The Seven Husbands of Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor was born in 1932 in London to American parents, and gained fame as a child star in the 1940s before becoming during the 1950s-70s one of the most highly paid actresses in show business.  She was married eight times to seven men:  Conrad Hilton Jr., Michael Wilding, Mike Todd,  Eddie Fisher, Richard Burton (twice), John Warner, and finally Larry Fortensky.  She died in 2011 at the age of 79.  You could say that she was a bit old fashioned, honoring as she did the constraints of legal matrimony, but in the days of the Hays office, those in show business were more constrained in their avoidance of bad publicity, whereas in the modern era, anything goes.  




1. Conrad Nicholson Hilton, Jr. (1951-1952)

Conrad Hilton Jr. was one of the sons of Conrad Hilton, founder of the Hilton Hotel chain.  He was born in 1926.    He was married to Taylor for about eight months, from early May 1951 to the end of January 1952.  He died of a heart attack at age 42, in 1969, his early death attributed to alcohol abuse.


 

2.  Michael Wilding (1952-1957)

Michael Wilding was born at Leigh on Sea, Essex, UK in 1912.  He was a successful commercial artist who joined the art department of a London film studio and moved from there into screen acting.  He was at the height of his fame as an actor in the 1950s.  He had two children with Taylor and later married twice more.  Taylor was his second wife.  They divorced after 5 years in 1957.  Suffering from epilepsy his entire life, he died at age 66 in 1979 from injuries from a fall down a flight of stairs. 

3.  Mike Todd (1957-1958)

Mike Todd, born in 1909 as Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen in Minneapolis was a film producer, but started life as a building contractor, and got into film work when hired to soundproof film stages. He began to specialize in extravagant productions in the theater and finally in film.  In 1950, in collaboration with Lowell Thomas he started a company popularizing a widescreen projection system invented by Fred Waller.  He then went on to develop an improved version of this widescreen projection method known as Todd-AO which was then applied to the films "Oklahoma!" in 1955 and in "Around the World in 80 Days" in 1956.   In March 1958, scarcely a year after their marriage, Mike Todd died in the crash of his private aircraft "The Lucky Liz" along with two other passengers and author Art Cohn who was writing a biography of Todd to be titled "the Nine Lives of Mike Todd".  The only thing lucky about the "Lucky Liz" was that Taylor stayed behind because she was suffering from a cold.   The plane, as was subsequently revealed was apparently overloaded and flying above its proper altitude when it crashed near Grants, NM. 

4.  Eddie Fisher (1959-1964)

Fisher was born Edwin John Tisch in 1928.  He was kind of a proto-rock and roll vocalist who was very popular in the early 1950s.   When he left Debbie Reynolds for Taylor in 1959 there was a very public divorce, the adverse publicity from which caused his record label to drop him and NBC cancelled his TV show.  He continued his career elsewhere but never again reached the heights achieved in the late 1950s.  Elizabeth Taylor was #2 of 5 for him. He died in 2010. 

5.  Richard Burton (1964-1974; 1975-1976)

Richard Burton was born  Richard Walter Jenkins in Pontrhydyfen, Wales in 1925.  He took the name of a schoolmaster named Burton who was a great influence on him.  He went on to a brilliant career as a stage and film actor in the 1950s and 1960s and was for a time the most highly paid actor in show business.  While he had met Taylor earlier in his career, they didn't click until they worked together in the massively expensive and troubled film Cleopatra. They were married in 1964.  They were divorced for a a little over a year in 1974-1975, remarried,  and then divorced a second time in 1976.  In view of the way Burton drank and smoked it is not surprising that his health began to collapse at age 41 and that he died of a brain hemorrhage at age 58.  His father died of the same thing a few years earlier but at 81.  

6.  John William Warner (1976-1982)

Warner was born in Washington DC in 1927.  He enlisted in the US Navy in 1945. Later he attended Washington and Lee University and entered law school at the University of Virginia, but dropped out to join the Marines in 1950 and served in Korea.  He then completed his law studies at George Washington University in DC. in 1953.  He served as law clerk for E. Barrett Prettyman in the US Court of Appeals and then joined a law firm in Washington.

In 1957 he married Catherine Conover Mellon, heir to the Mellon fortune and granddaughter to Andrew Mellon who was at one time the third richest man in America, behind Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller.   This marriage led to significant advantages in the realm of politics.  He served as secretary of the Navy from 1972-1974.   He married Elizabeth Taylor in 1976 and three years later was elected to the US Senate from Virginia, where he remained in office for thirty years. In 1990 and 2002 the Democrats did not even bother to field a candidate against him.   His marriage to Taylor only lasted until 1982, however.    As a senator he could only be called a "moderate" Republican and/or a RINO.  he retired from the senate in 2009.    

7.  Larry Fortensky (1991-1996)

Fortensky was born in 1952 in Stanton, California.  He was the oldest of a family of seven children.  As a contruction worker, he had health insurance, and so when he was arrested for intoxication and a DUI he checked into the Betty Ford Clinic for treatment, where he met Elizabeth Taylor, also undergoing treatment there.  They hit it off.  They were married at Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch, and pictures from the wedding were sold off to benefit AIDS charities, with which Taylor had become active in recent years.  After five years they were divorced, which satisfied a prenuptial agreement which guaranteed Fortensky $1 million if the marriage lasted five years.  At the time of his divorce Fortensky said he did not want to be known as "Mr. Elizabeth Taylor" for the rest of his life.  After his divorce he continued to have drug problems and financial problems.  He remained in contact with Taylor after the divorce and inherited $800,000 from her estate when she died in 2011.  






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