Elizabeth Taylor walking into a room

Slate's Emily Yoffe remembers the actress walking into Ivy at the Shore in Santa Monica around 1990 or so.

I was living in Los Angeles at the time and had lunch there with friends occasionally and it was perfectly normal for us to say, sotto voce, "Bruce Willis just sat at the table at your right." What you never did was obviously turn your head or openly look at the celebrities. Then Elizabeth Taylor came in for lunch. She was in her brief blond phase and she was escorted by her demi-celebrity hairdresser, Jose Eber. When Taylor arrived, everyone in the place dropped the pretense of being too sophisticated to stare. All conversation stopped, forks stayed poised mid-air, and everyone's eyes bore through Taylor. I was seated with an agent who said she'd never seen people act like this. Remarkably, this was long past the time Taylor was an active star or was regularly appearing in movies. But she had an enduring power to reduce everyone to a stunned fan.