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papers that Elizabeth's pneumonia had sold for them. Meanwhile, completely out of the loop in Palm Springs, Elizabeth's agent, Kurt Frings, tried some damage control on his own, telling the press that the hospital stay was planned well in advance so the star could have a little rest.
    By the following morning Brodsky and Walter Wanger had settled on the official line: food poisoning. Wanger announced that he'd also eaten the bully beef at Taylor's villa the day before and that he, too, felt sick. But they forgot one important thing: to check in with Dick Hanley. "Food poisoning?" Dick screeched when contacted by Reynolds Packard. "Where did that come from?" Taylor, he said, was just "tired out." No doubt a few urgent phone calls were hastily placed because Hanley was soon remembering that bloody beef. With the clout of a major movie studio behind them, the players and spinners were even able to get Elizabeth's doctors to back up the story. The eminent Times of London quoted the physician in charge of the case as saying Taylor suffered from "a stomach upset which might have been due to food poisoning." (Note the "might have been.") Breathing a sigh of relief, Brodsky wrote to his assistant Nat Weiss, "The food poisoning story ... seemed to go over."
    But what really happened was this: The affair with Burton hadn't ended, as Elizabeth had promised Eddie it would. She had fallen head over heels in love. And it wasn't all just a photo opportunity. When Burton had shown up with his hangover on their first day on the set, Elizabeth had helped steady him and, in the process, had looked down into his magnetic green eyes. "And it was like here I am, " she said. No matter what it might do to her career or her carefully wrought public image, she couldn't contain her feelings for the volatile Welshman. No way could she end it. "They sneak off at night to an apartment [Dick Hanley's] and have matinees in her dressing room," Brodsky told Weiss. One day Brodsky was scheduled to meet Elizabeth and Eddie for lunch, but Elizabeth didn't show. It was obvious that she had snuck off with Burton. "It was very, very embarrassing to have to sit there with a man whose wife you know is off having an affair," Brodsky said.
    Not long after this, Eddie paid a call on Sybil Burton in an attempt to enlist her aid in ending the affair. The smart, savvy Sybil listened politely and thanked Eddie for his concern. A huge row with Elizabeth ensued, with Roddy McDowall charging in and claiming that Eddie hadn't "behaved like a man." Soon the heartbroken Fisher was beating a hasty retreat to Switzerland, where he and Elizabeth had recently bought a house. Sybil, meanwhile, laid down the law, and Burton told Elizabeth that while it had been fun, it had to end.
    Elizabeth was overcome. "This was a woman who had always, always gotten what she wanted," said her friend Hank Moonjean, the assistant director on Butterfield 8 and Elizabeth's frequent companion in Rome. "You do not screw Elizabeth Taylor and then dump her. It just wasn't done. She didn't know how to process it in her mind."
    On the afternoon of February 17, Walter Wanger had visited Elizabeth, finding her "upset about her life and future." She was also drinking heavily. She had surrounded herself with her usual group of acolytes: Hanley and John Lee, Roddy and John Valva, and the Cleopatra hairstylist, Vivienne Zavitz. She told Hanley that life without Richard gave her the feeling of "scenes missing"—a movie-making term referring to the intertitle scenes missing placed in a rough cut of a film. Even in the most personal of crises, this child of the movies thought in cinematic terms.
    Increasingly distraught, Elizabeth went up to bed early. When Wanger and Zavitz checked on her a while later and found her passed out cold, Zavitz shrieked, "She's taken pills!" Someone downstairs called an ambulance.
    A suicide attempt? That's what Hollywood would believe. Most people laughed off the food poisoning story.