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

by Darwin Porter

  She telephoned Wilding that night, claiming, “I still love you—don’t think I don’t. You are the father of our children. But as Sinatra told me, when a relationship has lost its ring-a-ding-ding, it’s time to move on.”

  Hearing that McClory was back in Los Angeles, Elizabeth telephoned him that same night.

  “I was absolutely astonished at the way she broke off our romance,” Mc-Clory recalled years later. “One day, she told me I was the love of her life, and the next night she’s telling me that Mike Todd has taken over and is going to marry her. The Princess was his? How in a matter of days could she fall out of love with me and in love with him? It didn’t make any sense at all. I guess I didn’t know her at all, even though I’d repeatedly made love to her. I was in a doubly awful position because Todd was also my boss.”

  The following week, Elizabeth’s lawyers contacted Wilding, informing him that she was filing for divorce on the ground of incompatibility. He was to be granted reasonable access to their two sons, and she would waive all rights to alimony except $250 a month in child support. That was a relief to Wilding, since he had less than two hundred dollars in the bank at the time.

  When Dmytryk heard of the divorce, he spoke privately to the cast and crew. “It’s hard to have much sympathy for Wilding. He was married to Elizabeth but still maintained his steady love affair with Stewart Granger. Monty told me that Wilding fucked him on many an occasion. He was also screwing everybody from Marie McDonald to Marlene Dietrich with a little ‘in like Flynn’ on the side.” Of course, he was referring to Wilding’s close pal, Errol Flynn.

  When Granger heard the news of the impending divorce, he said, “In essence, Miss Lizzie cut off my mate’s balls. Call her the nutcracker.”

  Wilding and McClory were not the only people who had to be dumped.

  Todd had sent his mistress, Evelyn Keyes, on a trip to South America, scheduling stopovers for her en route in London and Paris. Ostensibly, the purpose of her trip was to find screens large enough to show Around the World in 80 Days in Todd-AO.

  She was staying in Elizabeth’s former haunt, the Lancaster Hotel in Paris, when she received what she later labeled as “the call.” It was from Todd. “I have to tell you, I’ve fallen in love with Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth who?” she asked, thinking he was joking.

  It was no joke. Finally, he convinced her that he was not going to marry her, but would wed Elizabeth as soon as her divorce came through.

  “When I hung up,” she recalled, “I realized I had been taken by this beautiful bitch. Mike had delivered the knockout punch. Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe had been passing fancies of his. I feared Elizabeth would stick around for a while.”

  Later, Todd contacted Keyes, hoping to keep her as a mistress on the side after his marriage to Elizabeth. “He was furious when I moved to Paris and married Artie Shaw in 1957,” Keyes said. The band leader had been previously married to both Lana Turner and Ava Gardner.

  In 1959, Keyes encountered her rival, Elizabeth, at a Hollywood party after Todd had died. “Maybe it was a good thing that he dumped me,” Keyes told her. “The advantage of his dumping me was that I would no longer have to smell the stench of his cigar. I would no longer be kept awake all night while he and his buddies played gin rummy. Unlike you, I might not have gotten the flu and would have taken that final flight with him. In that case, I would no longer be inhabiting this earth. So, in essence, by running off with my boyfriend, you may have inadvertently saved my life.”

  Years later, a more bitter Keyes emerged when a reporter asked her, “Who do you think was the love of Elizabeth Taylor’s life—Richard Burton or Mike Todd?”

  “Neither of the above,” said Keyes. “The love of her life is Elizabeth Taylor.”

  ***

  Late every Friday afternoon, a chartered plane landed in Danville, Kentucky, to fly Elizabeth to New York, where she stayed in the Park Avenue penthouse of Todd. He told his friends, “Lemme tell ya, any minute that little dame spends out of bed is totally wasted.”

  Every day on the set back in Danville, batches of yellow roses arrived. Todd called her at least five times every day, and, at night, would often talk for hours, much to the delight of the Danville phone operators who listened in. They later spread stories to their neighbors and often to the press. “It was sex over the phone,” one of the local operators said. “I didn’t know a man and a woman did such perverted things to each other. It was totally disgusting. Mr. Todd and Miss Taylor had better get right with Jesus—or else they’ll burn in hell’s fire.”

