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

by Darwin Porter

  “For Elizabeth, getting involved with Mike Todd, my boss, also meant getting into Eddie Fisher’s crotch,” Dick Hanley recalled. “The two men were glued at the hip. Unknown to the public then, or even now, was that Fisher had been sexually involved with Elizabeth even before she married Mike Todd.”

  “Wilding had first-hand evidence of this affair, and I think Debbie Reynolds at some point came to suspect it,” Dick claimed. “Actually, I always viewed the Todd/Taylor/Fisher liaison as a ménage à trois. And I was never certain who on any given day was fucking whom.”

  At two o’clock one morning, Todd and his gin rummy cronies planned to play until dawn, as stakes were the highest ever for this beer-swigging, cigar-smoking lot.

  Elizabeth grew bored, and Todd ordered Fisher to drop out of the game and take her back home, where Wilding was still occupying the guest room.

  “They talked until around four o’clock in the morning,” Wilding later told Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons. “I heard them. Finally, I went to sleep. At around eleven o’clock the following morning, a call came in from Benny Thau. He said it was urgent that he speak to Elizabeth. When I knocked on the door of the master bedroom, Eddie answered it. His face was covered with shaving cream, but nothing else covered him.”

  Embarrassed, Wilding called to Elizabeth, “It’s Thau on the phone. Some emergency at MGM.”

  “Okay,” shouted Elizabeth. “Tell the fucker I’m coming. First, I’ve got to take a piss. And shut the god damn door.”

  When Fisher brought Elizabeth back to Todd’s Beverly Hills mansion for a late luncheon the next day, Todd said, “I hope you two lovebirds had a good time.”

  The singer later said that after lunch, Todd practically dragged Elizabeth off to his upstairs bedroom. ”If you want to get fucked, let a real man do it,” he told her in front of Fisher.

  Before Elizabeth’s marriage to Todd, there were other intimate sightings of Elizabeth with Fisher. A waiter at the Beverly Hills Hotel later said he delivered a room service dinner to them late one night in a suite that Fisher had booked.

  “Fisher was in the nude in the living room listening to his own records, and I could see Taylor in the bed since the door was open,” the waiter claimed.

  That day, Fisher had had a domestic quarrel with Debbie Reynolds and had temporarily moved out.

  After her dalliances with Victor Mature and Eddie Fisher, Wilding could take no more humiliation. After Fisher left his home with Elizabeth, Wilding packed his luggage and moved out, leaving his two sons in the care of their nanny.

  He moved into the guestroom at the home of Joseph Cotten. The two actors had bonded during their filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949) with Ingrid Bergman.

  He had completed his last film for MGM. Entitled The Scarlet Coat (1955), it was a tedious and unconvincing historical drama set against a backdrop of the American Revolutionary War. In it, Wilding played a stiff and formal British military officer.

  The “rebel” in the film was the handsome bisexual actor, Cornel Wilde, a sort of poor man’s Errol Flynn, who was always revealing his body-beautiful chest. Wilde had had a fling with Laurence Olivier when he’d toured America playing Tybalt, Juliet’s hot-tempered cousin and the rival to Romeo as portrayed by Olivier. Known for his portrayals of swashbucklers, Wilde piqued Wilding’s sexual interest. The crew seemed well aware of their mutual “dressing room seduction,” and word on the set was “Wilde is wild about Wilding.” Their brief fling barely survived the completion of the picture, however.

  Cornel Wilde “Wilde is wild about Wilding”

  In the midst of their divorce proceedings, Wilding moved into a modest two-room apartment on Sunset Boulevard, claiming “that a bottle of vodka is my only companion.”

  Another blow came when he was summoned to Benny Thau’s office at MGM. This time, he was not offered another picture. “Let’s face it, Wilding,” Thau told him. “You’re no longer Mr. Elizabeth Taylor. Your contract is up. You’re out the door. Now leave. I’ve got more important business to attend to, like what to do with Debbie Reynolds.”

  Despondent, almost suicidal, Wilding was rescued by Hollywood agent Jerry Hogan, who brought him into his business organization as a partner. Wilding was miscast in his job as an agent, but Elizabeth graciously agreed to become his client for a while, and she’d later bring him in on some film contracts signed by Richard Burton.

