by Donald Bogle
Then she returned to Los Angeles for the Academy Awards ceremony. Resplendent in what looked like a Grecian gown and wearing a diamond tiara that Todd had presented her with, she stole the show even before the awards were announced. That evening George Stevens won another Best Directing Oscar. But Giant lost the Best Motion Picture award to Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days. Of course, Giant was the better picture, but Todd had done such a brilliant showman’s job of schmoozing with everyone in Hollywood—making friends, smiling, chatting, telling funny stories, and showing up always with his dazzling wife by his side—that he had won the industry over. George Stevens must have winced that his star had so blatantly promoted someone else’s movie, even if that someone else was her husband.
Before anyone knew it, Taylor and Todd were off to Paris, then London, where again she took ill, now bedridden with an aching back. But there was an additional concern. Now it was announced that she was pregnant. Oblivious to any questions about the pregnancy and her health, she was soon on her feet again, and the couple set out to leave London’s Heathrow Airport for Nice. Here an incident occurred that made news around the world. Arriving late at the airport, they missed their flight. A very dramatic public row ensued—with each blaming the other for the missed flight—as photographers snapped pictures like mad. Years later Taylor would say that the public quarrel was a joke. For once being late for a flight “was his fault and not mine. I was teasing him unmercifully and all these photographers and reporters were standing around. It was a kidding fight, but we were both using ‘Olde English’ language and ‘Old Italian’ gestures that are even better than language. Some photographer got a picture, and it was maybe Mike’s favorite picture of us. I call it the only talking still picture in the world. I mean, there’s no doubt about what we are saying to each other.” Todd chartered a plane to fly them to Nice, but there would be a two-hour layover in Paris. “I don’t want to go to Paris,” said Liz. “It bores me.” They flew directly to Nice.
• • •
In Nice, the couple attended the Cannes film festival, where Around the World in 80 Days was shown. “We had rented a villa, La Fiorentina, just outside Monte Carlo near St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, about three months into our marriage. The most beautiful house you’ve ever seen,” Taylor recalled. “I was in the pool, swimming laps at our home, and Mike came outside to keep me company. I got out of the pool and put my arms around him, and he said, ‘Wait a minute, don’t joggle your tiara.’ Because I was wearing my tiara in the pool! He was holding a red leather box, and inside was a ruby necklace, which glittered in the warm light. It was like the sun, lit up and made of red fire. First, Mike put it around my neck and smiled.” Then he presented her with matching earrings and a bracelet. “Since there was no mirror around, I had to look into the water. The jewelry was so glorious, rippling red on blue like a painting. I just shrieked with joy, put my arms around Mike’s neck, and pulled him into the pool after me. It was a perfect summer day and a day of perfect love.”
Quarrels and fights, some public, some private, continued, all becoming a part of their image as a tempestuous couple. Socializing often with the Todds were Eddie Fisher, who considered Todd his best friend, and his wife, Debbie Reynolds. Reynolds recalled that at dinner one evening, the Todds had a fierce argument: “Elizabeth said something to Mike that caused him to haul off and hit her, knocking her to the floor,” said Reynolds, startled and upset as the couple screamed and shouted at each other. “I went after Mike, jumping on his back and pummeling him so he would stop fighting with Elizabeth. Suddenly everyone turned on me. Eddie accused me of being naïve. Mike told me that Elizabeth could ‘take it.’ I honestly thought he was hurting her, but Elizabeth told me to stop being a Girl Scout. How did this turn into something I did wrong?”
Neither the press nor the public could get enough of their extravagant lifestyle, especially as Todd lavished gift after gift upon her. She wore sable and mink. The couple traveled in their private plane—dubbed the Liz by Todd—equipped with a double bed and a boudoir. They had a $25,000 white Rolls-Royce, equipped with a bar and telephone, and residences in Los Angeles; Palm Springs; New York on Park Avenue; and Westport, Connecticut. There were also three toy poodles. Usually, Todd shopped with her and indulged her at every opportunity. She also indulged herself at every opportunity, occasionally with complaints from Todd. The owner of a shop remembered that Taylor strode in alone one day and bought a sapphire mink coat from stock. “Next day,” said the store owner, “Mike brought it back . . . without comment.” But that kind of thing was the exception to the Todds’ rules.
Staying at exclusive hotels and dining at elegant restaurants, they also enjoyed the company of the high and mighty. Todd loved her passionately but shrewdly; he understood how she could help promote his career. With her access to powerful people and with a worldwide fame he would never match, she opened doors, which he could then brashly walk through and make an impression. Nicky had been resentful of her fame. Todd luxuriated in it.
He knew, too, that the stories of their opulence would delight and inspire wonder. Every Saturday night was a gift night for Liz. And mainly the gifts were jewels—fantastic one-of-a-kind jewels, necklaces, bracelets, earrings of the most precious gemstones: diamonds, emeralds, sapphires. The necklace, bracelet, and earrings he presented her with in Nice were only a few among so many more. When Todd had given her a 29.5-carat diamond engagement ring, he boasted: “One day’s receipt from Around the World in 80 Days.” But sometimes Elizabeth could be so casual about the ring that it seemed like a trifle to her—in the eyes of the public. One day while shopping in Beverly Hills, she let the owner of the shop try on her ring. As she was leaving the store, the owner said: “Don’t you want it back?” She had “forgotten” about it—or had she?
She loved every piece of jewelry Todd or anyone else gave her. Marilyn Monroe may have sung “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” but Elizabeth Taylor lived that way. Lovely jewels had been given to her by the likes of Bill Pawley, Nicky Hilton, and Wilding, and from Uncle Howard—nothing for her that was out of this world but sweet, she might say. Holding on to those jewels with an awareness that more would come, she would have one of the greatest private jewelry collections in the world.
But there was also a backlash that would continue in the years to come, from people offended by her extravagance. “Elizabeth Taylor will be 25 Wednesday, and a lot of people, shocked by her apparent frivolousness as she approaches the momentous date, are asking: ‘When will she grow up?’ ” commented Louis Berg of the Los Angeles Times. If there were any misconceptions about her, said Berg, they “are Elizabeth’s own fault. She flaunts her reckless and defiant feelings, and deliberately—out of defiance—tries to fool people into thinking she is more flip and foolish than she actually is.” Yet Berg seemed sympathetic to her. “Miss Taylor is trying to recapture the foolish years she never had . . . when did Elizabeth ever have a chance to be a teenager?” Oddly enough, Berg touched on the very mixed, conflicting feelings that many in the nation had about her.
• • •
Suffering from premature labor pains, Taylor’s health reached a crisis point in late July. When she was admitted to New York’s Harkness Pavilion at Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center, Todd said: “She’s in terrible pain but unless it’s a sheer outstanding emergency they don’t want to take the baby for two and a half weeks.” Todd remained by her bedside. “She’s been crying all the time.” He added: “She had a bad night last night. The night before they gave her an anesthetic or something and she slept pretty well.”
Even with this latest news about her health, no one would have been surprised if she suddenly surfaced and was off to a party. But with fears for the baby’s life, as well as her own, she stayed put. On August 7, 1957, she gave birth—again by cesarean section—to a four-pound four-ounce premature baby girl named Elizabeth “Liza” Frances Todd, named after her father and herself. Remaining in the hospital for thirteen days
, Elizabeth was told by her doctors in no uncertain terms that now with three cesarean births, she could not give birth to other children. Life magazine ran a picture of mother and daughter on its cover. Esquire magazine would also later run a picture of the two. As Liza grew older, she was often seen with her brothers as the three traveled with their mother around the world. It would always be a juggling act for Elizabeth to have quality time for the children. Her career would have its demands. But the children never expressed any anger with their famous mother.
• • •
In late September, Raintree County premiered in Louisville, Kentucky, and then in Beverly Hills. Though the film received mixed reviews, Taylor won fine notices. “Whereas most of the characters in the picture are flat and two-dimensional,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, “Miss Taylor’s possesses exceptional depth.” Some critics named Raintree County one of the year’s best films.
