Her inner life

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes director Nanette Burstein on Eddie Fisher and Susan Oliver with Elizabeth Taylor in Daniel Mann’s BUtterfield 8: “They cast Eddie Fisher in the film and his love interest looks exactly like Debbie Reynolds.”

In Nanette Burstein’s Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes (Cannes Film Festival world première and a Spotlight Documentary selection of the 23rd edition of the Tribeca Festival), written and edited by Tal Ben-David, we hear, through the audio tapes of journalist Richard Meryman, Elizabeth Taylor in her own words as she discusses her career and life, including her first five husbands, Conrad Hilton Jr. (Nick), Michael Wilding, Mike Todd, Eddie Fisher and Richard Burton.

Oscar nominees Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor with Montgomery Clift in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer

The tapes start in 1964. Elizabeth Taylor offers her interviewer a drink. “I’m not illicit, not immoral,” she says and the journey backwards into her childhood on the studio lot begins. Clips from Fred M. Wilcox’s Lassie Come Home lead into her efforts to land the starring role in Clarence Brown’s National Velvet. When a producer concludes that she was too small for the part, she stretched herself three inches in three months, she claims. At age 16, looking 27, so we hear, she is cast as Robert Taylor’s wife in Victor Saville’s Conspirator. Still a little girl, she is advertised as a sex symbol for the world. The press department’s fake dates lead quickly to the first of her many marriages.

In 1950, at age 18, she marries Nick Hilton, a virtual stranger whom she will divorce at 19. A Place In The Sun, opposite Montgomery Clift, directed by George Stevens, at first terrifies her, because she too wants to be taken seriously for her acting skill and not simply as an ingenue. Marriage number two to Michael Wilding, 20 years her senior, and a number of “empty roles” at MGM are followed by another challenge with Stevens’s Giant, opposite Rock Hudson and James Dean, whose shocking death at 24 cuts short their burgeoning friendship.

Elizabeth Taylor with King Charles in Clarence Brown’s National Velvet

Death is lurking everywhere. Producer Mike Todd, her third husband and "love of her life" dies in an exploding plane. He taught her “not to be afraid of being curious.” Despite the tragedy, she continues filming Richard Brooks’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, opposite Paul Newman. Eddie Fisher, Mike Todd’s friend and husband to Debbie Reynolds will soon become husband number four. The gossip columns call her a home wrecker, the marriage doesn’t last, and Daniel Mann’s BUtterfield 8, a film that mirrors the headlines in hurtful ways, will win her the Oscar. Joseph L Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer, for which both Taylor and co-star Katharine Hepburn received Best Actress nominations the previous year, would have been a much preferred choice (the Oscar, also deservedly, went to Simone Signoret for Jack Clayton’s Room At The Top).

The chaos surrounding the production of Cleopatra, pneumonia, six months in the hospital, meeting Richard Burton on the set - on and on the carrousel turns in Taylor’s tumultuous life. Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, which garners her a second Oscar, her friendship with Rock Hudson and the co-founding of amfAR in 1985 round out the documentary.

From New York during the Tribeca Festival, Nanette Burstein joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes.

Anne-Katrin Titze: Your film is about lost tapes. How did these lost tapes find their way to you? And was there a moment on the tapes that made you think, yes, this is what I want to do as a film?

Nanette Burstein: The tapes had sat in this journalist’s [Richard Meryman] attic, I assume, for the last 40 years, and his wife found them posthumously. The estate became aware of them and said, we would like these, and she gave it to them. And then they contacted me to say, would I take a listen and consider making a film about them with these lovely producers who are involved in this endeavour.

Elizabeth Taylor with Robert Taylor in Victor Saville’s Conspirator

And I was very interested. There’s a lot of stuff which you see in any archive that’s not interesting and then there are these gems. And there are enough of these gems about her inner life that I was excited to make this film. It’s so rare to have a legendary classic cinema star revealing so much of herself in an extemporaneous way.

AKT: Starting with her childhood as a Hollywood child star and what that entailed! Her father advertising her as his “beautiful daughter” at a very young age! Then she talks about the schooling [arranged by the studio] and the insincerity of it. Three hours school and then eight hours filming. I thought that was very revealing.

NB: Yeah, I think she felt highly uneducated. She didn’t go to school with kids, she wasn’t socialised, she was on film sets. And they would fit in her tutoring here and there, which was hard to focus on between takes. She always had a nanny in tow, so she was never alone until she was 18 years old, when she got married to somebody she barely knew and had no idea what she was getting into. Even though you’re in Hollywood, she was one of the most sheltered people you can imagine. She was not prepared for the real world and she also had this romanticised idea of love.

AKT: She struggled with that throughout her whole life.

Elizabeth Taylor with Rock Hudson in George Stevens’s Giant

NB: She did, yeah. She’s playing all these parts where she is in love. So she was in love with love. But the reality of love is different than the movie concept of love. She grew up with this fantasy of love and it didn’t always work out for her.

AKT: Age comes up a lot, and the differences between the ages she actually was and the roles that she played. At 16, looking 27 she was cast as Robert Taylor’s wife, her first adult role [in Conspirator]. Then later in Giant, she is playing 18 to 50 at age 22. Then in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at 32 she plays 50.

NB: Yes, in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? she is playing a woman 20 years older than herself. Well, there’s two separate questions here. The studio system had contract players, so you did films that they asked you to do and play the roles they asked you to do. And they really sexualised her at a very young age. She was 14, 15, 16, playing roles of an adult female that is married to a much older man. As she says in the film, she had her first kiss on a movie set before she had a real-life kiss.