  Eventually, Wilding returned to his native England, which he’d left as a big star to marry Elizabeth. “My return was bleak,” he said. “Although I had left Hollywood as a black-listed actor, I returned to England as a forgotten one.”

  In time, Wilding would marry the British socialite Susan Nell, but that marriage failed. Perhaps he found his true and compatible mate the final time around, when he wed the very talented, elegant, and almost aristocratic actress, Margaret Leighton. She encouraged his desire to be a painter. He married her in 1963 and was at her side and still married to her when she died in 1976.

  Having grown up in the British theater, which was peopled by homosexuals or bisexuals, Leighton was very understanding of the same-sex impulse in men. Wilding did not conceal from her the fact that he on occasion patronized “rent boys” in London’s Soho district.

  Leighton’s primary embarrassment came when a gay underground rag published an interview with a teenaged hustler who stated, “Michael Wilding swore on a stack of Bibles that he preferred fucking my bum to mounting that overworked, abused, and tired-out twat of that has-been actress, Elizabeth Taylor, who is fat as a sow right before slaughter time.”

  ***

  After those hectic premieres, Todd made an ill-fated decision to take Elizabeth on a vacation. Both of them flew to Nassau in The Bahamas, where the British press baron, Lord Beaverbrook, invited them on a yachting trip.

  Margaret Leighton

  Before she embarked, Elizabeth told a Bahamian reporter, “This is the happiest day of my life,” a line she would often repeat. But her happiness would have the life span of a sickly butterfly.

  During the initial stage of the cruise, she’d been drinking heavily, downing champagne beginning at ten o’clock in the morning.

  She decided to go below deck and sleep it off. As she was going down the yacht’s steps, the boat lurched. “I fell six steps on my fat ass,” she’d later recall. She was overcome with excruciating pain and screamed for help.

  Todd carried her into a stateroom and placed her on the bed. She was at this point sobbing in pain.

  He didn’t trust any of the local hospitals, and he chartered a plane in Fort Lauderdale that flew them on to New York. Elizabeth had to be carried on and off the plane. She was checked into the Harkness Pavilion of the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.

  After a series of tests, Dr. John Lattimer, one of New York’s leading orthopedic surgeons, told Todd that his wife-to-be would require a delicate operation. Several of her spinal disks had been crushed. Her left leg was numb and had started to atrophy. There was grave danger of paralysis and, possibly, amputation.

  During a four-hour operation on December 8, 1956, the doctor had to remove dead bone right down to the spinal cord’s nerve center. He then surgically removed bone from her hip and pelvis, out of which he fashioned “little match-sticks” that he assembled into a cluster that later calcified into a unified whole. After two months of recovery, this mass of bone fragments had fused into a six-inch “hybrid” component within her spinal column, allowing her to walk again.

  The pain was so great that at times that she would pass out. She required care around the clock. Friends such as Monty came to visit, and she expressed one of her greatest fears: “I’m going to spend the rest of my life in a wheel-chair.”

  Todd treated every event in his life as a publicity circus. Renting the room immediately adjacent to hers in the hospital, he issued hourly press briefings.

  The doctor also told Todd that Elizabeth was pregnant. That bit of news— that Todd’s twenty-four-year-o
ld bride-to-be was expecting a child out of wedlock—did not get inserted into any of Todd’s briefings to the press.

  To Monty, to whom she still confided her most personal secrets, she admitted, “I don’t know. I think it is Mike’s child…”

  “Mike Wilding’s?”

  “No, Mike Todd’s. But maybe Eddie Fisher, maybe even Victor Mature. If he grows up to be Samson, we’ll know it’s Vic’s kid.”

  Horrified at the prospect of bad publicity over a child arriving too early, Todd, through his lawyers, arranged for Elizabeth’s quickie Mexican divorce, which Wilding agreed to.

  To expedite the divorce, Wilding was flown to Mexico. As he told Todd, “I’m a pauper.” Todd offered him $200,000 for his cooperation. “As you know, my baby is growing every day in Elizabeth, and you are aware of how provincial the Americans are about such things.”

  To further entice cooperation from Wilding, Elizabeth offered him all the proceeds from the sale of the Benedict Canyon house—and not a fifty-fifty split.