  In a neighboring house, Monty’s emotional state seemed to grow worse every day. On two different occasions, Danville police arrested him for indecent exposure, as he was picked up walking nude from his house to Elizabeth’s.

  On most nights, she would take him inside her house and would try to sober him up in the shower. Later, she’d towel him dry and put him to bed, hoping that sleep would come to this troubled soul.

  On some nights, and infrequently, she was too intoxicated herself to deal with him. When that happened, he would stand outside the house, pounding on her door, evoking the final scene in his hit movie, The Heiress, with Olivia de Havilland.

  Everybody thought Monty and Elizabeth were having this torrid affair,” said Dmytryk. “I didn’t think so. Like I really cared. All I wanted was to pull off MGM’s first film in Panavision and not bankrupt the studio with their antics, accidents, and drunkenness. Any day, I expected Elizabeth to have some health emergency.”

  “My fears came true,” the director said. “In the oppressive summer heat of Kentucky, and all that humidity, and in those heavily corseted costumes she had to wear, my star collapsed.”

  A doctor was rushed to Elizabeth’s side when she fainted on the set, suffering from hyperventilation [faster than normal, or labored, breathing] complicated by tachycardia [a heart rate whose speed exceeds the parameters of “normal.”] For a week, she lay in a hospital bed in Danville, having been tranquilized with sodium amytal. Todd flew to her side and stayed with her every day until she was released and could resume filming.

  When Elizabeth vacated her rented house to move to other premises, the landlord threatened MGM with a lawsuit. An MGM employee, Steve Miller, inspected the premises of what he called “the world’s biggest slob. Bacon grease covered the kitchen walls. Her make-up was all over the bedroom sheets. She even ruined the draperies. Windows were broken. The springs in the sofa were also broken. Doors were missing knobs. Her two toilets overflowed. Liquor bottles were everywhere; the rugs were filthy, the crystal and china in bits and pieces.”

  Sex, insanity, and romance in the Deep South: In this scene from Rain-tree County, Elizabeth Taylor emulates Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind--except that here, unlike any scene in GWTW, the belle’s hoop skirts are translucent.

  On her next location in Natchez, Mississippi, hundreds of locals, including a large armada of black farm workers, turned out to witness Elizabeth’s arrival. Although she had been scheduled for scenes against an evocative background of antebellum ruins, it soon became obvious that that schedule would have to be revised.

  Nervous and upset over her confused life, she had had too much to drink on the plane. Three men carried her down the runway and into a waiting limousine, where she was driven to her hotel suite and put to bed to sleep it off.

  On her first night in Natchez, Monty visited her. Throughout the day and early evening, he’d taken too many barbiturates, tranquilizers, and amphetamines. After finishing off three bottles of champagne, she fell asleep on her bed. He had collapsed onto the floor beside her.

  Before dawn, she discovered that he’d fallen into a coma with a cigarette between his fingers. Both fingers were burned to the bone, and he had to be rushed to the emergency room of the local hospital.

  She somehow managed to get through the next few weeks, with the help of Todd’s loving support. Finally, she called him to come for her, “The god damn film is o
ver, and it’s taken ten years off my life. It’s been a nightmare.”

  Months later, in Los Angeles, Elizabeth sat in a darkened projection room holding Monty’s damaged hand as they watched the final cut of Raintree County.

  As Monty’s biographer, Patricia Bosworth noted, “There were many spliced-together sequences which used both his old and new face; thus one sees close-ups of him before his car crash where the camera has caught his erotic promise, his sense of energy and risk; then in the very next shot he’ll be on the screen in his postcrash face—in the same costume, same position, but looking zombie like.”

  After the showing, Monty denounced the film as a “colossal bore—a soap opera with elephantiasis.” Over dinner that night, he asserted, “I’m horrific, wooden, frozen. In my beard I look like Jesus Christ in a Union cap.”

  He also criticized Elizabeth’s performance, telling her, “Bessie Mae, in those mad scenes, you went over the top.” Most film critics agreed with Monty’s assessment, one reporter labeling her voice as “whining and screeching.”

