TOM LEONARD reveals the appalling depth of her addiction to cocaine and prescription drugs 

Slumped on the edge of her bed in the middle of the afternoon, wearing only her underwear, Elizabeth Taylor clutched a syringe of Demerol, a powerful opioid, in her right hand.

Christopher Wilding, her adult son by her second marriage (to the British actor Michael Wilding), was staying with his mother in the imposing mansion in Washington DC she shared with her sixth husband, John Warner, a senator from Virginia.

The house’s intercom had buzzed that day in the 1970s and Christopher recently recalled what happened.

‘She asked if I would please come upstairs to her bedroom to help her with something,’ he reveals in a new biography of his late mother. 

She was already pretty f***ed up on something … she pointed to a spot on her thigh and asked if I would administer the shot for her.’

Like so many in her family, Christopher had watched in horror as Taylor, then in her late 40s, had descended into ‘serious’ alcoholism and prescription painkiller abuse.

But injecting his junkie mother with her next fix was a step too far. ‘Being confronted with this scenario sucked all the air out of me and I told her that I was sorry — but that I absolutely could not help her with this.’

She looked at him with ‘deadened yet disappointed eyes’, steadied her hand — and plunged in the needle herself. Christopher couldn’t bear to watch his mother’s decline any longer and fled home to California.

His gruesome reminiscence is one of many shocking details revealed in Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit And Glamour Of An Icon, her first authorised biography.

Eleven years after the death of one of Hollywood’s greatest screen sirens, writer Kate Andersen Brower was given access to family and friends who have never spoken publicly, as well as to Taylor’s private letters and diaries.

Inevitably, there was a quid pro quo. The family was keen, as was the sympathetic Brower, to shed a more positive light on an actress generally remembered for diva behaviour and a taste for excess.

She was married eight times to seven men and assembled one of the world’s most valuable collections of jewellery. Millions were frittered on clothes and other baubles; she never travelled with fewer than 25 pieces of luggage.

The star of Cleopatra, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and A Place In The Sun remains, for many, the epitome of overpaid Hollywood vulgarity and self-infatuation. As the admiring Brower tactfully concedes: ‘Her motto was always “more is more”.’

Any attempt to paint her as a saint, then, will struggle.

Brower tries to cast the British-American actress as a feminist icon who, unlike her reported rival Marilyn Monroe, fought Hollywood’s entrenched misogyny, rather than becoming its victim.

The writer also argues that however outrageous her behaviour might have been, Taylor redeemed herself in the 1980s as a tireless campaigner for people living with HIV at the height of the Aids epidemic, raising more than $270 million for the cause.

And so while Richard Burton crudely marvelled at what he called Taylor’s ‘apocalyptic breasts’, Brower is instead keen to highlight what the star’s stepdaughter, the late Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher, called her ‘rampant empathy’.

Closeted gay actors such as Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson were among her closest friends — at a time when society was far less accepting of homosexuals.

Nevertheless, the biography’s biggest revelation concerns the scale of Taylor’s monumental drug abuse, which stints in the Betty Ford rehab clinic — her loved ones now confirm — never managed to scotch.

By 1990, three of Taylor’s doctors stood accused of over-prescribing addictive drugs to her on an epic scale — writing 1,000 prescriptions for 28 drugs between 1983 and 1988 alone. Son Christopher says she would ‘give Oscar-worthy performances on the phone with her doctors, pleading in an anguished, tearful whisper’ for higher dosages.

Friends told Brower that Taylor once hired a pharmacist as her publicist, so she could surreptitiously help the actress get hold of prescription drugs. 

She would guzzle sleeping pills and painkillers with whisky, vodka and champagne, but she also liked to get high on cocaine, cannabis and amyl nitrate. ‘She’d go to bed stoned, unfocused, unable to walk straight, [speaking in a] baby voice,’ recalls Christopher.

Although Brower was recruited to write the book by Taylor’s senator ex-husband John Warner, she claims that it was during his marriage to the actress from 1976 to 1982 that her drug abuse spiralled into dependency.

For all his relentless drinking, Burton — to whom Taylor was married from 1964 to 1974 and then again from October 1975 to July 1976 — hated drugs. It was only after he had finally left her that she truly felt able to indulge.

Bored and increasingly unhappy in Washington with a husband who was frequently away for work, she ate and drank so much that her weight increased by 40 lb to more than 12 st.

Warner, a Republican who died last year, made it worse by teasing Taylor about her size, nicknaming her his ‘little heifer’.

Of course, if anyone was heading for a problematic adulthood it was Taylor, a former child star who was turned into a sex symbol in her early teens.

Born in England in 1932 to wealthy and well-connected parents, her mother, Sara, was a Christian Scientist who claimed that when Elizabeth was born ‘covered with black fuzz’, she prayed and it went away.

They later moved to Los Angeles and Elizabeth was only ten when the ruthlessly ambitious Sara dropped her into the clutches of MGM Studios. As a child, she never had a conventional education or social life. Elizabeth was soon a major star, playing the heroine jockey of National Velvet. By her mid-teens, studio chiefs had her hooked on barbiturates and amphetamines, ensuring she was always bright-eyed for another day of filming.

Her father, Francis, was even more of a liability than her mother. Resenting the fact his daughter was the family’s main breadwinner, he would hit her when drunk, once punching her so hard it gave her lockjaw — a painful muscle condition that prevents the jaw from closing properly — for the rest of her life.

