“If I remember correctly, [this Warhol] was hanging somewhere in the living room. So many artists and writers were infatuated with Elizabeth. People loved giving her gifts. Maybe that’s where the warmth of her house came from.”
“The next time I saw Elizabeth I told her I’d been waiting for hours in her kitchen, and she said, ‘Why didn’t you just come upstairs and hang out with me and watch Baywatch?’”
“Elizabeth wasn’t great with women; she was really a man’s girl. She was very feminine in a lot of ways. Tough, but very, very feminine. She liked [jewelry boxes] like this. The dog on the right looks so much like [her dog] Sugar. She brought that dog everywhere.”
“That’s a chair by her vanity with a mirror and all her make-up and brushes. It took about three or four hours to get her together. Once her make-up and hair was done, she would cover her hair and take a scalding hot bath. The heat of the bath would soak all of the make-up into her skin so it would become natural-looking. It never felt like she had that much make-up on.”
“She once told me to go into her safes downstairs and bring some of the jewelry boxes up to her room. I almost fell over, I was so nervous. I brought them up and started photographing all of it. She said, ‘Why are you doing that?’ And I said, ‘Well I just love it that you have plastic tape on these incredibly beautiful old boxes filled with diamonds.’”
Elizabeth Taylor's famous 33-carat Krupp Diamond, which was sold by her estate in 2011 for $8.8 million.
“She was really private about her closet. She would take me up there and say, ‘Don’t photograph it!’”
“Elizabeth used to wear these boots with the most outrageous clothes on her lavender motorcycle—she’d get on the back and drive around with [ex-husband] Larry Fortensky. She always laughed whenever she would land on a ‘best dressed’ list.”
“This painting was hung in her bedroom. When I saw it, I fell in love with it. It looked like an illustration for a children’s book. I told Elizabeth, ‘I love this painting! Who did this?’ She laughed and said, ‘I did! I painted it when I was a kid.’ She’s very talented you know?”
“This was in her room off the side of her living room. Her living room was covered in a lot of paintings from her father or from Richard Burton when they were traveling around Europe all those years. The frames were so beautiful.”
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