Elizabeth Taylor, who was married eight times to seven men, is getting candid about her love life years after her death.
The actress, who died in 2011 at age 78, is the subject of a new HBO documentary, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes.
It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival June 11 ahead of August 3 streaming premiere on Max.
In the film, Taylor gives a rare insight into her husbands, including crooner Eddie Fisher, who was previously married to her friend Debbie Reynolds.
“I never loved Eddie,” said Taylor, as quoted by People magazine. “I liked him. I felt sorry for him. And I liked talking [to him].
“But he was not Mike,” Taylor added, referring to her third husband, Mike Todd, Fisher’s best friend.
When the movie producer died in a plane crash in 1958 at age 48, it was Reynolds and Fisher who rushed over to Taylor’s side.
“I was keeping Mike alive by talking about him because Eddie, he was a great friend of Mike’s,” said Taylor. “That was the only thing we had in common, was Mike.”
It didn’t take long for Taylor and Fisher to embark on an affair.
Taylor was assailed as a husband thief, Fisher as a deserter of his family. Reynolds won sympathy as the innocent victim, when she appeared before news cameras with diaper pins on her blouse.
A cover headline in Photoplay magazine in late 1958 blared: “Smiling through her tears, Debbie says: ‘I’m still very much in love with Eddie.'”
After Fisher and Reynolds divorced in 1959, he married Taylor “just three hours” later.
Taylor admitted she didn’t “remember too much about my marriage to him, except it was one big, friggin’ awful mistake.”
“I knew it before we were married and didn’t know how to get out of it,” said Taylor.
The scandalous union lasted five years. Taylor left Fisher for Richard Burton, whom she met on the set of 1963’s Cleopatra. At the time, Burton was married to his first wife, Sybil Williams.
But, according to the documentary, it wasn’t love at first sight.
“I’d never seen a gentleman so hungover in my life,” said Taylor.
The Welsh actor became her fifth husband from 1964 to 1974. Burton became husband No. 6 when they rekindled their marriage in 1975. They called it quits for good in 1976.
Only the first four of Taylor’s husbands are accounted for in the film. She accused the first, hotel heir Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr., of mental and physical abuse. She alleged Hilton kicked her in the stomach while pregnant, causing a miscarriage. They were married from 1950 to 1951.
When it came to her second marriage to actor Michael Wilding, it failed because “I needed someone to dominate me.” That union lasted from 1952 to 1957.
When asked about her public image, Taylor described it as”an untrustworthy lady, completely superficial — and too pretty.”
“Maybe because of my personal life I suggest something illicit, but I am not illicit, and I am not immoral,” said Taylor. “I make mistakes, and I have paid for them. I know that I will never be able to pay the bill, but that is not something you can put in the story.”
“My father left my mother for Elizabeth,” he added. “A lot of people were mad about that. … A lot of people were like, ‘So your dad left the good girl for the bad girl.’ … Liz made no bones about being the bad girl. She came a long way from ‘National Velvet.’ … So, when my mother was put in the position of being humiliated by my father … my mother was a classy person.”
Years later, Todd said, his mother and Taylor “became great friends again.” They starred in the 2001 These Old Broads, co-written by his sister, “Star Wars” actress Carrie Fisher. In the film, the women poked fun at the affair.
“I don’t think the press ever forgave my dad. The public certainly didn’t,” said Todd.
After Taylor, Fisher married Connie Stevens, the third of five wives. He died in 2010 at age 82. Reynolds died in 2016 at age 84.
