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

by Darwin Porter

  Back in New York, Elizabeth was on her own, as her mother had flown down to Florida. Elizabeth later claimed that this interlude in her life was “the beginning of my being an adult, with no parent or chaperone around telling me when I could take a crap.”

  Hearing that Griffin was in town, she called and invited him out on a date, with the understanding that it was a brother-sister type relationship of the sort she had with Roddy.

  Merv arrived at her hotel suite with three dozen long-stemmed yellow roses, her favorite.

  Escorted by him to the Stork Club, she introduced a “New Elizabeth Taylor” to public view, one clad seductively in a gown with plunging décolletage. “Let’s dance the night away,” she told Griffin.

  The occupants of the other tables couldn’t stop staring at Elizabeth, who seemed to tune them out. One aspect of her body disturbed Merv. He noticed that her bare arms were peppered with fine black hairs. They were unsightly, detracting from her otherwise stunning beauty.

  At two o’clock, they left the club, and he took her back to her hotel, with an invitation for dinner the following night at 21.

  The next evening, midway through their meal, Clark Gable walked in with his new wife, Lady Sylvia Ashley, a willowy blonde with a peaches-and-cream complexion and Wedgwood blue eyes. Nancy Davis (later Mrs. Ronald Reagan) had failed to persuade Gable to marry her.

  Lady Sylvia pointedly ignored Elizabeth when they were introduced, but Gable leaned over and kissed Elizabeth on the cheek. Then the newlyweds departed quickly for their table.

  “What do you think of Lady Sylvia?” Merv asked.

  “That gold-digging bitch,” Elizabeth said, “I heard she got her start modeling bras and bloomers. You know, she was once a chorus girl in the seediest clubs in London’s Soho.”

  That night, back at her hotel suite, Elizabeth invited Griffin in as a means of continuing their discussion. “I’m thinking about getting married,” she told him.

  “Well, I’m an available candidate,” he said, not at all seriously. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “I have five candidates in mind, and I’m currently conducting auditions. I can’t tell you now. You’ll read about it in the papers. Now I’ve got to get my beauty sleep. ’Night, love, and thanks for a darling evening. You’re sweet.”

  ***

  Later, from New York, Elizabeth flew to Miami, where Francis and Sara met her at the airport and drove her to her Uncle Howard Young’s mansion on Star Island. Reunited with her beloved uncle, she learned that he was tossing a big bash to celebrate her seventeenth birthday, to which he’d invited about one-hundred guests, including the power élite of South Florida.

  To the party, he invited a handsome, twenty-eight-year-old bachelor, William Pawley, Jr., whose wealthy father had been the U.S. ambassador to both Peru and Brazil. A pilot during the war, Pawley was the president of Miami Transit. Uncle Howard had selected Pawley as a more suitable beau for Elizabeth than Glenn Davis.

  She later stated that she found him “tall, dark, and handsome, with blue eyes that matched my own.” He stood six feet tall, with jet-black hair. Escaping from the party with her, he walked through the Star Island gardens with her, telling her fascinating stories based on his travels in Brazil, Peru, China, and India.

  Her discarded beau, Glenn Davis, later claimed that the Taylor family “pushed Elizabeth into the arms of this rich guy, a real slick operator who could show her a better time than I could afford and buy jewelry for her.”

  Davis also claimed that Sara and Francis “didn’t have a pot to piss in, and Elizabeth was their meal ticket. Sara was interested in three things—Elizabeth as a money maker, Christian Science, and her blocked bowels. I was later glad I didn’t marry Elizabeth Taylor.”

  After meeting Pawley, he booked her for dances, parties, yachting trips, fishing expeditions, leisurely luncheons overlooking the bay, and romantic lobster-and-caviar dinners.

  “Sara wanted Elizabeth to marry a guy who lived in a mansion with servants and a swimming pool, and who owned a yacht,” Davis claimed.

  In the beginning, Elizabeth seemed dazzled by Pawley, a dashing young man, but problems emerged after only a week. She confided to Francis and Sara that, “He’s already acting like a dominating husband. He even tells me what to wear. I think he prefers high-necked dresses—no breasts showing.”

