The bride was eighteen years old when she walked out of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills and into a crowd of three thousand people who had waited for hours in the street to see her. It was the sixth of May, 1950, and the wedding had been planned down to the last detail. What almost nobody standing there realized was that the studio had paid for the dress, chosen the date, and invited most of the guests. Within weeks, on the other side of the Atlantic, she would be sleeping in a separate cabin from her new husband and writing home in secret.
That was marriage number one of eight. She had met Conrad Hilton Jr. in October 1949 at the Macambo nightclub on the Sunset Strip. Nikki, as everyone called him, was twenty-three years old and the heir to the largest hotel fortune in America.
She was seventeen. She had been famous since she was twelve, when National Velvet turned a dark-haired child with violet eyes into the most photographed girl in the country. She had already been engaged twice, once to a football star and once to the son of a wealthy businessman, and both engagements had fallen apart under the weight of her schedule and her studio’s opinions. MGM did not object to Nikki Hilton.
MGM was delighted by him. Six hundred guests filled the church. The gown was designed by the studio’s own costume designer, Helen Rose, and paid for by the studio. It was not a coincidence that her new picture, Father of the Bride, was arriving in cinemas that same summer.
The studio had, in the most literal sense, produced her wedding as publicity for a film about a wedding. There is a detail from that day that people who were there remembered for years. The bride had been working a full schedule right up to the ceremony. She had been in front of cameras since she was ten years old.
She had spent her adolescence being told what to wear, what to say, and who to be seen with. Marriage was one of the very few doors out of that arrangement that the studio would actually hold open for her. A married woman was an adult. A married woman could leave her mother’s house.
Whether she was in love with Nikki Hilton or in love with the exit became a question people who knew her would argue about for decades. The guests went home. The couple sailed for Europe on a fourteen-week honeymoon, and the whole thing came apart almost immediately. She wrote about it decades later in her own book and talked about it on television in her sixties, and the account never changed.
She said she had not known he drank, because they had been engaged for nine months and he had not touched a drop in all that time. Two weeks into the marriage, that stopped. What followed was months of cruel treatment, verbal and physical. During that period she lost a pregnancy.
She was eighteen, thousands of miles from home, married to a man the entire American press had just described as her fairy tale. She began writing to her parents. She spent time apart from him on the ship. By the time they got back to California, the marriage was finished in every way except the paperwork.
There was no language for any of this in 1950, not publicly. There was no advice column that covered it, and no friend she could telephone without it appearing in a magazine the following week. The studio’s position was that the marriage was a fairy tale, because the studio had spent money saying so. Her own mother had been closely involved in arranging the match.
So she went through those fourteen weeks in hotel suites and on ocean liners, being photographed at dinner smiling on cue and saying nothing. She filed in December 1950, and the divorce went through at the end of January 1951. The marriage had lasted less than nine months. She was nineteen years old, and she had just learned something that would shape the next sixty years of her life: the version of her relationships printed in the newspapers and the version she was actually living had almost nothing to do with one another.
She never once pretended the marriage had been a good idea. Most stars of her generation buried the first marriage in a single polite sentence and moved on. She talked about it in detail for the rest of her life, long before anyone was thanking public figures for doing that. Nikki Hilton never really recovered from his own habits.
He died in 1969 at forty-two. What she wanted next was the exact opposite of all that: somebody older, calmer, unglamorous, safe. The man she found was so much the opposite of her first husband that the studio, the press, and eventually the marriage itself could not work out what to do with him. Michael Wilding was a British actor, well-liked, elegant, and forty years old to her nineteen.
She met him properly in England while she was filming Ivanhoe, and by her own description she fell for the calm of him. After the first marriage, what she said she wanted was friendship and security and quiet. They married on the twenty-first of February, 1952, in London, in a small civil ceremony. It was a second marriage for both of them.
The crowd that turned up was so large that getting them into the building was a problem, which told you something about how the quiet plan was going to go. For a while, it genuinely worked. They lived in California. Their son Michael was born in January 1953, and their son Christopher in February 1955.
Friends from that period described a house that was warm and slightly chaotic, full of animals, with a young woman who, for the first time in her life, was not performing constantly. The problem was arithmetic. She was twenty-one and becoming one of the biggest stars in the world. He was in his forties and his career was slowing down.
She made Giant. She made Raintree County. The money coming into the house was overwhelmingly hers, and by every account from people around them, he found that harder and harder to sit with. Gossip columns in 1955 ran stories about what was supposedly going on at their home while she was away filming, and whether or not the stories were true, they did what gossip columns are designed to do.
