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A Hollywood legend and her days in fairfield
She was gorgeous, kind, talented, and in 1947 at the age of 15, Elizabeth Taylor visited with her Uncle Jack Taylor and Aunt “Chubby” in Fairfield. There, she fished for crabs with a neighboring teenager on Pine Creek, an estuary that flows into Long Island Sound.
I was then known as Lois Bischoff, who, at 19, lived with my parents two houses away from Uncle Jack. We spotted Elizabeth and a neighbor in Uncle Jack’s old wooden rowboat, poling along at low tide with a net in hand, catching Blue Point crabs. I grabbed my Kodak box camera and asked if I could photograph E.T. She graciously agreed, taking off a bandana she wore to keep the sun from streaking her lush black hair—she had a photo-op in NYC the following day. An animal lover, she informed me that she had no intention of eating the poor crabs and would release them by and by. She was fun and very unaffected for a person who had already won wide acclaim for her role in National Velvet a few years earlier. E.T.’s visits to Uncle Jack were fairly frequent in her younger years.
Jack Taylor was a retired art dealer who lived in a handsome apple-green home amidst the summer colony on Old Dam Road. He drove an antique “woody” station wagon and his house had a Tom Sawyer wooden dock from which he and Chubby fished. He could be found daily working with flowers or putzing around the yard.
When his health declined, Uncle Jack went to Carolton Convalescent Home on Mill Plain Road, where he died on June 5, 1994, at the age of 100. During his stay, Elizabeth visited him and sent notes and gifts—remembering the staff with large bottles of her perfume.
Interestingly, in 1992, a Fairfield builder bought the Jack Taylor estate, tore down the house, and built three large colonials on the site. As a realtor with Coldwell Banker, I had the pleasure of selling the first house for what was then a healthy price of $344,500. Today, even in this economy, the house is valued at over $1 million—leading me to suspect that whatever E.T. touched, turned to gold.
The photographs are available for purchase: lois.smith@cbmoves.com