• • •
She was back on the road with Todd for Around the World in 80 Days—with trips to Honolulu, Sydney, and Hong Kong, all part of a world tour and all ongoing international promotion for the film. But Elizabeth took ill again, this time with an attack of appendicitis. In December, she and Todd returned to Los Angeles, where she had her appendix removed. After spending Christmas in Palm Springs, they resumed their travels in January 1958, flying to London, later to Prague, then to their main destination, Russia. Naturally, Todd hoped to exhibit Around the World in 80 Days there. In Moscow, citizens did not seem to know much about Taylor, much less Todd. Throughout the trip, Todd snapped pictures of his wife, one of which, rather grainy and out of focus, ended up nonetheless on the cover of Look.
“Living with Mike Todd,” said Elizabeth, “was like living with a circus.”
“You know I’ve chased lots of things in my life, including happiness,” said Todd, “and I finally caught it when I caught that dame.”
• • •
“I’m Saying Good-by to the Movies” was the title of the article “by Mrs. Michael Todd” that ran in the March 16, 1958, issue of the Los Angeles Times. “I won’t really be leaving show business; I’m just thinking of retiring the commodity known as Elizabeth Taylor, movie star,” she wrote. “I don’t think in all the years I was an actress I was ever truly happy. I don’t think I’ve ever really been happy before.”
This time the retirement talk sounded real, although it came at a surprising time. After the disappointments of not being nominated for the Academy Award for her performances in A Place in the Sun and Giant, she had finally won a Best Actress nomination for Raintree County. Still, she planned two films before calling it quits. One would be in Todd’s ambitious plans to film Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The other would be for MGM.
MGM balked at her idea of retirement and also a film with Todd. Still under contract to the studio, Taylor was its star, not his. Instead, she finally began work on the already-scheduled adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Because of the production code in Hollywood, the drama’s more controversial and explosive themes, those dealing with homosexuality and a loveless marriage, would have to be watered down or perhaps edited out altogether. Now signed to write and direct was Richard Brooks—the director of The Last Time I Saw Paris—who worked hard with fellow screenwriter James Poe to create a film acceptable to the code yet true to Williams’s themes. For those watching the completed movie, some of those “shocking” themes, though somewhat buried, nonetheless would still be apparent. Taylor’s costar was Broadway actor Paul Newman, not yet a bona fide movie star but certainly on his way. Originally, MGM wanted the production shot in black and white as a sign that it was a “serious” dramatic film, but Brooks said that with Taylor’s violet eyes and Newman’s blue ones, it had to be shot in color, which would create a hotter, sexier image. In the end, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was filmed in glorious Technicolor, and Brooks had one of Hollywood’s hottest couples on-screen.
Todd thought the role of Maggie was perfect for her. Helen Rose recalled, “He would see the ‘dailies’ and he talked to anyone who would listen about Elizabeth’s brilliant performance and what a job Richard Brooks was doing.” Todd was convinced it would be her finest film.
With her marriage, her travels, and now this challenging role, Elizabeth was undergoing one of the great transformations of her life. Before marrying Todd, she had lived in a cocoon. MGM shielded her, covered up for her, promoted her, and defined who she was in the public imagination and sometimes in her own. As Carroll Baker had recalled a few years earlier, “Her judgments and dialogue came straight out of MGM movies.” Now even more pampered than ever before—she loved the jewels, the furs, the first-class hotels and restaurants, the snapping to attention of all who saw her when she entered a room—she was moving, however, out of the realm of Hollywood into a broader, more complicated world. Todd’s life itself was a major step in altering her perspective; his poverty-ridden childhood; his hustler’s view of life; his experiences in topsy-turvy vaudeville—and then in the superchic sophistication of New York theater; his drive, energy, and confidence; his language; his refusal to take no for an answer; his comprehension of living on one’s own terms—all helped her move forward. The travels with Todd around the world exposed her more to politics and diverse cultures. It would be a mistake to say that Todd endowed her with all these new perspectives. On her own, she had been moving toward a broader worldview. That had already started with her trips abroad as well as those visits to cities like Chicago and New York. Todd simply introduced her to more and varied experiences, and rather than fearing what she was seeing and hearing, she embraced it all. She also was seeing even more ways to assert herself and to use her own powers, to make demands, also to keep exploring and examining and not to live by Hollywood’s rules. Many actors and actresses let the culture of Hollywood define them, which could be deadly. Hollywood could drop you in a minute—and then who were you?
