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

by Darwin Porter

“Mike Todd has a really violent streak,” Dick said. “Even worse than Nicky Hilton, who beat the shit out of you. In a way, Mike murdered his first wife. He lied about his age and got married when he was fifteen to a student, Bertha Freshman. One night they got into a violent argument, and he grabbed a kitchen knife and slashed her hand, practically cutting it off from her arm. She was rushed into surgery at some New York hospital and died on the operating table.”

  “How ghastly!”

  “At the time, Mike was having an affair with Joan Blondell, whom he was stealing from her husband at the time, Dick Powell,” Dick said. “He got Joan to lie to the police, and she claimed that he was with her all night during the butcher knife incident. Mike bribed someone and the autopsy report then asserted that the Freshman girl died of a heart attack.”

  “There’s more,” Dick told Elizabeth. “With the Freshman girl dead, Mike married Blondell after she got a divorce from Powell. It was a stormy, very violent marriage. During the first months of their marriage, he spent all her money, and she’d made a million films and found herself without a penny. They were staying at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan in a room fifteen floors above street level. The argument became so violent, he ripped off her clothes. At one point, he grabbed her and dangled her body out the window, holding onto her by her ankles. She nearly died of fright, but ended up with just a broken arm— at least not dead like Freshman.”

  “Remind me not to take Todd as a husband,” Elizabeth said.

  “That will never happen,” he said. “The other day, Mike told Kevin and me that after Blondell, he’ll never marry an actress again. ‘To live with a star, you gotta worry about her fucking hair,’ he said. ‘You gotta worry about when her bosom starts to drop. And when that first wrinkle comes, you get all her bills from a headshrinker.’”

  ***

  After spending a long night with McClory before departing for Texas, Elizabeth promised him faithfully that she’d rush back into his arms as soon as the exterior scenes for Giant were completed.

  In the meantime, Mike Todd “has me hysterically running around the world trying to complete Around the World in 80 Days with insufficient funds,” he told her. “I’ll probably get arrested for bad debts in Thailand, or some such place.”

  He was delighted, however, that Todd was going to list him as one of the film’s three producers—Todd himself, of course, William Cameron Menzies, and McClory.

  As a parting gesture, McClory told her, “Mike is using 112 locations in 13 countries. The whole thing is going to cost at least six million.”

  “My god, I should have done that cameo in it—or taken Shirley MacLaine’s role. This film is going to be bigger than Gone With the Wind.”

  ***

  Long before Edna Ferber’s generational saga, Giant (1956), went into production, Jennifer Jones lobbied George Stevens, after he’d been designated as the film’s director, for the juicy female lead, a character named Leslie. More than a decade before, she’d won an Oscar for The Song of Bernadette, and she promised the director that in the part of Leslie Benedict, she would win one again.

  But Stevens had his mind set on Audrey Hepburn. Sometime around July of 1954, he visited the petite actress in New York, where she was appearing on Broadway in Ondine. Almost from the beginning, Hepburn and Stevens disagreed over the interpretation of Giant’s character of Leslie, and soon, Hepburn was no longer in the running.

  Then, beginning in January of 1955, Stevens zeroed in on Eva Marie Saint, only to learn that she was pregnant with a baby due in April.

  Stevens then began to focus on Grace Kelly as a candidate for the role. A potential conflict arose, however, with MGM, which had slated her for some other film. Complicating the issue further was Prince Rainier of Monaco, who had other plans for Kelly.

  Then a colleague of Stevens, producer Henry Ginsberg, recommended Marlene Dietrich for the role. “Are you out of your mind?” Stevens asked. “She could play the grandmother part, but for any of the younger parts, she’s too old, too Teutonic.”

  During several tense weeks, Elizabeth knew that the role she coveted, that of Leslie in Giant, was almost beyond her reach. George Stevens, who had directed her so brilliantly in A Place in the Sun, “seemed to want every other actress in Hollywood, but considered me chopped liver, I guess,” Elizabeth told Wilding. “But I want that part, and I’m going to go for it. Imagine, I go from being a beautiful young bride to a grandmother. Oscar, you’ve got Elizabeth Taylor’s name written on your ass.”

  When it became clear that Grace Kelly would not be available, Elizabeth jumped with joy and headed for Benny Thau’s office to beg him to have MGM lend her services to Warner Brothers.

  There was still one problem. MGM didn’t want to lend her to Warner Brothers. “I had to go on a sitdown strike…well, almost,” she said. “Dare I say blackmail in certain quarters? No, don’t print that…it wasn’t exactly blackmail.”

  Then, she engaged in a big brawl with Thau. “I think he wanted me to play Lassie’s mother—or some such shit—in a sequel.” She finally won out, “but my bruises were black. I got no extra money. MGM took it all for the loan-out.”

  Finally, convinced that Elizabeth was the right actress for the part, Warner Brothers offered $250,000 for Elizabeth’s services, although she was making only $100,000 a year from MGM at the time.

  During his selection of candidates for the male lead, the character of Bick Benedict, Stevens was bombarded with phone calls from William Holden, Gary Cooper, and Clark Gable. At least a dozen other Hollywood males also made their voices heard.

  Lying on different massage boards at their gym, John Wayne told Forrest Tucker, “I’m gonna play Bick Benedict.”

  “Like hell you are,” Tucker responded, lying nude on his board. “The role calls for a big dick.” Then he ripped the towel off Wayne. “As you can plainly see, my Moby Dick is six times the size of yours.”

  Sterling Hayden said: “Forrest Tucker is too drunk to play the part. I’m the right size to play Benedict…in all departments.”

  Robert Mitchum said: “I’ve practically got the role of Bick Benedict sewn up! Stevens has always had a hard-on for me. I can just see billboards across America: ROBERT MITCHUM AND ELIZABETH TAYLOR STARRING IN GIANT WITH JAMES DEAN.”

  Late one afternoon, a call came in from Ross Hunter, the producer of Magnificent Obsession, starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. “I want you to consider Rock for this part. He’s going to become the biggest macho male star since Gable.”

  Universal, however, didn’t want to lend Hudson, rushing him instead into another soapy tearjerker with Wyman, All That Heaven Allows. But when it became clear that Hudson could fulfill his obligations to both films, he persuaded Warners to let him star in Giant. “I had to let a lot of guys at Universal suck my cock to get the role of Bick,” he later told Elizabeth.

  Before deciding on Hudson, Stevens had more or less made up his mind that the role of Bick Benedict should go to William Holden. Hudson later recalled that on the day the announcement was made that he would be the male star of Giant, he entered the studio sauna nude, only to discover an equally nude Holden sitting on a slab of marble.

  Hudson would describe the incident’s irony to Elizabeth: “Here I was, the new star of Hollywood, confronting an aging star with my better body, a bigger dick, and a more awesome presence. I felt embarrassed for Holden.”

  After Elizabeth won the role of Leslie, Stevens called her to announce that he was thinking of casting Richard Burton as the second male lead, the role of Jett Rink, the hell-raising wildcatter, who is secretly in love with Bick Benedict’s wife, Leslie, as played by Elizabeth.

  “I know Burton,” she said. “He’s a good actor and for him to play a hell raiser would certainly be type casting. But wouldn’t there be a problem with Burton’s voice? He’s Welsh, you know. Maybe you could get Howard Hughes—he’s Texan, you know—to dub his lines?”

  After rejecting Burton for the role, Stevens offered i
t to Alan Ladd, who was almost suicidally despondent at the time, and drinking heavily. He feared facing the camera, and was undergoing a lot of personal hell, including fear of a blackmail attempt from one of his hustler lovers, who was threatening to tell all to Confidential unless he surrendered $10,000 in cash.

  Finally, after sitting mesmerized through Elia Kazan’s then-recent release, East of Eden (1955), Stevens offered the role to that film’s star, James Dean. Stevens then hurriedly but thoughtfully cast Giant’s supporting roles, with choice parts going to Mercedes McCambridge, Chill Wills, Nick Adams, Carroll Baker, Jane Withers, Dennis Hopper, Rod Taylor, Earl Holliman, and Sal Mineo. Mineo told his gay friends, “With Hudson and Dean in the cast, I expect to get my ass pounded A LOT.”

  Then, Warners convened a press conference to present the stars of Giant to the world. Elizabeth met Dean for the first time. For his appearance, he wore a pair of “shit kicker” jeans, a threadbare red flannel shirt, tattered boots, and a cowboy hat he claimed had belonged to Gary Cooper. He hid his eyes behind a pair of dark sunglasses, and a cigarette dangled out of the corner of his mouth.

