To prepare for her memoir, Elizabeth Taylor sat down with a ghostwriter to talk about her life. The candid interviews with journalist Richard Meryman touched on everything from her childhood and career to her public scandals, neardeath 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 Aug. 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.
FINDING HER VOICE
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