# Elizabeth Taylor: The Jewel Collector and Humanitarian — The Untold Story
Elizabeth Taylor once said, “I adore wearing gems, but not because they are mine. You can’t possess radiance, you can only admire it.” It is the perfect key to the least understood chapters of her life. To the public, her jewels were symbols of excess — the biggest diamond, the most storied pearl, the most expensive auction in history. But the jewels were never really about wealth. They were love letters, made permanent: almost every great piece in her collection was a gift from someone who adored her, and she wore them the way other people keep photographs. And in the end, she did something no one expected — she turned the most glamorous private collection in the world into a weapon against a plague. This is the story of the jewels, and of the cause that mattered more to her than any of them.
A Love Affair with Jewelry
Taylor’s passion for jewelry began early and never dimmed. Her third husband, the showman-producer Mike Todd, gave her a 29 7/8-carat diamond engagement ring — and she loved to tell the story of his instruction: she was to say twenty-nine and seven-eighths, he told her, “because thirty would be vulgar.” It was Todd, with his circus-barker’s sense of theater, who understood that for Elizabeth, a jewel was never just a jewel. It was a chapter in a romance.
She took the subject seriously enough to write a book about it — My Love Affair with Jewelry, published in 2002 — in which she catalogued her treasures with the fondness of a memoirist. The collection eventually numbered in the hundreds of pieces: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and pearls from the great houses of Cartier, Bulgari, and Van Cleef & Arpels, alongside historic stones that had once belonged to Russian grand duchesses and European royalty. But three pieces tower above the rest, and each one is inseparable from the great love story of her life: Richard Burton.
La Peregrina: The Pearl That Survived Five Hundred Years
The most historically significant jewel Taylor ever owned began its journey in 1513, when a slave diving in the Gulf of Panama found an extraordinary pear-shaped pearl — and, legend holds, bought his own freedom with it. The pearl, later named La Peregrina (“the Pilgrim” or “the Wanderer”), passed through the hands of Spanish royalty for centuries. In 1554, Philip II of Spain gave it to Mary I of England as a betrothal gift, and it appears in royal portraits of Mary Tudor, Margaret of Austria, and Isabella of Bourbon — one of the largest perfectly symmetrical natural pearls in the world, weighing nearly 56 carats.
In January 1969, La Peregrina came up for sale at Sotheby’s in London. Richard Burton bought it for a mere $37,000 and gave it to Taylor as a Valentine’s Day gift. She was enchanted — and characteristically hands-on. Working with designer Al Durante at Cartier in New York, she helped design the ruby-and-diamond necklace from which the pearl would hang, a setting as dramatic as the stone’s history.
She also loved to tell the story of nearly losing it. As she recounted it, the pearl once slipped from its setting in a hotel suite and went missing; it was eventually found — scratched but intact — after one of her beloved dogs had gotten hold of it. It was, she laughed, the most expensive chew toy in history. When her collection was auctioned after her death, La Peregrina sold for $11.84 million — at the time, the highest price ever paid at auction for a pearl — to an anonymous telephone bidder.
The Taylor-Burton Diamond and the Krupp
If La Peregrina was the most historic piece, the Taylor-Burton Diamond was the most famous. The stone began as a 240.8-carat rough diamond discovered in South African mines in 1966; cut down to a pear-shaped 69.42 carats, it passed through Cartier’s hands — where Burton, after a dramatic bidding war, bought it in 1969 for a record $1.1 million. Taylor wore it as a pendant necklace, most memorably to the 42nd Academy Awards in 1970, where it blazed at her throat before a global television audience. She eventually sold the stone in 1979, reportedly directing much of the proceeds to charitable causes — even her divestments were acts of generosity.
Then there was the Krupp Diamond: a 33.19-carat, cushion-cut stone of exceptional clarity that Burton bought for her at auction in 1968 for $305,000. It had previously belonged to Vera Krupp, wife of the German industrialist. Taylor wore it almost every day for the rest of her life — it was her everyday ring, the one she reached for like other women reach for a wedding band. After her death it was renamed the Elizabeth Taylor Diamond, and at the 2011 auction it sold for $8.8 million.
And there was the Taj Mahal diamond, Burton’s gift for her fortieth birthday in 1972 — a heart-shaped stone with centuries of Mughal history, inscribed with a declaration of eternal love. Every piece had a story, and Taylor knew them all. The jewels were her autobiography, written in gemstones.
The $156.8 Million Farewell
Elizabeth Taylor died on March 23, 2011, of congestive heart failure, surrounded by her four children. Nine months later, in December 2011, Christie’s in New York staged The Collection of Elizabeth Taylor — four sessions over four days, 1,778 lots, with bidders from 36 countries. Every single lot sold. The jewelry alone brought in $115.9 million against a pre-sale estimate of about $30 million; the full sale totaled $156.8 million, a record for any private collection at auction.
