Elizabeth and Michael

by Donald Bogle

  Of then current child performers, he had become friendly not only with Emmanuel Lewis but also with Corey Feldman and later Macaulay Culkin, the star of the hugely successful film Home Alone. Perhaps for Michael those were the Lost Boys of the Peter Pan story, trying to find their path in life. With ever increasing feelings of isolation and alienation from grownup life, he saw those former child stars as his true compatriots. Only they could understand what he experienced and what he believed he had lost.

  “I used to think that I was unique in feeling that I was without a childhood. I believed there was only a handful with whom I could share those feelings,” he later said. He recalled that upon meeting Shirley Temple, they cried together, “for she could share a pain with me that only others like my close friends Elizabeth Taylor and Macaulay Culkin know.”

  • • •

  On July 6, 1984, the Victory reunion tour finally opened in Kansas, then was to work its way to such other cities as Dallas, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York, and finally, Los Angeles on December 9, 1984. The brothers’ Victory album was also released. Yet the tour—dogged by one problem after another—proved to be a breaking point for Michael. Jackie Jackson suffered a serious leg injury, which prevented him from performing in the first half of the tour. Controversy sprang up because of ticket prices. Though each ticket cost $30, fans were required to buy four tickets, which prohibited some fans from attending. (That idea had been cooked up by Joe and Don King. Michael had opposed it from the beginning.) There were other complications in purchasing tickets. Throughout, a contentious Michael found himself in opposition to Joseph and King. Throughout, he used his clout to ensure he would not let them run the show. No songs from the album were performed in the show because it was said Michael had refused to rehearse with his siblings. Michael also nixed plans for a movie company to film one of the concerts, and he vetoed a European leg of the tour.

  He simply wanted to be done with the tour, and so it seemed, with family obligations as well. It was all a mess that led to at least six lawsuits for damages that could add up to $182 million. But Michael felt he had done his part for the family. At that time, the Victory tour proved to be the biggest in rock history, playing in twenty-three cities and selling some 2.3 million tickets. From the tour, each of his brothers was said to have earned from $5 to $7 million. Michael donated his earnings to three charities, including the United Negro College Fund. At the end of the last show, Michael made a surprise announcement: this marked the last time the brothers would perform together. It shocked the family—and King.

  • • •

  Despite any feelings of loneliness, Michael gleefully hobnobbed with the famous—and the legends. In turn, the famous and the legends were eager to hobnob with him. Writer/biographer A. Scott Berg recalled a dinner at Katharine Hepburn’s New York town house at 244 East Forty-Ninth Street. There was much excitement because Michael would be a guest. When British playwright Tom Stoppard, who was having dinner at the nearby home of Stephen Sondheim, heard the news, he sent over a request for Michael’s autograph for his children. “Out of the question,” said Hepburn. Broadway producer Irene Mayer Selznick, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer and former wife of David O. Selznick, requested that Berg relay to her every detail of the evening. Had he known about Irene Selznick’s request, Michael would have been pleased. David O. Selznick was a hero of his. With the idea of surpassing the success of Thriller still looming large in his career goals, he had an anxiety similar to Selznick’s. After producing Gone With the Wind, Selznick was said to have been haunted by the fear he might not ever be able to top himself.

  The moment of Jackson’s arrival was etched in Berg’s memory: “He was wearing sunglasses and a satiny blue uniform trimmed in gold braid. Onstage, it would probably look dazzling. Up close it looked flimsy and gaudy, like something Professor Harold Hill might have sold to some boys in Iowa along with some tin trombones.” But Berg confessed: “I found it difficult to take my eyes off him—not because he was a star, but because he looked so unusual. His body was even slighter than pictures suggested; his skin was taut and a beautiful tawny shade; his nose, with its tiny bridge, bore little resemblance to any other nose I had ever seen. At twenty-five, he had the demeanor of an extremely polite ten-year-old. He spoke in a gentle voice, full of sweetness and wonder.”

  Among the guests were Hepburn’s niece Katharine Houghton (who had costarred as Sidney Poitier’s love interest in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) and journalist Cynthia McFadden. Some seemed surprised, however, by his level of conversation. Though Michael professed that Hepburn was his favorite movie star, he appeared to draw a blank about which of her films he liked. In fact, he didn’t appear to know much about any of her movies. No doubt he was drawn to her public persona, the older Hepburn who turned up on television interviews.

  “He fascinated me,” Hepburn told Berg. “He’s an absolutely extraordinary creature. He’s worked his entire life, entertaining professionally since he was three, and he’s never lived a single moment, I mean not a moment, in the real world. He doesn’t know how to do anything but write his songs and thrill an audience. He’s this strange, artistic creature, living in a bubble, barely touched by anything in the outside world.”

  Still, there was a moment that surprised even Hepburn—when she discovered that no matter how thrilled he might be by the pleasure of her company, Michael was climbing the star ladder to the rung on which the most elusive and potent megastars resided. Having met such idols as Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Jane Fonda, and Hepburn herself—and of course those magnetic entertainers he appeared to love most, Diana Ross, James Brown, and Jackie Wilson—he was eager to meet even more, especially two considered the ultimate movie stars of the twentieth century. The first was Hollywood’s most mysterious and aloof goddess who shunned the public eye. According to Berg, Michael asked Hepburn, “Do you know Greta Garbo?” Then came a second question: “Do you think you could introduce me to her?” Hepburn was neither pleased nor amused. “Absolutely not, Michael.”

  Aside from Garbo, the other star who Michael yearned to meet but apparently had not mentioned that evening was Elizabeth. Having grown up observing her from afar, he had always been aware of her. He probably could not remember a time when he didn’t know of her. Yet there were other stars who also fascinated him. His brother Jermaine once recalled that in Michael’s rooms—at the remodeled Hayvenhurst in 1983—there were photographs of Ava Gardner because he “loved her grace and beauty.” Later there would be photographs of Shirley Temple. But by this point in his life, Michael was clearly captivated by Elizabeth as the ultimate star. He witnessed the glories and the star spectacle of her life and career in a way he had not with Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Hepburn, whose careers stretched back to the now very Old Hollywood. In a way, Elizabeth’s career did, too. But Elizabeth Taylor had become a midcentury star who cast a glow over the rest of the century. Michael was dazzled and captivated by the career highs and lows, by the endurance, by the power of her unending fame, and perhaps by her refusal to live her life on anyone’s terms but her own. Just as important was the fact that she had been a famous child star who, having survived it all, had not retreated from the public eye just as he knew he never could. What was the secret of her endurance and her survival?

  Much had happened in Elizabeth’s life since Michael’s birth—and much of that he had grown up actually witnessing.

  Chapter 13

  * * *

  IF ELIZABETH TAYLOR’S life had ended on that August day in 1958 when Michael was born, she would still have been a legendary figure. But her life had taken astounding twists and turns since that day, of which Michael was aware. Possibly no movie star was as constantly written about or even debated over.

  Her marriage to Eddie Fisher kept her in the headlines in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Taylor’s career continued to soar. Her performance as the troubled Cathy in the international hit Suddenly, Last Summer earned her a third Oscar nomination
and also won her the Maschera d’Argento—the Silver Mask—the Italian equivalent of the Oscar. Said Fisher: “Elizabeth had an off-screen image as a wicked woman and a reputation for being a very difficult actress to handle, but with a track record like hers, she was in enormous demand. There weren’t enough hours in the day to read all the scripts and film projects submitted to her.” Then came the big career event. One morning while Elizabeth was bathing, Fisher took a phone call from producer Walter Wanger, then planning an epic on Egypt’s Queen Cleopatra. He wanted no one but Elizabeth to play the role. But she had balked. On the phone that day, Fisher called out to Elizabeth, “Wanger still wants you to do Cleopatra.” Almost as a joke, she shouted, “Tell him only if he pays me a million dollars.” Fisher relayed her words. To Taylor’s surprise, Wanger worked out a deal to do precisely that. Today that salary would come to more than $8 million.

