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

by Darwin Porter

  Also in the house that fatal night was fourteen-year-old Cheryl Crane, the daughter she had conceived with her former husband, Stephen Crane.

  In typical Hollywood fashion, everyone was called before the police, Among several others, the famed attorney, Jerry Geisler, arrived at the house. He was still famous for having successfully defended Errol Flynn during his trial on a charge of statutory rape.

  In five hours, a plan was concocted. To avoid a jail term for Turner, Geisler orchestrated a plan wherein Lana would assert that Cheryl went to the kitchen, got the knife, entered the upstairs bedroom, and stabbed Stompanato in an attempt to defend her mother.

  The belief was that Cheryl, as a juvenile, would receive a light sentence, if one at all, whereas a jury might “throw the book” at Lana.

  Frank Sinatra also arrived that night at the scene, and the singer agreed that Geisler’s plan was the way to go. “Let Cheryl take the fall—she’ll get off.”

  Later, when Elizabeth had an affair with Sinatra, he told her the details associated with the night Stompanato was murdered.

  Not only that, he informed her that Hughes had very generously ordered his security forces to guard Turner for the next eight months until fear of mob reprisal from Mickey Cohen died down.

  Hughes had been a lover of Turner’s, and although he’d long ago ceased to have relations with her, he had remained loyal to her.

  Elizabeth told Janet Leigh, “Hughes has no more interest in me, although I hear he still has the hots for you.”

  She firmly believed that, and was therefore surprised one afternoon when the doorbell rang at the Taylor home in Beverly Hills. Both Sara and Francis were at the art gallery at the time. On the doorstep appeared Hughes, looking like he was auditioning for the role of a tramp.

  Hughes no longer pressed his case for marriage. Instead, he presented her with a present—tubes of vaginal jelly, which he claimed might prevent an unwanted pregnancy.

  “Use this and you won’t get pregnant,” he instructed her. “If you do get pregnant, your nipples will turn brown instead of rosy pink, and you’ll also get stretch marks. If that ever happens to you, I definitely will not marry you.”

  Then, without saying anything else, he turned and headed back to his battered old Chevy, which offered no clue that its driver was the richest man in America.

  ***

  When Monty Clift was told by Paramount that he’d be appearing with Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters in A Place In the Sun, he said, “I know Shelley from the Actors Studio, but who in hell is Elizabeth Taylor?”

  It is inconceivable that he had not heard of her, although he’d never seen one of her films. They knew dozens of the same show business personalities. To discover who she was in 1949, all someone had to do was walk by a newsstand and look at the covers of various magazines, including Time.

  Elizabeth certainly knew who Monty was, as he’d been the hottest actor in Hollywood since his recent release of his screen debut in Red River (1948), followed by The Search (also 1948). She claimed, “He is the most beautiful man in films today.”

  As a means of generating advance publicity for their joint upcoming film appearance, the studio arranged for Monty to escort Elizabeth to the premiere of his latest film, The Heiress (1949), in which he’d appeared opposite Olivia de Havilland. The Heiress was based on Henry James’s novel, Washington Square.

  When Paramount explained that Elizabeth was a seventeen-year-old child star who had appeared in her first adult role in Conspirator, Monty said, “I’m twenty-nine years old, not a child molester. I’m not taking a kid to any premiere.” The studio insisted, however, and he finally relented.

  The day before Monty escorted Elizabeth to The Heiress, he spent the night on death row at San Quentin State Prison as a means of better understanding how to interpret his upcoming role as George Eastman who, during the final reel of A Place in the Sun, is sent to the electric chair on a charge of murder.

  In the back seat of a long limousine heading for Grauman’s Chinese Theater, he quickly learned that Elizabeth was not the “stuck-up, spoiled Hollywood baby doll” he’d anticipated.

  Sliding into the car beside him, she’d said, “Hello, Monty. Thanks for taking me out of my god damn house. My mother is such a pain in the ass, at times, I’m tempted to strike a match to her hairy cunt.”

