How to Be a Movie Star (13 page)

In his only film since returning from the war, Stevens had transformed
I Remember Mama
from what might have been merely a contemplative longing for a simpler time into something more truthful, a work of art suggesting that nostalgia obscured the difficult realities of the past. The blood-soaked fields of Europe had left Stevens with a cynicism out of sync with his prewar films. Yet his loss of innocence was tempered by a lingering hope that somewhere, somehow, such things as love and honor might still survive.

And so Stevens found himself drawn to Theodore Dreiser's novel
An American Tragedy,
the story of a young man who commits murder out of love for a beautiful, idealized girl. "The kind of girl," Stevens told Paramount execs, "that a young man could see at first glance and find his eyes so fixed upon that his attention will not turn. Her beauty and poise must give the impression that she is unattainable."

Sitting at his desk, turning the pages of the February 21, 1949, issue of
Life,
Stevens paused when he saw a full-page color photograph of a young woman from whom he could not turn away. The magnetic eyes of the seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor caught and held his attention. This was the girl he wanted for the film. No one else would do, Stevens was convinced.

"It might appear," he dictated to his secretary in a memorandum addressed to Paramount talent chief William Meiklejohn, "that Sondra, the girl in the story, has only the responsibility that any bright, interesting, and attractive girl would have in a love story, but in this case it is more—it is much more. It is the fundamental part of the machinery that goes to make this whole story work." In other words, Sondra must be so compelling that audiences understand (and remain sympathetic toward) the boy who commits murder to have her. "The only one of whom I am aware who could create this illusion," Stevens argued forcefully, "is Elizabeth Taylor."

Though Stevens was stating the obvious, no one gave in immediately. Elizabeth Taylor was, after all, the property of another studio. Stevens wasn't surprised by the resistance; nothing about this project had been easy.
An American Tragedy
had been filmed before in 1931, not very successfully, and the studio worried that the material was simply too downbeat for a public increasingly distracted by the escapist medium of television. The film industry was suffering from its own form of American tragedy. Average weekly movie attendance was in sharp decline; Hollywood would lose a full one-third of its wartime audience within a year. Even worse, with the court-ordered sale of the studios' lucrative theater chains, profits were in free fall. Between 1949 and 1950 Paramount's bottom line would drop from $20.8 million to $6.6 million.

An American Tragedy
would be a tough sell to the suits. But Paramount was never MGM, where the front office routinely issued the last word on creative decisions. Since the days of the smart, sexy films of Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg (who, in fact, had directed the first movie version of Dreiser's novel), Paramount had been Hollywood's studio of sophistication, a place where filmmakers took chances, where the Marx Brothers tweaked convention and Billy Wilder broke the rules with
Double Indemnity
and
The Lost Weekend.
Metro might have the gloss, but Paramount had its own special reputation.

Still, Stevens knew that he'd have to stay committed. Every few days the broad-shouldered, deep-voiced director (Katharine Hepburn called Stevens a "very male member of society") summoned his secretary to dictate another letter to the Paramount brass. When he was told that the studio wanted more comedies—not a film where the hero ends up on death row—Stevens actually prepared two lawsuits against his employers for "frivolously" withholding their approval. This was not a man who took no for an answer.

Eventually the studio came around, encouraged by the enthusiasm being shown for the film by Montgomery Clift, who was riding a wave of acclaim for his performance in
The Heiress.
Dropping out of Wilder's
Sunset Boulevard,
Clift signed with Stevens just days later (on March 23) for
An American Tragedy.
This was not only a serious, important picture, but now it was actually going to get made. But Stevens kept reminding all concerned that without the right Sondra, the weight of the film would be foisted solely onto the shoulders of its male star—a burden that might prove too much even for Clift's considerable strengths. So Stevens insisted they do everything possible to get MGM to loan them Elizabeth Taylor.