  In a touch of irony, the first buyer who came to inspect the Taylor/Wilding home was Ingrid Bergman. Her Hollywood career had been temporarily put “into the deep freeze” after she had a baby fathered by Roberto Rossellini during the course of her marriage to the Swedish doctor Petter Lindstrom. Bergman was not impressed with the unhappy abode and rejected the idea of buying the house. “It is not suitable,” she said, before rushing out the door.

  Leaving her hospital bed within the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital’s Harkness Pavilion on January 21, 1957, Elizabeth flew with Todd to Mexico City. Both of them dined with Wilding that night. As Elizabeth recalled, “He could not have been more gracious. After all, money talks.”

  To their deep regret, the local judge refused their divorce petitions at first. Todd met privately with him and threatened to kill “the god damn fucking wet-back son of a bitch.” The judge finally agreed to the divorce. Dick Hanley said, “Pesos, a lot of pesos, exchanged hands.”

  In Mexico City, the divorce came through. Todd announced to the world that he would marry Elizabeth on February 2, 1957 in the Mexican village of Puerto Marquez, near Acapulco.

  Joseph Cotten called Wilding and told him about the upcoming marriage which he had heard about on the TV news. Wilding asked Cotten, “Don’t you think Elizabeth might have had the consideration to wait until the funeral meats grew cold?”

  For the wedding, Todd must have imagined that he was producing another epic like Around the World in 80 Days. He ordered one hundred bushels of white orchids flown in, along with 15,000 yellow gladioli. He stocked fifty cases of champagne, and for the wedding feast, imported barrels of baby lobsters, cracked crabs, and tureens of Iranian caviar.

  Jazz musicians were imported from New York, and local mariachi bands were booked, for which bandstands had to be constructed.

  Local chefs were hired to prepare an array of Mexican specialties such as roast chicken in chocolate sauce. Each of the wedding guests was given a sports shirt to wear: Female guests received versions sporting the initials E.T.T., male guests received versions with the initials M.T.

  Kerosene torches were installed to light the night. Hundreds of coconuts were cut in half, later to be filled with champagne.

  Since Elizabeth was Protestant, no rabbi they knew at the time would perform a religious ceremony. Todd therefore prevailed upon the mayor of Acapulco, Mario Lepotoguí, to officiate at a civil service.

  Eddie Fisher flew in as the ceremony’s Best Man, and his increasingly estranged wife, Debbie Reynolds, was designated as Elizabeth’s Matron of Honor.

  Once again, Elizabeth’s favorite designer, Helen Rose, was hauled in to design a stunning wedding gown fashioned from hydrangea blue chiffon. “This is getting to be a habit with me,” Rose said.

  Sara and Francis Taylor flew in, as did Elizabeth’s brother, Howard, and his wife, Mara. Michael Todd, Jr., the son Todd had produced with his first wife, Bertha Freshman, also went to Mexico with his wife, Sarah.

  The bridegroom presented Elizabeth with an $80,000 diamond bracelet as a wedding present. For entertainment, Todd already had as his best friend one of the most popular singers in America, Fisher himself, who gave his vocal rendition of the “Mexican Wedding Song.”

  “Elizabeth had downed two bottles of champagne and was drunk,” Dick Hanley said. “She didn’t walk down the aisle, she had to be carried down. After they were pronounced man and wife, she had to be hauled out of the wedding ceremony by two beefy security guards. That baby she was carrying probably was going to be an alcoholic before it was born.”

  Rose later recalled the reception. “Here was this crippled and pregnant lady feasting on roast suckling pig and baby lobsters and all those tamales and enchiladas. She drank champagne until midnight when she came down with stomach cramps, which she blamed on the cracked crabs.”

  The next morning at around eleven, Fisher was called to their bridal suite, where he found Todd and Elizabeth drinking more champagne. Each of them, with Elizabeth looking especially voluptuous, was lying nude atop pink sheets.

  Reynolds later recalled, “Eddie loved it, and I knew he did even though I wasn’t invited. It made him part of the marriage. It was what he wanted that he didn’t have with me.”

