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

by Darwin Porter

  [In 2002, Elizabeth would write a book entitled My Love Affair With Jewelry in which she stated: “I don’t believe I own the pieces. I believe I am their custodian, here to enjoy them, to give them the best treatment in the world, to watch after their safety, and to love them.]

  Keyes later claimed that Todd paid scant attention to Elizabeth during their two-day yachting trip aboard The Hyding. “I did not suspect a thing. Elizabeth and I amused each other with stories about our experiences in Tinseltown, and we talked about previous boyfriends. She asked me what it was like to fuck Kirk Douglas, David Niven, Dick Powell, and Anthony Quinn, and I gave her all the details. ‘Since Niven is aboard, you might want to sample it for yourself.’ I suggested to her.”

  “She was showing a lot of bosom, and I told her that I’d often wondered what would have happened to me if I had needed a size 38 bra instead of a modest 34,” Keyes said.

  “Let’s face it,” Elizabeth said. “We live in a tit culture.”

  She amused Keyes with stories about her struggles with Louis B. Mayer, and Keyes told her about working for Harry Cohn at Columbia. “He shoved his hand between my legs and rubbed my vagina,” Keyes claimed. “He said, ‘Save some of that for me, ‘cause I’m gonna marry you.’”

  upper photo: David Niven as Phineas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days

  lower photo: a detail from the illustrations associated with that film. Some critics say that the artwork was more consistently charming than the movie itself.

  “It never crossed my mind that Mike was checking out Elizabeth,” Keyes later said. “She was everything he professed to dislike, the epitome of a movie star in dress, attitude, and demands. She never stopped drinking champagne from the moment she came aboard, and Mike didn’t like women who drank. And she had a husband aboard.”

  Technically, the yachting party was in honor of Niven, who had interpreted the role of the eponymous hero, Phineas Fogg, in Around the World in 80 Days. Niven had been the former roommate and lover of Errol Flynn, and he was obviously aware of Flynn’s fling with the then-underage Elizabeth.

  Although bisexual, Niven was mostly known for his affairs with the A-list stars of Hollywood, an impressive range that had included Grace Kelly (“my finest lay”), Ava Gardner, Paulette Goddard, Hedy Lamarr, Carole Lombard, Norma Shearer, Loretta Young, Mae West, Ann Sheridan, Ginger Rogers, Ida Lupino, Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth, and Merle Oberon. Both Flynn and Niven had been bedtime companions of tobacco heiress Doris Duke. Before she became Todd’s current mistress, Keyes and Niven had been lovers. She had high praise for his “beer can penis.”

  Niven told Flynn, “I always meant to get around to Elizabeth Taylor, but the poor girl so far has been denied the pleasure.”

  Todd wasn’t the only one concealing his attraction for Elizabeth. Since Wilding had been invited, McClory did not pay as much attention to Elizabeth as he wanted to, and he was denied the privilege of sleeping with her.

  After their first night at sea, she told McClory, “Mr. Wilding slept with me, but didn’t get to enjoy the honeypot. I’m saving that for you, baby.”

  In spite of what she promised, McClory, months later, said, “Do you remember that old song ‘Tennessee Waltz, ’ a big hit? Well, like the woman singing that song, I lost Elizabeth, my little darling, the night we sailed on The Hyding. The prize went to Mike Todd.”

  After their trip at sea, Wilding drove Elizabeth back to their crow’s nest home. He’d later tell Stewart Granger, “I think three men are after Elizabeth— at least one of them is…perhaps all of them. David Niven, Kevin McClory, and, a remote shot, Mike Todd.”

  Driving up the treacherous road to their home, Wilding asked her, “What do you think of Mike Todd?”

  “A real high roller,” she said. “He reminds me of that Damon Runyon character in Guys and Dolls, Sky Masterson. A bit too pushy, a bit too vulgar, and a bit too brash. He should go over big in Hollywood.”

  In the weeks ahead, Todd decided to throw a spectacular A-list party at his rented Beverly Hills mansion. The occasion was in honor of the newscaster, Edward R. Murrow, who had narrated the introduction of Around the World in 80 Days. Todd admired Murrow for having stood up against Senator Joseph McCarthy during his “witch hunt” for communists in the movie colony.

  Tanked up on champagne, Elizabeth was escorted by Todd to meet the celebrated news anchor. After a few polite interchanges, she provocatively said to him, “Tallulah Bankhead spreads the word at every party that you’re the best lay in New York.”

  Not missing a beat, he shot back, “Why don’t you climb the mountain and find out for yourself? Tallulah’s is not a reliable news source. Like all true Southern women, she likes to embellish to make a good story even better.”

  At one point at the party, Elizabeth encountered the “bitchy-and-oh-so-terribly-witty” Noël Coward, who had completed a cameo for Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days. “My dear.” he said. “Wonderful to see you again. I noticed that your latest boyfriend, Kevin McClory, has a stutter. To mock him, Todd refers to him as ‘Klevin.’ How do you find him?”

  “I find him very campy,” she said, using a word that had not yet come into general usage.

  “Talk about camp, darling,” he said, “you’re gazing upon the master. I spoke to Kevin or Klevin about you. He told me he found you ‘totally pornographic.’”

  “It pays to advertise,” she said.

  “Perhaps we’ll star together in a picture,” Coward said.

  “That, dear Noël, I’d bet my left tit will never happen.”

  She was wrong. In a 1967 release for Universal, Elizabeth, along with Coward and Richard Burton, co-starred in Boom!. It was based on a Tennessee Williams play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, which Tallulah Bankhead had appeared in on Broadway with Elizabeth’s former escort, Tab Hunter. It had been hailed as Broadway’s “odd couple casting of the century.”

  Another guest of honor at the Todd gala, David Niven, followed Elizabeth out on the moonlit terrace, perhaps planning to make good on his stated attempt to seduce her. He openly flirted with her, but she seemed distracted. At one point, although usually the perfect gentleman, he took her delicate hand and placed it firmly on his ample crotch. “That is what is in store for you.”

  “I’ve had bigger,” she snapped, sarcastically. Retrieving her hand, she headed across the terrace and back into the party, where Todd suddenly appeared with a fresh glass of champagne for her.

  She later said, “It was fun being with Mike Todd. I was attracted to him, but not overly. I loved hearing him talk about Todd-AO. When I saw Oklahoma!, I thought it was the best big screen system ever devised, when he showed it to me.”

  As the party wound down, Elizabeth decided to find Wilding to take her home, but saw him talking in a secluded corner to Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf. She’d heard from Dick Hanley that Dietrich and “The Little Sparrow” in her simple black dress from Chanel were having a lesbian fling. Within the hour, Piaf would sing a dozen love songs in French before the august assemblage of Hollywood flesh.

  Unknown to Elizabeth at the time, Wilding had resumed his affair with Dietrich, who had also shacked up with Todd during her appearance in Around the World in 80 Days.

  Dietrich had told her daughter, Maria Riva, “Michael is a new man now that he’s dumping that awful girl who made his life so miserable for so long. Now, we have to get his children away from the little harlot.”

  Riva would recall visits of Wilding to her mother. “They broke the springs in a double bed,” she claimed.

  The following Sunday afternoon, Todd once again invited Wilding and Elizabeth, this time for a swim party at his Beverly Hills mansion. Included in the guest list of about thirty were Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, hailed as America’s Sweethearts. Locked in a loveless marriage, the Fishers were anything but.

  Rumors were rampant that Fisher was actually in love with Todd and that Reynolds was a closeted lesbian, which she has vehemently and
frequently denied.

  Todd and Elizabeth spent most of the afternoon lying on one pink and one chartreuse air mattress, floating only a few inches apart on the surface of the pool.

  Standing with his wife, Fisher kept his eyes focused on them. He told Reynolds, “Elizabeth has skinny legs. I could never go for a dame like that!”

  She later said, “When your husband says that about a woman, she’s the one to watch out for.”

  ***

  Two days later, Elizabeth received a phone call from Todd, asking her to visit him at his office that morning at MGM, where he’d rented space in the Irving Thalberg Building.

  She drove to MGM, thinking that he might want to star her in his next picture after the release of Around the World in 80 Days, and after she finished shooting Raintree County with Monty.