  “She was more obnoxious than insane,” wrote another critic. “She dies in that swamp none too soon.”

  Despite the bad press, Elizabeth was nominated for an Academy Award as the Best Actress of the year. She faced formidable competition from Deborah Kerr in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison; from Anna Magnani in Wild in the Wind, and from her longtime rival, Lana Turner in Peyton Place. The Oscar went to a twenty-three-year-old Georgia-born blonde, Joanne Woodward, for her portrayal of the psychotic heroine in The Three Faces of Eve.

  A cult tragedienne with a hangover: Elizabeth Taylor with Montgomery Clift in Raintree County

  “I knew I wouldn’t win,” Elizabeth said. “The Academy thought Woodward was better at being crazy than I was.”

  As she moved deeper and deeper into Todd’s orbit, Elizabeth and Monty began to drift apart. Before flying back to New York, Monty told her, “I have two objects in mind. The first is never to step in front of a movie camera again. The second is to try and find what has so far eluded me—a reason to live. What reason do you have to live, Bessie Mae?”

  “To marry Mike Todd,” she said. “My life with a dead fish Brit is over.”

  “Sharks can be a lot of fun,” he warned her. “But, as you know, they can also be deadly.”

  ***

  After a Labor Day weekend spent in Atlantic City during September of 1956, Elizabeth arrived in New York flashing a twenty-carat diamond ring. “I’m engaged to Mike Todd,” she announced to the press.

  Then she stunned MGM and half the world by suggesting that she was going to retire. “I may never work again,” she said. “I want to be a woman to Mike Todd’s man. A home, a husband, a real family mean more to me. I’m far more interested in being Mrs. Mike Todd than in being an actress. I’m trading a real life instead of a life of play-acting at make-believe.”

  Sara was horrified that Elizabeth might retire, knowing she’d lose her weekly check from MGM. Francis Taylor had closed his art gallery and gone into early retirement, hoping to live off his wife and Elizabeth.

  At first, Sara approved of Todd, thinking he was a rich Italian. She was horrified when she learned he was a Jew named Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen.

  Elizabeth told Todd, “My mother is the most prejudiced woman in the universe.”

  When Todd was invited for his first dinner with Elizabeth’s parents, Sara became even more outraged. Todd put his hand inside Elizabeth’s dress and said, “Boy these little Jewish girls sure have big tits.”

  At other dinner parties, Todd referred to Elizabeth as “my little Jewish broad, Lizzie Schwartzkopf,” which translates from the German and Yiddish as “Blackhead.”

  Even though Todd was older than Wilding, he referred to the British actor as “that boring elderly husband Liz is married to. I doubt if she can get a rise out of him.”

  The cute, sweet actress Diana Lynn, who often dated homosexuals who needed a girl for the night to escort to a premiere, observed Elizabeth one night at one of Todd’s parties. “She had this almost iridescent sensuality. Her eyes, lips, and breasts gleamed. She was so damn sexy and flirtatious. I stood by and watched her work the room. She made every man want to unzip his fly and stick it into her.”

  Back in Los Angeles, on September 26, 1956, Elizabeth, along with director George Stevens and Rock Hudson, pressed their hands and footprints into freshly poured cement in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

  The premiere of Giant was announced for this same theater on October 7. Before arriving, Todd and Elizabeth had drinks with Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. Todd looked across the table at Elizabeth as the first bottle of champagne was served. “As soon as this premiere is over tonight, I’m gonna fuck you.”

  Todd escorted Elizabeth to the Los Angeles premiere, with Rock Hudson arriving with his new wife, Phyllis Gates. They were followed by Clark Gable escorting Joan Crawford and Tab Hunter with Natalie Wood on his arm.

  In late October, Todd and Elizabeth flew to New York for the respective premieres of both Giant and Around the World in 80 Days.

  By the time of the New York premiere of Giant, a weird cult had formed around the image of the late James Dean. Thousands of his fanatical fans believed that he had not died, but that he was going to make an appearance at the New York premiere of a movie that had helped make him famous.

