Eddie was given a small part in the film (which he essayed very well), but not for his acting ability so much as for his ability to babysit the star. It was, he says, “the worst job of my life, trying to deal with my hellion of a wife.”
By this time, Elizabeth Taylor had become the strong-willed, sharp-tongued powerhouse her mother, Sara, had been years earlier. However, at the same time, she had no one to regulate her penchant toward self-consumption. Those closest to her were often her handlers—agents, publicists, assistants—and rarely would she be scolded for her temperamental nature. There was one tremendous difference between Elizabeth and Sara, though. Her mother’s single-mindedness and drive was focused outward, on her daughter. Elizabeth, on the other hand, even after her children were born, still saw herself as the one who most needed tending. She firmly believed what her mother had told her all those years earlier: She was special. She deserved the finest. By now, though, she had gotten the best of everything, quite literally. If material goods and public adoration were all that were factored in, there’s nothing Taylor could have wanted. She had it all.
Of course, she didn’t really have it all, did she? What she lacked was a genuine, supportive relationship. She craved a strong man. 150
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However, she found herself in a serious conundrum. While looking for a fighter, she ultimately still needed to win. She craved both the strong man her mother never had, and the sense of righteousness her mother had in great abundance. It was a complex tug-of-war between dueling desires, a battle that would be impossible to win. While Mike Todd had the wherewithal for the conflict she so desired, Eddie did not. His supplication at her feet would inevitably fill her with rage. She became abusive during the making of Butterfield 8, trying to spur him into anger to get a rise out of him so that he might prove to her that he really was a man. It never worked. Instead of engaging in battle, Eddie was unfailingly sweet, his every reaction to her couched in careful gentleness . . . which only infuriated her all the more. Sometimes, if she had been particularly vicious toward him, the poor man would retire to his bed and draw the blankets over his head. She couldn’t help but connect his avoidance of the sparring bouts she would instigate with the weakness of her father, Francis. “Wimp!” she would at times shout toward Eddie as he headed away from the growing tornado that was Elizabeth Taylor.
Eddie, of course, had his own issues. “My father was a tyrant who treated my mother like a slave,” he explains. “I wanted my mother to fight back, and because she never did, I thought she was weak.” In Elizabeth, he had certainly finally found a strong mother figure, one who fought back . . . and how. In Butterfield 8, John O’Hara expertly wove Depression-era history with speakeasy culture. It’s based on the true story of Starr Faithful (her real name!), who’d been found dead on June 8, 1931, in Long Beach, on Long Island. After her death, it was learned that hers had been a hard-living, hard-drinking life of loose morals, mostly spent in speakeasies. She was tough, but sympathetic. In his colorful portrait, O’Hara reimagined Faithful as Gloria Wandrous, a tragic antiheroine whose turbulent life ends in a senseless death. The script was rife with illicit sex and rampant boozing; it was, arguably, the perfect Elizabeth Taylor vehicle. Finding Her Way
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O’Hara later said that in Gloria Wandrous he created Elizabeth Taylor before there even was an Elizabeth Taylor, just as in Pal Joey he had created Frank Sinatra before Frank Sinatra. (Butterfield 8, incidentally, was a telephone exchange in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.)
Production on Butterfield 8 began in New York on January 4, 1960. Eddie did what he could to get Elizabeth to work on time and act as an intermediary between her and everyone else, but in the end she was determined to have a terrible time, and so she did . . . as did everyone else.
When it was finished, there was a screening of a rough cut for studio executives. During it, Elizabeth hurled a drink at the screen. Then, in lipstick, she scrawled “NO SALE” on the office door of producer Pandro Berman (wickedly re-creating the memorable opening scene in the film in which her character does the same thing on the living room mirror after spending the night with Laurence Harvey).