  As she relayed in one of her memoirs, “I was sitting in his outer office with my feet up on a table, drinking a Coke, and he rushed in and picked me up by my arm. Without a word, he practically dragged me out of the office and down a corridor. He shoved me into an elevator, still not speaking, just marching along breaking my arm. He took me into this deserted office. He sort of plunked me down on a couch and pulled a chair up to me. He started in on this spiel that lasted about a half hour without a break.”

  “He told me he loved me and that there was no question about that. ‘We’re going to be married,’ he said. I looked at him the same way I imagine a rabbit looks at a mongoose. All kinds of things went through my mind. I thought he was stark, raving mad. I had to get away from this lunatic.”

  “Then he joined me on the sofa and took me in his arms. He tongue kissed me for at least five minutes. When he broke away for air, he told me very forcefully, ‘From now on, I’m the only man you’re gonna fuck!’”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Around the World with

  MIKE TODD

  With Mike Todd threatening to wed her, the still-married Elizabeth began work at MGM on Raintree County in April of 1956, one of the most troubled and painful years of her life.

  Before filming, she had to undergo a series of intricate costume fittings to dress like a rich Southern belle in the months leading up to the election of President Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.

  MGM hired a dialect coach, Marguerite Littman, to teach her the finer points of Southern dialect. In that endeavor, Littman did not succeed. Elizabeth’s Southern speech was attacked by many critics, “as the worst in the history of cinema.”

  Both Elizabeth and Monty agreed that “the script stinks,” but each of them, needing the money, decided to give it their best.

  When friends called, Elizabeth told them, “I filled in for Vivien Leigh, Miss Scarlett herself, in Elephant Walk, and now I’ve got another fiddle-dee-dee character to play—a completely bonkers Scarlett O’Hara type. I’m deranged. I’ve got to commit suicide in a murky swamp in penance for carrying the ‘infection’of Negro blood—or some shit like that. I haven’t gotten that far into the script yet.”

  The Civil War saga was based on Ross Lockridge’s epic 1,100-page novel, Raintree County, with filming set to begin with a budget of $5 million from MGM, the most money ever spent up to that time on any movie shot entirely in the U.S.

  The novelist was a thirty-three year old English teacher from Bloomington, Indiana. He wrote his first and last novel, and sold it to MGM for $150,000, but its production would be delayed for years. He never lived to see it on the screen—“just as well,” said Elizabeth—as he committed suicide in March of 1948. The reclusive novelist could not deal with the pressures of fame, or so it was said. There may have been other, more private, reasons.

  When Monty was cast as the lead, he was at the peak of his stardom and had a say in the choice of directors. Right from the beginning, that became a problem for MGM, as the actor turned down each of their original choices to helm this massive production.

  Monty rejected Richard Brooks, who had scored a triumph with Blackboard Jungle (1955) starring Glenn Ford. Brooks had previously directed Elizabeth in The Last Time I Saw Paris. Monty also rejected William Wyler, fresh from helming Gary Cooper in Friendly Persuasion (1956). Monty agreed, however, to accept the controversial Edward Dmytryk as the project’s director.

  One of the most famous directors of Hollywood, Canadian-born Dmytryk was known for directing films such as Back to Bataan (1945), starring super patriot John Wayne, whom J. Edgar Hoover always maintained “took it up the ass” when he was known as Marion Morrison in the 1920s.

  At the time he got sucked into the Red Menace vortex, Dmytryk had directed Crossfire (1947), starring three actors named Robert—Mitchum, Ryan, and Young. This film noir involved a victim of anti-Semitism and was handled with taste and intelligence. The novel on which it was based cast the victim as a homosexual, but that was viewed as too hot to handle for post-war American audiences. Dmytryk made the victim a Jew instead.

  Summoned to appear before HUAC in 1947, he refused to testify and was sent to prison. After a few months, he felt he was going insane while “caged like a wild animal.” On April 25, 1951, he asked to appear a second time before HUAC. This time, “the canary sang” [his words].

  Under oath, Dmytryk admitted to a brief membership in the Communist Party in 1945 and named twenty-six former members of left-wing groups. He ratted on Adrian Scott, Albert Maltz, and John Howard Lawson, fellow members of the Hollywood Ten. He testified that all of them had pressured him to include communist propaganda in his films.