And she says the movie kiss actually was better than the real-life kiss, but nonetheless. That’s a separate issue of what they did back then, which they wouldn’t do today, just because of optics, you know. The other issue is her romantic idea of love and that was an albatross for her because she fell into these marriages that weren’t always great for her.

Elizabeth Taylor Paul Newman in Richard Brooks’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

AKT: Another revealing moment where the age comes up, and it comes up by her very wittily, is during her third marriage to Mike Todd. The reporter says to her, “Once you said you had the mind of a child in a woman’s body.” And her response is so fantastic! She says “When I was 15!”

NB: I know! That’s one of my favourite things! Yeah, I think I was 15 then, if I were to think that now, I’d have to be slightly retarded! And even Mike Todd is pointing out how witty she is!

AKT: You expose some things with your editing. You show clips of Richard Burton saying in interviews the exact same thing about her, along the lines of, at first I thought she wasn’t doing anything … Great editing!

NB: Quite intentional! And here I am, doing these press interviews and we all get out stick. And the thing I was trying to point out is that they had their stick, they had their talking points and they would repeat themselves verbatim. Even the hand gestures or the laugh in a certain way, like, there are the stories we tell. And because they were this celebrity couple, I thought it was important, without really spelling it out, just to show you, okay, this is what they did over and over again.

AKT: The things that are repeated, the over-and-over-again-ness of it all - she also points it out to Richard Meryman himself on the tapes, saying, this is the 19th time you are talking to me about being a sex goddess!

Richard Burton embraces Elizabeth Taylor in the chaotic production of Cleopatra

NB: It’s true! Oh my god, I didn’t even bring up all the times he was asking. I was so annoyed as a woman listening. I was like, oh my god, leave it alone! Come on, man, why are you so interested in this? Actually it angered me a bit. It was important for me to say that because for her, she was like, I want to be respected as an actress. I don’t want to be respected as a movie star, which she considered not to have genuine chops. And I certainly don’t want to be thought of as a sex symbol. So stop asking me about that. It’s insulting. At that time, they didn’t get it! But you are, you are a sex symbol, why not talk about it?

AKT: The whole misogyny of the questioning!

NB: I know, that is the thing! Even the questions were misogynistic. I felt it was important, and I’m not trying in any way to demean Richard Meryman. I think he did great interviews, but it was of the time and there was just these lines of questions that are wild to listen to in 2024.

AKT: Right before seeing your film, I had watched the Tribeca Opening Night film, Diane von Furstenberg: Woman In Charge. And there were the questions again. David Letterman asking “So you reinvented the dress? Ha, ha!”

NB: Like that’s not important.

AKT: Some things were very similar. It was interesting to see what has changed and what hasn’t. Where are we now and what do people still get away with? Elizabeth Taylor’s Oscar for BUtterfield 8 is accompanied by clips from the film. You cut one clip right before she says to her mother “Why didn’t you slap me earlier?”

George Segal and Richard Burton with Elizabeth Taylor in Mike Nichols’s Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

NB: That’s true, that’s a good point. I find that movie to be - and I don’t know how many people get this watching the film - but basically she is in the midst of a scandal. Mike Todd dies, she marries Eddie Fisher, who was married to Debbie Reynolds and they were all best friends and he leaves her and marries Elizabeth. And Elizabeth is already regretting this marriage. And MGM makes her do this film. She does not want to do this movie. She is playing a prostitute and they cast Eddie Fisher in the film and his love interest looks exactly like Debbie Reynolds. And the Eddie Fisher character is in love with Elizabeth’s character.

You feel like real life is playing out on the screen to an extent, but in a way that she is being portrayed as a whore and a home wrecker. She hates this movie! Like, how could you do this to me in this moment of time? It couldn’t be more flagrant, what you’re doing to me right now! It’s kind of amazing to watch. I don’t know how obvious it is to viewers who are watching this film but I felt for her. And then she wins the Oscar for it and is like, I hate this movie, it depicts me as a slut and I don’t want to be seen in the way I’m depicted publicly.

AKT: And Eddie Fisher in this role! I did not know the whole background when I first saw the movie.

NB: That’s the thing! And then they cast this woman as his girlfriend who looks exactly like Debbie Reynolds! You can’t make this thing up!

AKT: Also when making Cat On A Hot Time Roof, her husband had just died in a plane crash! And she finishes the film!

Montgomery Clift with Elizabeth Taylor in George Stevens’s A Place In The Sun

NB: I know! She went right into it two weeks later. It was almost like her way of coping, to go into some character and not have to think about her devastation.

AKT: We get to see her in a different light. So thank you for putting this together.

NB: I was lucky to be given the opportunity.

AKT: Although I never saw her in the light that some of the male journalists saw her, there still is more depth to her now in the individual roles. I will not be able to see a Liz Taylor film the same way.

NB: I’m glad you are saying that. I do think that this film has allowed to understand her and the nuance of her that we never have been able to see her before.

AKT: Thank you so much for this! And good luck with the film!

NB: Thank you!

AKT: Any more projects about movie stars coming up?

NB: Not movie stars. I’m doing a film on Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist, and I’m doing a project on Sam Bankman-Fried.

AKT: Who did not get his education in Irving Thalberg’s former bungalow!

NB: No, he did not!

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes will be available on HBO and streaming on Max starting on Saturday, August 3.