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

by Darwin Porter

  Many biographers have claimed that Elizabeth’s “big” attraction for Fisher was the result of his being hung like a horse. Yet in startling contrast, many of his former bedmates, including Las Vegas showgirls, referred to him as “Princess Tiny Meat.” On the Oprah Winfrey Show, Debbie Reynolds, in reference to her former husband and his endowment, once pointedly performed a gesture with her hands, indicating that her former husband measured no more than four inches erect.

  During his lifetime, Fisher, or so it is estimated, seduced some 1,000 men and women, mostly women. One would think that all these objects of his seduction could agree on the size of his penis. But such is not the case. Marlene Dietrich told Orson Welles, “Eddie is parlor sized.” Her statement was enigmatic. Did Dietrich mean that he was hung appropriately for the parlor—but not for the bedroom?

  Jane Ellen Wayne, a Hollywood biographer, worked in public relations at NBC during the period when Fisher was televising his musical show for Coca-Cola. She talked to two or three starlets whom Fisher had dated at NBC. “They would talk about how well-endowed he was, and how skilled a lover he was, ranking right up there with Gary Cooper and Frank Sinatra. If anyone had an interest in good sex—and Elizabeth Taylor is said to have been ardent about it— Eddie Fisher was somebody who would have impressed her.”

  In addition to maybe one thousand hookers, Fisher also seduced numerous stars over the years. They included Edie Adams, Pier Angeli, Ann-Margret, Nathalie Delon (wife of Alain), Marlene Dietrich, Mia Farrow (to Sinatra’s fury), Judy Garland, Hope Lange, singer Jane Morgan, Merle Oberon, Stephanie Powers, Kim Novak, Carol Lynley, Juliet Prowse (to Sinatra’s fury), Angie Dickinson (of JFK fame), Maria Schell, and Mamie Van Doren. Exotic conquests included Judith Campbell Exner (mistress of both John F. Kennedy and mobster Sam Giancana), Pamela Turnure (press secretary to Jackie Kennedy), and Virginia Warren, daughter of Chief Justice Earl Warren.

  He was also rumored to be a closeted bisexual, and may have had a few discreet affairs with young men, including waiters in Las Vegas. He has gone on record denying almost a hundred times that he was a homosexual.

  “Oh, Eddie,” Elizabeth said, “you protest too much. Why don’t you shut up about it?”

  After marrying perky Debbie Reynolds, Fisher’s popularity soared, and he had a number of hit records, eventually commanding $250,000 for his appearance at a single recording session.

  Even Hedda Hopper approved of the Reynolds/Fisher marriage. “Never have I seen a more patriotic match than these two clean-cut, clean-living youngsters. When I think of them, I see flags flying and hear bands playing.” Hopper would soon change her definition of what she saluted and what music she heard.

  A popular New York columnist of his day, Earl Wilson, was among the first newspapermen to learn about the Taylor/Fisher love affair. On August 29, 1958, Wilson wrote: “Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher were dancing it up at the Harwyn Night Club this morning. Eddie having been Mike Todd’s close friend is now sort of an escort service for Liz.”

  “After Wilson’s column was published, all hell broke loose,” Fisher claimed.

  Wilson followed with almost nightly sightings throughout New York ranging from the Quo Vadis restaurant to the Embers Night Club.

  What Wilson had to say about Reynolds could not be printed. “To put it bluntly, Debbie has more balls than any five guys I’ve ever known. She pretends to be sweet and demure, but at heart she’s Hard-Hearted Hannah.”

  Hedda Hopper Interpreting E.T.’s involvement with E.F. as a personal betrayal

  When Hedda Hopper read Wilson’s column, she shouted, referring to Elizabeth, “That bitch! That slut!”

  The Soviets had launched Sputnik, Alaska had voted for statehood, and Dr. Martin Luther King had been arrested in Alabama, but newspapers were obsessed with the unfolding saga of “Liz & Eddie.”

  On September 8, 1958, The Los Angeles Herald Express headlined a story—EDDIE FISHER IS DATING LIZ TAYLOR. That revelation got more play than Khrushchev threatening atomic retaliation against the United States if it attacked Red China.

