Elizabeth Taylor Never, Ever Played It Safe. And She Liked It That Way.

Despite her death in March of 2011, Elizabeth Taylor is still one of the most iconic movie stars of the 20th century. As a child, she became a star in National Velvet (1944); she proved she was a formidable actor in A Place in the Sun (1950) and later won Academy Awards for Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Taylor was even more famous for her volatile personal life and her many marriages, including two to actor Richard Burton. In the 1960s and '70s, Taylor and Burton were among the most famous couples in the world. Even as Taylor’s career as an actress faded, her fame increased. As she told us in an exclusive interview when turning 60, the activist work she did raising money for AIDS research was far more fulfilling than her movie career. From the February 1992 issue of Good Housekeeping, enjoy this unfiltered, shoot-from-the-hip chat with one of the most legendary forces of our time.— Alex Belth, Hearst historian

It has been an epic 60 years.

Six decades of tumultuous life. Triumph and tragedy. Unbridled passion and a full life.

On the brink of her 60th birthday — February 27, 1992 — Elizabeth Taylor invited Good Housekeeping for tea and talk in the sitting room of her Bel Air home. She was surrounded by priceless paintings — Hals, Van Gogh, Vlaminick — and exquisite period furniture. Though the picture windows there was a breathtaking view of Los Angeles in the distance.

Elizabeth, whom I have known since she was a teenager, was beautiful, relaxed, talkative, and happy. Very happy. Slender again, her coif poofed and wild, she was clad in clinging black tights, soft boots and a bright, multicolored wooly sweater.

She smiled when she spoke of the approaching milestone birthday. “Sixty is a great age to be,” she said. “At my age, a woman can make anything out of life she wants.

“You can lay back and become elderly. Or you can hitch up your jeans and go forward because you have experience and expertise you didn’t have before. You’ve gained a certain reputation — one way or another — no matter who you are or what you do. You may be considered eccentric or crazy. You can do things that are completely off the wall and get away with it. Stuff you could never pull off when you were younger. You can have a ball with life if you want. Or you can become a couch potato and let life slide right by.

“By 60, you should have a terrific sense of humor, especially about yourself. I look around me and I’m amazed at all the things, good and bad, that have happened in my lifetime. My mother is 95 and it’s even more amazing to her.

“For me, 60 is especially great because I loathed being 30. I was going through an unhappy phase. I never felt so old in my life as I did at 30.”

From the beginning, Elizabeth has ridden a physical, psychological and emotional rocket ship, soaring to unprecedented heights, then plunging to the depths, again and again. It is never a matter of simply hanging on for the ride.

“The ups and downs, the problems and stress, along with all the happiness, have given me optimism and hope because I am living proof of survival,” she said. “I’ve come through things that would have felled an ox. That fills me with optimism, not just for myself, but for our species. God gave us that quality to make us different from other animals.

“Right now, I’m a bundle of energy trying to make things happen. And they do happen. Richard [Burton] used to say I was not accident-prone, but incident-prone. I think he was right. I wasn’t responsible for the autumn leaf flying into the eye of the horse I was riding, making him balk at the jump. I flew over the jump, and the horse stayed behind while I broke my back.

Elizabeth Taylor appears at the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert, Wembley Stadium in London in 1992.

“You can play life so close that you’re scared to cross the street. Or you can take chances and things happen. I do what I want without tempting fate. I don’t think I’ve shirked or turned away from life. You must be responsible to and for yourself, to and for the people you love and who love you. And that’s it. You can’t be responsible to the world for all your actions. You have your own guidelines for truth and honesty, dignity and respect. Whatever is important to you — that’s what you have to be true to. I’ve never lived my life according to what other people think, or to preserve an ‘image.’

“I can’t explain myself … I don’t think anyone would understand. It’s hard sometimes for me to comprehend. I accept certain things and take each day as it comes.

“So far, I’ve lived a tremendously full life. I don’t know how I could have crammed more into it. I’ve been asked to write my memoirs. Hell, no — I’m still living my memoirs. I can’t stop to spend time in the past when I’m living each day to the fullest. To me, every new day is as important as yesterday.”

Elizabeth says love has been the overwhelming force in her life that involved every facet of her character. She lavished love on her husbands and such friends as Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson, Halston and Malcolm Forbes. Love led her to the alter eight times: with Nicky Hilton, Michael Wilding, Mike Todd, Eddie Fisher, Richard Burton (twice), Sen. John Warner and now Larry Fortensky.

Elizabeth Taylor marries her fifth husband Richard Burton in Montreal, 1964.

“Yes, I have a great capacity for love,” she said, sipping her tea. “But look at all the love I’ve received. I couldn’t have survived without my support group of friends and family.

