by Donald Bogle
In the midst of all those Motown stars—all stars for whom Joe and the rest of the family had the utmost respect—Michael had outshone everyone. “He just stole the show,” Joe Jackson was said to have exclaimed to Katherine as they sat in the audience. At that precise time—when the program aired on May 16, 1983—audiences around the country saw him in an altogether different light. It was a splendidly coordinated, glowingly hypnotic performance in which he had stretched his own artistic boundaries. Even viewers who knew nothing about dance or current popular music or were not necessarily diehard Jackson fans could not turn away from the greatness they witnessed on those boxes with images that sat in their homes. The child entertainer had become as great as, if not greater than, Elvis, Sinatra, the Beatles, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Diana Ross, Sammy Davis Jr., and that forgotten great entertainer of the early twentieth century who could do it all—sing, dance, and act—Ethel Waters. For Michael, the greatest compliment was given the morning after the broadcast. A call came from Fred Astaire who told him, “I watched it last night, and I taped it, and I watched it again this morning. You’re a helluva mover.”
But not everyone was captivated by Michael’s performance. Jehovah’s Witness officials criticized and disapproved of his moonwalking, so he said, accusing him of “doing burlesque dancing and it was dirty.” He was told never to dance like that again.
Chapter 9
* * *
IN EARLY 1954, Sara wrote a series of articles on her daughter for Ladies’ Home Journal. Titled “Elizabeth, My Daughter,” these were no shocking exposes about a spoiled child. Some details of Elizabeth’s early years were embellished. Some details were glossed over. Certainly, Sara would never reveal the deep friction between Francis and herself, nor comment on a period of estrangement from her daughter. But they were a mother’s heartfelt feelings for her child. Sara was crafting a mythology about Elizabeth that ironically enough was based in some ways on a fundamental truth. Elizabeth benefited greatly from a relatively secure childhood with a sound family support system.
No matter what, Sara still and always would love her daughter deeply. Though Sara might not approve of certain aspects of Elizabeth’s life, her daughter still basically could do no wrong. Francis felt the same. So did Howard. In turn, Elizabeth’s deepest emotional connections and commitments were still to her parents, her brother, and now her child. Howard also had become a father himself, and Elizabeth would always have affection for his wife and his family. As for Michael Wilding, she loved him, too, but that love was never as powerful as her feelings for the others. A great love—outside that family unit—was still something she yearned for even if she might not have yet admitted it to herself. In her films, she had been bred on the idea of great loves, and for her, real life should conform to what the movies had led her to believe.
Whether at the studio or at her home, she spoke her mind and had a temper that flared easily. Sometimes growing impatient with Wilding, she also seemed to enjoy, even thrive on, a good domestic quarrel. But Michael wasn’t someone to argue with, since his temper could never match hers. Instead, he had that calm detachment that in her New Year’s resolution she said she hoped to find. Asked about Elizabeth, Wilding said: “What is it like being married to a glamour girl? Well, it’s like visiting the circus: the lions seem something quite terrible to us, but to the trainers who work with them it’s something quite different. Except that Liz isn’t like a lion—a bad simile!” He had said more than he intended. Years later Elizabeth’s personal assistant Tim Mendelson would say with affection that “she had a genius for creating chaos around her.”
Both she and Wilding were also aware that his career had stalled in a terrible way and perhaps permanently. “MGM signed me, brought me over to do The Law and the Lady with Greer Garson and sent me back,” he said. “They suspended me because I wouldn’t do one story [Latin Lovers] and then after that there were no stories and Liz was having the baby and we were finding a house and all that. Then came Torch Song and two in Europe and then they loaned me to Fox for The Egyptian.” Though he had a poetic quality, put to good use in the films Torch Song and The Glass Slipper, with Leslie Caron, he wasn’t star material by Hollywood’s standards. Neither he nor Elizabeth wanted to admit it, but he was always overshadowed by his young wife. Like Hilton, a frustrated Wilding was becoming Mr. Taylor. In some respects, a frustrated Elizabeth felt she was taking care of him.
• • •
Once Elizabeth had returned from Europe—from her would-be vacation and from her work on Beau Brummell—MGM was quick to star her in a film based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s post–World War I story “Babylon Revisited,” which was updated and retitled The Last Time I Saw Paris. Now set in post–World War II Paris, it told the story of an American writer who falls in love with a young American woman whose family has lived in France through the war. She’s spoiled, uninhibited, and rather reckless—and also in delicate health. He’s struggling to hold on to himself and to see his talent flourish. Ultimately, both are derailed by too much money and without the realization, as Fitzgerald believed, that in American lives there are no second acts.
