Mike Todd, the flamboyant, street-tough producer of Around the World in 80 Days, was Taylor’s third husband and, by her account, first great love. They married in 1957 when she was twenty-four, he fifty. “It was fantastic,” she says. “I felt like I’d come home; no, I felt like I’d found home.”
That distinction between coming home, which means you know what home is, and finding home, which means you never had one to begin with, is typical of the care Taylor uses in talking to me about the men in her life. I find that she will, in fact, talk about them.
“I saw no reason for his death,” she says of Todd, who was killed in an airplane crash thirteen months after they’d been married, leaving her with their six-month-old daughter, Liza (Taylor had already had two sons, Michael Wilding, Jr., and Christopher Wilding, by her second husband). “For several years I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t on that plane with him because I was supposed to have been. Then it became clear. If I’d been on that plane I would never have met Richard.”
Richard Burton, her fifth and sixth husband (they first married in 1964 and divorced a decade later, then married again in 1975 and divorced a year later), was, by her account, her second great, if tumultuous, love. In between Todd and Burton there was a five-year marriage to singer Eddie Fisher, of whom Taylor says: “Every time I married, I thought it would be forever, but I have no idea why I married Eddie. We talked about Mike all the time. Eddie had known him and idolized him, so it was a way of keeping Mike alive. I guess that’s pretty sick.”
Burton’s name, on the other hand, still brings tears, so much so that at one point, mid-reminiscence, she actually leaves the room. “I loved him for twenty-five years. We had a unique relationship. I was still madly in love with him the day he died and—he loved his wife—but I think he still loved me, too. I thought he’d always be there, at the other end of the phone. Even if we weren’t together, he was still in the world. When I realized I would never hear his voice again or see his face, his eyes…if I hadn’t been to Betty Ford before his death, I don’t think I’d be around.”