When Taylor Swift's album "The Life of a Showgirl" was announced and I read the song title "Elizabeth Taylor", I did not first think of movies, such as "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958), "Suddenly Last Summer" (1959), or "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966). Nor did I think of her many marriages. Instead, I thought of a 1980 Doonesbury collection, "A tad overweight, but violet eyes to die for", a line from a comic on Taylor's 1979 arrival in Washington DC with her husband, Senator John Warner of Virginia. So today, I was amused by beginning of the chorus of Swift's song: "I'd cry my eyes violet, Elizabeth Taylor." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 October 2025)

This is the four-panel comic from Doonesbury in 1979, featuring Congresswoman Lacey Davenport and her husband Dick at a reception for Senator Warner and his wife Elizabeth Taylor. Dick says that “A tad overweight but violet eyes to die for” was a John Warner campaign bumper sticker. — Thanks to an online bookstore for vintage books, I found this image of the back cover of the edition that I had, which features the comic with the line that is the title of the book.

Elizabeth Taylor’s “violet eyes” in “Doonesbury” in 1980 and in Taylor Swift’s song “Elizabeth Taylor” in 2025