Elizabeth Taylor Revealed ‘Extremely Intimate Personal Feelings’ in Newly Unearthed Interviews

To prepare for her memoir, Elizabeth Taylor sat down with a ghost writer to talk about her life. The candid interviews with journalist Richard Meryman touched on everything from her childhood and career to her public scandals, near-death experiences and marriages. After her book Elizabeth Taylor was published in 1965, the secret interviews were stored in the writer’s attic for decades until they were rediscovered by his widow.

Based on these forgotten conversations, the new HBO documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes allows the iconic Oscar-winning actress to tell her own story in her own voice. “It is so rare to have such a legendary star give extremely intimate personal feelings about their life,” Nanette Burstein, director of the documentary, which premieres August 3, tells Closer. “There’s a lot of intimate revelations that people haven’t heard — 90 percent of the film is in her own words.”

An actress since childhood, Elizabeth confessed that the sheltered world of Hollywood left her ill-prepared for real life. “I received my own real-life kiss one week before I received my first film kiss — I must say the film kiss was better,” Elizabeth said. “I was thrown into the adult world. I had to behave like a sophisticated woman, [but] I was a terrified little girl.”

She admits that her own “naïveté” and romantic feelings of being “in love with love” led her to marry Conrad “Nicky” Hilton at age 18. “I was a virgin. Not only a virgin physically but mentally,” said Elizabeth, who admits she was “petrified” on her wedding night. The marriage would last just eight months due to his gambling, drinking and abusive behavior. “Nick was always in a temper or stoned or something,” said Elizabeth, who told her interviewer that the whole marriage was a blur. “I don’t want to talk about Nick Hilton, about him kicking me in the stomach and causing me to have a miscarriage,” she said.

Elizabeth Taylor Found Her Voice

Elizabeth confessed to feeling insecure and unprepared as an actress, too. “I felt very much the inadequate teenage Hollywood sort of puppet that had just worn pretty clothes and hadn’t really acted except with horses and dogs,” she said of being cast in 1951’s A Place in the Sun, her first adult movie, opposite Montgomery Clift.

The film’s director, George Stevens, supported her, but when they reunited on the set of Giant several years later, Stevens humiliated Elizabeth in front of the entire cast and crew. “He said clearly, [that] I would never become an actress because I was so concerned about being pretty,” she recalled. “He constantly reminded me that I was a movie star, not an actress.”

Some good things came out of Giant. Elizabeth became very close friends with Rock Hudson, and she also forged a warm, if slightly unpredictable, relationship with James Dean. “He would tell me about the grief and unhappiness in his life, some of his loves and tragedies,” Elizabeth said. “The next day on set I’d say, ‘Hi, Jimmy!’ and it was almost as if he didn’t want to recognize that he had revealed so much of himself the night before. It would take maybe a day or two for him to become my friend again.”

Still, Elizabeth was devastated by the news of Jimmy’s death. “It seemed impossible,” she said. “I had just been with him that day driving around the studio in his Porsche. He was so alive, he was vital, I couldn’t believe he was dead.”

Elizabeth Taylor’s Heart Was Broken By James Dean’s Death

Her costar’s death led to a “whole period of examining my own life,” she said, but less than two years later, Elizabeth discovered a new depth of grief when her third husband, Michael Todd, was killed in a plane crash. “I think her marriage to Mike Todd was the happiest time of her life,” says Burstein. “He was the love of her life.”

Elizabeth’s first husband had been abusive and her second, Michael Wilding, too coddling, but Mike had built Elizabeth’s confidence. “I always had a feeling of inadequacy as a student and a human being,” she said. “I learned to enjoy life much more and not to be ashamed because you don’t know about something. Not [to] be ashamed of being curious — that curiosity was a marvelous thing.”

His death shocked her to the core. “I was so unprepared for the death of the person that I had put all my trust in. It was really more than I could handle,” confessed the star, who admitted she “didn’t ever want to work again.”

Elizabeth called her rebound marriage 14 months later to Eddie Fisher, who had been one of Mike’s friends, “one big, friggin’ awful” mistake. “I knew before we got married, but I didn’t know how to get out of it,” she said. The star sunk into a depression so deep, she tried to take her own life with sleeping pills. “I did it deliberately, calmly, and in front of Eddie,” Elizabeth confessed. “I was fed up with living.” A doctor arrived in time to save her life. “Thank God,” Elizabeth said. “I’m so deeply ashamed of it.”

But the marriage boiled over after she fell in love with Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra in 1961 and Eddie became possessive and dangerously jealous. “He had a gun,” Elizabeth recalled. “Every time I would start to close my eyes and nod out, he would stroke my arm and say, ‘I’m not going to kill you, I wouldn’t shoot you, you’re much too pretty,’ all night long. I ran from the house. I was so scared.”

Finally leaving Eddie for Richard created a fresh scandal — and friction with the people Elizabeth loved most. “My father called me a whore,” said the star, who admitted that she and Richard both carried guilt “for having inflicted such awful pain” on others. The whole episode left scars. Yet, Elizabeth insisted, “I am not illicit, and I am not immoral.”

Elizabeth Taylor’s Sobriety Was a ‘New Beginning’

By the mid-1980s, Elizabeth was single and newly sober. She had surrendered herself to treatment at the Betty Ford Center after her family staged an intervention. “I had taken sleeping pills every night of my life for 35 years,” she said. “I, at this point, had taken one or two Percodan mixed with booze before I could go out.” But instead of resenting her family, Elizabeth viewed the wake-up call as proof of their love.

Life after achieving sobriety was “a new beginning,” Elizabeth insisted in a 1985 interview, which is also heard in the new documentary, adding that for the first time she felt strong enough to stand on her own. “Being alone doesn’t frighten me,” she said. “I am quite liking not being afraid to be with myself. I think that is why I can give more.”

As the AIDS crisis gathered steam and began killing Elizabeth’s friends, including Rock Hudson, she found a calling. “I saw Rock just before he died,” Elizabeth said. “AIDS was this terrible stigma. It was like, ‘It’s their problem, let them handle it.’ There would have been no Hollywood without the homosexual community. Just as human beings, we owe our fellow man a certain responsibility.”

Throughout her life, Elizabeth endured a difficult relationship with her own fame. Burstein called it an “albatross” she carried, but in the end she found a positive way to use it. “I think there is a reason for having fame, a reason that can be turned into constructive uses,” said Elizabeth, who founded the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (ETAF) to raise awareness and provide support. Her estate still donates 25 percent of royalties from her image and likeness to the international foundation. “Fame can be a very negative thing,” Elizabeth said. “Unless you turn it around and make it work for you, what is the point of having it?”