The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice

by M. G. Lord

  The film sets up Jett Rink as Jordy’s polar opposite. At the beginning of the movie, Stevens tempts us to root for Rink. He grew up broke, and his struggles toward self-betterment—memorizing vocabulary and learning to make tea—are poignant. But when he strikes oil and becomes a billionaire, he builds an absurdly lavish hotel and orders its staff to refuse service to nonwhite people. He props himself up by tearing down others—whole races of them.

  Rink and Jordy clash at the black-tie opening of Rink’s hotel—which the Benedicts (also newly oil-rich) have been pressured to attend. Jordy expects the event to annoy him—and regrets agreeing to attend—but when the hotel beauty salon bars his wife, Juana, he hits the roof. The beautician is baffled by his anger: “She should have gone to Sanchez’ place, where they do her people.”

  Too furious to notice the thunderstorm through which he has slogged, Jordy, dripping, confronts Rink at the dinner in Rink’s honor. Portrayed with passion by Dennis Hopper, Jordy is a small, clenched bundle of indignation in a ballroom full of rangy, tuxedo-clad cowboys—the state’s petroleum elite. Rink sneers; he loathes Jordy’s education, idealism, and last name. He taunts Jordy about “marrying a squaw.” Then he orders his goons to hold Jordy back, so that he can avenge years of class resentment, throwing a punch to flatten the rich boy. Leslie winces when Jordy is struck; but she is proud that her son stood up to injustice. Bick, however, shamed, leaps to defend the Benedict family honor—not to demand respect for Jordy’s wife.

  Bick prides himself on being open-minded. But later, when he counsels Jordy to expect confrontation—that it comes with “marrying in that direction”—he exposes his prejudice. Bick is just a less-crude version of Rink. On the edge of tears, Jordy begs his father to hear what he has said—and to fight against the bigotry in his heart.

  At Sarge’s Diner, a roadside dump on the drive back to Reata, Jordy’s message sinks in. Sarge, the loutish white owner, grudgingly serves Leslie, Juana, Bick, and Bick’s biracial grandson. But when a Mexican couple sits down, Sarge evicts them. And Bick raises his fists—not for family honor or personal pride, but for something larger—racial justice—in which before this moment he had only superficially believed.

  Bick does not prevail. Sarge decks him; he crashes into a stack of dishes and topples to the floor. But in Leslie’s eyes, he is victorious. He has experienced a flicker of empathy. She has also triumphed. Her values don’t just reside in the Benedict children; they have taken root in her husband as well: “After a hundred years, the Benedict family is really a success.”

  Giant “depicts the erosion of sexual stereotyping,” critic Peter Biskind writes in Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties. “Leslie is more assertive, more a man than her mother back in Maryland, and she feminizes Bick, sees to it that he becomes more a woman than his father.” In 1956—the same year that Rebel Without a Cause blamed teenage delinquency on fathers who wear aprons—this itself was an achievement.

  But Stevens doesn’t just break down gender polarities. He implies that the innate values of women are nobler than those of men. He takes Leslie’s world—the world of women—and connects it to the “aggregate of pluralist values,” the “highest aspirations” toward which a civilization can strive: “tolerance, compromise, flexibility, and civility,” Biskind writes. He does this through Leslie’s commitment to social justice. In Giant, Biskind asserts, “woman’s world comes to be equated with nothing less than culture itself.”

  7

  1956–1959

  AS YOU CAN IMAGINE, Warner Brothers did not sell Giant as a feminist call to arms. It sold the film as a steamy love triangle—misrepresenting, often comically, the content of scenes. The ad campaign used “subliminal seduction,” a then-trendy technique for selling products by stealthily linking them to sex. The studio ran a half-page ad with three big pictures. In the first, Hudson, valiantly heterosexual, gazes longingly at Taylor. The caption: “Bick Benedict, owning so much except the one part of Leslie’s life that is no part of his.”

  The ad then shows Dean, shirt unbuttoned to the waist, oozing intensity, and Taylor on her knees before him. Although they are technically chaste, their positions hint at an act that would violate the Production Code. The caption: “Jett Rink, the outsider—and Leslie, wealthy and beautiful.”

