ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

HOLLYWOOD

Actor, jet-setter, and tanning virtuoso, George Hamilton began squiring the world's most famous woman, Elizabeth Taylor, in 1986. In an excerpt from his new memoir, he recalls their adventures, including the meltdown in Marbella when a cunning paparazzo caught Taylor topless

GEORGE HAMILTON

WILLIAM STADIEM

When you're going out with the most famous woman in the world, you may have achieved the impossible, but what you really want is even more impossible: to be alone. With her, that is.

Nobody on earth is better company than Elizabeth Taylor, more lively, more fun, or more of a three-ring circus, despite her desperate wishes to the contrary. When I first encountered Elizabeth, in her Cleopatra days in 1960s Rome, the paparazzi couldn't have treated her more viciously, taking hideous close-ups of her tracheotomy scar and then splashing the images across media outlets around the world. The reigning femme fatale may have been fair game for cheesecake bathing-suit photos, taken while she was making out poolside with Richard Burton, but the ghoulish press was fixated on the fatale part, exploiting beyond all canons of taste Elizabeth's fragile health and doing a rain dance for her demise. But she snapped back and showed them. She was the ultimate survivor.

When I began seeing Elizabeth, she was turning 55 and better than ever. The year was 1986. She and Virginia senator John Warner had divorced, and she had shed all the weight that John Belushi had lampooned, in drag, on Saturday Night Live when he re-enacted the tabloid episode of an overabundant La Taylor choking on a chicken bone. The paparazzi had never, ever let up.

Excerpted from Don't Mind If I Do, by George Hamilton and William Stadiem, to be published this month by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster; © 2008 by George Hamilton.

For Elizabeth, looking great was the best revenge, and she had gotten down to an in-your-face va-va-voom 120 pounds. There were lots of motivations beyond Belushi. She had an international launch tour for her new perfume line, Elizabeth Taylor's Passion. She was the world's face for the war on AIDS, which had taken her dear friend Rock Hudson the previous year. And Franco Zeffirelli had offered her the part of a lifetime as an opera diva in his forthcoming epic about Arturo Toscanini.

Elizabeth hadn't been in feature films for almost a decade, and Zeffirelli, who had directed her and Richard Burton in The Tam- ing of the Shrew, had convinced her that this role could win her a third Oscar. But if she was going to play a diva, she had to look like one. Hence, the crash diet. For Elizabeth, 55 was going to be the new 35, and I was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time to share the experience.

SHE WAS A "DAME" IN THE BEST OLD SENSE OF THE WORD. SHE'D DRINK WITH YOU. DANCE WITH YOU, PLAY CARDS WITH YOU, PIG OUT WITH YOU.

We had gotten together when a friend called me up in Los Angeles to ask if I would escort Elizabeth to some charity event. I called her to say hello and made an "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" proposition. I was getting an award at U.C.L.A. as the best-dressed man on television, or something of that ilk, and needed a date myself. I assumed she would have zero interest in seeing me win some prize for wearing a good suit, but she jumped at the chance. The kids at U.C.L.A. went wild when they saw her, and we were off and running for a year or so. I realized early on that if Elizabeth liked you she would do anything for you, go anywhere, say anything. She was a "dame" in the best old sense of the word. She'd drink with you, dance with you, play cards with you, pig out with you, and it could as easily be with a bunch of truckdrivers as with Nobel Prize winners.

We went everywhere, starting with a visit to her 90-year-old mother in Palm Springs, as well as a visit to mine. Then we went global, to Puerto Vallarta, where it was a little strange walking in Richard Burton's Night of the Iguana footsteps in the sand; to Acapulco, where it was a little strange walking in my own childhood footsteps, recalling how my brothers and I had ventured there with our adventuresome mother; to Gstaad, to spend New Year's at Elizabeth's ski chalet; to Rome, where we saw Zeffirelli and where we had a wonderful time walking in each other's dolce vita Gucci tracks, which hadn't changed that much in the Eternal City. For all the wonderful pasta there, sweet-toothed Elizabeth's favorite dish in Rome was the creme brulee, the very French, very decadent version from George's, off the Via Veneto, which she correctly worried could become her addictive Achilles' heel, or paunch, if she shot the Zeffirelli film.

Zeffirelli took us location scouting down the boot to Bari to visit the landmark Baroque opera house where he planned to shoot. He sold Elizabeth hard. He claimed Streisand, MacLaine, and Dunaway, divas all, were clamoring for the part, but Elizabeth was his first choice. We flew back to New York to celebrate Elizabeth's 55th at a gala party at Tavern on the Green. All I can remember is that we were five hours late. As the American Express campaign once said, membership has its privileges.

Our circuitous travels took us to the Mediterranean to visit my pal Adnan Khashoggi, the billionaire Saudi arms dealer and one of the planet's all-time hosts with the most. Among the things Adnan had the most of were connections. Not only was he locked in with the Saudi royal family, but his sister had married Egyptian multimillionaire Mohamed A1 Fayed, who owned Harrods, the Ritz, and everything else. Their son— Adnan's nephew and my friend Dodi—had produced the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire and would go on to make tragic history with Princess Diana.

