Bio - 199 - Elizabeth Taylor: There Is Nothing Like a Dame

by Darwin Porter

  Elizabeth had only two scenes in this tribute to British heroism in wartime, most of them played opposite Roddy McDowall. He played Susan and Sir John’s son as a young boy. In the movie, Roddy falls in love with Betty Kenney (Elizabeth), the daughter of tenant farmers on the Ashwood estate.

  During the filming, even at this early age, Elizabeth developed a crush on Peter Lawford, a romantic complication which would gnaw at her throughout most of the 1940s, especially when Lawford began an eight-month affair with Lana Turner. Elizabeth told Roddy, “He looks handsome in his pictures, but he’s much prettier in real life.”

  “I’m warning you,” Roddy said to her, masking jealousy with a smile. “Keep your hands off him, bitch. He’s mine!”

  “All yours and Lana Turner’s,” she said.

  Lawford was the latest of Turner’s many lovers. They included or had included Robert Taylor, Clark Gable, Victor Mature, Tony Martin, Howard Hughes, Buddy Rich, and Frank Sinatra, as well as two future U.S. presidents, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. At nineteen, she’d married bandleader Artie Shaw and filed for divorce four months later. With her latest husband, Steve Crane, Turner had given birth to a daughter, Cheryl. Having husbands, however, never stopped this femme fatale from enjoying affairs on the side.

  Lawford, a bisexual, was also having an affair with Roddy, but during the course of the filming, he also began a long-enduring affair with Tom Drake, a wholesome-looking “boy next door” type who played a dying American soldier in The White Cliffs of Dover.

  The entire cast, especially Clarence Brown and his co-producer, Sidney Franklin, gossiped at lunch about the many young love affairs blossoming around the set. Irene Dunne and Alan Marshal were also keen observers of the mini-dramas. Elizabeth usually remained silent, but eagerly absorbed whatever was indiscreetly revealed in her presence.

  The gossip, especially its gay variations, particularly intrigued another actor, Van Johnson, who played a minor role in The White Cliffs of Dover. Before the shoot was over, he, too, managed to attract the sexual and romantic attentions of Lawford.

  British-born Jill Esmond, playing a minor character, Rosamund, in the film, had recently been dumped by her husband, Laurence Olivier, in favor of Vivien Leigh. One day, at lunch, she told Elizabeth and Dunne, “My advice to established actresses or to aspiring ones is to never marry an actor. It’s bad for your health.”

  When Elizabeth heard that Clarence Brown’s next project involved directing National Velvet, she diverted her attention away from Lawford to focus on him directly. Enid Bagnold’s novel, National Velvet, originally written in 1935, had been kicked around MGM for years.

  The story’s theme celebrates the capacity of ordinary people, especially women, to accomplish great things. Set in the 1920s, it’s the story of a 12-year-old English girl named Velvet Brown, who rides her horse to victory in the Grand National Steeplechase. Velvet, in the novel, at least, is a high-strung, nervous child who passes credit for her eventual victory on to the horse she famously rides through various obstacles both on the racecourse and off. At one time, National Velvet was viewed as a possible vehicle for thirty-year-old Katharine Hepburn, who would, it was believed, convincingly portray a twelve-year-old.

  Margaret Sullavan was also considered for the role, as was Vivien Leigh. Finally, MGM settled on Elizabeth’s nemesis, Shirley Temple, but Darryl F. Zanuck at Fox wouldn’t release his money-maker from her contract.

  Elizabeth read Bagnold’s novel five times, telling Brown, “I was born to play Velvet Brown. I’ve been riding horses since I was four years old. And I’ve spoken with a British accent most of my life.”

  When Valentine’s Day came, according to Brown, Elizabeth sent him a “mushy” card. “The little Jezebel pubescent was practically making herself available to me in case I harbored secret desires as a child molester. Of course, I knew what the card meant: It meant she wanted me to star her in National Velvet.”

  To her horror, Elizabeth was shown an item in Variety which asserted that Pandro S. Berman, the producer of National Velvet, was going to order a nationwide talent search for a young girl to play the title role. He predicted that the search would be as big as that of the national hunt conducted in the late 1930s for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind.

  Studio executive Pandro Berman (top photo) gets bothered by a Hollywood Lolita

  lower photo: Horsing Around with Velvet left to right: Jackie Jenkins, Elizabeth Taylor, and Mickey Rooney

  The perky young Elizabeth swung immediately into action, demanding that Sara drive her to MGM. When she got there, she instructed her mother to remain outside as she barged into Berman’s office without an appointment. “What’s this shit about a nationwide search to find some snotty-nosed kid to play Velvet? You’re looking at Velvet right now.”

  As Berman would later tell Brown and Louis B. Mayer, “The force and power in that voice—and the language she used—was like no eleven-year-old girl I knew. I suspect that Elizabeth Taylor is a midget disguised as a young girl.”

  Berman told her she was wrong for the part. “You’re too small for the role, much too short. Maybe if you could grow three more inches in height…And I’m afraid I have to bring up a delicate point. During the steeplechase, Velvet is disguised as a boy, but the audience has to know she’s really a girl. How shall I put this diplomatically? We need to cast a girl with some semblance of tits on her.”

  “I couldn’t believe what happened next,” Berman told Brown. “That young girl standing before me ripped open her white blouse. She wasn’t wearing a training bra, and she flashed her bosom in front of me. Jane Russell in The Outlaw had bigger breasts, but this little vixen had a small pair of world class knockers on her at her age. I’m a tit man myself, and I know women’s breasts. I’d guess a size B cup.”

  “But it’s what she said that floored me,” Berman claimed.

  “I’ve got the boobs, you fucker, and I’m going to star as Velvet Brown.”

  “‘And so you are,’ I told her,” Berman said.

  The next day, MGM announced that Elizabeth Taylor had been granted her first starring role as Velvet Brown in the upcoming motion picture, National Velvet.

  The beginning of one of Hollywood’s most enduring legends was birthed that day.

  Velvet Goes National Elizabeth Taylor with Mickey Rooney

  John Derek in 1956:“Thank Heaven for Little Girls”

  Hollywood News of 1944!!

  Starring with the Stars in White Cliffs of Dover!

  The eleven-year-old Anglo-American ingénue

  ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  CHAPTER SIX

  How Hollywood’s Last Superstar Made

  HER DEBUT

  There is a moment within her 1944 film, National Velvet, when Elizabeth Taylor, playing Velvet Brown, and disguised as a male jockey, faints after learning she has won the legendary Grand Steeplechase in an English racing event attended by the Queen.

  Summoned to the scene, a doctor unbuttons her racing silks. With no hint of the irony of the famous cleavage to come, he pronounces to bystanders, “It’s a girl!”

  The story may be apocryphal, but pint-sized Mickey Rooney, her co-star, was said to ask, “Where did a little girl like you grow boobs?”

  “They didn’t grow on trees,” was Elizabeth’s sharp response.

  Rooney could hardly have been impressed with Elizabeth’s boobs-in-the-making. He’d just emerged heartbroken from a marriage with the sultry MGM beauty, Ava Gardner. To a journalist on the Hollywood Reporter, he’d rhapsodized over Ava’s breasts. “She had these big brown nipples which, when aroused, stood out like some double long golden California raisins.”

  To fill out for her role, Elizabeth had put herself through a hard regime, using “fast-grow creams” and performing rigorous daily exercises. She was aided not so much by Sara, but by Liz Whitney, who was married to the industrialist and socialite, Jock Whitney, known for seducing some of the most famous women of the 20th
century, including Tallulah Bankhead.

  “I was like a surrogate aunt to the eleven-year-old,” Liz Whitney said. “In Hollywood, we were called ‘Big Liz’ and “Little Liz.’ To play the role of Velvet, Elizabeth desperately wanted to increase her bust size more than she worried about her horse-riding scenes. In addition to a truckload of cosmetic creams, she ate huge meals. She also read avidly from the dozen or so books I gave her on chest development.”

  In her 1987 memoir, Elizabeth Takes Off, the star recalled those heavy breakfasts she used to eat at Tipps Restaurant in Los Angeles: Two fried eggs, hamburger patties, hash-brown potatoes, and a stack of silver-dollar pancakes covered with maple syrup. And I never put on an ounce.”

  In the three months that preceded the actual filming of National Velvet, which began shooting in February of 1944, Elizabeth claimed she grew three inches and put on ten pounds of weight, which contradicted her claim of not adding an ounce.

