How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  By 1957 everyone from cops to columnists was eating out of Mike Todd's hand. Part of that was due to the state-of-the-art team behind him, one that made the Metro publicity department seem very old-fashioned. Telephones rang simultaneously in Todd's offices at the United Artists Building at Forty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue and at his homes in Manhattan, Connecticut, and Beverly Hills, making Todd, even when he was away, "very much a part of the office operation," according to Glenda Jensen. Elizabeth loved to visit the office and marvel at her husband's routine. "He'd have ten different ideas going on at once," she said. "He'd have two telephones in his hands, a different conversation going on over each phone, plus a Dictaphone going." The staff was similarly linked by home-office phones. "There was a lot of coming and going by the employees and very few had desks," Jensen said. "They just checked in regularly"—a 1950s version of telecommuting.

  Among Todd's staff were lawyers and accountants and technicians. Everything was covered. If a theater owner had any projection troubles, William Boettcher was on hand to fix things. Rivington Bisland, a former baseball player and boxing promoter, plotted box-office strategy. Ned Mann devised special effects for parties and premieres. Morris Lefko and Vincent Liccardi ran top-notch sales and advertising divisions; later they'd take their expertise to MGM and Paramount, respectively. The very faces of the Todd operation were unusually modern in their diversity: In addition to the overtly gay Dick Hanley and the Japanese-American Midori Tsuji, there were also Puerto Ricans and African-Americans on staff, and not in minor positions either.

  Yet by far the most impressive element of the Todd operation was Bill Doll's press and public relations machine. These were hard-boiled New York press agents, the kind featured in the film Sweet Smell of Success—clever, cunning, ruthless when they needed to be, but amazingly effective in getting their clients coverage. "Those guys were nuts," said Shirley Herz, one of Doll's deputies. "They were crazy. They were creative. And press agentry was an art." Doll proved just how artful when he printed up a mock front page of Daily Variety announcing that production of Around the World had wrapped. 'THE WORLD' COMES TO AN END, BLARED THE HEADLINE. BILLIONS OF PEOPLE AWAIT 'THE SECOND COMING'—OF NEW SHOW IN TODD-AO. The whole page was filled with items hyping Todd and his picture, and was inserted into real issues of Daily Variety. Many readers took it to be a legitimate part of the trade paper. Press agentry at its best.

  What's significant is that by 1957—just as old Hollywood was winding down—Mike Todd had in place a structure and a system that could pick up where the studios' vaunted publicity machines had left off. His buddy Robert Harrison over at Confidential might rail about the studios' duplicitous press operations, but in fact Todd's PR team did pretty much the same thing. And despite being based in New York, the canny showman had every intention (and every ability) to expand his operations westward. If there were concerns that by liberating Elizabeth from MGM she'd lose the machinery that had long sustained her fame, the Todd press department was proving every day that it was equal to, if not better at, the task.

  Certainly Todd's operation was considerably more farsighted than its West Coast counterparts. As the number of newspapers decreased and the number of television stations grew (almost all of them centered in New York), Todd directed his agents to adapt. "We had to learn to think visually," said Shirley Herz. It was no longer enough to send out eight-by-ten glossies. Now the stars themselves needed to be trooped out to sit under the harsh television lights for some face-to-face time with Edward R. Murrow or to sing and dance with Todd's buddy Eddie Fisher on his top-rated NBC variety show.

  Elizabeth had already performed her own dog-and-pony show for the small screen, promoting Giant with Rock Hudson on Toast of the Town. No doubt Todd saw more of that in her future. He wasn't concerned, as some were, that television would diminish a star's appeal. In fact, television could significantly enhance it, he believed, by connecting the star more intimately to the public. No longer distant deities on the silver screen, stars now appeared right there in Americans' living rooms. That's why so many big names—from Charles Boyer to William Holden to Tallulah Bankhead—were clamoring to appear on I Love Lucy and other top-rated TV shows. "Mike Todd had enormous vision," said Susan McCarthy Todd. "He was an incredibly modern man." One trade paper declared he had "become his own brand." By the middle of 1957, with just one film under his belt, Todd had convinced the public that what he had for sale was exactly what they wanted to buy. It was a lesson learned well by his wife.

