Watch: Elizabeth Taylor’s Son Reacts to Taylor Swift’s Song Tribute

Long before there was the obsession with Taylor Swift‘s love life, there was utter hysteria over Elizabeth Taylor.

To appreciate the magnitude of Taylor’s mark on tabloid culture, imagine if Swift—who’s now engaged to Travis Kelce—had also married and divorced all the exes she’s allegedly written songs (and liner notes) about. But Taylor also won two Best Actress Oscars and was a philanthropist, activist and businesswoman whose White Diamonds was the first wildly successful celebrity fragrance.

And if anyone was going to appreciate what the late movie star went through in order to live life on her terms, which included eight trips to the altar, it was Swift. Though she did need an assist from her parents to find out that Taylor’s son Christopher Wilding was a fan.

Asked if any contemporary stars reminded him of his mother, Wilding told The Guardian in 2024, “Well, I can’t tell you how much I admire Taylor Swift,” her willingness to stand up for her convictions invoking “a little bit of the same spirit my mom had.”

When Scott and Andrea Swift sent their daughter that clip, then she became obsessed.

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Elizabeth Taylor’s Son Reacts to Taylor Swift’s Song Tribute

“I just immediately started talking to Travis about it,” Swift said in an Oct. 8 interview with Pandora. “I was going on and on about Elizabeth Taylor, talking about all the things about her that I love, all the things that made her so glamorous and funny and witty and interesting, and how she kept challenging herself late into her life.”

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The result was “Elizabeth Taylor,” track No. 2 on Swift’s record-smashing 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl.

“All the right guys promised they’d stay / Under bright lights, they withered away / But you bloom,” she sings. “Portofino was on my mind and I think you know why / And if your letters ever said ‘goodbye,’ I’d cry my eyes violet/ Elizabeth Taylor, tell me for real, do you think it’s forever?”

In addition to the nod to Taylor’s stunning eyes—which were really blue-gray but appeared violet in certain light—plus mentions of white diamonds, Musso & Frank’s restaurant (a 106-year-old Hollywood landmark) and lovers who are “forever in the papers, on the screen and in their minds,” it’s obvious Swift did her homework.

While one of Life of a Showgirl‘s signature colors is a shade she christened “Portofino Orange Glitter,” the scenic town on the Italian Riviera is also where Taylor stole away with Richard Burton amid the filming of 1963’s Cleopatra—the notoriously expensive epic they fell in love making while both were married to other people.

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But though Burton is the other half most associated with Taylor, she may not have married him at all (let alone twice) if she hadn’t lost third husband Mike Todd in a plane crash. Which prompted her to seek comfort in Eddie Fisher‘s arms while he was still married to Debbie Reynolds…

Read on for an untangling of Taylor’s dramatic love life and see why it’s the stuff of legend, let alone a Swift song:

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William Pawley Jr.Elizabeth Taylor was 17 and staying with an uncle in Miami Beach when she accepted a proposal from 28-year-old radio station owner William Pawley Jr. in 1949.But “after a few weeks,” Taylor’s mother Sara Sothern wrote in a letter, per Kate Anderson Brower‘s 2022 biography Elizabeth Taylor, “Elizabeth saw the pattern of her future life with Bill unfolding. The longer we stayed, the more homesick she became for California, the studio, her work, the old life she knew and loved.”Yet Taylor, who made her big-screen debut at 10, also wrote her fiancé dozens of love letters, vowing in one that she was “only too ready to say farewell” to her career.That was not the case, and Pawley asked for his ring back while she was shooting A Place in the Sun a few months later in Lake Tahoe.

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Conrad Hilton Jr.Taylor met Conrad Nicholson “Nicky” Hilton Jr. in October 1949 at the Mocambo nightclub in West Hollywood, the same night she said a final goodbye to Pawley.She was a week shy of her 18th birthday when they announced their engagement in February 1950, Taylor telling reporters when asked what she and the 23-year-old hotel heir had in common, “We both love hamburgers with onions, oversized sweaters and [opera singer Ezio] Pinza.”They married on May 6, 1950, at Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills—MGM paid for the nuptials as a way to promote Taylor starring in Father of the Bride—and set off on a months-long tour of Europe.But the honeymoon was over within weeks once Hilton resumed drinking (he died at 42 in 1969) and became physically abusive, the actress later telling Life magazine writer Richard Meryman that she miscarried after Hilton kicked her in the stomach.Taylor, still only 18, was granted a divorce after 205 days of marriage on Jan. 29, 1951.

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Michael WildingTaylor already had a crush on Michael Wilding when she ran into the British actor, who was 20 years her senior, in London while she was in town to film 1952’s Ivanhoe.They quietly (minus 3,000 fans swarming outside) tied the knot Feb. 21, 1952, at the Caxton Hall Registry Office and celebrated with an intimate reception at Claridge’s.Taylor revealed she was pregnant after wrapping The Girl Who Had Everything later that year—and was promptly suspended from MGM.”You were penalized for doing what a woman does naturally,” the actress said, per biographer Brower. “And I resented that so much.”Son Michael Wilding Jr. was born Jan. 6, 1953, followed by Christopher Wilding on Feb. 27, 1955, his mother’s 23rd birthday.But as Taylor’s career flourished, she and Wilding grew apart, separating in 1956 and divorcing the following year.

