How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  For the next eleven years Dick served Mayer "devotedly [and] loyally," Elizabeth would say, "available twenty-four hours a day." Hanley would never forget the afternoon in late 1943 when the young starlet and her mother passed by his desk on their way into their meeting with the studio chief. Dick had brought a box of cinnamon buns into the office that day, and Elizabeth's nostrils suddenly flared at the aroma. Hanley noticed a gleam in the little girl's eye.

  "Would you like one?" he asked.

  Of course she would—but even as she stretched out her hand, Sara was urging her onward. It wouldn't do for Elizabeth to greet Mr. Mayer with sticky fingers.

  It was a courtesy call, but still the stakes were high. Mayer needed to be thanked, flattered, and bowed down to for agreeing to cast Elizabeth in National Velvet. If he liked her well enough, and if the picture performed as well as they hoped, there was a long-term contract on the other side of all this. Nothing could have pleased Sara more.

  But Elizabeth wasn't entirely sure. Entering Mayer's office, she was distinctly nervous. She knew that people on the lot called the Executive Building "the iron lung" because "the executives tell you just how to breathe." Even at twelve years old, she was aware that "stars were born and built and died more or less at the whim of L. B. Mayer." The round little man frightened her, and as she took a seat opposite his desk, she kept her eyes fixed on him. "He looked rather like a gross, thick penguin," she said. "He had huge glasses and a way of looking at you that made you feel completely squash-able. You felt his vitality, but you also felt his enormous arrogance, his ego, his overbearing, driving personality. To know him was to be terrified of him."

  But that day Mr. Mayer couldn't have been more gracious. He recalled—or said that he recalled—an interview he'd had with mother and daughter several years earlier, before they'd signed with Universal. He lamented the fact that they hadn't become part of the MGM family back then. (Sara, in her telling of the story, would always insist that Mayer had wanted to hire Elizabeth at that time, but she had turned him down—a rather unlikely scenario.) Mayer enthused about his high hopes for National Velvet, and with a twinkle in his eye, assured them that he already had other projects in mind for Elizabeth.

  When he wanted to be, Mayer could be very charming—and there was no question that Sara was dazzled. It wasn't long before the stars in her eyes were noticed by other people on the lot. Ava Gardner would always believe that Sara and Mayer had had an affair; Francis Taylor's brother was convinced that if the studio chief had ever snapped his fingers, Sara would have left her husband for him. It's not so far-fetched. Sara was used to relying on older benefactors like Victor Cazalet and Howard Young. And having only recently lost Cazalet in a plane crash, she may have been, even unconsciously, looking for someone to replace him, someone who could ensure her well-being in a way that her husband never could and who could play doting godfather to Elizabeth.

  But Elizabeth never warmed to Mayer the way her mother did. She found the enforced adulation of the man utterly unnerv ing. His very public birthday parties, held on the enormous Stage Thirty, were particularly egregious. A year earlier, before she'd become a hot property, Elizabeth had stood on tiptoe near the back of the crowd to see "Big Daddy Mayer, the benevolent white father," as she called him, standing up on a dais and beaming as hundreds of his employees sang "Happy Birthday" to him. Afterward he gushed how he considered them all his children. At his side were his top stars, people like Robert Taylor, Van Johnson, Greer Garson, and five-year-old Margaret O'Brien, then MGM's most popular child actress. O'Brien was so successful that she could even opt out of the studio school, taking lessons from a tutor in the privacy of her dressing room.

  Elizabeth had envied O'Brien at the time. But now she was knocking at the gates of stardom herself. As she and her mother stood to leave, Mayer leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. But finding far more favor with Elizabeth was Dick Hanley, who made sure to slip her a cinnamon bun on her way out.

  On the set of National Velvet, Elizabeth was happier now that she was playacting and riding horses. Brown was solicitous of her, aware that Sara was always just out of camera range. But that didn't prevent him from removing the MISS TAYLOR sign from her dressing-room door, replacing it with the simpler ELIZABETH. The director wanted to make sure that stardom didn't go to his little star's head.

