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

by Darwin Porter

  “Mistinguett and I have been appearing together since 1919, making love on and off the stage, and watching the sun rise over the Seine on many a morning,” said Chevalier.

  Mistinguett kissed Elizabeth on both cheeks and said that Maxwell had asked her to mount the stage at Maxim’s in about thirty minutes and sing her signature “Mon Homme.”

  She fulfilled her promise. The moment she went on stage, an almost reverent hush fell over the chattering guests. Mistinguett, as always, gave a beautiful rendition of her ode to undying love: “Sur cette terre, ma seule joie, mon seul bonheur.”

  From his position beside Elizabeth, Chevalier translated the words, whispering in her ear: “On earth, my only joy and happiness, is my man.”

  During the song, a very short woman in a simple black dress approached and stood beside Elizabeth. When Mistinguett finished her number, the woman stood on her tiptoes and whispered, “I could have sung it better than that bitch.” When the lights brightened, Elizabeth recognized her as Edith Piaf, one of the genuinely famous singers, internationally, of the postwar era.

  Then an overfed Orson Welles came up to Elizabeth and gave her a lustful kiss before introducing her to the Maharajah of Kapurthala. Then Welles spun around and brought the French author and artist, Jean Cocteau, into her presence. This was the first time she’d ever seen a man wear a black cape lined with chartreuse-colored silk.

  The overdressed French cabaret entertainer Mistinguett

  Elizabeth was not aware of Cocteau’s reputation, but was amazed at his appearance, a fakir-thin body with legs so willowy they evoked broomsticks. He extended a frail hand that looked as if it would be crushed if squeezed too tightly. She would later tell Maxwell, “He had a certain fish-eyed look and the saddest eyes I have ever seen.”

  You and I, ma chère, are going to spend eternity together,” Cocteau told her.

  “I don’t think I understand,” she said.

  “You see, we are standing at the doorway to hell. I will be there before you, but you’ll be on the way one day to join me. Together, we’ll live forever, experiencing the tortures of the damned.”

  “I certainly hope not,” she said, turning to meet the next guest Maxwell was presenting to her.

  Maxwell had carefully instructed Nicky to stand in line with Elizabeth, greeting all the guests in the same way he’d done during his wedding reception in Bel Air. But he kept wandering off. Elizabeth spotted him returning to her receiving line with Maxwell and another young man, who was talking with great animation to Nicky.

  Maxwell introduced Jimmy Donahue to Elizabeth, describing him as, “You know, the heir to all those Woolworth five-and-dime stores.”

  He paid her scant attention, continuing to be mesmerized by Nicky. Donahue’s biographer, Christopher Wilson, in Dancing With the Devil, summed up his subject:

  “Blonde and slender, Jimmy Donahue was the archetypal postwar playboy. He could fly a plane, speak several languages, play the piano, and tell marvelous jokes. People loved him for his wit, charm, and personality. The grandson of millionaire Frank W. Woolworth, he was the cousin of Barbara Hutton, one of the richest women in the world….Gay at a time when the homosexual act was unmentionable, Jimmy was notorious within America’s upper class and loved to shock…At the time Elizabeth met him, Donahue was about to embark on a long affair with both the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.”

  Jean Cocteau to E.T. “Together, we’ll live forever, experiencing the tortures of the damned.”

  After a few minutes of idle chat with Elizabeth, Donahue wandered off with her husband, getting lost amid the splendor of the restaurant’s belle époque décor. Maxwell had also disappeared.

  Debauched Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue

  Barreling in on her next was Porfirio Rubirosa. “We meet again, beautiful angel, without Doris Duke and Errol Flynn. Perhaps the two of us can forget them if we have each other.”

  “Rubi!” she said. “What a delight.”

  “Welcome to Paris,” he said. “I noticed that your new husband often deserts you, which is a dangerous thing to do in a room filled with the most deadly of international sharks.”

  “Maybe he needed something from Woolworth’s five-cent store,” she said.

  “I know Jimmy very well, as I am planning to marry Barbara Hutton, his kissing cousin.” Rubirosa said. “Any man who wanders off with that Jimmy won’t be seen again at least until morning. Please, let me be your escort through the rest of this evening as a means of guiding you safely through Elsa’s international riffraff.”

  “It’s a deal, big boy,” she said. “I’m just a hopelessly lost little teenage girl far away from home and her mama.”

  “I am the maiden’s prayer,” he said, taking her arm.

  “So I’ve heard,” she said with a smirk.

  After endless chitchatting and endless goodbyes, with promises of future lunches and future parties before her departure from Paris, Rubi guided Elizabeth out of Maxim’s and into a waiting taxicab. He ordered the driver to stop four blocks from the George V so that they could walk through the nearly deserted streets of Paris.

  “I bet I’m not the first girl you’ve rescued on her honeymoon,” she said to him.

  “Not the first,” he answered, “Nor the last, I’m sure. But when I’m with the world’s most beautiful woman, I can’t think of yesterday or tomorrow…only tonight.”

  ***

  Elsa Maxwell was the first person who called Elizabeth the next day at the George V, to find out what had happened with Rubirosa. “My dear, you don’t have to go into all the clinical details. From Doris Duke, Joan Crawford, Tina Onassis, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Dolores del Rio, Evita Peron, and even from Manouche, I’ve heard about that sex organ of his—eleven inches long and thick as a beer can. I also know Rubi can go all night.”

  “You said it all,” Elizabeth told her. “There is nothing else for me to add to your wonderful description. At least I know why he’s dubbed ‘Rubber Hosa.’”

  “What you did last night is called ‘a revenge fuck,’” Maxwell said. “A very common occurrence in high society marriages. Husband runs off with somebody else. Wife takes on another lover in his absence. I heard that Nicky is attending a three-day party with Jimmy at this château in the Île de France. Don’t expect to see Nicky again until sometime on Wednesday. I’ll have to speak to that Jimmy and tell him what a low-down cad he is to make off with a woman’s husband on her honeymoon. For him, it wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “I want Nicky to come back to me,” Elizabeth said, “I love him so. I can’t believe how insensitive he is.”

  “Let me give you some advice,” Maxwell said. “Let him go away whenever he wants. But collect those diamonds; stock up on Hilton stock; and shop the fashion houses of Paris, but buy only the most expensive gowns. And take up with any hot lover your heart desires. I’ve got a long list of desirable men who want to date you. I might even fix you up with a king here or there, one who has lost his throne to the communists, but made off with the state treasury.”

  “It’s not the kind of life I envisioned for myself,” Elizabeth said.

  “It’s rare for a person to write the scenario of his own life,” Maxwell said. “God…or more likely The Devil...does it for us. Happy times to you on the Côte d’Azur.”

  Nicky did return on Wednesday and spent his time in the bar of the George V. Elizabeth came down to join him and encountered Chevalier there, enjoying cocktails with Mistinguett.

  Elizabeth courteously acknowledged Chevalier, but ignored Mistinguett. She had a reason for her rudeness.

  Someone on the hotel staff had translated a comment the French performer had made to the Parisian press about Elizabeth the day after their meeting at Maxim’s. Mistinguett had not been impressed: “Elizabeth Taylor can’t act; her voice sets your teeth on edge, and all she does is flash diamonds and show décolletage. I guess she’ll go far.”

  “One of the saddest sights I ever saw was Elizabeth sitting in the
bar of the George V begging her young husband to come upstairs and go to bed with her,” said Chevalier. He later told Elsa Maxwell, “Every man in Paris wanted her, and she was having to beg for sex from her husband. I spoke about it to Marlene Dietrich. She found the story appalling. ‘I would never beg for sex,’ Marlene told me. ‘And I predict that MGM will never be able to turn Taylor into a femme fatale like me.’”

  On June 12, 1950, Elizabeth and Nicky flew to England to attend the London premiere of Father of the Bride. Nicky stood inside the lobby of the theater, fuming, as Elizabeth signed autographs for some 2,000 of her British fans.

  Nicky told the theater manager, “I don’t think I can stand another day of being Mr. Elizabeth Taylor. You won’t believe this, but in America, I’m much more important than she is—and a hell of a lot richer.”

