by Donald Bogle
“I have never seen anyone so grief-stricken,” said Helen Rose, who remembered that Elizabeth stayed in bed for several days—and could not stop crying.
• • •
A memorial for Todd drew a huge turnout of some nine hundred members of the movie colony, at Temple Israel on Hollywood Boulevard. Among those in attendance was, rather touchingly, Michael Wilding. No matter what, Elizabeth was still in his thoughts.
Not attending the Hollywood tribute was Elizabeth, who headed to Chicago for the funeral. Escorting Elizabeth through a throng of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen at the Los Angeles airport were Dick Hanley and MGM’s publicity chief, Bill Lyons. Also by Taylor’s side was Sydney Guilaroff, who had considered traveling with her to Chicago. But Elizabeth told Guilaroff she wanted Helen Rose to go, which he said he well understood. On the flight were her brother, Howard; Dr. Rex Kennamer; and Todd’s friends, columnist Jim Bacon and Eddie Fisher. At the airport, there were also curiosity seekers, said Rose. Crowds were also at the Chicago airport—and outside Elizabeth’s hotel, the Drake, “to see Elizabeth in her misery.” “It was during this trip I realized what it meant to be a glamorous film star and the pressures involved,” said Rose.
In Chicago, Elizabeth was escorted by her brother, Howard, and Dr. Kennamer to Waldheim Cemetery. A tent had been pitched for Todd’s family and friends. Inside were seats and the casket with Todd’s remains. For Elizabeth—still suffering a fever—the day was all the more painful because of the circus-like atmosphere. “When we arrived on this windy, wintry day,” said Helen Rose, “the cemetery was packed with people—mostly women and children. We were told some of them had been there since early morning and had brought their lunches in paper bags.” Rose also recalled: “We had to squeeze into the enclosure where the services were to be held. Howard and Rex held Elizabeth by the arms. She was still very ill and weak.” Everyone was aware that Todd’s ninety-two-year-old mother was too ill and infirm to attend the services. A band of twelve Gypsies showed up with violins and offered to play music for the rites. Their offer was declined. On a nearby road, cars were double-parked, causing a minor traffic jam. Onlookers called out to Taylor.
Standing over the casket, Mike Todd Jr. called his father “the greatest human being I’ve ever known.” Twice Elizabeth cried out, “No, no.” As the casket was about to be lowered into the ground, Elizabeth gently touched it, sobbing, “I love you, Mike.”
“Reporters later wrote that Elizabeth hurled herself hysterically over Mike’s grave,” said Eddie Fisher. “It wasn’t true. After the service, she asked us all to leave the tent and then spent a few moments there alone. When she emerged, the crowd surged through the barricades, surrounding her, shouting and snatching at her clothes.”
Afterward, Elizabeth sat in the limousine with her head resting on her brother’s shoulder. But the vehicle had problems getting through a crowd of some three hundred people, still hoping for a glimpse of Liz. “People swarmed all over the car, rocking it back and forth and pounding on the windows,” recalled Fisher. “Please, for God’s sake, get the car moving,” Elizabeth cried.
• • •
Todd’s death affected her in profound, unexpected ways, again dramatically altering her life and her evolving view of life. Having lived before the public eye, she later appeared resentful of the public’s demands on her. Her defiance against prevailing social attitudes grew and intensified. So did a suspiciousness of the motives of people she encountered, especially at the studio. For a time, she was emotionally adrift, not sure what to do with her life. Yet, ironically, more than ever, she seemed determined to live her life completely on her terms. Her stoic Christian Science beliefs helped sustain her. “Half of life is dealing with fate, with the unforeseen,” she said. “The night I said goodbye to Mike Todd and went to bed while he went to the airport, I had no idea that the next day my whole life would be changed and that nothing would ever change it back again. Sometimes you just have to wait until the blow hits you, and then do the best you can.”
