For Elizabeth, a life-changing event occurred as the SS Manhattan sailed across the watery North Atlantic grave of the Titanic. As part of their onboard entertainment, the passengers were shown a film, The Little Princess (1939), starring Shirley Temple, then one of the world’s leading box office sensations. It was the story of a motherless daughter placed in an exclusive girls’ school while her father goes off to fight the Boers. After his death, the money for her school is cut off, and she is relegated to the role of a servant.
Throughout the film, seven-year-old Elizabeth sat mesmerized, watching Temple. Over breakfast the next morning, Elizabeth announced to Sara, “When we get to Hollywood, I plan to become a child star. I would be so much better than that goody-goody, curly haired, chubby-cheeked lollipop sucker. She just cries out, ‘I’m adorable…Don’t you think so too?’ She makes me sick at my stomach. I read in a movie magazine that she’s four years older than me. That means she’ll soon be too old to play the part of a five-year-old. Someone’s going to replace her. You’re looking at her—namely, me. I’ll give the little tart one thing, though. Her legs are better than mine.”
Diva rage from a seven-year-old: Shirley Temple as The Little Princess
Apparently, Sara was shocked at such talk from one so young—and by such determination and ambition.
***
Arriving in glamorous pre-war New York, Elizabeth was enthralled. No one seemed to be worried about war clouds looming over Europe.
After four days, the Taylors traveled by train to California.
Sara had faced a choice of living in California or New York, and she’d already had the experience of living in both states. Her happier and better days had been spent in Los Angeles, where she’d enjoyed her greatest success as an actress. She still associated Broadway with her series of theatrical flops. Publicly, she said that she wanted to be close to her family, who had moved to California. But there was apparently another reason, a secret she may have kept to herself. She wanted to help her strong-willed daughter in rising to the rank of a child star.
Once there, they were driven to a chicken farm owned by Sara’s father in San Gabriel. Neither Sara not Elizabeth could tolerate the place, both of them longing for the excitement of urban life. “After we left,” Elizabeth recalled, “I swore I’d never look at another egg as long as I lived.”
Sara’s father drove Elizabeth and Sara in a pickup truck to Los Angeles, where they found a temporary house rental for $75 a month. Elizabeth later jokingly recalled to her friends, “I made a grand entrance into Hollywood smelling like chicken shit.”
Sara was later accused of becoming a stage mother from hell, pushing her daughter into a film career. Sara denied that. “Later on, that might have been true, but in the beginning, my daughter was determined to become the next child star, replacing Shirley Temple. It was her idea. She turned on the charm with anybody who might help her. I wrote Francis that our daughter was seven years old going on thirty.”
Francis eventually managed to tear himself away from Victor and their life together in London and departed to join his family in California. Reunited at last, Francis opened a branch of his increasingly well-known art gallery at the Château Élysée in Hollywood, but soon moved it to the dramatically more up-scale Beverly Hills Hotel, on its the lower level, with easy access to the hotel’s outdoor swimming pool. Art lovers Vincent Price and Edward G. Robinson were among his early patrons.
Elizabeth settled into a daily routine: After finishing classes at The Willard School, a private day school near Pasadena, Elizabeth was driven to the gallery, where she studied her lessons, hoping to spot movie stars out by the pool. She remembered that James Mason was the first film star she spotted. He was a bit tipsy when she went up to him. “You’re very beautiful,” he told her. “Come back in ten years, and I’ll make mad, passionate love to you.”
The talk in Hollywood at the time involved the filming that had recently begun on Gone With the Wind. The novel the movie was based on was a bestseller by Atlanta’s Margaret Mitchell.
After the producer, David O. Selznick, evaluated such stars as Ronald Colman, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, Basil Rathbone, and (unbelievably) Humphrey Bogart, he’d settled on a reluctant Clark Gable for the male lead of Rhett Butler.
Selznick’s search for the film’s heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, had ignited a nationwide talent hunt. Many of the contenders were already established stars, and included an aging Tallulah Bankhead, Miriam Hopkins, Paulette Goddard, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Joan Fontaine, Susan Hayward, and (unbelievably) Lucille Ball.