  Fisher later reported that Elizabeth and Todd fought every day for weeks on end.”The gal’s been looking for trouble all her life, but everyone was too timid to fight back,” Todd said. “They kept her on a milktoast diet. With me, I fed her red meat. When she flies into a tantrum, I fly into a bigger one. We fight because we love it. When she’s mad, she looks so beautiful, I take her in my arms and smother her with kisses. Naturally, that leads to other things.”

  Fisher later said, “I think Elizabeth likes to be hit. I know that sounds crazy. But she and Mike had a violent relationship. Call it foreplay.”

  One reporter came to interview Todd in Los Angeles, and found him sitting around the swimming pool naked. Halfway through the interview, Elizabeth opened the second-floor window and called down to Todd. “Get your ass back in this bedroom,” she shouted at him. “I want you to fuck me this minute!”

  Elizabeth later wrote, “What sweet craziness it was to be married to Mike Todd. He translated the impossible life I had been living on the screen to reality. He had a great gift of showmanship and a great heart as well. On the surface, he seemed to be rough, tough, and gruff, but it was an act. He was gentle and honest, with a deeply ingrained integrity that belied his flamboyant exterior. Every woman should have a Mike Todd in her life.”

  What she didn’t know when she said that was that it would be a short marriage, lasting only eighteen months.

  “Each of them burned the candle at both ends, and it was destined to flicker out,” said Dick. “Such intensity, such fire, could not last forever.”

  ***

  For a year, Elizabeth did not appear on the screen in the wake of her hit movie, Giant. Her new role was that of a globe-trotting bride, who was secretly pregnant and ensnared within the orbit of a cigar-chomping entrepreneur, that extravagant showman, Mike Todd.

  Even though she wasn’t making movies, Todd turned her into a media event unlike anything she’d experienced before. Wherever they went in the world— America, Europe, Asia, Australia—he alerted the paparazzi and newspaper reporters. It was a rare day when Mr. and Mrs. Mike Todd didn’t appear on the frontpages of newspapers somewhere in the world.

  “Elizabeth was turned into a media circus,” said Dick Hanley, Todd’s new secretary. “For the next twelve years, even beyond, she would be the most written about female personality on the planet, challenged only by Jackie Kennedy when she moved into the White House. Elizabeth and Jackie vied for who would grace magazine covers, and Elizabeth didn’t endear herself to the First Lady when she kept telling friends, ‘I got to Jack long before Jackie ever got her mangy paws into him.’”

  Everything Elizabeth said or did, however trivial, was deemed worthy of a headline. When there was no story abo
ut her, some journalist made one up. She appeared on the covers of enough magazines to fill a warehouse.

  What had been originally conceived as an extended honeymoon evolved into a world tour to promote Around the World in 80 Days in cities as diverse as Rome, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Moscow.

  Biographer Brenda Maddox wrote about Elizabeth’s new media persona. “Todd changed Taylor from a dull movie beauty into an international celebrity whose sybaritic life and loves became a running news story, and into the archetypical star goddess who takes her public with her to the very brink of death. He woke Taylor up sexually, professionally, and financially.”

  With their honeymoon in Mexico behind them, Todd didn’t like that he and Elizabeth would have to depend on commercial airliners to get around the country.

  Before leaving Los Angeles, Todd purchased a private Lockheed Lodestar, an aircraft he christened The Lucky Liz. The Lodestar was the same type of aircraft that another of Elizabeth’s suitors, Howard Hughes, had used to fly around the world in 1939.

  In an extravagant gesture, Todd spent $25,000 on the airplane’s bedroom, boasting that “it is the only plane in the world with a double bed. Yet he was very penny-pinching when he was confronted with safety features, spending only $2,000 for an overhaul of the antiquated anti-icing system, which would prove to be a fatal mistake.

  As a private joke to reporters, he said, “I plan to begin the penetration the moment we’re airborne over California, reaching my climax at Idlewild in New York. As The Lucky Liz hits the runway for that final bump, bump, it will help me reach the ultimate depth.”

  Of course, although many reporters laughed at the innuendos, no newspaper at the time would print such a remark.

  En route to New York in The Lucky Liz, the Todds landed in Chicago in February of 1957, where he presented Elizabeth with another wedding present, “His and Her theaters—yes, her own movie house, which would become a good source of revenue for her in the years ahead.