The hidden life of Elizabeth Taylor – as seen by her son: ‘Her love for Richard Burton never went away’
Chris Wilding is a shy man approaching 70. As a little boy, he was also shy. He used to get embarrassed when his mother turned up at school for parents’ day. Everybody made such a hoo-ha about it. There she would be, in her furs and finery, done up to the nines. She was so famous and infamous, sexy and scandalous, and he would never hear the end of it. And yet to him she was just Mom.
Elizabeth Taylor was the world’s best-known actress, becoming a global celebrity at 12 after starring in National Velvet. By the age of 35, she had won two Oscars, first for playing sex worker Gloria Wandrous in the 1960 film BUtterfield 8, which she described as “a piece of shit”, and then six years later for her brilliantly visceral performance as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
She was married to one of the world’s best-known actors, Richard Burton. Together, they were the world’s best-known couple. When she wasn’t married to Burton (twice), she was married to an assortment of heirs, tycoons, actors and a man she met in rehab. There were seven husbands in all, and eight marriages.
Profiles of her were inevitably superlative-heavy. She was called the most beautiful woman in the world, commanded the highest salaries, demanded the greatest attention, and, by the time of her death in 2011, had become Tinseltown’s greatest campaigner. And she was a mother to four children.
Even in the era of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, it’s hard to imagine just how huge Taylor was. Wilding says that, whenever they left the house, photographers would be waiting for them. Whenever he came across news kiosks, his mother would be on the front of magazines and papers, sometimes with Burton, often accompanied by a scandalous headline. “There were crowds wherever she went; always a gaggle of photographers following, people gawping.” Did he like it? He gives me an “Are you kidding?” look. “No, it was horrible. None of us liked it.”
He says his mother initially became famous, “because she was extraordinarily beautiful. I think her beauty mostly helped ensure she had constant, steady work, but I think it hindered her too, in that she wasn’t taken seriously as an actress, or as seriously as she deserved to be, because she was so beautiful. People figured she got the work just because she was beautiful, rather than being a good actress.”
It was only after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that she felt she was taken seriously. It was an astonishing performance as the terrifying and terrified Martha. “She had to act and look much older than she was,” says Wilding, “and she did it really well. For me, that was the pinnacle of her acting.” Did she enjoy her career? “By and large she did. If she hadn’t enjoyed it, she would have stepped away.”
Wilding is video calling from Sierra Madre, the tiny city in southern California where he lives. He recently retired after a variety of jobs, latterly as an “undistinguished” film-editor. The job suited him perfectly, he says. “I’m an introvert, and what I liked was that you’d get given the work with instructions and were left alone to do it.”
Presumably your mother was an extrovert, I say. He thinks about it, and shakes his head. Sure, she was larger than life, “an alpha personality”, as he says, but she also had another side. “My mother was complex. Nuanced. She didn’t seek attention, she wasn’t always ‘on’, so I would say, no, she was not an extrovert.”
Her life story is told in a new three-part BBC documentary, Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar. There’s fabulous vintage footage, rare interviews, and those closest to her talk about what made her tick. There’s Michael Jackson’s daughter (and Taylor’s goddaughter) Paris Jackson, Hollywood royalty Joan Collins and Sharon Stone, reality star/businesswoman Kim Kardashian and former lover George Hamilton. One of the most quietly considered voices we hear is Wilding’s. He can take us through more of her life than any of the others. After all, she was only 23 and on to her second marriage, to actor Michael Wilding, when he came into the world.
Taylor was born in 1932 in London to American parents, and the family moved to California in 1939 because of the imminent threat of war in Europe. Her father, Francis, was an art dealer; her mother, Sara, was an actor determined that Elizabeth would follow in her footsteps. By the age of nine, Taylor had a contract with Universal Studios, and after a few minor parts she moved to MGM where she auditioned for the role of Velvet Brown, the girl who was desperate to win the all-male Grand National.
Taylor was told she would have got the part if she had been taller. So she went home and willed herself to grow. She hung from doors, ate steak for breakfast, lunch and supper, and gained three inches in three months. The producers told her that if she had such tenacity she was obviously right for the part. And so began the Liz Taylor legend.
In the documentary, we hear stories of MGM’s exploitation in the 1950s – Taylor being forced to make any number of movies; the endless hours of filming with a smidgen of schooling chucked in on the side; MGM head Louis B Mayer’s ordering her to sit on his lap for photos. Horse metaphors pop up regularly. Stone says Taylor was “groomed” into the studio system while Taylor herself is shown remarking that it’s no coincidence they refer to the “MGM stable … like we’re animals not people”. When a furious Mayer swore at her mother, Taylor told him: “You and your studio can go straight to hell.” She was ordered to apologise by Mayer’s deputy but refused. She wasn’t fired because already, at the age of 15, she had the power.
