EXCLUSIVE: Elizabeth Taylor's Best Friend Tells All — Including Hollywood Icon's Loves, Lusts and Search for Happiness

"Big girls need big diamonds," Elizabeth Taylor once said, and they were indeed some of her favorite things.

"My mother says I didn't open my eyes for eight days after I was born but when I did, the first thing I saw was an engagement ring. I was hooked," she winkingly joked of her lifelong weakness for jewelry and husbands.

Behind the glitz and glamour, though, was a much different Taylor who only those in her inner circle truly knew, RadarOnline.com can reveal.

"Fame and beauty were not important at all. She didn't even look at herself in the mirror," Vicky Tiel, Taylor's longtime best friend, said of the larger-than-life actress whose lonely childhood in front of the cameras led her to long for acceptance and companionship in her personal life.

"What was important was having a great meal at a table with 20 people around it and everybody gossiping, everybody happy. If she could have anything, that's what she'd want."

Taylor moved from the U.K. to the States at age 7, when her American parents – father Francis, an art dealer, and mother Sara Sothern, a former actress – fled Europe at the start of the second World War.

"When I arrived in Hollywood, they called me 'little refugee'," Taylor said of feeling ostracized, adding that as a child she'd "always preferred animals to little girls or boys."

J. Randy Taraborrelli, author of the biography Elizabeth, said, "She was always just a little bit different."

By the age of 9, Taylor's captivating looks started landing her film work, all under Sothern's watchful eye.

"My father had made my mother quit the stage when she was 29, and she lived her life vicariously through me," Taylor explained.

While she enjoyed performing, the pressures were great.

"I paid the bills [from] the minute I started working," she said, confessing to Barbara Walters in 1999 that her financial success was so hard for Francis to accept that he'd sometimes "bat me around a bit" when he drank.

"When I left home and had my own child," she said, "I started thinking about my father and how it must have felt for him to have his 9-year-old daughter making more money than he was."

Taylor shot to stardom at age 12 with 1944's National Velvet, and her fame brought more work demands in the coming years, leaving little time for fun.

"I wasn't allowed to date. As a result, I had no real inner self-confidence," said Taylor, who tried to spread her wings by marrying hotel heir Conrad "Nicky" Hilton at the age of 18.

"I left home as soon as I could. When I had to swear in front of the archbishop to be a good wife, I had my fingers crossed behind my back because I didn't know. I was still a child."

Their 1950 marriage lasted less than a year and sent Taylor off on a desperate lifelong search for love and happiness that would find her marrying eight times, twice to Richard Burton.

It was shortly after her first marriage to the actor that he introduced her to Tiel, the designer of the miniskirt, after Taylor admired her innovative new fashion in Paris.

"He said, 'Can you please make a dress for her like that,'" Tiel recalled. "So I measured her, and we became best friends. We were family."

The 1960s were a heady time for Taylor. She'd always longed for companionship, and she surrounded herself with friends. "Elizabeth wanted people around, and she got them. She invented the entourage," said Tiel.

"At times there were 12 of us all hanging out together," she added of the fun-filled girl talk and Scrabble sessions the actress adored.

Taylor seemed to be making up for the free-spirited teen years she never got to experience. "Maybe a half-hour conversation would be, 'Where are we going to eat?'" Tiel recalls with a laugh, adding that with Taylor's bank account, the sky was the limit. "We'd be in France and we'd have food flown in from England because Elizabeth had to have shepherd's pie."

The joy of those around her was paramount to the star. "She was interested in equality," Tiel said. "She had a black personal assistant – Robert Wilson – and he went everywhere with her. That was unusual for the '60s, and she would make sure movie stars had to sit next to him at lunch."

Her driver, Gaston Sanz, was a former karate champion. "He was this tiny guy with big muscles – not sophisticated. She would have him sit next to Princess Margaret because Elizabeth liked the grand people to mix with the regular people."

Her passionate, albeit tumultuous, romance with Wilson had a lot to do with her happiness. The two fell in love on the set of 1963's Cleopatra and wed in 1964, when Taylor was 32, and costarred 11 times on the big screen during their relationship. Having divorced in 1974, the duo remarried in 1975 for nine months.

In the time they were together, Taylor was on top of the world. She was one of Hollywood's biggest stars after winning her second Oscar – for 1966's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – and she'd finally found the man who completed her.

"Richard was a real man, and he treated Taylor beautifully. To see them together, you couldn't find a match like them," said photographer Gianni Bozzacchi, author of My Life in Focus: A Photographer's Journey With Elizabeth Taylor and the Hollywood Jet Set. And even though their fairy-tale romance ultimately came to an end when Taylor was 44, she never got over him.

"When I visited Elizabeth years later in Bel Air, there was a platform around her bed with [photos in] antique silver frames," said Tiel. "They were all of her and Richard."

Still, Taylor found solace in her three children, Liza Todd Burton, Christopher Wilding and Michael Wilding Jr. She fought selflessly to give them and her 10 grandkids a normal life out of the spotlight.

She also worked hard to give back.

"She became impassioned about activism," granddaughter Laela Wilding said. "I can't think of anything more inspiring than our grandmother's compassion and determination for other people."

The former lost soul, finally fulfilled, chose to focus on helping others whom she saw as underdogs. "Elizabeth turned her hand to fighting AIDS. She was ahead of her time, and we were both on the board of the first AIDS organization," famed columnist Liz Smith said of her friend's advocacy, which started in the '80s and continued to thrive up until Taylor's death at the age of 79 in 2011.

Adds Taraborrelli, "She realized the biggest difference she could make was to use her name and stardom for something bigger and better – for the world, rather than just for herself."

In the end, the lost little girl had grown to be one of the most confident and unforgettable women that ever lived. "Follow your passion, follow your heart," Taylor said, "and the things you need will come."