  The Pawley family exerted a powerful influence over their heir. His parents reportedly told him that Elizabeth Taylor was a very vulgar young woman, and they’d much prefer him to marry a Florida débutante from a good family—“not some Hollywood tramp.” Apparently, the Pawleys had hired a private detective in Los Angeles, who had uncovered and reported shocking revelations, including the accusation that both of her parents were bisexuals—and gold-diggers as well, living entirely off whatever profits they could make off Elizabeth. It was also alleged that she had attended sex parties at the home of Errol Flynn, and that she’d engaged in numerous affairs with actors who had included, among others, both Robert Stack and John Derek, even though it was widely implied in fan magazines that she was still a virgin.

  So This is Love? Merv Griffin, singer and movie star hopeful, signing autographs in 1953.

  At an upscale party hosted aboard the Pawley family’s yacht as it was moored at a dock in Miami’s harbor, family members and much of tout Miami virtually ignored Elizabeth, even though she was accustomed to being fawned over by the press and public alike.

  Ignoring the objections of his family, Pawley proposed to Elizabeth and she accepted.

  He presented her with her first “white diamond”—a three-and-a-half carat emerald-cut solitary ring for which he paid $16,000. She described it as a “Nice piece of ice,” to the press, uttering that line in an imitation of Mae West.

  Once the engagement ring was on her finger, Pawley became even more possessive, claiming that she’d have to give up her career in Hollywood and devote herself full time to being his wife. Amazingly, she agreed, asserting, “I’d rather be making babies than making movies,” to the press.

  “I have no intention of becoming known as Mr. Elizabeth Taylor,” Pawley chimed in.

  That news sent shock waves all the way to Louis B. Mayer’s office. He immediately dispatched MGM producer Sam Marx, who was in Miami Beach at the time, to visit the Pawley mansion for a showdown with Elizabeth.

  At first, Pawley didn’t want to let Marx into his home, claiming that he was about to take Elizabeth fishing. But she ran down the stairs and told Pawley that she’d already agreed to meet with Marx, because years before, he had arranged for her first big break in films.

  Over tea, Marx told her that he was in Miami supervising the filming of A Lady Without a Passport, starring Hedy Lamarr. “Lamarr looked great in those 1940s films, but she’s getting a bit long in the tooth. Mayer agrees that you are the only one on the lot who can become the Hedy Lamarr of the 1950s. No one else is that beautiful.”

  He also told her that Time magazine was planning to put her picture on the cover of its August, 1949, issue. The magazine was going to announce that such golden stars of yesterday—Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford—had reached their “sell-by dates.”

  “Time will editorialize that a new type of goddess will soon emerge onto the American landscape—and her name is Elizabeth Taylor,” Marx said.

  He also told her that MGM was planning its biggest picture of the year, a vehicle where she’d play a bride, the daughter of Spencer Tracy. He went on to say that Mayer wanted to lend her to Paramount for “the female role of the year,” appearing opposite Montgomery Clift in a film based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.

  “If you leave the film industry now, you’ll be remembered, if at all, as a little girl who rode a horse in National Velvet,” Marx said. “Conspirator bombed at the box office. If you must eventually leave Hollywood, make these two big pictures and go out in a blast as the world’s biggest female box office attraction who abandoned everythin
g for the man she loved. Otherwise, you’ll be tossed into the dustbin with Shirley Temple and Margaret O’Brien, two kids who couldn’t make it as adults in film. Do you want to become the forgotten bride of some guy down in Miami, or do you want to reign as the Queen of MGM?” Marx asked her.

  That question seemed to cinch the deal for Elizabeth, who told Marx she’d return to MGM. However, before she could star in the two blockbusters he described, she had been cast opposite Van Johnson in a movie entitled The Big Hangover.

  After a tearful farewell with Pawley, and despite his objections, Elizabeth flew back to Hollywood with Sara and Francis. When she got there, she told Roddy McDowall and Dick Hanley, “I’m starved for love. Bill and I have agreed not to do it until our wedding night. In the meantime, spread the word secretly that I’m available for dates.”

