of Taylor’s 1964 autobiography. For his research, he recorded his conversations with Taylor, never intending to make the tapes public, says the documentary’s director, Nanette Burstein. She adds, “And the estate discovered their existence, and decided that they wanted someone to use her voice from beyond the grave to tell her story.”
Burstein says hearing Taylor’s voice feels like being transported in time. “You're there with the cigarette smoke and the champagne constantly being poured, or the whiskies, in some nightclub, or sometimes at her house, or sometimes on the houseboat. And they're very extemporaneous … candid … revealing, which is so rare for a megastar to talk so intimately about themselves.”
Taylor became a star in her teens after starting a career as a child actress in the 1940s. “Something funny happened to me. I was like a child actress,” Taylor says in Burstein’s documentary. “And then all of a sudden, I was playing, at the age of 16 but looking 24, I was playing in a film, Robert Taylor's wife. The awful thing is I received my own real-life kiss one week before I received my first film kiss. I must say, that film kiss is better than my real-life kiss. But it was sort of like I was thrown into the adult world, but I had to behave like a sophisticated woman. And in my own world, I was a terrified little girl.”
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor attend a party at the English Embassy in Paris after the opening night of “Lawrence of Arabia,” March 15, 1963. Credit: AGIP/Bridgeman Images via Reuters Connect.
In her off-screen life, Taylor went from marriage to marriage. “She didn't just date men. She got married. And I think she did have this very romantic notion of love,” Burstein says.
Taylor reveals in the tapes, “I thought something would automatically happen to me inside. I thought I would obtain maturity just because I was a Mrs. instead of a Miss. Of course, it has nothing to do with it.”
However, the actress had “tragic luck,” Burstein says. For example, her third husband, Mike Todd, died in a plane crash a year after they got married. The two had a child together. Taylor admits in the recordings, “I was unprepared for the death of the person that I put all my trust in. It was really more than I could handle.”
After Todd’s death, Taylor married his best friend, Eddie Fisher — three hours after Fisher’s divorce from Debbie Reynolds was finalized. The public saw her as a homewrecker. She ended up regretting the relationship with Fisher, Burstein says. “That was the only thing we had in common — was Mike. I never loved him. I liked him. I felt sorry for him. And I liked talking with him about Mike. … But I trapped myself in that,” Taylor shares in the film.
The actress ended up attempting suicide — by taking sleeping pills — during that marriage. She told journalist Meryman that she would rather be dead than go through a divorce.
However, Taylor eventually divorced Fisher after meeting Richard Burton and having a tempestuous affair with him. They devolved into a codependent, alcoholic relationship. The two later divorced, married each other again, and divorced a second time.
“It was her longest marriage. They tried to make it work. I mean, that's why there was a second attempt. I don't think, in the end, that they were good for each other. … While they loved each other deeply, they were not going to be able to quit drinking while they were together,” Burstein says.
Elizabeth Taylor appears with husband Eddie Fisher, c.1960. Photo by Toni Frissell (1907-88)/Bridgeman Images via Reuters Connect.
Meanwhile, when it came to Taylor’s platonic relationships, many of her friends were closeteed queer men she met through movie-making. “What her best friend says is that they were never going to hit on her, and so she felt safe around them. And they felt safe with her,” Burstein explains. “They knew that she could care less about their sexual preference in an era that was extremely homophobic, and that she loved them dearly, and that their secret was safe with her. And they could confide in her about anything, and she could confide in them about anything. And those were the longest relationships and probably the closest relationships she had in her life.”
In the 1980s, few people publicly talked about the AIDS crisis, but Taylor was outspoken and raised millions of dollars for it. She even tried (unsuccessfully) to push President Ronald Reagan to tackle the issue.
Throughout Taylor’s (big) life, Burstein says, she earned tons of money, created lots of films, traveled the world, acquired luxuries like jewelry and art — but she never had privacy and was heavily judged.
“She was judged through the lens of the culture of the 1950s and 60s, which was quite sexist. And I'm not sure that she would be judged in the same way today. In fact, I know she wouldn't have been.”