Liz whiz Star-smitten devotee continues to grow his one-of-a-kind collection of all things Taylor By: David Sanderson Posted: 2:00 AM CDT Saturday, Sep. 13, 2025

Fourteen years since its namesake’s death in 2011 at age 79, Passion by Elizabeth Taylor continues to be one of the world’s best-selling perfumes.

The scent was originally created by the English-born screen legend, that’s true, but there is some discourse, at least here in Winnipeg, as to how Taylor arrived at the fragrance’s moniker in the first place.

Retired real estate agent Hannon Bell, 75, has spent the majority of his life collecting anything and everything associated with the two-time Academy Award winner. Through the years, news of his encyclopedic knowledge of Taylor has been documented in dozens of publications, including the National Enquirer, People magazine and the Globe and Mail.

In 1974, Bell had a set of yellow T-shirts printed that read “Hannon’s Passion: Elizabeth Taylor” across the front, combined with a black-and-white image of the star.

Taylor’s publicist eventually got wind of Bell’s design, and sent him a letter stating Taylor was hoping he could mail two of his T-shirts to Europe, where the star was filming A Little Night Music. Bell happily complied, rifling off a size small and a medium.

A little over a decade later, Bell was leafing through a copy of USA Today when he spotted a full-page photograph of Taylor touting a new perfume. The ad showed Taylor dressed in a low-cut gown, flanked by a man in a tuxedo whose face was in silhouette. At the bottom of the page was the tag line, A Man and his Passion.

For years, Bell had been led to believe the fragrance was so-named because of his T-shirt gift. Earlier this summer, however, he stumbled across a recently posted YouTube video that hit him “like a ton of bricks.”

The clip was recorded at a press conference in 1989, shortly after Passion’s release. At one point a reporter asks Taylor about the perfume’s name. It was all her idea, came her response.

“There’s no other way to put it; I was floored,” Bell says, seated in his sun-drenched living room, where a framed portrait of Taylor done by Andy Warhol hangs on the wall behind him.

“Even C. David Heymann, who wrote a book about her (Liz: An Intimate Biography), once told me, ‘Hannon, she got it from you.’ To be clear, this has zero to do with money. It just would have been nice to hear her say publicly while she was alive that she owed a debt of gratitude to a super fan.”

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Bell was 13 years old in 1963 when the blockbuster film Cleopatra, starring Taylor in the title role and Richard Burton as Roman general Marc Antony, opened in movie theatres across North America. He lined up at the downtown Metropolitan Theatre to secure a ticket, not so much because of Taylor — he was only somewhat familiar with her at the time — but rather, because of his budding fascination with Egyptian history. A King Tut exhibit had been staged at the Manitoba legislative building earlier that year, and he attended seven or eight times. That and he’d painted a floor-to-ceiling mural on the walls of his bedroom depicting ancient tombs.

As the 243-minute epic was unfolding on the screen in front of him, however, Bell began to think it was perhaps time to park his interest in all-things-Tutankhamen, in favour of the person portraying the former Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom.

“I mean, I was going through puberty at the time — she was gorgeous, that’s the story, pretty much,” Bell says laughing.

Back then, Bell’s father operated a drugstore, Bell Drugs, at the corner of Smith Street and Graham Avenue. There was a newsstand near the back of the shop, and before long, the teen was scouring entertainment magazines such as Modern Screen and Movieland, in search of photos and articles related to Taylor. Nothing was too small or insignificant.

“If I found something I’d cut it out and put it in a scrapbook, along with any ticket stubs I had from one of her movies,” he says, recalling that he took a high school date to see Reflections in a Golden Eye in 1967, when the psychological drama starring Taylor and Marlon Brando was playing at the Gaiety Theatre on Portage Avenue, directly across from the Bay. (No word if Bell’s gal friend was intimidated by his preoccupation with an individual routinely hailed as the most beautiful woman in the world.)

Bell never halted his collecting ways, not when he moved to Toronto, then New York City, in the early 1970s to study acting, not during his modelling days, and not during his marriage to his wife Lorraine, who died in 2016. He smiles, saying his current partner doesn’t ask too many questions about his pastime. That said, she was pleased a year ago, he admits, when he retrieved 130 or so three-ring binders packed with Taylor ephemera, meticulously sorted into categories such as “films,” “husbands” and “children,” that he had been storing at her place, due to ongoing renovations at his own domicile.

The closest Bell — who also keeps original scripts, official eight-by-10 photos and scads of books and videos — ever came to meeting his heroine was in 1980, when he was invited to the Manhattan office of her press secretary, John Springer. Taylor, who was in the midst of shooting The Little Foxes, had agreed to pop by for a brief visit and to listen to a song Bell had composed in her honour titled The Lavender Lady. Unfortunately, she cancelled at the last minute. However, the get-together wasn’t a complete bust. One of the people present was Maria McKeown (née: Burton), Taylor’s youngest daughter.

Despite being disappointed by Taylor’s Passion comments, Bell isn’t about to host a bonfire. He was at McNally-Robinson Booksellers earlier this month when he spotted a nostalgia magazine about the life and times of Lucille Ball. Aware that Taylor had an association with the comedic actor, he leafed through the publication until he found what he was after. There on page 58 was a shot of the two of them together.

“These days, I don’t ruin a magazine by cutting pictures out of it, what with them being so expensive,” he says, pointing to a $14.99 price tag. “Instead, I usually run to Staples or somewhere, and make a photocopy before filing it away, according to what year it’s from.”

Bell, who was inundated with media requests from all over the world following Taylor’s death, has approached representatives of Guinness World Records, to see if his cache qualifies for their annual publication. Their response: sadly not, as they have nothing to compare it with.

“I suppose that’s true because I’ve never met anybody else who does something similar,” Bell says.

“Though I have received a few gifts from people who’ve read about what I do. One time, a person in Toronto was nice enough to send me a picture she took of Elizabeth Taylor and her dog Sugar while they were out for a walk in the city, where she was doing some promo work.” (File under: “Taylor, pets.”)

As for the monetary value of what he has amassed, Bell borrows a page from his real-estate days, stating it’s whatever the market will bear. It could be worth $1 or it could be worth $1 million, he says, running his hand over a life-size bust of Taylor-as-Cleopatra.

He did consider selling the lot about 20 years ago, with part of the proceeds going to the icon’s charity, the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation which she established in 1991. Except the interested party was only out for portions of what he had, not the whole shebang.

“In the end I just couldn’t do it. To me it would have been like having a Corvette and selling the steering wheel, then the motor, then the fender. I mean, what would I have had left? At this point, it’s probably here to stay.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca