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

by Darwin Porter

  Later, when Brooks came by, she denounced him as a “bastard. You’ve just come to see if I’m able to go back to work. Well, screw you and your Southern Gothic horror tale. I’m never coming back. Go fuck yourself!”

  Because of the crowds gathering outside her house, the Beverly Hills police erected barricades and stationed patrolmen to guard the property. Before gaining entrance to the house, everyone had to pass through a security checkpoint . After being questioned, Sara and Francis Taylor were allowed inside, as was Michael Wilding. Her favorite hairdresser, Sidney Guilaroff, arrived to tend to her personal needs, including grooming.

  Condolences poured in from around the world, including from the White House. One wire read: “The President and I extend our deepest sympathy. Mamie Eisenhower.”

  Another from Clark Gable, who had lost his great love, Carole Lombard, in a plane crash sixteen years previously, read: “I know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”

  Toastmaster and entertainer, George Jessel, summed up Todd’s life. “He went from being a sideshow barker at the Chicago World’s Fair to the man who could tell Picasso, ‘Wrap up those pictures. They’ll make a nice present for Elizabeth.’”

  The Todd home was bedlam, as photographers even climbed up onto the building’s roof. Looters broke into the garage where Todd stored his liquor and made off with cases of Scotch and champagne.

  Dick was out of a job after Todd’s death. Subsequently, he took over Elizabeth’s household and began to handle her personal and business affairs, even scooping up dog poop.

  Phone calls were coming in from tout Hollywood and from reporters the world over. Dick handled each call graciously and efficiently, although denying all requests for photographs, interviews, and personal visits.

  From New York, Fisher called Dick, claiming that he was “deeply concerned about her, afraid she would try to commit suicide or lose her mind completely.”

  On his first night alone with her, Dick read her letters from all over the world—“from the famous and the unknown.”

  In the middle of Elizabeth’s depression, Dick told her that Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, was said to have fatally stabbed her mother’s lover, Johnny Stompanato.

  “I bet Lana did it,” Elizabeth said. “Johnny was once my lover. I’ll always remember him. Lana didn’t have to kill him. She could have kicked him out instead.”

  Dick routed very few of the incoming calls through to Elizabeth. However, she’d instructed him, “When Eddie calls, and I know he will, put his call through to me right away.”

  From New York, Fisher talked to Dick, telling him he was leaving the following day to fly to Elizabeth’s side. He had to conclude some business before he could fly away.

  The call from Fisher was directed to Elizabeth’s bedroom. At times, Dick heard her screaming in agony into the phone, a call that he estimated took almost two hours.

  When it ended, Dick entered the room. “I was contemplating suicide with sleeping pills,” she told him. “But Eddie has given me reason to live. He told me he’s always been in love with me. He also told me that he never loved Debbie and could never figure out why he’d married her. With him by my side, I know I can get through the night.”

  ***

  For many reasons, both professional and personal, Paul Newman was deeply concerned about Elizabeth’s condition. He’d gone to her home as soon as he heard the news over the radio. But it was two days before he was able to clear security and was allowed inside.

  Amazingly, one of the first persons he encountered in the crowd downstairs was Greta Garbo, who had just descended from Elizabeth’s bedroom upstairs. She recognized him immediately. “Go upstairs and offer her comfort. I did what I could,” Garbo told him.

  Mounting the stairs, Newman knocked on her door. There was no answer. As he turned, he spotted a photographer trying to conceal himself behind the open door of an adjoining bedroom. He confronted the photographer and demanded that he leave. As her security help later learned, the photographer had planned to barge into Elizabeth’s bedroom and snap a picture of the grief-stricken widow, which no doubt would have appeared on the front covers of tabloids across the country.

  After the photographer was evicted from the premises, Newman returned to the door of Elizabeth’s bedroom and knocked again. This time Elizabeth herself opened the door. She stood before him in a sheer nightgown. When she saw him, she fell into his arms, and he guided her back into the room, where he gently returned her to her bed, covering up her nudity.

  Without make-up and with no sleep for the previous two nights, she looked at him, her violet eyes bloodshot. In spite of her pain, she remained beautiful. She reached for him. “Don’t ever let me go,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

  Through tear-streaked eyes, she told him that “Mike had a premonition about that flight.”