  Although at first he was shocked by the vocabulary coming from one so young and beautiful, he quickly adjusted to it and was delighted by her blunt talk. “You’re my kind of gal, Bessie Mae.”

  “Where did you come up with this ‘Bessie Mae’ shit?” she asked.

  “All the world calls you Elizabeth Taylor,” he said. “I want to call you what no one else does.”

  For Elizabeth’s appearance at The Heiress’s premiere, Helen Rose had designed something “sexy and sophisticated,” in this case, a strapless gown with a snowy Polar Bear fur cape. Monty sat gazing at Elizabeth, fingering his lucky red dice on the way to the premiere of his latest movie.

  Hedda Hopper spotted Elizabeth straightening Monty’s tie before they entered the zany, pagoda-inspired movie palace. The next day, Hopper printed, “These magnificent lovebirds are very soon going to be married.”

  Inside, as The Heiress flickered across the screen, Monty slid farther and farther into his seat until he was sitting on his coccyx.

  Elizabeth had high praise for the movie, constantly reassuring him how great he was.

  Leaving the theater, Monty was accosted by an aggressive reporter, who wanted to know what he thought of The Heiress. Brushing him aside, Monty said, “I hated the fucking thing. Let me out of here.”

  After the film, Monty and Elizabeth were driven to the home of William Wyler, who was hosting a party for A-list movie stars. Here, she met one of the film industry’s favorite British actors, David Niven. He later said, “Monty and Elizabeth looked like twins. I’m sure Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden, looked just like them.”

  Later, she was seen chatting with Clark Gable, who told her that he was sorry they didn’t get to appear together on the screen.

  “I heard Tracy is going to play your dad in Father of the Bride. I could have played that role.”

  Gary Cooper came up to her. “I’ve never dated a gal with lavender eyes before, but I sure would like to,” he told her.

  Back on her doorstep, Monty escorted her to the stoop and kissed her on the forehead. “I promised Paramount I’d stay sober while escorting you. Now Marlon Brando and I are going to let it rip. Get stinking drunk.”

  “I’d like to join you guys some night,” she said.

  “You do so at your own risk,” he said. “We might double rape you.”

  “That would be okay,” she said, stepping inside and shutting the door.

  ***

  Built into the deal that Louis B. Mayer had arranged between MGM and Paramount, MGM would receive $35,000 for ten weeks of Elizabeth’s services during her loanout for the production of A Place In the Sun. On October 2, 1949, Elizabeth and Sara left together for location shooting on Lake Tahoe, high in the Sierra Nevada mountains on the border between California and Nevada. The Sierra Nevada was where the desperate and snow-bound Donner party, a century before, had regressed to cannibalism as a means of surviving the winter.

  above, left: novelist Theodore Dreiser right: director Josef von Sternberg “explicit condemnations of capitalism and materialism in America.”

  A Place In the Sun was based on Theodore Dreiser’s celebrated novel, written in 1925, An American Tragedy. It was inspired by a notorious criminal case that unfolded in New York State in 1908. Chester Gillette was put on trial and convicted of drowning his girl friend, Grace Brown, although he maintained all the way to the electric chair that he was innocent. The event occurred on Big Moose Lake in New York State’s Adirondack mountains.

  Players in the real-life version of American Tragedy Chester Gillette (left) and Grace Brown

  An earlier version of the film, entitled An Am
erican Tragedy and released in 1931, had starred Phillips Holmes in Monty’s role, Sylvia Sidney in Shelley Winter’s part, and Frances Dee as the rich girl (i.e., the role played by Elizabeth). It was directed by Josef von Sternberg, a German-Austrian director already widely known at the time of his film’s release, based on his having helmed Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, the film that launched her as an international success.

  Dreiser’s novel from 1925 and von Sternberg’s film from 1931 had each been interpreted as explicit condemnations of capitalism and materialism in America. But as New York author Norman Mailer told Shelley Winters about the 1951 film version, “I hear the script is being watered down so much it’s going to taste like warmed over piss.”

  When Shelley told that to Elizabeth, she went to Stevens, the director of the 1951 version, and asked him, in more diplomatic terms, what he thought about that.