Perhaps in this desire to fully break out of the cocoon and to live her view of a “normal” life as wife and mother, she appeared as if she might indeed give up her career. She would do the same at other points in her life. But her career and her work as an actress meant more to her than she appeared willing to admit—to herself. That, of course, had been true even during the marriage to Nicky Hilton. She would for a time make one movie a year. But she would not forsake that career, no matter what she said publicly.
But then suddenly, in the midst of her personal transformation, something happened that shocked everyone, something that shook her to the core, something that became a part of the tragic legendary life of Elizabeth Taylor.
In March 1958, Todd was set to fly to New York with Elizabeth to accept an award from the Friars Club as Showman of the Year. While working on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elizabeth had taken ill again, this time running a 102°F fever from a virus. Nonetheless, Todd still planned on her accompanying him to New York. He also tried to persuade Cat on a Hot Tin Roof director Richard Brooks to join Elizabeth and him on the flight east. “We’ll fly in and come right back and be ready to shoot Monday,” Todd said to Brooks. But Brooks told him bluntly: “You’re insane. If she has a cold and can’t work for two days, how in the hell is she going to get on a plane and be back and healthy enough to work on Monday? She shouldn’t go.”
Finally, her physician Rex Kennamer insisted that she not travel. Having first met Kennamer the night of Monty’s accident, she had liked and trusted him. Soon after, he became her personal physician. On this occasion, she was so ill that she had no choice but to stay in Los Angeles. Before leaving home for the airport, Todd—in retrospect—seemed jittery and even strangely apprehensive, kissing his wife good-bye several times. Todd told the butler, “All right now. Make sure and look after everyone for me.”
Just before his private plane, the Liz, took off from Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank at 10:41 p.m., Todd called Elizabeth, saying he would call again when the twin-engine plane stopped to be refueled. The weather was foul. It was raining hea
vily. Yet Todd appeared to brush aside any concerns. With Todd were writer Art Cohn, then working on the story of Todd’s life, and two pilots, Bill Verner and Tom Barclay. Always the confident optimist, Todd most likely assumed all would be well. But during the flight, the plane ran into treacherous weather. Ice formed on the wings. The plane did a nosedive and crashed in Grants, New Mexico.
In the early morning hours, Elizabeth was in bed at the twelve-room villa that she and Todd had rented. Unexpectedly, Todd’s executive secretary Dick Hanley, her physician Rex Kennamer, and columnist Jim Bacon arrived at the house. Todd had enjoyed Bacon’s company and had invited him to take the flight to New York. But the columnist backed out because of the weather. In the early hours of the morning, an Associated Press reporter had called Bacon from New Mexico with chilling news of a plane crash. In turn, Bacon spoke to Todd’s secretary Hanley—and thus went to the house. “The minute we walked in that bedroom door,” Dr. Kennamer recalled, “Liz knew why we were there.” Todd and the three others on the flight had all been killed in the crash, their bodies almost burned beyond recognition. “Her first impulse was to run away from the news,” recalled Hanley. “Although she had been in bed with a fever of 102, she jumped out of bed in her bare feet and darted through every room in the house, tried to get outside. She screamed so loud that even the neighbors heard her, and went completely hysterical. As she dashed for the front door and the open street, Dr. Kennamer grabbed her and we took her up to bed. She submitted to the sedative that eventually quieted her.” The news quickly spread through Hollywood. Later Elizabeth granted Bacon an interview, which turned out to be the scoop of his career.
Friends and associates arrived at the Taylor-Todd residence. Among them were Sydney Guilaroff, Helen Rose, Taylor’s agent Kurt Frings, and her secretary Peggy Rutledge. Todd’s close friend, singer Eddie Fisher, was then in New York. Elizabeth’s three children were in the home. But Elizabeth was not in shape to care for them. Fisher’s wife, Debbie Reynolds, took Taylor’s three children to stay at her house. Also at the Taylor-Todd house were MGM executives Eddie Mannix and Benny Thau. Even they had been moved by the tragedy that now enveloped this young actress. Also arriving at the home in Coldwater Canyon was Hollywood’s great recluse, Greta Garbo. The Taylor family came. Photographs captured a grim-faced Francis driving a distraught Howard and his wife, Mara, as they left Elizabeth’s home. The death of Todd and the young widow he had left behind drew the attention and sympathy of all of Hollywood, as well as the nation itself.