  When he was introduced, Dean was deliberately rude to Elizabeth. Stevens had indiscreetly relayed to Dean that, “Elizabeth doesn’t want you in our film. Up until the last minute, she pushed Monty Clift for the role. But those guys who insure films at Warners refused to insure Monty because of all his drinking and his drugs.”

  Right before flying to the film’s location in Marfa, Texas, a drought-stricken whistle-stop of 3,600 inhabitants in the high desert of West Texas, where daytime temperatures sometimes rose to 120° F., Dean had been featured in a black-and-white TV commercial promoting safe driving. In the clip with him was Gig Young, who’d had a very brief fling with Elizabeth. At the end of the commercial, Dean says, “Drive safely because the life you save may be my own.”

  The filming of Giant had been delayed because of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, which gave Dean the chance to shoot Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and gave Hudson the chance to complete his film with Jane Wyman.

  In Giant, Elizabeth was cast as a young woman (Leslie) from Maryland’s blue grass country, who marries a wealthy Texan, Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson) and becomes the mistress of his Reata Ranch. Dean was cast as a surly ranch hand who inherits what appears to be worthless desert. However, he discovers oil in a footprint left by Leslie on his property. He drills for oil and hits his first gusher. In the years before World War II, Jett (Dean) starts an oil-drilling company that makes him enormously wealthy.

  During the course of Giant’s approximately 200 minutes, it moves through the rise and failing fortunes of Texans, with side detours into moral dissipation, racism, miscegenation, the oppression of women, oil well conflicts, and the changing social scenario of Texas itself. The movie’s subplot involves the war between the longtime Texas aristocracy and the nouveau riche wildcatters whose oil well have “come in big.” Budgeted at $2 million, Giant would end up costing $5 million, an almost-unheard-of price at the time.

  For Elizabeth, after suffering through all those “rubbish” movies at MGM, Giant became a milestone in her life. Other than being saddled with a husband she didn’t want, her biggest problem involved having to postpone her flourishing romance with Kevin McClory.

  ***

  Elizabeth recalled, “In Texas, Rock and I hit it off right away. The heat, humidity, and dust in Marfa were so thoroughly oppressive we had to bolster our spirits any way we could. So we stayed out drinking all night and luckily were young enough and resilient enough to go straight to the set in the morning with fresh complexions and with no bags under our eyes. During our toots, we concocted the best drink I’ve ever tasted—a chocolate martini made with vodka, Hershey’s syrup, and Kahlua. How we survived, I’ll never know.”

  “Rock and Elizabeth were like kids again,” claimed Stevens. “They indulged in a kind of baby talk, and they liked to play pranks on each other, tossing water at each other from our rapidly dwindling supply.”

  She told Dick Hanley, “Rock has become my second best friend—no one will replace Monty as Number One.”

  Because of the severe housing shortage in such a small town, Elizabeth was the only member of the cast and crew assigned to a private house of her own. Local residents moved into tents so they could rent rooms in their houses to the actors, staff, and crew who had descended on their town for the filming. Hudson and Dean were assigned a shared room with twin beds in a small house whose adjoining single room was occupied by the character actor, Chill Wills.

  “With Dean and Hudson in the room adjoining mine, they were like two pigs rolling in shit for the first few nights,” Wills later claimed. “The walls were shaking, and I heard the sound of creaky bedsprings until two or three in the morning. Then the fights set in. By then, I knew the honeymoon was over for these two queer boys.”

  Dean complained to Elizabeth, “Every night, Rock is trying to queer me and make me his bitch. My ass is sore. I’m moving out of that house.”

  When Hudson got to know Elizabeth more intimately, he confessed to her, “I want sex, real man-on-man sex, but I don’t go in for this kinky stuff. Dean wants to get into that claw-footed, old timey bathtub we have, and then he begs me to piss on him. He also likes me to burn his ass with my cigarette butt—shit like that. I’m not into all this sicko crap.”

  In Texas, Hudson and Elizabeth discovered nachos, devouring them along with a massive consumption of alcohol. “Then they staged belch-and-fart contests,” Dennis Hooper said.

  On the set of Giant, Elizabeth had to battle her weight problem. All those chocolate martinis she consumed with Hudson were obviously fattening. But Stevens complained that she compounded the problem with her midnight snacks, which consisted of homemade vanilla ice cream drenched in fudge and peanut butter, preceded by a series of mayonnaise sandwiches, “which I just adore.”