The irony of this story is that, in the end, despite all of the melodrama that had surrounded the making of Butterfield 8, Elizabeth was terrific in it. As always, it was her talent that would redeem her—and, of course, the vulnerability of which her Cat on a Hot Tin Roof director, Richard Brooks, speaks and that now had another level of humanity to it. In a 1975 interview Brooks said that, in his view, her work had been enhanced by the experience of Mike Todd’s death: “What it did mainly was it helped her grow up. Death and anguish were things she’d read in a script and she could emulate from other performances or from being told about. But when Todd died, it was something happening to her in the moment, and she was enough of a pro, enough of an actress, to know that this was something that you use honorably and to the best of its advantage. That was what she did. She used everything in her life from that moment on, and consciously too—the joys as well as the sorrows.”
Despite her bravura performance, however, Elizabeth still felt that the movie had been a complete waste of her time. “This pic-152 Elizabeth
ture stinks,” she said succinctly. As it turned out, most of the country’s film critics agreed with her bitter assessment when the movie was finally released to the public. Undaunted, though, Elizabeth’s devoted audience flocked to the theaters to see her star in Butterfield 8: The film wound up tripling its $2.5 million cost, earning more than $7.5 million for MGM.
Part Three
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HER DESTINY
A False Start for Cleopatra
W ith Butterfield 8 finally out of the way, Elizabeth Taylor was finally free to do something she really wanted: make the film Cleopatra. September 28, 1960, was the day scheduled for the beginning of principal photography on that film. For the production, an eight-acre outdoor lot at Pinewood Studios, some fifteen miles northwest of London, had been majestically re-created as the ancient city of Alexandria at a cost of about $600,000. Peter Finch had been cast as Julius Caesar, Stephen Boyd as Mark Antony. After numerous revisions, the script was now being honed into a final draft by screenwriter Dale Wasserman, who had been instructed by Walter Wanger to focus all of his attention on the development of Elizabeth’s role. “The film was about Elizabeth Taylor, and I was to write it as a vehicle for her, with only her in mind throughout,” he recalled. “That was made clear to me at the outset.” Though she now occupied a big part of his creative world, Wasserman had never even met Elizabeth. He based his work on his observations of her after repeatedly viewing most of her movies.
On November 13, Elizabeth’s health took a turn for the worse. She awakened with a terrible headache. So bad and persistent was the pain that a doctor had to be summoned. Before long, Elizabeth was checked into a hospital, now suffering from spinal meningitis. Out of the blue and without warning, it was as if her pain, misery, and anger continued to have no outlet other than through the slow and utter destruction of her body.
Sara, with her Christian Scientist background, was not sur-156 Elizabeth
prised by this latest turn of events. “I was afraid this kind of thing might happen to her,” she told one of Elizabeth’s friends at the time. “I mean, look at how unhappy she is. It has to manifest somehow.” Needless to say, those kinds of comments did not sit well with Elizabeth.
After a week’s stay in the hospital, Elizabeth, Eddie, and the children abruptly took off for Palm Springs, where she would recuperate, leaving those invested in Cleopatra in London to wonder if she would ever return to the set, and if so, when. By this time, $7 million had been spent on the film. The movie was already proving to be a financial disaster, and Elizabeth had stepped before a camera only a handful of times, giving the studio about twelve minutes of usable footage for its millions. At the rate she was going, it promised to be many months before she would find her stride as an actress in this film
. Elizabeth’s absences had already cost Lloyd’s of London, the production’s insurer, millions of dollars. Therefore, 20th Century-Fox made the decision to shut down the production, as if they had any other choice with its star an ocean and a continent away.
