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

by Darwin Porter

  Elizabeth later recalled, “Peter was one of the guys I had this tremendous crush on, and he had already made love to me. I thought he was terribly, terribly handsome. He had such an elegant speaking voice. I avoided his mother, Lady May, because she was a bitch from hell. The whole cast of Julia Misbehaves knew that I was in love with Peter and teased me about it. The trouble was, he wasn’t really in love with me.”

  During the filming of Julia Misbehaves, Elizabeth reached her full height of five feet four and a half inches. Her ideal weight fluctuated between 118 and 120 pounds.

  In February of that year, Conway and the cast of Julia Misbehaves threw a “Sweet Sixteen” party for Elizabeth, presenting her with jade earrings and a silver choker. Her present from Mayer and MGM was the chic wardrobe she wore in the film. Sara and Francis gave her the greatest gift of all, a solid gold key to a baby blue Cadillac, even though she hadn’t learned to drive yet. The bill for the Cadillac came from Elizabeth’s own earnings. In addition, she received word from MGM that her weekly salary had been raised to $1,000.

  Lawford was enlisted as her escort to her Sweet Sixteen party, but he hadn’t shown up. She was very tipsy when the chocolate layer cake was brought in. By the time Lawford did arrive, she had fallen asleep on a nearby sofa, having drunk too much champagne. But she recovered in time for him to take her dancing at the Cocoanut Grove.

  upper photo: Greer Garson, Peter Lawford, and Elizabeth Taylor in Julia Misbehaves.

  Inset photo: Greer Garson

  That night at the Ambassador Hotel, site at the time of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Elizabeth and Lawford double dated with Garson and E.E. (“Buddy”) Fogelson, a rich Texas oilman. For Fogelson, it was love at first sight when he met the red-haired beauty. Before the evening ended, he told Garson, “I’m going to marry you.” He did. She was at his bedside on December 1, 1987, when he died at the age of eighty-seven.

  “Elizabeth welcomed the mobility that a car provided,” Roddy recalled. “Carmen Miranda must have been her driving teacher. Elizabeth was hell on wheels. As for parking, she always managed to hit the rear of the car in front of her and the one parked behind her.”

  One morning she crashed into John Wayne’s new, fire-red Thunderbird. He was furious or “boiling mad,” as he put it.

  After bashing in The Duke’s car, Elizabeth became a hit-and-run driver. However, two stagehands witnessed her plowing into Wayne’s vehicle.

  When confronted with the evidence, she dismissed complaints. “Duke should not have parked there in the first place since it was my spot. Also, he should have left room for me to park. I think the Road Hog got what he deserved.”

  Wayne never quite forgave her and used future occasions to attack her. When he was having a torrid affair with actress Gail Russell, he said, “Gail is ten times more beautiful than ugly Liz with her thunder thighs will ever be.”

  His anger continued to bubble over for years. He attacked her for appearing in two screen adaptation of plays by “that queer, Tennessee Williams.” He was referring, of course, to the 1959 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and to the 1959 Suddenly, Last Summer. The latter picture infuriated Wayne, who called it “garbage from a diseased mind.”

  “I don’t like to see Hollywood’s bloodstream polluted with perversion, or immoral and amoral nuances. The film depicts homosexuality, murder, and psychotherapy,” Wayne charged. Privately, he told friends that Elizabeth “cursed like a sailor and had a filthy mind.” He was also infuriated when she won an Oscar for appearing as a prostitute in Butterfield 8 (1960). “At least MGM knew that she’d be great playing a whore, a role she knows only too well. I heard she even tried to get Lassie—a male collie, incidentally—to fuck her in her first movie.”

  John Wayne (photo above): “Playing a whore is a role she (E.T.) knows only too well,”

  Elizabeth Taylor (about John Wayne): “These closeted queens have such bitchy tongues.”

  When she heard about this, she said, “Oh, Wayne, Oh, Johanna Wayne. These closeted queens have such bitchy tongues on them.”

  Although Mayer had warned Lawford to stay away from Elizabeth and to protect her innocence, he continued to see her secretly. “Louis B. doesn’t know that I’ve already tasted the honey,” he told her.