  The last frame shows Dean leering at Taylor as if she were a hamburger and he had missed lunch. The caption: “Jett Rink’s shack. No one has ever set foot in it—and then, suddenly, Leslie.” The last picture is the most distorted. Far from depicting a sweaty, libidinous tryst, the actual scene is prim and tender. To show Leslie that he is not a brute, Jett struggles to get everything right as he makes her a cup of tea. His actions are a perfect metaphor for the feminization of the West.

  Unlike the ad, with its inadvertent comedy, tragedy hung over the production, as it would soon over Taylor’s life. On September 30, 1955, shortly before the film was due to wrap, Dean fatally crashed his Porsche 550 Spyder on his way to a road race in Salinas, California. Dean and Hudson had avoided each other during filming; Hudson, some biographers theorize, was miffed when Dean rebuffed his advances. But Taylor forged close platonic relationships with both men. When she learned of the accident, she collapsed. Stevens was furious; Taylor’s histrionics were delaying his movie. Stevens thought Dean had been addicted to risk; he almost expected Dean to meet a premature demise. Challenge death often enough, and death is likely to prevail. But Taylor had to be hospitalized—sickened, her internist wrote, by both grief and “the extreme mental duress she was put under by the director.” Her final performances, however, proved worth the wait. Although she herself did not earn an Academy Award for Giant, she helped Stevens win his second.

  Happily, when Taylor returned to Los Angeles, Wilding was no longer unemployed. MGM gave the forty-three-year-old actor a part, though not one suited to his maturity and gravitas. Outfitted in tights and ballet shoes, the uniform of a fairytale prince, he skipped and hopped through The Glass Slipper, a musical version of Cinderella.

  After Taylor scored a success for a rival studio, MGM seemed oddly determined to drag her down—as it had done after A Place in the Sun. It foisted a lemon of a script upon her: Raintree County, a cheap reworking of Gone with the Wind set in the North. Taylor’s character, Susanna, was supposed to resemble Scarlett O’Hara, except that, as the part was written, the character had neither Scarlett’s wit nor her cunning nor her survival instinct. She had Scarlett’s beauty, but this was wasted without Scarlett’s genius for using it to manipulate men. As Leslie Benedict in Giant, Taylor had delivered an eloquent plea for racial justice. By contrast, in Raintree County, Taylor is forced to portray a self-destructive bigot. Her character goes nuts—babbling, gurgling, and, ultimately, drowning herself—from fear that she has “Negro blood.”

  At least MGM cast Taylor opposite her friend Montgomery Clift—fresh from a celebrated performance in From Here to Eternity. But this, too, would lead to tragedy. On May 12, 1956, Taylor and Wilding invited a few friends to their Benedict Canyon house for dinner. The guests included Rock Hudson and his wife, Phyllis Gates (former secretary to Hudson’s agent, whom Hudson had married to banish rumors about his sexuality). She also invited Clift and the actor Kevin McCarthy, who was visiting Los Angeles to work on a TV program. Clift and McCarthy had been friends since 1941, when they met in New York at the Actors Studio.

  During the filming of Raintree County, Taylor lived in a modernist house high on Beverly Estates Drive, which snakes up from the floor of Benedict Canyon—a rustic, wooded enclave adjacent to Beverly Hills. Even today, with abundant streetlights, smooth pavement, and a house on every lot, the street is treacherous at night. In 1956, the street was pitch-dark, pothole-ridden, and virtually uninhabited.

  Clift’s biographer, Patricia Bosworth, wrote that Clift regularly mixed booze with prescription drugs while shooting Raintree County. But when I interviewed McCarthy in Los Angeles, he insisted that Clift a
nd he had “gone on the wagon” that day.

  The dinner, he recalled, was unremarkable, except that Wilding had a sore back and spent the night horizontal on a couch. At about ten thirty P.M., McCarthy excused himself. He had to travel to Berkeley, California, early the next morning. Clift knew the canyon even less well than McCarthy, so Clift left with McCarthy, planning to follow him down the hill.

  The two men had rented identical cars—brown-and-white, four-door Chevrolets. As McCarthy eased through the first hairpin turn, he was jolted alert. Clift had hung back, then surged forward. That daredevil, McCarthy thought. “He’s trying to tickle my bumper.” So McCarthy sped up, zipping through another sharp curve. But suddenly, he recalled, “I didn’t see his lights anymore. I thought, Now what the hell has he done? Gone out to take a leak?”

