Elizabeth Taylor’s son Christopher Wilding revealed recently that her family made the difficult decision to hold an intervention for her in her in the 1980s.
Wilding, who is Taylor’s second son with her second husband, the late actor Michael Wilding, revealed in the third episode of third episode of the BBC docuseries Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar that her family decided to stage the intervention following her divorce from her sixth husband, US Senator John Warner, in 1982.
After that tumultuous event, her drug and alcohol use ramped up, leading her family to be concerned for her health.
Making things more complicated were Taylor’s struggles with chronic pain, for which she regularly took pain killers.
‘She had physical ailments, especially bad back problems, for which the use of pain meds was a legitimate recourse,’ Wilding said, via People.
Elizabeth Taylor’s son Christopher Wilding (R) revealed in episode three of the BBC docuseries Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar that her family held an intervention in the 1980s over her drug and alcohol use; pictured together in 2002 in NYC
But she also may have turned toward drugs over other options due to a generational mindset.
‘When she was little, we had all these miracle drugs and you took a pill. That was her approach — better living through science,’ Wilding explained.
But those in Taylor’s close circle knew that she wasn’t simply using medication under a doctor’s supervision, but was instead ‘abusing alcohol and pain meds, including injectable ones.’
Wilding added that family members would speak to Taylor about her substance use occasionally, but it didn’t seem to make an impact on her usage, so an intervention was proposed.
‘We just wanted her to get help,’ Wilding said. ‘Close family members flew in and boy, that was difficult.’
The docuseries was able to include the perspective of Taylor herself — who died in 2011 at age 79 — as she had spoken about the intervention on tape.
‘The family intervention stopped me so dead in my tracks,’ she admitted on the tape. ‘It leaves you totally speechless, and it’s so sincere and done with such love that you know it must be agony for them.’
Then, in another recording, Taylor admitted the intervention felt as if she had been ‘slapped in the face with reality.’
‘And I thought, “My God, I thought I was a good mother. How have I allowed myself to do this to the people I love most in the world?”‘
As he recalled how each family member spoke to Taylor about how her struggles with substance abuse impacted them, Wilding said everyone was ‘petrified’ over how it would go, as his mother was a ‘formidable woman.’
But she ended up having the best possible reaction to the intervention, as she agreed on the spot to be admitted to a rehab clinic — on the condition that she could wait to leave until the following morning.
Taylor had been abusing alcohol and drugs, particular pain meds prescribed for her back, following her 1982 divorce from US Senator John Warner
Wilding said everyone was ‘petrified’ over the intervention because Taylor was so ‘formidable,’ but she agreed to leave the next morning for the Betty Ford Center. She did stints there in 1983 and later in 1988; seen in 2009 in Santa Monica
Wilding remarked that his mother ‘had to do a lot of things she never had to do in her adult life’ when she checked in to the Betty Ford Center, which included sharing a room with a stranger.
‘Everyone was assigned kind of life, domestic chores,’ he explained.
Therapy was also a major component for patients at the clinic, and Taylor committed to the process to help with traumas she had sustained over the decades.
‘I felt really for the first time in my life like I wasn’t being exploited by anyone,’ Taylor said in a recording. ‘I was being accepted for myself. I was forced to look at the honest truth of who I was.’
The heiress Aileen Getty, who was married to Wilding from 1981 to 1989, recalled in the documentary how her former mother-in-law wasn’t afraid to speak about her substance use struggles with family members.
‘She lived in everyone’s home. We witnessed her suffering and maybe that did have power too. She shared that suffering with us,’ Getty recalled.
‘If she hadn’t have gone public, the chances are it would have leaked to the press anyway,’ she continued. ‘That’s when I think there was a real switch that flicked on, like, “Actually, better to be the one that puts it out to the world so that you control the narrative.”‘
Taylor first entered the Betty Ford Center in 1983, when she became the first celebrity to admit herself publicly under her own name. She would later return for a second stint in 1988.
Taylor embraced therapy there for decades of unaddressed psychic trauma. In recordings, she described her heartbreak at seeing how her substance abuse affected her children; pictured with former husband Mike Todd in 1957 in LA
In addition to drug and alcohol abuse, Taylor suffered significant weight gain, especially following her divorce from Warner, she she struggled with.
She later wrote a diet book that outlined her struggles with overeating.
Taylor also had a history of smoking regularly, though she cut down significantly following related health problems in the early 1990s.
In addition to interviews with family members who knew Taylor best, the documentary also includes talking heads from other stars, including Sharon Stone and Kim Kardashian, who either witnessed the icon’s celebrity first hand or have lived with the influence of Taylor’s public life.