Gone with the Wind and the role Baby Elizabeth didn’t get:
Two views of Victoria Regina Butler (“Bonnie Blue”) as played by Elizabeth’s rival, Cammie King.
Top photo: With Clark Gable and bottom, with a disinterested Vivien Leigh
Finally, Selznick discovered “my Scarlett,” in the person of a relative newcomer to U.S. audiences, Vivien Leigh, a British beauty and a lover of Laurence Olivier, who was also in Hollywood at the time, preparing for his signature role in Wuthering Heights. Elizabeth had previously encountered Olivier in London, where he had often been intimately associated with Victor and Francis.
In her (very vanilla) memoirs, published in 1964 under the title of Elizabeth Taylor by Elizabeth Taylor, she said, “I would be out with my mother shopping, and people would come up and say, ‘Your daughter looks so much like Vivien Leigh! Go to Selznick’s studio and have her tested for Vivien Leigh’s daughter.’ Of course, each time, I was thrilled.”
Elizabeth learned that the role of Victoria Eugenia, also known as “Bonnie Blue,” the daughter of Rhett and Scarlett, had not yet been cast. When she learned that the role involved riding a pony, she said, “The part is mine. I know how to ride. MGM won’t have to give me riding lessons.”
Elizabeth was encouraged and, to some degree, sponsored in her bid for the role by three famous Hollywood players—Vivien Leigh, Greta Garbo, and gossip maven Hedda Hopper.
Knowing how much his daughter wanted the role, Francis telephoned Olivier, his former lover, and invited him to visit, with Vivien, the Taylor family at their home in Beverly Hills.
Although they arrived an hour late, “Larry and Viv” dazzled seven-year-old Elizabeth. Years later, she would often recall meeting this romantic couple. “Each one, both Larry and Vivien, was more beautiful than the other. I could-n’t decide. Right there and then, I wanted to grow up to look just like Vivien.”
Over drinks, Vivien told Elizabeth’s parents, “Your daughter is stunningly beautiful. If I had a daughter, I would want her to look just like Elizabeth. I’m going to beg David Selznick and George Cukor to cast her as Bonnie Blue.”
Olivier had brought along a script that laid out the young character’s part. Elizabeth might have been disappointed at how small the role was, but she thanked Olivier and Vivien profusely and said she’d await word about whether MGM would grant her a screen test.
Elizabeth was told that within the context of the film, Rhett Butler would kiss Bonnie more frequently than he’d kiss Scarlett. “I know what I’m going to do,” Elizabeth told Sara. “When Clark Gable leans over to kiss me good night, I’m going to grab his cheeks and give him a sloppy one. I know the director will cut it out of the picture, but for the rest of my life, I can claim that I got my first screen kiss from Clark Gable himself. I hope his mustache doesn’t scratch me.”
Nothing ever came of Vivien’s offer, and Elizabeth harbored a grudge against her for the rest of her life.
Many years later, Elizabeth felt a sense of triumph when she was called in to replace an emotionally unstable Vivien Leigh in Elephant Walk, most of which had already been filmed in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) before Vivien had a complete mental breakdown. Released to theaters in 1954, the film still depicted Vivien in its long shots, with all of the close-ups rather awkwardly completed, months later, by Elizabeth.
Greta Garbo (photo above) to young Elizabeth: “You’r
e the only girl in Hollywood I would even consider.”
A few days after her inaugural meeting with Vivien at her parents’ home, Elizabeth was in her father’s gallery when Greta Garbo walked in to evaluate the kind of art Francis was selling.
Noticing Elizabeth, Garbo turned to Francis and said, “What a divine child you have. She is far too beautiful for the movies.”
Hearing that, Elizabeth approached Garbo. “Oh, ma’am. My father took me to see you and Robert Taylor in Camille. You are the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“How very kind, in spite of your misjudgment,” Garbo responded.
“If you ever make a movie that calls for your daughter, let me play her,” Elizabeth pleaded.
“You’re the only girl in Hollywood I would even consider,” Garbo said. “But I think, at the moment, you’d be ideal cast as Vivien Leigh’s daughter in Gone With the Wind. Tomorrow morning I will call Louis B. Mayer and recommend you.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” Elizabeth said, kissing her hand.