When asked to play Cleopatra in 1958, she demanded $1m. It was ludicrous. No actress would be paid $1m. But the studio coughed up because she was Taylor. “She understood the power and value of her beauty and used it for all it was worth,” Wilding says. “She was like: ‘Hey man, if you’re going to exploit me, I’m gonna fucking exploit you.’ I loved that attitude of hers.”
By the time Cleopatra was released in 1963, Wilding was eight and becoming aware of Taylor’s celebrity status. He was also getting used to the fact that the men in her life and the dads in his kept changing. Her first husband was the heir Conrad Hilton, an alcoholic sociopath who used Taylor as a punch bag. The marriage lasted a year. She left Wilding’s biological father, the actor Michael Wilding, after five years and two children. Self-made tycoon Mike Todd was killed a year into their marriage when his private plane crashed. The plane was called The “Lucky” Liz. Taylor had been due to travel with him but was ill. After his death, she considered taking her own life but she had a vision in which Todd told her that it wasn’t her time yet. Instead, she converted to Judaism, as a way of staying true to the Jewish Todd. She also began an affair with his best friend, singer-actor Eddie Fisher, who was married to Debbie Reynolds. Taylor was not yet 30 when Fisher became husband number four.
Then came Burton. The Welsh actor with the magnificent baritone was cast opposite her as Mark Antony in Cleopatra and they fell in love. After they outed themselves as a couple on the Via Veneto in Rome during filming, the Vatican condemned their affair as “erotic vagrancy” and an “insult to the nobility of the hearth”. Even Taylor and Burton referred to it as “le scandale”. Within days of divorcing Fisher, she married Burton.
There weren’t really that many men in Taylor’s life, says Wilding. “She just married the people she went out with. Mom had a conventional mindset about these things. You didn’t just have affairs. If you were in love with someone, you got married. But the media made such a big deal about it.”
It is the relationship with Burton that Wilding remembers most clearly. Sometimes he refers to Burton as Richard, sometimes as Dad. “I’ve obviously cycled through several stepfathers,” he says. “But Richard was there for the main formative years, so he was the main one for me.” You sense Burton was the most important father figure in his life, step- or biological. Wilding says he never questioned his mother’s approach to marriage and divorce. “It seemed normal. She was the anchor and the constant factor.” He says she always knew she had to be the breadwinner, even with Burton, who was a generous man and making millions at the time.
Because his parents were usually away working, Wilding went to boarding schools – in California, Britain, Hawaii and Germany. And it was at school that he began to realise his life wasn’t quite as regular as he had thought. Either his peers were overly nice to him or they taunted him. “They said: ‘Your mother likes to sleep with a lot of guys.’ It was awkward,” he says in the film. And he sounds uncomfortable just talking about it. How did he react when they said this? “One time I stood up for my mother and got in a fight with this kid and got my ass handed to me. I got thrashed by this guy, so I thought: ‘Well, standing up for my mother’s valour is not worth it. I’m not going to do that again.’” He giggles.
Even without the media scrutiny, Wilding believes, the relationship between his mother and Burton was doomed. It was near-impossible for two such explosive personalities to stay together. “It could be tempestuous,” he says with a hint of understatement. “Especially later when their relationship was falling apart. Richard was struggling with alcohol, and my mother also – and with pain meds. I don’t think they could figure their way out of that box. I don’t think they even knew they were in that box.”
Were they violent to each other? “No, I don’t think so. Certainly not in front of us children. He could be loud and belligerent. With that voice, if he told you to hop it, you’d fucking hop it, man! You’d get the fuck out of there.” Who was the scarier of the two? “Richard! He had this massive presence, and that big voice, and it was really impressive. As kids we always saw him as the larger personality – the force of his personality was just huge. But looking at interviews with him and my mom, she’s the dominant figure, and he’s the subordinate one. He’s sitting there quietly and she’s protecting him, fending off reporters and taking charge. That had never occurred to me as a kid.”
By 1974, Burton drank three bottles of vodka a day, while Taylor was also an alcoholic and addicted to pain-killers. Wilding says there were times when he was terrified of going into her bedroom because he expected to find her dead. She was attended to by doctors who would overprescribe to order. Today, Wilding says, they would probably be jailed.
But he has a degree of sympathy for them. “I know I wouldn’t have wanted to be one of my mother’s doctors because she was incredibly persuasive. Strong was the man who could stand up to Elizabeth Taylor.” Did she schmooze or bully? “Well, she was an actress. So if she wanted to appear as if she was in pain she could goose the performance to make it appear pretty dire. She legitimately did have a lot of pain issues and she had an extremely high tolerance to those drugs. But she also liked being high.”
