Elizabeth Taylor's Emotional Secret Visit to Rock Hudson Before He Died - People Magazine
Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor became close friends (and drinking buddies) after they starred together in Giant in 1956, but they grew even closer in the final months of Hudson's life after he was diagnosed with AIDS. On one memorable Sunday visit, in the summer of 1985, Taylor made a secret visit to UCLA Medical Center with Hudson's doctor, Michael Gottlieb, the immunologist who identified AIDS as a new disease in 1981. "I drove her up in my rickety Dodge... "We slipped in one of the back freight doors on the shipping dock to avoid being seen," he recalls. "Elizabeth was dressed to the nines, totally together," notes Gottlieb. They rode up to his tenth-floor room in a steel-walled freight elevator. "She had hit the wall of the elevator with a large diamond, the Krupp diamond," he says. "There we were with no security, sneaking in the back door of a hospital. " Afterwards, he says, "Rock was very glad to have seen her. After Hudson's death on Oct. 2, 1985, Taylor planned a memorial at his Beverly Hills home with mariachis and margaritas. "She did a beautiful job," says Wallace Sheft, Hudson's business manager who later worked with Taylor. Source: www.people.com