A Near-Death Experience
and Then an Oscar
M arch 4, 1961—a day Elizabeth Taylor would never forget. She, Eddie, and the children were in London staying at the Dorchester Hotel. She was getting ready to finally begin work on the almost forgotten Cleopatra film and would shortly be leaving for Rome. On this day, though, something in her body had gone Her Destiny
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very wrong, and without warning she collapsed. She was found on the floor, suffocating, her face turning blue, her fingernails black. By sheer coincidence, down the hall from Elizabeth’s room, a bachelor party was being given for a young medical student. The hotel operator figured that a doctor would be at that party, and made a call to the room. Sure enough, a noted anesthesiologist was there. He ran down the hallway to Elizabeth’s room, where he found her on the bed, nearly unconscious. He tried to dislodge the congestion in her throat with his finger, but to no avail. Then he pushed his finger against her eye, pressuring it to ensure that she would not go into a coma. She woke up instantly, took one look at him, hurled an epithet at him, and then passed out again. Arrangements were made for Elizabeth’s immediate transportation to The London Clinic. There, an emergency tracheotomy was performed. While she was on the operating table, though, she says, she woke up. Looking at all of the doctors and nurses around her, she tried to speak. However, the air from her lungs just went straight out the gaping hole in her throat. When a nurse noticed that Elizabeth had come out of the anesthesia, she saw the terror in her eyes and leaned over to comfort her. Elizabeth asked her for a piece of paper and a pen. In scrawled handwriting she wrote,
“Am I still dying?” Then she lost consciousness again. After the tracheotomy, it still did not look good for Elizabeth. By this time in her life, she’d had a nervous breakdown, colitis, three cesarian sections, a tonsillectomy, anemia, a crushed spinal disk, bronchitis, meningitis, phlebitis, a broken leg, torn knee ligaments, double pneumonia, food poisoning, a splinter in her eye, three vertebrae replaced in her spine, a tracheotomy—illnesses and accidents by the score, and she wasn’t even thirty. Again, certain questions are unavoidable: Why so much misery in her life? What was behind it? Did she feel so out of control that she believed her only safe haven to be a hospital? This time, though, she didn’t seem to have the will to go on, so exhausted was she from her . . . life. In fact, Eddie was told that she was dying. It appears that Elizabeth was not totally unaware, at least by this time, of the 158
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possibility that something in her mentality may have been responsible for her illness. Later, in 1965, in her first memoir, she would write, “When I became sick with pneumonia, I think it was my subconscious which let me become so seriously ill. I just let the disease take me. I had been hoping to be happy, pretending to be happy. But there was something deeply desperate inside me and I was consumed by self-pity. My despair became so black that I just couldn’t face waking up anymore.”
Sara Taylor flew to England to be at her daughter’s side with, of course, Francis. Again, the attention from Sara was focused, as always during times of crisis, on Elizabeth’s physical well-being rather than on her film career. Did that make Elizabeth, on some level, feel more loved by her mother?
“I remember Francis calling me in tears to tell me that Elizabeth was dying and that he and Sara were going to be with her,”
says Stefan Verkaufen. “I asked how Sara was doing. He said, ‘Not good at all.’ I knew that she’d already been very upset about the business with Eddie Fisher. It hadn’t been an easy couple of years for the Taylor parents. I don’t think people were aware of how difficult Elizabeth’s romantic life and her illnesses had been on them. It was a constant heartache. Now this.”
When the news got out that Elizabeth Taylor was in her final days, thousands gathered in the streets in front of the hospital to hold vigil for her. There were prayer services all over the world. It doesn’t overstate it to say that the possibility that Elizabeth might die was major, worldwide news; some news outlets even erroneously reported that she had died—much to her later glee. Many historians have pointed to this time in her life as the period during which Elizabeth garnered the most sympathy thus far, thereby softening her image as a tempestuous homewrecker. It’s true; she certainly now seemed more fragile and vulnerable than ever before. Of course . . . she recovered. She always, somehow, recovered, didn’t she? One day she just looked up at Eddie and, because she Her Destiny
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couldn’t speak, her eyes did the talking for her: I’m alive, they seemed to say. I can’t believe it. How wonderful! Her mother later told Peter Lawford in a television interview,
“We were there for three nights, we didn’t leave the hospital. We sat on a bench outside her room. And the doctors kept coming out and saying it looked like the end. And I was praying with all of my heart, and so was Daddy. And I knew it wasn’t the end, and she knew it. She told me afterward that she could hear all of this. They had machines all around her, yet she could hear everything they were saying . . . and she knew that it wasn’t the end.”