  He responded, “I’m not going to blame American society like Dreiser did. I’m turning this movie into a psychological drama. Our hero’s downfall is that he has this uncontrollable passion for the most glamorous woman on the screen today—read that Elizabeth Taylor.”

  But Mailer’s charge was to some extent accurate. In Washington, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, aided in no small part by the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, had already launched their notorious commie witch hunts, and much of Hollywood was terrified. Paramount brought pressure on Stevens to ensure that A Place In the Sun did not evolve into an anti-capitalist tirade, and that it did not appear to glorify the proletariat working class as portrayed on screen by Monty.

  In response, he referred to both McCarthy and Hoover as “two disgusting fags.” And when he read the script, he told Elizabeth, “Its message is that sex in America is the way to both rise and ruin.”

  Sara, in contrast, was thrilled that Elizabeth would be directed by Stevens, one of the hottest directors in Hollywood at the time.

  Stevens did not have an impressive beginning in Hollywood, having launched his involvement there as a gagman for Hal Roach and later directing Laurel and Hardy. In the 1930s, he became famous for directing such films as Alice Adams (1935), with Katharine Hepburn; and Swing Time (1936) with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He would later direct Elizabeth in both Giant (1956), and the disastrous The Only Game in Town (1969).

  One critic referred to Stevens as “a big, raw-faced man who looked just like a character in one of his westerns, escaping from an Indian about to scalp him.”

  Actually, Elizabeth didn’t learn until later why Stevens had selected her for the film. “I wanted the girl on the candy-box cover, the beautiful girl in the yellow Cadillac that every American boy, some time or other, thinks he can marry.”

  The staff had been instructed not to swear in front of Elizabeth. But that ban was lifted after the first day, when a stream of foul-mouthed invective flowed from her mouth.

  She told Stevens, “I can outcuss, outdrink, outsuck, and outfuck the best of them.” He was startled. She was so different from her movie magazine image.

  “I realized after the first week that a lot of guys in Hollywood had had that pussy,” Stevens told his crew.

  As factory girl Alice Tripp, Shelley Winters appeared onscreen in tacky clothes with no makeup, playing a 1950s girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Guys knocked up girls like that but didn’t want to marry them, figuring they could do better on the other side of the tracks.

  Shelley told Elizabeth, “After this role, I will for the rest of my life play the girl most men would like to murder.”

  Shelley’s role was originally intended for Audrey Totter, but MGM refused to release her. Then Stevens briefly considered Gloria Grahame, but her boss, Howard Hughes at RKO, refused to release her, too. Monty had lobbied for the role of Alice to go to Betsy Blair, who was married at the time to Gene Kelly. Coincidentally, Kelly had, for years, had a crush on Monty.

  Stern-faced Anne Revere, a descendent of Paul Revere, the hero of the American Revolution, played the role of Monty’s mother. Soon after, she was blacklisted for her liberal politics during the McCarthy era witch hunt. Bowing to studio pressure, Stevens cut most of her scenes from A Place In the Sun, and after that, probably because of her political positions, she didn’t appear in another movie until 1970.

  During the cool October nights of 1950, Elizabeth escaped from the clutches of Sara and hid out with Monty, getting to know him. Like his sometimes lover and rival, Marlon Brando, rail-thin Montgomery Clift had been born in Nebraska. When he signed to play Elizabeth’s doomed lover in A Place In the Sun, he met a woman twelve years younger than himself. Since the age of fifteen, he’d been appearing on Broadway, making his film debut in Howard Hawks’ western, Red River (1948), in which he played the highly strung adopted son of John Wayne as part of a tense relationship both on and off the screen. Addicted to both alcohol and drugs before he met Elizabeth, Monty was also deeply conflicted about his sexuality. He often said, “I love women, but I prefer to have sex with men.” Monty’s male lovers came and went.

  Elizabeth Taylor with Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun

  By breaking into films, he started a migration of young New York actors to Hollywood—Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, James Dean, Steve McQueen, Anthony Perkins, George Peppard, and many others.

