"Only Eddie Fisher, as a boyhood friend of the frantic playgirl, seems like something dragged in from left field."

"He plays a music writer who lives in a dark room in Greenwich Village and acts as if he wishes they would all go away and leave him alone."

From the 1960 NYT review — by Bosley Crowther — of "Butterfield 8," the movie Elizabeth Taylor won an Oscar for playing "the slut of all times" in. Fast-forward to 2010 and Eddie's dead.

When Eddie Fisher's best friend, producer Mike Todd, was killed in a 1958 plane crash, Fisher comforted the widow, Elizabeth Taylor. Amid sensationalist headlines, Fisher divorced Reynolds and married Taylor in 1959.

The Fisher-Taylor marriage lasted only five years. She fell in love with co-star Richard Burton during the Rome filming of "Cleopatra," divorced Fisher and married Burton in one of the great entertainment world scandals of the 20th century.

Fisher's career never recovered from the notoriety.

Eddie, like Todd and Burton, is now dead. He made it to 82. What did he do after Liz? Did anyone pay attention to anything other than Liz? Even now, the old man finally gone, we hear of his death, and we think — don't we? — of the goddess Elizabeth Taylor.