  “The less Mayer knows about my private life, the better,” she said.

  She found dating Lawford unsatisfactory, although Sara told friends that Elizabeth and Lawford planned to marry when she turned seventeen. Even during the peak of their dating, Elizabeth suspected that Lawford was carrying on affairs with both men and women on the side.

  As the dean of Hollywood biographers, Lawrence J. Quirk, wrote: “Peter was compelled to make love to a number of women he involved himself with. They expected it, and he needed it, for pleasure and for his image’s sake, and to help dispel rumors about his relationships with men—and there were a number of them. These relationships worried him; they were often a sexual release rather than a romance. When he fell in love or entertained romantic feelings toward a man, Peter grew inescapably depressed. This side of his erotic life he found ominous, threatening, baleful, yet he needed it, too.”

  Amazingly for her age, Elizabeth seemed to understand Lawford’s dilemma, a harbinger of the sympathy and support she’d offer during later friendships with Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift.

  Lucille Ryman, chief of talent at MGM, noted that the teenage Elizabeth “seemed to be chasing after anything in pants, and she seemed desperate to find a husband, probably because she’d be able to move out of the house she shared with Francis and Sara.”

  Lawford didn’t believe that Elizabeth’s love for him was genuine. He dismissed her “as a girl in love with love.”

  Sheilah Graham, a rival columnist of both Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, was the first journalist to suggest in print that Elizabeth was a sexual predator, even though she was only sixteen years old. Graham drew up a list of what she privately called “the biggest whores in Hollywood.”

  Photoplay would not print that, of course, and the list’s name was changed to “Hollywood’s Most Dangerous Women.” The list was headed by Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, and Joan Crawford, and also included Jane Wyman, Rita Hayworth, and—as the youngest star on the roster—Elizabeth Taylor.

  Some editors at Photoplay objected to Graham putting Elizabeth’s name on that notorious list, claiming, “But she’s only a child.”

  “Like hell she is!” Graham shot back. “If you’re fucking Ronnie Reagan, Peter Lawford, Robert Stack, John Derek, Marshall Thompson, Mickey Rooney, and Errol Flynn, you’re a child no more. Admittedly, she’s had only a fraction of men, unlike the other whores on my list, but they’d had years to seduce men. At the rate Elizabeth is going, she will have beat out all of them by the time she’s forty.”

  One “fan” letter arrived at MGM from Betsy Blywood in Athens, Georgia. “Elizabeth Taylor may have turned sixteen, but she dresses and acts like the Whore of Babylon. I will pray for her.”

  A Date with Judy and Julia Misbehaves were each released within a week of each other. Most of the reviews sounded similar, using the same vocabulary—“Silly,” “trivial,” “vacuous,” or even “vulgar,” although why any critic would have used the term “vulgar” in association with either of these somewhat saccharine screenplays was never fully explained.

  Critics claimed that Sidney Guilaroff, one of the leading hairdressers in Hollywood, went too far in “maturing” Elizabeth’s screen image. They complained that she was “one of the loveliest girls in movies, but in Julia Misbehaves, she was made up and her hair done in such a way as to make her prettiness tiresome and conventional.”

  In spite of bad reviews, the film had a strong opening at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, the New York Herald Tribune hailing Elizabeth as “one of cinema’s reigning queens.” But the movie flopped overall, and did nothing to advance the fading career of Greer Garson.

  MGM itself seemed confused as to how to promote Elizabeth’s sc
reen image. As author Alexander Walker wrote, “MGM was guilty of giving out confusing signals. Perhaps it, too, was confused. Elizabeth, in a photo spread taken by the fashionable photographer, Valezka, could pass for thirty with her hair drawn back close to her skull. And one picture of her, bosom thrust forward and stretching a tight, off-the-shoulder blouse, while she tilts her head back in a look of unashamed enjoyment of her own sexuality, must rank among the frankest photos MGM permitted an up-and-coming star—and a legal minor, too—to be pictured at that time.”

  “I’ll be god damn if I’m going to be Judy Garland having my breasts strapped down so as to look fourteen,” Elizabeth warned MGM.

