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

by Darwin Porter

  As Errol Flynn would tell anybody who asked, Curtiz was a tyrant on the set. One afternoon, when Sara was away, Curtiz was shooting a scene between Lydon and Elizabeth. “I told you not to eat lunch,” he shouted at Lydon. “Actors who eat lunch are drowsy all afternoon.” Then he not only denounced Lydon, but got so angry at him he kicked his ass, toppling the juvenile over a box.

  “I nearly broke my spine,” Lydon recalled. “What a bastard!”

  Curtiz then turned his fury on Elizabeth, calling her a “big tit, two-bit whore.” In tears, she ran screaming from the set to her dressing room, where she bolted herself inside. Curtiz stood before the locked door, calling in to her, “Son of a bitch, Elizabeth. Stop fucking crying. You break my heart. Cut the shit.”

  Fortunately, the director and his star had made peace by the time Sara arrived back from lunch.

  Elizabeth didn’t resent the affair of Sara with Curtiz. On many a night, Sara was away somewhere with her lover, leaving Elizabeth at home with a maid. Elizabeth quickly learned that the maid could be bribed, allowing her to slip away for some off-the-record rendezvous with her beau du jour, as she referred to the various young men she met secretly.

  “I wanted a more grown-up role than the girl I played in Life With Father.” Elizabeth said. “but since Mayer didn’t fire me, I continued in that gauze-wrapped cotton candy cloud that was MGM in those days. Mayer remained a tyrant, but I never set foot in his office again after that fight we’d had. Even when he summoned me, I wouldn’t go. I did, however, show up at his annual birthday bash at MGM with a fake smile plastered on my face. We both hated each other.”

  “I got by better than his gay actors did at the time,” she said. “There was a whorehouse across from the studio. Mayer made the gay guys go over there and fuck the whores as a means of proving their manhood.”

  Writer Jhan Robbins summed up Elizabeth’s life at this point. “She belonged less to her family than to a studio, to agents, publicity people, photographers, costumers, directors, coaches, makeup artists, fan clubs, and her huge, adoring, and insistent public. Elizabeth, one might say, no longer had a career— rather, the career had her.”

  Confronted with the absence of her real father, she turned more and more to her agent, Jules Goldstone, using him as a kind of surrogate daddy. “Unlike Sara, Jules was eager for me to play more adult roles on the screen. Off screen, he contributed to my juvenile delinquency. He was pinning most of his hopes on me to make it big, even though his other major client was my former director, Clarence Brown.”

  Goldstone also represented the humorist, James Thurber.

  “Goldstone worked to get me roles and to arrange things. I wanted him to line up dates for me and to convince Sara that they were strictly for MGM publicity purposes. The first man Jules sent to my mantrap was a handsome young actor named Marshall Thompson.”

  Hailing from Illinois, Thompson was known for his boy-next-door good looks.

  At first, Elizabeth didn’t want to date Marshall because she’d read that he had wanted to become a priest. Elizabeth told Goldstone, “I don’t want a date who’ll listen to my confessions. I want a young man with whom I can commit sins.”

  For her first meeting with Thompson, she dressed to imitate Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun. She put on a large pair of hoop earrings, and wore a peasant blouse with a full skirt with a cinched waist. At some point later that evening, Thompson sang “Golden Earrings” to her, a song by Frankie Lane that around that time was on The Hit Parade.

  Thompson was seven years older than Elizabeth. On their first official date—an attendance at the premiere of The Yearling (1940), a sensitive tale of a young boy’s attachment to a deer—Sara insisted that Thompson’s mother accompany them as a chaperone.

  “We managed to dump his dear ol’ mom early in the evening and sneak off together,” Elizabeth said. “When he first kissed me, I practically had to blast open his mouth to get my tongue inside. He wasn’t an expert on French kissing. But by the time Christmas came around and he took me to a Yuletide dance, we kissed beneath the mistletoe. God, had he learned his lessons. I felt his tongue at the bottom of my throat. After that night, I came up with a nickname for him: HOT LIPS!”

  Later, Elizabeth was seen with Thompson dining at the Trocadero and dancing at the Cocoanut Grove. Sometimes at later sightings at that nightclub, they would have drinks with Peter Lawford, who seemed intent on seducing Thompson himself.

  Photoplay, the most popular movie magazine of its day, staged a Hollywood party in honor of Elizabeth, who arrived with Thompson as her escort. Pictures of the party were lavishly featured in the magazine’s next issue, which arrived on the desk of Louis B. Mayer. Examining the pictures of his rising young star, he exploded in fury. He called Dick Hanley into his office and dictated a memo to Howard Strickling, his chief of publicity.

  “Miss Taylor with her plunging neckline looks like a teenage whore flaunting her wares. That is, of course, an accurate portrait of who she is, but it’s not the squeaky clean image we’re promoting here at MGM. See that this doesn’t happen again. When Miss Taylor goes out in public, warn her that she must keep her tits covered.”

  Elizabeth and Thompson frequently talked about appearing as young lovers together on the screen. She discussed the possibility with her agent, Jules Gold-stone, who presented it to Benjamin Thau at MGM. He told Goldstone that Thompson did not have “an image that’s masculine and virile enough for Elizabeth. Mayer and I are thinking about co-starring her with either Clark Gable or Robert Taylor.”

  Goldstone reminded Thau that Taylor was nearly forty years old and that Gable had been born in 1901.

  For the next few weeks, Elizabeth and Marshall showed up every Sunday afternoon at Roddy’s house, retiring at around four o’clock to his cabana.

  Then one afternoon, Roddy introduced her to one of his recent lovers, another handsome young actor named Richard Long. Roddy assured her, “Dick accommodates both sexes.” Elizabeth soon realized that she was more attracted to Long than she was to Thompson, but she had to compete with Merv Griffin for Long’s favors.

  “I had to fight off Griffin to get my nails into Richard’s gorgeous flesh,” she told Roddy. “I got him before he ended up playing the son to Ma and Pa Kettle in all those hillbilly flicks. Dick was a real gentleman in bed, perhaps too gentle. I think that both Dick and Marshall represented the kind of all-American boys who girls were marrying at the end of the war, heading for the suburbs to raise kids.”

  “In bed, both of these young men were sufficient in their way, but hardly adventuresome. No variation. Actually going to bed with either of them was like getting the same fuck twice.”

  “I drifted away from both Marshall and Dick when I found more intriguing partners,” Elizabeth confessed.

  After a brief fling with Long’s gym buddy, Rock Hudson, an actor who would become Elizabeth’s close friend, Long married Suzan Ball, a cousin of Lucille Ball. But Suzan died of cancer a year later.

  Some time after Suzan’s death, Long called Elizabeth, hoping to rekindle some passion in her, but she politely turned him down. Ironically, he married Barbara Thompson, and became the brother-in-law of his former competitor for Elizabeth’s affections, Marshall Thompson.

  Elizabeth with Marshall Thomson

  In 1974, after multiple heart attacks, Long died at the age of forty-seven. Too preoccupied to attend the funeral, Elizabeth sent flowers.

  “Marshall and Dick treated me well,” Elizabeth recalled to Roddy. “They were boys you had a hot dog and a coke with and I was dreaming of champagne and caviar. Actually, I wanted men who stood for danger. Take Errol Flynn, for example. Dick or Marshall would take a girl to bed, perform adequately, and then want to go to a football game. I wanted to be ravished by a lover who would take me to darkest Africa and do unspeakable things to me.”

  “I knew both Francis and Sara Taylor,” Thompson recalled years later to columnist James Bacon. “They trusted me. Perhaps that trust wasn’t
well founded, since Elizabeth and I were doing it. When Francis died in 1968, I went to the funeral. Elizabeth showed up with Richard Burton.”

  “Burton stormed over to me like he wanted a fight,” Thompson said. “He was drunk. ‘So you’re the bloke who gave Elizabeth her first screen kiss,’ Burton said. Then Elizabeth came up behind him. ‘No, Richard, Marshall gave me my first offscreen kiss.’ Then Burton glared at me. ‘That makes it even worse,’ he said.”

  “If looks could kill, I would have been buried that day with Francis,” Thompson said. “I found it hard to believe that a world class whore like Burton, who had fucked half the pretty boys and half the beautiful women on the planet, would actually be jealous of me after all those years.”

  “After the funeral ended, I stood and watched as Elizabeth and Burton got into a long stretch limousine. At that time they were the most notorious couple on the globe. Why was Burton jealous of me? After she dumped me, she had a string of affairs and adventures with all sorts of men who would make our little fling look like a scene from Shirley Temple’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Elizabeth, that darling little girl from National Velvet, had grown up to become a world class adventuress.”

  ***

  From March of 1945 until the summer of 1947, MGM had no film roles for Elizabeth. At this strategic stage of her career, she was desperately searching for more mature roles and not just waiting around for MGM to assign her her next picture.

  She telephoned her agent, Jules Goldstone, every day. If MGM didn’t have a part for her, perhaps Paramount or Warner Brothers did. She was almost certain that Louis B. Mayer would lend her out, since MGM had previously made sizable profits by doing that.

  One role that appeared on the horizon with a part she felt was suitable was That Hagen Girl, a script written by Charles Hoffman and based on a novel by Edith Roberts.

  The soap opera plot involved a small town’s small-mindedness. A teenaged girl, Mary Hagen, is ostracized because gossips think she is illegitimate. When a lawyer, an older man called Tom Bates, arrives in town, the gossips assume (incorrectly) that he is the girl’s father.

  A handsome young hunk, ultimately played by Rory Calhoun, pursues the Hagen girl, but she falls for the older character, the lawyer, instead. He rescues her from a suicide attempt after she jumps into a roaring river. Bates professes his love for her and gives her a reason to live.

  Ronald Reagan, whose career at the time was in a steep decline, read the script and (wisely) rejected it. The casting department at Warners insisted, however, promising him that if he accepted the role of the lawyer in That Hagen Girl, they’d eventually assign him a lead role in another, yet-to-be-determined outdoor adventure picture. Despite his objections to playing romantic scenes with a teenager, (he was thirty-six years old at the time) Reagan accepted the deal.

  Elizabeth wanted Goldstone to get her the role of the Hagen girl before filming on another project ( Cynthia ; 1947) began. When she learned that Reagan’s friend, actor/politician George Murphy would be cast in the film with her, she enlisted his help in her campaign to get the role opposite Reagan in That Hagen Girl.

  A few days later, Reagan, partly because of Murphy’s intervention, called Elizabeth and invited her to dinner at an apartment in West Hollywood. She noted that he pointedly did not invite her to his home, which he still shared with his estranged wife, Jane Wyman.

  Elizabeth was picked up by her agent, Goldstone, and delivered to the apartment in West Hollywood. In distinct contrast to the plan which had been presented to Sara, Goldstone would not be at the dinner, but would retrieve Elizabeth shortly before midnight to take her back home.

  Elizabeth would relay the details of what happened that night to dozens of her friends, but not until after 1980, when Reagan was elected president of the United States, beating the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter.

  ***

  A few weeks after her dinner with Reagan—the details of which are relayed within this chapter’s next scene—he called her with news that the studio had rejected her bid and had cast Shirley Temple, an older teenager, in the Hagen role instead. Temple would play the role as part of a loan-out from David O. Selznick.

  “I was terribly disappointed that my nemesis had been cast opposite Reagan,” Elizabeth said. “But it was only one of many casting disappointments I’d experience in my future.”

  She followed the news of this troubled film as it was made. She’d read that Temple interpreted her role as That Hagen Girl as “my lip-smacking chance,” even though Shirley’s domineering mother, Gertrude, had warned her that “Reagan is long on quips and short on talent.”

  Reagan’s onscreen involvement with a younger actress was already raising concern, but at least some of his fears had been assuaged by Cary Grant, who had reminded him that earlier that year (1947), Grant had appeared in a romantic plot co-starring Shirley Temple in The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer. Grant reminded Reagan that he was seven years older than he was. “And I pulled it off,” he said.

  Nonetheless, during the filming of That Hagen Girl, Reagan informed its director, Peter Godfrey, that he found it embarrassing to play a romantic lead opposite Temple because of the seventeen-year- difference in their ages. “I find such relationships repulsive.”

  Tersely, Godfrey reminded Reagan that “my own wife is young enough to be my daughter.” In embarrassment, Reagan retreated.

  One of his scenes required that Reagan jump into a roaring cold river to rescue Temple from her suicide attempt. When he has her safely on shore, he declares his love for her. It was a difficult shot, requiring lots of time and several takes.

  The role that Elizabeth was glad she lost, and the role that another child star was sorry she got: That (horrible) Hagen Girl

  lower photo: Its co-stars, Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple, who shocked viewers with its “appearance of unrebated incest.”

  In the wake of his immersion in the freezing waters, Reagan, hovering near death, was hospitalized at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital with viral pneumonia and a constant temperature of 104°. Elizabeth sent flowers. During his hospitalization, Reagan received the unfortunate news that his wife, Jane Wyman, had suffered a miscarriage.

  Temple, during the slowdown in filming caused by Reagan’s hospitalization, despite strenuous dieting, kept gaining weight. Finally, a doctor informed her that she was pregnant.

  That Hagen Girl had its sneak preview in Pasadena. In disguise, Elizabeth was escorted there by Marshall Thompson. She was hoping that the film would be a disaster, and her wish, indeed, came abundantly true.

  During the scene in the movie when Reagan tells Temple, “I love you,” the audience screamed, “OH NO!!” Because of their reaction, the studio opted to cut that pivotal scene from the film’s final version.

  Later that evening, Elizabeth told Thompson, “With me in the role, the audience would have believed that Reagan really loved the Hagen girl. But despite her age, her fans still think of Miss Temple as a little curly haired moppet. As I told Reagan, audiences won’t accept a love affair between Miss Lollipop and him. I was right.”

  “I learned a lesson from watching That Hagen Girl,” Elizabeth confided to Thompson. “Shirley Temple probably destroyed her chance to segué from being a child star to a teenaged actress. I’m not going to let that happen to me. Also, there is absolutely no chemistry between Reagan and her. Reagan knows, however, that there is chemistry between us—but I can’t go into that right now. I don’t want to shock you. You’re far too young.”

  Time magazine denounced the picture, claiming, “Moviegoers with very strong stomachs may be able to view an appearance of rebated incest as a romantic situation.”

  Temple told the press, “As movie kissers go, Reagan was good.”

  Reagan said, “After the cuts, it was left up to the audience to decide if I married Shirley, traveled with her doing naughties, or adopted her.”

  Unlike Temple, based on the dinner she had shared with him in that apartment in West Holl
ywood, Elizabeth could evaluate firsthand Reagan’s performance in bed—and not just as a kisser. But she would wait for him to become President of the United States before she “dined out” on stories about his performance in the boudoir.

  ***

  During the 1980s, Elizabeth did not like Reagan’s policies, and was horrified at his utter silence on the subject of the AIDS epidemic sweeping across the globe like the Black Plague of the Middle Ages.

  For the first time, she began speaking publicly about his seduction of her when she was a teenager back in the Hollywood of the late 1940s. Often, under the influence of a champagne buzz, she’d have her dining companions laughing and amused at social venues that stretched from Rome to Gstaad, from London to New York and on to Los Angeles.

  She recounted how her agent, Jules Goldstone, drove her to a secret little apartment in West Hollywood. “I never knew if this were Reagan’s fuck pad— or else the apartment of a friend of his,” she said.

  Ostensibly, shrouded at the time in studio intrigue, she had arrived to lobby for the role of Mary Hagen in the box office disaster That Hagen Girl, a part that eventually went to the older Shirley Temple.

  “I thought he might have invited me to a restaurant, but he preferred this small flat,” Elizabeth told Frank Sinatra’s guests in Palm Springs one night.

  “Reagan opened the door wearing an apron. He complimented me on how beautiful I was—and how grown-up I looked. Then he offered me a drink and invited me into his dimly lit living room, where the music of Doris Day could be heard. I later found out he was also pursuing Miss Day.”

  “The table was already set with candles. He invited me into the kitchen, where he’d made a salad. He pointed out five kinds of lettuce he’d purchased at the Farmers’ Market. Our meal that night included juicy hamburgers, his favorite. He told me he’d ground the beef himself.”

  “Reagan was treating me like a grown woman, and that thrilled me,” Elizabeth said. “Of course, I was still a child at the time, but I didn’t want to be treated like one. Back in those days, he was still quite handsome and had a good body, at least according to the standards of the time, which were hardly the buff standards of today. A few years earlier, he’d actually posed for beef-cake photos.”