“The marvelous thing about love is the happiness it generates. I’ve managed to be happy most of the time. I love being in love. I’m in love now. There was hardly a time in my life when I wasn’t in love — it’s the best magic in the world. You can be in love with the same person for 40 years. You don’t have to keep getting married. I’m not advocating that.”

Beauty, too, has been Elizabeth’s lifelong companion. Since infancy, mush has been made of her startling violet eyes and stunning face. The subject bores her. She credits her parents and providence for the fortuitous configurations of her features and drops the subject quickly.

“What one looks like is relatively unimportant,” she said. “Anyone can be beautiful because that comes from what you are inside. Beauty and prettiness are different things. What a person is is massively important.”

There is no evidence of Elizabeth’s motion-picture career in the house; her two Oscars — for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Butterfield 8 — are not on display. Absent, too, are photographs of herself. She seldom refers to her roles or pictures except to make a point about a friend.

Nor does she take much interest in the Taylor legend, chronicled thousands of times in myriad variations over the last half-century. Asked how, at 60, she would describe who and what she is — that personal, intimate Elizabeth buried beneath mountains of gossip interviews, speculation, and fiction — she became thoughtful.

“I’m comfortable being Elizabeth Taylor,” she said. “I feel very centered and very simple, I don’t mean simplistic because I am complex, and God knows, I’ve led a complicated life. I like uncomplicated things now. I feel at peace, and I don’t like chaos, although I sometimes create chaos.

“I’m a woman of great conviction and being true to those convictions is everything to me,” she went on. “My edict has always been ‘Unto thine own self be true.’ And I think I’ve succeeded. I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused anyone. It’s never deliberate. However, I don’t regret anything. Regret is a total waste of time. Nothing can be done about the past. I get on with my life and try not to repeat my mistakes.

Elizabeth Taylor wearing a green sleeveless low-cut dress with a white fur wrap, circa 1950.

“Being a celebrity doesn’t bother me now. I can get all the privacy I want. I have a loving husband, lovely home, my animals and my children who have wonderful families of their own.”

Asked to single out the best remembered moments in her life, decade by decade, from childhood to the present, Elizabeth fell silent. Only the cackles and whistles of a pet parrot could be heard from some distant point in the rambling, two-story house that was originally built for Nancy Sinatra Sr.

“My happiest moments as a child were riding my Newfoundland pony, Betty, in the woods on 3,000 acres of my godfather’s estate near the village of Cranbrook, in Kent,” she said. “Our family lived in the hunting lodge. The very first time I got on her back, she threw me into a patch of stinging nettles. But I soon became an accomplished horsewoman. I’d ride bareback for hours all over the property.”

Elizabeth’s smile evaporated when she spoke of her teens. She departed with her parents for California when war broke out in England. Soon thereafter, she became a working actress.

“My teenage years were boring, she said. “After age 10 I didn’t have a childhood. I didn’t date. I had no friends my age except other child actors at MGM. I rode horses and acted. The highlight of my teens was getting to know Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun. Acting had been a game to me. He taught me acting was more than just performing on camera. Monty showed me it was an art form.”

Mike Todd dominated Elizabeth’s life during her twenties. He was brash, bold and handsome, a producer and gambler whose credo was, “I’m often broke but I’ve never been poor.” She’s never forgotten the party he gave for her at New York’s Madison Square Garden following the premiere of his movie Around the World in 80 Days. Elizabeth, 25, wearing a spectacular white gown and diamond tiara, made her entrance aboard an elephant.

Elizabeth Taylor with baby, Liza, and husband Mike Todd, circa 1957.

“He made me feel like a queen that night,” she says wistfully. “But he made me feel like a queen every day. He was gorgeous, and a mini atom bomb whenever he entered a room. I’ll always remember a trip on his plane from Yugoslavia to Paris. Mid-flight, he asked, ‘Where would you like to have lunch? Venice for Italian food or Nice for French?’ As it turned out, one of the engines stopped and we went into a tailspin. We knew we were going to die. We clung to each other, said we loved each other and waited for the end. But the pilot miraculously landed in Nice at the very last second. Two months later that same engine did the same thing and the plane crashed and killed Mike.”

Just as Todd was the towering figure of her twenties, Richard Burton, the great love of her life, was the epicenter of Elizabeth’s thirties and forties. He was a troubadour, teacher, husband and love, a romantic, masculine Celtic presence whose memory to this day softens her features and brings mist to her eyes.

