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

by Darwin Porter

  “Miss Taylor, you are my favorite movie star. I’ve adored all of your films. Anything you want in London, I’ve been ordered to get it for you.”

  “How about Prince Philip?” she asked.

  “Oh, you sweet darling, you have a wicked sense of humor. Prince Philip is on my list, too. You know, he fucks around, don’t you? I want him first, then I’ll pass him on to you.”

  “You’re my kind of guy,” she said, kissing him on the cheek in front of a rather disdainful Sara.

  The next morning, after an English breakfast in Claridges dining room, Sara stayed in the suite while Percy drove Elizabeth to the Taylor family’s former home on Wildwood Road near Hampstead. She was shocked to find the house in disrepair. He asked her if she wanted to go inside, informing her that it was now occupied by the Women’s Voluntary Services, but she declined. “I’d rather remember it as it was.”

  Back at Claridges she told Percy, “I want you to escort me everywhere. But don’t get your hopes up. I don’t put out, at least not for you.”

  “Oh, my dear, that’s something you, with your ghastly plumbing, will never have to worry about.”

  That weekend, Percy drove Sara and Elizabeth to the estate in Kent associated with the late Victor Cazalet, where they were entertained by his sister, Thelma.

  The Taylors were welcomed warmly as part of the family. There was much talk of London before the war and loving memoires of Victor were shared. “I also miss Francis so much,” Thelma said. “I wish he could have come.”

  “He simply can’t afford it,” Sara said. “Even though Elizabeth is a movie star, she doesn’t make that much money.”

  “She will one day,” Thelma assured Sara.

  On the following Monday at around noon, Percy escorted Elizabeth and Sara to a luncheon at London’s Ritz Hotel, where they met the British director Victor Saville, one of the founding fathers of British filmmaking. Having been associated with MGM since 1941, he’d previously directed such classics as Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), and worked closely with such stars as Greer Garson, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, Errol Flynn, and Hedy Lamarr.

  Saville was so supportive of Elizabeth, and so complimentary of her, that she felt she’d have a good working relationship with him.

  Thirty minutes late, the star of the picture, Robert Taylor, finally showed up.

  Before becoming the pretty boy of MGM in the 1930s, he’d trained as a cellist in Nebraska, where he was known by his birth name, Spangler Arlington Brugh.

  Elizabeth knew Robert’s image only through two pictures she’d seen— Camille (1937), where he’d co-starred with Greta Garbo, and Johnny Eager (1942), with Lana Turner. Elizabeth was startled at how his face had changed since World War II. No one would accuse him of being a pretty boy ever again.

  As critic David Thomson put it, “Taylor’s history is like that of Tyrone Power: of hollow, gorgeous youth dwindling into anxiety. But in Taylor’s case, there is something touching in his decline. For he became not plainer, but harsher: Churlish, peeved, disagreeable—no more than that, never enough to make him an absorbing villain.”

  A villain was what MGM had miscast him as in Conspirator, where he played a British officer spying for the Russians and married to an unsuspecting, twenty-one-year-old American, as portrayed by the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth.

  “Just think,” Elizabeth said to Robert, “You’ve had girlfriends on the screen who have included Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Jean Harlow, Vivien Leigh, Joan Fontaine, and Hedy Lamarr—and now you get me.”

  He looked her over. “And how lucky I am.”

  Robert regaled his luncheon table with stories about his early days at MGM. “After several months of studying with MGM’s acting coaches, I was told to go back to my family farm in Nebraska. That made me so god damn sore, I stayed on in Hollywood.”

  “I remember in 1937 when MGM tried to counter your pretty boy image by releasing photographs of you shirtless, revealing hair on your chest to prove your ‘ He-ness,’ as it was defined at the time,” Saville said.

  “I’d rather forget that,” Robert said.

  Before leaving, Robert told her, “We have love scenes coming up in the film, but would you at least give me a peck on the cheek as a preview?”

  “Of course I will,” Elizabeth said, kissing him on the mouth.

  “Aren’t there laws about making love to a minor like Elizabeth?” Saville asked.

  She smiled at him. “Laws are only made to be broken.”

