by Donald Bogle
Always living high on the hog, Todd went through millions and was known sometimes as a hustler, even at times a con man. He always seemed like a man on the make, eager not only to mount one show-stopping production after another but also to be a part of the upper echelons of society. Self-educated, he became conversant on any number of subjects, including art, poetry, and other cultural matters. Though he didn’t have a depth of knowledge, he had a true appreciation for art, which he shared as he joyously mingled with the rich and the famous, the movers and shakers of New York.
Todd also had two failed marriages. His first was to Bertha Freshman, a young love whom he soon outgrew. His wandering eye was always falling on one show biz beauty or another. He had a steamy affair with Gypsy Rose Lee and was also involved with Marlene Dietrich, to name only a couple of the women he fascinated. But when he tried to divorce Bertha, she flatly refused. Then she died of a collapsed lung while being operated on for a damaged tendon in her finger. In 1947, he married actress Joan Blondell. They divorced three years later. Afterward, Blondell didn’t even want to hear his name. She said he had spent all her money.
Now Todd set out to conquer Hollywood with Around the World in 80 Days. His primary stars were David Niven, newcomer Shirley MacLaine, and Mexican actor Cantinflas. To ensure a large audience for the film, Todd persuaded a gallery of stars—Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton, Red Skelton, Jose Greco, and John Gielgud—to accept small roles, or cameos. Because he couldn’t pay them, he offered instead perhaps a painting by Picasso or a Rolls-Royce. He was such a salesman that they accepted. He also developed Todd-AO, which was a new widescreen process. Everything about Around the World in 80 Days would be lavish and spectacular.
While working on the film, Todd became involved with actress Evelyn Keyes, best known for playing one of Scarlett O’Hara’s sisters in Gone With the Wind. Sophisticated and highly intelligent, Keyes had been married to director John Huston. She knew her way around Hollywood and intellectual circles. But she had no idea what Todd was soon up to. Hearing rumors of McClory’s affair with Taylor—the two had been spotted around town and even attended the opening of Moby Dick together—Todd requested that McClory introduce him. McClory assumed it was perhaps to get her involved in a project. But Todd had other things on his mind.
The Wildings were invited for an afternoon on Todd’s rented yacht along with Evelyn Keyes, Elizabeth’s agent Kurt Frings, and his wife, playwright Ketti Frings, Kevin McClory and others. A few weeks later Todd invited the Wildings, along with about two hundred additional people, including Evelyn Keyes, to a dinner he gave for the prominent broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow at a rented Hollywood mansion. On that evening, like so many others, every eye in the room was on Elizabeth, who, said Ruth Waterbury, arrived “in white satin, very décolleté, her dark hair, her dark tan very much in contrast. She wore diamonds about her throat, and the skirt of her gown was so full that when she sank down on the green-carpeted floor, the white satin made a perfect circle around her.” Taylor and Todd exchanged greetings but said little more—although Waterbury said their eyes met more than once. Wilding left the gathering early. Kevin McClory escorted Elizabeth home around 2:00 a.m. Perhaps without realizing it, Wilding had opened the door to the final dissolution of his marriage. On July 19, 1956, Hedda Hopper announced the separation of the Wildings.
• • •
Following a six-week delay because of Clift’s accident, Elizabeth prepared to depart for more location work on Raintree County in Danville, Kentucky. For the time being, Wilding moved into the home of Stewart Granger. Later he flew to Sweden to shoot a film.
Hearing news of the separation, Mike Todd—a man who knew what he wanted and was determined to get it—didn’t waste any time. He arranged a meeting with Elizabeth at MGM, where he had set up an office. Once Todd was alone with her, he told her, “I love you. I am going to marry you.” As startled as she was by his blunt declaration, she was as attracted to him as he was to her. Thereafter began his great courtship of the most beautiful woman in the world.
