She had the most beautiful eyes I ever saw.
Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes were purple. They were violet. I’ve never seen anything like them again.
She was shorter than most people think. She was tiny, but she had a way about her — she carried herself taller.
We met in Miami back in the 1970s. She was doing a play, I think it was “The Little Foxes,” and over the years, we talked so many times I can’t even put a number on it.
She was a beautiful girl who was a major actress with major talent. A lot of times with beautiful women, they’re not appreciated for their talent because they are so beautiful. Elizabeth Taylor was absolutely a great talent, and she was humble about it.
For instance, in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” she played a shrew and didn’t look very pretty.
She had extreme loyalty to friends. If she was your friend, it was for life.
The great actor Montgomery Clift was a great friend of hers. If she wasn’t by his side when he died in 1966, I believe she wanted to be. When Rock Hudson developed AIDS, she was onto AIDS before everyone, and was brave enough to enlist so many friends to get into the fight against it.
She told me once that [film producer] Mike Todd, her third husband, was the love or her life. And she certainly had, of course, an incredible attraction with Richard Burton. But Mike Todd had “owned a piece of her,” she said, and she never got over his death. Even though she went on to lead a full life, a day didn’t go by that she didn’t think about Mike Todd, who had died in a plane crash only a year after they were married.
She was up. She was down. She had extraordinarily bad luck in the medical department, and suffered from terrible back and heart problems.
I got a beautiful letter from her that day that I did my last “Larry King Live” show [in December]. I’m carrying it with me right now.
She wrote to tell me that she was very sorry she couldn’t be with me that day because of illness.
“I am sure,” she wrote, “that I am one of many, many interviewees who were exhausted from explaining themselves, their actions, their projects, their loves, and heaved a sigh of relief knowing that they were coming to talk to you. Talking to you was like having a late-night chat with a friend. The audience’s loss is your family’s gain. May good thoughts and love follow you everywhere.”
There will never be another one like her again.
Elizabeth Taylor made several appearances on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” but they spoke often off the air.