“What lovely manners,” Garbo said to Francis. “Your daughter must have grown up in Europe.”
Elizabeth never knew whether Garbo recommended her or not. At the time, Garbo was filming Ninotchka (1930), with one final movie to go, the disastrous Two-Faced Woman released in 1941 as her farewell to the screen. Neither of these movies contained a suitable role for Elizabeth.
Elizabeth would encounter Garbo again. In 1958, shortly after the death of Mike Todd, Elizabeth’s third husband, the widow was receiving mourners in the den of her home. Suddenly, Garbo appeared before her. She placed a gentle hand on the new widow’s. Into her ear, she whispered, “Be brave!” before disappearing.
The columnist, Hedda Hopper, remained young Elizabeth’s last chance for the role of Bonnie Blue. Hopper was a friend of Victor Cazalet and his sister, Thelma Cazalet-Keir.
Hopper was already throwing business toward Francis, having herself purchased one of Augustus John’s study of gypsy heads. She introduced him to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Nelson Eddy, and David O. Selznick, who purchased a drawing by John for $150, for which Francis had paid nothing. E l i z a b e t h was sick that day and had not attended school, nor had she been at the art gallery at the day’s end. “It was one of the disappointments of my life that I was not at the gallery the day Selznick arrived.”
Nonetheless, Hopper suggested in her column that Elizabeth was a dead ringer for the role of Scarlett O’Hara’s daughter, adding, “although she has never acted professionally.” But as events unfolded, the dream of transforming Elizabeth into a juvenile replacement for singing star Deanna Durbin and/or Shirley Temple backfired, at least temporarily.
Sara had maneuvered Hopper into inviting Elizabeth to her home for an audition in her drawing room.
In a memoir, Hopper later evaluated the audition like this: “The young girl, her face clouded with worry and tears about to fall, sang a sweet song, ‘The Blue Danube,’ in a weak and thin voice. As she sang, she nervously fingered her hair and stared into space. It was one of the most painful ordeals I have ever witnessed. Finally, I told Sara to let the child be a child, and not try to force her into the movies.”
Despite that pronouncement, Hopper would later take credit for “discovering Elizabeth Taylor.”
With money coming in from the gallery, and still subsidized to some degree by Howard back in New York, Francis eventually moved his family from Pasadena to the more fashionable community of Pacific Palisades, where their neighbors included Norma Shearer, the former queen of MGM, and Darryl F. Zanuck. In Elizabeth’s dancing classes, she made friends with Judy and Barbara Goetz, the grandchildren of Louis B. Mayer, who would soon become her boss.
In Sara’s words, Elizabeth ended up with a broken heart when Selznick and George Cukor cast four-year-old Cammie King in the small but pivotal role of Bonnie Blue.
In 1944, five years after the elaborate 1939 release of Gone With the Wind, Cammie’s mother brought her daughter for a visit with her movie star friend Irene Dunne during the filming of The White Cliffs of Dover. Alongside Dunne, Elizabeth Taylor was appearing in that movie with Roddy McDowall.
Cammie recalled, years later, “When I met Elizabeth, I realized what a rude and ill-mannered girl she was. She looked me straight in the eye and told me, ‘I could have played Bonnie Blue so much better than an ugly, gawky thing like you.’ Then she turned and walked away.”
In the mid-1990s, in a glut of regional nostalgia, the 60-something-year old Cammie King was signing autographs, dressed in an antebellum hoop skirt in the parking lot of a supermarket in the town of Washington, Georgia. There, the author of this book asked her about Elizabeth Taylor coveting her iconic role of Bonnie Blue. Cammie responded, “Even as a young girl, Elizabeth Taylor was far too brazen to play an innocent girl like Bonnie Blue. She was much more at home cast as a whore in Butterfield 8. Esther Williams, not Elizabeth Taylor, was my screen idol.”
THREE HOLLYWOOD PLAYERS: A ferociously ambitious stage mother (Sara; left figure above); Baby Elizabeth groomed and camera-ready; and (right figure) the infamously egomaniacal gossip columnist and former B-rated actress, Hedda Hopper.