  “I willed myself to grow into the part.”

  When shooting began, she found that Clarence Brown once again had been assigned to direct her.

  Brown had been personally selected by Louis B. Mayer. Previously, Brown had guided Greta Garbo through seven of her films. Of Elizabeth, he said, “There’s something behind her eyes you can’t quite fathom. Something Garbo had.”

  Sara and Elizabeth tangled with Brown during the first week of the shoot when he demanded that she cut her beautiful long hair. Both mother and daughter refused, but Brown insisted.

  In desperation, they turned to Hollywood’s best-known hairdresser, Sidney Guilaroff, who would later loom large in the life of Marilyn Monroe. Author Ellis Amburn called Guilaroff “the crotchety, queenly, Metro makeover genie, who’d given Garbo, Greer Garson, Joan Crawford, and Norma Shearer their distinctive looks while serving as their father-confessor.”

  Guilaroff saved the day by concocting a perfect wig that matched Elizabeth’s hair color. He was able to fit it tightly over her scalp. When she showed up on the set, Brown gave her his hearty approval and continued with the picture. He learned the truth when she appeared at the wrap party with her hair down to her shoulders. He knew, of course, that she didn’t grow that long hair overnight, and that he’d been tricked by a clever hair stylist. “Are the boobs fake, too?” he asked her.

  “That’s all me,” she told him. “Feel them if you don’t believe me.”

  “A brazen little thing,” Brown said. “At times this twelve-year-old sounded like a tart on Times Square.”

  Rooney, twenty-three at the time he met Elizabeth, was the former box office champion at MGM, known especially for his Andy Hardy series. In spite of her age, Rooney was rumored to have begun an affair with Elizabeth.

  This appears not to be true. If Rooney had seduced Elizabeth, as some reporters maintain, he might have written about it in his candid memoir, Life Is Too Short, unless he wanted to face a belated charge of child molestation. Rooney was very outspoken about admitting previous affairs, and was, perhaps, the only star to praise Marilyn Monroe as “a great cocksucker” in a memoir.

  A lot of the gossip may have stemmed from an item in Sheilah Graham’s column. A rival of both Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, Graham was the first columnist to cite Elizabeth, in print, as part of a romantic link.

  Graham claimed that two very young MGM stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland, had lost out to another MGM star, Ava Gardner, in the race for Rooney. She claimed he was “one of Hollywood’s most prized lovers.” This incited a rival columnist, James Bacon, to suggest, “Maybe everything about Mickey isn’t sawed off.”

  What is strange about Graham’s column is that Ava and Rooney had already married and separated, and that she was already deep into a pattern of dating other men. Surely, Graham must have known that, yet the item ran in newspapers across the country anyway.

  On meeting Rooney, Elizabeth had seemed to measure her new height against his shortness. She told Brown that she was glad he was only “titty-high,” which was a gross exaggeration, of course, but showing what, as the years passed, evolved into a wicked sense of humor. The director was amused with her choice of words. After making that remark to him, he called her “Sugartit” throughout the remainder of the shoot.

  On the set, Elizabeth bonded with “King Charles,” the horse she would ride in the film. Named “Pi” in the movie, he was a splendid, chestnut-colored gelding that was the grandson of the famous Man o’ War. He wore a white star on his forehead and had three “white socks.” Rooney warned her that the horse was downright mean, but Elizabeth wasn’t afraid. She even took to riding him bareback.

  The script called for her to take a fall off Pi. She insisted on doing the scene herself, but she hit the ground with such a thud that she bounced back off the turf. This accident would cause her tortuous pain throughout the rest of her life, and it was not treated properly on the set of National Velvet. Three years later, when she took another fall, a spinal X-ray revealed that two of her vertebrae had jammed into each other because of that initial impact in 1944.

  Gossip columnist and former mistress of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sheilah Graham

  In snagging the role of Velvet, Elizabeth and Sara had exaggerated her ability as an equestrienne. “She had trouble staying seated on an active mount,” claimed Egon Mertz, and instructor at the chic Riviera Country Club, where Elizabeth took lessons. “She was much better riding Snowy Baker.”

  Mertz was referring to Reginald Leslie (“Snowy”) Baker (1884-1953), the Australia-born actor matinee idol and former champion boxer, who in semi-retirement worked at the Riviera. He would get down on his hands and knees on the floor of the clubroom. A red leather saddle would be placed on his back, and he’d put a rope into his mouth instead of reins. Elizabeth would mount him and crack her crop on his muscled back, and he’d bolt ahead like a racehorse. “She’d ride him screaming like a drunken cowboy at the rodeo,” claimed Mertz.

  Irene Dunne, who had appeared with Elizabeth in The White Cliffs of Dover, had been invited to the Taylor home on Elm Drive for tea. “I was flabbergasted,” she later recalled. “There were large framed pictures of Elizabeth in every room, and just tons of mother-daughter photographs. At least ten scrapbooks lay on the coffee table filled with interviews and photographs of Elizabeth. In the hallway and in the living room were mounted costumes on store mannequins that Elizabeth had worn in films. I couldn’t imagine what all this adulation was going to do to the poor child. In spite of all this praise and attention, she still had beautiful manners and was so polite, a lovable youngster.”

  top photo: Australian boxing champ Snowy Baker, “the first male Elizabeth ever rode.” lower photo: Irene Dunne

  Elizabeth got along with her co-stars, except for Anne Revere, who would win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for portraying Velvet’s mother. According to Revere, as stated to Clarence Brown, “This Taylor girl reminded me of a mechanized midget with buck teeth, content to go through the motions without the slightest hint of feeling.”

  Although Revere was not impressed, Sara noted that a lot of other women were paying “undue attention to my daughter.”

  Sara began to follow Elizabeth into the women’s toilet, fearing that one of the lesbians working at MGM would attempt to molest her daughter. Elizabeth rebelled at such strong parental control, later claiming, “I felt like I was living under a microscope.”

  Fortunately, Elizabeth had Roddy in her life. Knowing that he was a homosexual, Sara trusted him to be alone with her daughter. When Elizabeth wanted to slip around and see a boy, Roddy served as her “beard.”

  Ironically, attempts at child molestation were not unfolding within the ladies’ toilets at MGM, but right from within the Taylor household.

  Roddy had been a frequent guest at the Taylor home in Beverly Hills, but during her filming of National Velvet, he’d stopped coming over and met with Elizabeth only at his own home. One Sunday afternoon at one of his cookouts, she asked him why he no longer visited.

&n
bsp; He bluntly told her why: He said that one Saturday evening when the Taylors were entertaining guests, he went to their bathroom to take a leak. “As you know, there are no locks on the door. As I was pissing, the door opened. It was Francis. I thought he wanted to use the bathroom and that he’d excuse himself to wait until I had finished by business. Hell no! He barged right over to the toilet bowl and stared at me in mid-piss. He’d told me he’d always wanted to see my dick, which he’d heard was one of the biggest in Hollywood. He propositioned me and asked me to go with him to the bushes in your backyard for a quick blow-job.”

  “If it had been anyone but your father, I might have said yes,” Roddy told Elizabeth. “I rarely turn down a blow-job. But I just couldn’t do it with the father of my best friend. The thought made me sick.”

  He might have been surprised at how calmly Elizabeth received the news. She later told him, “I’ve known about my father for a very long time. You were a guest in our home. I must apologize for him.”

  After Roddy confessed what had happened with Francis, Elizabeth showed up on the set of National Velvet looking rather dour. Her spirits were brightened when she was invited to lunch with the novelist Enid Bagnold, who had created the original character of Velvet. Enid later said that she found Elizabeth “a sheer delight, but very, very old for her age.”

  Enid told Elizabeth that she had originally sold all rights to National Velvet to Paramount for a flat fee of $8,000. “Not realizing that I’d have to pay American taxes, I spent all the money and then ended up having to shell out $2,000 to the U.S. government.”

  At the end of the shoot of National Velvet, Elizabeth approached Pandro S. Berman and asked if he would make her a gift of the horse, King Charles, to whom she had become attached. He explained to her that since it was the property of MGM, he would have to ask Louis B. Mayer. At that point, based on having watched National Velvet, Mayer was convinced that Elizabeth was going to become a big star. “She could play Dracula’s daughter and people would line up at the box office,” the studio mogul predicted. “Give her the god damn horse. I heard it’s become lame anyway.”