  Elizabeth and Newman talked for about an hour, a session he later shared with Brooks. Fearing that she wouldn’t be able to return to the film set of Cat, he had desperately wanted to assess the emotional condition of his co-star.

  “I was always the strong one in any relationship I ever had,” she confessed to him. “Even with my parents, and certainly through my marriages. But when Mike came along, I surrendered myself to him. He made the decisions. He was my shield against the world. I was his vassal. He solved all my problems. He loved me as no man has ever loved me. I was his. Without him, I have nothing.”

  Spontaneously, Newman blurted out, “You have me.” Later, he would tell Brooks that he didn’t really know why he’d said that. “The words just came out.”

  “Stay with me tonight,” she whispered in his ear. “I can’t stand to be alone. Mike slept here by my side. Last night I kept reaching out for him, finding nothing. No one.”

  “I’ll be here for you,” he promised.

  If Brooks is to be believed, Newman told him that he made love to Elizabeth that night. “It was not a love of passion but a love of comfort,” Newman allegedly told his director. “She needed me. My human warmth.”

  He also told Brooks that “I came to my senses the moment I left her house. I couldn’t replace Todd in her life. I have a life of my own. A wife. Kids. I feared I’d horribly misled her. I can’t be the next Mr. Elizabeth Taylor. I just can’t.”

  Brooks assured him that he should feel no guilt for what he had done. “You were just tending to a desperate woman’s needs.”

  The next day Elizabeth placed three frantic calls to Newman on the set, but he didn’t return those desperate pleas to speak to her.

  ***

  Still harboring his longstanding crush on Elizabeth, her aviator suitor of yesterday, Howard Hughes, finally connected with Elizabeth on the phone. Very generously, he offered her the use of one of his TWA jets to fly her to Todd’s funeral in Chicago and then back to Los Angeles. She willingly accepted his offer and thanked him profusely.

  During the flight to Chicago, the crew remembered Elizabeth clinging desperately to Fisher, and cuddling up protectively in his arms. The pilot later said, “Those two clung to each other like long lost lovers.”

  Ashen and veiled, Elizabeth disembarked from Hughes’ TWA plane in Chicago. On the ramp, she was supported by her brother, Howard, and her doctor, Rex Kennamer. Dick Hanley followed them, carrying her two large purses.

  Her arrival at Chicago’s airport was greeted by some 2,000 fans, screaming her name and clamoring for an autograph, which she would not have given under any circumstances. A limousine whisked her to the Drake Hotel in Chicago, where a suite had been prepared for her. It was filled with flowers from friends and from fans expressing their sympathy.

  Michael Todd, Jr., with his wife, Sarah, had met Elizabeth at the Chicago airport. He had gone ahead to make the funeral arrangements.

  The next day, police estimated that some 20,000 frenzied fans lined the funeral route to Todd’s grave site. It was believed that this was the largest turnout since Bugs Moran gang members were buried in th
e wake of the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  Some of the more crazed fans showed up along the funeral route not to gape at Elizabeth but to scream and shout for Fisher. They were the more dedicated members of his Chicago fan club. Many of them brought their record albums for him to autograph. Of course, in these circumstances, he could not grant such requests.

  Designer Helen Rose flew to Chicago with Elizabeth’s “widow’s weeds”— a black mink wrap, black leather gloves, a black suit trimmed with broadtail fur, a black velvet cloche hat, and a black veil that left her scarlet-painted lips visible.

  Elizabeth specifically had not invited Monty, knowing that he found Todd distasteful. Ignoring her wishes, he showed up anyway. She spotted his face in the milling crowds.

  Monty was horrified by the crowd. “It was noisy and vengeful. I saw envy in their faces, hatred, and bleakness.”

  Mike Todd’s brother, David Goldbogen, had originally wanted a nine-foot tall replica of an Oscar statuette to function as Todd’s tombstone. But the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences threatened to sue, and the plan was abandoned.

  Defined during its aftermath by Dick Hanley as “a Todd extravaganza,” the funeral of Michael Todd took place on March 25, 1958 at the Jewish Waldheim Cemetery in Zurich, Illinois, outside Chicago.