Ironically, in 1957, MGM tried to replicate the box office bonanza associated with Gone With the Wind with the release of the big-budget Civil War epic, Raintree County, starring Elizabeth and Montgomery Clift. For her efforts, Elizabeth won an Oscar nomination as Best Actress, but Raintree County, beset with troubles throughout its filming, never approached the pathos and popular appeal of Gone With the Wind.
Despite her loss of a role in Gone With the Wind, Elizabeth continued to follow, with deep interest, the career of Clark Gable, and reciprocally, he saw most of her pictures, including National Velvet. To the press, he later defined her role as “The best ever performance given by a juvenile.”
By the late 1940s, Elizabeth was voicing violent objections to anyone daring to call her “a juvenile.” She wanted to play adult roles opposite MGM’s leading males. She desperately wanted to escape that awkward period that Shirley Temple had endured between playing pre-teen girls and becoming an adult.
Louis B. Mayer became aware of how Elizabeth had filled out, and how she appeared on screen as an actress far more mature than her actual age. An audacious idea was proposed: Elizabeth would appear on screen opposite Clark Gable as his love interest in an upcoming picture. But Mayer needed to be convinced, and he persuaded Gable to appear in a screen test to see how the unlikely pair would emote.
Later, after Mayer viewed the results of that test, he referred to it as “grotesque,” and ordered all copies of it burned.
That screen test, however, lay in Elizabeth’s future as a late teenager. Back with her parents in Hollywood during World War II, she became a fast-rising child star, graduating not only from young girl roles but from Hollywood boys to Hollywood men.
It would be an arduous journey.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mother’s Little Dividend
INVADES HOLLYWOOD
Film critic Barry Monush accurately described the decades-long film career of Elizabeth Taylor like this: “For the most part, she was merely competent, sometimes inadequate, and now and then above average, with occasional instances where she rose most brilliantly to become something special.”
But how did it all begin?
Elizabeth made her first appearance on the screen in a highly forgettable B-list comedy, There’s One Born Every Minute, released by Universal Pictures in 1942. From such a box office disaster, one of the most publicized movie careers of all time was launched.
Before signing with Universal, she’d toured the studios at MGM, comparing it to a garden party with “happy child actors running and playing.” She wanted an association with the top-tier MGM instead of with some second-rate studio turning out B-list comedy/horror films like Abbott and Costello’s Hold That Ghost (1941), which she’d recently seen. Sara, however, had warned her, “Sometimes, movie stars don’t have a choice of studio
s, but take what is offered, including pictures they don’t want to make.”
Elizabeth’s career got a jump start when Andrea Cowden—the wife of J. Cheever Cowden, CEO of Universal Studios—made a happenstance visit to the Howard Young Gallery in Beverly Hills, where she met Francis. Through Francis, she purchased $20,000 worth of Augustus John sketches and paintings, some of which Francis had stolen from the trash can of the Welsh painter.
On the wall of the gallery, Sara had affixed a photo of her daughter next to a photographic portrait of Vivien Leigh. Andrea commented on the similarities of their features. That casual remark catalyzed an invitation from Sara to the Cowdens for tea at the Taylor home in Beverly Hills. “Tea” turned out to be filet of beef Wellington with caviar, followed by a fresh raspberry parfait.
Dressed in frilly clothing, Elizabeth was brought out after dinner. Sara had spent most of the day grooming her. J. Cheever Cowden seemed stunned, pronouncing her “the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
Francis later recalled, “Cowden put his money where his mouth was.” On April 21, 1941, he signed Elizabeth to a five-month contract at Universal, with a salary of one-hundred dollars per week.
In the project that evolved out of all this, There’s One Born Every Minute (1942), Elizabeth appeared briefly onscreen with the film’s star, Carl (“Alfalfa”) Switzer, a refugee from the Our Gang comedies. In the 1970s, decades later, on television’s The David Frost Show, Elizabeth claimed that in her screen debut, “I played a beastly child who runs around slinging rubber bands at fat ladies’ bottoms.”
Top photo, inset: Carl Switzer (“Alfalfa”) “He taught me every curse word I’d need.”
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