Liz Taylor: Fame And Misfortune

Elizabeth Taylor has been world-famous for over 60 years, and it hasn't been easy on her, despite two Academy Awards, legions of fans, and one of the most beautiful pair of eyes in Hollywood.

Celebrity biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli goes deep into Taylor's wild, flamboyant, and often painful life, including her eight marriages to seven men, and her relationship with Michael Jackson, in his latest book, "Elizabeth."

On The Early Show Wednesday, Taraborelli told co-anchor Rene Syler that Taylor's relationship with her mother, Sarah Taylor, was pivotal in her life.

"Sarah was a fascinating woman," Taraborrelli said, "who really did — she believed two things. She believed, No. 1, that she was largely responsible for Elizabeth's success. And in many ways, she was. And No. 2, how she would have loved to have had that success, because she was a woman who was a Broadway actress before she met Elizabeth Taylor's father, and she gave up her career in order to raise Elizabeth and her brother and to marry and raise this family.

"So you can understand why both love and ambivalence existed in Elizabeth where her mother was concerned, because Elizabeth was kind of thrown into the MGM studio system by her mother. And she had such a difficult time as a child star."

As did Michael Jackson, with whom Taylor became close friends.

She addressed that during an appearance on CNN's "Larry King Live" in May, telling King, "We're very much alike. ... We both had horrible childhoods. Well, working at the age of 9 is not a childhood. He started at 3. And that certainly isn't a childhood."Taraborrelli, himself a friend of the Jackson family, pointed out to Syler that: "You can see from that clip, she still has a lot of emotion tied into her childhood. I really think Elizabeth sort of secretly hoped that she and Michael might be able to heal each other from their damaged childhoods. What she found out during the course of knowing Michael is that he's not a person to really do much self-reflection. He doesn't really think about the consequences of his actions. He just goes from one drama to the next, as we kind of know. The relationship, I think, isn't as close as it once was."

As for Taylor's multiple marriages, Taraborrelli told Syler: "She had such an emptiness inside during those years. I think she felt that so much of her life had been sort of allocated to her by the studio and by her mother in portions that, when she was old enough to make her own decisions, the answer was always, 'More, and now.' And so she made a lot of bad choices in men, you know, in trying to find sort of her soul mate, the person who might fill her, you know, with inner peace. She was always looking for a sense of inner peace, but not within. And she really didn't start looking within until she was in her 50s. That's when she really started to do some serious self-reflection."

Taraborrelli told Syler his decision to write the book actually had its roots in an interview he did with her years ago.

He says he came away thinking: " 'This is a woman who has not really been defined by happy times. If anything, she's been defined by hardships.' And I had never really seen any of it chronicled in an accurate and empathetic way, because all the books about her had been such rumor and innuendo-filled essays. So, I decided to try to find the real story. It was tough. This was really a complicated project, and it took me three years to write this book."

Will Taylor be happy with it?

"I think so," Taraborrelli said. "I really think this is a true look at a legend."

To read an excerpt of "Elizabeth, click here.