It was the affair heard around the world, when Elizabeth Taylor infamously stole best friend Debbie Reynolds’ husband Eddie Fisher.
The “Singin’ in the Rain” star — who died in 2016 just a day after her daughter Carrie Fisher — was married to the singer while Taylor was wedded to Mike Todd.
It was after Todd’s death in 1958 that things began to go south.
Reynolds’ son, Todd Fisher, opened up about the “Cleopatra” star’s rendezvous with his father and how it made his mother feel to Fox News.
Eddie and Reynolds divorced in 1959, and he subsequently married Taylor just weeks after.
However, the “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” star left him five years later for two-time husband Richard Burton.
“My father left my mother for Elizabeth Taylor,” Todd said. “A lot of people were mad about that.”
“A lot of people were like, ‘So your dad left the good girl for the bad girl.’… Liz made no bones about being the bad girl. She came a long way from ‘National Velvet,’” he continued.
Todd went on: “So when my mother was put in the position of being humiliated by my father… my mother was a classy person.”
The messy situation included Taylor being labeled as a jezebel while the “Any Time” crooner was seen as a man who left his family.
The “Halloweentown” alum was branded as a virtuous victim who was left heartbroken in front of the news cameras.
Photoplay magazine even published a headline in 1958 that read: “Smiling through her tears, Debbie says: I’m still very much in love with Eddie.”
“She never talked my father down to us,” Todd recalled. “She could have given us an earful about Eddie leaving her for Liz. And a lot of it, of course, was in our faces too as children growing up. And this scandal never really went away. To this day, it’s still talked about.”
Despite public shame stemming from the adulterous affair, Reynolds kept her clean image strong.
“What you saw is who she was – she really was apple pie,” he said about his late mom. “There was no dark side to her. I’ve known a lot of people [who] had one image that they portrayed to the public and a different image that was who they really are. But my mother really was that person.”
The AIDS activist and the “Bundle of Joy” starlet squashed their beef in the later decades, even starring in 2001’s “These Old Broads” together.
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