LIZ'S LOVE LETTERS ON SALE
Before becoming a bride eight times over, Elizabeth Taylor was a 17-year-old starlet scribbling letters to her first fiance, charting on pale pink stationery his progression from her one-and-only to the one who got away.
Before becoming a bride eight times over, Elizabeth Taylor was a 17-year-old starlet scribbling letters to her first fiance, charting on pale pink stationery his progression from her one-and-only to the one who got away.
"I've never known this kind of love before - it's so perfect and complete - and mature," Taylor wrote to William Pawley on May 6, 1949. "I've never loved anyone in my life before one third as much as I love you - and I never will (well, as far as that goes - I'll never love anyone else - period)."
Teenagers really don't know themselves, do they?
Taylor, who died last week at age 79, was engaged to Pawley in 1949, just before her first marriage to Nicky Hilton. More than 60 of the letters she wrote him between March and October of that year (if it were today, we'd only have worthless tweets and emails) will be auctioned in May by RR Auctions of Amherst, N.H., which bought the letters two years ago from Pawley, who lives in Florida.
"My heart aches & makes me want to cry when I think of you, and how much I want to be with and to look into your beautiful blue eyes, and kiss your sweet lips and have your strong arms hold me, oh so tight, & close to you . . . I want us to be 'lovers' always . . . even after we've been married seventy-five years and have at least a dozen great-great-grandchildren," Taylor wrote, showing that she also had a future in romance novels.
The online auction, set for May 19-26, also will feature letters that Taylor's mother wrote to Pawley after the engagement ended, including one in which she wrote, "You have a nervous condition and a problem with jealousy, as such you and Elizabeth can never be together."
How harsh. It's like a Bronte novel. But mother should have known that saying never to a teenage girl could lead to . . . seven husbands.
Bobby Livingston, spokesman for the auction house, said that the letters were estimated to be worth $25,000 to $35,000 before Taylor's death, and he expects they could fetch two or three times that amount now.