  But his great wealth was an illusion. His productions were all about show—no surprise, so was his life. Much of Todd's world was as artificial as what he created on the stage and screen. His ostentatious style and standard of living far exceeded the reality of his true financial worth. Revenues piling up from Around the World were blown through with a delicious disregard. Money burned holes in Mike's pocket. So he took Elizabeth around the world, rented a mansion in Connecticut, and leased a private eleven-passenger Lockheed Lodestar plane that he named the Liz—a "needless extravagance," according to his son. It was the only plane in the world with a double bed, Mike boasted. He and Elizabeth "roughed it," he joked, by dispensing with a steward. His wife was a "rugged type" who "can pour her own champagne and carve her own pheasant."

  By living so conspicuously, Todd created an image for himself that sustained the illusion he wanted people to believe. The publicity he generated with his lavish parties and premieres served as collateral when he went to sign his name at the bottom of a note. Despite the 116 fall guys from 1946 who might have argued otherwise, each and every one of Todd's creditors believed that they would eventually get paid. "I've often been broke," the showman famously quipped, "but I've never been poor." For him, being rich was simply a state of mind. Money in the bank wasn't needed to back it up.

  It was a child's-eye view of the world in many ways, and that, perhaps, was the biggest bond between husband and wife. Mr. and Mrs. Todd were two excitable children grabbing what the world had to offer. The critic Brooks Atkinson mused that despite Todd's "brashness and cunning," it was his "basic immaturity" that defined him. "There is a certain innocence about the typical Broadway showman," Atkinson wrote. "Since he is primarily concerned with externals, he is interested only in the externals of his own life and never learns much about the nature of the world and its people." Todd's great success, Around the World in Eighty Days, was "enchanting [and] childlike" in Atkinson's opinion, and watching it today, that is still the impression one gets of the man who made it. He seems as if he's still a young boy standing on a street corner selling used umbrellas, dreaming about what the rest of the world might look like and how someday he might get out there and see it. No, not just see it. Own it.

  And as Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor walked down that gangplank from the SS Liberté that day in July 1957, there was every reason to believe that they could own the world, that all of their dreams would come true.

  Two weeks later Mike found himself huffing along out of breath at Elizabeth's side as medics frantically wheeled her into the Harkness Pavilion at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. With each spasm of pain that wracked her body, Elizabeth squeezed her husband's hand. "Premature labor," Todd told the assembled reporters. It would have to be: They had only been married five months.

  "I'm spending all my time by her bedside," Todd announced after getting Elizabeth settled into a room. "She's in terrible pain, but unless it's a sheer, outstanding emergency they don't want to have to take the baby for two and a half weeks." The baby was due, he told reporters, on October 15—three months away.

  Of course, that still put the date of conception several weeks before their marriage on February 2. In 1957 these things mattered—especially in public life and especially when the woman in question was a thrice-married Hollywood movie star. People were still talking about Rita Hayworth's baby born seven months after her marriage to Aly Khan; many had laughed off Aly's feeble explanation that premature babies were c
ommon in his family. And only in the last year had Ingrid Bergman received any kind of forgiveness from the public for having a baby with Roberto Rossellini while she was still the wife of another man. So it was critical that the public not think that Elizabeth had been unfaithful with Todd while she was still legally married to Michael Wilding.

  But any cynic could do the math, and some did, writing letters of outrage to Hedda Hopper. It's likely that the baby was conceived in November 1956, just a few weeks after Elizabeth had filed for divorce from Wilding and some three months before the di vorce was final. Even if the child was premature, it seems unlikely that it came a full three months early; babies born that young usually face major physical difficulties growing up, and the child who was born to Elizabeth on August 6, 1957—a girl she named Elizabeth Frances and called Liza—was a beautiful baby who grew up healthy and strong.

