How to Be a Movie Star (14 page)

Someone, maybe Howard Strickling himself, had noticed a small story on the sports pages concerning Lieutenant Glenn Davis, a three-time All-America halfback from West Point, who would be coming to Los Angeles to play one game with the Rams in their exhibition battle against the Washington Redskins. Linking Elizabeth with a sports and military hero was a press agent's dream. It mattered little that Glenn was twenty-three and Elizabeth just sixteen at the time. It was romantic in the desired idealized fashion and could proceed rather rapidly to a tidy conclusion: Davis was set to begin a three-year stint with the infantry in Korea that autumn.

Everyone agreed to the ruse. Hedda Hopper gushed via typewriter that the meeting between the two was "spontaneous combustion." While she'd admit later that "the romance was largely a studio directive," Hedda at the time made much of Glenn's sending Elizabeth a tiny gold football that she wore on a chain. "It was so childish," Elizabeth said. "I remember reading the papers at the time and I thought, 'My God, they think it's a big hot romance!'" But the stories that appeared in the summer of 1948 were so successful that the studio decided to further parlay Elizabeth's romantic interests. And the press went along, eager to play their part.

The craftsmanship of these escapades is revealed in the files of Louella Parsons, who preserved the script of a live, supposedly authentic radio interview that she conducted with Elizabeth around this time. On the air, the young star told the columnist that she'd "talk about anything," so Parsons asked her about her first onscreen kiss in
Cynthia.
"Why," said Elizabeth, "I tell you if a boy kissed me like that in real life, I-I-I..." It all sounded so off-the-cuff, but the script reveals that "real life" had been penciled in to replace the original phrase "private life" and the stammer "I-I-I" had been written in over the original line "I think I'd slap him." (Had that seemed too shrill?) The whole "interview" was, in fact, a little radio play written ahead of time by Louella's producers and vetted by Metro's publicists. Before she went on the air, Elizabeth was handed a script, much as she would have been on the set of a film. She had little or no say in it. As such, it's hard not to hear studio talking points when she mouths lines like "I was going steady ... Gee, it was awful. A girl misses so many dates that way."

The next suitor was found not by Howard Strickling but by Howard Young, Elizabeth's granduncle—although the young man certainly had to pass muster with the studio. William Pawley, Jr. was the son of the American ambassador to Brazil, heir to his wealthy family's aviation business. This time Elizabeth was actually somewhat smitten, much more so than she'd been with the stage-managed Davis. It didn't matter that everything she and Pawley did was choreographed and sold to the public. They had a date at the Ice Capades in April 1949 with a gang of photographers in tow. Hedda Hopper said the young couple "didn't need skates ... they were floating."

Elizabeth Taylor, Metro's romantic dreamgirl, was a hot sell. "The luscious, long-lashed lass of love," one studio press release described her. Such purple prose soon turned literal: The Elizabethan orbs—Hedda Hopper had called them "deep-set pools of blue" just a year before—suddenly became "violet" in the spring of 1949. That particular shade was a buzzword in beauty columns at the time; violet eye shadow and lipstick were said to make women more alluring. In Ellen Gatti's popular serial then running in the
Los Angeles Times,
fictional girl-about-town Lily Thorndyke was known for her "famous violet eyes." Did some studio press agent get an inspiration from reading that? Not only was Elizabeth ascribed the color, but other new stars like Paula Morgan were as well.

But what did hyperbole matter to the young Miss Taylor? It was all a romantic lark. From all accounts, the inexperienced teenager was enjoying the romantic attentions of her new suitor. By the early summer, around the time that the loan-out to Stevens and Paramount was decided and preparations began for
The Big Hangover,
Elizabeth was anticipating flying to Florida to see her Bill, her first real "crush"—despite the fact that, at twenty-eight, he was eleven years older than she was. The studio, although happy to promote the pair, considered Pawley merely another prop for her public image. When the time came, they expected the serviceable young man to obediently fade away. Florida, ruled the studio, was an unnecessary expense. "They weren't counting on the young lady herself," said Dick Clayton, who saw behind the studio's façade. "They didn't know then that this creation of theirs was actually going to have a mind of her own."