There was another pressure on that house that rarely got mentioned. She was ill a great deal in those years, and in pain a great deal, from a back injury that went back to a riding accident in her teens and would follow her for the rest of her life. Long stretches of the Wilding marriage were spent in hospitals and in recovery. It is difficult to keep a quiet ordinary domestic life going when one half of the couple is either on a film set or on her back for weeks at a time, and the other half is watching the phone not ring.
They separated in 1956 and divorced at the end of January 1957. There was no war. She called it a friendly divorce and meant it. He remained in her life afterwards, and they stayed on good terms for the rest of his life.
When he died in 1979 after a fall at his home, she spoke about him with real affection. Of the seven men she married, he got out with the least damage. And he got out just in time, because five days after that divorce was final, she married a man who had already decided he was going to marry her, and whose fourteen months with her would end in the worst thing that ever happened to her. Mike Todd was a showman in the old sense of the word.
He was a Broadway and film producer, loud, superstitious, broke and rich in alternating years, and twenty-five years older than she was. In 1956 he had produced Around the World in 80 Days, which went on to win Best Picture. He did not court her so much as lay siege to her. The stories from that period are almost hard to believe: an entire display of jewelry set out in the garden for her to walk through, a meal flown in from Paris.
When he gave her a ring, the scale of it became a news item in itself. He told people early on, flatly, that she was going to be his wife. He was also, by every account, the first person who treated her as a partner rather than as a possession or a product. He argued with her.
He swore in front of her. He took her opinions on his business seriously, which nobody in her professional life had ever done. He had a habit of telling her she was intelligent, which after fifteen years of being told she was beautiful apparently landed like a thunderclap. They married on the second of February, 1957, in Acapulco, five days after her divorce from Wilding became final.
The Mexican comedian Cantinflas, who had starred in Todd’s picture, stood up as best man. She was twenty-four. Their daughter, Elizabeth, called Liza, was born in August 1957. The birth was difficult and early, and she came by cesarean, and the complications were serious enough that Taylor was told afterwards she should not have more children.
By every single account she ever gave for the rest of her life, those fourteen months were the happiest she ever had. Interviewers asked her again and again over the decades to name a favorite among seven husbands, and she never hedged on this one. On the twenty-second of March, 1958, Todd flew east out of Burbank in a private plane heading for New York, where he was to be honored at a dinner. The plane was called the Lucky Liz, after her.
She was supposed to be on it. She had a bad cold and was in the middle of filming Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and he did not want her flying with a fever, so she stayed home. The weather that night was bad. The aircraft was carrying more fuel than usual for the distance, climbing into a storm system over high desert country.
It was found the following morning on a slope in New Mexico. There were no survivors. She said later that he came back up to say goodbye to her several times that night before he left, and that it felt afterwards as though they had both known something. She was twenty-six years old with three small children, and she was a widow.
What happened in the weeks after that was witnessed by a lot of people and described by all of them in roughly the same way. She could not be consoled. She went back to the set of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof because working was the only thing that functioned, and she gave one of the best performances of her career while doing it. In her own writing years later, she said plainly that she had not expected to survive that period and had not much minded either way.
There was also the practical wreckage, which nobody talked about because it was not cinematic. She was twenty-six. Her husband’s business affairs were complicated, and his estate was not in the tidy condition everyone assumed. She had a newborn daughter of seven months, two small sons from a previous marriage, and a film to finish.
She was not left alone in it. Todd’s closest friend came to sit with her over and over, in the way close friends do. He had been at the wedding. His wife had been her matron of honor.
What happened between those two people over the following months would detonate into the single biggest public scandal of the decade and turn the most beloved young woman in America into the most hated one almost overnight. Eddie Fisher was one of the most popular singers in the United States. He was married to Debbie Reynolds. The four of them, Todd, Taylor, Fisher, and Reynolds, had been a foursome photographed together constantly, the picture of glossy 1950s friendship.
In the autumn of 1958, the gossip columnists got hold of what was happening between the widow and her late husband’s best friend, and the whole thing went off like a bomb. It is genuinely difficult now to explain the size of it. This was the era of fan magazines with circulations in the millions, and the story had everything those magazines existed for. Reynolds was cast instantly and permanently as the wronged wife at home with two small children, one of whom was the future writer and actress Carrie Fisher.
Taylor was cast as the woman who took him. Churches commented. Columnists who had spent fifteen years praising her turned on her in a single week. Her fan mail turned poisonous.
Reynolds, for her part, spent decades afterwards refusing to play the role the press had written for her, and in later years the two women repaired things entirely. There is a photograph of them together on a cruise ship in the 1960s, laughing, one of the more quietly satisfying images of that whole generation. But in 1958 and 1959, none of that was available. The public had decided.