  Later, Percy told Elizabeth, “I used to have the hots for Robert Taylor. But in my fantasies, I’ve moved on to dream about younger men.”

  Elizabeth eagerly awaited her first kissing scene with Robert. She later said that she closed her eyes and pretended it was Glenn Davis.

  Two Taylors (Elizabeth and Robert) in Conspirator, She was 16, he was 38.

  “Robert isn’t as good a kisser as Glenn is,” she told Percy. “But he did give me some advice. He told me to powder down my lips before kissing him. That way, I wouldn’t smear his make-up. How unromantic!”

  Much MGM publicity was generated by that first kissing scene. The word got out that to conceal Robert’s “enormous erection,” he’d ordered cameraman Freddie Young to shoot him only from the waist up.

  Reportedly, Young mocked those remarks. “Taylor couldn’t produce a big hard-on if his life depended on it—call that one ‘Princess Tiny Meat.’”

  Elizabeth wrote Roddy, complaining about having to do schoolwork while co-starring in a film. “It’s hard to concentrate on algebra when Robert Taylor is sticking his tongue down your throat.”

  Robert told Saville, “That Elizabeth Taylor is stacked. I didn’t realize it until she appeared in one scene in a négligée. Good god, she is just a child, but I can’t help myself.” He later told Saville that he slipped her back to his hotel suite and seduced her.

  “How was it?” Saville asked.

  “I’ve had better,” Robert said. “I told her that if she didn’t shave her legs, I would do it for her.”

  During the shoot, Elizabeth was asked how she felt about very young actresses appearing on the screen with middle-aged men. “Hollywood thinks nothing of romantically pairing older men with young girls,” she said. “But you never see the reverse. Imagine seeing Roddy McDowall on the screen making love to Barbara Stanwyck.”

  One scene that Saville shot with both Taylors didn’t go over with Dore Schary at MGM’s home office in Hollywood. Schary ordered that the director reshoot it. “When Elizabeth’s robe flies open in a scene where she’s struggling with Bob, we see far too many of her God given assets,” he wrote. “Please try to keep in mind that this is not a blue movie.”

  When the rough cut of Conspirator was rushed back to MGM, Pandro S. Berman was not impressed with Elizabeth’s first venture into an adult movie. “She has the face for it, but doesn’t possess the strength of voice to go with it. It was like she was half child, half grown woman. I advised MGM to hold up the picture for a while until her career was more secure.”

  Ultimately, when the film was released in 1949, the critics agreed with Berman, although many claimed that Elizabeth delivered a fine performance in an otherwise mediocre movie. Conspirator, evaluated by the box office as a flop, did nothing to advance the post-war career of Robert Taylor.

  Even though the two Taylors failed to excite audiences, it would not be the last time they would be cast together in an MGM film.

  During the filming of Conspirator, Elizabeth blossomed as a social flower in London, meeting people who would alter her life forever.

  ***

  One noonday, Elizabeth and Percy Rogers were enjoying some fish and chips at the MGM canteen in London, and he was filling her in on all the movie and theatrical gossip of the West End. She obviously could not have known it, but two of her future husbands—Richard Burton and Michael Wilding—would also be having lunch that day in the canteen.

  During that era, MGM tal
ent scouts were successfully luring the most talented British stars, both male and female, to Hollywood. Among those solicited, Deborah Kerr was already in California, and such actors as Stewart Granger, Wilding, and Burton would soon be on their way to America, too.

  Orson Welles, whom Elizabeth had known since the days of filming Jane Eyre, had stopped by her dressing room earlier that morning. He was having lunch with Wilding.

  In his memoirs, The Wilding Way, the British actor recalled the first time he spotted Elizabeth, although he associated the circumstance with the wrong year of 1951. That was when she returned to England to film Ivanhoe, once again with Robert Taylor as her co-star. Wilding actually met her when she was filming Conspirator in MGM’s London commissary in 1948.

  “I was aware of her beauty,” Wilding wrote. “Instead of asking the waitress for the salt, she sashayed down the whole length of the canteen to pick it up from the counter. All eyes focused on her, and I’m sure that was her intent.”

  Wilding claimed that Welles, his luncheon partner, raised a satirical eyebrow and quipped, “The girl didn’t ought to do that, you know. Upsets the digestion.”

