No one, but no one, commanded a room like a young Elizabeth Taylor—a Hollywood legend celebrated as much for her diva-like behavior as her Oscar-winning performances. This is someone who built her outfits around her megawatt Van Cleef & Arpels diamonds, and who once flounced out of a 1965 Beverly Hills dinner before Princess Margaret, the guest of honor, had even arrived, after taking objection to the seating plan. (Taylor felt strongly that she and her then husband Richard Burton should have been at Margaret and Lord Snowdon’s own VIP table.) When the late Queen Elizabeth II traveled to Washington, D.C., on her 1976 tour of America, she decided to host a 1,500-person reception at the British Embassy. All night long, a fleet of television crews shadowed Her Majesty as she moved around the embassy’s velvet-soft green lawn, shaking hands with her many guests—until, suddenly, the cameramen up and disappeared in a frenzy. It turned out that Taylor had made her long-overdue grand entrance, and MGM royalty trumped actual royalty in terms of TV ratings—a fact Elizabeth II found deeply amusing.
Now, with the star on everybody’s lips yet again thanks to one Taylor Swift—“I’d cry my eyes violet / Elizabeth Taylor / Tell me for real / Do you think it’s forever?” she sings in “Elizabeth Taylor,” the second track on her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl—we take a look back at the early years of the Elizabeth Taylor, one of Hollywood’s greatest legends.
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