Johnny Carson had spent years asking Elizabeth Taylor onto “The Tonight Show.” On Feb. 21, 1992, she finally took the guest chair between Carson and Ed McMahon, in a black leather jacket, with his retirement only a few months away.
“Three and a half months to go and we finally got you here,” Carson told her, as Showbiz Cheat Sheet recounted in a 2022 look back at the night.
She hadn’t come to promote a thing. “I’m not plugging anything. I have nothing to sell,” she said. “I really wanted to come on the show and thank you for 30 years of brilliant entertainment.”
About 10 minutes in, Carson turned to Michael Jackson. The previous October, Taylor had married Larry Fortensky at Michael’s Neverland Ranch, and Carson hadn’t forgotten the scene. “Tell me about your friendship with Michael Jackson,” he said. “It’s intriguing because you seem to come from different worlds.” He reminded her that “they had 22 helicopters overhead” and “people parachuting in.”
Taylor skipped right past the wedding and talked about Michael. “We became friends and he’s like my brother,” she said. “There actually is a lot of similarity between Michael and myself. We’re both from show business, show business children, we started very young, had no childhood to speak of.”
She mentioned “the loneliness of that,” then moved on to the lighter things they shared. “He loves animals, I love animals, we’re both shy,” she said. “We can talk to each other on so many different levels.”
Listen for Carson’s question about the helicopters. Her answer about Michael starts right after it, and the story about the film he kept bringing up isn’t far behind.
Elizabeth Taylor’s only “Tonight Show” visit, in full
This is the full 17-minute appearance from the official Johnny Carson channel. Carson asks about Michael at about 10:13, and Taylor tells the movie story at about 11:19.
Next she described the way Michael takes in the world around him. “Michael is like litmus paper, he’s like blotting paper, he just soaks up everything and he’s so curious,” she said.
That curiosity had a funny side. One of her films had stuck with him, and he kept bringing it up. It wasn’t one of the roles that made her a legend.
“Until about two months ago he kept saying to me, oh God, I just loved your performance in Jane Eyre,” Taylor told Carson. “And I say, Jane Eyre, I was 11 years old, you know, Michael, I have grown up.”
“Jane Eyre” is the 1943 film with Joan Fontaine in the title role and Orson Welles as Mr. Rochester. Taylor was a child when she made it. By the time Michael was raving about it, she had already won two Best Actress Oscars, and he was still praising the little girl.
Then he caught up with her. “He finally saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and I was like very impressed and I said thank you Michael,” she said.
That 1966 drama, with Richard Burton, won Taylor her second Academy Award for Best Actress. After all the talk about a part she played as a girl, Michael had finally seen her on screen as a grown woman.
A minute later, Carson steered her to Louis B. Mayer and her early studio years. Three months after her visit, on May 22, 1992, Carson said goodnight on “The Tonight Show” for the last time. Taylor never sat in his guest chair again.