  In Manhattan for the taping of his television show for Coca-Cola, Fisher invited Elizabeth to spend Labor Day weekend with him at Grossinger’s, the most famous resort in New York State’s Catskill Mountains. Grossinger’s was where he had launched his career in 1949. It had also been the setting for his wedding ceremony to Reynolds in 1955, when he had been the number one singing star in America. (“Eat your heart out, Frankie,” he said.)

  Thousands of Elizabeth’s fans, nationwide, were outraged that she did not spend “at least a year in mourning,” in the wake of Todd’s untimely death.

  In Hollywood, Reynolds could take it no more. At 2am on the morning of September 6, she telephoned Fisher’s suite at the Essex House in Manhattan. There was no answer. She knew that Elizabeth was staying in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Through a ruse, she called the Plaza’s switchboard, claiming that she was a telephone operator in California and that Dean Martin was on the line, waiting to speak to Fisher.

  Fisher came to the phone, “Deano, what in hell are you calling me for at this hour?”

  “It’s Debbie. Why don’t you roll over in bed and give Elizabeth the phone?”

  After five minutes of violent arguing, Fisher finally admitted the truth. “I’m in love with Elizabeth. I never loved you. I want a divorce.”

  “If you marry her, she’ll dump you within eighteen months,” Reynolds shouted back at him. She later asserted, “And Elizabeth did get rid of him, just as I had warned him.”

  On reflection, Reynolds claimed, “Eddie wanted to be a movie star. He married one. Then he left me for someone even bigger. Looking back, I can see that Eddie wasn’t that interested in me. I was not a woman of the world, or a passionate woman like Elizabeth. He was way overmatched with her, but he didn’t know that, and she didn’t realize it at the time, probably because she was in such despair.”

  The New York Daily News claimed, “The storybook marriage of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds skidded on a series of curves yesterday—Liz Taylor’s.” Life magazine chortled, “Hollywood was caught with its make-believe down.”

  Elizabeth’s former friend, party giver Elsa Maxwell, wrote: “The facts seem to me to prove she has been aggressive in her romances, ruthless in her disregard for the feelings of those who have stood in her path, and indifferent to the wreckage she has left behind her.”

  At the time this attack appeared, an MGM publicity picture of Elizabeth, sensually dressed in a white silk slip and satin pumps, was plastered across America. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was soon to be released.

  All the sympathy Elizabeth had generated after the loss of her husband faded as soon as news broke that she was involved in an affair with Eddie Fisher. In Stockholm, a newspaper headlined the story as BLOOD THIRSTY LIZ VAMPIRES EDDIE.

  “Harlot” and “Jezebel” were some of the kinder words used to describe her after that. She was called “a viper,” “a cannibal,” “a barbarian,” and “a man-eater.”

  Fan magazines such as Photoplay urged the public to boycott her films. She was denounced in newspaper editorials, and a minister in Los Angeles had his congregation burn her in effigy.

  Max Lerner, a writer for The New York Post, for a brief time would become Elizabeth’s lover. He defended her marriage to Fisher. “I like the fact that they are quite frank about their feelings for each other. This is a case where a joyous candor is far better than a hypocritical show of virtue.”

  She liked the column so much, she invited Lerner to visit Fisher and her in her suite. “I fell in love with her,” Lerner said. “She told me how stimulating Eddie had been in bed the night before. ‘Three and a half times, Mr. Max.’”

  The following week, Elizabeth, still in love with Fisher, bizarrely launched a sexual affair with the chubby fifty-seven-year-old political columnist. Their on-again, off-again fling continued until 1961.

  She met Lerner at times in secluded pubs in London, eventually in
viting him back to her suite at the Dorchester when Fisher was away at a singing engagement. In time, she would tell Lerner, “I thought I could keep Mike’s memory alive that way, but I have only his ghost in Eddie.”

  Until she got involved with Fisher, Elizabeth played Sinatra songs, but she switched to “Wish You Were Here,” “I’m Walking Behind You,” “I Need You Now,” and “Oh! My Pa-Pa.”

  The adverse publicity whirling around his romance caused NBC to cancel The Eddie Fisher Show.

  Elizabeth tried to defend herself from attacks. “Mike is dead. I’m alive. Maggie the Cat is alive.” She very accurately told the press, “No one woman breaks up a happy marriage.”