She did not handle it diplomatically, which made it worse. Asked to explain herself, she made remarks about her dead husband and her own loneliness that were read as flippant and printed everywhere. Fisher and Reynolds divorced, and on the twelfth of May 1959, Fisher and Taylor married in Las Vegas. She had converted to Judaism earlier that year, a decision she had begun considering during her marriage to Todd and which she kept for the rest of her life.
The marriage itself, once the noise died down, was not much of a marriage. She was working relentlessly. He gradually became less a husband than a member of her staff, traveling with her, managing arrangements around her, watching his own singing career recede while hers grew. People who worked around them in those years described a dynamic that was uncomfortable to be in the room for.
There was one thing he gave her that mattered, and it was not romantic. In the immediate aftermath of Todd’s death, she had been in genuine danger, not from anyone else, but from the state she was in, and the people around her at the time were frightened. He sat with her through it. Whatever the marriage became afterwards, that part was real, and she said so.
Then, in the space of eighteen months, two things happened that flipped the public against him and back toward her. In March 1961 in London, she became critically ill with pneumonia. It was severe enough that she required an emergency procedure to help her breathe, severe enough that obituaries were prepared, severe enough that news bulletins were carrying updates. She recovered, and she carried a small scar at the base of her throat for the rest of her life and never hid it.
Three weeks after that, she won the Academy Award for Butterfield 8, a film she had openly disliked making. Nobody in Hollywood pretended the two events were unrelated. The industry that had been ready to run her out of town two years earlier gave her a standing ovation. Then she was cast as Cleopatra for a salary of one million dollars, which no actress had ever been paid before.
The production moved to Rome, and in that production was a Welsh actor, married, celebrated as the finest stage performer of his generation, who was about to make her the most famous half of the most famous couple on the planet. Fisher was still her husband when the photographs came out. He went home. Their divorce was finalized in March 1964.
Richard Burton was thirty-six years old, married since 1949 to Sybil Williams, with two daughters. They were introduced properly on the set of Cleopatra in Rome in 1962. What happened between them was not concealed for long, and it was not the kind of thing that could have been. The Italian press followed them everywhere.
Photographers hired boats. The story crossed from the film pages to the front pages within days, and then it crossed further than that. The scandal was condemned from the Vatican in print, by name. There was even discussion in the United States Congress about whether she should be allowed back into the country.
Burton gave the whole episode a nickname in French that made it sound like a piece of theater. It stuck. They married on the fifteenth of March 1964 in Montreal, ten days after her divorce from Fisher came through. She was thirty-two.
He was the fifth man she had married, and she was the second woman he had. What people who met them in that period always described first was the noise. Not arguing necessarily, just volume. Two very loud, very funny, very well-read people who talked over each other constantly, traveled with an entourage the size of a small circus, and were followed everywhere by photographers who had worked out that a single frame of the two of them was worth more than a week’s ordinary work.
They could not eat in a restaurant. They could not walk anywhere. So they built a world that moved with them: the same staff, the same hotels, the same suite layouts requested in every city, and they lived inside it for ten years. They made eleven films together.
Some were extraordinary. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966, where she played a woman twenty years older than herself, put on weight for it, made herself deliberately unglamorous, and won her second Academy Award. Some were forgettable.
Almost all of them made money purely because the two of them were in the same frame. They earned between them sums that are still startling, and they spent all of it. There was a yacht, the Kalizma, named partly after the children, on which they lived for long stretches because it let them avoid tax complications and journalists at the same time. Their dogs lived on it too, because British quarantine rules meant the animals could not come ashore.
And there were the diamonds, which became a running story of their own. In 1968, he bought her a stone of just over thirty-three carats at auction, and she wore it constantly and casually on her hand at lunch. In 1969, he bought a pearl with four hundred years of European royal history behind it. That same year, one of the best-loved stories of the whole marriage unfolded when the pearl briefly went missing in their hotel suite and turned up in the mouth of one of the dogs, undamaged.
Also that year, he bought a diamond of sixty-nine carats at auction after being outbid the first time, and it ended up carrying both their names. They adopted a daughter together, a little girl born in Germany in 1961, whom Taylor had begun the process of adopting before the marriage. The child grew up as Maria Burton. The jewelry stories lasted because she loved the stones themselves.
She knew their histories. She could tell you the cut and the weight. And she refused to keep them in a vault. She wore them to lunch.