Once she was in Danville, Todd called nightly. Flowers were sent. Gifts arrived. Upon her completion of Raintree County, Todd sent a private plane to pick her up and bring her to New York just to spend time with him. She loved the gifts, the attention, the forceful personality, the sexual magnetism. The press loved it all, too. Once word was out that they were seeing each other, Taylor and Todd were a far more interesting media couple than Taylor and Wilding. Would Todd tame this Hollywood wild child? Would their extravagant romance lead to marriage or frizzle out? What about another age difference? She was twenty-four. Like Wilding, Todd, who some believed was fifty-one, was old enough to be her father and had a grown son by his first wife. With a second divorce coming so early in her life, did she understand what she was doing? What about her young children? Was her life careening out of control?
By now, Wilding was reading the same stories about his wife that everyone else in the country read. Seen publicly with Todd, she was obviously in love with him. In late September, Wilding returned to Los Angeles from Sweden to see Elizabeth and also to visit his ailing father, who was still living at Taylor’s home. Met at the airport by Elizabeth’s agent Kurt Frings and her assistant Peggy Rutledge, Wilding realized that Elizabeth was nowhere in sight.
Once Kevin McClory became aware that Todd and Taylor were in love, he was said to be infuriated. Todd had lifted the woman he loved right out of his arms without his even being aware of what was happening. He stopped speaking to Todd, and he carried both a torch and a grudge against Elizabeth for years to come. McClory later reconciled with Todd, and he stayed in the movie business and later wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film Thunderball.
• • •
At MGM, Pandro S. Berman, as always, was mainly interested in getting Elizabeth back to work—as the star of the movie version of Tennessee Williams’s controversial Broadway hit Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Joshua Logan directing. But there was one possible obstacle, and that was Mike Todd. Though he thought the role as Williams’s frustrated, sexy Maggie the Cat was perfect for her, Todd had gotten it into his head that Elizabeth should retire from the screen and just be Mrs. Todd. That was, of course, once she divorced Wilding and married him. Elizabeth herself was in agreement—seemingly. “What nonsense!” Hedda Hopper exclaimed. Now that she was finally getting the dramatic roles she fought for, how could she suddenly give it all up? Amid much media speculation, she flew to New York in the fall of 1956 not only for the premiere of Giant but also for Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days.
Giant opened mostly to glowing reviews, with praise for Taylor, Hudson, and Dean. In the Los Angeles Times, Philip K. Scheuer wrote: “Giant is at once, paradoxically like life and bigger than life—most realistic when it is most theatrical, and larger than life whenever it slows the tempo to reality.” He noted that “a preview audience reacted with something so close to accumulated awe.” When the Oscar nominations were announced, Giant had nominations for Best Motion Picture, Best Directing, two Best Actor citations—one for Rock Hudson, the other for James Dean. Also nominated was Mercedes McCambridge for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. But as with A Place in the Sun, Elizabeth was overlooked. Still, her performance would not be forgotten.
In a prefeminist age, audiences watching Giant saw Taylor’s fire and rebelliousness in key scenes in which her character, Leslie Benedict, defied her husband Bick’s standards as well as his Texas male-centric racist culture. In one sequence that would resonate with audiences for decades to come, when the men lounge around in the evening to discuss politics and the women are relegated to sit among themselves in another section of the huge Benedict living room, presumably to have some mindless female chatter, Taylor’s Leslie joins the men’s group to hear their conversation and possibly contribute her own opinions. But an embarrassed Bick, who believes she has stepped out of her socially designated gender role as a passive wife, tells her that they’re talking bus
iness. Then he soon adds, “We’re talking about politics.” Taylor’s Leslie responds, “You married me in Washington, remember. I lived next door to politics.” She adds that she was brought up on politics. When one of the men says: “Don’t you go worrying your pretty little head about politics,” she responds angrily: “You mean my pretty empty head, don’t you?” Finally, after other exchanges, she tells the men: “If I may say before retiring, you gentlemen date back one hundred thousand years. You ought to be wearing leopard skins and carrying clubs. Politics. Business. What is so masculine about a conversation that a woman can’t enter into?” But throughout as she spoke her mind in this scene and others, she maintained a traditional femininity. Her allure was contrasted with the independent, rather butch style of Bick’s possibly lesbian sister, Luz, who clashes with Leslie and soon after dies. In opposition to her husband Bick’s bigotry toward Mexican Americans, Taylor’s Leslie also defies racial lines. She challenges class lines as well—through her friendship with the ranch hand Jett Rink, played by Dean. In its own way, Giant was forecasting a new day for postwar women in America as well as for minority groups.