  Fear replaced annoyance. In the rearview mirror, McCarthy saw headlights—erratic flickers—as if a car were careening from object to object. He raced back up the hill: “I saw Monty’s car. The lights were on. The motor was racing.”

  McCarthy ran to turn off the ignition. The doors were mangled, jammed. Because he couldn’t see a driver, McCarthy assumed Clift had been thrown clear. But when he reached through a shattered side window to turn the key, he saw Clift—bloody, crushed—beneath the level of the dashboard.

  “Even now it hurts to talk about it,” he remembered decades later. “It brings tears to my eyes. I thought: What do I do? I can’t just leave him here. But I have to leave him here—to get help.”

  McCarthy zoomed to the Wilding residence. “Get an ambulance!” he shouted when Wilding opened the door. “Monty’s been in an accident.” While Wilding barked details into the telephone, McCarthy and Taylor barreled down to Clift.

  “He was conscious,” McCarthy said. “Sort of groaning—going, mrrrrr, mrrrrr. And I froze.” But Taylor rushed to him. She tugged and pounded on the doors, and when they wouldn’t budge, she climbed through a rear window—indifferent to the grease, blood, and dust on what McCarthy recalled had been her white silk dress. As Taylor cradled Clift’s head, he made that “mrrrrr” noise again. He was choking. His front teeth had been dislodged by the impact and were now stuck in his throat. Without hesitating, Taylor reached into his mouth and pulled them out. She saved his life.

  “Liz was so strong,” McCarthy said. “Like one of those pioneer women. Like you read about. Like … like—”

  Like Leslie Benedict in Giant? I suggested.

  “Yes!” He agreed. “In so many ways.”

  Rex Kennamer, Clift’s doctor, arrived first at the scene. Even at death’s door, Clift never forgot his manners. He politely introduced Kennamer to Taylor. No sooner had she said hello than she was again forced to harden into Leslie Benedict. Behind the ambulance came the press, jockeying for a gruesome shot of Clift. “Get those goddamned cameras out of here!” Taylor shouted, covering his face with her hands. Then, in a voice that sent the photographers scrambling, she added, “Or I’ll make sure you never work in Hollywood again.”

  Although Clift’s nose was broken, his face bandaged, and his smashed jaw wired shut, he survived. In occasional upbeat moments he even sipped martinis through a straw. Such moments, however, were few and far between—for both him and Taylor. Between Clift’s accident and Dean’s death, Taylor was badly in need of solace. She grieved, too, for her marriage to Wilding, which was past resuscitation. In such a state, what could be more normal than to seek comfort, and, if one looked like Taylor, to find it? During this time, biographers link her first with singer Frank Sinatra, then with cinematographer Kevin McClory, who had worked as a unit director on Around the World in 80 Days, producer Mike Todd’s latest movie.

  McClory, however, made a very big mistake. He introduced Taylor to Todd. Within hours of their meeting, Todd, the cigar-chomping Broadway impresario turned Hollywood macher, had fallen in love. Never mind that she was still married to Wilding, Todd courted her lavishly. He courted her on location in Kentucky, where Raintree County was shooting. He courted her with presents—sparkling, eye-catching objects—a Cartier emerald bracelet, a $30,000 black pearl ring, and, eventually, a 24.9-carat diamond engagement ring.

  In November 1956, Taylor filed for divorce from Wilding. She became Mrs. Michael Todd in February 1957 in Acapulco, Mexico. Having become pregnant by Todd in late 1956, Taylor needed a speedy Mexican divorce—and Wilding, for $200,000 and proceeds from the sale of the Benedict Canyon house, was willing to accommodate. He left Mexico when the divorce was final—two days before the wedding.

  Wilding retreated to London to avoid journalists, who nevertheless tracked him down. Beleaguered yet classy, he wished the couple well, hoping Taylor would find with Todd what she had been unable to find with him. “They are,” he observed, “two of a kind.”

  Wilding may have meant the remark disparagingly, as a comment on their emotional rapaciousness. But the fact was, Todd and Taylor had much in common professionally. They approached their movie work in a similar way. Each aspired to the same goal: overriding a viewer’s logical left brain by engaging his or her intuitive right—or better yet, striking the mother lode of emotion: the reptile brain.