It was the most glamorous estate sale in history. But the headline that mattered most was where the money went: by Taylor’s prior arrangement, the proceeds benefited the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. The jewels that had been love letters in life became, in death, a final act of the cause she had championed for nearly thirty years.
Rock Hudson and the Summer That Changed Her
The cause began with a friend. In the summer of 1985, Taylor’s former Giant co-star Rock Hudson — the strapping leading man with whom she had shared the screen in George Stevens’s 1956 epic — announced that he was dying of AIDS. In 1985, AIDS was still widely treated as a unspeakable affliction, a “gay plague” that mainstream America preferred not to discuss. Hudson, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, had kept his illness secret until he could no longer hide it. He died on October 2, 1985.
Taylor was devastated — and galvanized. As early as 1984, she had hosted one of the first major AIDS fundraisers, benefiting AIDS Project Los Angeles. After Hudson’s announcement, she and Dr. Michael Gottlieb founded the National AIDS Research Foundation; within weeks, it merged with Dr. Mathilde Krim’s AIDS Medical Foundation to form the American Foundation for AIDS Research — amfAR. Taylor became its Founding National Chairman, its principal spokesperson, and its most glamorous weapon. At a time when few public figures would even say the word “AIDS,” Elizabeth Taylor said it on television, in Congress, and at black-tie galas — and dared anyone to look away.
She lobbied Washington for research funding at a moment when the federal response was shamefully slow. She used her fame the way she had once used her beauty: as an instrument. And she kept at it for the rest of her life. Over the decades, her fundraising for the cause exceeded $270 million — a figure that places her among the most effective celebrity philanthropists in history.
Her Own Foundation
In 1991, Taylor went further, founding the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation to fund direct care and services for people living with HIV/AIDS — complementing amfAR’s research mission. She paid the foundation’s overhead costs herself, so that every donated dollar could go to the work. She established the Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center, providing free HIV/AIDS testing and care at the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, D.C., and created an endowment for AIDS research at UCLA.
The honors that followed tell the story of how the world came to see this second act. In 1987, France made her a Knight of the Legion of Honour. In 1993, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented her with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award — her third Oscar, and the one she cherished as deeply as the two she had won for acting. In 1997 came the Screen Actors Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award for humanitarian service; in 2000, the GLAAD Vanguard Award; in 2000, Queen Elizabeth II made her a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire; and in 2001, she received the Presidential Citizens Medal. She had been the most famous actress in the world. She became something rarer: the most famous actress in the world who had used her fame to save lives.
Loyalty: The Friend Who Never Left
There was one more quality, quieter than the jewels and the activism, that those who knew Taylor always mentioned first: her loyalty. Hollywood friendships are famously disposable. Hers were not.
In 1956, during the filming of Raintree County, Montgomery Clift — her beloved co-star from A Place in the Sun — crashed his car into a telephone pole after leaving a dinner party at her home. Taylor was among the first to reach the wreckage. Finding Clift choking, she reportedly pulled a dislodged tooth from his throat with her fingers, saving his life, and stayed with him through the night, refusing to leave his side at the hospital. She remained his fiercest defender for the rest of his troubled life, long after the industry had written him off.
Her childhood friend Roddy McDowall — her co-star in Lassie Come Home (1943), the film that made them both famous as children — remained her confidant for nearly sixty years; it was to McDowall that she vented, inimitably, about BUtterfield 8. She stood by Rock Hudson when his diagnosis made others keep their distance. She formed a deep, much-misunderstood friendship with Michael Jackson in his most embattled years, defending him publicly when it cost her socially to do so. And in one of Hollywood’s most graceful reconciliations, she co-starred with her old rival Debbie Reynolds in the 2001 television film These Old Broads — the two women who had once been tabloid enemies, laughing together on screen, the ancient scandal finally laid to rest.
The Radiance She Left Behind
Elizabeth Taylor’s life is often told as a story of appetites — for love, for diamonds, for the camera’s gaze. But the truer story is about what she did with what she was given. The jewels were never really hers, she insisted; you can’t possess radiance, you can only admire it. So she admired it, wore it joyfully, told its stories — and then, at the end, gave it away to fight a plague that the world had been too frightened and too prejudiced to face.
The auction paddle has fallen. The pearl and the diamonds have new owners. But the foundation she built still funds clinics and care, and the example she set — that fame is a tool, and the only worthy use of a spotlight is to shine it on someone in the dark — still outshines every stone she ever wore. That is the untold story of Elizabeth Taylor: not the collector, but the giver. Not the legend, but the friend who never left.