The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

When a reporter covers the president of the United States, whose every move is news, he’s said to be on “body watch.” The same was true when you covered Elizabeth Taylor, whose every utterance—and every hospitalization—were front-page news, even in her seventh decade. I was on the Elizabeth Taylor body watch since my childhood as an inveterate moviegoer, and it continued when I was a reporter at
The San Antonio Light
and at
Newsweek
after I came to New York. As editorial director of G.P. Putnam’s Sons in the early 1980s, I commissioned Hollis Alpert to write a major biography of Elizabeth’s husband Richard Burton, and secured the cooperation of her publicist, and my friend, John Springer.

The result of all this Elizabeth-watching is the book you hold in your hands, which first came out in 2000. Since most books have a very short shelf life, I did not dare to suppose that
The Most Beautiful Woman in the World
would still be in demand over a decade later, with editions in many languages throughout the world. In response to its continuing popularity, my publisher asked me to prepare an updated version that would tell my readers exactly what Elizabeth was up to in Act III, the dramatic denouement of her amazing life, that of a Hollywood actress who held sway as the world’s No. 1 celebrity for well over sixty years—a unique and unprecedented feat.

The answer, as you’ll see, is by turns funny, sad, surprising, and finally gratifying as honors began to pour in from the White House and Buckingham Palace. Hollywood had long ago crowned her as its queen by bestowing two Best Actress Oscars. Now, in her golden years, the world’s most powerful governments, disregarding her scandalous past, certified her as one of the great heroines of our time.

On a more personal level, her friend Jack Larson, interviewed for this edition, reveals that even as she approached eighty, Elizabeth Taylor was never without handsome men in her life. Her beauty faded, but her many-faceted allure proved to be more than skin-deep. In the twenty-first century, her ardent admirer was Bulent Tugrul, a young Turk.

Equally fascinating in this updated edition are the confessions of legendary Hollywood cocksmen who wrote tell-all books following the original publication of
The Most Beautiful Woman in the World
. Robert Wagner, Vic Damone, and George Hamilton add zest, wit, and eye-popping surprises to the amorous saga of the screen’s most notorious siren.

In her seventies, as throughout her life, Elizabeth was rarely without drama, which was regularly supplied by accidents, medical catastrophes, and the deaths of close friends like Paul Newman and Michael Jackson. How she coped with her increasingly chaotic life, and continued to go before the public even when she was crippled and disoriented, is not only a lesson in pluck but may well have as profound an effect on society as she did when she changed our ideas about homosexuality in the 1980s and 1990s. If Elizabeth Taylor could grow old and flaunt it, so could we, and our ageist, youth-obsessed, Botox-crazed culture would be infinitely the better for it.

Also new to this edition are intriguing details that flesh out Elizabeth’s relationships with Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, President Ronald Reagan, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Truman Capote, Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand, Carrie Fisher, Marlee Matlin, and Maureen O’Hara, who was stunned when Elizabeth stole her thunder at a tribute to their mutual friend Roddy McDowall. Included as well are new disclosures about Elizabeth from such stars as Tony Curtis, Robert Vaughn, and Ernest Borgnine, some hurling laurels, others darts.

Another entirely new chapter provides complete, exhaustively researched accounts of Elizabeth’s relationship with England’s Queen Mother and Elizabeth’s investiture in Buckingham Palace as a Dame Commander of the British Empire. There is an hour-by-hour diary of Elizabeth’s reaction to Michael Jackson’s death, his funeral, and her heretofore unreported visit to the Universal City amusement park with his orphaned children, one of them her godchild.

Finally, the indestructible kind of inner beauty a stricken, seventy-eight-year-old Elizabeth Taylor displayed during her horrendous battle with a leaking heart valve in 2011 brings this updated edition to a moving conclusion.

In an industry littered with the premature checkouts of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor survived well into the new century, and into her Senior years, by a simple, touching philosophy: “I didn’t want to be a sex symbol. I would rather be a symbol of a woman, a woman who makes mistakes, perhaps, but a woman who loves.”
¹

In her latest photo, love is what radiates from her ruined features—love for the paparazzi for still paying attention to her, and love for the public, in the end her most durable paramour.

Preface

I was in Las Vegas around 1959 or 1960, staying at the Desert Inn, and one evening I attended Eddie Fisher’s show, which was absolutely first-rate. In those days, he was still a golden-throated headliner. Later, as I stood watching a poker game in the casino, I suddenly became aware of Elizabeth Taylor standing next to me. “Is the show over?” she asked. It was odd—she wasn’t looking at me, but seemed to expect an answer. I told her that Eddie had been terrific, and she said she was always expected to make an appearance and sit ringside, but she hadn’t arrived in time. She could have been talking to herself. Everyone else around us in the crowded casino was engrossed in the game and took no notice of her. Rooted to my spot a few inches from her, I couldn’t help staring, and she didn’t appear to mind. Indeed, she seemed relieved that I was going to let her be, and not ask for an autograph or take a picture.

The first thing you noticed about her when she was still in her twenties was that, despite the beauty she displayed on film, no camera had ever done her justice. Her skin was unbelievable. She had on a simple sun-dress, and I remember her shoulders being velvety and iridescent. Her coloring made me think of a rose at dusk. Her manner was appealingly demure—typical 1950s ladylike poise. Being in her presence, at the height of her beauty, was an almost religious experience. She was an example of nature perfecting itself, a once-in-a-generation phenomenon.

We both spotted Eddie at the same time as he entered the casino from the dressing room area. People who’d just seen the show began to recognize him, and their gaze followed him as he approached Elizabeth, whom they still hadn’t noticed. Eddie kissed her on the cheek, and they stood smiling at each other, an apparently happy young couple, both dark-haired and both shorter than most of the people around them. The crowd at last realized who she was, and a murmur went through the room, taking only seconds to build into a roar. Suddenly everyone around me went ballistic, charging the startled couple. Even diners who’d been helping themselves at the complimentary buffet threw down their plates and joined the chase. The casino was an extension of the hotel lobby, and fortunately we were standing fairly near the entrance. Eddie and Elizabeth made for the door at a dead run. The last I saw of them, they were sprinting just ahead of the herd.

It was then I first began to think of writing this book, but a couple of other careers intervened before I got around to it, first as a New York editor and later as a collaborator on autobiographies by Shelley Winters, Kim Novak, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Peggy Lee. Through it all my fascination with Elizabeth never wavered, especially with her emotional life, which in many respects is the most misunderstood erotic voyage of the twentieth century.

Chapter 1
Discovering Boys
A MIXED BLESSING

One of Elizabeth Taylor’s child-star contemporaries at MGM’s Little Red Schoolhouse was Jean Porter, who later became famous for a fast-talking comedy routine with Red Skelton in
Thrill of a Romance
. “We had a surrogate mother, Muzzie McPhail, who took care of all of us MGM kids,” recalled Porter in 1998. “For Elizabeth, Virginia Wiedler, Roddy McDowall, and me, Muzzie McPhail was someone whose shoulder we could cry on. How we loved Muzzie! She was there every day, morning until evening when everybody went home. Muzzie’s son, Doug McPhail, was under contract to Metro [and appeared in minor parts in
Born to Dance
,
Maytime
, and
Sweethearts
]. Elizabeth and all of us knew Doug; they were grooming him in case Nelson Eddy ever faded away, but Nelson kept turning them out, and Doug finally hanged himself.”

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