'You Haven't Lived Unless You've Known Elizabeth'

Her friends and family had a hard time accepting her death. “She'd come back from the brink so many times. We all expected her to do it again. So in that sense it really was a shock when she didn't,” says her friend and final publicist, Sally Morrison, about Elizabeth Taylor's death, in Los Angeles on March 23. Elizabeth had been in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for six weeks, suffering from complications caused by congestive heart failure, which was first diagnosed in 2004. Hampered throughout her life by a series of health woes—crippling back pain, osteoporosis, respiratory illness, scoliosis, a brain tumor, a stroke, more than 100 hospitalizations—she had valiantly soldiered on through her last years, and had taken to Twitter to reassure her hundreds of thousands of fans that she was still in this world, despite what they might read in the tabloids. “Dear friends, my heart procedure went off perfectly,” she tweeted in October of 2009 after doctors repaired a leaky valve. “It's like having a brand new ticker.”