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

by Darwin Porter

  On the set of Beau Brummell, both Elizabeth and Granger detested their German director, Curtis Bernhardt. Elizabeth showed her contempt by yawning in his face whenever he gave her direction. Granger almost attacked him one day when he kept poking him with the stick he always carried around. After one poke too many, Granger, in front of Elizabeth, grabbed the stick from the director’s hand and broke it in two.

  The Granger/Taylor affair ended almost before it began. In England, Granger came down with intestinal flu, an infection which led to colitis. Elizabeth accompanied him to a hospital for “colonic irrigations,” which were so messy, and so horrible, that they destroyed Granger forever as a dashing and romantic ideal in her life.

  Months later, in Hollywood, Granger, perhaps during pillow talk, confessed to Wilding, his long-time lover, that he’d been intimate with Elizabeth during the London filming of Beau Brummell.

  When Wilding asked Elizabeth about this, she said, “He fucks you. Why not me? Besides, darling, it is no secret. I always fall a little in love with my leading men, and I expect I always will. So live with it!”

  What had really destroyed the last vestiges of romantic feeling Elizabeth had for Granger centered around events associated with the filming of Green Fire (1954).

  During the making of Beau Brummell, Granger had received an advance screenplay of Green Fire, some South America-based hokum about love and conflict between an emerald prospector (Granger) and a coffee-plantation owner (Grace Kelly). As Elizabeth later discussed with Wilding, “All Stewart did was talk about his upcoming love scenes with that stuck-up bitch, Grace Kelly. He’s heard the rumors—and they’re true, I’m sure—about how she fucks all her leading men. He was worried to death about halitosis. He was afraid that his nervousness about kissing her would cause an upset stomach which would lead to his having bad breath.”

  During Granger’s location shooting for Green Fire in South America, Elizabeth invited Jean Simmons to come over to her house for dinner. “Are you afraid to have Grace Kelly alone in the jungles with your Stewart?”

  “Not really,” Simmons replied. “As you know, I’m playing one of Napoléon’s mistresses in Desirée. Instead of Stewart, Marlon Brando is doing the honors.”

  In his memoirs, Granger admitted that “Jean liked Brando a lot, but I found him fairly insufferable.”

  Granger later wrote, “Grace had one phobia—her behind. For me, it was the most delicious thing imaginable, but it did stick out a bit, and she was very self-conscious about it. Our last scene was played in a torrential downpour and when the final kiss came, we were both soaking wet, which accentuated that fabulous behind. To save her embarrassment, I covered it with both hands. If you look closely at the kiss, you’ll see Grace give a start as those two eager hands take hold.”

  When shooting was finished on Beau Brummell, MGM generously financed six weeks of travel on the Continent for Elizabeth and Michael. There was talk that this second honeymoon might save their marriage, but the couple often got into epic battle in their hotel suites.

  ***

  Almost immediately after Elizabeth completed filming on Beau Brummell, and the European holiday that followed it, she was rushed into the filming of The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), her fourth film in less than a year. It was based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited. In addition to Van Johnson, her co-stars included Walter Pidgeon, Donna Reed, and Eva Gabor.

  The crew noted that on the set, Elizabeth fought virtually every day with the film’s director, Richard Brooks. When he called her “a bloody cunt,” she told him “to go stick a dildo up your dingleberry-coated asshole, you dirty son of a bitch. You should have been smothered at birth.”

  Elizabeth had been excited when she received the script. “I’m to play Zelda and Monty is going to be F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

  But when Monty read the script, he rejected it. Soonafter, Michael Wilding, then in the final throes of his marriage to Elizabeth, made it clear that he’d accept the role if it was offered to him. Brooks, however, at the last minute, made a bad casting decision and offered the role to Van Johnson, with whom Elizabeth had previously worked on that disaster entitled The Big Hangover (1950).

