What Elizabeth Taylor's 8 Marriages Did To Her 4 Children

In October of 1970, a seventeen-year-old boy got married outside a register office in England, and a press photographer was there to record it. He was not famous. His bride was a teenager too. The only reason that photograph exists is that his mother had been married five times by then, and her name was Elizabeth Taylor. Eight marriages to seven men. Conrad Hilton Jr. in 1950, Michael Wilding in 1952, Mike Todd in 1957, Eddie Fisher in 1959, Richard Burton in 1964, Richard Burton again in 1975, John Warner in 1976, Larry Fortensky in 1991. Across them, four children: Michael Wilding Jr., Christopher Wilding, Liza Todd, and Maria, adopted from Munich. This documentary is about the four people who had no vote in any of it. There is an easy version of this story, and it is wrong. The easy version says the children resented her and grew up damaged and angry. The record does not support it. There is no memoir from any of these four accusing her. No lawsuit, no bitter interview. Taylor called her children her best friends and said they made her prouder than anything else she had done, and the children have broadly agreed. What follows is stranger than the scandal version, and harder to sell. Run the timeline from the child's side. Between the ages of four and eleven, Michael Wilding Jr. had a father leave, a stepfather arrive, that stepfather die violently, a second stepfather arrive, a second stepfather leave, and a third stepfather arrive. Mike Todd died on the 22nd of March, 1958, when his Lockheed Lodestar went down in the Zuni Mountains southwest of Grants, New Mexico, killing all four aboard. Liza Todd was seven months old and has no memory of him. The aircraft had a name painted on it: The Lucky Liz, after his wife. Even the wreckage carried the brand. The central document here is one that almost never gets quoted properly. In April of 1962, during the Cleopatra affair, the Vatican's weekly newspaper L'Osservatore Romano published an open letter about Elizabeth Taylor. It used the phrase "erotic vagrancy." And it did not stop at her conduct: it suggested her four children should be taken away from her. Michael was nine. Christopher was seven. Liza was four. Maria was not yet legally adopted. Nobody involved had met any of them. Christopher Wilding described what that period was like from inside a boarding school dormitory, speaking in the BBC series Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar. He read the magazines to keep up with his own mother, the same magazines her fans read. The other boys read them too. He recalls the taunts - "Well your mother just likes to sleep with a lot of guys" - and his own word for it was "awkward." Years later his mother told him she felt she had not been a great mother. He told her she was wrong. Look at where the four of them ended up. Michael Wilding Jr. left for India, formed a rock band, lived on a commune, acted briefly in the 1980s, then quit the industry to sculpt. Christopher Wilding spent a career in film as a photographer and sound editor, two of the most invisible jobs on a production, and retired in 2016. Liza Todd studied at Hornsey College of Art and the Otis Art Institute, began sculpting in bronze in 1979, and lives quietly in upstate New York with no social media presence and no interviews about her private life. Maria stayed furthest from public work of any of them. Four children of the most photographed woman of the twentieth century. Two sculptors, one behind the camera, one out of it entirely. Four exits from the same building. The argument this documentary makes is that the damage did not come from the marriages. It came from the coverage of the marriages, and those are different things with different mechanics. A hard childhood is negotiated inside a house between people who know each other. A hard childhood on the front page adds a second thing on top: strangers own the account, the version that circulates is not the version you lived, and you cannot correct it, because you are nine. Sources weighed on camera include the L'Osservatore Romano letter of April 1962, Christopher Wilding's own account in the BBC documentary, the NTSB-era record of the Todd crash, the adoption timeline of Maria Burton, and Taylor's own statement on what repeated marriage does to children - "How terrible to change children's affiliations, their affections." Where the record cannot decide something, we say so. The consistent career pattern across all four children is named as a pattern and not as a motive, because no one in it has ever explained it. This channel covers the families behind American power and fame, using documents rather than legend. #ElizabethTaylor #RichardBurton #Cleopatra #OldHollywood #HollywoodHistory #Documentary #MikeTodd #LizaTodd