  Taylor moved toward this instinctively. As directed by Stevens in A Place in the Sun, she enflamed the screen with unambiguously grown-up desire—using words that the left brain would dismiss as baby talk: “Tell Mama. Tell Mama all.” Because he worked behind the scenes and not in front of an audience, Todd approached this goal more deliberately and methodically—by investing in technologies to expand the sensory limits of film. At the 1939 World’s Fair, Todd, then a Broadway producer, met Fred Waller, inventor of a three-camera, wraparound screening system that plunged viewers into a projected world. Captivated, Todd invested in the system, christened it Cinerama, and in 1952, brought out This Is Cinerama—a movie to show what the technology could do. Highlighted by a harrowing ride on the Coney Island roller coaster, the movie anticipated the immersiveness of virtual reality.

  Buoyed by this success, Todd pushed harder, funding what he hoped would be another breakthrough, Smell-O-Vision, which recognized the emotional power of scent. Taylor, too, understood this power; and perhaps Todd’s dream—the dream of Smell-O-Vision—inspired her in later years to found a perfume empire, one of whose cornerstone fragrances is named Passion.

  This is not a glib connection. An appreciation of smell sets its possessors apart; it suggests a heightened receptivity to sensual information. The base of most perfumes is musk, a secretion from abdominal glands in the male musk deer. This substance contains a potent sexual allure—a chemical magnet, whose very molecules must enter our bodies for us to sense them. Smell often triggers a violent response. Bad smells repel us, protecting us from, for example, spoiled food. Beguiling smells seduce us. They tickle the primitive brain. Often they override judgment. “The nose really is a sex organ,” playwright Tony Kushner wrote in Angels in America, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Smelling “is desiring.”

  The olfactory sense does not work like vision, hearing, or touch. To perceive an aroma, receptors in the nose must come in contact with actual bits of the aroma’s source. Smell is a comingling of substances, as is sex. “We have five senses,” Kushner continued. “But only two that go beyond the boundaries … of ourselves. When you look at someone, it’s just bouncing light, or when you hear them, it’s just sound waves vibrating air, or touch is just nerve endings tingling.” But smell is made “of the molecules of what you’re smelling.”

  Kushner’s explanation is not only scientifically accurate but also part of a memorable seduction scene. Taylor and Todd may not have known how smell worked—scientists continue to study the process—but they understood its power, and they knew that skilled technicians could help them exploit it. To realize his idea, Todd worked with top engineers. To formulate her scents, Taylor hired preeminent chemists.

  Smell-O-Vision should not be confused with Odorama, the facetious scratch-and-sniff card that director John Waters cr
eated for his 1981 movie, Polyester. Smell-O-Vision involved scent canisters on a turntable that was synchronized with a projector so that odors would be released at key points in a film. It also featured a blower to flush scents from the theater before introducing new ones. Smell-O-Vision was precise and technically sophisticated. To manufacture it, the Todd organization engaged the Belock Instrument Corporation, a Long Island–based defense contractor that built guidance-and-control systems for the Atlas and Polaris missiles.

  Todd’s tragic, premature death in March 1958 prevented him from bringing Smell-O-Vision to market. The owner of a rival theater chain, Walter Reade Jr., got there first with a poorly thought-out system called AromaRama, whose very name mocked Todd’s groundbreaking Cinerama. Reade chose Behind the Great Wall, a travelogue about then-communist China, to demonstrate his device. Its slogan was “You must breathe it to believe it.”

  Unfortunately, AromaRama lacked a means to clear a room of odors before adding new ones. It pumped smells willy-nilly into the audience, one on top of the other. Sometimes its mistakes were funny. “At one point, the audience distinctly smells grass in the middle of the Gobi Desert,” Time magazine wrote. Similarly, an “old pine grove in Peking” smells like “a subway rest room on disinfectant day.” Mostly, though, the layered scents sickened viewers, inflaming allergies and lodging in clothes.

  When Smell-O-Vision debuted a month later, it worked without a hitch: no missed cues or layered stenches. But this didn’t matter. Reade had already discredited the concept.

  On November 4, 1957, Todd was still very much alive, and Life magazine offered a rare peek inside the Taylor-Todd household. On the cover, Taylor looks radiant: indifferent to the camera, absorbed by her three-month-old daughter, Liza Todd. Inside the magazine, she and Todd roughhouse with Michael and Christopher Wilding. Although Taylor’s makeup is light and her clothing casual, she is far from unadorned. The diamond on her left hand is as big as her daughter’s head.