  Although Wilding had wanted to appear opposite his wife, he rejected the chance to star opposite Grace Kelly in The Swan. Whereas his best friend, Granger, had been eager to appear with Kelly, Wilding had never been that impressed with her. The Swan had been filmed as a silent in 1925 and as a talkie in 1930, when it was retitled One Romantic Night. In this fluffy melodramatic comedy, Louis Jourdan was cast as Kelly’s suitor, but she’s promised to a prince. Wilding was to play the stuffy prince, but the role eventually went to another English actor, Alec Guinness.

  The Last Time I Saw Paris marked the acting debut of Eva Gabor, who told Elizabeth that, “We are distantly related. After all, Zsa Zsa married your former father-in-law, Conrad Hilton.”

  Wilding wanted to go to the premiere of The Last Time I Saw Paris, but Elizabeth rejected his offer, attending the event with Monty as her escort instead.

  “My greatest fantasy,” she told Stewart Granger, “was for Monty to have Michael’s dick transplanted onto him—and for him to be straight.”

  On three different occasions, Monty brought Rock Hudson to Elizabeth’s house for dinner. “I’m madly in love with him,” Monty told Elizabeth. “He’s the top. I’m the bottom. Unlike me, he’s got this monster cock and knows how to use it. I can’t get enough of him. Jane Wyman’s after him, too.”

  Dick Hanley, years later, recalled being invited to dinner one night at the home of Stewart Granger. “Jean Simmons, of course, was the hostess. Guests included Monty, who was there with Rock Hudson. Michael brought Elizabeth, but those two former lovebirds sang to each other no more. Victor Mature, who had seduced both Elizabeth and Jean, showed up solo. Richard Burton arrived with the glamorous Lana Turner as his date. Each of them had signed to star in a film entitled The Rains of Ranchipur (1955), a remake of the 1939 The Rains Came, which had starred Myrna Loy and Tyrone Power in equivalent roles.”

  “What a strange evening for my beloved Elizabeth,” Dick said. “She was there with her present husband, Michael, and her future husband, Burton. Not only that, but she was there with her lover, Mature, and Monty, if he could be called a lover, and also a future lover, Rock. And she’d also fucked Stewart, the host. It must have been a lot of fun having all of them together.”

  Elizabeth Taylor with her onscreen beau, Stewart Granger

  In the summer of 1954, Elizabeth and Wilding moved into another, larger home, at 1375 Beverly Estate Drive, high above Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills. It was a high-tech house, built of steel and adobe. Elizabeth immediately took to swimming nude in the pool, even if she had guests. She told Dick, “Most of my male guests have already fucked me, so what the hell?”

  Joan Bennett, who had played her screen mother in Father of the Bride and Father’s Little Dividend, did not have her phone number and just showed up at Elizabeth’s door one day. Wilding opened it and went to tell Elizabeth of her arrival. Lounging beside her pool, Elizabeth said to Wilding, “Tell Joan to go fuck herself.”

  Bennett had always befriended Elizabeth, and the two actresses had gotten along together for both “The Bride” and “The Dividend” pictures. But Elizabeth later told Wilding, “Who in hell does she think she is? Showing up on my doorstep without an invitation. Bennett has to realize I’m a star now and that I deserve some respect.”

  Four dogs, including two poodles, along with five cats and two ducks, roamed through the house. None of them was housebroken. Her dog, “Gee Gee,” was allowed to lick her newborn child, a policy that horrified Sara. Elizabeth told her that “a dog’s saliva is the purest thing in the world, a true disinfectant.”

  By the time of Elizabeth’s second pregnancy, she and Wilding were hardly speaking. He slept on a large lavender-colored divan in the living room, and she occupied the master bedroom by herself or whatever anima
l wandered in. She later admitted that, “This was one of the most miserable times of my life— I was dead old at twenty-four. It was just smog and no sunshine.”

  With the debut of her second pregnancy, Elizabeth in her own words was “living hand to mouth.” Instead of undergoing another cut in salary as before, she agreed that MGM could extend her contract by an extra year, a decision she’d later regret.

  “The best way I know to celebrate my twenty-third birthday is to give birth.”

  Between films, Elizabeth gave birth to her second child, again by Caesarean. On the day he was born, February 17, 1955, she named him Christopher Edward Wilding. Edward was the first name of Monty.