Such a fuss over a girl whose meatiest bit of acting so far had been as Amy in
Little Women,
then in current release. To Hollywood, Taylor was a pretty girl who wore pretty dresses and photographed well in color. Her films over the last few years had been mostly frothy confections churned out by Metro's expert moviemaking machine. But Stevens saw something unique in Taylor's loveliness. "She was this extraordinary child," he told reporter Ruth Waterbury years later. "She was a child of great beauty and sweet personality." He had decided to scrap Dreiser's title and call the film
The Prize,
because "a girl in a young man's eye, in our society, can be the prize. And Liz, at that time, was the capital prize. If she played this part, and would be in this picture ... she would be staggering as far as [the boy's] equilibrium is concerned."

By June, however, there was still no definitive word on Elizabeth's availability. Stevens was getting anxious. What he didn't know was that Metro had turned down the request after mistakenly thinking that Stevens wanted Elizabeth for the less-glamorous part that eventually went to Shelley Winters. But by the end of the month, with everything cleared up and a price of $35,000 agreed upon, Stevens had his Sondra. Ten miles northeast of her home studio in Culver City, the director began laying the groundwork for the film that would change Elizabeth's life.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, had no inkling of what Stevens was up to, or what it all might mean for her. Being fitted for costumes as a last-minute replacement for June Allyson in the gimmicky comedy
The Big Hangover,
all she knew was that she'd be loaned to Paramount sometime later that year to star opposite the exciting new actor Monty Clift. Posing and preening in front of a full-length mirror and holding her arms out wide so that costume designer Helen Rose could measure from her shoulders to her waist, Elizabeth likely didn't give the Stevens project any more thought than that.

After all, there were plenty of activities to keep a young starlet busy. In the last twenty-two months there had been five gala premieres of pictures costarring Elizabeth Taylor, each one taking her another step farther along the road to adult stardom. Metro had invested too much in Elizabeth to let her go the way of most child stars. Already Deanna Durbin was a fading memory, and even Margaret O'Brien, once the studio's surefire hitmaker, had entered an awkward adolescence that would soon render her obsolete. But Elizabeth, graced with a more mature beauty, was being carefully groomed into a sultry leading lady. After playing sweet and innocent in
Cynthia
and
Life with Father
(both 1947), she was allowed to vamp it up in
A Date with Judy
(1948), playing best friend to star Jane Powell. "The big surprise," wrote Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., in the
New York Herald Tribune,
"is Elizabeth Taylor as the petulant, dark-eyed banker's daughter. The erstwhile star of
National Velvet
and other films has been touched by Metro's magic wand and turned into a real, 14-carat, 100-proof siren with a whole new career opening in front of her. Hedy Lamarr had better watch out." In rapid succession came Elizabeth's sophisticated turn in
Julia Misbehaves
(1948), where she steamed up the screen kissing Peter Lawford (she was fifteen, he was twenty-four), and finally her spirited interpretation of the conceited Amy in
Little Women.

But it would take more than movie roles to turn Elizabeth Taylor into an adult star. "You have bosoms!" exclaimed the renowned Philippe Halsman, the photographer for the
Life
magazine shoot. "Stick them out!" So she did—and all around the world men fell like dominoes. Howard Hughes wanted to date her. This new, more mature Elizabeth was presented to the public by none other than her mother in an article for
Photoplay,
a gig surely arranged by Metro publicists. "No longer do her worries center upon her pets," Sara wrote. "Now ... there are other things that interest her—things like clothes and cars and boys. For, as Elizabeth says herself, 'You can't love just animals all your life.'"

So it was good-bye, Nibbles, hello, Robert Taylor—Elizabeth's first bona fide grown-up leading man. (Sara even wrote a poignant death scene for Nibbles a few years later in her
Ladies' Home Journal
article, providing an artful segue from one chapter of Elizabeth's life to another.) The pairing with Robert Taylor came in a melodrama called
Conspirator,
filmed in England the previous autumn by Victor Saville. With the picture in the cutting room, the publicity department was whipping up interest by leaking stories that the young star had been too distracted to return to her lessons after spending the afternoon kissing Robert Taylor. Envious housewives across America swooned on cue. Suddenly Elizabeth was wearing the latest designs of Parisian couturiers like Pierre Balmain and Christian Dior. "I learned how to look sultry and pose provocatively," she said. "I developed sex appeal, even though I knew that, somewhere inside, the child had still not completely grown up."

