Not Pattie Boyd, Not Jane Fonda: The Old Hollywood Star Whose Affair Captured The Vatican's Attention

If there's one consistent thing about Hollywood, it's that there's always some project or person causing a scandal and sparking backlash. There was the time that actor and activist Jane Fonda visited Vietnam and angered a lot of Americans, or the controversy surrounding English model Pattie Boyd and her love triangle with George Harrison and Eric Clapton — just two of the celebrity scandals that rocked the 1970s. It's admittedly rare, though, to attract the attention of the Vatican, but that's exactly what happened with actor Elizabeth Taylor. When she was discovered to be having an affair with Richard Burton, marking one of the all-time biggest scandals of "Old Hollywood," a disapproving piece ran about her in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's weekly newspaper.

In April 1962, the paper published an open letter that raked Taylor across the coals; it may not have referred to her directly by name, but it was largely understood to be about her and her affair with Burton. Among other things, the letter used phrases like "vagrancy" to describe what Taylor was doing, according to Town & Country, with the paper calling her affair "[an] insult to the nobility of the hearth." The Vatican outlet even wrote that Taylor's four children should be separated from her.

Taylor and Burton met on the set of "Cleopatra" in 1961. At the time, Burton was married to actor Sybil Williams, and Taylor was married to singer Eddie Fisher. Taylor's relationship history was a veritable who's who of old Hollywood; Fisher was her fourth husband, and Burton would go on to be her fifth (and sixth).

Audiences got to hear directly from Elizabeth Taylor concerning this open letter in the Vatican newspaper in the 2024 HBO documentary, "Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes." The film features recordings that Taylor made in 1964, and the actor didn't mince words when it came to the letter. "The Vatican newspaper had come out with an item saying that I was so despicable," Taylor said, "that my own children should be taken away from me, an attack that really — well, it made me vomit." 

Whoever wrote the anonymous letter to the Vatican paper wasn't the only one who didn't like what Taylor was doing with Richard Burton. When her father found out, he reportedly referred to Taylor as a "w*ore," according to "Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes." Taylor would go on to marry (and divorce) Burton twice, with their total time as a married couple adding up to 11 years.

By the time Taylor died in 2011, the Vatican newspaper took a kinder take on Taylor. In an obituary for her that ran in L'Osservatore Romano, she was referred to as the "last remaining star in the firmament of old Hollywood" (via the National Catholic Reporter). It was purportedly her philanthropic work that helped reframe her in a more positive light.