She let people try them on. When she eventually wrote a book about the collection decades later, it read less like an inventory than like a diary, because each piece had a day attached to it. Underneath all of it, the drinking was constant, and it was ferocious on both sides. The fighting was so regular that the press gave them a nickname for it.
Friends who spent time with them described evenings that swung from extraordinary warmth to open warfare and back again inside an hour, with an audience of guests trying to look at their plates. He was, by his own later description, not an easy man to be married to. He said the two of them lived on the edge of something that could erupt at any moment, that it was magnificent, and that it could also be lethal. By 1973, they were separating and reconciling in public.
In 1974, the divorce was granted, and it should have ended there. It did not. Within a year, they were back on a plane together, heading somewhere nobody would find them, for one of the strangest weddings of the twentieth century. They had been apart for about a year when they began circling each other again.
There were meetings in Switzerland, then a trip to Southern Africa in the autumn of 1975, nominally for a charity tennis event. She later explained the timing in a way that said a great deal about how she made decisions. She had had an X-ray that showed something on her lungs, and for half a day she waited to find out whether it was serious. It turned out to be nothing.
But she had spent those hours thinking about what she actually wanted, and what she wanted was him. On the tenth of October 1975 in Chobe in Botswana, beside the river, they were married for the second time by a local district official, with almost nobody present. She wore green. There was no orchestra, no six hundred guests, no studio publicist.
It was as far from the Church of the Good Shepherd in 1950 as it was physically possible to get. For a few weeks, it was reported as a fairy tale, and even the people closest to them wanted to believe it. He had stopped drinking. She was calmer than she had been in years.
They talked about staying in Africa, about doing something useful with the money, about getting out of the business altogether. It lasted nine months. The old problems had not gone anywhere, and they did not take long to come back. By February 1976, they were fighting and separating again.
The second divorce was final on the twenty-ninth of July 1976. By that August, he had married somebody else. They never really finished. They wrote to each other.
They telephoned. In 1982, for her fiftieth birthday, he came to the party, and afterwards he told reporters that the two of them would never marry again, that they would probably each marry other people, and that they would always end up drawn back toward one another anyway. In 1983, they went on stage together in a Noël Coward play about a divorced couple who keeps circling back to each other. She kept a letter he had written to her not long before the end, a letter about the two of them and about coming home, which arrived after he was already gone.
She said she kept it with her. He died in August 1984 of a brain hemorrhage at fifty-eight. She was devastated in a way that everyone around her recognized as different in kind from her other losses. She said afterwards that part of her went with him.
She traveled to Switzerland for the funeral. She stayed away from the burial itself to avoid turning it into a press event, which for a woman with her history was an act of considerable restraint. But before any of that, four months after the second Burton divorce, while the ink was barely dry, she had already married again. She met John Warner at a dinner at the British Embassy in Washington in 1976.
He was a Virginia landowner, a former Secretary of the Navy, and at that point head of the country’s bicentennial celebrations. He was in every respect from a different world. They married on the fourth of December 1976 at his farm in Virginia. She was forty-four.
In 1978, he ran for the Senate, and she campaigned for him properly, relentlessly, across a state where a great many voters had never expected to shake the hand of a film star. She stood in halls in small towns, in church basements, and at county fairs for months. The consensus among people who covered that race was that she made a real difference to the result, and he won. It cost her something.
At one stop in a small town in the southwest of the state, she choked on a piece of food at a public event and had to be helped. It made national news and became a punchline for years afterwards. She was also, for the first time since she was a child, not working. Since the age of ten, she had gone from picture to picture with barely a gap, and whatever else was falling apart in her life, there had always been a call sheet in the morning.
In Virginia, there was no call sheet. There were dinners and fundraisers and long gray afternoons. Then he won, and he went to Washington, and she was a senator’s wife in a large house in Virginia with very little to do. What followed was the lowest stretch of her adult life.
She was bored in a way she had never been bored before. Her weight went up, and the press treated it as a national story and were vicious about it. She was drinking heavily, and had been for years, and taking prescribed medication on top of it. She said afterwards, with characteristic directness, that the marriage had worked until politics arrived, and that in the end he had married the Senate instead.
She pulled herself out of it partly through work. In 1981 she went to Broadway in The Little Foxes, her stage debut at forty-nine, and got real reviews for it, and the touring production took her back out into the world. They separated in 1981, and the divorce came through in November 1982. They stayed genuinely friendly.
He spoke warmly about her for the rest of his life, and she about him. Then in December 1983, at fifty-one, she did something that nobody of her stature had ever done in public before. Her family staged an intervention, and she checked herself into the Betty Ford Center. Rather than hiding it, she said so openly.
