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Hedda Hopper conspicuously printed not one word about Taylor's hospitalization, even when the rest of the papers were filled with it. Certainly the accepted "truth" of that night has become this: Distraught over Burton, Elizabeth took some pills. But the suicide attempt story has never seemed to fit with the full picture of Elizabeth Taylor, the star who rallied from death and ill health so many times, who never gave up anything easily, who had a new baby in the house plus three other children. For a public inured to celebrity suicides, it's been easy to chalk up this episode as just one more failed attempt. But Elizabeth was never, ever Marilyn Monroe. She was never a victim.
    When Joe Mankiewicz saw her that night at the hospital, he asked her how many pills she had taken. "Fourteen," she told him in a strong voice. "She'll be fine," Mankiewicz said. "If she can count them, she'll be fine."
    Call it a tantrum with pharmaceutical overtones. This was an era, after all, when people routinely washed back handfuls of pills with shots of vodka if they wanted to blot out the world. Elizabeth—drunk and depressed—had made a great show of wondering how she could possibly go on without Richard. But an authentic suicide attempt? Joe Mankiewicz never thought so. "Dad's theory," said Tom Mankiewicz, "was that they could have stopped seventy-five percent of the accidental suicides in the world at that time if by law all sleeping pills had to be suppositories."
    Two days after being admitted to the hospital, Elizabeth was discharged wearing a leopard-print fur coat and matching shoes. Eddie was there with Dick Hanley to pick her up in a black Cadillac. Photographers pursued them for the seven miles back to the villa, where Elizabeth graciously turned to face them in her doorway. Flashcubes popped all around. But Eddie refused to stop, slipping inside without looking back.
    Far above these earthly dramas, John Glenn was piloting the first American manned flight to orbit the Earth. His landing later that day bumped the goings-on in Rome down a notch in the headlines, but some tabloids still went with Elizabeth on their front page. Leopard fur, they reasoned, sold better than a flight suit.
    Meanwhile Richard Burton, seemingly stricken with guilt, put out a statement denying rumors of an affair, vowing "never [to] do anything to hurt [Elizabeth] personally and professionally." Yet the denial fizzled. So far no story had referred to anything more than troubles between Elizabeth and Eddie; Burton himself had not yet been mentioned. His denial, however, inserted his name into the story for the first time. That's not to say the press didn't know what was going on: Dorothy Kilgallen told her readers that "all the preliminary details have been burning on the Rome–New York grapevine for quite some time." Reporters were simply waiting for something concrete to tie Burton to Taylor, and unwittingly Burton had just given it to them. His publicist, Chris Hofer, had convinced his boss that a statement would end it all. But when the denial only ratcheted up the story, all that ended was Hofer's job. Peeved, the publicist told the press that he'd been made "the fall guy."
    The gloves were now off. Paparazzi slapped ladders against the sides of Elizabeth's villa and scrambled over the walls. Dick Hanley and the servants had to beat them back with brooms and rakes. At Richard's villa, two-year-old Jessica Burton, soon to be diagnosed with autism, was so terrified by a photographer peering through a window that she screamed nonstop for hours. Ivan Kroscenko offered Jack Brodsky 100,000 lire for a negative of Burton and Taylor together that he could pass off as stolen from the studio. "The paparazzi were everywhere," Tom Mankiewicz said. "They were throwing themselves on the hoods of our cars."
    Tom was dating Elizabeth's stand-in, Marie Devereux, a young English actress with an uncanny resemblance to the star. (The long shots of Cleopatra entering Rome