  The million-dollar salary became the most talked-about movie deal of the era, which, as film historians later noted, marked a major shift in Hollywood—and the power of a movie star. It was indeed the movie that changed Hollywood. In this case, though it was not acknowledged as fully as it should have been, a woman had led the way to the emerging new Hollywood. In the decades to come, at one time or another, such male stars as Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise, Will Smith, and Denzel Washington would rule the roost in the movie industry, and as big as such female stars as Jane Fonda, Julia Roberts, Angelina Jolie, and Jennifer Lawrence would be, for far too long none would outearn most of the important men in the business. That had not been the case with Taylor.

  But while Taylor was ready to move forward to a new phase of her career, MGM had another idea. Still under contract to the studio, she had to do another film for MGM before she would be free to star in Cleopatra. Taylor did everything she could to persuade the studio to release her. But MGM, seeing the publicity and the box office returns from her films, ironically two of which, Giant and Suddenly, Last Summer, were done on loan-outs to other studios, refused to let her just walk away. She would have to film BUtterfield 8, based on the John O’Hara novel about a high-class call girl who has a tragic end. Despising the script, she asked such writer friends as Tennessee Williams, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Paddy Chayefsky for suggestions to whip the screenplay into shape. MGM rejected all the suggestions.

  Producing BUtterfield 8 was Pandro S. Berman, who had lost all love for the woman he believed he had led to stardom with National Velvet. Berman always thought the real problem—which blinded “her sure dramatic instincts” for the role offered her—was money. MGM was paying her only $100,000. She said, however, that the role disgusted her. Finally accepting the fact that there was no way out of her MGM contract or the role, she decided to make life hell for MGM and Berman. “She demanded everything, and on some of the things I gave in to her. She insisted upon the picture being shot in New York. She insisted on Helen Rose’s coming to New York to do her clothes,” recalled Berman. “She demanded that some of her regular crew be sent to her. I agreed to all that.” Much to the consternation of the movie industry, MGM also agreed to cast Eddie Fisher in an important supporting role. Having appeared on-screen only once before, opposite Debbie Reynolds in Bundle of Joy, Fisher had been pleasant and agreeable, but he was not a movie star. But “she was making every effort to piece together a marriage, which from the beginning, had little chance of survival,” Helen Rose remembered, believing that Elizabeth was also making “an effort to give Eddie stature.” The perceptive Rose showed sympathy for Fisher when she commented: “This was a mistake as he was not good in the film and it only added to his insecurity.”

  Also causing problems on the film were Elizabeth’s ongoing health issues, now a part of her movie star legend. As in the past, when she traveled with husband Mike Todd despite excruciating back pain, she still appeared to disregard advice of family, friends, and physicians to take better care of herself. A simple cold could become serious overnight, which was just about what happened shortly before production began on BUtterfield 8.

  Stricken with double pneumonia, Taylor was rushed to the Harkness Pavilion in New York. “Elizabeth was so heavily medicated that she was out cold in the ambulance,” Fisher recalled. “Lights were flashing and sirens screaming as we turned in to the hospital. And at that moment Elizabeth sat up on the stretcher, took a compact out of her bag, and started fixing her face. ‘Get me my lip gloss,’ she said, handing me the bag.” With the decline of his singing career, Fisher found himself often being nursemaid to Elizabeth, and in time, the studio depended on him to keep things in control. Other times she appeared to dramatize health issues that were not serious. But for Fisher that was simply life with Elizabeth.

  Still, the problems on BUtterfield 8 mounted. “The wardrobe for the film was in New York and ready to be fitted, but Elizabeth was in bed with the flu. The studio hoped I could complete the fittings so the film could be started,” recalled Helen Rose. But once Rose arrived in New York, she was informed that Elizabeth was ill and could neither see nor speak to her on the phone.