“I am the most fortunate woman to have had Mike and Richard in my life,” she said. “They were singular men. Mike encouraged my sense of adventure. I felt like a bird set free from a cage and asked to fly after being overprotected for so many years. Richard enriched my life in different ways, internal journeys into feelings and thoughts. He taught me poetry and literature and introduced me to worlds of beauty. He made me laugh. He made me cry. He explored areas in me that I knew existed, but which had never been touched. There was never a dull moment. He was a melancholy poet who thought acting was a bit specious and meretricious, not a serious art form. That gave him a great sense of impatience and darkness. Real life was much more important to us than playacting. I can’t understand actors who take it so seriously. Richard was an acting genius, but he was a brilliant writer who would have been happier as a teacher. I loved Richard through two marriages and until the day he died.”

“Mike and Richard never met during their lifetimes. Maybe they’re up there together now and having a ball,” she said, pointing skyward.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the film set of The Sandpiper in 1965.

And the most profound experience of her past decade?

“Getting clean and sober,” she said without hesitation. “Until I went to the Betty Ford Clinic I was about to self-destruct. I had been a very unhappy, self-destructive person the whole time I lived in Washington (as the wife of Sen. John Warner). It’s a difficult city for women anyway, and so ego-oriented it makes Hollywood look like chopped chicken liver. I wasn’t allowed to express my opinions or even wear my favorite color, purple, because Republicans didn’t like that color.

“People assume Elizabeth Taylor couldn’t possibly be lonely. Believe me, for five years in Washington D.C., I was the loneliest person in the world. I didn’t have a friend. I rarely saw my husband. My children were grown and had their own lives. I began drinking out of loneliness. It got out of hand and for a while, I lost my identity. I had nothing to do. I was in a vacuum. It was a death sentence. There aren’t many things in life I’ve missed, including despair so black I hit bottom. I was doing an Anna Karenina but I pulled myself off the tracks just before the train went by. I signed in at the Betty Ford Clinic — twice; I started partying too much out of boredom after my first trip there. A major, important part of all the changes in my life was meeting my husband, Larry, at the clinic. We got to know each other so intimately during group therapy we fell in love. I want this marriage to endure. Divorce is like a little death. It’s a failure. Nobody gets married with the intention of it not succeeding.

“I’ve always been shy and thought I needed booze to overcome it. You learn at Betty Ford you don’t need a drink to be able to talk to people. I was touched by God to pull myself up and out of it.

“Gaining weight has never bothered me. I had a ball. It was destructive the first time because it involved drinking. The second time I put on weight because I became a chocoholic. I wasn’t drinking and I craved sugar. Also, I just didn’t give a damn what I looked like. I ate because I enjoyed it.”

A wise Elizabeth, all too familiar with the whims of providence, is cautious about making plans. She has suffered more than her share of shattering blows. But crises that might have destroyed lesser women have just increased her zest for whatever comes next.

Beneath a patina of tranquility, she has a kinetic vitality. She works tirelessly raising money for AIDS research — to date, some $40 million — and in promoting her growing perfume business: Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion and the new White Diamonds.

Elizabeth knows well the despair of life-threatening illnesses. She touched the scar at her throat where a tracheotomy saved her life. She speaks of back operations and other surgeries and of being stricken by a near-fatal bout of pneumonia two years ago.

Almost everyone she meets wants some small piece of her life. With mock severity, she said, “Well, they can’t have it! I give plenty of me away, but I’ve reached a point that I don’t want people to take pieces anymore. I’ll give away as much as I can in the fight against AIDS. For the first time in my life, I am making my fame work for me in a positive way. Before that I resented fame; I fled from it.

“If AIDS continues to escalate the way it has, no one will be safe. People should give their time and money to help find a cure. It’s our moral responsibility to educate people about safe sex. People shouldn’t stop having sex — I’d be the last person in the world to advocate that — but safe sex is important.

“Why have I become involved? Because of the stigma that AIDS was considered a homosexual disease. It offended my sensibilities because I know so many homosexuals. It outraged my sense of fairness. Well, now I’m doing everything I can. This work means more to me than anything I’ve ever done as an actress.”

Elizabeth Taylor testifies about AIDS before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee in 1992.

There is a more intimate item on Elizabeth’s agenda for the next decade. In the spirit of Mike Todd, she is making plans for a major birthday bash to celebrate her 60th.

“I want to have a blast,” she said. “A big party because February is such a gloomy month. I’d like to rent the whole Orient Express for my friends and end up in Venice at the Cipriani Hotel. I know the owners of both and I’ve talked to them about it.”

Her smile was beatific. Few women have lived such a rich, varied, and controversial life, and she is confident there is much, much more to come. It was observed that there is, after all, only one Elizabeth Taylor.

“Thank God for that!” she said.