  In spite of this blatant publicity, and despite rumors about her sexual promiscuity, Mayer decided to give Elizabeth “one last chance,” at playing an innocent virgin. He cast her as one of the leads in Louisa May Alcott’s children’s classic, Little Women, which had been brought to the screen before, with Katharine Hepburn playing the lead.

  Elizabeth’s “ripening” as a woman was concealed by a period costume showing nothing. Even her celebrated raven-black hair was concealed with a blonde wig.

  She didn’t want the role in Little Women and privately protested to her friends. “This is my last time appearing in a child’s part. I want to heat up the screen like Ava and Lana. God damn it, I will, too, even if I have to go into the executive headquarters at MGM and suck off Benjamin Thau like Nancy Davis [later, Reagan] does every morning.”

  ***

  George Cukor had directed Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Jean Parker, and Frances Dee in Little Women way back in 1933. In the 1940s, David O. Selznick planned a remake starring Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple, but later, he abandoned the project. Then MGM picked up the property and named Mervyn LeRoy to helm this glossy 1949 remake of Alcott’s gentle account of teenage girls finding maturity and romance.

  The Alcott story was largely autobiographical, the tale of sisters growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, during the 1860s. The little women keep the home fires burning as their preacher father serves in the Union army during the American Civil War.

  Under a strawberry blonde wig, Elizabeth was cast as Amy, a character described as “snooty, anxious, nervous, and haughty.” Ironically, Amy had been played by Bennett in the 1933 version. Bennett, a few months after the completion of the 1949 version, would play Elizabeth’s mother in one her most popular films, Father of the Bride (1950).

  At the age of thirty-two, June Allyson snagged the lead as Jo in the 1949 version of Little Women, playing a fifteen-year-old. Allyson was married to Dick Powell at the time and pregnant with her first child.

  Other sisters included Janet Leigh as Meg and Margaret O’Brien as Beth. Cast with Elizabeth once again, Mary Astor played the beloved Marmee, with Peter Lawford in the role of “Laurie.” Other members of the cast included Rossano Brazzi, Lucile Watson, Leon Ames, and the old and very grand C. Aubrey Smith, who would die before the picture’s release.

  Elizabeth despised Astor and resented having to appear in another movie with her. The hatred was mutual. “Elizabeth spoke all the time with this boyfriend stationed in Korea while holding up production. She mercilessly ticked away MGM’s money while we waited on the set for her to get off the phone. I had never encountered such a brazen attitude on the part of a child actor. Nobody in the company, including the director, dared utter a word about it to the precious darling, despite the fact that she was holding up the shooting schedule for weeks.”

  “Elizabeth visited me a lot in my dressing room between takes,” Allyson said. “She obviously was thinking about marriage and asked many questions. She wanted to know if a married woman has to submit to sex any time her husband wants it. She also was eager to know if she had the legal right to demand sex from her husband.”

  “I told her that technically in marriage, a man and a woman should agree on having sex before committing the act. ‘Usually, it’s a spontaneous act,’ I said. ‘But men being men often want it when they want it. Of course, you can demand sex from a man, but they have such different plumbing. If they don’t want to, you can’t get a rise out of those fuckers.’”

  In addition to Allyson, Elizabeth also bonded with Janet Leigh on the set. In fact, they became such close friends they began to go out on double dates.

  “Elizabeth was always looking for some diversion to take her mind off wearing that blonde wig—she detested the thing,” Leigh claimed. “The light hair really didn’t do justice to her coloring. Our daily exposure allowed me a deeper perception of Elizabeth. I think I had anticipated a different person, because of the early recognition of her incredible beauty and success. I didn’t expect the warmth, the humor, the openness, and the regard she extended to her friends.”

  Despite Leigh’s rosy portrait of Elizabeth, her future husband, Tony Curtis, had a different view. “Janet got some good parts in spite of the fact that she was forced to dwell in Elizabeth’s shadow. Janet and the girls at MGM didn’t have an easy time competing with Elizabeth, who had an incredible allure and got any star role she wanted, which made it very hard on the other young actresses. As for me in 1948, I didn’t need Elizabeth Taylor. To hell with the bitch. I was fucking Marilyn Monroe.”

