Elizabeth Taylor was the most famous woman in the world. Her marriages (eight), her adventures, her jewelry, her medical disasters were all documented by tabloids and photographers. But away from the spotlight, Elizabeth Taylor shared a different side of herself—smart, wounded, desperate to prove herself—with the inner circle of confidants who surrounded her during her turbulent life.
That's what Nanette Burstein, director of the new HBO documentary “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes,” was able to shed light on after the Taylor Foundation contacted her and allowed her to sort through 40 hours of unreleased audio recordings from interviews the screen legend gave in the 1960s with journalist Richard Merryman.
“It’s very rare to find a legendary movie star who is so open about her inner life,” says Burstein. “It was an opportunity not only to understand this revered figure in film history, but also to chart the trajectory of the women’s movement and the way women’s roles began to shift in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Taylor grew up in the studio system, first breaking hearts as a 12-year-old in “National Velvet,” then evolving into more mature roles as wives and damsels in films like “Conspirator” and “Father of the Bride” while still in her teens. Burstyn’s film includes promotional material of a 16-year-old Taylor who almost makes people drool over her looks. It’s an ad campaign that hasn’t aged well.
“They were discussing her as a sexual woman before she was 18,” Burstein says. “They even gave her measurements and weight.”
Then there were Taylor's off-screen relationships, the good (her union with producer Mike Todd), the bad (her abusive marriage to Conrad Hilton), and the complicated (her fling with Richard Burton, which burned brightly before collapsing in a torrent of booze). Taylor saw Todd, who died in a plane crash about a year after their marriage, as the great love of her life.
“My theory is that it would have lasted,” Burstein says. “He was the best partner she had. I think they would have made a lot of movies together and in a healthy way, because some of the ways she made her movies with Richard Burton were not very healthy.”
There were career triumphs after Todd's death—including Oscar-nominated roles in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Suddenly, Last Summer” and, of course, “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—that tapped into Taylor's volcanic emotions, allowing her to stretch and roar in ways her studio masters initially resisted.
But Taylor’s lasting legacy may be her work as an AIDS advocate. Her friendships with gay men like Roddy McDowall, Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson, whose deaths helped bring attention to AIDS, gave her a personal connection to the disease. She became one of the first stars to use her platform to push for more research into AIDS, using her fame to raise money.
“AIDS was seen as a ‘gay disease’ and no one wanted to do anything about it,” Burstein says. “It made her angry that no one was talking about it. So I thought, ‘Well, I have this fame. It’s always been a toxic part of my life, but why not use it to do amazing things?’ And she did. In her mind, that was her greatest accomplishment.”