  Brown was also insistent that Elizabeth cut her long, luxurious hair for the climactic scene in which she dons a jockey's cap and uniform, and triumphantly rides her horse to victory in the Grand National. Here Elizabeth balked. Playacting had just reached its limit. In tears, she rushed into the hairdressing department, lorded over by a strutting peacock by the name of Sydney Guilaroff, who took pity on her. For the next week, Guilaroff worked around the clock to weave thousands of individual strands of hair into a short wig and attached it to Elizabeth's jockey cap. According to Guilaroff, whose stories sometimes were more than a little fanciful, Clarence Brown was completely fooled, and Elizabeth threw her little arms around her hairdresser and cried, "Thank you, Sydney." Guilaroff would remain her confidante for the next two decades.

  But her hair was not the only problem during the shoot. Brown and Pan Berman had at one point worried that Elizabeth would look too young; now they had the opposite concern. At twelve, Elizabeth was fast becoming a woman. Suddenly she was busting out all over. "Not an ounce of puberty on her," Anne Francis said, in awe. "She was full-blown by the time she was thirteen."

  Publicist Jack Hirshberg, lunching with Walter Pidgeon and Hume Cronyn in the commissary one day, nearly spilled his chicken soup all over himself when Elizabeth walked past their table. "She was thirteen," Hirshberg said, "but, oh boy. You might say she was in the early spring of her physical development."

  On the set of National Velvet, Hedda Hopper watched in wonder as the adolescent star cinched her belt, showing "her charms to perfection." Hopper wasn't the only one transfixed. Twenty-three-year-old Mickey Rooney was already making a beeline toward his young costar when Hedda lunged and grabbed him by the seat of his pants. "Lay a hand on her," she warned, "and you will have to answer to me."

  Rooney laughed. "I believe you would beat me up."

  "I sure would," the columnist replied.

  As Elizabeth blossomed, studio execs became jittery. Her virginal image needed to be safeguarded at all costs. "The studio was concerned because she'd just go flouncing around the lot," said Anne Francis. "So they corralled her mother and said, 'You'd better be next to her at all times because we're afraid something might happen.'"

  Of course, Sara had no intention of ever being too far from Elizabeth's side. For all her developing womanhood and occasionally salty language, Elizabeth remained childishly dependent on Sara for everything from how to dress to what to eat for lunch. She was still a dreamer, easily reduced to tears by sad songs and unhappy stories. Fellow child actress Darla Hood, longtime star of the Our Gang series, would regale Elizabeth with movie plots, real and imagined. When they didn't end happily, Elizabeth would always interrupt and insist, "Oh, don't end it that way. I want it to end happily."

  In 1944 most movies did end happily, of course, especially those made by MGM. Elizabeth—coddled and protected by her mother—grew up believing that unhappiness need never touch her. And so her distress was very real when Clarence Brown replaced Mona Freeman with Angela Lansbury as Velvet's sister. When she encountered Freeman, aged seventeen, sitting outside the soundstage in tears, Elizabeth began sobbing herself. "She never knew until that very moment that anyone could be replaced," said Margaret Kerry, who was on the lot at the time. "It frightened her."

  Elizabeth Taylor's ambition, as formidable as it was, would never be coldhearted. Her tears for Mona Freeman demonstrate that. But the incident reveals more than just her compassion. From that moment on, Elizabeth understood that she needed to make herself irreplaceable.

  Elizabeth had brought her chipmunk, Nibbles, to the Beverly Hills home of Hedda Hopper. Cupping the furry little crea
ture in her hands, Elizabeth told the columnist to lean in for a better look. As she did so, the chipmunk leaped onto Hedda's arm and clawed its way up her flabby, mottled skin. Hedda screamed, she recalled, "like a banshee."

  But nothing could make Hopper cross with Elizabeth Taylor at this point. "You couldn't have wished for a sweeter child," she said. There was no longer a need for Sara to pester the columnist. From the moment it was clear that National Velvet was going to be a gigantic hit, Hedda became a one-woman cheering squad for Elizabeth's career. She insisted that the young star drop the "Miss Hopper" business and start calling her "Aunt Hedda."