Coincidentally or not, many of Taylor’s later affairs and marriages went on to be with violent men.

According to Brower, who provides scant evidence for the claim, there were also ‘rumours’ that Francis may have been secretly gay. The author suggests this might explain why Taylor would go on to befriend so many homosexual actors.

She was just 18 when she married hotel heir Conrad Hilton, after her mother took her to a doctor to check if she was still a virgin (she was). 

During their eight-month marriage, his drunken violence caused her to miscarry.

She married her second husband, 40-year-old British actor Michael Wilding, when she was 20. 

Unlike Hilton and many of her subsequent spouses, he didn’t hit her. Frustrated with Wilding’s gentlemanly behaviour, she had an affair with Frank Sinatra. 

When she fell pregnant by the singer, she rang and asked him to marry her. Instead, he had his manager put her in a limousine and drive her to Mexico for an abortion.

By the time she and Wilding — with whom she had Christopher and another son, Michael — divorced in 1957, she was already having an affair with her future third husband, boorish film producer Mike Todd.

Actress Debbie Reynolds, a close friend of Taylor, once almost fainted after seeing Todd punch Taylor so hard she fell out of her chair. ‘I loved it when he would lose his temper and dominate me,’ said Taylor.

Todd — father of Taylor’s third child Liza — died in a plane crash in 1958. Taylor told her security guard: ‘When the plane crashed, I crashed with it.’

She wasn’t the grieving widow for long. Taylor, who first started taking sleeping pills to cope with Todd’s death, soon snatched her fourth husband, in 1958.

This was Eddie Fisher, husband of Taylor’s supposed bosom pal Debbie Reynolds (and Todd’s former best friend). He once memorably described himself as ‘the doormat to her stiletto heel’.

Taylor converted to Judaism in 1959. While Todd and Fisher were both Jewish, Taylor denied that she abandoned her mother’s Christian Scientist background because of them.

In 1962, she finally found her brazen equal in Richard Burton —who was also married with two children to Welsh-born actress Sybil Christopher. Their affair began while they were making the doomed epic Cleopatra.

‘I get an orgasm just listening to that voice of his,’ Taylor would later say. He was her kind of man: possessive, domineering and violent to her when drunk. The passionate but stormy ‘Liz & Dick show’, as it was dubbed, ‘ushered in an era of decadence and glamour never seen before’, according to Brower.

That’s a polite way of putting it. The couple’s alcoholic and rage-filled marriages survived on an endless cycle of ‘make-up sex’ and obscenely expensive gifts. Diehard fans would book hotel rooms below theirs just so they could hear the screaming matches through the ceiling.

Taylor said they were ‘mutually self-destructive’, although they lucratively exploited their notoriety, charging vast sums as the ‘most famous couple in the world’ to appear on screen together.

Actress Demi Moore, a longtime friend of Taylor, remembers admiring a particularly jaw-dropping piece of jewellery and asking why Burton gave it to her. ‘It was for Tuesday. It was a Tuesday gift,’ she said simply.

Sotheby’s jewellery expert Ward Landrigan recalls Burton paying $305,000 ($2.5 million today) for a fabulous 33-carat diamond in New York and being told ‘Elizabeth wants the diamond now.’

She flew him to London that night and Burton grabbed it as soon as he opened the door of their penthouse suite. Taylor squealed, ‘Oh s***!’ in delight and the pair knocked over a table in their excitement to see it on her finger.

Brower marvels at what she calls Taylor’s ‘innocent exuberance’ — but others would call it grasping materialism. Even Princess Margaret dismissed the ring as ‘positively vulgar’ — but later asked Taylor if she could try it on herself.

Taylor and Burton both cheated on one other, but he far more. Following their initial divorce and separation between 1974 and 1975, the relationship finally ended when, in 1976, Burton started seeing the much younger ex-wife of racing driver James Hunt and demanded his second divorce from Taylor.

She married Republican John Warner the same year and — after helping him get elected to the Senate — tried to become a classic Washington wife.

Yet her Hollywood lifestyle was potentially damaging to his career. ‘I made a condition,’ said Warner. ‘No jewellery, and she had to get rid of the Rolls-Royce and the yacht.’

Perhaps it’s not surprising that both her weight and drug consumption soared under such exacting demands.

In a hilarious footnote to their union, Taylor persuaded Warner to introduce legislation to ban pay lavatories in the United States after she couldn’t find a dime (ten cents) to use the ladies at an airport.

She divorced Warner in 1982. Moving back to Los Angeles, she sank into drug-cushioned loneliness. She took so many pills that staff feared to go into her bedroom if she wasn’t awake at a certain time, in case they found her dead. 

Her children were told they couldn’t ring her after 9pm as she would be too high.

Taylor married only once more: a much younger construction worker she’d met in rehab named Larry Fortensky, in a five-year marriage from 1991 to 1996.

But her most eventful male relationship in her later years was with Michael Jackson. Their unlikely bond, reportedly forged by their mutual broken childhoods, was odd then and — with all that has emerged about how the singer used his childlike behaviour to camouflage his paedophilia — seems even more disturbing now.

Jackson gushed that Taylor, who died of heart failure aged 79 in 2011, was a cross between Mother Teresa, Princess Diana and Peter Pan’s Wendy.

However, fawning biographers cannot escape the fact that her finer points were well hidden in a supremely messy and selfish life.