  Nicky always found London boring, and he was anxious to fly to the French Riviera, with its gambling casinos, where they had scheduled stopovers in both Monte Carlo and Cannes. Their first stopover was in Cannes where Nicky had booked the bridal suite at the Carlton. Here, they joined Europe’s haut monde.

  Alerted to their arrival, French photographers practically mobbed them, and soon after, Nicky punched one of them in the face. After his camera fell to the pavement, Nicky stomped on it before rushing into the relative safety of the hotel. Elizabeth understood enough French to realize that a lawsuit would be pending.

  During his first night in Cannes, Nicky deserted her and headed for the casino. He could not take her along, because she was not old enough to satisfy the age requirements of French law. When fans tried to crowd into the hotel lobby to get a look at her, Nicky angrily told the manager, “I didn’t marry a girl, I married an institution.”

  One night, he ran off with two French hookers and drove with them in a rented car to St-Tropez. He remained absent for two nights. Elizabeth was in the lobby gift shop of the Carlton when she saw him return, picking up his messages at the front desk. An argument immediately ensued. He knocked her down onto the lobby’s marble floor, calling her “a dirty little whore.” He also claimed that, “While I was away, you must have fucked every beach boy in Cannes.”

  The fall injured her already weak back, and the manager summoned an ambulance, which hauled her off to the local hospital. There, she was ordered to rest for three days. At no point did Nicky come to visit her.

  Two gendarmes, however, came to visit her, suggesting that she press charges, but she refused. She did, however, decide that she wanted to leave Europe. An immigration officer journeyed all the way from Nice to discuss her options. Under normal circumstances, she would have had to visit his office, but he wanted to meet her. He explained that she and Nicky were traveling on a joint passport, which could not be used for her single return. Besides, Nicky had possession of the passport. She’d have to apply to the U.S. consulate for an individual passport, which was bound to involve her new husband. When all the red tape became too much for her, she abandoned her whim.

  ***

  Elizabeth may have been away from Hollywood, but the town had not forgotten her. Louella Parsons’ spies reported that the Hilton/Taylor marriage was in trouble. In her column, Parsons wrote: “Their fights get nastier and nastier. The biggest blow-up came in the south of France. Nicky leaves his bride alone night after night in favor of the gambling tables. This is a new and unbearable situation for her. No man has ever ignored her before. In Hollywood, she was always the center of attention, like Shirley Temple before her star flickered out.”

  Sam Marx at MGM told the press, “Elizabeth is going into this marriage sexually unawakened.”

  When she read that, she was furious. “Tell Sam he can stick a fourteen-inch dildo up his ass. How does he know if I’m sexually asleep or awake? Was he following me around all this time with a god damn camera?”

  ***

  When the unhappy couple checked out of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, Elizabeth and Nicky were driven by limousine to Monte Carlo. A hotel van followed them with all her luggage. Reservations had been made at the very up-scale Hotel de Paris, close to the casino.

  During her so-called honeymoon in Monte Carlo, Elizabeth expected to spend her nights alone while Nicky patronized the Monte Carlo casino. Indeed, on his first night there, he exited from the hotel’s very grand entrance and strolled down the street to the casino. A monument to opulence, it, along with the Opera in Paris, had been designed by Charles Garnier, and had welcomed luminaries who had included Sarah Bernhardt, Mata Hari, King Farouk of Egypt, and Prince Aly Khan.

  Through the intervention of her new friend, Elsa Maxwell, invitations to gala events in Monte Carlo arrived the following morning. Two that particularly appealed to Elizabeth included invitations from the shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis, for supper aboard his yacht; and one from Prince Rainier III for a dinner at his palace. Both men had included Nicky in the invitation, but he rejected both offers, asserting that his luck at long last had changed, and that he was on the verge of a winning streak at the casino.

  Elizabeth decided to accept the invitations and to go alone. Her rebellious streak was reinforced because of Maxwell’s support.

  When she informed Nicky that she would attend the dinners without him, he told her she could not. “Send them your regrets.”

  “I will not!” she said defiantly.

  He slapped her face. “You’re such a god damn whore,” he yelled at her before storming out. “Don’t you leave this hotel suite.”

  The more immediate of the two invitations had come from Onassis. Elizabeth, following his instructions, arrived aboard his yacht, Olympic Winner, while it was anchored in the Port of Monte Carlo.

  With the appearance of a man in his early 40s, he elaborately welcomed her aboard. He wore tinted glasses under hair the color of squid ink. He was smoking a cigar and did not have a pretty face, but his strong personality was charismatic and made up for other failings.

  By now, she was familiar with older men making the usual compliments about her beauty. Onassis had a different twist, however, referring to her as “a modern day Aphrodite.”

  Over vintage champagne, she settled in to get to know Onassis. She asked about his wife, Athina (“Tina”) Livanos Onassis, whom he’d married in 1946 when she was seventeen.

  “She’s resting at our château near Antibes, and we are expecting a child around December.”

  Tina had been quoted in the paper as having said, “Celebrities are important to Ari. All of his fantasies are connected with them.”

  He told her that beautiful women like his wife cannot be moderate. “They need an inexhaustible supply of excess. That’s why I rented this beautiful villa for her. It has forty-two rooms with a staff not quite as large as that of Buck-ingham Palace. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor used to live there. You must come and stay with us this weekend.”

  “That sounds divine,” she said.

  “Tina likes me to provide her with a lot of places to live—a home on Sutton Square.” (He failed to name the city.) “A permanent suite at the Plaza in Buenos Aires, and a villa in Montevideo. An apartment on the Avenue Foch in Paris, a seaside villa outside Athens.”

  Over a dinner of Iranian caviar and lobster, he told her fascinating stories of the sea. She was shocked to realize he believed that mermaids were real, claiming to have seen three in his lifetime.

  “A millionaire should always live a bit above his means,” he told her.

  “I don’t think you need to tell my new husband that,” she said. “He already knows it, throwing away vast fortunes in gambling casinos.”

  “That’s what keeps Monte Carlo rolling,” he said. “That damn casino brings in enough money so the locals don’t have to pay income taxes.”

  She told him that she found him so easy to talk to he could become her Father Confessor.

  “I’d rather you think of me as a potential lover, but Father Confessor will do,” he said.

  She poured out a litany of complaints about Nicky, making r
eference not only to his gambling, but his desertions, his womanizing, and his brutality.

  “He must be Greek,” Onassis said. “I tell you, all Greek men, without exception, beat their wives. It’s good for them.”

  “I can see that we will not always agree on everything,” she said. “Nicky also withholds sex from me. He makes me beg for it.”

  “Now that is unforgivable,” he said. “I can’t imagine any man not giving you sex morning, noon, and night.”

  Waiters kept filling her tulip-shaped glass with champagne, and provided Onassis with glass after glass of his favorite drink, ouzu.

  After he’d heard her complaints, he recommended that she get an annulment. “You tell me he’s Catholic. If the marriage is annulled, he can marry his second wife in the church. Your marriage will never have existed, and you’ll be completely free to marry again, too. Call me a matchmaker. I may have your new husband already selected for you. He’s the man you’re having dinner with tomorrow night at his palace.”

  “Prince Rainier!” she said. “I hope he’s young and handsome.”

  “He’s young and reasonably handsome, and he’s looking for a wife. If he does not produce a male heir, this principality will revert to France. That means locals will pay French taxes for the first time, probably at a rate that’s higher, much higher, than what they’re paying to Monaco now.”

  I’m not sure the prince would want to marry an American film star,” she said. “It might be too shocking.”

  “Quite the contrary. If he married a film beauty, it would attract international publicity and bring thousands of high rollers to Monaco to lose their fortunes in the casino. Marriage to Rainier would make your marriage to the Hilton boy look like a minor side show at a roadside carnival.”

  “Would I have to give up my career?” she asked.

  “Of course, my dear. After all, the Prince can’t marry a working woman. But becoming a fairytale princess would mean more than being a movie star. You’d be known as Princess Elizabeth.”