  Reference to the scandal would last in the public mind for years. Even the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy, in analyzing the depth of her popularity in America, commented sardonically on her own situation years later: “Anyone who is against me will look like a rat—unless I run off with Eddie Fisher.”

  “I never suspected that Elizabeth was going to entice my husband away,” Reynolds said. “I might not have been as surprised were it anyone else. But how it all happened was rather scandalous in that they didn’t take more care to avoid hurting me. I understand when I look back on it. Who would pass on Elizabeth? No woman living was a beautiful as her. And Eddie had even tried to act like Mike Todd, smoking big cigars.”

  “I was the last to find out about the affair,” Reynolds continued. “There had been hints in the papers, and I had noticed that when I turned up at a party, my own friends were whispering. Although I didn’t want to find out the truth, I had to face up to it. Even so, it was a great shock to find them together. It left me shattered. The shock of discovering the affair was the day I lost my innocence. I was a virgin when I married Eddie. I was very religious, so I didn’t believe in divorce. But they laid guilt on me that I was keeping them and true love apart. So, I finally let Eddie off the hook. I told him to go.”

  In later years, Reynolds said, “I should have married my first love, Robert Wagner. All we did was kiss. But Elizabeth, not me, bedded Bob. She knew him as Bathsheba knew David.”

  Over the years, Fisher made increasingly bitter remarks about Reynolds. “Debbie Reynolds was indeed the girl next door. But only if you lived next door to a self-centered, totally driven, insecure, untruthful phony.”

  “My trouble with Debbie began on my honeymoon night,” Fisher told Elizabeth, “when I left her alone to join Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, and Sammy Davis, Jr., in a poker game. That, sweet cheeks, won’t happen in my marriage to you.”

  ***

  Flying back to Los Angeles on an airplane separate from that used by Fisher, Elizabeth rented an elegant Bel-Air home where Tyrone Power, one of her former lovers, had lived previously with Linda Christian.

  On November 15, 1958, Elizabeth was resting in the bedroom that Power had occupied within the house. It was from within the premises of that room that she took a call from Dick Hanley, who told her that Power had died of a heart attack during the filming of a dueling scene in Spain. The movie he was working on at the time was Solomon and Sheba, a biblical epic co-starring Gina Lollobrigida. [Power was replaced at that point onward in the film by Yul Bryn-ner.]

  Newspaper editors were desperate for stories about “Liz and Eddie.” Sometimes copy was falsely created. News stories surfaced that she’d had a nervous breakdown and was committed to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, where she was said to have been forced into a straitjacket.

  The day that false story appeared, she made a spectacular entrance into Chasen’s in Los Angeles on the arm of Eddie Fisher. From other tables, some celebrities got up and walked across the dining room to greet her, including Gregory Peck, who kissed her on the mouth. “Sorry you didn’t make Roman Holiday with me,” he said. Bette Davis and Myrna Loy also greeted her. However, Joan Crawford, accompanied by a handsome young man, made it a point to parade by her table and pointedly ignore her.

  Many of Elizabeth’s other friends no longer received her, even refusing to accept her phone calls. She was greatly hurt by their rejections.

  Fisher gave a small party for her, inviting those few friends who still were on good terms with her. Perhaps surprisingly, two of her most loyal supporters were Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Others who showed up at the party included the ever-faithful Rock Hudson and directors Richard Brooks and Joe Pasternak. Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis remained faithful, as did Peter Lawford and George Burns and Gracie Allen.

  Toward the end of the party, Elizabeth learned that Lawford had given Hudson a blow-job in her bathroom.

  During this period of her life, it wasn’t all party time, dinners, and love-making with Fisher. Illness of some sort had always hovered over Elizabeth. This time, it was her daughter, not herself, who nearly died of double pneumonia.

  Ignoring the press attacks on her, and perhaps as a means of helping her cope with them, Elizabeth devoted all her attention to Liza. “She was sort of blue gray in color.” Elizabeth said. “They punctured her lumbars and had great big pipes going into her veins, and her little arms were strapped onto boards taped to the bed. Her chances were very slim. But with hope and a lot of prayer, the poor little thing came through. I don’t think I could have borne it if Mike’s daughter, my child, had died.”

