Elizabeth Taylor’s Assistant of 20 Years Shares Her Beauty Secrets: ‘She Was the Real Deal’ (EXCLUSIVE)
See why the late Hollywood star's executive assistant calls her 'the best friend I've ever had'
Elizabeth Taylor was one of the most captivating stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, and over a decade after her death, her singular glamour lives on. Given her legendary life, it’s easy to believe she might have been intimidating and untouchable, but Tim Mendelson, her executive assistant from the early ’90s until her passing in 2011 and the co-trustee of her estate, got to know her as a deeply empathetic and surprisingly grounded presence.
“I don’t know about past lives and reincarnation, but Elizabeth and I certainly had a very strong bond,” Mendelson says, and in his long working relationship he witnessed both Taylor’s charitable spirit and her love of the finer things in life firsthand.
It’s rare to hear about a celebrity and an assistant having such a close and enduring partnership, but Mendelson speaks of Taylor with genuine admiration, and it’s clear that they shared a powerful connection.
Tim Mendelson sat down with Woman’s World to share his fascinating journey with Elizabeth Taylor, along with some of her beauty, style and gift-giving secrets.
Woman’s World: How did you start working with Elizabeth Taylor?
Tim Mendelson: In 1984, I got a job with Nolan Miller, who was the costume designer on Dynasty. I was the shopper, so my whole job was going out and getting fabrics for these amazing clothes. He worked with a lot of movie stars from the Golden Age. Barbara Stanwyck was his best friend, and I used to drive her to the doctor. I was just a kid. I was 19 years old, and I was friends with Melissa Rivers and her mom, Joan Rivers, offered to call and help get me this job out of the goodness of her heart. I didn’t even know her.
Nolan made some clothes for Elizabeth during that time, but I didn’t meet her then. I went back to college, and somebody I was working with at Nolan’s went to work for Elizabeth full-time, and she needed help there. I was trying to have a career in film, so I was a production assistant, but I kept going up there when they needed me, and then they finally called me to go on the White Diamonds perfume tour. It was the month before she married Larry Fortensky at Michael Jackson’s ranch in 1991. I ended up going and helping with the wedding, which was this wild experience.
I stayed because they needed help, and the woman who had brought me there from Nolan’s knew me. It just started out as folding sweaters and hanging pictures and doing little things like that, but there was some trust there. Eventually, I started to have a relationship with Larry, Elizabeth’s husband, and then with Elizabeth. She told me she was observing me from the beginning.
It took a little time, but after a year and a half, she called me to her room and said she wanted me to be her secretary. To me, a secretary was this old-school thing, like Mad Men, but Elizabeth was like, “I don’t think you understand. You know how to get stuff done. I need somebody who can get stuff done.” I argued with her for a little while. Eventually, she said, “You know what? You’re going to take the job.” I was really young, probably around 26, and she was a big deal.
WW: What was your relationship with her like?
TM: She took care of me and protected me. It wasn’t a totally smooth path throughout and we had some tough times between us, but we were dedicated to each other. In the end, she was the best friend I’ve ever had, and she told me that I was her best friend and how much she relied on me. She was a very guarded person because so many people had taken advantage of her and everybody wanted something from her.
She shared the responsibility of her day-to-day life with me. I had access to her extraordinary jewelry collection. She was endlessly entertaining and endlessly interesting, and she was a beautiful person. She was doing this phenomenal work in the fight against AIDS and from the beginning, she was such an ally to the gay community. I’m gay, and we were so alone back then. She stepped into it and really took responsibility when she started AmFAR and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. She really was a person who gave of herself. She was a great woman to work for, and she’d been through a lot.
I didn’t really think about the fact that she was the pinnacle and I didn’t think about other celebrities as competition, but I understand now that she was unique. Enough people have told me now that she was just the real deal and a lot of people are faking it.
She said what an important job this was. I was like “I’m going to fail and then you’re going to fire me.” She said, “You’re not going to fail and I’m not going to fire you.” That was in 1993 and she died in 2011. She went through a lot of changes, and I grew up with her.
WW: Elizabeth was always an icon of glamour. What was her approach to fashion?
TM: She loved clothes, but she had an absolute passion for jewelry. With her jewelry, a lot of the value was in who gave it to her. When I saw her jewelry, I thought it looked like the stuff from Dynasty, but over time, I learned about the importance of these pieces and what they actually meant. She lived like a queen.
She had worked with costume designers from the time she was a teenager, with Helen Rose and with Edith Head on A Place in the Sun. The white dress she wore in that movie became one of the most copied dresses of the ’50s. These incredible women were like second mothers to her, so she had a great connection to fashion.
She was also very dear friends with Halston and helped discover Valentino when she was doing Cleopatra in Rome. She had relationships with a lot of different designers. She didn’t worship fashion, but she utilized fashion. There wasn’t a time that we left the house, no matter what it was for, where we didn’t coordinate the jewelry and the clothes and the handbag and the shoes.