Surprisingly, acting also sustained her. It enabled her to distance herself from her own life by living out the emotions of a character. Some of her most exciting performances would soon come. There would be a newfound fire and toughness in those performances. For Elizabeth, there would also be a problem in terms of her acting career, and that problem once again would be her studio, as far as she was concerned. But now she would be ready to fight head-on. “I believe you have to put up your dukes and fight, even if you don’t know what you’re fighting against.”
• • •
A few days after Todd’s funeral, the Academy Awards were held. The Best Actress award, for which Elizabeth had been nominated for Raintree County, went to actress Joanne Woodward for The Three Faces of Eve. By coincidence, Woodward was married to Elizabeth’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof costar Paul Newman.
At MGM, director Richard Brooks continued filming Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, shooting scenes that did not involve Elizabeth. Word was that the production would have to shut down, pending her return, which MGM hoped might be in another week or two. But as far as Elizabeth was concerned, the studio didn’t care about her grief. She questioned the motives of studio executives Benny Thau and Eddie Mannix when they had visited her home after Todd’s death. Had they come merely because MGM was concerned about her returning to work on their damn picture? Yet Helen Rose recalled, “The studio asked us not to pressure Elizabeth into going back and finishing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. They were considering either recasting it or shelving it entirely. Despite the rumors of the studio’s ‘cruelty to the stars,’ it was Benny Thau himself who told me that Elizabeth’s health was more important than the film.” But not every executive looked at the situation the way Benny Thau did. Recalling the studio’s insensitivity, Richard Brooks remembered the day he received a call from Todd’s secretary Dick Hanley.
“I think you ought to get up here because this girl is hysterical. She’s about to go off the deep end.” Arriving at her home, Brooks was led to her bedroom, where Elizabeth “took one look at me and started screaming.”
“You son of a bitch!” Brooks remembered her yelling. “I guess you’re here like all the rest of these bastards who have been here all day long! ‘When am I going to go back to work?’ And she named them all, all the executive staff from the studio, including the producers of the movie,” said Brooks. “They had gone there with flowers and doleful voices and all that crap, but what they finally got around to asking each time was, ‘So, how soon do you think you’ll be back, honey?’ Well, she saw me and figured it was the same deal.”
“Elizabeth, if you don’t want to come back to the movie,” Brooks told her, “don’t come back. It’s a movie—that’s all it is. If you don’t do it, they’ll start over and find somebody else to do it. If you never want to come back, that’s fine.”
“I’m never coming back,” she told Brooks. “Fuck you and the movie and everybody else.”
Yet she couldn’t deny the connection she felt to her character Maggie, in part because of Todd’s enthusiasm about her performance.
Quietly, Elizabeth contacted Guilaroff, who was styling her hair for the film. Did he think she should return to work? He gently told her, “Yes, I do. For Mike’s sake. He said it was a wonderful part for you.” She resumed work on the film. “Never missed a day and was never late,” said Brooks.
“Fortunately, she was able to quickly put herself back into the part of Maggie,” said Guilaroff. “With the emotional resonance she brought to the role from her recent tragedy, it was a triumphant performance for Elizabeth, one of the finest of her career.” With Cat completed, she still had a deal with MGM to make one additional film within the next three years. But there would be no love lost between the studio and her.
• • •
Between $3 and $5 million was left by Todd to Elizabeth and his son, Mike Todd Jr.
Completing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elizabeth made plans to rent a n
ew home, to flee memories of Todd at their old residence. Later there were reports that if she appeared in John Huston’s The Unforgiven, she would be paid “the highest price any woman to date has ever received for a motion picture.” At this point, before she had even peaked in acclaim or popularity, she was considered Hollywood’s most important star.
With her brother, Howard, and his wife, Mara, Elizabeth flew to New York in June. On the flight was Hedda Hopper, who shortly before had visited her and told her readers, “I’ve known and loved Elizabeth Taylor since she was 10. My admiration for her today is unbounded.” During the flight, the two talked until the early hours of the morning. Elizabeth still wore the engagement ring and bracelet Todd had given her, a gold chain with diamonds running through it. On the third finger of her right hand, she wore the wedding ring she had given Todd, which had been the only thing salvaged from the plane crash and fire.