She wrote about it. She talked about it. For a great many people watching, it was the first time they had heard a person like that say those words out loud. She went back a second time in 1988.
It was there, on that second stay, that she met the man who would become her eighth and final marriage: a construction worker from California, twenty years younger than she was, who had never had anything to do with any of this. Larry Fortensky was in his mid-thirties. He operated heavy equipment for a living, and he had no interest in being famous. They met as two people in the same treatment program in 1988, which is not a setting that produces glamour.
The relationship that followed was mocked relentlessly, and both of them knew it. The age gap ran one way the press was not used to. The class difference was the entire joke in every column. He was photographed in a hard hat and printed beside photographs of her in diamonds.
She was by then in her late fifties and completely done with caring what the columns said. He was straightforward about the fact that he had had no idea who she really was when they met, because in that particular room, nobody’s surname mattered. The people around her were divided about it. Some thought it was the healthiest relationship she had been in for thirty years.
Others thought it could not possibly survive contact with her actual life, which involved private planes and state dinners and a level of daily attention that would flatten most people. They married on the sixth of October 1991. The ceremony was held at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch in California, because Jackson was a close friend of hers and offered it, and the security around it was near military. It was not enough.
A photographer parachuted out of the sky into the property during the ceremony and had to be removed by guards, which was by a considerable margin the strangest thing that ever happened at one of her eight weddings. The marriage lasted five years. They divorced on the thirty-first of October 1996. There was no scandal attached to it and no great public drama.
By then she was almost the only person left from her era who could still generate a front page, and this one barely managed it. What happened afterwards said more than the marriage did. In 1999, Fortensky was badly injured in a fall at his home and left with lasting damage, and she quietly made sure he was looked after, both at the time and in the arrangements she left behind after her death. He lived another two decades and died in 2016, and he never sold a book about her, and he never gave the interviews he could have given.
She never married again, and she was asked about it constantly. She was sixty-four when that final divorce came through, and she had another fifteen years to go, and by all accounts she spent almost none of that time looking. By the late 1980s the marriages were behind her, and she had found the thing that occupied the last quarter of her life. She also became, in those years, something she had never been before: respectable.
Not because she changed particularly, but because everyone who had condemned her in 1959 had grown old, and a generation arrived that had no memory of any of it and simply liked her. She turned that into fuel. She launched a fragrance business that made her genuinely, independently wealthy for the first time in her life. Not studio wealthy, not husband wealthy.
Her own. She was unapologetic about the commercial side of it, because it paid for everything else she wanted to do. In 1985, her friend Rock Hudson died. The disease that killed him was at that moment something the film industry and most of American public life were refusing to discuss at all.
The fear was enormous. The stigma was worse. Almost nobody with anything to lose was willing to stand next to it in public. She helped found the American Foundation for AIDS Research that same year.
In 1991, she started her own foundation. For twenty-five years, she raised money, testified before Congress, and used the one asset she had accumulated more of than anyone alive, attention, to point at something other than herself. People who worked with her on it all said more or less the same thing: it was not a hobby, and it was not managed by a publicist. She made the phone calls herself.
She kept the friendships too, right to the end. The oddly assorted collection of people she had picked up across sixty years, some of them famous, most of them not, many of them people she had met in hospital waiting rooms or treatment centers or on film sets forty years earlier. Loyalty was the thing she was proudest of, and the thing the coverage of her life had the least room for. She was made a dame in 2000.
She retired from acting in 2003. Her health, after a lifetime of broken bones, surgeries, and long hospital stays that had started with a fall from a horse as a teenager, gradually gave way. She died on the twenty-third of March 2011 in Los Angeles at seventy-nine, of heart failure. Her funeral, at her own instruction, started fifteen minutes late.
She had left word that she wanted to be late to her own service. After sixty years of being the most watched woman in the world, it was about the only joke left available to her, and she took it. And there is one more thing about that list of eight. She never pretended to be good at marriage, but she was absolutely insistent on doing it.
She was asked constantly why she did not simply live with the men instead. Her answer, given with a shrug in a dozen different interviews across forty years, was that she was not built that way. If she was going to be with someone, she wanted it written down and made official, whatever the cost, and however badly it had gone the last time. Eight ceremonies.
Seven men. One of them she buried. One of them she married twice. One of them she was still on the phone to when he died.
One of them she looked after long after the marriage had ended. The newspapers spent six decades counting the weddings and filing the whole thing under scandal. The far stranger truth is that almost every man on that list stayed in her life in some form, and she kept nearly all of them as friends, which, given how some of those marriages began, is the last thing anybody would have predicted from the crowd outside that church in 1950.