  Pawley telephoned her every day and agreed to fly to Hollywood to escort her to Jane Powell’s wedding to Geary Steffen, Jr., scheduled for September 17, 1949. Elizabeth caught the bridal bouquet. Afterward, the wedding party converged on the Mocambo nightclub, where Vic Damone was the headliner.

  Elizabeth had long harbored a crush on him, and the singer joined the bridal party between his sets. When Pawley excused himself to go to the men’s room, she slipped Damone her phone number.

  Elizabeth Taylor with her wealthy Florida beau, William Pawley, Jr..

  That same night, she told Pawley, “I won’t abandon my career until I play a monster on the screen, a real hellion, for which I will win an Oscar.”

  That, of course, was a dream destined to come true.

  At that point, Pawley probably realized that Elizabeth was never going to settle down to marry him, but that she planned to continue, hell-bent, on her career. As a means of soothing his frustration and disappointment, he flew to his father’s estate in Virginia. There, he read in Hedda Hopper’s column that his engagement to Elizabeth had been canceled.

  After that, partly because of her role in the collapse of previous engagements to both Glenn Davis and William Pawley, Elizabeth began experiencing her first bad press. She was portrayed as a heart-breaking femme fatale, a very-mature teenager flitting duplicitously from man to man.

  The writers and editors at Photoplay were particularly incensed with her because of how its October, 1949 issue, meticulously prepared and edited many weeks in advance, had laid out a splashy (and already out-of-date) feature article that showcased Pawley and Elizabeth as two beautiful people madly in love with each other.

  The Sunday Pictorial in London attacked her “New Look” in fashion. During the filming of Conspirator, before returning to the United States from London, she’d flown to Paris and acquired gowns from Christian Dior, then, arguably the most sought-after couturier in the world. But despite her haute sense of revised glamour, Sunday Pictorial stated, “For breaking off her most recent engagement, somebody should administer a series of resounding smacks behind the bustle of Elizabeth Taylor’s latest Paris fashion creation. She is a living argument against the employment of children in the studios.”

  Pawley had some difficulty getting Elizabeth to return his engagement ring, but she finally shipped it back to him. Her predilection for acquiring and hanging on to jewelry came out in another way, too.

  At the Diamond Jubilee of the Jewelry Industry Council, where she functioned as one of the figureheads, she was lent, as a prominently showcased accessory, a $22,000 diamond tiara. At the end of the event, she begged council officers to let her keep it. They simply could not do that, but compromised, allowing her to keep it for one week before she had to surrender it.

  After writing Pawley some loving and regret-tinged letters, Elizabeth emerged more or less unscathed from her most recent broken engagement. When reporters at the Mocambo asked her about the breakup, she said, “Bill and I went well together under the palm trees; we looked nice on the dance floor; we loved to go boating. But we had nothing in common.”

  Many decades later, during the spring of 2011, the weekly tabloid, The Globe, conducted an interview with the then-elderly Pawley, finding him living in Pembroke Pines, Florida, with relatives. “I loved her with all my heart, and I know she loved me,” he told reporters. “I planned to spend the rest of my life with her. Studio officials wrecked our romance, leaving me devastated. I still haven’t gotten over her, and I’m ninety years old.”

  He’d saved her letters, which she had written in purple ink on pink stationery. In one of them, she wrote:

  “My heart aches and makes me want to cry when I think of you, and how much I want to be with you and to look in your beautiful blue eyes, and kiss your sweet lips and have your strong arms around me, oh so tight and close to you. I want us to be lovers always—even after we’ve been married 75 years and have at least a dozen great-great-grandchildren.”

  Pawley waited until 1974 to get married, a quarter of a century after his engagement to Elizabeth. When his wife died in 2002, Elizabeth, from Hollywood, placed a call to him to extend her sympathies.

  Upon Elizabeth’s own death, Pawley told the press, “If Elizabeth had married me, she would not have needed all those other husbands.”

  ***

  An odd request for Elizabeth came in from Benny Thau at MGM. Mayer had hired Stewart Granger, whom they’d planned to launch into major American stardom after his robust success in British films.

