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

by Darwin Porter

  “No one liked him on the set,” Dmytryk said. “He was rude and drunk most of the time. He and Marlon Brando had actually attacked each other when they appeared together in The Wild One in 1953. I feared Marvin would make trouble on the set.”

  When introduced to Elizabeth, Marvin said, “I’m a rip-snorter.”

  “Perhaps one night you can show me the difference between a rip-snorter and a hellraiser,” she said.

  “I’m your man.”

  Within two days, Elizabeth came up to Marvin and said, “I hope you don’t consider me forward, but I’d like to go to bed with you.”

  Down and dirty: Lee Marvin

  “Marvin didn’t consider her forward at all,” Dmytryk claimed “When he got drunk and needed to fuck, he’d chase a jackrabbit into the hills. I couldn’t believe it. Against all odds, Marvin and Elizabeth became an item for a few nights.”

  Drake, however, had trouble believing that Elizabeth would be attracted to Marvin. One afternoon in the MGM commissary, he asked Marvin if the rumors were true about intimacies between Elizabeth and him.

  “The beautiful bitch likes it dirty and deep, which rules you out, gay boy,” Marvin shot back.

  According to Dmytryk, “I had no idea how the mating game would play out after I shipped this motley crew to the Deep South. But when the interior shots were completed on the MGM lot in Los Angeles, it was time to fly cast and crew to Kentucky for exterior shots. Then tragedy struck.”

  ***

  It was a hot afternoon on May 12, 1956, when Elizabeth decided privately to throw her last dinner party—take-out food only—as the wife of Michael Wilding. He had been lying on the sofa all afternoon complaining of lower back pain. “Listen,” she said, “in this marriage, I’m the one who gets the back pains.”

  She proceeded with the organization of the dinner party she’d scheduled for that evening, unaware that it would become one of the most notorious in the history of Hollywood. Wanting to know her director better, she invited Edward Dmytryk and his wife Jean. “J. Edgar Hoover will probably have us arrested as commies for hanging out with the Dmytryks,” she told Wilding.

  She also decided to invite Rock Hudson, hoping to renew their friendship after she’d more or less deserted him on the set of Giant to hang out instead with James Dean. “Of course, we’ll have to ask that lesbian Henry Willson forced him to marry—what’s the name of the bitch? Oh, yes…Phyllis Gates.”

  Mostly she wanted to invite Monty, and she had a special reason for doing so. At a party she’d met this handsome gay priest, Father George Long, who told her he’d more or less fallen in love with Monty after watching him play a priest in the 1953 film, I Confess. She called Monty, urging him to come. “You’ve got to meet this priest. He’s one hunk. He thinks you’re gorgeous, and his favorite word is ‘fuck’”

  Monty turned her down. MGM had hired a chauffeur for him for the duration of his involvement with Raintree County. At MGM, Dore Schary had told Benny Thau, “I don’t want Monty to become another Jimmy Dean-style auto casualty, so we’d better get a full-time driver for our druggie star.”

  On the evening of Elizabeth’s dinner party, however, Monty had already released the driver from his duties that night, since he had planned to retire early to bed.

  Elizabeth begged and begged for Monty to make an appearance at her party, but Monty would not relent. At four o’clock, she called yet another time, beseeching him to attend. Again, he pleaded that he was too tired, claiming that the road to her house was too dangerous for him to drive at night.

  At five o’clock, she called a third time, and still he was determined not to come. He also told her he’d taken sleeping pills, which would make it hazardous to be on any road.

  But tenaciously, she asked Wilding to call Monty at around six, and it was through him that Elizabeth finally wangled Monty’s agreement to come.

  “I can’t stay long,” he warned.

  To entice Monty, Wilding had told him that Elizabeth had invited his best friend, Kevin McCarthy, who was currently filming Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Monty had ridiculed him for appearing in this sci-fi horror flick, little knowing that it would become a film classic still being shown during the 21st century.

  At the party, Monty sipped “piss-warm, pussy pink rosé” and heard Elizabeth talk about how beautiful both of them looked in the early rushes she’d seen by Robert Surtees, the cinematographer of Raintree County.

