By the time Elizabeth Taylor swept onto the set of The Nanny in February 1996, Daniel Davis had spent three seasons as Niles, the butler with the sharpest tongue on the Upper East Side, and he had watched plenty of famous faces pass through the Sheffield mansion. None of them arrived quite like she did. “And Elizabeth Taylor had an entourage, and she really does have these lavender eyes,” Davis, now 80, told a fan panel at 90s Con in Hartford, Connecticut, on October 17, in remarks first reported by People.
The star herself, he insisted, could not have been nicer. The paperwork that came ahead of her was another matter, because it spelled out a list of requests so specific that Davis can still recite it 30 years later, from the color of the washcloths to a pricey present that had to be waiting in her dressing room.
Why Was Elizabeth Taylor On Four CBS Sitcoms In One Night?
Taylor was not dropping by on a whim. She was launching a new fragrance, Black Pearls, and CBS built an entire evening around her that it called “Taylor-Made Monday.” On February 26, 1996, she turned up in all four of the network’s sitcoms between 8 and 10 p.m., moving from The Nanny to Can’t Hurry Love, Murphy Brown and High Society, with one running storyline about a string of black pearls that kept getting lost and found from one show to the next.
Her stop on The Nanny was the episode “Where’s the Pearls?” Mr. Sheffield invites the screen legend over, and Fran Fine, who can never keep her cool around a celebrity, completely falls apart when she meets her. When Taylor needs her black pearl necklace sent off by courier, Fran insists on taking it herself by taxi, and after a fender bender the pearls are left behind in the cab, which is exactly where the next sitcom picked up the thread.
Fran Drescher, who turned 69 on September 30, remembers a guest who made the whole stage feel at ease. “Elizabeth Taylor was really warm, very generous,” Drescher told Fox News Digital in 2022. That warmth, Davis says, did not always extend to the people she brought along.
What Did Her Team Ask For Before She Arrived?
Davis was careful to keep Taylor herself out of the blame. She “was gracious as she could be,” he told the Hartford crowd. “Charming and gracious and lovely, but her entourage was a little demanding.” Then he started counting off the requirements, beginning with the room she would be using between scenes.
“For example, the dressing room she was in had to be painted lavender,” he said, and the color scheme didn’t stop at the walls. “The towels and the washcloths had to be lavender.” Taylor was famous for those violet eyes, and her team apparently wanted everything around her to match them.
The drinking water came with its own rules too, because Taylor brought her dog. “There had to be two different kinds of water,” Davis recalled, one for the star and one for her pet, “because her water made the dog’s mustache turn brown.” Parade also reported his account of the lavender room and the two kinds of water, and like People, it stressed that Davis pinned the list on her handlers rather than on the woman herself.
Why Couldn’t The Cast Look Her In The Eye?
The strangest line in the contract, according to Davis, told the cast they were “not to look at her eyes.” For a working actor, that is a tall order when your scene partner is Elizabeth Taylor and the whole episode is built around meeting her, and he didn’t say how anyone managed it once the cameras rolled.
He did manage to get a picture with her, though it came at a price. Davis asked for a photo, Taylor agreed, and then he learned a hard copy would cost him $150. “I said, ‘Why?'” he remembered. The answer was that “according [to] her direction, it had to be retouched so she looks like a billion dollars.” He paid, and that photo hangs on his wall to this day.
Davis had a long career of his own before and after Niles. Born in Gurdon, Arkansas, he worked for years on the stage, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a national tour of Coco opposite Katharine Hepburn, and Star Trek fans know him as Professor Moriarty, the holographic villain he played on The Next Generation and later revived on Star Trek: Picard. You can see where he and the rest of the gang ended up in our look at the cast of The Nanny today.
Taylor, by 1996, was a two-time Oscar winner for Butterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and had become as well known for her AIDS fundraising and her jewelry collection as for her films. She died on March 23, 2011, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles at 79, after weeks in the hospital with congestive heart failure, and her four children went on to build very different lives of their own. Fittingly for a woman who loved jewels, the most expensive item on her Nanny rider came from Tiffany’s.
What Was Waiting On Elizabeth Taylor’s Dressing Table?
Before Taylor ever walked in, her contract required a gift from Tiffany’s to be placed on her dressing table, and it had to be worth no less than $5,000. Davis saved that detail for last at the Hartford panel, and People and Parade both reported the same $5,000 floor from his account.
The twist is that the woman it was meant for never got to enjoy it. “But this is the entourage making these demands, not Ms. Taylor at all,” Davis explained. “And then, she never saw the present.” By his account, the present was there as promised, and the guest of honor went home without ever knowing about it.
What Taylor did leave behind was the memory of an afternoon on the Sheffield couch. As Drescher put it, “She sat on the couch on the set and whoever wanted to stand behind her and take a picture with her could. She was very welcoming of everybody.”