She loved to shop. We mostly had clothes come to the house, and she didn’t really use stylists. I helped her and I knew something about it, but she really knew what she was doing from a young age, and she was willing to take risks. She loved color and knew what assets to show off, and she always had fun with fashion.
WW: Did Elizabeth have any interesting beauty tricks?
TM: She would do her makeup and then at the end, she would take a bath for the steam. Somehow the steam would set her makeup. She also said that women should wear less makeup as they get older, and she put Earl Grey tea bags under her eyes to help with bags.
She did her own eyebrows, and she had iconic eyebrows. Her brow shape was amazing, but it didn’t even occur to me back then how interesting it was that she did them on her own. Now there are all these different celebrity eyebrow artists. Early on, she showed me how to mix the color, and she’d do it all herself. No one ever touched her brows.
She generally did her own makeup, and she loved doing it. She was trained by the best people. Somebody who worked for Nolan Miller after me recently told me that when he met Elizabeth, she basically taught him how to build a dress from the inside out, because she knew a lot from back in the day when she worked with amazing craftspeople. She always said that she would have been a hairdresser if she wasn’t a movie star. She liked cutting people’s hair and sometimes cut her own hair too. It was all fun to her.
WW: Given Elizabeth’s love of shopping, what was her gift-giving philosophy?
TM: In the 20 years that I worked for her, with the exception of once or twice when she was in the hospital and I couldn’t talk to her, she chose every gift she ever gave. She had a very big family and a group of close friends and was extremely thoughtful in her gift-giving. She was very grateful for her privilege in being a movie star, and she wanted to be able to share a little bit of that luxury with people.
With women, she gave a lot of jewelry, cashmere sweaters and handbags, mostly from luxury brands. She liked Hermes and Valentino and for men, we shopped at Zegna and Gucci. For Christmas, it was hard because there were so many gifts all at once. When she bought a gift for somebody, she wouldn’t just grab things. She would always think about the colors and style that people liked, and there always had to be a connection. I don’t think we ever bought somebody a candle or a coffee table book. Those things can be great, but they would never fly with her.
WW: Which of Elizabeth’s movies was her favorite?
TM: Her favorite film was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She was in her 30s playing someone much older. They originally wanted Bette Davis in the role. It was so against type, and she won the Oscar for Best Actress. She really went for it, and it was the performance that she was the most proud of. That film changed Hollywood.
Elizabeth’s tabloid fame has really overshadowed the amount that she accomplished as a Hollywood person. Hopefully, over time, her legacy will reveal itself more and people will forget about the tabloid stuff and start to understand her true contribution going from a contract player as a child actress to growing up through the studio system to doing Cleopatra and being the highest paid star at that time.
WW: What are your favorite movies of hers?
TM: There are three films that I really see her in: National Velvet, Giant and Cleopatra. I didn’t really spend a lot of time watching her movies because I was with her so much, and it was my job. At the end of the day, I’d go to the grocery store and see her on the tabloid covers and then I’d turn on the TV and see her. It was a lot.
For our brand, House of Taylor, we have five core values: Courage, compassion, conviction, confidence and celebration, and they’re all in National Velvet. I was really surprised by how much the best part of Elizabeth is in that little girl.
Giant also shows the best part of Elizabeth, and the film deals with racism, health inequity, economics and politics. There’s a lot of feminist stuff too. I didn’t see Cleopatra until after she passed. I finally saw it when they had a 50th-anniversary screening in 2013 at Cannes. I was surprised because Elizabeth held onto that Cleopatra vibe too.
WW: Elizabeth had a larger-than-life persona. What do you think were the biggest misconceptions around her?
TM: I think her fans get her. They get her spirit and how special she was, so I can’t say that no one understands her the way that I did. I’ve learned from her fans because I was so close to her that sometimes I didn’t have a perspective. Those 20 years were a tornado and I’m still learning things from her that I couldn’t learn at the time, because of that closeness.
She wasn’t snobby at all. She wasn’t judgmental. She didn’t take what she had for granted. There’s a misconception around her marriages that she just couldn’t make a marriage work, but she went into every one of those marriages believing it was forever. She really, truly believed in love, and she really wanted to be a wife. That was the role she wanted above all else. Her own mother gave up her career as an actress to be a mother and a wife, and I think deep down Elizabeth felt like she needed a man who was going to be strong enough.
Elizabeth’s strength came from her femininity. She was maternal and empress-like, but she was little girl-like as well. She enjoyed playing, and she held onto that childlike sense of wonder about things. Even with her own jewelry that she’d had for decades, she still got excited to see it. Most people get jaded, and they take things for granted, but she wasn’t like that.
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