Serious and perceptive with a tough masculine edge, the film’s director Richard Brooks had begun his career as a newspaper writer, then became a novelist, and then with director John Huston cowrote the script for Key Largo. Later he would direct Blackboard Jungle, a story of rebellious high school students that would be important in the career of the young Sidney Poitier; Elmer Gantry, which would bring Burt Lancaster an Oscar; Sweet Bird of Youth; In Cold Blood; and Looking for Mr. Goodbar. He would also direct Elizabeth again in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Though Brooks originally wanted Montgomery Clift for the role of the writer in The Last Time I Saw Paris, the part went to MGM’s Van Johnson. Exteriors were shot in Paris with Johnson. But most of the movie was filmed at MGM, starting in April 1954. Working hard to please its star, MGM redecorated Elizabeth’s dressing room and added a nursery. Again Helen Rose designed a glamorous wardrobe for Elizabeth, and Sydney Guilaroff created simple yet lush hairstyles, including a short poodle cut that became popular. With a script by Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein, and Richard Brooks, The Last Time I Saw Paris was part romantic drama and part ill-conceived attempt to look at a lost generation. Though the film failed to capture Fitzgerald’s world of glittering, doomed young souls, glimmers of Fitzgerald’s tale were there nonetheless, and Elizabeth identified with its immensely desirable but lost, fragile heroine. The film would mark a turning point in her career. Though it would have none of the power or tragic grandeur of A Place in the Sun, The Last Time I Saw Paris would wake Elizabeth from a slumber and make her think again about acting.
One of her most affecting scenes occurred late in the film. After a night on the town, she arrives home in the midst of a heavy snowfall. Dressed in a vivid red gown, designed so dramatically by Helen Rose, she steps out of a cab that then goes off. Delicately, she walks up the steps that lead to the door of her home. When she tries to open the door, the chain inside is still on. From the outside, she can see her husband who, having had too much to drink, has fallen asleep on the staircase. She calls to him but there is no response. Thinking he doesn’t want to see her, she leaves and walks down the driveway of her home as the snow continues to fall heavily. The visual contrast between the fragile beauty in red and the heavy snowfall is sweeping Hollywood romanticism, yet under Brooks’s direction and Taylor’s performance, it works and is moving. “When we were shooting the scene in which she wanders ill through the streets of Paris, I told her I wanted her to look like a drop of red blood against the dirty snow of the streets, and her whole body conveyed just that feeling. She was a natural actress who could use all the elements of her life like a memory bank to call on for the emotions of the role. She didn’t talk about her secrets, but she used them,” recalled Brooks. “Elizabeth felt the story more deeply than anyone else, and she had marvelous imagination.”
“I did enjoy doing The Last Time I Saw Par
is, even though it wasn’t supposed to be a good film,” she said.
• • •
In March, Rhapsody opened to mixed reviews but rhapsodic ones for Elizabeth. “The fact that they found quite a bit of nonsense in Rhapsody did not prevent the New York film critics from enjoying it,” Richard Griffith wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “Elizabeth Taylor was showered with their very best prose, and one gave up the attempt to do justice to her and contented himself with the simple statement that she ‘looked sublime.’ ”
Reviews that focused on Elizabeth’s beauty were nothing new. Reviewers of Elephant Walk and The Girl Who Had Everything often commented on her fabulous face. All the focus on her beauty was often frustrating for Taylor. And in the years to come, she could appear resentful of the fuss about the looks. Yet those discussions of her beauty overlooked and refused to acknowledge the simple fact that beauty on-screen is never just beauty. Any number of sensational looking models, who had glistened and glittered in the pages of glossy fashion magazines, discovered it was an entirely different ball game in movies. It was never the idea of standing still and looking pretty. Beauty on-screen came only when there was a spark, a luminous quality that sprang from inside the actress, revealing or suggesting innermost feelings or her fundamental connection to the role she was playing, the emotion she was conveying. At those times when a movie goddess really had no character to play because of an inadequate script, she had to draw from those innermost feelings or her view of life. It was what a star persona was all about. Garbo languished in her metaphysical despair; Harlow exulted in her jaunty high spirits, her sexy ability to banter with the boys, to tell them off if necessary.
Though Elizabeth often dismissed her movies of this period, they were in many respects gorgeous photoplays that afforded audiences the opportunity of being in the presence of Luscious Liz for a couple of hours, of seeing that spark within her start to sizzle or erupt. Dazzlingly costumed by Helen Rose, she was like a painting or lush piece of sculpture, an image—as George Stevens understood—of unattainable beauty and glamour, of idealized perfection. “When I had someone as beautiful as Elizabeth, and there are very few women that beautiful,” said Rose, “I had to be very careful not to overdress her, to keep everything I did very simplified because it’s like a beautiful jewel. You don’t put it in a very ordinary setting. You’re very careful of the setting, and I had to be very careful because naturally I want to set a fashion trend. But being a costume for a motion picture, I couldn’t set a fashion trend. My job was to keep Elizabeth Taylor looking like Elizabeth Taylor.” But it was never a flat image without blood or warmth, passion or sensitivity, as again Stevens knew. Out of all of cinema’s great goddesses, she appeared the most understanding of the dilemmas of mere mortals, perhaps the warmest and most down-to-earth.
But at this point, she considered her career as “only a way of making money. It was very hard to take any great interest in a career of playing the perennial ingénue.”
