Elizabeth Taylor Found Her Life Dictated by Republican Wives' Rules During Her Marriage to Senator John Warner
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Elizabeth Taylor’s life as a politician’s wife in Washington, D.C. is often remembered for the wardrobe rules she was supposed to follow. She was married to Senator John Warner of Virginia from 1976 to 1982, and her style was often dictated by others — out with her favorite color purple and in with the tweed and plaid.
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But Taylor’s identity was lost beyond what she was required to wear at official political events. As a Democrat who had a passion for service, the actress was incredibly “underutilized” at the time of her marriage to the GOP senator. Kate Andersen Brower, author of Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon, explains to SheKnows how the unwritten Republican wives’ rules almost made her disappear completely.
“We have never had a celebrity of her magnitude married to a U.S. Senator. She was so underutilized, and she had this pent-up reserve of passion for social issues and political activism, and she couldn’t actually do it.” She explains. “People around John Warner told her they didn’t want her to wear the color purple and that she should cover up more, and all of these ridiculous things.”
Taylor was expected to follow the antiquated Washington, D.C. idea that “spouses are to be seen and not heard.” As one of the most famous women in the world and someone with a very accomplished career, Brower notes that the conservative climate didn’t “make room for spouses to be politically active” in a space where Taylor could have been very effective.
Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon
She believes that Taylor “would have enjoyed being a first lady who was really politically active, kind of a pre-Hillary Clinton era.” It was a missed opportunity for Taylor, Warner, and everyone in the GOP who was trying to hold her back — and that resistance to Taylor’s stardom became one of the “final straws in her marriage” to Warner.
After President Ronald Reagan’s assassination attempt in 1981, Taylor rallied around gun control, so she told Warner that she was going to take an ad out in national newspapers and have some of her famous friends sign it. As a Republican, her husband was obviously against the idea, but Taylor did it anyway. It became the turning point for her where she refused to “let any man, even though she was love crazy, dictate the terms of her life.” After years of living under Warner and the Republicans’ rules, Taylor was ready to “live on her own terms.”
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