“Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes ”director breaks down the doc’s biggest revelations
"Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes" uses over 40 hours of never-before-heard interviews with the actress.
Elizabeth Taylor made her screen debut at age 10 and was a tabloid fixture from the time she was a teenager. She was in the public eye for most of her life.
Given that, one might think there isn't anything new to discover about Taylor. But that was until over 40 hours of taped interviews with Taylor from 1964 were discovered in the attic of the late journalist Richard Meryman. The tapes belonged to Taylor, but Meryman's widow was unaware of that fact. In 2019, House of Taylor reclaimed the recordings, and they are now stored securely in the Elizabeth Taylor Archive.
Those tapes are now the bulk of the new documentary, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, which premiered on HBO on Aug. 3 and is now streaming on Max.
Documentarian Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture) was approached by producers and the Taylor estate about turning the tapes into a film. "Richard Meryman was going to ghost-write a biography, and so he recorded 40 hours of conversations over the course of a year in 1964 when she was at the height of her fame and married to Richard Burton," Burstein explains. "The tapes sat in his attic for many, many decades until about five years ago when his wife discovered them after his death."
Related: Kyle MacLachlan recalls Elizabeth Taylor 'had to have a gift every day' on The Flintstones set
"The audience will learn a lot about her, even those that are super fans because there's so many personal revelations in the movie," Burstein continues. "It's very confessional and intimate. Often, when she would tell [Meryman] some of the more interesting stories, she would say, 'Oh, you can't use that in the book.' If she thought that these tapes were going to be shared, she would not have spoken in the same way. That said, she's no longer with us, and her estate, which is partly her family, wanted the world to hear that side of Elizabeth."
Here are 11 of our favorite revelations from the film:
Elizabeth Taylor tried to grow three inches in a month for "National Velvet"
Taylor, already on contract at MGM and an avid horsewoman, was determined to play Velvet Brown in National Velvet, but the studio told her she was too small. Though she was only 12, she was so desperate for the part that she ate steak nightly and regularly hung on to doorframes in an attempt to stretch herself out.
Her first kiss happened only a week before her first onscreen kiss
Taylor narrowly avoided having her first kiss in front of the cameras. It happened when she was 16, one week before her first onscreen kiss with Robert Taylor in The Conspirator (the film was not released until two years later). "The screen kiss was better," she told Meryman.
Elizabeth Taylor assumed she would magically mature after marrying Nicky Hilton
The film grants some space to Taylor's career as a child star, most notably delving into the fact that it was she, and not her parents, who pushed her to pursue an acting career. At first, it was a grand game of make-believe but the studio kept strict watch over her — and she never went anywhere by herself until she was nearly 18 years old.
Because of this, when she married Nick Hilton at only 18, she was still a virgin, "physically and emotionally" as she put it. The couple did not consummate their marriage until three days after the ceremony.
"I thought I would obtain maturity because I was a Mrs., not a Miss," Taylor added.
Burstein wanted to make it clear that so much of Taylor's approach to romance, dating, and love came from growing up in the movies. "She didn't have a normal childhood in any way," says the director. "She was playing roles in all these movies as an adult woman when she was a teenager. And her costars were more than twice her age often. So, she was both very naive about the world, but also acting like an adult in these movies and having a very romantic idea of love. Because the way it was portrayed in the movies is not how love is in real life. So she was in love with love, but she was in love with this idea of love that wasn't real."
She was with James Dean the morning before he died
James Dean was wrapping up production on Giant, in which he starred opposite Taylor, when he died in a car crash at only 24 years old. Taylor was in the projection room watching the daily rushes of their film work when the call came in with the news. "I had just been with him that day, driving around the studio," she remembered.
Though a fierce woman, she liked her husbands to dominate her
Taylor played powerful women on screen and paved her own way off of it. But in her relationships, she preferred an alpha male. Discussing her marriage to Michael Wilding, she admitted that she henpecked him to provoke a response. "I needed someone to dominate me," she said.
She felt the same with her next husband, Mike Todd, who was significantly older than her. Taylor told a story of how she would purposefully be late or do things to annoy Todd to get him to "dominate" her. Then, when it worked, "I would just purr inside," she said. Prior to Todd's tragic death in a plane crash, she was even intending to retire from acting to focus on their home life.
