Just when you thought there was nothing new left to be learned about Elizabeth Taylor, along comes this nugget from the column of Liz Smith: "When I was a little girl, my father was abusive when he drank and seemed to like to bat me around a bit," the star has told Barbara Walters in an interview to be broadcast on Oscar night. "But when I left home and had my own child, 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, 67, says she forgave her father ("a very proud, beautiful, dignified man"; in fact the star got her looks from her father, not from her notoriously pushy mother), and Liz Smith speculates that having a drunken father who hit her may explain why Taylor married Nicky Hilton, also known to have been an abusive alcoholic.