  "I haven't yet seen National Velvet," Hopper wrote in October 1944, "but I'll lay a wager right now it will be voted Metro's best picture of the year." A month later Hedda told her readers, "Elizabeth gets a star rating and deserves it." She added that Elizabeth was "beating Shirley Temple in her love of animals." It was more of the studio's party line about Elizabeth's menagerie of pets, yet by simply writing the words "she is beating Shirley Temple," Hopper was giving a terrific boost to the new star's standing. If Elizabeth was beating all-time child-star champ Temple in anything, she was doing very well indeed.

  By now "Aunt" Hedda was eagerly gobbling up credit for discovering Elizabeth Taylor. Just as National Velvet premiered, Hopper recapped the starlet's short career in a lengthy column, writing how she and Elizabeth's parents had put their "plan into action" and brought the girl to MGM's attention. Hedda's frequent annoyance at Sara's ambition apparently had been forgotten, at least for the moment.

  Velvet opened to rave reviews in December 1944. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times proclaimed that Elizabeth's "face is alive with youthful spirit, her voice has the softness of sweet song and her whole manner in this picture is one of refreshing grace." The New York Sun deemed her "one of the screen's most lovable characters," and the Post declared her "as natural and excellent a little actress as you would ever hope to see."

  Indeed, National Velvet stands the test of time, and so does Elizabeth. She proved to be a very different kind of child star: charming, never cloying. And she accomplishes the near-impossible task of consigning that inveterate scenery chewer, Mickey Rooney, to the background, despite his top billing. Filmed around Pebble Beach on the Monterey Peninsula, the Technicolor film is visually gorgeous, with the plunging cliffs and deep blue skies perfectly evoking the story's English setting. By the end of 1945, Velvet would place among the top ten most profitable pictures of the year.

  Soon after the film's release, Metro announced Hold High the Torch for Elizabeth, in which she'd play the owner of a devoted collie named Bill. Immediately those indefatigable publicists launched an aggressive campaign to keep their young star and her four-legged friends in front of the public. A big to-do was made over Louis B. Mayer's presenting Elizabeth with King Charles, the black stallion she'd ridden in Velvet, but the headlines didn't stop there. When columnist Sheilah Graham arrived on the lot to interview the young star, she found her walking her chipmunk on a red wool leash. Like Hedda Hopper, Graham reported that Nibbles scrambled up her arm. "Now if you can love a child after her chipmunk frightens the daylights out of you, that child's got something," Graham told her readers. "Elizabeth sure has."

  When filming was delayed on Hold High the Torch, it became imperative that Elizabeth's name and face be kept circulating in the press. Adorable shots of the thirteen-year-old actress posing with two puppies hanging in stockings were released to newspapers in September 1945. Then someone in the publicity department came up with the brilliant idea to publish a book written by Elizabeth—a book that would confirm everything the public believed about its little heroine—and release it to coincide with Hold High the Torch. And so, in the spring of 1946, came Nibbles and Me, in which Elizabeth's pluckiness, honesty, compassion, and all-American girlishness were on full display. The book, an early example of a merchandising tie-in, was the perfect complement to her new film—which had been retitled Courage of Lassie, capitalizing on MGM's earlier franchise although the collie is still called "Bill" in the film.

  The genius of Nibbles and Me was its studied appearance of happenstance. Press releases informed us that Elizabeth had written an essay for school, and Miss McDonald had thought it so good that she showed it to the studio higher-ups. They, in turn, were so impressed that they showed it to the people over at the publishing house of Duell, Sloan & Pearce, who suddenly had a brainstorm on the spot that the little essay might make a fine book. Of course that was the way the studio described the book's genesis. Certainly the idea couldn't have come from that building full of publicists and planters adjacent to the MGM lot.

  "That's what was so great about the studios," said Dick Clayton, the agent who helped discover and promote James Dean and Tab Hunter. "They could make you believe anything. [Nibbles and Me] was a great example of public relations."

  Promoting both book and film, Elizabeth escorted Nibbles to "interviews" with Maxine Arnold of Photoplay (which ran an excerpt) and Sara Salzer of Screen Guide. Hedda Hopper, of course, gave the story lots of ink, featuring the little creature and its mistress several times in her column.