  Shelley Winters later said, “Elizabeth and I once made a bet about how many of those actors we would eventually seduce. I think she won.”

  Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino would follow in Monty’s footsteps with this edgy, intense, and mutely eloquent style of acting.

  Monty was unlike any man she’d ever met. He appeared on the set wearing a scruffy T-shirt washed last season, and a pair of jeans that had been fresh sometime before World War II. He also sported a ripped leather jacket that looked as if an RAF pilot had worn it during an ejection from his airplane during the Battle of Britain.

  Monty uttered enigmatic statements that only she seemed to fully understand. “There is an evil in Hollywood that confronts me at every turn. I am unable to handle it. No one can be taken at face value. Everyone is a liar. I feel I’m climbing a ladder to this giant skyscraper, and I have an overwhelming desire to fall off and drop into space.”

  Although he didn’t plan to embrace her as a lover, Monty was mesmerized by Elizabeth’s physical beauty.

  “My god,” Monty said. “She has black sable eyebrows and eyes so deceptively blue that they appear violet in a certain light.” She stood only five feet two inches tall, although she always lied about it, claiming she actually stood five feet, four inches. Amazingly, on screen, she photographed as if she was tall.

  “She was indeed the kind of woman a guy like my character, George Eastman, would kill for as a means of reaching his place in the sun.” Monty asserted.

  Their first scene was set in midsummer, although it was filmed during October. The film crew had to hose away a light snow that had fallen the night before. The script called for both Elizabeth and Monty to appear in bathing suits beside and in the lake. Monty refused to disrobe because of his insecurities about his willowy, hairy frame, with only Elizabeth appearing in a bathing suit.

  “In a bathing suit, I look like a monkey,” Monty told Stevens.

  [For years, Monty made frequent visits to a skin specialist on West 57th Street in Manhattan for electrolysis, with the intention of removing a thick pelt of hair from his thin chest and narrow shoulders. Elizabeth would also undergo such treatments.]

  “You know what really caused Monty and Elizabeth to bond?” a drunken Roddy asked one night at a party. “All that excess body hair that both of them suffered with.”

  Stevens was not satisfied with Elizabeth’s scene in the lake, and ordered one retake after another until Sara protested, claiming that her daughter was menstruating and was likely to get terrible cramps. Then she made the amazing charge that this sequence in the cold water would prevent Elizabeth from ever having children.

  After the filming of the lake scene,
Elizabeth spent the next three days in her bedroom, since Sara would not let her return to work. Throughout the two decades that followed, Elizabeth would insist that she would not work when having her period, a stipulation written into every one of her contracts.

  Stevens found Elizabeth a temperamental star, difficult to direct. He accused her of “spitting fire at me.”

  “Does the Princess of MGM have distemper (sic) today?” At one particularly difficult moment, he archly reminded her that the title of the picture was not Lassie Comes Home but A Place In the Sun.

  Ivan Moffat, the film’s associate producer, later observed, “In Elizabeth’s arms, Monty Clift was enveloped by the mothering tentacles of the world…In some hirsute, androgynous way, they did indeed look alike,” Moffat said. “In close-ups, they looked like a brother and sister committing incest.”

  Stevens told Monty and Shelley, “Elizabeth is a sex time bomb waiting to explode.”

  “Then what am I?” Shelley asked. “Chopped liver?”

  “In this picture, that’s exactly what you are,” the director responded.

  “At night, Monty coached Elizabeth in her role by becoming Angela Vickers—delivering her lines, complete with facial expressions and gestures. “It was amazing to behold,” Elizabeth said. “It was as if he became the essence of femininity that Angela Vickers represented, yet it never bordered on drag queen grotesqueness.”

  Elizabeth Taylor, fashion icon, in a much-copied gown designed by Edith Head

  For months after the film’s release, copies of Elizabeth’s white gown, a design by Edith Head, were replicated and purchased by young women across the globe. The design featured a tight bodice embroidered with white daisies and a skirt of ivory tulle over white silk. The designer later remarked, “Elizabeth in the gown was like sunlight moving over the water of a crystal blue lake.”