Elizabeth sat in the Lion's Den, the anger boiling up inside of her. Mr. Mayer had launched into a tirade. What had set him off wasn't clear—but he was shouting and swearing at Sara, who had requested this private meeting. His curses bounced off the white leather walls in that cavernous office (Samuel Goldwyn once quipped that an automobile was required to reach Mayer's desk from his office door).

It wasn't as if Elizabeth had never heard such salty language. Some of those very same words had tumbled out of her own pretty little mouth on occasion. But Mayer's ire only intensified her distrust of her lord and master. She became increasingly repulsed by the studio chief "foaming at the mouth," as she described him.

At last she could take it no more. "Don't you dare speak to my mother like that!" Elizabeth shouted, standing up and leaning in over Mayer's high-gloss, custom-designed wraparound desk. "You and your studio can both go to hell!" With a dramatic flair, she spun on her heel and ran from the office straight into the arms of Dick Hanley, whose shoulder she cried on not for the last time.

Although Benny Thau insisted that she apologize to Mayer, Elizabeth refused. For the rest of her life, she would take pride in telling people how she never again stepped foot inside Mayer's office. Maybe it wasn't only her choice; surely Mayer didn't relish a sequel to such a scene. But neither did he penalize his fast-rising investment, whose pictures had all made money. No doubt Sara, always more willing to compromise than Elizabeth, made all the necessary apologies as her daughter sobbed in Hanley's arms.

The contretemps with Mayer had occurred some three years before Elizabeth's romance with Bill Pawley, so perhaps studio officials should have been a bit more prepared when the young star insisted that she be allowed to fly to Miami to spend time at the Pawley family's beach house. After all, it had been obvious for some time that Elizabeth Taylor wasn't as malleable as most. Unquestionably cooperative during costume fittings, photo shoots, and makeup sessions, she possessed an independent streak, too—one that allowed her to sidestep the ordeal of pills and pressure that Judy Garland endured within the studio system. Neither would Sara, whatever her ambition, have permitted such treatment of her daughter.

Even as a teenager, Elizabeth had learned a great deal about self-preservation. Years later when she was making a film called
Divorce His, Divorce Hers,
she was surprised when the little girl playing her daughter left the set early. The director, Waris Hussein, explained that the girl was only allowed to work so many hours because she was a child. "We didn't have that at MGM," Elizabeth said incredulously. "You had to learn to survive on your own. I managed to do it, but Judy never did."

Tom Mankiewicz, a friend of both actresses, thought that the difference between Elizabeth and Judy "was one of temperament." Elizabeth came into the business "already strong," he said, while "Judy was emotional, needing affirmation. She sang these songs and you could hear the need and the doubt in her voice. Elizabeth survived the demands of the studio because she was confident that she could get what she wanted on her own."

By her early teens, Elizabeth had developed a crucial, clear-eyed perspective. "I began to see myself as two separate people," she said. "Elizabeth Taylor the person and Elizabeth Taylor the commodity. I saw the difference between my image and my real self"—an ability sorely lacking in many (if not most) Hollywood stars. "Before I reached my teens I resolved to separate my feelings of self-worth from the public image of Elizabeth Taylor. It was a lesson I never forgot." It also allowed her to do the things necessary to sell the commodity to the public without getting lost in the illusion.

That's not to say her journey through the studio system was a cakewalk. "A little red schoolhouse across from Stage 20, to me, is an extraordinary kind of confinement for youthful exuberance," George Stevens would say. Indeed, Elizabeth's highly regimented days often left her anxious and fretful. "I would get up early [and] go out on the polo field," she said. "To get some of my steam off ... I would take forty jumps before I would go into work." Many times over the years she would lament never having had a real childhood—"no football games to go to, no proms to attend, no growing-up things."

There were compensations, of course. Stepping out onto the lot one crisp February morning, Elinor Donahue was awed by the sight of Elizabeth's birthday present from Mr. Mayer: a pale blue Cadillac. "Everyone was talking about it," Donahue said. "'Did you see the car they're giving to Elizabeth Taylor?' We all raced onto the lot, and there was the car with a big red bow wrapped around it. Maybe there wasn't a bow, but that's how I remember it, because it was such a big production in giving it to her." Jane Powell's mother was "huffy" about the gift, Donahue recalled, because Jane had wanted a car, too; but Mrs. Powell had felt girls so young shouldn't be indulged with cars. Mrs. Taylor, on the other hand, "was very agreeable about Elizabeth getting one," Donahue said. Miss Taylor was given a special license to drive the Cadillac so that she didn't have to troop downtown to pass a test with the City of Los Angeles.

