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