Wilding did stand up to her. By now he was in his early 20s, and Taylor was married to Republican senator John Warner and living in Washington. One night she took out a syringe and asked him to inject her with the opiate Demerol. Wilding refused. “So then she did it for herself!” That was when he decided he had to get away. “I moved out to California. I couldn’t be around it. It was difficult to watch someone you love going down the tubes.”
Did she talk about her addictions to him? “No, not with me because I’m a recovering alcoholic too. Forty-something years now. I haven’t fallen off the wagon.” Does he think his alcoholism may be related to hers? “They say you can be predisposed to having that problem if it runs in the family. But it’s not like learned behaviour.” He pauses. “Though alcohol was freely available at the house.” And he drank plenty of it.
Despite her self-destructive ways, Taylor was happy for much of her life, but living in Washington with Warner from the mid-1970s to early 1980s she hit a low. “She loved John and he loved her, but she was a fish out of water in Washington. She didn’t have a purpose there and didn’t have anything to do other than be a supportive wife in the background. She was depressed.” Taylor put on weight and was monstered by the press for it. Looking back now at the way chatshow hosts and comics fat-shamed her is shocking. Did it hurt her? “It must have stung. You wouldn’t be human if it didn’t,” he says.
As for Burton, it was obvious he was destroying himself with alcohol from early on, and it broke Wilding’s heart. “Drinking was almost a point of pride for Richard. Like: if you have a few bevvies you’re a man now. One particularly fraught Christmas my parents were trying to reconcile, but it was another train wreck. They were both drinking. I wrote a letter to Richard saying what a drag it had been and if he was going to kill himself couldn’t he pick a more imaginative way of doing it.”
He laughs, but he is clearly upset just thinking about it. “It wasn’t a very nice letter. And he wrote back to me, justifying his drinking in these romantic terms – Dylan Thomas had gone out in a blaze of alcoholism; there was somehow some honour in it. He wrote these lengthy justifications about his drinking.” That’s so sad, I say. “Yeah, when he and Peter O’Toole or Richard Harris got together it was exactly that thing. I felt terrible for Richard. He was desperately unhappy with his drinking problem. He knew that it was killing him, and towards the end he knew there was no way out.”
Wilding encouraged him to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, which is founded on the principle of recognising a higher power. But Burton refused. “For him the notion of a higher power meant recognising a God, which he couldn’t do. I tried to explain to him that a higher power could be your writing muse or whatever is greater than you.”
After Burton and Taylor split up, Wilding remained close to Burton, and continued to think of him as his second father. “One time when I was in Europe I visited Richard and he drove me to the airport as he always did, just to hang out with me till my flight left. I was sober at that point, and he wanted to know how I did it. I talked to him about AA, but he felt he had to do it himself. He understood he was a better person and happier when he was sober but he would always relapse. He knew it would get him in the end. And it did.” Burton died in 1984, aged 58.
“I’ve got a great photo,” Wilding says. He gets up and fetches it from the nearby mantelpiece. Burton looks big and gorgeous, Wilding tiny and adoring. “There are no two such different-looking people,” he says. “This is coming home from school and we’re both looking terribly uncomfortable posing for this photo. I understood his demons and unhappiness.”
Did the demons go beyond addiction? “My impression is if he could have imagined an ideal career for himself it would have been as a writer. I don’t think he felt the career of a film actor was respectable. Especially since he worked in the theatre with a lot of the greats. You know – [John] Gielgud and [Ralph] Richardson. There was talk that he’d sold out by becoming a highly paid movie actor and I think he may have bought into that himself despite it being his choice.”
What does he miss most about him? Silence. The seconds tick by. He looks on the verge of tears. “Oh …” And a few more seconds pass. “Everything,” he eventually says.
In 1983, after her family staged an intervention, Taylor agreed to go into rehab at the Betty Ford clinic. Naturally, she went public about it. Another first, making celebrity rehab respectable. Wilding says she wanted to take ownership of her addiction. “Rather than be exposed by some tabloid: ‘Oh, she’s been in Betty Ford because she’s an alcoholic,’ it’s: ‘Hey, guess what? I was in Betty Ford because I’m an alcoholic.’ She thought this might help other people too.”
When he visited his mother at the centre, Wilding says it was clear who was in charge. “She had all those therapists wrapped tightly around her little finger.” Despite her talk, she remained addicted to pills. “She went to AA meetings for a while, but she slowly backslid.”
Despite this, Taylor did turn her life around. In the 1980s, she became Hollywood’s leading advocate for people with HIV and Aids. At a time when many people were terrified of touching people with Aids, she visited hospice after hospice and told the world that what they needed was love, support and a hug. In 1985, just after the death of her friend Rock Hudson, she called out the Christian right: “How dare these so-called religious people get up and say it was God’s idea; God’s wrath to kill the homosexuals? We’re all fucking God’s children.”