Elizabeth was awestruck at what was happening to her. "Truly a most remarkable machine," she said of the studio that made her, then made her over. "L. B. Mayer and MGM created stars out of tinsel, cellophane and newspapers. Their tremendous publicity staff built the background, built the personality, built the character. Makeup and wardrobe built the façade, and the story department found something just right for that personality."

The great studios were run like the successful corporations that they were, with various departments reporting along a chain of command that led to the chief executive. "Big Daddy Mayer" rarely visited sets or watched a shoot, but he always had the final word. At regular meetings in his private suite, which he liked to call "the Lion's Den," he was kept apprised of all production decisions by his top lieutenants: Eddie Mannix, Lawrence Weingarten, Hunt Stromberg, Benny Thau, among others. Wags dubbed them "the college of cardinals." These execs shared the top floor of the Executive Building with Mayer, and it was they who fanned out across the lot to lord over directors and stars. Benny Thau was the most influential man in Elizabeth's life, more so even than her own father—for it was Thau who was in charge of her contracts, who eased her way and got her what she wanted on every film she made.

Hurrying across the lot from Wardrobe, Elizabeth's next appointment was with Hair and Makeup. If she was to play a real grown-up woman in
The Big Hangover—
one even worldlier than her role in
Conspirator
—then she needed to look the part. Heading into the salon, Elizabeth encountered a cross section of Metro's talent. "When you walked into the hairdressing department," said Elinor Donahue, "you'd see Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner and Lucille Ball and Lana Turner—whoever was working on the lot that day—all in a row, getting their hair done." Sydney Guilaroff, repeating the magic he'd worked on
National Velvet,
sat the young star down in an available chair and spun her around a few times. After a few minutes of experimenting, he came up with a short, sophisticated do that made her look older—but not too old.

Next she was hustled over to Makeup, where the sweet fragrances of Max Factor were always "drifting out through the walls," as actress Ann Rutherford remembered. Department chief Jack Dawn positioned Elizabeth in front of his lighted mirror and tied a cotton cloth around her shoulders. With a few deft strokes of lipstick, eye shadow, and rouge, he turned the teenager into a glamorous movie star, making sure to darken and emphasize the mole on her cheek—the same one some myopic idiot had once wanted to remove. Dawn knew the mole gave Elizabeth a certain exotic allure.

Transforming ordinary folks into stars was taken very seriously in Hair and Makeup. The temperamental Dawn insisted that his staff be treated as artists instead of technicians, and their wondrous results did, in fact, earn them such a distinction. Elizabeth mostly just sat back and let them do their work—but she wasn't complaisant. When they wanted to change the arch of her eyebrows, she said no. When they suggested that she paint her mouth "way over," she declined again. Given the beauty of the face in the mirror, there wasn't much argument. Barbara Stanwyck, on the lot to make
East Side, West Side,
stopped by one morning and saw Elizabeth being made up in the chair. "No woman," she quipped, "has the right to be that beautiful at five
A.M.
with her hair up."

Selling a new star to the public was never easy, but it wasn't nearly as difficult as selling a star who'd been around since childhood and whose brand was now being recalibrated. The attempt hadn't worked with Shirley Temple at Fox. Despite several high-profile films, the public had never really taken to Temple as a teenage star. Metro understood, as Fox did not, that the most important part of a transformation had to occur in public. And so, after being dolled up at the studio, Elizabeth's crucial next assignment was to go out on the town—with a full entourage of publicists, press agents, photographers, and reporters in tow. It was time for her audience to see Elizabeth
dating.

For a girl who never made a change to her hairdo without input from the studio, whose education, social outings, vacations, and birthday parties had always been coordinated and hyped by publicists, it seemed natural that dating, too, would fall under the auspices of her employers. With her mother or some press agent almost always at her side, Elizabeth had no concept of how to meet boys, or talk to them, or pick one out for herself. It probably felt quite natural when she had been called into the publicity department the previous summer and informed that a perfect date had been found for her.