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Mike ToddProducer Mike Todd, who was 25 years older than his bride, wed Taylor on Feb. 2, 1957, in Acapulco, the third marriage for both of them. The groom’s best friend Eddie Fisher served as his best man.In March they celebrated Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days winning the Oscar for Best Picture, and then the couple welcomed daughter Elizabeth “Liza” Frances on Aug. 6.Todd and Taylor also made headlines when they traded loud barbs at what is now London’s Heathrow Airport after missing their flight to the French Riviera.When they finally got to Nice, Todd told reporters, per the LA Times, “I’d rather fight with her than anyone else on earth. She’s so pretty and it’s so nice to make up.”But on March 22, 1958, Todd was killed in a private plane crash in the mountains of New Mexico. The 50-year-old had been on his way to New York, where he was due to be honored as Showman of the Year by the Friars’ Club. Taylor was supposed to go too but had stayed home with a bad cold.

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Eddie FisherFisher, married to Debbie Reynolds since 1955, rushed to Taylor’s side to console the devastated widow.After his divorce from Reynolds was finalized, Fisher wed Taylor at a Las Vegas synagogue on May 12, 1959—a hasty union Taylor later called an “awful mistake.””I was keeping Mike alive by talking about him because Eddie, he was a great friend of Mike’s,” she told Meryman in 1964, per the 2024 documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes. “That was the only thing we had in common, was Mike. I never loved Eddie. I liked him.”And Taylor said she hated 1960’s BUtterfield 8, the movie she and Fisher made together, though she won a Best Actress Oscar for her turn as a tragic model and it was MGM’s biggest hit of the year.

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Richard BurtonTaylor fatefully headed to Italy to shoot Cleopatra opposite Richard Burton as Marc Antony in 1962.”She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud,” the Welsh actor wrote of his costar in a 1965 Vogue essay. “She was, in short, too bloody much.”He had been married to Sybil Burton since 1949 when he and Taylor embarked on a scandalous affair that prompted a condemnation from the Vatican for “erotic vagrancy.”Sybil left her husband in 1963 but Taylor was only divorced from Fisher for a few days when she swapped vows with Burton on March 15, 1964, at the Ritz-Carlton Montreal.Burton, who shared daughter Kate Burton with Sybil, adopted stepdaughter Liza, as well as daughter Maria (whom Taylor was in the process of adopting from Germany before she and Fisher split up).

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While Taylor and Burton’s fur-draped and jewel-dripping union was flashy and tempestuous, it was also creatively prolific. After Cleopatra they starred in 10 more movies together, including 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which Taylor won her second Best Actress Oscar.But both were drinking heavily and tired of making headlines when they divorced in June 1974.

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Richard BurtonTheir estrangement didn’t last, Burton and Taylor remarrying in Kasane, Botswana, on Oct. 10, 1975.Yet the old ghosts were waiting for them and they divorced again in July 1976. But they stayed close for the rest of Burton’s life, Taylor signing a 1982 birthday telegram, “Love you very much, your double ex-wife Elizabeth.” Burton, who married twice after Taylor, died Aug. 5, 1984, at the age of 58.Taylor’s son Christopher, who considered Burton his main stepfather, told The Guardian in 2024, “As kids we always saw him as the larger personality—the force of his personality was just huge. But looking at interviews with him and my mom, she’s the dominant figure, and he’s the subordinate one. He’s sitting there quietly and she’s protecting him, fending off reporters and taking charge.”They may have been too combustible to stay married, but Burton ranked as Taylor’s greatest love. She said years later, “After Richard, the men in my life were just there to hold the coat, to open the door. All the men after Richard were really just company.”

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John WarnerThe next man to open the door for Taylor was John Warner, who served as secretary of the Navy under Richard Nixon.The divorced father of three escorted Taylor to a dinner at the British embassy hosted by Queen Elizabeth II in the summer of 1976. When the actress found out Warner would be spending time at his farm in Virginia, she invited herself along—and that’s where they wed that December.His wife adding massive star power to the campaign trail, Warner was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 1978 and he spent 30 years in office—but only six years married to Taylor.

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Larry FortenskyAfter meeting at the Betty Ford Center in 1988, Taylor married construction worker Larry Fortensky—who at 39 was 20 years her junior—on Oct. 6, 1991, at Michael Jackson‘s Neverland Ranch.They divorced five years later but stayed friends until Taylor’s death on March 23, 2011, at 79.While her romantic history was the stuff Hollywood headlines are made of, Christopher said his mother didn’t really have that many men in her life.“She just married the people she went out with,” he told The Guardian. “Mom had a conventional mindset about these things. You didn’t just have affairs. If you were in love with someone, you got married. But the media made such a big deal about it.”

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