She never loved Eddie Fisher and knew it was a mistake to marry him
For better or worse, one of the biggest components of Taylor's fame was her numerous marriages and relationships. In the 1950s, she made headlines for her affair with Eddie Fisher, which destroyed his marriage to Debbie Reynolds. Fisher and Taylor wed only three hours after Fisher's divorce from Reynolds was finalized.
"I was still in love with the memory of Mike and kept him alive by talking about him," Taylor recounted of the infamous relationship. "I never loved Eddie. I liked him and liked talking about Mike with him... I don't remember much about my marriage, except it was one big, giant mistake, and I knew it before the wedding."
Adds Burstein: "She wasn't in love with Eddie, and all of a sudden, she's having an affair with him, and he's married to Debbie Reynolds, America's sweetheart, and it's this huge scandal, and suddenly, she's engaged to be married to him. She knew going into it [that] it was a huge mistake, but she didn't know how to get out of it because it was so public at that point. So, she just went ahead with it. And then, of course, the marriage did not endure as a result of her lack of interest in being wedded to him."
At first, however, Taylor was reluctant to face another divorce, so much so that she attempted suicide, noting, "I would rather be dead than face going through a divorce."
Related: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's scandalous love story
Eddie Fisher would sit by a bed with a loaded gun
In one particularly horrific anecdote, Taylor revealed that in the midst of her affair with Richard Burton, Fisher would sit at her bedside, pointing a loaded gun at her, and nudge her awake by taunting, "I wouldn't kill you. I wouldn't shoot you."
She liked being an actress, but hated fame and her public image
Though Taylor was larger-than-life, at heart, she was incredibly insecure. "Some part of me is sorry that I became a public utility," she said. "I don't like the sense of belonging to the public. I like being an actress."
Burstein was particularly surprised by how much Taylor wrestled with her public image and felt disrespected as an actress. "I was surprised at her level of insecurity being so famous and successful," the director says. "She felt like she wasn't respected as a talented actress, but that she was seen more as a movie star or pretty face. She really wanted that respect from not just her peers but from the audiences. She is very aware that the public thinks that she's a home-wrecker. She is very much slut-shamed, and none of the men that she's having these affairs with had to deal with this. So, it was also very revealing of the era that she was in and how sexist it can be."
She thought she would be attacked by Italian extras on Cleopatra
When Taylor filmed a scene in Cleopatra where the titular Egyptian queen enters Rome as part of a lavish procession, she feared for her life. She was surrounded by hundreds of Italian extras, and she worried that they hated her for her affair with Burton and her public image as an "immoral woman." She imagined that they might rush her platform and try to hurt her. But instead, they chanted "Baci!" (that means "kisses" in Italian) and blew her kisses.
Related: Elizabeth Taylor gets her first-ever authorized biography: See the cover
She couldn't wait to be old, 'obese, and saggy'
Taylor understood the futility of trying to fix her public image. "If you try to explain, you lose yourself," she remarked. Instead, she was excited for time and for Mother Nature to take care of it for her. "I'm looking foriiiiward to getting fat, obese, and saggy," she quipped to Meryman.
Taylor got a taste of her wish a few years after these interviews with Meryman, portraying Martha in 1966's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Burstein wanted to be sure to showcase Taylor's own challenges with accepting or embracing her image. "It spoke volumes about the misogyny at the time and why she was insecure about being an actress," the director reflects. "And why she resented being seen as this sex pot as opposed to the woman who aged up and wore a fat suit to give a haunting performance of an extremely flawed woman."
She rejected the notion of being a sex symbol
Throughout her conversations with Meryman, the journalist kept pressing Taylor to address her status as a sex symbol. "The number of times that he kept coming back to this subject matter — I couldn't possibly include them all in the film, you would've just been so bored because it was over and over again," Burstein says. "I was appalled. I'm like, 'This is really the most important question you want to ask her?' And she keeps answering it, saying, 'I don't even know what that means, a sex symbol. I don't want to talk about it, and I don't agree. I'm an actress.'"
Related: Richard Burton said Ian McShane reminded him of Elizabeth Taylor during sex scene
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Burstein notes that there are also instances on the tapes where Burton and friend Roddy McDowall weigh in, also pushing Taylor to acknowledge that she's a sex symbol until she finally can't take it anymore.
"What the hell is a sex symbol?" she asked Meryman. "I don't think I am; I don't want to be a sex symbol. Because I'm a woman in the prime of my life, sex must enter into any role I play. I know I'm an actress. I know I'm a female. I'm very proud of being a woman, and I don't think of myself as a sex goddess. I'm just a broad."
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.