Especially distasteful was Beau Brummell, one of the few films in which she seemed unable to connect to what’s going on around her. Movies such as The Big Hangover and Love Is Better Than Ever were forgettable throwaways. Still, she brought to other films an intense romanticism, even a dreamy suggestive melancholia. Also important were the signs of rebellion in these characters—the fire within Elizabeth herself—who were in search of something to give meaning to their lives, and who in such films as Rhapsody and The Girl Who Had Everything were clearly and ironically in conflict with their fathers, which represented the conflict of their own identity.
Emanating from her were a vulnerability, a gentle sensitivity, and sometimes, as in Ivanhoe, an inexplicable melancholia that drew audiences to her. In these films, she was also a troubled beauty. Her young wife or girlfriend characters also displayed flashes of anger, resentment, frustration, and drive that the films did not fully explain. In her opening scene with her aristocratic, social-climbing father (Louis Calhern) in Rhapsody, she announces, just before one of his society luncheons, that she’s leaving his household, that, in essence, she’s tired of living a useless life. At a conservatory where young musicians study and rehearse around the clock to perfect their art, she yearns for the love of a brilliant young violinist played by Vittorio Gassman, who sees her love as clinging, suffocating, and destructive, so much so that he walks out on her. She tells herself that in the future she will not be the one who loves but who is loved. Ultimately, she has a destructive relationship with another brilliant but insecure musician, the pianist played by John Ericson. Then to prove her worth to her former lover, she helps the pianist to rehabilitate himself, learning to stand on his own two feet, but most significant, to respect himself and his talent. In turn, she comes to love the pianist more deeply than she realized.
• • •
Upon completing The Last Time I Saw Paris, Taylor, Wilding, and their son went on another vacation to London, where again they visited his parents.
Once back home, she endured a round of social/professional activities and obligations. Money was very much on her mind. She appeared in advertisements for various products such as LUX soap. She also gave tips for beauty columns. The couple sold their home on Summit Ridge Drive and bought a new eight-room modern showplace at 1375 Beverly Estate Drive in Benedict Canyon. To purchase the new home, Taylor had to go to MGM for a $150,000 loan. She felt humiliated by the way MGM treated her when she asked for the loan, but she also needed money because of something else she had kept secret: she was pregnant again. MGM put her on suspension as it did other female stars during their pregnancies. Still, there were health concerns within the Wilding household. Wilding was plagued by back problems and was briefly hospitalized. In December, the Wildings returned to England: his mother had died; his father was ill, and they eventually brought him to California to stay with them.
• • •
In late February, Elizabeth entered the hospital in Santa Monica where she had—by another cesarean section—her second son, Christopher Edward Wilding, born on her birthday, the twenty-seventh. In newspapers around the country, photographs showed a radiant twenty-three-year-old mother holding her baby. During her first pregnancy, she believed she had gained too much weight. Afterward, it was torture to lose it. She was a tad fuller in her films now, her figure all the more voluptuous and womanly. Watching her weight more carefully during the second pregnancy, she went on a strenuous diet following Christopher’s birth. This was the start, however, of the weight problems that would dog her throughout her life. As she admitted, she also enjoyed a good meal.
Something else important was happening in her life that she immediately saw as a great professional challenge and opportunity. Months earlier she had learned that director George Stevens was set to film—for Warner Bros.—an adaptation of Edna Ferber’s novel Giant, a sprawling generational epic set in Texas. Its heroine, Leslie Benedict, was an independent woman who ages from an eighteen-year-old bride to a matriarch in her fifties. It would star up-and-coming handsome leading man Rock Hudson and a young New York actor about whom there was a buzz in Hollywood—James Dean, who had already completed East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. Elizabeth yearned to play the female lead. But Stevens was set on Grace Kelly.
By now, Kelly had appeared in the critically lauded High Noon and a trio of films directed by Alfred Hitchcock: Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief. Having won the Academy Award for her performance in 1954’s The Country Girl, Kelly was possibly now the leading young actress in Hollywood. Audrey Hepburn also had quite a rise in films, appearing in the role William Wyler originally wanted Elizabeth for in the 1953 Roman Holiday, which won Hepburn an Oscar. What had become of Time’s forecast that she would be the actress of the new era? Taylor became friends with Kelly and Hepburn, each of whom she liked. But she was aware of the irony that despite the success of Kelly and Hepburn and the rise of Marilyn Monroe, she was still America’s most famous young film actress, the one people across
the country were interested in reading about. That irony may also have grated on her.
“I did A Place in the Sun at Paramount, and tried hard in it,” she said. “I felt I had done well and now maybe MGM would give me a break. It gave me a bit of heart, which was soon lost again—lost under a morass of mediocrity. Not just the scripts. I was mediocre, too.” MGM and the other studios, she knew, wasted the careers of any number of stars. It took grit and fight to survive in Hollywood—really a man-governed world. Women such as Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland had battled with their studio, Warner Bros. Marilyn Monroe would eventually fight like mad with her studio, Twentieth Century Fox. But a studio could turn vicious. In the 1930s, the dark-haired Kay Francis—once the highest paid actress in Hollywood and for a time the queen of the lot at Warner Bros.—sought better roles from her studio. In the end, a vindictive Warner Bros. put her in even worse films or used her rarely until finally her contract ended. By then, she was just about finished in films. She ended her film career in B movies. But she returned to the stage.