  Thanks to Todd's rapport with the press, however, very little comment was made about the child's birth date. Hedda Hopper, eager to kiss up to the biggest man in showbiz, provided cover for the Todds, writing in her column how very much they had been hoping that the pregnancy "would go the full nine months." And so Elizabeth Taylor escaped the scarlet letter of Rita Hayworth and Ingrid Bergman.

  She had her husband to thank for this. But, of course, there were so many things to be grateful to Todd for. Stretched out on a chaise near the pool at their Westport, Connecticut, home, Elizabeth flexed her toes as one assistant pampered her with a pedicure and another massaged her hands. A third was applying some of Marian Bialac's celebrated Yatrolin cream to her cheeks. She could hear Mike on the telephone inside the house, shouting at some studio official. She knew he was trying to free her from the despised Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which, unnerved by all the talk about her starring in her husband's pictures, had started protesting that she was still under contract to them. Now that the baby was born, the studio wanted her back to star in the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams's play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, promising her an exciting, up-and-coming costar—either Ben Gazzara or Paul Newman.

  But even a project as enticing as Cat held little appeal if it meant giving up this life of leisure. Lifting a cold cucumber slice from her eye, Elizabeth begged her husband not to make her go back to work. He surprised her by telling her that she should make the film—though he promised it would be the last one she would ever have to make for MGM. Ringing back just then, the studio countered that they were owed two pictures. And so the battle began.

  Enter Kurt Frings, Todd's personal choice for Elizabeth's new representation. Gentlemen agents like Jules Goldstone and Le-land Hayward were fading away. In this more desperate Hollywood, Elizabeth needed someone who used cunning, pressure, and threats to make things happen. Frings, one of Todd's regular poker buddies, was precisely the shark she needed, a harbinger of the high-powered agents who'd soon dominate in Hollywood and become almost as famous as the clients they represented.

  A former lightweight boxing champ from Cologne, Germany, Frings was a small, compact man with jet black hair, flashing green eyes, and a temper that was all too easily triggered. "A notorious international character" was the way the United States government described him in 1940, when he was a war refugee in Tijuana waiting for asylum in this country. Although Congress recommended that Frings be admitted, President Roosevelt had vetoed the bill, citing allegations of moral turpitude. Particularly egregious from the government's point of view was Paramount's plan to make a film of the play Hold Back the Dawn, written by Frings's wife, Ketti, which portrayed the former pugilist as a heroic refugee, not the con artist the government considered him to be. "Imagination played a greater part than fact" in the play, the U.S. narcotics commissioner insisted. But the point was moot: Hold Back the Dawn was filmed in 1941 with Olivia de Havilland and Charles Boyer, and garnered a slew of Oscar nominations.

  Once Frings finally managed to get into the country, he had an odd way of repaying his wife's advocacy. Their fights frequently brought out the police. But Frings's well-connected network of friends and clients (by 1958 his roster included Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Dorothy McGuire, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, and José Ferrer) ensured that the brawls were kept out of the press. That didn't mean Frings's clients always liked him: George Cukor would eventually terminate his representation when he felt that Frings demanded commissions he wasn't entitled to, and Cronyn was peeved that his own agent couldn't seem to remember his name.

  Elizabeth, on the other hand, adored him. Like Mike, Frings was bold and brash, and she'd laugh uproariously as the two men drank their whiskies and told off-color jokes about the studio heads. Even more important, Elizabeth's new agent was finally gaining her the upper hand in dealing with Metro. Frings had informed the front office that Elizabeth didn't need the studio now that she was Mrs. Mike Todd; if she wasn't accommodated, she'd walk out on her contract. If Metro wanted to sue, then they should go ahead. With such bravado, Frings managed to get Elizabeth's old contract rewritten with better terms. She'd be paid a weekly rate of $4,850 prior to the making of Cat and then a flat fee of $125,000 (plus per diems and overages) once principal photography began. If she did a second film for them (and that remained an "if" as far as Frings was concerned) then she expected the same deal, as well as the right to appear in Don Quixote or any other Todd production before any second film for Metro. And her mother was to continue being paid $300 a week—for doing nothing, unless babysitting grandchildren was part of the deal.