  That gay priest did not show up at the party, so Monty turned his amorous attention instead to one of his all-time favorite lovers, Rock Hudson, who had little passion for him. “Monty doesn’t give me much to work with,” Hudson had previously confided to Elizabeth.

  After Monty went into the bathroom and took some downers, he emerged more hostile to Hudson. The macho star was filming the 1956 Written on the Wind with Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, and Dorothy Malone.

  Elizabeth knew that Hudson was having an affair with the very handsome Stack. “But I beat you to him,” Elizabeth chided Hudson.

  Monty may have been jealous of Stack, and at the party, he told Hudson he was “seriously pissed off at him,” but he never said why.

  Then, announcing that he was “dead tired,” Monty was the first to leave. McCarthy followed him out the door, having stated to the party guests that he had an early morning plane to catch. Outside the Wilding home, Monty asked Kevin if he’d lead the way down the “murderous cork-twisted road” that eventually funneled into Sunset Boulevard.

  “If you don’t go ahead and drive in front of me off this god damn mountain, I’ll be driving in circles all night,” Monty claimed. McCarthy agreed, but warned him not to follow “too closely on my tail.”

  McCarthy recalled that fateful night. “I looked in my rearview mirror, and I saw Monty’s car approaching too close to my vehicle. I thought he was playing chicken with me. I put my foot on the gas and went faster when his own car seemed almost on top of me. We both made the first turn, but the next one was treacherous. We were careening, swerving, and screeching. There were no streetlights. I saw his car lights weave from one side of the road to the other. Then I heard this terrible crash. A cloud of dust appeared in my rear-view mirror.”

  Braking and then parking off to the side, McCarthy got out of his car and rushed to the scene of the accident. Monty’s Chevrolet was now “an accordion-pleated mess.” He peered into the dark car whose motor was still running. Reaching through a broken window, he managed to turn off the ignition, but he didn’t see Monty. Unknown to McCarthy, Monty had fallen into a fetus-like position under the wheel.

  McCarthy suspected that his body had been thrown from the car, but he didn’t see him anywhere on the nearby grounds. The car had collided into a telephone pole jutting upward from the edge of the cliff and, in the dark, seemed to hang precariously above the ravine. McCarthy was afraid that it might burst into flames.

  He desperately needed to get to a phone, but he had noticed on the way down that all the neighboring houses were under construction. He raced up the hill, panting for breath. Passing through the garden gate and into the Wilding home, he pounded on the door, screaming for Elizabeth.

  It was Wilding who answered the urgent pounding, and at first he seemed to think that McCarthy was playing some terrible sick joke. “Go home, Kevin!” he said. “The party’s over.”

  “My god,” McCarthy shouted into the living room, loud enough for the remaining guests to hear. “Come at once. Monty’s dead!”

  A screech came from within the house. It was Elizabeth.

  ***

  Her screams of agony pierced the night air as her household, except for Wilding and his painful back, raced to the site of the accident. Hudson had been urged by McCarthy to bring a flashlight.

  “My only thought was that Monty was somewhere in that car, perhaps on the floorboard,” Elizabeth later recalled. “When we got there, we found the doors jammed shut. Rock shone his flashlight into the front seat. Monty was there and moving.
His head looked like it has been smashed into the steering wheel. The wind-shield was broken, the dashboard smashed. He was bleeding profusely—so much so that it looked like his face had been halved.”

  At the scene of Montgomery Clift’s car accident

  “There are various printed stories about how I broke into the car,” she said. “In all honesty, I don’t remember. I know that I came through the rear because I vaguely remember crawling over the front seat to get to him. How I did it remains a mystery to me to this day. Everyone at the scene was so involved he told contradictory stories. Rock was the strongest of the lot, and he eventually got the smashed-in front door open.”

  “I know I had on this pink scarf,” she said. “I remember ripping it off and using it to try to help stop the flow of blood. I wore this white dress. It turned scarlet. All my previous revulsion about blood left me. I held his head and he sort of came to. He became almost lucid. Of course, he was suffering from shock. A tooth was hanging on his lip by a few shreds of flesh, and he asked me to pull it off because it was cutting his tongue.”