  Regrettably, his testimony damaged pending court cases where these men were trying to exonerate themselves. In a revealing 1996 book, Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten, Dmytryk recounted his horrible ordeal.

  Unlike the others, his directorial career wasn’t wrecked. He would go on to helm one of Humphrey Bogart’s greatest films, The Caine Mutiny (1954). He would also direct Bette Davis, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Sean Connery, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Richard Burton, Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, and Barbara Stanwyck, typecast as a lesbian, in Walk on the Wild Side (1962).

  Although he had nothing to do with determining salaries, Dmytryk had to listen to numerous complaints from Elizabeth about the money she was drawing. “It’s unfair,” she said to him. “I’m getting $125,000 to make this god damn fucker, and Monty is drawing $300,000.”

  “Hang in there, kid,” Dmytryk told her, “I predict that one day, with your star power, you’ll get $500,000 per picture.”

  Throughout the entire film, Monty rehearsed with Elizabeth in his role as John Wickliff Shawnessy and her part as Susanna Drake. Using Lockridge’s novel as a guide, he constantly tried to rewrite Millard Kaufman’s screenplay.

  Dore Schary had assembled an impressive supporting cast, including Eva Marie Saint (playing Elizabeth’s rival in love), Lee Marvin, Rod Taylor, and Nigel Patrick. Others in the cast included Agnes Moorehead, who had long been rumored to be the lesbian lover of Debbie Reynolds. Elizabeth provocatively asked her if that rumor were true. Even though Elizabeth was a big star and Moorehead only a supporting player, the older actress slapped her face. “Maybe I deserved that,” Elizabeth said to Monty.

  She spent some time with another member of the cast, Tom Drake, talking about their early days at MGM when both of them were in love with Peter Lawford.

  Before signing for Raintree County, Monty had shown very poor judgment in turning down other scripts. He’d rejected High Noon (1952), which became one of Gary Cooper’s biggest successes, and he even turned down East of Eden (1955), which virtually immortalized James Dean.

  His public behavior had also become increasingly erratic. In 1955, he attended the premiere of Guys and Dolls, starring “those sworn enemies,” Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra, both of whom had made love to Elizabeth. He had no comment on the performance of Sinatra, whom he’d befriended on the set of From Here to Eternity and had lived with temporarily. But in the middle of the screening of Guys and Dolls, Monty had stood up. In his loudest voice, he’d screamed tha
t Guys and Dolls was ”vomitable—this god damn picture stinks!”

  Outside in the lobby, he punched his fist into a glass cabinet containing pictures of the stars and severely lacerated his arm. While waiting for an ambulance, he urinated on the street in front of passers-by.

  Even before filming of Raintree County began, Monty had increasingly been displaying erratic behavior. His doctor said that one day, he discovered “every pill known to mankind,” in the actor’s medicine cabinet.

  For a birthday gift, Elizabeth had presented Monty with a green alligator vanity case, and he carried it at his side wherever he went. It was reported to contain more pills than Bayer had aspirins.

  ***

  On MGM’s lot during the filming of Raintree County, Elizabeth still had a British husband at home, whom she had yet to divorce; a boyfriend (Kevin McClory) on a leash; and a new man in her life, Mike Todd.

  “But in spite of that array,” the director Dmytryk said, “she still had a roving eye for male flesh. Many of the more innocent members of the crew thought she was having an affair with Monty Clift, who followed her around like a lovelorn dog. Perhaps he was in love with her, but I doubt if they ever made it in the haystack. He did tell me one day, ‘It’s no good trying to hide my feelings. I can’t get over it—Elizabeth is the only woman I have ever met who turns me on. She feels like the other half of me.’ He did say that, but I’d bet two inches off my dick that she wasn’t getting anything from Monty but embraces.”

  She was also seen on several occasions dining with Tom Drake in the MGM commissary. “They make a handsome couple,” Dmytryk said, “but they talk about their boyfriends over club sandwiches.”

  On her second day on the set, Dmytryk introduced her to actor Lee Marvin, a former Marine born in New York. He had a lean and mean appearance, as well as a commandingly deep voice and a menacing aura. In film noir, he’d entered the pantheon of screen sadists when he tossed hot coffee into Gloria Grahame’s face in the 1953 film The Big Heat.