In the wake of writer Richard Meryman’s death in 2015, his wife Elizabeth was rummaging through their attic. Meryman, a writer for Life magazine, known for his iconic conversations with indelible figures (including Marilyn Monroe, in her final interview) appeared to have one more major story waiting in the wings. Somewhere among the dusty stacks, Elizabeth discovered something akin to lost treasure: 40 hours worth of candid interviews with Elizabeth Taylor. Made throughout 1964—the year after Cleopatra tipped her already tremendous fame into notoriety—the recordings reveal a side of the American icon rarely seen.
“She didn’t think they were ever going to be shared with anyone,” says director Nanette Burstein, whose new documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, now streaming on Max, is built around that uncovered audio, originally assembled for a book Meryman wrote about the star. “You very rarely have such a legendary figure speak so frankly from beyond the grave,” she continues. “If she had been recorded on camera, it would have been a completely different vibe. [This format] makes them feel that much more authentic.”
An outsize figure both in life and in the years since her death in 2011, at age 79, Taylor invited only the rare few behind her glamorous facade. “The woman I knew was not Elizabeth Taylor, the movie star; she was simply a wonderful, fun, silly, and caring grandmother,” says Quinn Tivey, one of Taylor’s grandsons and a co-trustee of her estate, who served as an executive producer on the film. “I remember watching movies with her in bed, chatting about dating advice, and just hanging out with a very cool person.” Tivey, the son of Liza Todd, Taylor’s daughter with her third husband, Mike Todd, viewed the lost conversations as a key to the woman behind the legend. “I see the ways that she protected the difference between Elizabeth Taylor, the brand name, and Elizabeth Taylor, the person, and she talks about this in the documentary to great effect,” he says.
Taylor, whose tumultuous personal life included being married eight times—twice to Richard Burton—and losing one husband, the aforementioned Todd, in a tragic plane crash, was a source of tabloid fodder for much of her life. Where some wilted in the face of so much public scrutiny, however, Taylor soldiered bravely on. “She was true to herself, she was bold, she was courageous, and she had been through such highs and lows, living such a complete and complex life,” Tivey says.
Tasked with stitching all the pieces together was Burstein, the Academy Award-nominated filmmaker who first broke out with the 2002 documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, about another enigmatic Hollywood figure: Robert Evans. “I knew I wasn’t going to do a cradle-to-grave film,” says Burstein of the Elizabeth Taylor project, which uses, in addition to Meryman’s interviews, a conversation Taylor had with the writer Dominick Dunne in the 1980s to tell the story of her life in her own words.
“Before she was even involved, I knew that Nanette would be the perfect director for this project,” says Tivey. “We handed over our tapes and materials to her, trusting her creativity and vision, and she made a beautiful film.”
The process turned Burstein into a veritable archeologist, combing through records that occasionally proved unsalvageable. “I had one reel of film of her when she was a baby, but it had deteriorated,” she remembers. “When film smells like vinegar you know it’s gone.” However, a lot of footage from Taylor’s archives was in quite good shape, including scenes of her horsing around on the set of 1956’s Giant with her close friend Rock Hudson and co-star James Dean. “The wonderful thing about making a film like this is that you generally know the structure beforehand, but you also wind up learning a ton along the way,” Burstein says. “Certainly the level of fame she had, I didn t realize it was on such a large scale. It was on par with The Beatles and Princess Di.”
The film considers its subject through a distinctly modern lens, interrogating the complicated nature of Taylor’s early success, when the press fawned over her looks as a young teenager and men twice her age played her love interests. “She went to school on the lot, and was constantly around people much older than her,” Burstein says. “So she did not have a childhood, yet was playing a mature woman on screen.” When Taylor eventually married her first husband, Hilton hotel heir Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr., at 18, the marriage lasted only a year, a cause of some uproar in the buttoned-up early ’50s. Yet it was an empowered decision made by Taylor herself: As she explains in the film, Hilton was such a violent alcoholic that he regularly split her lip, and once even caused a miscarriage by kicking Taylor in the stomach. “She was a strong-willed woman who was ahead of her time,” says Burstein. “She lived the life she wanted to live and dealt with the consequences.”
Yet while her romantic relationships have attracted the most attention (including her infamous love triangle with Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, and her affair with Richard Burton denounced by the Vatican), Taylor’s friendships provided the longest and most stable bonds of her life. Two of the most important were with Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson, both of whom were closeted; it was her loyalty to them that later made her such an early and outspoken advocate for AIDS research. “She felt comfortable around [Clift and Hudson] because they didn’t hit on her like every other heterosexual man, and they felt comfortable around her because she had zero homophobia and had great empathy that they were living this double life,” says Burstein. (While Clift died from a heart attack in 1966, when he was only 45, Hudson was diagnosed with HIV in 1984, ultimately dying from complications related to AIDS a year later, at 59.) Established in 1991, The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation would prove the perfect use for Taylor’s immense fame, raising millions for the cause.
Even now, over a decade after her death, Taylor remains the ne plus ultra of A-list stars and philanthropists, as relevant and riveting as ever. While her estate’s House of Taylor has continued to expand her legacy, collaborating with brands and even selling official merchandise supporting the Foundation, Taylor herself still regularly fetches headlines.
“It’s extraordinary to be able to follow her through the film,” says Tivey. “It’s inspiring to see how she channeled so many of her experiences into her advocacy work later in life. And that work continues even now.”