ELIZABETH TAYLOR - The Price She Paid for FAME

A GLAMOROUS LIFE COULDN'T PROTECT THE STAR FROM PAIN, TRAGEDY, ILLNESS AND ADDICTION

- LOUISE A. BARILE

When Naomi deLuce Wilding was young, she loved watching movies in bed with her grandmother Elizabeth Taylor. “We used to watch a lot of horror movies together,” she tells Closer. “We liked to get scared.”

Naomi jokes that watching scary movies might not sound like “the most responsible, grandmotherly thing to do,” but after growing up on movie sets, Elizabeth had a great understanding of the difference between make-believe monsters and real-world horror. “I’m like a living example of what people can go through and survive,” she said.

Elizabeth reported to her first film set at age 9. “In a lot of ways, she had a very charmed life,” Kate Andersen Brower, whose biography Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon, was recently released in soft cover, tells Closer.

“The flip side is that she had a very sheltered existence; she couldn’t be a normal kid, she didn’t have many friends her age.”

In fact, young Elizabeth was quite lonely, and her mother, Sara, and the studio ruled her life. “My sister related a story about watching National Velvet with my grandmother,” Naomi recalls. “[Elizabeth] said, ‘I remember this part. My mom said we had to reshoot it because my hands looked too fat,’Imagine what that feels like when you’re 12!”