  This offered a far more useful education than anything Elizabeth was learning in class. Watching her mother negotiate her contracts, she learned the art of the deal. For Nibbles, she received a $1,000 advance and a share of the royalties, all spelled out in an addendum to her contract dated October 31, 1945, signed and initialed by both Elizabeth and Sara. For her performance in Velvet, there also had been an enormous increase in salary (from $100 a week to $750 a week) plus a $15,000 bonus. And in a coup de grâce, Sara had engineered above-the-title billing for Elizabeth in Courage of Lassie. It had taken Judy Garland five years of small parts and low-paying contracts to make it to the top; Elizabeth—and Sara—had accomplished the task in less than half that time.

  Elizabeth was also now a star in school, which meant greater leverage. Strolling into the Little Red Schoolhouse, she took a seat in one of the large stuffed chairs off to the side. Miss McDonald eyed her and finally asked if she'd like to come join them at her desk so that the lessons might begin. "Oh, I'm quite comfortable here," replied the star of two of the studio's biggest pictures. "But thanks for asking."

  Part of her understood, however, that her world was make-believe, that other girls her age did not live as she did. To accommodate the orthodontic braces Velvet wears in the film, the studio had pulled two of Elizabeth's baby teeth and installed temporary ones, just so that the braces would fit properly—and Velvet's smile would look the way the director wanted it to in the finished film. One publicist thought the mole on her cheek should be removed; another wanted to lighten her hair. Elizabeth was continually fretted over, pulled one way then another, and spoken of as a commod ity for this or that film. Although the perks of stardom thrilled her, Elizabeth understood even then that by signing a long-term contract, she had become the studio's "chattel." With Elizabeth's father and brother fading into the background, MGM—and its executives and publicists and hairdressers and makeup artists and directors and contract players—became her family.

  The trade-off was stardom. In August 1945, during a train layover in Chicago, Elizabeth and Sara learned that the Japanese had surrendered and World War II was over. Amid the hullabaloo at the station, with hats flying and soldiers kissing girls, Elizabeth didn't escape notice. "We were so surprised to find in all the excitement that crowds of people recognized me as Velvet and wanted my autograph," Elizabeth said. "It made me feel very happy." In the midst of a national celebration, it was the reality of her own stardom that had the biggest effect on Elizabeth.

  Yet not very long after this, she and her mother were cornered by a crowd in Paris filled with people who poked at Elizabeth as if she were, in Sara's words, "a china doll." Mother watched daughter with mounting concern. "Elizabeth stood there, at bay, cornered, miserable." After they got away from the mob, the young star wondered, "[Do] people who come close to you like that have the
same feelings you have?" And therein lay the crux of Elizabeth's life. Stardom was all she knew, with both its thrills and its trials. What else might exist out there—what ordinary people were like and how they felt—she could only wonder about.

  There's a scene in National Velvet where Velvet muses: "I want it all quick. I don't want God to stop and think I'm getting more than my share." In real life, no matter how many lingering questions she might have had, Elizabeth Taylor was about to get Velvet's wish.

  Three

  The Most Exciting Girl

  February 1949–August 1951

  IN HIS OFFICE on the Paramount lot, George Stevens was restless, puffing on his cigar, thumbing through the latest issue of Life magazine, lost in his reveries. Since returning from the war, where he'd helped liberate Dachau, the director had been a different man, no longer the brash, gregarious fellow who'd made Alice Adams, Swing Time, Gunga Din, and The More the Merrier. Colleagues now found him silent and taciturn, unable to summon any passion for the kind of lighthearted films he'd once made. "The edge had gone off the humor," said Frank Capra. "He had seen too much ... a nightmare of the stupidity of man."

  In his only film since returning from the war, Stevens had transformed I Remember Mama from what might have been merely a contemplative longing for a simpler time into something more truthful, a work of art suggesting that nostalgia obscured the difficult realities of the past. The blood-soaked fields of Europe had left Stevens with a cynicism out of sync with his prewar films. Yet his loss of innocence was tempered by a lingering hope that somewhere, somehow, such things as love and honor might still survive.

  And so Stevens found himself drawn to Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy, the story of a young man who commits murder out of love for a beautiful, idealized girl. "The kind of girl," Stevens told Paramount execs, "that a young man could see at first glance and find his eyes so fixed upon that his attention will not turn. Her beauty and poise must give the impression that she is unattainable."