Elizabeth Taylor’s affair with Richard Burton was condemned by everyone — including the Vatican.
The actress, who tied the knot eight times to seven men, is the subject of a new HBO documentary, “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes.” The film details the Oscar winner’s life and loves in her words from a recently discovered series of candid interviews.
In the documentary, Taylor described how her love affair with “Cleopatra” co-star Richard Burton brought on a blistering attack from the Vatican.
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“The Vatican newspaper had come out with an item saying that I was so despicable [of a] woman that my own children should be taken away from me,” Taylor is heard saying.
“[It’s] an attack that really — well, it made me vomit,” she added.
During her marriage to husband No. 4, pop singer Eddie Fisher, Taylor fell in love with Burton. The press exposed their on-set affair in 1962, which took place shortly after Fisher separated from his wife Debbie Reynolds to marry Taylor. At the time, Burton was married to his first wife, Sybil Williams.
“My father called me a whore,” Taylor admitted to late journalist Richard Meryman. “I met such opposition from everyone.”
In an open letter in Vatican City’s weekly newspaper, Taylor was charged with “erotic vagrancy” for sleeping with Burton while still married to Fisher. The Vatican decried “this insult to the nobility of the hearth,” Town & Country reported.
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According to the book “Furious Love,” Congresswoman Iris Faircloth Blitch called on Congress to make “Miss Taylor and Mr. Burton… ineligible for reentry into the United States on the grounds of desirability.” Congressmen in New York and North Carolina agreed, blaming the nation’s “moral slide” on the affair.
“Somebody was at the studio trying to blow me up with a bomb,” Taylor recalled in the film. “So the Italian FBI were out there for five days [while we filmed]. It was really a horrendous week.”
Taylor and Burton were determined to stay together.
Burton and Williams parted ways in 1963. Taylor and Fisher called it quits in 1964, the same year she married Burton.
When Meryman asked Taylor if she felt guilty about publicly leaving Fisher for Burton, she replied, “Oh, yes… We both do, having inflicted such awful pain.”
Meryman also asked if Taylor was worried about “divine retribution” for her actions. Taylor is heard asking Meryman if he meant being “punished in hell.”
“I think we must pay on this Earth,” she said. “We should do our penance now.”
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Still, Taylor had no regrets.
“I couldn’t help loving him,” Taylor admitted. “It was a fact.”
Burton became husband No. 5 from 1964 to 1974. He became husband No. 6 when they rekindled their marriage in 1975. They called it quits for good in 1976.
After being discarded by Taylor, Fisher became the butt of comedians’ jokes. He began relying on drugs to get through performances, and his bookings dwindled. He later said he had made and spent $20 million during his heyday, and much of it went to gambling and drugs.
Fisher attempted a full-scale comeback. But his old fans had been turned off by the scandals, and the younger generation had been turned on to rock music. The tour was unsuccessful.
In his 1999 autobiography, “Been There, Done That,” Fisher called Reynolds “self-centered, totally driven, insecure, untruthful, phony.” He claimed he abandoned his career during the Taylor marriage because he was too busy taking her to emergency rooms and cleaning up after her pets, children and servants. Both ex-wives were furious, and his daughter, “Star Wars” actress Carrie Fisher, threatened to change her name to Reynolds.
Fisher died in 2010 at age 82.
Earlier this year, author Roger Lewis’s book, “Erotic Vagrancy,” was published. It explores the heated love affair between Taylor and Burton that resulted in two marriages and two divorces.
“They were in their reality of lust,” Lewis explained to Fox News Digital. “They would sneak off for dirty weekends.”
“Whenever Burton thought, ‘I’ve got to get back to Sybil, this is getting ridiculous,’ Taylor would have an overdose,” Lewis alleged. “Meanwhile, Eddie Fisher was trying to control her, and she hated that. She didn’t want anyone telling her what she could or couldn’t do. … It was just chaos.”
The couple loved and fought hard. Lewis said Taylor gave Burton “the terrors,” which he documented in his diaries.
“Their fights were physical,” Lewis claimed. “They would bash each other. … I think they got bored and would poke at each other. There was also this competitiveness. But all the fighting would end up in the bedroom, which would get them energized all over again. This went on for years, all in front of their servants and paid retainers. It was a very extreme relationship.”
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The relationship was doomed. Taylor’s addiction to pills and Burton’s alcoholism contributed to their divorce in 1974 after 10 years of marriage. Taylor soon called Burton and asked him, “Do you think we just made a terrible mistake?” They remarried the following year and called it quits for good less than 12 months later.
Lewis said the pair remained the loves of each other’s lives. Taylor once said, “I was still madly in love with him until the day he died.”
Burton died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1984. He was 58.
“Elizabeth Taylor didn’t go to the funeral because she thought it would attract too much publicity and would be inappropriate,” said Lewis. “But a few days later, at dawn, she went to the graveyard on her own to pray at his grave. She said, ‘That was the only time that Richard and I were ever alone.’ … It was only when he was in the grave, and she was with him at the graveyard, that they had privacy at long last.”
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Taylor kept Burton’s last letter, which was written to her three days before his death, in her bedside drawer. It stayed there until she died in 2011 at age 79.
“I truly believe there was absolute devotion there,” said Lewis. “It was much more than a big love affair. Beyond question, they were the loves of each other’s lives. Even when you look at photos of them today … they devoured each other with their gazes. It was a pulverizing love that … became dangerous. But there’s no doubt that the love was there. It never left.”