  Fans ate potato chips and popcorn, trashing the cemetery with their garbage. Untamed children crawled over the Jewish tombstones. Hot dog vendors peddled snacks and drinks to the mob.

  At Todd’s grave site, covered with a black tent, Elizabeth bowed before the bronze casket containing his charred remains. “I love you, Mike,” she said, sobbing. “I will love you for eternity. There will never be another.”

  As Rabbi Abraham Rose conducted the Orthodox service, his voice was drowned out by fans shouting, “LIZ! LIZ! LIZ!”

  A photograph of the young weeping widow, supported by Eddie Fisher, was flashed around the world. In Dick’s words, “Eddie had become a surrogate for Mike. Michael, Jr. was yet another surrogate. Elizabeth had two men in her life, both of whom were in love with her.”

  Fisher later referred to the funeral as “an agonizing ordeal—I didn’t think I’d get through it.” Like the widow, he knelt before the casket and sobbed. “I’ve lost the only real friend I ever had.”

  Dick stood nearby, mesmerized by the scene of the weeping Elizabeth with Fisher. “Eddie was behaving more like a widow instead of as a best friend,” he later said. “I had heard only rumors about the intimacy of Eddie and Mike. It was not a traditional male/male friendship. They were asshole buddies in more ways than one, or so I heard.”

  As the police tried to clear a pathway for Elizabeth back to her waiting limousine, unruly spectators tried to break through the cordon of police, hoping to tear off pieces of Elizabeth’s clothing. One woman with a camera ripped off Elizabeth’s veil, saying, “Listen, bitch, I want a picture of your tear-soaked face.”

  Fisher managed to push Elizabeth inside the limousine, whereupon they discovered that the driver was missing—lost in the crowd. The mob surrounded the car. Some of the young men began to rock the vehicle, trying to force her to come out and to pose for pictures. She screamed, fearing the limousine would be toppled over. It took eight policemen to force the crowd to stand back from the limo. The driver finally appeared.

  As Elizabeth recalled, “Hordes of people swarmed like insects all over the limo so we couldn’t see out the window.”

  It took an hour for the police to clear a pathway for the limousine to leave the cemetery and take Elizabeth back to the Drake. Once there, she met privately with Monty. The confrontation did not go well, as she had not wanted him to come to Chicago. He was seen storming out of the Drake, where he hailed a taxi to take him to the airport and onto a flight back to New York.

  Then Elizabeth and Fisher, along with their special guests, were driven to the airport for the flight aboard Hughes’ plane back to Los Angeles in the wake of that grotesque funeral.

  Throughout most of the flight, Elizabeth, in front of everyone, huddled with Fisher, his arms protectively around her. He shared a memory of Todd with her:

  “Mike told me that most young boys in America grow up wanting to become President of the United States. But Mike told me his life-long wish was to marry Elizabeth Taylor.”

  ***

  One of the strangest events occurred at the Todd household in Los Angeles after Elizabeth returned from Chicago. Roddy McDowall came over for a sleepover to look after Elizabeth because Fisher had a singing engagement that night.

  Nicky Hilton showed up at the door demanding to see Elizabeth. He didn’t wait for an invitation, but stormed up the steps and barged into her bedroom.

  Roddy heard a drugged Elizabeth say, “Nicky, oh Nicky, you’ve come back!”

  Roddy was asleep on the sofa when a disheveled Hilton, tucking in his shirttails, came downstairs at around 5am the next morning.

  Roddy, who had known Hilton for years, was anxious to learn what had happened.

  “I fucked her all night and I mean that literally,” Hilton said. “Well, maybe I took a cigarette break here and there. I thought I could fuck her into a reconciliation, but she turned me down at 4am. I won’t be back. I’ll drop in and see you, kid, the next time I want a great blow-job.”

  Roddy stood on the Todd family’s porch watching Hilton drive away to his next adventure.

  By 10am that same morning, Michael Todd, Jr., arrived to see the sultry beauty who was technically still his stepmother. She had seen him only on carefully choreographed occasions during the course of her marriage to his father. Sometimes, he had been with his wife, Sarah, whom he’d married in 1953.