  Jules Goldstone told her that having her two sons had cost her a million dollars because of the MGM suspensions the births had necessitated. “My boys are worth it,” she shot back.

  Even though she’d just given birth, she told Janet Leigh, “My marriage is over. Mike and I are now brother and sister.”

  Monty was at the Wilding home nearly every night. He nicknamed her older son “Britches,” and seemed to dote on him so much that rumors spread that the second baby was actually Monty’s child.

  Right after the birth, an invitation arrived from the Academy Awards officials, asking her to appear at the March, 1955 ceremonies at the RKO Pantages Theater in Los Angeles to present the Oscar for Best Documentary.

  Still overweight, she immediately went on a diet of fresh fruit juices and ice cubes “to get back to my fighting weight.”

  Reviewed by the international press, her appearance was stunning. There were gasps from the audience when she came out onto the stage wearing a white fur stole over a gown of white silk, organza, and satin, with stiletto high hells, a bouffant hairdo, and a fortune in diamonds around her neck and dangling from her ears.

  Backstage, she said, “Tell all my fucking critics that Elizabeth Taylor is back and ready for a long reign as the Queen of Hollywood.”

  ***

  At two o’clock in the morning, an urgent phone call was placed to the home of Roddy McDowall. He was in bed that night with an unidentified partner, perhaps Tab Hunter, or perhaps another of agent Henry Willson’s “pretty boys.”

  “What in hell’s going on?” Roddy asked her. “Are you okay?”

  “I feel great!” she said. “I want you to be the first to know. I’ve been royally fucked.”

  “I didn’t know Prince Philip was in Hollywood,” he said.

  “Cut the shit!” she said. “I’ve been fucked by a handsome Irishman from Dublin. For the past three hours, he’s deep-dicked me twice. God knows he’ll want it again before dawn breaks over Malibu.”

  “Who is this divine creature, and does he make house calls?” Roddy asked.

  “His name is Kevin McClory,” she said. “It rhymes with glory, and is he ever glorious. Great body, great everything.”

  “Never heard of him,” he said.

  “He’s a production assistant to that loud-mouthed jerk, Mike Todd,” she said. “Sooner than later, I’ll be writing my name as Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding McClory.

  “How did you meet him?” he asked.

  “Shirley MacLaine introduced me,” she said.

  “God, I hope that Kevin hasn’t invaded her too.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Giants

  To Elizabeth, the new man in her life, Kevin McClory, was a dashing figure. He’d descended from two of her favorite authors, those literary sisters, Emily and Charlotte Brontë. Both of his parents had been actors in Dublin.

  He told her tragic stories of his service in the British Merchant Navy during World War II. At one point, his ship was torpedoed in the North Atlantic. Most of the crew drowned, but he drifted for more than 700 miles in a lifeboat in freezing conditions before he was picked up off the coast of Ireland with four other survivors.

  He became friends with famous writers and directors, including John Huston, who defined him as “a man’s man like Bogie.” Huston hired him to work on The African Queen (1951), with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn.

  McClory was also a close friend of writer Ian Fleming, and he was one of the first to realize the cinematic potential of his James Bond character. “Your secret agent would be ideal in a dynamite series of movies,” he told Fleming.

  Long after the ending of his affair with Elizabeth, McClory would become famously associated with the James Bond character. He became a player in a series of legal battles asserting that Fleming had plagiarized his script, Thunderball. Eventually, after prolonged wrangling in and out of courts, McClory prevailed and was cut into the profits generated by the film, Thunderball (1965) and in its remake entitled Never Say Never Again (1983).

  right photo: Kevin McClory upper left photo: Sean Connery as 007 in the much-disputed Thunderball

  In later years, McClory spoke several times to journalists about his affair with Elizabeth. “I did not break up her marriage,” he asserted. “When I fell in love with Elizabeth, she had long ago fallen out of love with Wilding. It was all over except for the divorce. I was crazy for her, and she was in love with me—and we planned to get married after she divorced Wilding. Of course, I warned her that I was a man of modest means and could not give her the trappings of a wealthy film producer.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she told him. “I’d live in a log cabin with no jewelry, scrub your floors, and cook Irish stew for you every night and serve it with cold beer if you’d make me your wife.”