  “Suddenly, he was gasping for breath. He motioned that one—maybe more—of his teeth had broken away and had lodged in his throat. I reached in with my hand and removed two teeth so he could breathe. It was perhaps the most ghastly night of my life—yes, the most ghastly.”

  “The damn ambulance got lost and was about an hour late,” she recalled. “But his doctor arrived. Monty, with virtually no head, actually formally introduced us.”

  Before the ambulance got there, photographers and reporters descended on the scene. Elizabeth yelled at Hudson and McCarthy to form a shield to protect Monty’s face from their view. At one point she placed her scarf over his face so they could not photograph “that bloody pulp.”

  She yelled at the photographers, “You sons of bitches, take one picture of him, and I’ll kick you in the nuts. I’ll have you barred from every studio in Hollywood, you fucking leeches.”

  “Finally, that asshole of an ambulance arrived,” she said. “Monty could have been dead, the van went via Idaho to get to us.”

  In back of the ambulance, Monty had passed out. She sat close by his side, holding his hand and telling him how much she loved him. “By that point, his face had swollen until it was almost the size of his shoulders,” she said. “That beautiful face of his looked like a giant red soccer ball.”

  “I wanted to die, and Monty almost did. Guilt overcame me. I knew if I had not insisted he come to my house, he’d be asleep in his own bed right that very moment. That night would haunt me. For years, I’d have nightmares. I’d ruined the life of my best friend…perhaps for always.”

  ***

  When news that Elizabeth had insisted that an exhausted Monty make a tortuous drive up and down a mountain, she came in for a lot of press criticism. “The Girl Who Had Everything wants it her way—or the highway,” charged one reporter.

  The stongest criticism leveled against her came from Monty’s other two close women friends, the notorious Libby Holman and Mira Rostova, his acting coach.

  Rostova attacked Elizabeth to Paul Newman, who was a leading contender for the male lead in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

  “It’s all the fault of that beautiful witch,” Rostova charged. “Monty had repeatedly told her that he was too tired to drive up that dangerous mountain. He never likes to drive at night, and he knew that the access road was treacherous. He should have gone to bed instead. She preferred him to risk his life for her— and for what? Another one of her stupid little parties.”

  After Elizabeth was allowed at last to see Monty, she said, “In his hospital room at Cedars of Lebanon, it was all I could do not to let out a scream. His head was as big as the biggest pumpkin at Hallowe’en—and far more grotesque. His jaws were wired. He would have to have a series of operations to reconstruct his once beautiful face and teeth. He had a broken nose and a cracked upper cheekbone. There was a gaping split in his upper lip and cuts and bruises all over his face. He was in traction for whiplash injuries.”

  One Saturday afternoon, Elizabeth arrived to find Libby Holman sitting by his bedside. A fight erupted between these two jealous women. The Broadway Diva denounced Elizabeth, calling her “sensual and silly…a god damn heifer in heat.”

  “Screw off!” Elizabeth shouted back at Holman. As she was storming out the door, Elizabeth called back to Monty, “I’ll return when you’ve gotten rid of this dyke murderess.”

  Later that afternoon, Elizabeth became even more furious at Holman when she learned that the fabulously wealthy singer had been smuggling martinis in to Monty, who had to sip them through a straw. His doctors had warned him that drinking alcohol might sabotage plans for the plastic surgery needed to reconstruct a new face on him.

  When Holman left, Elizabeth returned to Monty’s room. His hand reached out for her. “Oh, Bessie Mae, don’t be mad at Libby. I need all the friends I can get right now.”

  “I want you to live,” she said. “That is my only concern.”

  “Bessie Mae, my Bessie Mae. At one time you and I were hailed as the most beautiful man and woman on the planet. Now you’ll have to carry that beauty banner yourself.”

  Before every hospital visit, Elizabeth stopped at the Farmers Market in Los Angeles to purchase mushy foods such as guacamole and overripe bananas. She could spoon feed him, even though it caused him pain to swallow.