  Co-starring with Lawford again, Elizabeth maneuvered it so that he would ask her out. One day at work, she said, “Peter, we both love the beach. Why not go together?”

  He seemed to have other plans, but agreed to take her to Will Rogers State Beach.

  Later, she complained about that date to Roddy McDowall. “To my regret, Peter spent most of the day looking at the bodies of all those gorgeous young men. I noticed that he made frequent trips to the gents’ toilet and was gone for a very long time.”

  “Perhaps he has a weak bladder,” Roddy said, jokingly.

  “One time, when he came back from the loo, I accused him of not paying me much attention,” she said.

  As she relayed to Roddy, Lawford became very blunt with her. “Elizabeth, my dear, if you had better legs, I’d be more attentive. You don’t have shapely legs. You have pods. Too many hot fudge sundaes at Will Wright’s Ice Cream Parlor.”

  “Of course, it broke my heart to hear him say that,” she confessed. “I really have dieted. My waist has gone from twenty inches to eighteen. But all my life I’d never been able to do anything about my pods. I thought swimming would help. At Malibu, I thrashed around in the water so long I got this awful cramp. Fortunately, my brother Howard was on the beach with some of his friends. He jumped in and swam out to rescue me.”

  Opening at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall in March of 1949 as an Easter attraction, Little Women in its latest incarnation became one of the top-grossing films of that year.

  ***

  Until the summer of 1948, most of Elizabeth’s fans assumed she was still a virgin, as erroneous reports circulated that she was guarded, day and night, by Sara. Elizabeth laughed at these fan magazine fantasies. Among the columnists, Sheilah Graham, former lover of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, knew that Elizabeth had indulged in a number of affairs, and as such, she printed an occasionally negative blurb. Perhaps Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper knew it, too, but for the moment, at least, it served their purposes to present Elizabeth as “The Virgin Princess of Hollywood.”

  The first of her romances to hit the press was largely a creation of the MGM publicity factory. At the time, Glenn Davis, the most famous football player in America, was as well known on the sports pages as Elizabeth was in the movie magazines. He had won the Heisman Trophy in 1946, and the same year, the Associated Press named him “Male Athlete of the Year.”

  MGM publicists wanted to link Elizabeth romantically with this “dreamboat” athlete as a means of generating publicity, since her last teenage films had not fared as well, commercially, as her earlier films as a child star, especially those Lassie vehicles.

  Just prior to the period of his greatest exposure in Hollywood (and to Elizabeth), Davis had completed twenty-two
weeks of infantry training at the U.S. Army’s Fort Benning. He was scheduled to be in Los Angeles that summer playing football before being shipped off for military duties in Korea, beginning in September.

  Question: What happens when you mix the two most famous football players in America, the publicity department at MGM, and everybody’s favorite emerging new starlet?

  left figure: Doc Blanchard

  right figure: Glenn Davis

  inset figure: Elizabeth Taylor

  Davis stood tall and handsome, with auburn hair. His former girl friend, Glenda Neal, said that he was “built like a Greek god, especially where it counts.”

  A romance between Elizabeth and Davis was promoted by Dorismae Kearns, who worked for Howard Strickling in the publicity department at MGM. Sara invited Dorismae and her husband, Hubie Kearns, to their beach bungalow at Malibu one Saturday afternoon. At MGM, Dorismae’s duties included overseeing publicity for Elizabeth, which was almost a full-time position.

  Hubie was also an athlete, formerly renowned as a track star for the University of Southern California. He had won a bronze medal in the 400-meter event in the 1948 Olympics, and was a good friend of Davis.

  Accompanied by Davis, now an army lieutenant, Dorismae and Hubie Kearns walked onto the beach at Malibu to discover Elizabeth engaged in a game of touch football with her brother Howard and his friends from school. Elizabeth’s first words to Davis were, “I bet I can play football better than you.”

  “You think so, squirt?” he said. “You’re on.” The game became more tackle football than touch football, and both Davis and Elizabeth ended up wrestling together in the sand.

  After that, they headed for the nearby Taylor home, where Davis greeted Sara, who would later recall the moment: “When I saw that frank, wonderful face, I thought this is the boy for my girl.”