  The near death of fifteen-month-old Liza didn’t garner any sympathy for Elizabeth in the press. Instead, Elizabeth during this crisis received some of her worst hate mail. Several death threats came in from the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. One member referred to her as “The Jew Cunt in need of circumcision.”

  Elizabeth and Fisher were getting nothing but attacks and threats. In contrast, good and glowing press reports were devoted to Reynolds. She brilliantly played the role of the abandoned wife, appearing before photographers in pigtails with no make-up. For dramatic effect, she had diaper pins fastened to the corner of her blouse. “I am still very much in love with Eddie,” she told the press.

  When Dick and Elizabeth heard that, they mocked her. “Yeah, right,” said Elizabeth. “That fucking bitch! That fucking liar! Twice, she practically hauled him into the divorce courts. The only reason she didn’t divorce him the last time around was because she found out she was pregnant.”

  “I have to tell my children that Daddy’s not around any more,” Reynolds told the press in her best “Tammy” voice.

  Fisher dismissed Reynolds’ antics, calling them “a charade for the media. She did not enjoy sex with me. I called her Mount Virgin. It was a real challenge to get to the summit.”

  As Reynolds glowed in America’s approval, Elizabeth made another controversial move.

  Before marrying Fisher, she converted to Judaism, a move she’d been considering while still married to Todd. The Arab League immediately banned her films. “I’m proud to be a Jew,” she said. “Eddie and I have so much in common now. I love him dearly and plan to be Mrs. Eddie Fisher forever.”

  “My darling Elizabeth enters into every marriage thinking it is forever,” said Roddy McDowall in Hollywood.

  “Even as a little girl, I wanted to be Jewish,” Elizabeth said. “In Ivanhoe, I was, although I was almost burned at the stake. Blame it on eating all those bowls of Louis B. Mayer’s chicken soup in the MGM commissary. I identify with the sufferings of the Jews. Being Jewish brings me closer to Mike Todd. I even have a new name—Elisheba Rachel. I also just purchased $100,000 worth of bonds for Israel.”

  In front of her parents, Elizabeth converted to Reform Judaism at Temple Israel in Hollywood. Sara equated the event as something equivalent “to attending a witches’ Sabbath.”

  Mike Todd might have approved, but Fisher, not that keen on religion in any form, didn’t seem to care. He told columnist Rona Barrett, “Jewish girls are no good for fucking. They seem to feel they’re doing you a favor.”

  During Elizabeth’s marriage to Fisher, the couple attended a synagogue only once, to observe the high holidays, and she never gave up wearing a gold cross.

&
nbsp; In Hollywood, Sara, an anti-Semite, told her friends, “I hated Jews all my life, and now I have one for a daughter.”

  Fisher now called Elizabeth “My Yiddena” (“my little Jewish woman”).

  After her conversion, one small town newspaper in Alabama wrote that, “Elizabeth, the traitor, had denied Jesus Christ and will burn in hell’s fire.” Another claimed, “She has now joined the pagans—Marilyn Monroe, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Carroll Baker.”

  Lesser lights such as singer Polly Bergen and the British bombshell, Diana Dors, had also recently converted to Judaism.

  When a slightly tipsy Elizabeth at Romanoff’s was asked, “What do you see in all these Jewish husbands,” she had an answer: “The only difference is a small piece of skin.”

  ***

  The Reynolds divorce from Fisher came through as an interlocutory decree in February of 1959. The final dissolution of the ill-fated marriage would require another year’s wait.

  Elizabeth announced to the press that she had rented quarters for herself and her children at the Hidden Well Ranch in Pleasant Valley, Nevada, five miles from Las Vegas, as a means of being near Fisher, who had signed for an engagement there at The Tropicana.

  Even at the time of the Reynolds/Fisher wedding in 1955, Fisher was already hooked on cocaine and methamphetamines, as he candidly admitted in his memoirs. Since 1953, he’d been receiving injections from the notorious “Dr. Feelgood” (Max Jacobson), who was also injecting Jack and Jackie Kennedy. As Fisher said, “Jack Kennedy and I shared drugs and women.”

  “I have often been asked what I learned from marriage,” Fisher said. “That’s simple: Don’t marry Debbie Reynolds. Sexually, Elizabeth was every man’s dream. She had the face of an angel and the morals of a truck driver.”