She described herself as being too selfish and ambitious to have children. Yet she surrendered all to him--of her own volition. In various passages from her autobiography, Hepburn, the daughter of a suffragist and birth-control crusader, sounds disconcertingly unliberated: "We passed 27 years together in what was to me absolute bliss. It is called love. I could never have left him. I wanted to protect him. I struggled to change all the qualities I felt he didn't like. I was his." And then there is this startling admission: "I have no idea how Spence felt about me. He wouldn't talk about it."

EDWARD AND MRS. SIMPSON
The Prince and the twice-married American met in 1931, and within four years, the rest was rapidly becoming history. Their romance shook the British Empire, rocked the Church of England, changed the succession and foretold the dissolution of the power of royalty. He made a radio broadcast, one of the most famous public declarations of love in history: "I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love."

But what a strange kind of love it was. His letters to her reveal a Peter Pan with urgent needs for a dynamic, motherly woman. He pleaded for her love like an infant; she lectured back on behavior and "being your best." Theirs was a mother-son relationship, "psychical rather than sexual," wrote Winston Churchill. But to the Prince, the financially beset social climber was "the perfect woman." And David, as Wallis always called the man who would not be King, insisted to the end that they had never been lovers before they married.

This "fairy tale" disintegrated into a cafe-society postscript. Living in exile in France, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as they were officially styled, benefited from air fares and hotel suites paid for by nouveau riche hosts. They decorated the best nightclubs, the Duke always looking a bit bewildered. (There is a photo of them at El Morocco wearing matching paper crowns.) When the Duke died in 1972, he left Wallis 3 million [pounds] and a small tribe of pugs. She lived into a sad senility.

ELIZABETH TAYLOR AND RICHARD BURTON
"Her breasts would topple empires before they withered...she was the most sullen, uncommunicative and beautiful woman I had ever seen," said Richard Burton in 1953 of his first look at Elizabeth Taylor. Nine years later, while married to others, he and she began a relationship that enraged the Vatican and caused the gainful employment of hundreds of paparazzi. On the set of "Cleopatra," what Liz and Dick called le scandale just went on and on. The public saw them in bathing dishabille, in drunken brawls and other feats of extreme behavior.

And they embarked on a life of extremes after he divorced and she divorced to marry each other. There were furs, dogs, yachts, incredible cars, houses, gigantic jewelry. But there was also an intensity that resulted in bantering and not-so-bantering insults. They likened themselves to "a pair of scissors" or, as Taylor put it, "chicken feathers to tar." Yet she admired and studied his skills at Shakespeare, poetry and literature, and he loved her ability to keep up with him--in everything. But booze, gross amounts of it, did in the marriage. In 1973 they split. Miserable apart, they remarried in 1975, only to break up in four months.

When he died in 1984, she was barred from the funeral by the last Mrs. Burton. Elizabeth nonetheless received the most condolences. Today she says Richard was "one of the two great loves of my life." The other was Mike Todd, who died in a plane crash. But most of her friends know that Burton was the man she fought hardest to keep--and the man she would probably have tried to win back again had he lived.

Liz Smith's syndicated column appears daily in more than 60 newspapers across the U.S.

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