Elizabeth Taylor called marriage to Debbie Reynolds’ ex Eddie Fisher a ‘friggin’ awful mistake’: ‘I felt sorry for him’
A new documentary about Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor covers a lot more than just Liz and Dick.
There’s Liz, Dick, Conrad, Michael, Mike, Eddie, John and Larry.
In “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes,” a doc receiving its North American premiere June 11 at the Tribeca Film Festival, never-before-heard audio recordings of the “Cleopatra” star, who died in 2011, reveal her true, sometimes brutal feelings about her seven husbands.
She says Conrad Hilton Jr. abused her while she was pregnant, and that actor Michael Wilding wasn’t dominant enough for the duo to survive, according to People.
But Taylor is particularly harsh about hubby No. 4, singer Eddie Fisher, the ex of Debbie Reynolds and father of “Star Wars” actress Carrie Fisher.
“I never loved Eddie,” Taylor says of the man she had an affair with while he was still with Reynolds. “I liked him. I felt sorry for him. And I liked talking to him. But he was not Mike.”
Mike Todd, the Oscar-winning producer of the hit 1956 film “Around the World in 80 Days,” was Taylor’s third husband, who died in a plane crash in 1958.
“I was keeping Mike alive by talking about him. Because Eddie, he was a great fried of Mike’s,” she says in the doc. “That was the only thing we had in common, was Mike.”
The pair are said to have wed only three hours after Fisher’s divorce from Reynolds was finalized, and the relationship lasted four years.
“As a matter of fact, I don’t remember too much about my marriage to him, except it was one big, friggin’ awful mistake,” Taylor says. “I knew it before we were married and didn’t know how to get out of it.”
They divorced in 1964, two years after Taylor began an affair with “Cleopatra” co-star Richard Burton. Once it was finalized, Liz and Dick got hitched just 10 days later.
After Taylor split from her seventh husband, Larry Fortensky, in 1996, she largely receded from public life. The actress died in 2011 of heart failure at 79.