From 1986 to 1991, Paul Newman and his closest good friend, screenwriter Stewart Stern, labored on an oral historical past of his life with the star’s household, pals and closest work colleagues. They amassed 14,000 pages of notes and ultimately gave up, unable to handle the sheer quantity any extra. The display icon died in 2008 at 83 and Stern in 2015. The manuscripts disappeared till producer Emily Wachtel discovered them whereas archiving a household storage unit. Sorted right into a e-book, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, they embody recollections of encounters with quite a few Hollywood stars, together with Newman's confession he was haunted all his life by a second with Elizabeth Taylor whereas they had been filming Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Newman wrote: "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof began production only a week after The Long, Hot Summer hit the movie theatres. I was cast as Brick, Elizabeth Taylor’s hard-drinking husband, and it was my job to make my character’s refusal to have sex with Elizabeth seem believable – even though in our movie, unlike Tennessee’s original play, we were barred from alluding to Brick’s gayness as the reason for his marital abstinence...

"Elizabeth had missed a few days on the set due to a virus. The sickness additionally prevented her from accompanying her husband, the producer Mike Todd, on a fast journey to New York. Todd took off in his personal airplane from Burbank and died, together with one other passenger and two pilots, when his Lockheed Lodestar crashed in the course of a stormy evening over New Mexico."

Taylor had only married Todd, her third husband, on February 2, 1957.  Their daughter Elizabeth Frances, known as Liza, was born that August.

Todd’s shock death on March 22, 1958, absolutely flattened the emotionally volatile and vulnerable Taylor. And Newman found himself completely out of his depth.

He wrote: "Elizabeth’s physician positioned her beneath sedation. Our manufacturing was likewise in shock and in addition in jeopardy. I made a decision to cease by her residence and provide what solace I may. When I arrived, I used to be proven as much as her boudoir, the place I listened to Elizabeth sobbing, ‘Why him? Why now?’ She was extremely doped up. Not understanding what else to say, I began to supply her some well-worn clichés about how this was all God’s will.

"Elizabeth cut me off, looked up at me, and practically snarled, ‘Oh, shut up. Get the f*** out of here!’"

Along with medicine and mattress relaxation, Taylor additionally turned, as so typically, to a person. This time it was the singer Eddie Fisher, who was an in depth good friend of her late husband.

They quickly started an affair however, scandalously, he was nonetheless married to Taylor’s good friend, fellow star Debbie Reynolds. Fisher left his spouse amid an enormous public scandal, and married Taylor married on the Temple Beth Sholom in Las Vegas on May 12, 1959.

The ultimate a part of the tragedy was Taylor’s later confession that she had by no means really beloved Fisher and solely married him to attempt to distract from the ache of dropping Todd. By 1962 she was already having an affair with Richard Burton, who she would marry, for the primary time, in 1964.