The day Elizabeth Taylor kidnapped my daughter

Back in the good old days the Carlyle Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was the hotel for Yankee swells, rich politicians such as JFK, and, of course, upper-class Eurotrash. Both my children were born at a hospital nearby, and both newborns spent their first month of life at the hotel. Alexandra and I would leave our nearby brownstone, which was more upside down, and move to the Carlyle, which was more sideways, thanks to my dad’s generosity. We were given the presidential suite with round-the-clock service and doctor availability galore. While waiting for her brother to be born, my five-year-old Lolly had the run of the hotel and took full advantage, raiding the formal dining room for sweets, demanding funds from the cashier (unsuccessfully) and playing with her toys in the middle of the reception area as the grandees came and went. Then one day she suddenly disappeared.

Alexandra was in bed having just given birth to John Taki, the nanny had needed a private moment, and I was recovering from a night out. Panic stations all round, but doormen on both exits assured us that no one had seen the five-year-old, and a thorough search of the hotel was ordered. With the cops on their way, the mystery was solved when a lift operator remembered that Elizabeth Taylor, appearing in Broadway’s Little Foxes, had picked up the pretty little girl and taken her to her suite so she could play with some other child she and Richard Burton had collected. Some weeks later, at the play’s opening in Washington, I was seated next to the star having been invited by the daughter of Taylor’s then hubby, a US Senator. I told her about the kidnapping of my little girl but the star remembered little.