• • •
In August, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened to solid reviews. “It was a powerful stage drama and it is a powerful screen drama, and Brooks has exacted—and extracted—stunningly real and varied performances,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.” Miss Taylor is astonishingly good.” Later the paper wrote that here she had surpassed all her previous portrayals. In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote of Elizabeth: “She is terrific.” Variety called it “an intense, important motion picture.” “Elizabeth has a major credit with her portrayal of Maggie. The frustrations and desires both as a person and a woman, the warmth and understanding she molds, the loveliness that is more than a well-turned nose—all these are part of a full-scented perceptive interpretation. That she performed in this manner under the stress of recent tragedy makes her performance certain to provoke conversation.”
Early on, there was Oscar buzz. But then the Taylor life took another surprising turn that ultimately ruined her chances for that Oscar and forever changed the nation’s view of her.
Consoling her over Todd’s death was Eddie Fisher, who spent hours with her as they reminisced about Todd. Philadelphia-born, the fourth of seven children of Russian-born Jewish immigrants, Fisher had dropped out of high school in his senior year to pursue a singing career. Having appeared on the radio show Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, he soon performed with bands. His career took a turn upward following his performances on Eddie Cantor’s radio show. After a stint in the army, Fisher appeared on TV variety shows, had hit records like “Oh! My Papa” and “I Need You Now” and his own TV show Coke Time With Eddie Fisher from 1953 to 1957, then The Eddie Fisher Show.
Before long, rumors were afloat throughout Hollywood and then New York that perhaps Elizabeth and Eddie were spending too much time together, that perhaps their friendship was more than a friendship. By September 1958, when Fisher flew to New York to perform at Grossinger’s in upstate New York, Elizabeth joined him. Her children remained in Los Angeles. Their time at the resort did not go unnoticed. It seemed to make it official in the eyes of the press and public. Mike Todd had not yet been dead six months. But already the Widow Todd and her late husband’s best friend were having a hot and heavy love affair. What made their romance all the more a sensation was that Fisher was still married to America’s girl next door, Reynolds, who as everyone knew, had been matron of honor at Taylor’s wedding to Todd—and who also had cared for Elizabeth’s children at her home when the tragedy first struck. Could there be a more shocking or juicier scandal? Apparently not. The media descended on them.
As Taylor boarded a plane in New York to return to Los Angeles, she said talk about a romance with Fisher was “garbage.” But no one was buying that, either. When asked why she was going to Los Angeles, the Taylor temper flared. “Because I’ve got three children there!” For the public, there was the question of what type of mother she was.
Once she arrived in Los Angeles, she was met by her agent Kurt Frings—and the press. In her arms, she demurely carried a Yorkshire terrier—and acted as if she didn’t see all the reporters and photographers and ignored their questions. A TWA wagon carried Taylor and Frings about one hundred yards, from the plane to a Cadillac that was waiting for her. When one reporter pleaded for a comment, Taylor simply said, “Hello.” Asked if she planned to see Fisher and Reynolds while in Los Angeles, she replied, “I don’t know. I just got here.” Asked to make some statement, she told the press corps, “But I have nothing to say.” Afterward, she checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel. But the media followed her luggage, which was taken to a private residence in Beverly Hills.
A phalanx of publicists, agents, managers, and studio people—all were consulted at some point by the three players in the drama. A lid had to be kept on this scandal. And everything had to be done to salvage the careers of Taylor and Fisher—and of Reynolds, whose image might somehow be tarnished if personal stories about her domestic situation hit the press. Later generations might be hard-pressed to understand all the discussion, all the outrage, all the curiosity of the media and public. But this was the tail end of the staid 1950s, a conformist age when the nation seemed afraid of its own shadow, when its citizens were expected to adhere to traditional gender and marital roles, something Elizabeth had already challenged in her films and her off-screen life. But this scandal could wreck her career. For Americans of the Eisenhower Age, her behavior was considered an affront to public decency and morality.