  Cast members Laurence Harvey, Dina Merrill, Mildred Dunnock, Betty Field, and Susan Oliver were all aware of her displeasure with any number of things. “She didn’t like the director we hired, Daniel Mann,” said Pandro S. Berman. She may have had reason for not liking Mann, known as a Method director. When she was to film a scene in which her character showered, Mann instructed her to play the scene as if the faucet were a penis. Taylor stormed off the set. “Elizabeth said we couldn’t make her act and she would do a bad job, because she hated the character of Gloria,” recalled Berman. “I was sure that her desire to be a pro and co-operate with other actors, and her sense of obligation to her public would protect me from her doing any such thing.” Berman was right.

  Mann himself noted that, despite her protestations, she took her work more seriously than she wanted to admit. At times, she asked to redo a take, feeling she hadn’t given her best. In the end, her performance would be riveting. The opening sequence—when her character Gloria Wandrous awakens alone in the apartment of a socially prominent man who picked her up the night before—was a marvel that was close to the purely visual performances of stars in the silent era. With a minimum of dialogue, she had to communicate Gloria’s curiosity about the apartment in which she found herself, also her maneuvers to put herself together to leave the apartment, and then her defiance when she finds an envelope in which the man has left her money for the night—a sign that he regarded her as little more than a prostitute, the very thing her character Gloria prides herself on not being. Throughout the opening sequence, she was primarily dressed in a formfitting slip, her figure now lush and perhaps almost overripe, her sensuality at its height. Like Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones, hers was a natural sensuality (essential for her character) that was unmatched by most other actresses on-screen. The rest of the movie was, as she had known, disjointed with a script without focus or finesse. Critic Pauline Kael summed up the film’s faults best: “The John O’Hara novel that seemed perfect for the movies, plus the role that seemed perfect for Elizabeth Taylor—and this is the garish mess it became. Daniel Mann’s direction is maybe even worse than the Charles Schnee–John Michael Hayes script.” Nonetheless, in the tradition of the great stars, Elizabeth Taylor’s performance made the film worth seeing.

  With BUtterfield 8 completed, she was finally free to make Cleopatra.

  • • •

  From beginning to end, few other films in movie history drew the attention of Cleopatra, its only rival for that distinction being Gone With the Wind. The production of Cleopatra made Elizabeth Taylor the most famous woman in the world. Yet absolutely no other film was plagued by so many delays, mishaps, miscalculations, and plain screw-ups. Originally, Twentieth Century Fox had envisioned Cleopatra as something of a low-budget quickie, possibly with Joan Collins as Cleo. But once Taylor was signed, producer Walter Wanger turned it into a first-class, big-budgeted spectacle with a top-flight director, Rouben Mamoulian
, and costars Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd. Taylor wanted the film shot abroad—and in Todd-AO, the widescreen process developed by her late husband, Mike Todd. Fox decided to shoot the film outside London at Pinewood Studios. With the weather conditions—often chilly and damp—there were countless delays in filming exteriors. This proved to be the first significant miscalculation.

  Then one disaster after another struck the production, making headlines around the world. Always new health crises dogged Elizabeth. At one point, she was in such pain that after specialists attempted to treat her, she was hospitalized, believed to be suffering from meningitis. As it turned out, the cause was a dental problem. The remedy: several teeth were removed.

  Afterward came the major crisis. At the Dorchester in London, Elizabeth struggled with yet another cold, but this time with near-deadly results. Suddenly, Elizabeth was struggling to breathe and soon fell unconscious. A physician—“one of the greatest anesthesiologists and resuscitationists,” recalled Elizabeth—was attending a party at the Dorchester and was asked to come to her suite. He determined that her condition was so grave that she was rushed by ambulance to the London Clinic. Nine other specialists were called in, including the queen’s physician. “They got me to the hospital, slit open my throat, and stuck a pump down to take this stuff out of my lungs—which if you molded it into a ball and threw it on the floor would bounce.” A tracheotomy had been performed. Once again she had contracted double pneumonia, but now there were fears she might not survive.