Elizabeth Taylor left her seventh and final husband more than $800,000 in her will and had given him an allowance for years, but he insists he was never a gold digger.
Construction worker Larry Fortensky, who Taylor met in rehab and divorced in 1996, says he kept working during their five-year marriage and never asked for a penny.
“I am a proud man and I like to work. I didn’t want her money,” he told London’s The Mail on Sunday. “I always worked for a living and I carried on when I was with her.”
Fortenksy, 59, is now in poor health following a serious fall and lives as a recluse in a two-bedroom bungalow outside of Los Angeles after a series of “bad investments.”
He walked way from the marriage with a $1 million settlement. In 1999, he suffered a serious head injury from a drunken fall that left him in a coma for six weeks.
Since then he has battled with memory loss and is unable to work.
Fortensky insists he never asked Taylor for help, but when she heard about his injury, she wrote to him and offered him a $1,000 a month.
“Darling Larry. I’ve been thinking of you lately and worry about you,” Taylor wrote in a letter. “I think you could use a little help so I would like to send you a thousand a month for the rest of my life or until I go broke.”
“I accepted it but never asked for it,” he said.
Taylor came to his aid once again when the bank was set to foreclose on an $800,000 house he had bought at the height of the property boom.
“I called and told her about Larry’s troubles,” Fortensky’s sister Donna said. “She sent me a check the next day for around $15,000.”
“Larry found out what I’d done and was mad at me,” she said. “It kept the bank at bay for a while but then he ended up losing the house anyway.”
Fortensky spoke glowingly of his relationship with Taylor – who ԁıеԁ last month at age 79.
“She was funny and sweet and the more I got to know her the sweeter she became,” he said, “Of course she was very pretty and I wasn’t too bad-looking in those days either. We had an instant physical attraction.”
Together, they travelled the world and she lavished him with gifts, but he says they had the most fun together riding his motorcycle.
“She would wear a helmet and no one knew who she was. We could be alone and free,” he said. “Elizabeth loved that. She loved a burger and a beer. She was down-to-earth, or at least as much as she could be for someone who’d been a star since she was a kid.”
But he said the gulf between them was difficult at times.
“Everywhere we went there were cameras. Elizabeth would put on lipstick constantly because she said she never knew when she was being photographed,” he said. “I found it hard. It wasn’t my cup of tea, those cameras everywhere. Elizabeth was used to it. I never got used to it.”
The marriage began to crumble, when Taylor underwent double hip replacement and Fortensky was banished from the master bedroom.
“That was the beginning of the end,” his sister Donna said.
The two remained close throughout the years, Fortensky said, and spoke several times a month until the day before she went to hospital for the last time.
“I thought she was going to be okay. I told her she would outlive me. She said, ‘Larry, I’m going to be okay,'” he said.
When he heard she had ԁıеԁ, he was devastated.
“I was so sure she would get to go home and I would talk to her once again,” he said. “I love her, I always will. And I know she loved me, too.”
