Peter Darmanin, a Maltese businessman who for a time was close to famous US actress Elizabeth Taylor, expressed his regret at her passing away today, aged 79.
"It is a pity that she has died so young and the time I spent with her was an experience," he said when contacted.
Mr Darmanin came close to Taylor after she broke up from Richard Burton in 1976.
The People magazine had described what happened:
"What began to look like the final act of the marathon Taylor-Burton romance took shape in Gstaad, Switzerland in January. Burton was on a trip and Liz was whiling away the lonely hours at the birthday party of her daughter Maria at the Olden Hotel bar. Across the crowded room she spotted a stranger, Peter Darmanin, 37, a good-looking advertising man from Malta.
"I felt a pair of devastating eyes staring at me as I turned around," Darmanin remembers.
"It was Elizabeth Taylor. She told me she was very happy to see me. I bowed, kissed her hand and told her how happy I was to see her."
Twenty minutes later they were dancing, and that evening Peter moved into Elizabeth's Chalet Ariel for, as he describes it, "five days of wondrous bliss." Then, with his vacation over and his wallet flat, Peter flew back to Malta. Had it really been so romantic, his secretary asked him. "Yes," said Peter, "and the minute I was there I knew I belonged."
The intermission was brief. The dashing Maltese had hardly said hello to his widowed Mum, with whom he lived in Valletta, when the telephone began to ring insistently. Elizabeth was lonesome again, and Burton had gone off to New York to rehearse his role in the Broadway production of Equus.
Although Darmanin was broke, his bank account $2,500 overdrawn and business piling up, he could not resist the siren song. Borrowing another $2,500 from a friend and bringing along a filigree Maltese cross brooch as a gift, he caught the plane back to Gstaad, and soon he and Liz were inseparable.
She didn't like the tiny Maltese cross very much, but she did like the man from Malta. "I really am enjoying myself," Peter told a friend. Then, during a party in his second week at Chalet Ariel, tempers flared, and Liz cracked Peter with her famous 33.19-carat ring, opening a cut in his left eyebrow. "I saw Peter being hit by a half-million-dollar diamond," said Tony Schranz, one of the guests. "It was a silly argument. I really don't know what it was all about."
Dazed and depressed, Peter slunk back to Malta to nurse his wounds (he also was suffering from a bruised right hand, the result, he said, of a bite from one of Liz's dogs).
The press hounded him for intimate details, and offers for his story poured in, including one for more than $50,000. A gentleman to the core, he turned the money down, the magazine said.