Elizabeth Taylor Once Forgot Her Iconic 33 Carat Krupp Diamond in a Hotel Room
"She wasn't shy about traveling with her jewels."
The Gist
- Elizabeth Taylor frequently traveled with her jewelry and once forgot her iconic Krupp Diamond in a hotel room.
- The 33 carat diamond was a gift from her former husband Richard Burton.
- The Krupp Diamond was later renamed the Elizabeth Taylor Diamond following her death in 2011.
Elizabeth Taylor needs no introduction, and neither do her diamonds. Case in point? The Elizabeth Taylor Diamond, renamed after her death in 2011. Originally called the Krupp Diamond, the ring weighed a whopping 33 carats and never left Taylor's side—until, that is, she left it in a hotel room. Former executive assistant Tim Mendelson recalled the shocking mistake in an interview with People.
"I was sitting at the table next to her. She was sitting next to the artist, Robert Rauschenberg, and she tapped me on the shoulder," he told the publication. "She said, 'Come close.' And she whispered my ear, 'I left the Krupp Diamond.'"
"She said, 'Don't tell anyone. Take Moshe,' who was her head of security at the time," he continued. "We went in a speedboat back to the hotel. I walked into the suite and we had told them they could clean. So there was this whole cleaning crew in this massive suite and people were vacuuming and all this stuff."
"In the bathroom, the diamond is just sitting there. I grabbed it and put it in my pocket and went back to give it to her," he concluded. "It's so crazy, but I think she was protected. She had such an amazing spirit and such courage, but she was protected."
Taylor's former husband Richard Burton gifted the Raintree County actress the diamond in 1968. The duo initially connected on the set of Cleopatra. As legend has it, Burton walked up to Taylor on the first day of filming and whispered, “Has anybody ever told you that you’re a very pretty girl?” They were married on March 15, 1964, divorced in 1974, remarried in 1975, and divorced for good in 1976.
"The first day on the set, he was hungover and very vulnerable and his hands were shaking," Taylor later recalled. "He asked me to hold a coffee cup up to his lips, and I was gone.”