  Todd Jr. admitted in his memoirs that he and Elizabeth “never left the house” following his father’s funeral. He recalled that on several occasions “she relapsed into a state of near hysteria. She was crying and fighting against the fact of his death. When she’d pull herself together, she would say, ‘Mike can’t be dead. I don’t believe it.’”

  In the wake of Todd Sr.’s death, Elizabeth confided to his son, “I dream of Mike almost every night, dream that he is still alive. In the dream, I’m in his apartment on Park Avenue. Suddenly, he comes into the room. ‘You silly nigger,’ he says to me. ‘You thought I was dead, didn’t you? But I was just lying low till I got things straightened out.’”

  “It wasn’t the dream that shocked me as much as Elizabeth dreaming that Dad had called her a silly nigger,” Todd, Jr. said. “That made no sense at all. I never heard Dad call anybody a nigger, especially his goddess wife.”

  In his hours-long talks with Elizabeth in her bedroom, Todd Jr. shared many stories about her late husband that she had not heard before. Some of these tales amused her; others made her jealous, especially if a woman was involved.

  Mike Todd Sr. and Jr. in 1952

  Todd Jr. claimed that Marilyn Monroe had desperately wanted to appear in a cameo in Around the World in 80 Days, portraying the saloon singer in San Francisco, a role that had gone to Marlene Dietrich.

  “Monroe arrived at Dad’s apartment on Park Avenue,” Todd Jr. said. “He took her to his bedroom and auditioned her privately there. While I watched a Roy Rogers movie on TV, Dad and Monroe were in there for at least three hours. I heard a lot of giggling. It must have been some audition. Finally, Monroe emerged and wet-kissed me goodbye. In spite of her efforts, she didn’t get the part. I never understood why not. Monroe would have brought more publicity to the film that Dietrich.”

  When the story was repeated to Fisher the next day, he said, “I also auditioned for Mike. He had me sing the same lyric all afternoon, but decided to give my part to Sinatra. He told me that Sinatra would bring him a lot more publicity. For his stint in the film, Sinatra was given a brand-new Thunderbird.”

  “Dad didn’t believe in following the rules,” Todd Jr. told Elizabeth, “and you know that’s true. When I was eight years old, he told me you don’t ask a policeman if you can spit in the subw
ay. ‘If you gotta spit, you spit, but you don’t ask if you’re allowed to.’”

  Todd, Jr. said that he once visited his father in Palm Springs, where he and Elizabeth were resting from their world tour. One afternoon, Todd Sr. left to play golf and then to engage in some heavy drinking with Frank Sinatra.

  “Elizabeth and I were alone around the pool,” Todd Jr. said. “She had on this tight-fitting swim suit with a leopard print. At some point, she casually pulled it off and lay nude in front of me. She didn’t come on to me, but she closed her eyes, knowing that I was taking in her beautiful body and big tits. I got an erection and I couldn’t get it to go down for a while. If I’d fucked her then, and Dad had caught me, he would have held my head underwater until I drowned. Elizabeth was very provocative to do that. After all, I was her stepson.”

  “On some nights, we talked about reviving Mike’s plan to film Don Quixote in Spain,” Todd Jr. recalled. “Dad had talked about casting various actors over the years. But Elizabeth came up with a weird suggestion for casting the lean, lanky Don Quixote. ‘Gary Cooper could be great in the title role,’ she said. Maybe he would. The idea wasn’t as crazy as it sounded at first.”

  “Elizabeth decided, at least for two or three weeks, that I was the only man on earth who could replace my Dad in her life,” Todd Jr. claimed. “She went for me—I mean, came on really strong—and I caved in. She told me I was like a younger version of my father—and that thrilled her. She said she’d never gotten to know him as a young man, since he was already in late middle age when they met. She and I were contemporaries, and she said that by loving me, she was getting to experience what young love with Dad could have been. I knew that didn’t make any real sense, but it was a conceit she harbored for quite a while, even though it was completely unrealistic.”

  Eventually, Cat’s director, Richard Brooks, visited Elizabeth in her bedroom and later observed: