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

by Darwin Porter

  “I decided on first picture Flynn’s a bum,” Curtiz said. “Can’t act. So what happens? Warner’s assign this jerk to me time and time again.”

  “Which of my pictures did you like the best?” Errol asked Elizabeth.

  “I’ve seen only two,” she said. The Adventures of Robin Hood and Captain Blood.”

  “I’ve got a great idea.” Errol said. “Why don’t you guys come with me to my farm on Mulholland Drive? I’ve got a copy of my 1937 film, The Perfect Specimen.”

  “I was the director,” Curtiz said. “Hal B. Wallis told me to cast an actor who’s athletic, cultured, smart, very handsome, and charming. I get this idiot.”

  “In the film I have a boxing scene, Errol said. “I get to show off my Betty Grable legs and my perfect specimen of a chest. “Members of the audience screamed and fainted when I came out half-naked.”

  Two views of superstar Errol Flynn lower photo: In his notorious “fuck pad”

  “I can’t wait to see it,” she said. “I’d love to accept your invitation.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s hit the road. Curtiz, you take your own car, and Elizabeth can ride with me.”

  “I know that sitting beside temptation like me, you’ll be the perfect gentleman,” she told him.

  Elizabeth was apprehensive as Flynn pulled into his driveway, but was relieved to see that Curtiz had trailed them in his own car. Built in the “California colonial” style on a mountaintop, 7740 Mulholland Drive, though modest by A-list movie star standards, was the most notorious private residence in Greater Los Angeles.

  As he showed her around, she was amazed at the number of French doors. “That means I can throw them open at parties—I’m always giving parties. You must come to them.”

  Roddy had already told her about some of these parties and even provided details about the special features of the house—bugging devices, hidden passageways, two-way mirrors, and peeper holes. “One hidden chamber is called “the jerk-off room” although I’ve never heard that anyone actually masturbates there. They don’t have to.”

  As she returned with Flynn to the living room to join Curtiz, a Mexican maid brought in pink champagne and caviar. “I usually like my liquor brown, but in honor of you, I made it pink champagne tonight,” Flynn said.

  “Not for me,” Curtiz griped. “I’m no god damn fairy. Bring me a whiskey.”

  As Elizabeth drank gingerly, Flynn pointed out a new glass-fronted cupboard he’d ordered as a display case for his collection of ancient Greek vases, some of which had been excavated by divers off the Aegean coast of the Greek island of Lesbos.

  Curtiz, meanwhile, set up the screening for The Perfect Specimen, the story of a super-rich character played by Flynn, who is kept sheltered by his grandmother until a vivacious Joan Blondell comes crashing through his fence, launching a whirlwind courtship.

  At the film’s end, Flynn turned on the lights. Curtiz had disappeared. Flynn with Elizabeth migrated to a panoramic terrace, with its view over Los Angeles.

  “At night, everything looks so beautiful,” she said. “All the ugliness of Los Angeles is hidden. The moonlight is very forgiving.”

  “The moon is not needed to enhance your beauty,” he told her.

  “Thank you for the compliment,” he said. “But if you want to see beauty, just check out the image in the mirror when you take a shave in the morning.”

  “No teenage girl has ever said that to me before,” he said. “I love it! More! More!”

  Flynn poured more pink champagne, as an incredibly beautiful, blonde-haired young boy who appeared to be no more than fourteen, came onto the terrace. “Mr. Flynn,” he said. “Miss Doris Duke is on the phone.”

  An avid reader of gossip columns, Elizabeth knew who Doris Duke was. The tobacco heiress was the richest woman in the world, and Elizabeth wondered if Flynn was her kept boy. Judging from her pictures and the articles that had appeared about her in the press, Duke was known as a not particularly beautiful woman who had developed a knack for distracting and eventually “purchasing” the men she desired.

  When Flynn returned, he said, “That was Miss Duke. She’s flown into town from Hawaii and wants to see me.”

  “I hope you didn’t tell her I was here,” she said. “I don’t want to make such a powerful enemy.”

  “It would not have mattered,” he assured her. “We have an understanding about such things. We’re just fuck buddies, nothing more serious than that.”

  As Stephanie Mansfield, author of The Richest Girl in the World put it, “Flynn was Doris Duke’s kind of man—bisexual, promiscuous, and not above asking Doris for money. His whole life was once described as a trespass against good taste, which appealed to her.”

  Over dinner, where pheasant was the main course, Flynn entertained Elizabeth with stories of his early life “growing up as a wicked little Tasmanian Devil.”

  “But I thought you were from Ireland,” she said.

  “You’ve been reading my press. Privately, I called my mother ‘The Cunt,’ and despite her lack of nurturing, I eventually grew, all by myself, into a strapping lad. Every married woman and every homosexual in Australia tried to get into my trousers. I decided to charge them for the privilege. I was a bona fide male whore until I went to New Guinea to search for gold. That didn’t pan out, forgive the pun, so I sold natives as slave labor to the miners. One night I killed a man. But he was only a native, so what the hell?”

  “You are the most dangerous man I’ve ever met,” she said.

  “For saying that, you get a kiss.” From his perch on her side of the sofa, he leaned over to kiss her. One kiss led to another. Unlike her experience with Marshall Thompson, she didn’t have to teach Flynn to open his mouth when kissing. Before the session ended, each of them had removed most of their clothing, or so she’d relay later to Dick Hanley.

  Flynn did a striptease for Elizabeth; his body was that of an athlete. During their time together in bed, she uncovered one of his sexual secrets. He rubbed cocaine on the tip of his penis before intercourse.

  “He hurt me,” she later told Dick, “but did so in such a thrilling way.”

  After their lovemaking, during pillow talk, he’d complained that “I’m just a god damn phallic symbol to the world. They say I’m always trying to seduce young girls—statutory rape and all that. Hell, I come home to find the little vixens hiding under my bed. In my dressing room, I just lie there reading the trades while they work me over.”

  Curtiz called Flynn the next day to see how it had gone. “We’re not fated to have a long affair,” Flynn told the director. “There’s a big drawback to Elizabeth. I’m a leg man, not a breast man. Her legs are too short. Her breasts are terrific, but how do you make love to a breast?”

  “Someday when you’re older, you fucker, I’ll tell you,” Curtiz said before hanging up the phone.

  To both Roddy and to Dick, Elizabeth breathlessly supplied the details of her one-night stand. “Suddenly, there he was, all six feet two inches of delicious manhood. I was smitten from the first moment he walked in. I know girls have charged him with rape. He didn’t have to rape me. To me, Errol Flynn is romance, danger, adventure.”

  He called Elizabeth shortly after their experience together, telling her, “You are a very special girl, and I worship you.” Before ringing off, he asked her to come back to the house on Mulholland Drive the following Saturday afternoon, and she willingly accepted.

  When she arrived, the house was very different, not romantic at all. She heard the giggles and screams of children coming from the swimming pool. In the living room, Flynn presented her with a large toy poodle whose fur had been artfully dyed pink. “It’s adorable, but how do I explain this when I take it home?”

  “Tell Sara it’s a gift from a crazed fan, which would be the truth in my case,” he told her before kissing her.

  He walked with her to the edge of the swimming pool where he pointed out his young son, Sean, who was nine years younger th
an she was. He was playing in the shallow side of the water with two slightly older girls. Then Flynn directed her to a dressing cabana where he told her she’d find a bathing suit her size. In the cabana, she discovered at least twenty women’s swim suits, making her wonder who’d worn these suits before.

  Then she joined the kids in the pool, playing games as if she was a child again. She found Sean an extremely beautiful, blonde-haired boy. He provided her with a black inner tube, then struggled to overturn it once she’d settled into it. After being dumped in the water, she chased him from the pool, threatening to rip off his bathing trunks. Comfortably seated in a chaise longue, Flynn seemed to enjoy the scene as he puffed on a Havana cigar.

  Two hours later, Elizabeth was in Flynn’s bedroom. He’d left the door open, and was bouncing her up and down on a king-size bed large enough for four couples. He’d toss her into the air, catching her as she came down. When she looked up, she spotted Sean at the door.

  “She’s only a girl,” he said, coming into the room. “That’s the game you play with me!” It sounded like a protest.

  “And you’re only a boy, sport,” Flynn told his son. “See this girl I’m bouncing up and down? Show some respect. She’s going to become your stepmother one day.”

  Sean stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Later that evening, Elizabeth told Sara that she’d spent the afternoon at Roddy’s house. But in the privacy of her bedroom, she called Roddy to report on the day’s events. “I’m going to tell you the biggest secret of my life.”

  “You’re pregnant,” he said, only half in jest.

  “You wish. No, not that. Errol is going to marry me.”

  “Did he propose?” Roddy asked.

  “Not quite, but he more or less did. He practically swore on a stack of bibles to his son, Sean, that I was going to become his stepmother.”

  ***

  Errol Flynn had appeared suddenly into her life, and he disappeared two weeks later with the same suddenness, without telling her of his departure.

  “He was ‘in like Flynn,’ and then out like Flynn,” she told Dick Hanley. During his reaction to that observation, Mayer’s secretary told her that he thought Flynn had gone on a mysterious trip to Mexico. “He can indulge in debaucheries South of the Border that would get him arrested in the U.S.”

  As a young girl who was emerging fast but somewhat prematurely into the adult world, Elizabeth suffered from a kind of attention deficit syndrome, even if that term had not yet been made known to her. “Her interest in certain men shifted from week to week,” said Dick. “She would continue to visit Flynn from time to time, but when Robert Stack walked into her life, Robin Hood went back to Sherwood Forest.”

  ***

  After a spree with Sara in England, Elizabeth was summoned back to Hollywood by Louis B. Mayer, who had hired Richard Thorpe to direct the feel-good film A Date With Judy (1948) at MGM.

  Its cast included Jane Powell in the title role, Wallace Beery, Selena Royle, and, for laughs, Carmen Miranda and Xavier Cugat. As mentioned before, Robert Stack would play one of the male leads in a frothy, and somewhat flawed, film about the “coming of age” of a character played by Elizabeth.

  The best scene in the movie did not include any of the more prominently featured leads, but featured Carmen Miranda suggestively teaching a wealthy patriarch, as played by Wallace Beery, how to dance the rhumba. But everything ends happily by film’s end, when it’s made obvious that Rosita is destined for a future with her true love, a character played by Xavier Cugat, at the time Hollywood’s most successful Latino entertainer.

  That same year, 1948, Thorpe had directed Peter Lawford in On an Island With You, co-starring Esther Williams.

  But despite his many previous successes, Elizabeth was mainly intrigued about why Thorpe had been fired from the directorship of The Wizard of Oz. He was very blunt in telling her.

  “I directed Judy Garland for only two weeks. Mayer didn’t think I had the right air of fantasy about the picture. I gave her a blonde wig and was accused of giving her a cutesy ‘baby-doll’ makeup, making her look older than the innocent little girl from Kansas they wanted. George Cukor came in temporarily and got rid of the wig, the make-up, and me.”

  “Well, we won’t have this problem on A Date With Judy,” Elizabeth responded. “I want to look older and very sexy.”

  “You certainly have the tits for it, kid,” her director told her. She would work with him on future pictures.

  A Date With Judy’s producer was Joe Pasternak, who, in 1939, had cast Stack in his inaugural film, First Love, starring Deanna Durbin. Stack gave Deanna her first screen kiss. But that decade had passed and, as the forties were coming to an end, Deanna was passé. When Elizabeth was introduced to Pasternak, she told him, “Robert Stack is not going to give me my first screen kiss. He’s much too late for that.”

  “Don’t worry, kid,” he told her. “Stack is going to give you your first adult screen kiss.”

  Elizabeth was mesmerized by Carmen Miranda, the “Brazilian Bombshell.”

  “Why does MGM think I have an accent?” she asked Elizabeth in heavily accented English. “What do they expect from a South American?”

  Carmen’s banana hats fascinated Elizabeth, and the star loved to drive fast cars. One afternoon, when Sara was ill, Carmen volunteered to drive Elizabeth home. “My God, she went one-hundred miles an hour,” Elizabeth later said. “She was arrested for speeding. The cops suspected her of being drunk. I went with her to the police station where she was booked. I got home by eleven that night. Miraculously, I was still alive.”

  Typical of post-war MGM musicals, A Date With Judy was light froth, with all the stars—more or less— required to sing.

  Elizabeth recalled bandleader Cugat walking around with a little Chihuahua under his arm. Whenever he passed by Elizabeth, he pinched her butt.

  Like his former co-stars, Elizabeth found Wallace Beery obnoxious. The most unlikely superstar of Hollywood’s golden era, he had been married to screen vamp Gloria Swanson throughout most of the course (1916-1919) of World War I. He was usually cast as a jowly, lovable lug. Offscreen, he was anything but the image he portrayed. “He never spoke to me, walked right past me, even though out of respect I always addressed him. He was known for his scene stealing and constant mugging, and he was also a thief. Anything that wasn’t nailed down, including some of the props, he took home with him.”

  A Date With Judy represented the first time Elizabeth wore make-up on screen, and the first time she had a leading man who wasn’t four-legged. “One minute I was kissing a horse and the next thing I was kissing Bob Stack with tongue. I loved it. I had such a crush on him.”

  Depicted in luscious Technicolor, Elizabeth was the sultry schoolmate of MGM’s singing sensation, Jane Powell, known as “The Girl Next Door.” Thanks partly to her startling singing voice, she’d begun performing since the age of two, and had arrived in Hollywood with hopes of becoming the next Shirley Temple.

  In the film, Elizabeth played a rich girl, the rival of Powell. She and Powell were never very close, although they attended MGM’s schoolhouse together, and Powell was frequently invited to Roddy McDowall’s Sunday afternoon gatherings.

  Powell later recalled, “Elizabeth was younger than me, and she got to wear green eyeshadow, show off her figure in a tight sweater, and look sexy. That hurt. I was really a little jealous, not of her, but of that green eyeshadow. Just once, I would love to have appeared as sexy in a movie. Bob Stack also gave me my first screen kiss, but Elizabeth got him at the end of the movie. She was really beautiful, with breasts.”

  Elizabeth echoed Powell’s comment. “I got Stack in more ways than one.”

  Months later, after seeing the movie’s final version, Elizabeth told a reporter, “My silly character never left the first dimension, although I looked gorgeous in those gowns by Helen Rose. I was so impressed with her dresses that I had her design my wedding gown. When I met he
r, though, she wore a nondescript black dress with food stains on it, and her slip was showing. She’d tied her hair in an unflattering knot. She obviously concentrated on designing clothes for others, not for herself. She made me look very grown up.”

  A Date With Judy was Elizabeth’s first attempt to mold herself into a young femme fatale and “not be turned out to pasture” like other child stars, including Margaret O’Brien and Deanna Durbin. “I did not want an awkward period of adolescence to destroy my daughter’s screen character,” Sara stated. “She became a young woman overnight.”

  Powell shared a dressing room with Elizabeth and remembered that she complained that she was “mad for Peter Lawford and he doesn’t give a shit for me.”

  “She was inconsolable and didn’t seem able to accept rejection,” Powell said.

  Light froth “in luscious Technicolor:” Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Powell in A Date with Judy

  Bob Stack made her forget about Lawford.

  “With Robert Stack in bed beside you, what girl in the world could want anything better?” Elizabeth asked.

  ***

  After three years of military service as a gunnery instructor during World War II, Robert Stack returned to Hollywood, wanting to be cast in adult action roles. “What did I get? I ended up as the boy next door in love with the girl next door. But it was worth it. That girl happened to be Elizabeth Taylor. Unlike Errol Flynn, I didn’t want to be brought up on a statutory rape charge. But everybody on the set kept telling me that Elizabeth wanted to go out with me. Even though I was twenty-nine years old and she wasn’t quite sweet sixteen. I knocked on her dressing room door. My good friend, Flynn, had told me that he’d broken her in already, so I didn’t have to teach her sex education courses.”

  She came to the door in her brassiere. “Unlike Flynn, who’s a leg man, I’m a breast man. ‘I’ve come to ask you out on a date,’ I told her.”