  “I nearly cried seeing him struggle just to get some baby food in him,” she recalled. “I begged him not to return to work on Raintree County. Rock Hudson told me he’d like to take over the role, but I didn’t tell Monty that. Paul Newman also seemed willing to take over, the way he’d taken over for Jimmy Dean in two movies.”

  “I’ve got to go back to work for you, Bessie Mae,” Monty said. “I owe it to you, damaged face or not.”

  “You owe me nothing,” she said. “It is I who will forever be in your debt. At times, I’ve thought about divorcing Michael just to marry you and take care of you for the rest of my life.”

  Monty’s recovery and reconstruction work went much faster than anyone, including his doctors, had predicted. She was with him when he was released from the hospital. He was driven to his dingy little rented house on Dawn Ride Road. “At least it has a pool,” she said.

  She called on him every afternoon, finding him drinking heavily, against doctors’ orders, and taking morphine-based painkillers.

  She once told Wilding, “I can’t stand to look him squarely in the face. I do, of course. But I don’t find Monty there anymore. His once lustrous eyes are now dead like a fish on ice at the Farmers Market.”

  “I know my beauty will never be restored,” he told her one hot afternoon. “From now on, if I ever work again, I’ll be cast in horror movies.”

  Once or twice, he took his fingers and ran them up and down her face. “Do you remember when I once was as young and beautiful as you are today?” he asked her, expecting no answer.

  Both Dore Schary from MGM, accompanied by the Raintree director, Dmytryk, made weekly visits to check on Monty and his face. Finally, after a nine-week delay in production, Schary announced that he thought Monty was ready to face the camera again. But both Schary and Dmytryk knew that the early close-ups of Monty’s face would not match those in his post-accident scenes.

  As author Ellis Amburn wrote, “When he recovered, he was scarcely recognizable as Montgomery Clift, appearing pinched and withered. The famous gullwing eyebrows were now shaggy thickets, the left side of his face was almost paralyzed, the once heroic jawline was soft and mushy. His eyes looked dead, no doubt due to pain, bewilderment, and massive doses of barbiturates.”

  Dmytryk, after a few tests at the studio, decided that Monty should be filmed whenever possible from the right side of his face. “The left side of his face was immobile and not capable of conveying any emotion. One half of what was once the screen’s most expressive face had died.”

  Dmytryk called Elizabeth and told h
er to prepare to leave for location shooting in the Deep South, beginning in Danville, Kentucky.

  “I loathe going down there with all those bigots,” she told him. “Poor Monty and I will be treated like freaks.”

  ***

  In July, with her luggage packed, Elizabeth walked out of her home after kissing her sons goodbye. Her only words to Michael Wilding were not of love, but of instructions in child care.

  She had not broken with Kevin McClory, her secret lover, but fortunately, he was out of town working for Mike Todd. If any close friend asked, she said, “Kevin and I are madly in love.” By now, all of Hollywood, and most of her fans, knew that her marriage to Wilding was heading for the divorce court.

  No sooner had she arrived in Danville, Kentucky, to resume her role as the deranged Susanna Drake, than there was a knock on her door. A teenage boy appeared with a telegram from Mike Todd.

  “I LOVE YOU,” it read.

  Within the hour, the manager of the hotel arrived with a bonded and insured present from Todd. It was an emerald bracelet from Cartier. He’d already ordered exotic flowers for her suite. That night he called her, talking for nearly four hours, vowing eternal love and outlining how exciting their life would be together.

  The next day, Elizabeth moved into a house that had been rented for her in Danville. Nearby, Monty was moved into an equivalent rented house.

  Reporters rushed to Kentucky to follow her after MGM issued a press release on July 19, 1956:

  “Much careful thought has been given to the step we are taking. It is being done so that we will have an opportunity to thoroughly work out our personal situation. We are in complete accord in making this amicable decision.”

  Although not stating exactly what this “amicable decision” was, it was an obvious notice that Elizabeth was planning to file for a divorce from Wilding. MGM publicity agents failed miserably at spelling out the details.