“I am not in love with Liz and Liz is not in love with me,” Fisher announced before he flew back to Los Angeles. Once there, he stayed for several hours at the residence of his friend Joey Forman before returning to his home with Reynolds. But when the two were alone, all hell broke loose. In no time, the couple “engaged in a heated argument over his conduct and the fact that he had failed to let her know he was staying in the East an extra week,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “The couple seemed to be on the way to reconciling late in the afternoon when, together, they vaulted a rear wall to escape newsmen and Eddie escorted his wife to a nearby doctor’s office.” But the coverage did not stop there. Once Debbie and Eddie returned home, Fisher wasn’t around long. He “again deserted the house, evaded newsmen by walking in one door of a hotel and out another and didn’t return until after 1 a.m. He was reported to have again left early yesterday to spend the night with Forman.” Every move and maneuver of the three principals was being monitored, scrutinized, analyzed, and discussed.
Taylor received a phone call from Hedda Hopper. Exactly what was going on? Hopper wanted to know. Elizabeth and Hopper then had what turned out to be an explosive conversation. Elizabeth wasn’t answering Hopper’s questions. Then Taylor—in essence—told Hopper to back the hell off. It was her life—and, if anything, Mike Todd would have wanted her to go on living. Later an outraged Hopper reported that Elizabeth, upon being asked how she could embark on such an affair, especially so soon after Todd’s death, had said: “Mike’s dead and I’m alive. . . . What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?” Across America newspaper readers were outraged. So was Taylor, who said she had been misquoted. “What happened was this,” Taylor recalled. “The columnist asked if I was aware how much Mike was in love with me, and I said ‘Oh, God, you know how much I loved Mike. I loved him more than my life. But Mike is dead now, and I’m alive, and the one person who would want me to try and live and be happy is Mike!” Interestingly, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Taylor’s Maggie, in response to the animosity of her husband, Brick, over the death of his friend Skipper, which he held her responsible for, had cried out: “Skipper is dead. And I’m alive! Maggie the Cat is alive.” Taylor always believed that Hopper had lifted the “false” quote about Todd from the film. But Hopper was adamant—and angry—and turned with a vengeance against the actress she had praised from the time Taylor was a little girl.
• • •
As recounted by the press, it was a gorgeous, scandal-ridden adulterous drama of devotion and betrayal with a trio of characters, each living out public perceptions or misconceptions about them. There was the naïve, gullible but
passionate young husband, suddenly transfixed and falling head over heels in love. There was the sweet, seemingly adoring girlish wife, mother of two, completely unsuspecting and caught off guard by the shift in her husband’s affections. And at the center of this stormy tale, there stood the dark-haired, violet-eyed temptress, aware of her powers of seduction, aware of a home she was wrecking but seemingly heartless and hell-bent on her own gratification. Of course, the situation was far more complicated and complex, but the press and public went with it, and the headlines in newspapers around the country told the story in daily feeds.
“Marriage Breaks Up Amid Rumors Singer Courted Miss Taylor,” reported the Los Angeles Times on September 11, 1958. Then followed one juicy headline after another.
“Eddie Fisher Talks; Says He’s Sick Man”
“Debbie Will Seek Divorce from Eddie”
“Debbie Divorces Fisher; Wins Million Settlement”
“Debbie Not Bitter, Just Wants Her Happiness.”
So pervasive was the coverage that the September 12, 1958, edition of the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial under the banner:
“Three Cheers for Love!”
While crisis piles on crisis elsewhere in the universe, it is comforting and reassuring to be reminded that something is stable in a restless world. Good old Hollywood goes along in its accustomed groove, stirred not by events in far-off Formosa or the Middle East but engrossed at present in the romantic affairs of Eddie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor. “I am still in love with my husband,” says Debbie. “I’m not taking anything away from Debbie Reynolds because she really never had it,” says Liz.