Anne Sebba: How I interviewed Elizabeth Taylor and missed the story

The death of Elizabeth Taylor has reminded Anne Sebba of the two interviews she conducted with the Hollywood star - with mixed results.

“I met her only twice but both occasions were unforgettable,” she recalls. “In 1973, I was a junior reporter for Reuters in Rome and the bureau sent me to doorstep the restaurant where she was having dinner to ask for news of the latest apparently violent split from Richard Burton. Would they make it up? I dressed in my finest and the Maitre D’ allowed me in, while a queue of male reporters was left standing outside. Miraculously, La Taylor then invited me to take a seat on the banquette next to her and was so utterly charming that of course, aged 21, I found my tongue completely tied. How could I possibly ask such a woman whether she was going to kiss and make up? We chatted, I think, about the weather, the food, and the film she was making but not the story that the newspapers wanted. I wafted out of the restaurant mesmerised after my proximity to a legend and of course completely unaware of the rocket I would get from the office the next day for my failure to plunge the knife.”

Ten years later, writing the biography of Enid Bagnold - wife of Reuters chairman Sir Roderick Jones - Sebba went to interview Taylor again, this time to talk about the film in which she shot to fame, National Velvet, as Bagnold had written the book. “Once again I was overwhelmed by her charm and the power of her extraordinary beauty. This time we had a real conversation about how desperately she had wanted the role of Velvet as soon as she had read the book.”

Sebba (née Rubinstein) left Reuters in 1978 for a career as a biographer - Laura Ashley, Mother Teresa, Jennie Churchill - lecturer and journalist. She has written eight books, several short stories and introductions to reprinted novels. Her next book, a biography of Wallis Simpson titled That Woman, is due to be published in August.

PHOTO: Anne Rubinstein, as she then was, in Reuters’ Rome bureau. ■