Wilding had a personal involvement. His then wife, the heiress Aileen Getty, contracted HIV and developed Aids after an extramarital affair. Getty, who is still alive, says in the documentary that she was told she had weeks to live. “I went out to Liz’s house and blurted it all.” Despite the hurt Getty had caused Wilding, Taylor supported her. Wilding says his mother couldn’t stand Hollywood’s hypocrisy. So many of her friends had been gay or bisexual – sex symbols such as Hudson, James Dean and Montgomery Clift. She knew the truth about Tinseltown – it was largely built on the creativity of the gay people that were now being shunned.
“She said that without the gay community there would be no Hollywood. My mother lost a number of dear friends to Aids. Her secretary, Roger Wall, who she was very close to, was diagnosed with HIV and killed himself. She saw the way we as a society allowed fear to get the better part of us. I remember clearly the fear around it. The closed-mindedness was affecting people in a terrible way. She had a really strong sense of right and wrong. And she just thought it was wrong.”
In 1991, she established the Elizabeth Taylor Aids Foundation to raise funds and awareness to fight the spread of Aids/HIV. Wilding says she loved her new role as a fundraiser. “She was merciless. She would go after wealthy people and just shame them into writing huge cheques. She’d do it right to their face. ‘How big a cheque are you going to give me? What? Add another zero!’ She got a kick out of doing that.”
At the age of 64, in 1996, Taylor divorced for the final time. Taylor had been married to Larry Fortensky, who she met in rehab, for five years. She was done with husbands. Now she dedicated herself to campaigning and friendships.
When Wilding was being interviewed for the documentary, he was asked to describe her in one word. He eventually came up with “heart”. She was a loyal friend to so many, he says. He talks about how close she was to Michael Jackson, and how much they had in common. “They both worked from an early age. They were both the principal family support. My mom had great sympathy for Michael. He had led such a sheltered life, but not in a natural way. He, like her in a way, was ill equipped to be out in the real world.”
Did she stand by him after the allegations of child sexual abuse? (Jackson was acquitted of all criminal charges in 2005.) “Yes. She was a staunch friend to everyone she loved.” Damning evidence about Jackson emerged in the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, long after he and Taylor had died. Does Wilding think if she were around today, she would she still be fighting his corner? “I think so, yes.”
Who does Wilding think was the love of her life? “She said she had two. Mike Todd and Richard. I was too young when she was with Mike. I don’t remember him. But her love for Richard never went away. It was an ill-fated relationship, but neither one lost their love for the other.”
The documentary is called Rebel Superstar. How does Wilding think she most obviously rebelled? “Well, erm, I guess when she told LB Mayer to, you know, mind his own business. Her whole life, she rebelled, and that’s what was so great about her. I hope she continues to inspire women and girls to take the risk of: fuck it, do things your way, stand up for yourself. As my ex-wife says in the film, she was the Queen of Fuck You.”
Do any of today’s stars remind him of his mother? “Well, I can’t tell you how much I admire Taylor Swift. I’m now a Swifty. [Her Instagram post] at the end of that presidential debate was so fucking great.” He is talking about when Swift gave her backing to Kamala Harris and signed off her message Childless Cat Lady. “Huge props to her. That reminds me a little bit of the same spirit my mom had.”
Has he inherited any of that spirit? Well, he says, they are very different people. “My siblings and I hate having a camera pointed at us. We all ended up in professions that didn’t require that. My sister Liza and brother Michael are sculptors. It’s solitary work like film editing. We went in the opposite direction to Mom. Michael acted for a little while, but in the end nobody wanted to act.”
When Wilding retired he hoped to devote some of his time to one of his passions – making guitars. But a diagnosis of arthritis has put a stop to that. Now he is enjoying the quiet life, spending time with Margie, his wife of 30-plus years, his three children (the first two were with Aileen) and grandchild, and the mountain lions, bears and bobcats that hang out in the San Gabriel mountains.
It’s 13 years since Elizabeth Taylor died, aged 79. As with Burton, he doesn’t know where to start when I ask what he misses most about her. He stumbles around for fitting words. Chutzpah. Bravery. Passion. Heart, of course. But nothing really suffices.
“She and I were very close. We got each other. We had the same birthday too. She actually chose my birthday because I was born by C-section. They said to her: ‘You’re due around this time; is there any day you prefer?’ So she chose to spend her birthday in a pretty unpleasant way, having me.”
It was amazing, he says, how they celebrated their joint birthdays together every year till she died. He stops and starts again. Actually, it wasn’t that amazing. “She liked big parties; I hate them. I would rather not be noticed at all. For years I thought, ‘I can’t wait till I can ignore my birthday.” And suddenly it hits him what he misses most. “Of course, once she died I was like: fuck, now I really miss sharing my birthday with her.”
Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar is available on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer from 27 September.
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