Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Hello and welcome to part three of our coverage of Elizabeth Taylor.

When we left her, Elizabeth had just ended the seventh marriage to the sixth husband.

We had talked about her sustained rise as an actress, about her many awards.

She's at this point, won two Academy Awards, won for Butterfield 8, and another won six years later for who's afraid of Virginia Welfth.

She's had more illnesses and hospitalizations than either you or I can count.

She's also helped destigmatize recovery when she admitted herself into the Betty Ford Center for addiction to pills and alcohol.

So Elizabeth Taylor was just coming out of her treatment at the Betty Ford Clinic. The year was 1985, and there was a terrible volcano brewing in the gay community.

A mysterious virus that no one understood, and it had no cure.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose name was Anthony Fauci, wrote a memo warning of this plague's transmissibility in danger.

And his warning was dismissed as fear mongering and, and I quote, to alarmist.

So if you think history does not echo, get your time machine and go back to 1985.

Elizabeth Taylor saw friends and coworkers start to fall prey to this disease.

But instead of compassion and concern, society began to shun the victims to stigmatize them. This must be payback for quote their lifestyle.

Elizabeth had come out of treatment sort of revitalized. You know how you sometimes just have motivation, just bubbling over and most of us clean a closet, or we might paint something.

But Elizabeth was approached by the organizers of a major AIDS benefit called the age project Los Angeles commitment to life. And she was asked to attach her name to this event.

Well, she had worked with a couple of the organizers, one of whom later said there are three draws in this world, the Pope, the Queen of England and Elizabeth Taylor.

What she said was I couldn't just sit back and watch this terrible sickness takes so many of my friends without wondering if there's something I could do. So I couldn't imagine what that would be.

You know, she had wanted to retire to come out of the Betty Ford and just step back into the shadows and have a private life at last.

Like she's, if you think about it, the last time she had a private life, she was in the little Tweety bird house of little swallows with her horse and the birds.

And that was a mighty, mighty long time ago, but the world was absolutely not going to let her do that.

All right, then she said, if you're going to treat me as a commodity, if you're going to harvest my life for print inches and your newspaper and magazine, then how about I use you for a change and do some good with this fame.

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