  For about ten nights, Hudson seduced Elizabeth. Actually, she was the aggressor. She’d later tell Roddy McDowall something he already knew. “Rock is really endowed, and I mean really. As a lover, he’s very efficient and eager to get on with it. For me, it’s over before it begins. We’ve decided to be great friends, not lovers. No woman will ever succeed in igniting his enthusiasm in bed, and of that, I’m certain.”

  Dean ended up claiming that Hudson acted “like a lump of wood,” and Hudson called Dean “that little scruff.” On other occasions, when he was particularly angry at Dean, he referred to him as a “dick-crazed schizoid.”

  Dean was very blunt around Stevens. “Before I met Rock, I’ve had my cock sucked by four of the biggest names in Hollywood. After meeting Rock, I can now make that five big names.”

  One hot afternoon between set-ups, Dean confided one of his sexual fantasies to Stevens: “In World War II, I heard women wore a lipstick called Victory Red, or some shit like that. My greatest sexual turn-on would be to have three women paint their mouths with this lipstick and give me a blow-job—Elizabeth Taylor, Tallulah Bankhead, and Edith Piaf.”

  Giants killing time with one another in the high deserts of West Texas Rock Hudson with Elizabeth Taylor

  “George always had to have a patsy to pick on throughout every one of his films,” Elizabeth claimed. “On Giant, it was both Jimmy and me. Actually, Rock and I speculated that George secretly had the hots for Jimmy. Whenever he thought Jimmy wasn’t looking, he was always eying him like a lovesick schoolgirl. One scalding hot afternoon, when Jimmy didn’t show up for work, George told Rock and me, ‘I should punish the little bastard and make him suck my dick.’”

  “George and I staged some epic battles under that hot sun,” Elizabeth said. “Our biggest fight was when he wanted me to wear those thick brogue shoes and a long grandma-in-the-wilderness skirt, plus a man’s battered old cowboy hat. I attacked him for trying to force this ludicrous getup on me. I told him, ‘What are you trying to do? Make me look like a lesbian in drag? I’m Elizabeth Taylor, in case you forgot it.’”

  At first,
Dean and Carroll Baker sat together whispering conspiratorially. “Our main diversion was making fun of Rock and Elizabeth,” Baker later said. “We were cruel and cutting.”

  During the first two weeks, Elizabeth and Hudson spent every night together. Dean was frequently seen bonding with Baker, whom he’d known from the Actors Studio in New York.

  Carroll Baker

  Hudson constantly complained to Elizabeth about Stevens. “He gives Dean all the close-ups, and I’m left out in the cold,” Hudson claimed.

  Elizabeth and Hudson feared that Dean was stealing the picture. Both actors set out to woo Baker into their cabal. In that, they succeeded, and subsequently, Dean stopped speaking to her, feeling betrayed.

  Elizabeth (a penitent Madonna worshipping at a crucifixion?) with James Dean in Giant

  “Dean got the ultimate revenge,” Baker said. “He succeeded in stealing Elizabeth from Rock and me. The dirty rat wanted Elizabeth for himself, and I went into a state of mourning. Elizabeth went off every evening with Jimmy, ignoring Rock and me. The tables had turned.”

  During the final three weeks of the shoot, Elizabeth temporarily deserted both Hudson and Baker. Her friendship with Hudson would be recharged after Dean’s untimely death.

  The film’s cast and crew were shown the daily rushes in an battered old movie theater that had closed down with the coming of television. Most of the participants preferred to sit on the theater’s ground floor, but Elizabeth and Dean usually retreated to the balcony where they were alone. Elizabeth brought popcorn from her house to share with Dean.

  “They were like two lovebirds,” Wills said. “I never could figure out these switch-hitters. One night they’re taking it up the ass, and on another night, they’re pounding pussy. You figure.”

  Throughout the shooting of Giant, Elizabeth was plagued with various illnesses, some of which required hospitalization. The first of her health emergencies began in July of 1955, when she developed a severe sore throat and could not deliver her lines. That was almost immediately followed by a bladder infection and thrombophlebitis, a blood clot in a vein of her left leg. She blamed its flare-up on Stevens for “making me wear those tight breeches.”