Off-screen, most were quick to judge Elizabeth by the era’s standards: with one divorce and another on the way, she had not fully accepted society’s designated roles of acquiescent wife and mother. Yet the young and some of the old were fascinated by her quest for love, by her determination to go against the precepts laid out by society for women. Unlike the gorgeous, ladylike Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn, or the perky all-American Debbie Reynolds and Doris Day, each an important icon in her own right, Taylor and Marilyn Monroe were boldly sexual, flaunting society’s rules on a woman’s place and challenging the very idea of female submission in the realm of sexual politics. In the fledging Playboy magazine, Monroe’s nude calendar shocked the era, but it did represent a woman’s freedom regarding her body. Taylor’s marriages and divorces, played out on the front pages of newspapers in the States and abroad, also represented a liberation from society’s proscribed roles for women. Always upfront with Elizabeth were her self-assertion and independence. None of this had fully come to the fore, but it would soon, and the public was watching her with rapt attention.
• • •
In early October, Hedda Hopper reported that Elizabeth would go to Lake Tahoe to begin divorce proceedings. Taylor was coy as to whether she would marry Todd. “We haven’t got that far yet,” she said. Later there was talk about a Mexican divorce—and more talk about Taylor retiring from the screen. “What’s this bilge about you retiring?” Hedda Hopper asked her. “Well, if I got the Mary Martin role in South Pacific, nothing could keep me away from it,” she told Hopper. “But I’ve never been crazy about a career. I never wanted to be an actress.” Here Taylor was rewriting her own history, and Hopper knew it. She also understood that Elizabeth would never be able to give up her career, never be able to move away from the public eye.
Again, Hopper, ever Elizabeth’s mother hen, expressed other concerns. “I’m sorry about this divorce. Liz is so young, only 24. Rather impulsive and excitable. Mike Todd is excitable, too, and he knows how to woo a girl,” Hopper said. “I hope and pray that after her divorce she will take some time to consider her next move. But knowing her as well as I do, I doubt if she will.” Out of the picture now were Taylor’s parents, who surely felt like Hopper but again could say little to deter their daughter from doing exactly as she pleased. Both Francis and Sara were also concerned about their daughter’s health and her emotional state. None of that mattered. In late October, she made it clear: “I will marry Michael Todd as soon as I obtain my divorce.” In November, Taylor filed for divorce in Santa Monica before taking off for New York with Todd.
The next month she was admitted to New York’s Harkness Pavilion at Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center, where, on December 8, she underwent surgery for a herniated disc and spinal fusion. Her Christian Scientist beliefs again helped her cope with the pain. It was a matter of believing that pain could be endured—and conquered—through prayer and focus. But pain also had to be accepted. In the Los Angeles Times, Louis Berg said that “amateur psychiatrists” believed her illnesses and health problems were not real, just “hysterical.” One day she might appear crippled by pain. The next day she might hop on a plane and take off for who knew where. “But it was the nature of injury, as anyone with a crushed disc could tell you, that she should suffer excruciating pain one instant, and immediate relief the next. The pressure on the nerve is touch and go.” Todd would later say he had the X-rays to prove hers was a medical condition, not a psychological one. Once out of the hospital, she was soon indeed back on the go and determined to marry Todd right away. But there was still the ticklish problem of her divorce from Wilding.