But even taking a driving test is part of one's coming of age. "Elizabeth felt a part of her childhood had been taken from her," said Mark Miller, secretary to Rock Hudson and a fond acquaintance of Taylor's in the 1950s. "She was shrewd enough to know she'd missed out in some important ways." Anne Francis said that a sense of detachment from the real world was common on the MGM lot: "We were aware of living a very different reality from the rest of the world, and that was sometimes hard to balance." Elinor Donahue, emotional about her experience even sixty years later, said it was both "unreal and wonderful." She said that they all "lived in a fairy tale, but fairy tales come to an end."

Yet a Cadillac would not have offered much consolation to Elizabeth on the day in 1946 when her father moved out of the house and into the Beverly Hills Hotel, taking seventeen-year-old Howard with him. Mother and daughter were on their own, which they virtually had been for several years, with the Taylor men and the Taylor women living separate lives within the same house. Extramarital affairs were whispered about on both sides. Years later Elizabeth would describe the moment when her "idyllic, happy little family"—the one profiled in
Good Housekeeping
and
Ladies' Home Journal—
"fell apart." Francis "erupted," she said, as Sara increasingly "lived her life vicariously" through their daughter. He also resented Elizabeth making more money than he did.

In some ways, when her soft-spoken father moved out, Elizabeth felt "no special loss." She hadn't been close to him for years. Benny Thau remained her surrogate father, she admitted, and it was to Thau she went "for help and advice." But her parents' separation had an impact on her nonetheless. "It didn't show up at the time," one friend told a reporter. "But...[the rupture in her parents' marriage] played a part in maturing her."

What the breakup demonstrated was the toll that movie stardom took on personal lives. Francis Taylor's brother John candidly observed that Elizabeth's career was a "point of contention" that aggravated the "basic incompatibility" of her parents. Indeed, Elizabeth had watched for the past six years as the bond between Francis and Sara steadily disintegrated. Never passionate, they had once been at least companionable, with Sara still calling her husband "Daddy." But as his wife became more single-minded in her devotion to Elizabeth's career, Francis built up resentments. According to John Taylor, there had been more than just one separation between husband and wife.

Metro had a hand in reconciling the Taylors just at the moment their daughter was venturing into the dating pool herself. "Elizabeth learned early," said Dick Clayton, "that image was the most important thing, that love and all of that ... had to be juggled [along with career and stardom]. How could you grow up in Hollywood and not learn that?"

It was to keep up appearances that the studio finally agreed to allow Elizabeth to head to Florida to see her Bill. But now they had a new problem: how to make it seem as if she hadn't jilted poor Glenn Davis, who was off serving his country in Korea. Fan-magazine readers had bought into the Davis story with a vicarious passion, and now letters to the editor demanded to know "if Liz had penned a 'Dear John' letter to Glenn."

Hedda Hopper, happy as ever to help, went to bat for Pawley, assuring her readers that he, too, was a war hero, having been a pilot during the war. The columnist spun romantic tales of the heartsick Pawley yearning to fly a plane to be near his beloved. Eventually, since the basic narrative was the same, the fan magazines simply exchanged Davis for Pawley and seemed content with that—especially because they got a much more satisfying payoff this time. On June 6, 1949, Hedda broke the story of the happy couple's engagement. The news was personally phoned in to the columnist by Elizabeth herself. Making it official, Sara sent an engagement notice to the
New York Times.
Significantly, the engagement was announced by only the star's mother. Had Francis declined to get involved because he saw the whole thing for what it was?

Of course, none of this could have happened without MGM's approval. Elizabeth might buck her handlers from time to time, but an actual engagement would need to be officially sanctioned. Apparently they'd decided to milk the Pawley story for a little more publicity, consenting to an engagement party. Sara, in her official spin, would say that Elizabeth had begged her "to announce the engagement so she could wear her lovely diamond ring in public." She'd claim that she tried to do so quietly, "but when you are in the limelight it is impossible to do anything quietly. You are suddenly surrounded by cameras and publicity." Cameras and publicity, of course, were what everyone, including the studio, wanted—and an announcement in the
New York Times
and a phone call to Hedda Hopper hardly qualifies as doing it "quietly."