No one, but no one, commanded a room like a young Elizabeth Taylor—a Hollywood legend celebrated as much for her diva-like behaviour as her Oscar-winning performances. This is someone who built her outfits around her megawatt Van Cleef & Arpels diamonds, and who once flounced out of a 1965 Beverly Hills dinner before Princess Margaret, the guest of honor, had even arrived, after taking objection to the seating plan. (Taylor felt strongly that she and her then husband Richard Burton should have been at Margaret and Lord Snowdon’s own VIP table.) When the late Queen Elizabeth II traveled to Washington, D.C. on her 1976 tour of America, she decided to host a 1,500-person reception at the British Embassy. All night long, a fleet of television crews shadowed Her Majesty as she moved around the embassy’s velvet-soft green lawn, shaking hands with her many guests—until, suddenly, the cameramen up and disappeared in a frenzy. It turned out that Taylor had made her long-overdue grand entrance, and MGM royalty trumped actual royalty in terms of TV ratings—a fact Elizabeth II found deeply amusing.
Naturally, the fashion world loved Taylor, too. Though she was photographed for Vogue many times, perhaps her most memorable incarnation in the magazine came courtesy of Burton, who wrote a personal essay about life with Taylor for a ’70s issue, titled “Travelling With Elizabeth, By Her Husband Who Loves Her In Spite of It.” “I love Elizabeth to the point of idolatry but—let’s repeat that ‘but’—she will unquestionably be, as David Jones once wrote of a man from Bethesda, late for the last bloody judgment,” he began. “And, infuriatingly, she is always breathtakingly on time. She actually misses no train or plane or boat but, of course, misses the fact that her husband has had several minor heart attacks waiting for her while he shifts a shivering Scotch from his trembling hand to his quivering mouth to his abandoned liver, waiting, waiting, waiting for her to come out of the lavatory.”
Here, some 82 years after the release of her first film, we take a look back at the early years of Elizabeth Taylor, one of Hollywood’s greatest legends.