  Back at her table, Elizabeth asked Percy the identity of the man dining with Welles.

  “He’s an actor, Michael Wilding, under contract to Henry Wilcox, the producer. I think he’s making a picture with Wilcox’s wife, Anna Neagle.”

  “Very handsome, very debonair,” she said. “When I walked past his table, he looked at me with devouring eyes.”

  “That’s because he’s a notorious breast man, but he’s too old for you, my darling. The old sod must be forty if he’s a day. Before the war, he met and married this woman named Kay Young because he said her beauty reminded him of Joan Crawford. But his true love, and this has been so since the war, is actually sitting over in the far corner of the room making eyes at your Robert Taylor.”

  Elizabeth stared long and hard at Robert’s luncheon guest. “He’s stunningly attractive, too. What’s his name?”

  “Stewart Granger,” Percy said. “He’s a real swashbuckler, our British film industry’s equivalent of your Errol Flynn. He was madly in love with Deborah Kerr before she went to Hollywood. When he made Caesar and Cleopatra, Vivien Leigh fell madly in love with him. But, in spite of all his philandering, his most consistent lover has been Michael Wilding himself. Of course, those two are never faithful to anybody. Stewart right now is obviously making a play for Robert, because he wants to star in pictures for Metro in Hollywood. He knows that Robert can open many doors for him. I have no doubt that those two hot guys will be exploring each other’s bums before Big Ben strikes midnight.”

  Elizabeth spent the rest of her time glancing first at Granger, then at Wilding. “When I think of the two, Granger has the most sex appeal,” she said. At the time, of course, it was inconceivable that in a relatively short time, she would be living under the same roof with both men.

  “Stewart is in love with Jean Simmons, who is being billed as Britain’s answer to Elizabeth Taylor,” Percy said.

  “I saw her play Ophelia opposite Laurence Olivier in Hamlet,” Elizabeth said. “She was very good and very beautiful.”

  As Elizabeth looked at the entrance, she spotted Laurence Olivier entering the canteen with a handsome young actor. “What is the deal with those two?” she asked.

  “Larry is mad about the boy,” Percy responded. “That’s Richard Burton, an actor from Wales. He’s the biggest whore in the business. He’s seduced all the stately homos in the British theatre, including Noël Coward and John Gielgud. He’s also gone through half the actresses in the theater.”

  “I adore British actors,” she said. “They seem to play musical chairs every night. Everybody is sleeping with everybody else, regardless of gender.”

  “We’re far more sophisticated about such things than you uptight Americans,” Percy said.

  Olivier nodded as he walked by Elizabeth’s table, and she met Burton eye to eye. After he was out of earshot, she said, “I will not become another notch in Mr. Burton’s belt.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Percy told her. “Richard’s got the most seductive voice in the British theater, far more so than Larry. Richard is also generous with his cock. Once in his dressing room, he owed me a favor, so he let me go down on him. Seven and a half inches at full mast, in case you do become interested.”

  “That is most doubtful,” she said. “Give me this Stewart Granger any day, even Michael Wilding.”

  At that point, she saw Welles, trailed by Wilding, heading toward their table. “Elizabeth, my sweet, dear child, I’d love to drop by your suite tonight to pay my respects to you and Sara. I also am friends with the world’s most intriguing personality, who’s also staying at Claridges and would adore meeting you.”

  “I’d be delighted, as always, Orson,” Elizabeth said. “not only to see you, but to meet this mystery guest of yours—no doubt, Winston Churchill himself.”

  Welles looked over at Percy. “No need to introduce me to this one. His reputation has preceded him.” Then he turned around to Wilding. “Forgive me, Elizabeth, this is Mr. Michael Wilding.”

  “Miss Taylor, an honor,” Wilding said. “Are you real or merely a painting that Leonardo da Vinci did by dawn’s rosy light?”

  “I’m just a lonely little chit from Hampstead, wiggling her ass across the canteen, hoping to attract some handsome British gentleman who will invite her out on a fucking date. Is that too much to ask?”