For the next week Eddie sat at her side, watching over her, aware of her every breath. She seemed so fragile lying in her bed, her arms stuck full of needles, her body connected to all sorts of beeping machinery. She looked so young and innocent without her makeup, nothing at all like the hellion she’d been with him in recent months. Now she actually resembled the young lass from National Velvet, as if her most recent tragedy had somehow brought her back to her youth. Sympathy for her surged up in Eddie. He was so moved and frightened, there were times he would put his head on her breast and sob. He did love her, no matter what she thought of him.
“I remember wondering, without her anger, what would she be?” he recalled many years later. “It occurred to me that I’d never known her when she wasn’t angry. At me. At the studio. Her mother. Mike, for dying and leaving her. At the world. Without her anger to keep her going, I wondered if she would just fall limp and be . . . nothing. I just didn’t know.”
One day, he glanced at her and caught her staring at him. When she forced a weak smile, he knew she was back. The late novelist Truman Capote once remembered his visit to Elizabeth in the hospital: “She was very lively, though one could see she had gone through a massive ordeal. She was whiter, by far, than the hospital’s bed sheets. Her eyes, without makeup, seemed bruised and swollen, like a weeping child’s. ‘My chest and lungs were filled with a sort of thick black fire,’ she told me. ‘They had 160
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to cut a hole in my throat to drain out the fire. You see,’ she said, pointing to a wound in her throat that was stopped with a small rubber plug. ‘If I pull it out, my voice disappears,’ she said and pulled it out and indeed her voice did disappear—an effect which made me nervous, but which made her merry. She was laughing, but I didn’t hear her laughter until she had reinserted the plug.”
When she left the hospital to go back to Hollywood on March 27, Elizabeth credited Eddie’s devotion for her return to—not good, but reasonable—health. For Elizabeth, it was one step forward, three back when it came to any recovery. She would stay in California for a six-month recuperation before resuming work—finally—on Cleopatra. Later, in July 1961, Elizabeth would be honored at a fund-raiser at Cedars of Lebanon–Mt. Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles (now Cedars-Sinai). It was at that event, in a speech written for her by Joseph Mankiewicz about what had happened to her in Rome—
leave it to Elizabeth to have someone write a speech for her about her own near-death experience—that she demonstrated her flair for the dramatic that she’d inherited from her mother. Although there is no way to be sure, it is quite likely that Mankiewicz also directed this emotional soliloquy. Remember, h
e is the only person in the history of the movies to win two back-to-back Oscars for directing and writing: People Will Talk (1949) and All About Eve (1950). Standing alone at a microphone in front of a rapt audience, she intoned:
“Throughout many critical hours in the operating theater [ Op- erating theater! Pronounced by Elizabeth as THEE-uh-tah], it was as if every nerve, every muscle were being strained to the last ounce of my strength. Gradually and inevitably, that last ounce was drawn, and there was no more breath. I remember I had focused desperately on the hospital light hanging directly above me. It had become something I needed almost fanatically to continue to see, the vision of life itself. Slowly, it faded and dimmed, like a welldone theatrical effect to blackness.
“I died.”
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With that, a collective gasp could be heard from her audience.
“Shall I tell you what it was like?” Elizabeth asked. People in the audience nodded eagerly.
“Being down a long, far tunnel, and there was a small light at the end. I had to keep looking at that light. And I heard the voices, urging me to come back. Come back, Elizabeth. Come back.” She also said that she saw Mike Todd on the other side, and he too urged her to turn around and return to her life. Indeed, she was more than just an actress, through and through. She was her mother’s daughter. “The experience I had was painful, but beautiful,” she said dreamily. “It was like childbirth.”
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