  Granger was fresh from the beds of Jean Simmons and Michael Wilding, and a recent affair with Robert Taylor during the making of Conspirator. Granger was being seriously considered for the lead role in MGM’s big production of Quo Vadis?

  Thau wanted Elizabeth for a screen test with Granger, with the understanding that as a result, she might be selected as the lead, opposite Granger, in Quo Vadis?

  She had seen Granger lunching with Robert Taylor at the MGM canteen in London, but they had never been formally introduced.

  Granger later recalled, “I found her incredibly beautiful and curvaceous, but was disappointed by her rather squeaky voice. She would have been better in silent pictures. Except for the voice, she had everything else in abundance, and she could speak British to me. In the test, she was my demure slave and I the lecherous Roman conqueror.”

  John Huston was set to direct the scene.

  Granger had learned that Elizabeth was just past her seventeenth birthday. “I was dressed in a skimpy tunic—shades of Caesar and Cleopatra that I did with Vivien Leigh—and I had my hair curled, Roman style. Huston said, ‘Play the scene like a big buck drunken nigger.’”

  “I broke up the crew ogling Elizabeth’s assets.” He later recalled that Huston, as an experiment and test, also filmed a love scene whose footage was later destroyed, like her screen test with Clark Gable. “She pressed that body against me, and I got overly excited. I was lecherous all right. I didn’t know if the bitch was play acting or, perhaps, was desperate to get fucked. I finally concluded that she wanted me to fuck her. Since my precious Jean (Simmons) was away, I made plans to have this hot-to-trot teenager for the night.”

  When Elizabeth was allowed to see the screen test, she told Dick Hanley, “Huston wanted to see if Stewart and I had any chemistry between us. We not only had chemistry, we blew up the chemical works.”

  “I saw the screen test too,” Dick later said. “I think Mayer should send a memo to future actors appearing in love scenes with Elizabeth. He should order all of them to wear jock straps.”

  Originally, Gregory Peck had been offered the lead. He arrived at MGM and dressed in Roman gear, but looked into a full length mirror and decided, “My calves were far too skinny for such a role.”

  Both Elizabeth and Granger lost the lead roles in Quo Vadis? Their parts went instead to Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr. When Taylor signed for the lead role, he was shown the screen test of Granger and Elizabeth. The director, Mervyn LeRoy, told Taylor to play the part just like Granger did. “If I were so great and just right for the part, why didn’t MGM use me?” Granger asked. Instead, he was assigned the lead
in King Solomon’s Mines, which, coincidentally, starred Deborah Kerr. “Deborah and I renewed our love affair,” Granger later confessed.

  As he’d anticipated, Granger found Elizabeth only too willing to go out with him for the night. He informed her that they couldn’t go to any public place where photographers were likely to spot them. “I’m committed to Jean,” he said, “but I’ve always been a naughty lad.”

  “Please,” she responded. “I’m used to back alley romances. You’re not my first secret date.” She looked provocatively at him, as he remembered. “Are you going to kiss me or not?” she asked.

  “Bloody hell,” Granger said. “The little minx had just gotten into my rented car. We kissed all right. I felt her up—what breasts!—and she fondled my jewels. She got me so hot we skipped dinner and drove to the apartment where I was staying.”

  “Instead of dinner, we feasted on each other,” Granger told Huston, who spread the gossip around. “Elizabeth confessed to me that she believed in love at first sight. I told her to pull back, that I was in love with Jean, and that we shouldn’t see each other any more. I didn’t want to break her heart. She was an impressionable seventeen-year-old.”

  “That morning, when I drove her home, she cried all the way there,” Granger recalled.

  Years later, he said, “Oh, what tangled lives we actors lead. Other than making films, the second best business in Hollywood is laundering sheets from hot beds.”

  ***

  [Ironically, in a strange twist of fate, and despite the murky dramas associated with Granger, her young age, and the fallout associated with their screen test, Elizabeth ended up in Quo Vadis? anyway — as an extra.

  During her honeymoon in 1950 with hotel heir Nicky Hilton, she flew with him to Rome. After she learned that he’d spent the night in a Roman bordello, the newly married couple had a violent argument and he attacked her.