Just before we flew to Marbella, near the home port of Khashoggi's mega-yacht, the Nabila, I got an intriguing invitation from another pal, Regine, the nonpareil discotheque proprietor. Regine pretty much invented the disco, or at least the exclusive form. I had been a young regular at her first club, Chez Regine, in Montparnasse, where there was a tiny speakeasy door-within-a-door. If Regine liked your looks, you got to party with Onassis and Callas and Princess Grace and Agnelli and Mastroianni. If she didn't, you could go around the comer to drown your sorrows in Hemingway memories at La Coupole. She was two decades ahead of Rubell and Schrager at Studio 54, plus a lot more personal and motherly, with the spaghetti suppers she would make for us to greet the dawn.

In any event, Regine, who had since opened branches in Monte Carlo, Rio, and New York, was planning a nocturnal incursion on the Costa del Sol with a disco at the ultra-chic Marbella Club, a country club for stars and tycoons and royalty founded by Prince Alfonso de Hohenlohe-Langenburg. It was almost as nice as the Nabila, and Regine insisted I bring Elizabeth to stay as long as we wanted.

Some luxurious terra firma didn't seem like a terrible idea. But I grilled Regine about the press. Elizabeth didn't want any paparazzi, and with every good reason. Yet I knew that Regine's lifeblood was celebrity, and the temptation to leak Elizabeth's presence to the newspapers would have been strong; the publicity could only have burnished Regine's new start-up. She swore on Catherine Deneuve's and Alain Delon's lives that Elizabeth was safe. I would never betray friends, she insisted. And we were friends indeed, not photo ops. Armed with Regine's assurances, I sold Elizabeth on the holiday.

ELIZABETH AND I HAVE ALWAYS FELT HEALTHIER WITH A TAN. THE FIRST RAYS BROUGHT HER OUT OF BED AND OUT OF HER CLOTHES.

We arrived and settled into a palatial suite overlooking both and the jagged Sierra Nevada. It was early summer and the sun was a tanner's dream. Elizabeth and I have always felt healthier with a tan. The first rays brought her out of bed and out of her clothes. She basked on the terrace with nothing on but a Brazilian tanga bottom, no top, and a funny-looking flowered swimming cap.

Our first night there would feature a party with Sean Connery, a Marbella resident who was in town for the golf. I knew they ate late in Spain, but it wasn't late enough for Elizabeth, who took forever getting her hair and nails done for the fete. At 10:30 she was still being beautified. By 11:30, Sean and his wife, Micheline, gave up. He had an early call for the links. By two A.M. we had made our grand entrance, fashionably late as ever. Gypsy dancers were performing. Within an hour of our arrival, the bad buzz came our way.

Countess Gunilla von Bismarck, I believe, was the royal with the grim tidings. Topless pictures of Elizabeth had been taken. They were going to hit all the papers. It was going to be the biggest scandal since Jackie Onassis was captured topless on Skorpios by amphibious lensmen. This scandal was bigger, as the Juno-esque Elizabeth had far more to show than the gamine Jackie. This, alas, was going to be the show of shows.

But not on Elizabeth's life. "I want those pictures!" she exclaimed. She was furious, and rightly so. I had let her down, subjected her to humiliation of the worst sort. I felt betrayed by Regine, who denied all complicity. But the buck stopped with me. A gentleman does not sell his lady friend into photographic servitude. I had to stop the presses.

It was an endless night. We retired from the party, and I worked the phones at the Marbella Club until dawn, calling every contact I had in Spain and in the tabloid press. Finally, my friend Enrique Herreras, from my 1979 film, Love at First Bite, tracked down the cunning Spanish shutterbug, a Gibraltar-based stringer for a fellow named Otero; the photographer caught the first plane from Madrid and arrived at our suite at 7:30 in the morning.

Clearly petrified, he surrendered the roll of negatives to me, handing over the cache that was going to make him rich and famous. I was about to burn it when Elizabeth, who was quietly fuming, said, "Let me see it." She unspooled the roll and held it up to the encroaching daylight. She studied it for what seemed like an eternity. I steeled myself for a torrent of abuse unlike any that had issued from her famous lips since she starred in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But she didn't hit the roof at all. A sly grin crept across that beautiful face of hers. The violet eyes lit up. "I like them. Don't you? My breasts look rather good, don't you think?" She passed the roll to me.

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DOWNLOAD AUDIO OF GEORGE HAMILTON READING FROM HIS BOOK.

"You look spectacular," I was forced to admit.

"What about the hat?"

"I think it works. Reverse chic."

"I hate censoring the press anyhow. Not my style. I'm a First Amendment gal."

The room seemed to bulge as we released our collective breath. The Spanish shooter went a little weak in the knees. I felt a wave of exhaustion sweep over me. But all that was important for now was that Elizabeth was happy. I never had a chance to see the published pictures. All I know is that Elizabeth sold a lot of perfume.