  “Do you really mean that, my darling girl?” he asked her.

  “I mean it as much as a man does when he tells a woman he’ll put in only the first two or three inches,” she said.

  ***

  “Kevin has brought me more joy and happiness than I’ve known in years,” Elizabeth confessed to Dick Hanley, “still and always” one of her best friends.

  But Dick was in a despondent mood. After eleven years of devoted service to Louis B. Mayer, he asked if he could take his first vacation, volunteering to do so without pay.

  “You are most deserving of a long vacation,” Mayer said. “A very long vacation. Don’t bother coming back to MGM. You’re fired!”

  Dick revealed this news about his job loss to Elizabeth at a dinner with Mc-Clory. “I never loved Kevin more,” Elizabeth said, “than when he showed me what a take-charge kind of man he was.” Within two days, he had secured a job for Dick with his own boss, Mike Todd.

  All of them were working on Todd’s upcoming blockbuster, Around the World in 80 Days (1956). “Todd wanted me to do a cameo in his big movie, but MGM said no,” Elizabeth said.

  After the first week of working with Todd, Dick began learning secrets, the way he had at MGM when he’d been employed by Mayer.

  “What’s the biggest scandal you’ve learned so far?” Elizabeth asked him.

  She knew nothing of Mike Todd’s background. Dick told her Todd had a fondness for big-breasted women and that he defined himself as a self-made man. The son of a Polish émigré rabbi, he had hawked newspapers on the streets of Brooklyn and shined the shoes of Wall Street brokers before breaking into show business as a gag writer.

  “Mike’s having an affair with Marlene Dietrich but shacked up with Evelyn Keyes full time. Not only that, he sees Marilyn Monroe now and then, ever since he got her to ride that pink elephant at some big event at Madison Square Garden.”

  “Busy man,” was Elizabeth’s only comment, since at that time, she didn’t have the slightest interest in pursuing a relationship with Todd, viewing him as both brash and vulgar.

  “Mike’s best friend is Eddie Fisher,” Dick said. “They spend a lot of intimate time together. I don’t know if this is true or not, but the whole staff, including your boyfriend Kevin, believes that Todd on occasion pounds Eddie’s ass.”

  “C’mon,” she said. “This is Hollywood. That isn’t so hard to believe. Fisher has told the press on many occasions that he’s not gay, even when nobody asks him. I think he brags too much about
all the beautiful women he fucks.”

  “Maybe he doth protest too much,” Dick said. “I’ll make a pass at him and will let you know if he accepts. Right now, he shares Dietrich with Mike. I also knew John Garfield. He told me that one night at Grossinger’s resort in the Catskills, Eddie followed him around like a lovesick puppy. Garfield told me he gave him a mercy fuck.”

  “There must be more—tell me more,” Elizabeth said. “You’re making Fisher sound more intriguing than ever.”

  “Well, he’s fucking Pier Angeli, who is supposed to be in love with Kirk Douglas, Jimmy Dean, and Vic Damone,” he said. “On occasion, Fisher also fucks Judy Garland.”

  Two views of Joan Blondell top photo: with her then-husband, Mike Todd

  “Tell me something I don’t already know,” she said. “Judy tells me everything. She can recite the exact measurements of most of the stars at MGM.”

  “Well, there’s another thing,” Dick said. “Eddie and Mike like three-ways with beautiful gals, and Todd once fucked Mae West when they did that show, Catherine Was Great together. He also used to fuck the stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee.”

  “You’re making this guy a Don Juan,” she said. “I never thought of him that way before. All you and Kevin do is talk about your boss. Forget about Judy, Mae West, and Gypsy. Tell me some shit that even Confidential won’t print.”

  “Okay, but you asked for it. On occasion, Todd even pounds one of your best friends, dear sweet and demure Jean Simmons.”

  “The way Stewart Granger cheats on her, he deserves to be married to a fellow whore,” she said.

  “Are Stewart and your husband Michael still an item?” Dick asked.

  “Until death do them part,” she answered.