  Before that premiere, George Stevens hosted a reception for the film’s cast. The director warned that there might be a problem associated with security at the premiere. The New York Police Department had assigned extra men to the premises, and wooden barriers had been erected to restrain the throngs. Fears involved the possibility of a riot because of the hysteria engulfing the fans, mostly those who had come to worship the memory of James Dean.

  Hudson was among the first to arrive. The identity of his date for the evening—Tallulah Bankhead—came as a surprise. She had gone to bed with him the night before. Hudson called such seductions of older female stars “mercy fucks.”

  She told a reporter from NBC, “I’m here tonight, darling, because of this divine young man, Rock Hudson, who is a giant in every conceivable way.”

  For the premiere at New York City’s Roxy Theater, Todd had presented Elizabeth with a pair of ten-thousand-dollar diamond earrings. The crowd outside the theater grew and grew until it stretched for several blocks. As Elizabeth and Todd emerged from their long black limousine, a roar went up as fans pushed against the police barricades.

  Carroll Baker and her husband, director Jack Garfein—a Holocaust survivor for whom she had converted to Judaism—walked directly behind Elizabeth and Todd. As Baker remembered it, “The fanatic Dean cult were nearest the red-carpet aisle leading into the entrance. Those closest to us were thrashing against the barriers, letting out menacing, eerie cries; they had red, distorted, lunatic-like faces. The sight of them filled me with revulsion a moment before the premonition of danger gripped me.”

  In front of them, Todd, too, was aware of the danger, and he was shoving photographers and reporters aside to make a pathway to safety for Elizabeth. It was as if he was trying to create a tunnel for her to escape.

  Baker then described the pandemonium that followed. “There was an explosion of human bodies across the barricades and a stampede of howling maniacs trampling each other and rushing the actors.”

  Photographers were knocked down along with their cameras. Some of the fans even knocked over police officers, whose caps often went flying through the air. Jane Withers was nearly trampled to death.

  The fans tore at Elizabeth, grabbing her hair and trying to rip off pieces of her gown. Todd yelled at them, “Stand back.”

  A screech went up. “My earring,” shouted Elizabeth. “I’ve lost one of my earrings.”

  “Forget the god damn earrings.” Todd shouted at her. “I’ll buy you another pair.”

  The manager of the Roxy appeared, and ushered Elizabeth and Todd into his office, where he offered them a brandy to st
eady their nerves. Bankhead had retreated to the women’s room, and Hudson joined Elizabeth. His shirt was in shreds, and his jacket had disappeared, along with his wallet.

  Giant became the highest grossing film in the history of Warners until the 1978 release of Superman.

  When the Academy Award nominations were announced, Elizabeth’s name was not on the list. Her fellow actors—Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Mercedes McCambridge—were nominated, although only George Stevens as Best Director carried home an Oscar.

  Giant earned Dean his second and last Oscar nomination, but, of course, he never lived to see the film’s release.

  ***

  Right before 80 Days opened at the Rivoli Theater in New York, Todd shocked Elizabeth by telling her that he was flat broke. “I’ve spent every penny I have and I’m deep in debt.”

  To pay the rent at the theater, Eddie Fisher presented him with a certified check for $25,000. The premiere would go forth as scheduled.

  The Los Angeles Times Corporation heard about Todd’s financial dilemma and offered him $25 million for the outright purchase of 80 Days. Elizabeth urged him not to take it. Within months, the picture had earned more than $30 million on a $6 million investment.

  The October, 1956 premiere of 80 Days was a sensation, the movie garnering a standing ovation. The New York Daily News called it, “Titanic, titillating, and thrilling.”

  The next day, pictures of Elizabeth with Todd ran on frontpages around the world.

  Todd’s film, like Giant, was a worldwide smash. After the ovation for 80 Days in New York, Todd grabbed Elizabeth. “Lizzie, baby, we’re the King and Queen of the World.”

  ***

  Since Todd and Elizabeth were virtually living as man and wife, there remained the issue of her divorce from Michael Wilding.

  On November 14, 1956, Elizabeth’s lawyers filed papers in California asking for a divorce. The charge was extreme mental cruelty. He would have to pay no alimony and would get fifty percent of the proceeds from the sale of their home, which was worth around $200,000 on the market at that time.