Elizabeth Taylor Gets the Last Word

More than a decade after the death of one of Hollywood's greatest legends, never-before-heard interview tapes reveal her most intimate secrets

- JACK SMART

Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t one to mince words. But even her most ardent fans will be surprised by her frankness in the recently unearthed interviews at the center of the new documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes. Director Nanette Burstein, whose film made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May and debuts on HBO Aug. 3, marvels at how Taylor “spoke so candidly at the height of her career.”

The documentary samples 40 hours of conversations between the star and the late journalist Richard Meryman in 1964 and 1965—a time when Taylor’s relationship with new husband Richard Burton demanded so much attention that the paparazzi were invented in order to cover it. “So much had been written about her and scandalized about her,” says Tim Mendelson, cotrustee of Taylor’s estate and her executive assistant from 1990 until her death from congestive heart failure at age 79 in 2011. The Lost Tapes, he adds, “sets the record straight.”

It reveals who she was as a wife, mother, activist and friend. “If everybody could go through life with someone like Elizabeth Taylor over their shoulder supporting them,” says Barbara Berkowitz, Taylor’s lawyer and cotrustee, “we’d have a much nicer world.” Here are some of the documentary’s key revelations.

Taylor remembered herself as a “terrified little girl.”

The London-born actress needed no encouragement from her art dealer father, Francis Taylor, or stage actress mother, Sara Sothern, to give Hollywood a try when the family relocated to Los Angeles when Taylor was 7.