How Do You Tell Elizabeth Taylor's Life Story? With Family, Friends, and Friday Emeralds

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Books about Elizabeth Taylor have covered her legendary (and rocky) romance with Richard Burton, her love of jewelry, and her work on screen, but Kate Andersen Brower’s new biography, Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon, is the first to include it all—or at least to do so with the blessing of Taylor’s family.

The first-ever authorized biography of the late actress and philanthropist makes fine use of incredible access to Taylor’s papers—including never-before-published letters and diary entries—as well as her closest friends and family members to tell a haunting, funny, charming, and truly human story about an extraordinary woman who led an incredible life.

Here, the author tells T&C what she learned about the legend, how she managed to get where no biographer had gone before, and the ways in which Taylor still managed to surprise her.

This is the first authorized biography of Elizabeth Taylor. How did that happen?

The family is really very private. They don't really want the attention. But what I tried to convey to them is that Elizabeth Taylor is this incredible icon, and we need to talk about her so that people remember her because it's been a little more than a decade since she passed away.

I usually write about politics, but during the Trump era people were so divided and it wasn’t something I wanted to cover. Then one day about four years ago, my husband said to me, “Why don’t you talk to John Warner, who lives in Virginia?” My husband went to UVA and Warner had spoken there, and my husband just loves him, and since he was married to Elizabeth Taylor, it felt like a cool story maybe for a magazine.

So, I found out how to reach him and I got to sit there and interview him and talk about his marriage to Elizabeth. He was so insistent that someone do a book about her and then that people don't forget her. He told me the story of when they met in the 1970s at the bicentennial celebration at the British Embassy, about how he escorted her to the dinner at the embassy and she fell in love with the idea of living on his farm in Middleburg, Virginia. She wanted to be Mrs. John Warner; it was like she was running away from the Elizabeth Taylor the star and she wanted to be married as a way to escape and have some privacy.

How did you get from talking to Warner to writing this book, which features so many friends and family members?

Warner was close with [Taylor’s son] Chris Wilding. Chris had lived at Warner’s Georgetown house and at the Middleburg farm when he was in his twenties, when Elizabeth and Warner were married. And Warner said, "I'm going to call him up and tell him he should talk to you. Here's his phone number, call him tomorrow." So, I called Chris, and he was very open to the idea that a really honest book about his mom should be written. He's probably the least guarded of all of the children. Chris put me in touch with the trustees [of Taylor’s estate] and I went out to Beverly Hills to meet with them. They wanted to know that I was serious and was going to work with them and be honest about what I was doing.

Part of this being an authorized biography is that you were allowed access to things that hadn’t been published before.

They take this very seriously, and they have a tremendous number of letters and diary entries and photographs, more than 7,000 documents and more than 10,000 photos from her life, from her childhood on. I went through and chose which ones; I had access to everything.

I focused a lot on her relationship with her husbands and her relationship with her kids because I didn't even know she has four kids. We all think we know Elizabeth Taylor because she's this huge star, but I didn't know how vulnerable she was, how much she did behind the scenes to help people with AIDS who were dying when she was taking up the cause. She was literally doing kind of a Dallas Buyers Club situation where she was funneling money to get illegal drugs because she was so desperate to help these mostly gay men who worked for her or who were her friends who had no other options because it was before any treatments. I found this great letter she wrote to an AIDS patient who was an interior decorator; she wrote on her lavender stationary, "I hope you get out soon so you can redo my house in shades of lavender." She knew he was going to die, but she wanted to keep that hope. She did things like that all the time and getting access to that was special.

There have been books written about Taylor’s marriages, her style, all kinds of very focused ideas. When you’re capturing her whole life, what do you decide needs to be in the book?

Her life was so big and it was a bit overwhelming at certain points to decide what would resonate with an audience today.

When we were going through the pandemic, I was working on the book, so I was thinking about AIDS in that context of at the beginning of the pandemic when there was no cure and people were dying. Also, I think that a lot of people suffer from anxiety and to know that she actually did too… She was late all the time for everything, and part of that was because she would put this tremendous pressure on herself to try to look a certain way. It took her hours to get ready—the last thing she would do anytime she had had an event would be to take a bath with her full hair and makeup done. That social anxiety is part of her that a lot of people can relate to.

For me as a woman, reading what she went through when she was with Eddie Fisher, she was called a home wrecker or when she was with Richard Burton and the Vatican condemned her was so surprising. It was a puritanical era, and she was ahead of her time. The book gets into that, the fact that she was a trailblazer, not only when it came to AIDS, but also as a woman who had agency over her life.

What became your favorite thing about her?

The way she would stand up for people. There's a letter that she wrote to Ernest Lehman, who was a producer of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, when the director, Mike Nichols, wanted to not hire somebody to whom she had promised a role. In this letter, Elizabeth writes, "You know you don't treat people like this. I can't now go to my friend and tell him he can't be our assistant director." She was standing up for this guy who wasn't paid anything close to what she was, who was not a movie star., and saying, "I'm not doing this. This isn't right."

There's so much about her that's kind of quirky. She would take her jewelry out and show it to people; like Demi Moore describes going to her house in Bel Air and Elizabeth just being giddy, taking out these jewels, diamond rings, emeralds, Bulgari pieces, and these things that were just incredible. She would point to the emeralds and say, "These are my Friday emeralds." And Demi Moore was like, "What is a Friday emerald?" And she said, "Richard would just give me gifts like this for no reason at all."

What's your favorite Elizabeth Taylor movie?

Oh, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. For sure.

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