By Bill O’Driscoll, Reno Gazette-Journal

The eyes.

To an impressionable college intern dispatched to the then-MGM Grand Reno to pursue an Elizabeth Taylor sighting one February night in 1979, it was her eyes that made a first — and lasting — impression.

Elizabeth Taylor died March 23.

That, and a cast with a splint on the 46-year-old actress’s left wrist that glared against her cardinal-red evening pantsuit.

I got within 5 or 6 feet of her before the bodyguards closed in. It was really nothing, I was told, just a fall on ice, somewhere in New York, they thought.

Thirty-two years later, news of Elizabeth Taylor’s death Wednesday at age 79 evoked memories of that encounter at the MGM, now the Grand Sierra Resort, when the diva strolled down the plush corridor lined with photographs of MGM legends, including herself.

Taylor had been to the area before for the 1951 movie “A Place in the Sun” filmed on location at Lake Tahoe and nearby Cascade and Echo lakes.

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