What Actually Happened With Elizabeth Taylor's Marriages
Elizabeth Taylor had five marriages, but not all of them were to the same people counted twice. She married three men twice. That is the short version. The longer version is messier and involves a lot of public scrutiny that she never really asked for. Her first husband was Conrad "Nicky" Hilton Jr., son of the hotel fortune. They married in 1950 when she was eighteen. The marriage lasted two years. He was twenty-six. There were rumors about his sexuality and her infidelities. The whole thing fell apart quietly. She got a divorce in Mexico in 1951, which was common practice at the time because California didn't have no-fault divorce yet. You had to establish residency and wait six months minimum. Second marriage was to Michael Wilding, a British actor. They wed in 1952. Two kids came out of it. The marriage ended in 1957. The split was relatively amicable by Hollywood standards. He wasn't used to the fame level that came with being married to someone who was already a huge star. She was twenty-seven. He was thirty-nine.
Then came Mike Todd. He was a film producer, twenty years her senior. They met on the set of Around the World in Eighty Days. He produced it. She starred in it. They married in 1957. He died in a plane crash in 1958. She was pregnant at the time. She had a stillborn daughter. That one actually wrecked her for a while. I've read interviews where she talked about how the grief changed the way she handled subsequent relationships. She became more aggressive about getting what she wanted emotionally. Not manipulation, exactly. More like she stopped pretending she had patience. Third marriage was to Eddie Fisher. This is the one everyone knows about. She was still grieving Todd. Fisher was married to Debbie Reynolds at the time. They met on the set of BUtterfield 8. Richard Burton was also in that film. The Fisher-Reynolds divorce caused an absolute media firestorm. Hollywood basically blacklisted both of them for a while. Taylor and Fisher married in 1964. It lasted three years. They had two children together, one of whom died in infancy. That boy was named Elijah. She never spoke about him much. Richard Burton. That was the fourth marriage. They wed in 1964, right after the Fisher divorce. The marriage was publicized as the romance of the century until it wasn't. They divorced in 1974 after ten years. The reasons are well-documented. Alcoholism on both sides. Professional competition. Constant filming together. It wore them down. She said later that loving someone that much was exhausting.
She remarried Burton in 1975. That was the fifth marriage. It lasted until Burton's death in 1978. Lung cancer. He was forty-three. She was forty-seven. She gave two public eulogies, which was unusual for her. She was typically private about grief.
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What Nobody Talks About
People reduce these marriages to scandal because it's easier. The reality is that Elizabeth Taylor was navigating a system that had very little compassion for women in her position. She was a child star who became a major adult star before divorce was socially acceptable. Every choice she made was judged through a lens that didn't exist anymore. If she'd stayed with Nicky Hilton, people would have called her unambitious. She left him, she was ruthless. It was the same behavior, different headline. She also inherited a significant amount of money from her mother and from her grandmother. Financial independence matters more than anyone admits when you're analyzing marriage patterns. Most of her spouses were financially comfortable but not independently wealthy. That dynamic creates tension that biographers sometimes miss because they're too busy charting affair timelines. The Mexico divorce business was real. She went there three times. Not just for the Hilton divorce. The speed of those proceedings tells you something about how seriously she took her own autonomy. In the 1950s, a woman divorcing quickly in Mexico was practically unheard of for someone with her profile. She did it anyway.
One thing researchers consistently get wrong is the timeline. People conflate the first Burton marriage with the Fisher divorce. The Fisher divorce was finalized in March 1964. Taylor and Burton married eight days later. But the actual relationship between Taylor and Burton had begun on the set of BUtterfield 8 in 1960. They worked together again on Cleopatra starting in 1962. The public scandal was about Fisher leaving Reynolds, not about Taylor and Burton. Reynolds famously said she recognized her husband by the color of his car. That quote got repeated so often it lost whatever meaning it originally had. There's also the matter of her health. Taylor had polio as a child. She survived pneumonia multiple times. She underwent surgery for a blood clot in her lung in 1990. These health issues shaped how she approached relationships. She outlived four of her five husbands. That's a statistical fact that gets buried under the gossip. She was sixty-nine when Burton died. She lived to be eighty. Sixteen more years after losing him.
The Numbers Don't Lie
Conrad Hilton Jr.: 1950-1951. One year. Michael Wilding: 1952-1957. Five years. Mike Todd: 1957-1958. One year, ended by death.
Eddie Fisher: 1964-1967. Three years. Richard Burton: 1964-1974 and 1975-1978. Thirteen years total across two marriages. The longest marriage was to Burton, but even that didn't last. The shortest were the Hilton and Todd marriages, both of which ended in under two years for completely different reasons. One was incompatibility. The other was premature death.
If you're researching this topic, the best primary sources are her own interviews from the 1970s and 1980s, particularly the ones with Richard Schickel and the CBS Reports special. She was more coherent and honest in those than in the tabloid features that multiplied after Burton's death. The biographies by Deborah Carter and Jere Burns are serviceable. The William Mann book from 1964 is outdated but contains some details that later writers filtered out because they were inconvenient. What tends to get lost is that Taylor herself controlled much of her narrative. She started her own production company in the 1960s. She negotiated for screen credit and profit participation at a time when that was extremely rare for actresses. The marriages are easier to catalog than the career moves, but the career moves are where her actual agency shows up most clearly.