  The balance of power had shifted. It was no longer Metro who told Elizabeth what to do; it was now Mike Todd who bossed the studio around. When Cat director Richard Brooks objected to Metro's decision to make the film in black-and-white, he knew whom to complain to. Referencing his two stars—Paul Newman had won the part opposite Elizabeth—Brooks told Todd, "For Christ's sake, when you get a chance to shoot the violet eyes of Elizabeth Taylor and the blue eyes of Paul Newman, do you use black-and-white?" Todd just nodded and said, "I see." The next day "three black crows," as Brooks called them, appeared from the front office and ordered him to switch to color. Brooks credited the change to Todd's influence.

  Mike was eager for Elizabeth to star in Cat, despite the statements of some Taylor biographers to the contrary. His reasoning was simple: Now that profits from Around the World were finally leveling off, Elizabeth stood to be the bigger moneymaker in the household, and Todd was counting on cash from Cat to seed Don Quixote. He also may have been bracing for another looming fi nancial crisis: The government was again investigating him, this time suspecting fraud in his recent tax returns. The results of the investigation would be inconclusive, but several people who knew him said that they wouldn't be surprised if Mike had routinely underreported his income.

  As plans for Cat continued apace, Elizabeth became more excited about the film; she knew what it could do for her. Maggie the Cat—the sexually frustrated wife of a sexually confused scion of a Southern cotton family, as restless and as jumpy as a cat on a hot tin roof—was part spoiled sexpot, part compassionate earth mother, a role ready-made for Elizabeth. Paul Newman's part (as the tormented Brick) was actually the center of the piece, but Maggie—one of the greatest of Tennessee Williams's gallery of female characters—was a stunning and sexy opportunity for Elizabeth to cavort around a hot plantation bedroom in a white slip and draw upon the same sensitive attributes that had made her work in A Place in the Sun so memorable. Newman was a rising name but not yet the icon that he would become. For the first time Elizabeth Taylor was unquestionably the star of the picture, not playing second fiddle to a Clift or a Hudson.

  Brooks had come to the film only after George Cukor, faced with objections from producer Pandro Berman, had bowed out. Cukor's idea had been to cast Joan Blondell as Big Mama, Maggie's mother-in-law, which would have brought the two wives of Mike Todd together on the screen. Instead, Brooks cast Judith Anderson and brought Burl Ives in to re-create his Broadway incarnation of Big Daddy. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was shaping up to be
one of the major films of the year. Everyone wondered how Metro would finesse the central conflict of the play—Brick's unresolved love for another man. The death of his childhood friend Skipper seems to have stilled his very existence. On stage there had been freedom of expression; in a Hollywood still fearful of the heavy-handed fist of the Production Code, such matters would need extreme delicacy. Cukor seemed glad to be free of the responsibility: "I couldn't do an emasculated version," he told Louella Parsons, "and I don't see how the movie itself could be properly presented." The controversy made the project even more interesting to anticipate. "This is one film that everyone expects to go sky high," Parsons said.

  Elizabeth wasn't the only one in the family planning big things. As Around the World in Eighty Days finally reached smaller theaters across the country, Todd came up with the inspired idea to turn their premieres into fundraisers for charity. Bill Doll's press agents poured into small cities to coordinate things in the weeks prior to the opening nights. Flying in on the Liz for the film's premiere at the Strand Theatre in Hartford, Connecticut, Todd himself effusively thanked the audience who had paid the exorbitant price of $5.00 per ticket and raised thousands for two local children's charities. For his largesse, Todd received a thunderous ovation. Back in Los Angeles, in his continuing campaign for respect and recognition, he posed at the County Museum beside a weary-looking Elizabeth as he donated several paintings from his collection, including a Renoir, a Pissarro, and a Monet. Obviously exhausted from Liza's difficult birth, Mrs. Todd could still grasp the effectiveness of her husband's methods of self-advancement. Giving back cemented fame. Celebrity was a two-way street, and those who benefited from the public's attention and affection must never forget their part in the exchange.