Todd and Taylor flew to Mexico, where they hoped to marry. The plan was that she’d get a quickie divorce there. But in order for the divorce to be immediately granted, Michael Wilding had to appear in Mexico. In the end, Wilding—still charming, still gracious, still understanding, still calm, and still bittersweetly enchanted by his young wife—came to the rescue and arrived in Mexico. For him a strained but magical part of his life was ending. There was only one Elizabeth. Newspapers ran photographs of Taylor with her soon-to-be former husband Michael Wilding and soon-to-be new husband Mike Todd. Once the decree was granted, Wilding boarded a plane that night for Los Angeles. “Well, that’s it,” he said.
Debbie Reynolds said that “in order to settle her divorce quickly,” Elizabeth “sold a very expensive painting and gave the proceeds and all her savings to Wilding.” But stories also spread that Todd had paid Wilding a handsome sum to come to Mexico—and then get out of the picture.
Rumors also spread that Taylor and Todd pushed for that quickie divorce because she was pregnant by Todd.
• • •
On February 2, 1957, Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Todd were married in Acapulco at the estate of Mexican political figure Melchor Perusquia. Of all her weddings, including the spectacular first to Hilton, Elizabeth—wearing a Helen Rose–designed mauve dress with a dramatic hood—looked most beautiful at this one. In her hand, she carried a bouquet of white and butterfly orchids and lilies of the valley. Taylor’s long dark hair coupled with her tan brought out the brilliance of those violet eyes. In attendance were her parents, Sara and Francis; her brother, Howard, and his wife, Mara; and Mike Todd Jr., who at twenty-six was a year older than his new stepmother. Singer Eddie Fisher was Todd’s best man, and his wife, Debbie Reynolds, was Elizabeth’s matron of honor. The couple honeymooned at the seaside estate of a former president of Mexico.
It was far from a perfect honeymoon. Though photographs show a magnificent-looking Taylor, about to reach the height of her beauty, she also looked tense at times and not completely at ease. Later it was revealed that she remained in pain from her back problems. Not having fully recuperated from her surgery, she planned to do so in Mexico—during her honeymoon. Though attentive to her, Todd himself was pepped up, eager to make new deals, eager to promote Around the World in 80 Days for its international release. When the couple flew by private plane from Acapulco to Mexico City for a party, he saw that she was in unbearable pain. But onward they went nonetheless, fulfilling social obligations, meeting people, smiling, laughing, and schmoozing. During the Todd years, her drinking increased, partly because of an unending round of social engagements, partly to keep up with Todd, and perhaps partly to dull some of her physical agonies. In the end, there were too many activities, too many gatherings, too many people, for her to get much rest.
When the couple arrived back in Los Angeles, yet another party was thrown to welcome them home, this time by Sydney Guilaroff and Helen Rose at Guilaroff’s home. “We started with twenty-five of their best friends and ended with eighty-five,” said Rose. “Everyone seemed to be ‘The Todds’ best friends.’ ” That night, Rose remembered, “Elizabeth sparkled with the diamonds Mike had given her as wedding gift. Elizabeth had never been m
ore beautiful.” Nor had Rose “ever seen her happier—before or since.”
The parties went on until finally Taylor and Todd had to face the music—the facts of her health. On February 10, when Todd flew Taylor back to New York for further treatment, their plane was met at the airport by an ambulance—and the press—which sped her to Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan. During these health crises, photographs, which captured her tension and her discomfort, were compelling and oddly enough contributed to the public conception of her as a still larger-than-life goddess—even in her chronic illnesses. Often enough wearing a mink with her makeup dramatically applied, she remained beautiful and imperious, an unearthly figure not to be defeated by pain, able to rise above it somehow, never letting her glamour be diminished by it.
Following her New York hospital stay, she was back in action again, much too soon, flying with Todd to a home they had leased in Palm Springs, where she would recuperate while the couple would continue their honeymoon. But after she attended a banquet with Todd at Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel, the pain shot up again, and she was flown back to New York to Harkness Pavilion for treatment.