  “I’d like to be that gentleman,” Wilding said. “However, the first time a waiter asks, ‘And Mr. Wilding, what will your daughter order tonight,’ I’m out the door.”

  She laughed heartily. “I’m at Claridges, and most anxious to escape my mother, Sara. Perhaps you can fix her up with Robert Morley. She just loves bushy eyebrows.”

  “I’ll call tomorrow, since Orson here has you booked for tonight,” Wilding said. “In fact, I need a date to take to Lord Mountbatten’s ball in honor of his daughter. Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip will be there. I’m sure they’d love to meet a British girl who went to Hollywood and made good. They’ll probably entice you back to England to make films here on your native soil.”

  At that moment, a messenger from MGM stopped at Elizabeth’s table, passing a note to Percy. He read it quickly and looked up at Welles and Wilding. “Sorry, gents, but Elizabeth and I have to go. We just got word that two guests have dropped by the set to call on Elizabeth—Patricia Neal and Ronald Reagan.”

  ***

  During the cold, bleak winter of 1948 in London, four homesick Americans bonded, waiting for the weeks to pass in the bombed-out city, with its deprivations and food rationing, until they could return to sunny California. During their frequent evening excursions, Patricia Neal was escorted by Ronald Reagan, her co-star in The Hasty Heart, and Robert Taylor was Elizabeth’s date. Neal was desperately lonely for the arms of Gary Cooper, and Reagan was still in deep mourning over the end of his marriage to Jane Wyman. At that point in her life, Elizabeth hadn’t quite ended her love affair with Glenn Davis.

  For Robert Taylor, his “lavender marriage” to his bisexual wife, Barbara Stanwyck, was over except for the final divorce proceedings.

  On the set of Conspirator, Elizabeth had renewed her acquaintance with Reagan and was introduced to Neal. He suggested that Robert Taylor join them that Friday night for a steak dinner at the Savoy Restaurant. In meat-scarce London, Reagan had ordered a dozen steaks flown in from “21” in Manhattan.

  In the Savoy Dining Room, Patricia remembered that “Elizabeth was so exquisite, so young, and Robert delighted in teasing her. There seemed some intimacy between them that I could only guess at. I also got the vague suspicion that something had gone on between Ronnie and Elizabeth back in Hollywood, but perhaps I was wrong. He didn’t have a reputation as a child molester.”

  The maître d’hôtel arrived with the bad news. The steaks shipped from New York had gone bad, or so he claimed. Rea
gan suspected that the meat-hungry staff had either consumed or sold them. Nonetheless, he ordered a dozen more, warning the maître d’, “When they get here, I don’t want you coming into the dining room with blood dripping out the corners of your mouth.”

  “Over dinner, which consisted of stale mutton chops, Robert amused us with stories of MGM, and Ronnie lobbed complaints about Jane Wyman and their failed marriage,” Neal said. “Elizabeth and I listened patiently.”

  “When I starred with Garbo in Camille in ’36, she told the director I was ‘so beautiful but so dumb,’” Robert said. He also told them that when he signed to make The Gorgeous Hussy (1936) with Joan Crawford, Hollywood wags asked, ‘To which of them does the title refer?’”

  Reagan claimed that he was going to make a deal with Wyman that each of them should not discuss the other to members of the press. “I was really pissed off when she told reporters that I’m as good in bed as I was on the screen.”

  “I read the other day in the papers that she’d made another crack about me,” Reagan said. She told some reporter, ‘Don’t ask Ronnie what time it is, because he will tell you how a watch is made.’”

  When Robert took Elizabeth to another steak dinner at the Savoy, Reagan learned that, according to the maître d’, “only six of your steaks went bad this time.”

  One night, when Robert did not show up for a previously scheduled dinner, Elizabeth contacted Percy, who told them what had happened. Earlier that evening, Robert had been arrested in a room above the Wounded Pelican, a pub with upstairs bedrooms in Soho. It was a hangout for London homosexuals, who could rent “hot beds” for sex. Robert had been caught with a young hustler from Birmingham.

  Both Reagan and Neal seemed very concerned, but Elizabeth less so. She was convinced that MGM publicists, operating on orders from Howard Strickling at headquarters in Hollywood, would hush up the scandal.