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

by Darwin Porter

  Outside the bedroom, Griffin told Elizabeth, “I think a declaration of love from Monty was more than Frank could take. He wasn’t going to go from the arms of Ava Gardner into the arms of Monty Clift. No way! Not Frank!”

  He also told her, “I’m checking out of here. Frank has already packed his bags. Please look after Monty and take care of him.”

  That morning, Elizabeth drove Monty to her doctor, who found he had no broken bones, but was in a critical condition. Her doctor warned her, “He’s got to stop drinking or he’ll die.”

  In the days ahead, she went by every evening to nurse him back to health. One night, she arrived and found strangers living in his suite. The manager informed her that Monty had checked out that morning.

  The next day she reached him at his apartment in New York. “I just had to leave Hollywood,” he said. “I was smothering to death. I’m not going to appear in another movie unless it’s with you.”

  ***

  During the closing days of 1952, Michael and Elizabeth were invited to a New Year’s Eve party at the home of their recent hosts, Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons. Currently, the London-based guests living with them temporarily were Richard Burton and his wife, Sybil Williams, an actress.

  In later years, Granger would claim, “Burton was a clever actor, but a shit, an absolute shit.”

  In contrast, when he first came to Hollywood, the bisexual Granger had been powerfully attracted to Burton, although not avoiding dalliances with Wilding as well. Elizabeth was aware of Granger’s sexual interest in Burton, but she learned far more about her future husband’s sexual adventures when she attended the Granger party.

  As she headed for the kitchen, Burton was telling Granger and James Mason, fellow British actors, about his recent sexual fling with Marilyn Monroe. Elizabeth dallied at the entrance, wanting to hear what he was saying without making Burton aware of her presence. She would remember virtually every word and write it down in her diary, which one night in her future, she’d read to him.

  “Unlike many of the guys she’s slept with, I can’t offer her shit,” Burton claimed. “We’re doing it just for fun. She’s incredibly beautiful and very sexy, but she’s a studio plaything at Fox. Yet she is the loneliest lady I’ve ever met. She’s like a lost little girl wandering around a crowded room, even if surrounded by hot-to-trot blokes. She told me she loves my voice, and I told her I love her body. After coitus, I recited poetry to her, and she actually cried. I am reciting, and she kisses my pimply neck. Call it poetic love. We’re still going at it. It’s blinding hot passion, but I don’t dare fall in love with her. I’m getting put off by hearing so much about her promiscuity. In a way, I don’t want to go where so many other men have gone before me. She’s really a prostitute.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being a bit harsh, old boy?” Granger asked.

  “What in the fuck do you call a woman who offers sex in return for career advancement? I also went after Miss Olivia de Havilland, while we’ve been filming My Cousin Rachel, but I don’t think Miss de Havilland is succumbing to my charms. She told someone, ‘Burton is a course-grained man with a coarse-grained charm and a talent not completely developed.’ She may be right. I don’t know what in hell I’m doing in front of a camera.”

  At that point, Elizabeth decided it would be discreet to enter the room.

  Seeing her, Burton said, “Let’s get Mrs. Wilding’s opinion on the subject. Elizabeth, do you think Marilyn Monroe is as sexy as they say?”

  Knowing that the actors were not aware that she’d eavesdropped, she snapped, “Not at all! I hear she’s frigid and no man has ever given her an orgasm. Now get out of my way, gents. Who do you have to fuck around here to get a drink?”

  Until midnight, Burton, as Elizabeth observed, spent the entire night dancing with Jean Simmons. He held her lasciviously close, rubbing his body up against her. A television set was blaring about the countdown to midnight, and what the world might expect from the New Year.

  Elizabeth was stunned when Burton began kissing Simmons. He continued to kiss her as the old year faded and the new year began. Elizabeth was rewarded with a “hen peck” on her lips from Wilding, followed by a “deep throat” kiss from Granger.

  When she broke away from Granger, she noted that he, too, was aware of how Burton was kissing his beautiful young wife, but laughed it off. As Elizabeth later said, “What could Stewart say? React with jealousy? Like hell. Burton was plowing Stewart’s ass as well as Jean’s. It was obvious.”

  She noticed Sybil standing in a corner of the room, looking on in anger at her husband as he was kissing another man’s wife. Finally, when Sybil could take it no more, she walked over and slapped Burton across the face.

  From that point on, the New Year revelers lapsed into a stony silence.

  Pamela, the wife of James Mason, later asserted that “Sybil’s slap resounded across the room like a bomb blasting off.”

  Sybil rushed sobbing to her bedroom, as Burton chased after her. Granger, at long last, stepped in front of his own wife and belatedly extended the tongue so recently sampled by Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth tugged at Wilding’s sleeve. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  The next day, Elizabeth called Granger. He treated the whole event rather matter-of-factly. “Sybil became a bit bored with Jean and me. She moved out this morning. Burton left with her. They are going to be living with James and Pamela Mason. Sybil will have no problem with James going after her. But she’d better watch him with Burton. James told me that for the past three years, he’s had the hots for Burton.”

  ***

  After an examination, Elizabeth’s doctor, M.E. Anberg, showed her some alarming X-rays of her fetus. Her umbilical cord had shifted its position. “It now runs the risk of being wrapped around the baby’s neck and could choke him. You must have a Caesarian.”

  Birthed by Caesarian section on January 6, 1953, Elizabeth’s first baby entered the world as Michael Howard Wilding, Jr. Weighing seven pounds and three ounces, the baby shocked her doctor and the attending nurses. As it came out of the womb, it already had a thick crop of black hair, evoking the birth of Elizabeth in London in 1932.

  Coincidentally, Elizabeth’s first baby was delivered in the same Santa Monica hospital room where Shirley Temple had been born. Elizabeth predicted that Michael Jr. would grow up to become a child star like Temple had. The fan magazines reported that Elizabeth was “deliriously happy and madly in love.”

  After the birth of her boy, Benny Thau at MGM ordered that Elizabeth report to him every two weeks so he could monitor her weight. Almost exhibitionistically, she had her strip down to her bra and panties for an intimate inspection.

  While on a crash diet, she lost two film roles, the first, Young Bess (1953), which went to Jean Simmons, who appeared opposite her husband, Stewart Granger. “Elizabeth threw a jealous fit,” according to Wilding, but managed to restrain herself around Simmons.

  She also lost a leading role in another movie, All the Brothers Were Valiant (1953). Director Richard Thorpe, who didn’t want to work with Elizabeth again, assigned her part to Ann Blyth. As such, Elizabeth lost the chance to work with her friends, the film’s male leads, Robert Taylor and Stewart Granger. Granger called her, “Listen, fatty, when are you going to slim down so we can make a picture together?”

  She turned down Roman Holiday (1953), and regretted it for the rest of her life, as it made a major star out of Audrey Hepburn. A former ballet dancer who fled Nazi-occupied Holland, Hepburn would be launched into major stardom playing a princess opposite Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday.

  Throughout the rest of her life, Elizabeth would be compared unfavorably to Hepburn, who represented style and elegance on the screen. Each actress would also vie for the title of “The World’s Most Beautiful Woman.”

  In 1953, Elizabeth went to Benny Thau’s office and virtually begged him to lobby for her to win the role of The Barefoot Contessa (1954), a script based loosely on t
he tumultuous life of Rita Hayworth. “Please, please, please, Benny,” she beseeched him.

  When Thau called the picture’s director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, he said, “No way. Ava Gardner has already been cast. She’s fucking Joseph Schenck.” He was the head of United Artists, which was financing The Barefoot Contessa.

  Elizabeth also turned down the lead female role in Elephant Walk (1954), a picture scheduled for filming in Ceylon. The coveted role went eventually to Vivien Leigh instead.

  Since Elizabeth was growing increasingly bored with Wilding, she often staged suppers which she would have her local delicatessen prepare for her, since she didn’t know how to cook. Their guests were strictly from the A-list. Monty was invited to every gathering, as were Stewart Granger, Jean Simmons, Roddy McDowall, Dick Hanley, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn (but only sometimes), Errol Flynn, and Humphrey Bogart. On many a night, Judy Garland sang for the supper guests.

  At the party, Richard Burton showed up without his wife, Sybil. He’d been on three straight nights of prodigal drinking and what he preferred to call “rampant wenching.” He sat with Garland and Elizabeth, as his hand traveled up Garland’s dress. She did not resist, as she was known for unzipping her dance partners on the floor and checking out the merchandise.

  Burton told Elizabeth and Garland, “I’ll never divorce Sybil, and she’ll never divorce me, because she loves me and understands me. Not only that, she, above all, knows I’m a genius.”

  After Burton departed, Elizabeth said, “There goes 1952’s Toast of Hollywood—a man likely to continue as the town’s toast throughout 1953 as well.”

  Then, sarcastically, she glanced over at Wilding and said about him, “And there stands a man who in Hollywood is just toast.”

  “Then he’s welcome to join my club,” Garland said. “We can call my clan of has-beens ‘the Post-Toasties Club.’”

  Later that night, Elizabeth became much too drunk and denounced Wilding in front of their guests as if she were already rehearsing her role in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). “I want a man made out of flesh and blood, not some well-mannered wax dummy from Madame Tussauds.”

  Dick Hanley, who still seemed to know everything going on in the film world, even in remote parts of the globe, kept her informed of the scandals whirling around the making of Elephant Walk in Ceylon.

  Hanley told her that Vivien Leigh’s mental and physical condition was deteriorating rapidly, and that feelers would be going out in February of 1953 to see if Elizabeth was willing to reclaim the role, originally intended for her.

  Time magazine did not approve the casting of Elizabeth in Elephant Walk: “Elizabeth Taylor, though very beautiful, is too young and inexperienced an actress to fill a role designed for Vivien Leigh.”

  The final scenes of Elephant Walk were to be shot in Hollywood. From Ceylon, Leigh arrived in California, but her mental condition had deteriorated so rapidly that Paramount had to fire her.

  With Leigh out of the picture, Paramount negotiated with MGM for a loan-out because of Elizabeth’s physical resemblance to Leigh. Because of their similarities, many of the long distance shots of Leigh filmed in Ceylon could be retained for the final cut.

  After learning that MGM had signed a contract to lend her out to Paramount for $150,000, Elizabeth stormed into Benny Thau’s office and demanded a raise.

  “You’re getting ten times my full salary,” she shouted at Thau.

  “Tell me something I don’t already know,” he said sarcastically. “A contract is a contract. You signed it!”

  “So you won’t give me a raise, even if I come by every morning and suck you off?” she asked.

  “No raise. Now get out. You’re such a whore.”

  Bitchily commenting on Elizabeth’s weight gain during the birth of her first son, Hedda Hopper wrote “The title of Elephant Walk fits Elizabeth Taylor perfectly, considering the new ballooning figure she shows off to the world.”

  At the moment she read that, Elizabeth was “living mainly on ice cubes and fruit juices.”

  As a heavily tranquilized Leigh was put on an airplane from Los Angeles headed back to London, Elizabeth began shooting interior scenes for Elephant Walk, having regained her full pay and her former figure. She resumed work on March 19, 1953.

  Elizabeth was only twenty-one when she shouldered the burden of the movie role that Leigh had abandoned, and submitted to the direction of William Dieterle.

  “When a reporter asked Elizabeth if she liked Leigh as an actress, Elizabeth asserted that she did. “She has an innocence bordering on decadence.”

  On the first day of shooting, she told Dieterle. “My character of Ruth Wiley is rather underwritten. This appears to be a rather weak fable of men and pachyderms, with me brought in for female relief from all this macho shit.”

  She continued with Dieterle: “I know that you just directed Rita Hayworth in Salome; you’ve directed Bette Davis, and even gave Charles Laughton his hunchback, but now you’re faced with Elizabeth Taylor. I want to look fucking gorgeous in this piece of crap. Got that?”

  The director’s final summation of Elizabeth on screen—“Beautiful but dull. In private, however, she’s beautiful but hardly dull. She’s a regular little harridan. I wish my leading men, Mr. Finch and Mr. Andrews, had put more energy into their roles instead of satisfying Miss Taylor’s insatiable lusts. Michael Wilding could never satisfy that maneater.”

  Actually, Laurence Olivier, Leigh’s husband, was originally slated to play the role that went to Peter Finch. In the story, the owner (John Wiley, as played by Finch) of a tea plantation in Ceylon courts Elizabeth in England, then marries this “lovely English rose” and takes her back to Ceylon. The sprawling manor house (identified coyly in the script as “a bungalow”) was built directly astride the pathway used for centuries by migrating elephants. On site, facing a preoccupied and indifferent husband, the character played by Elizabeth develops a passion for Dick Carver (as played by Dana Andrews), the plantation’s manager.

  Elizabeth referred to Elephant Walk as “the Ceylonese version of Rebecca.” Dieterle asserted that Elizabeth had been “fatally miscast. Who in hell would believe that Finch would prefer to hang out with his buddies instead of going upstairs and fucking his wife…unless, of course, he preferred sex with his mates? That would be the only reasonable explanation as to why Finch would ignore the sexual needs of a wife like Taylor.”

  Because of complications, Elephant Walk ended up costing $3 million, the most expensive Paramount Picture ever made up until that time.

  Elizabeth slipped into Leigh’s scenes with professional ease until few movie-goers could detect which actress was which, especially in long shots (nearly all of which focused on Leigh) or when the character of Ruth Wiley shows her back to the camera in certain scenes. Of course, all of Leigh’s close-ups ended on the cutting room floor and had to be reshot with Elizabeth.

  Brunettes menaced by elephants: Vivien Leigh (left) and Elizabeth Taylor

  Upon its release, Elephant Walk was savaged by the critics, Leonard Maltin claiming that the “pachyderm stampede climax comes none too soon.”

  ***

  Liberated (at least temporarily) from her increasingly boring husband, Elizabeth fitted in perfectly with her two hellraising co-stars in Elephant Walk, Peter Finch and Dana Andrews.

  Both of them could close down any bar in the world. “Immediately after meeting her, we knew she was one of us,” Andrews said. “We invited her to become a charter member of our exclusive fraternity, the ‘Fuck You Club.’”

  “For a member to join our club, she has to have a foul mouth—I don’t mean an occasional ‘fuck you,’ but a stream of profanity that would shock a fifty-year-old Barcelona whore,” Andrews said. “Not only that, a new member has to have the most awful table manners—I’m talking Henry VIII with all the belching and farting that that implies. From what I heard later on, we taught Elizabeth well. For the rest of her life, she became known for breaking wind a
t the most formal of dinners, including at the homes of those billionaires, Doris Duke and Malcolm Forbes.”

  “I wish I had been old enough to star opposite you in Laura,” Elizabeth told Andrews. “The part would have been so much better with me and without Gene Tierney’s buck teeth. I heard you were once arrested for assault with a deadly weapon,” she continued. “Am I to become the next victim of that deadly weapon?”

  The next day, she showed him an item a columnist had written about them. “As the stars of Elephant Walk, Dana Andrews and Elizabeth Taylor are perfectly matched. Overall, they are reliable actors, rather uninspired, who on occasion are capable of doing something impressive on the screen, but both of them are rather wooden. They’ve been accused of sleepwalking through their performances. I hope they’re both awake to get out of the pathway of those rampaging elephants at the end of the movie.”

  Andrews visited her in her dressing room late one afternoon after both of them had finished their scenes for the day. “Peter told me he’s fucking you, and, as a charter member of the Fuck You Club, I should be pounding you too. But I fear I’m too drunk to get it up.”

  “Oh, Dana,” she said, “you’re such a dear. Perhaps you’ll do the honors during our lunch break tomorrow?”

  When Dick Hanley came over to Paramount to visit Elizabeth, she told him that she found Finch “most compelling. His blue eyes can penetrate right through you. He’s very alert, very intelligent, and has ruggedly masculine features.”

  “It sounds as if Milady is in love,” Dick told her. Later, he recalled, after his introduction to Finch, “He stands so close to you, you can smell his breath.”