How to Be a Movie Star (40 page)

The million-dollar deal transformed the financial future of the industry. "You're worth what you can get," Tony Curtis quipped to one reporter, summing up in six simple words the new thinking in Hollywood. Like Elizabeth, Curtis was no longer content with a set salary but rather opted for a percentage of the gross. He was hoping to make nearly a million from
The Vikings,
then finishing up its successful run on the nation's screens. Studios, meanwhile, were being forced to settle for a steadily decreasing percentage of the profits—an arrangement that could only lead to a fundamental shift in the way movies got made.

That's precisely why so many of the old guard—like Hedda Hopper—shuddered. "It is ... basically a fight between the older generation and the younger generation," actor Rod Steiger observed, likening the struggle to Ibsen's
The Master Builder,
in which an older architect fears being made obsolete by younger men with new and different ideas. The handwriting was on the wall. The studios were on their way out—dealt a potentially fatal blow by a star who had hated them ever since that day in Mr. Mayer's office when he'd made her mother cry.

Sam Spiegel was worried, and he was not a man who worried needlessly. One of the shrewdest of the new breed of independent Hollywood producers, the Austrian-born Spiegel had an Old World charm and a New World sensibility. He knew how to make films and he knew how to sell them. His productions tended to be edgy—and successful. He'd won an Academy Award for Best Picture for
On the Waterfront
in 1954 and produced the biggest box-office hit of the year,
The Bridge on the River Kwai,
in 1957. But now he was worried. And with good reason.

The initial reviews of
Suddenly, Last Summer
were not good. Much of the film is, after all, a talkathon with long, tedious stretches of monologue for each of the three principals. Moreover, the unsavory aspects of the script, like the famous death by cannibalism, proved too much for some critics.
Time
compared the experience of watching the film to being crushed in the "clammy coils" of a giant snake;
Variety
termed the picture "possibly the most bizarre film ever made by a major American company." Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times,
who'd waxed lyrical over Elizabeth in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
thought that she was "rightly roiled" here, "but her wallow of agony at the climax is sheer histrionic showing off."

Even Hepburn hated the film, disappointed in how literally Mankiewicz had directed Gore Vidal's script, which she felt was all about metaphor. Spiegel was worried that he had a disaster on his hands. Hedda Hopper agreed. In her column, noting the reluctance of the three stars (all of whom she disliked) to participate in publicity, she wondered how "Sam Spiegel expects to sell that one." Spiegel wondered himself.

But he had an idea. Working with the publicity department at Columbia, which was distributing the film, Spiegel laid out a daring marketing campaign. "The idea was to sell Elizabeth Taylor," said Tom Mankiewicz, and downplay the lurid subject material. And so, once again, the movie poster that dominated Hollywood for a season featured Elizabeth Taylor dressed in flimsy white, her breasts seeming to throw themselves at the spectator. This time, instead of the slip she'd worn in
Cat,
she was photographed in a low-cut bathing suit—in a pose not seen in the film, but designed merely to sell the picture. The copy line read:
SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER CATHY KNEW SHE WAS BEING USED FOR EVIL!
The ploy worked. The film, which went into general release in January 1960, defied its critics and became the fourth-highest grossing film of the year, making $5.5 million in the United States alone.

"Elizabeth was a sex symbol, the most desirable woman in the world," Mankiewicz said. "So they used that to their advantage."

The same thought was on the minds of Metro executives, who had finally settled on the picture that they wanted her to make for them. Instead of running from Elizabeth's Bad Girl persona, MGM wanted to embrace it. Even though the fan magazines were still calling her a home wrecker, Elizabeth's risqué image had proven its box-office value. So the script for
Butterfield 8,
based on the novel by John O'Hara, made sure to play up all that smut and scandal—even if this seemed to confirm the opinions of those fans who'd written to Hedda calling Elizabeth a "harlot" and a member of the "oldest profession in the world." The protagonist, Gloria Wandrous, is a party girl who jumps from man to man, accepting gifts and free rent in exchange for sex. The film charts her rise and fall in sexy, salacious detail.

Elizabeth was horrified when she read the script. "Little more than a prostitute," she said about Gloria. She knew that the studio was trying to exploit her offscreen publicity for their own advantage. It's no surprise that she would always hate the picture. Deeply offended, she flat-out refused to do it.

Her protests were met with smug smiles at Metro. They reminded her that as long as she still owed them one last picture, they had the power to preempt any deals that she might make with other producers. If she wanted to make
Cleopatra
—and all that
money
—she'd have to make
Butterfield 8
first. Elizabeth sulked. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Mike had promised her that she'd never have to go back there, but now Eddie—and even Kurt Frings—were powerless to prevent it. Finally she agreed—so long as they could shoot the picture in New York. Hollywood—the industry
and
the town—had become anathema to her.

Just how much Gloria was modeled on Elizabeth's public image can be discerned by reading the description of the character that director Daniel Mann scribbled on the shooting script. "Finds men the source of her regeneration," Mann wrote. "She needs to call the tune. A will to find and lose herself. She has a great sense of humor. Changes come fast. Emotion flows—flips—flops. She's up, she's down. Big-hearted." It's hard not to think that he was describing Elizabeth.

And there's more. The film, which began shooting in February 1960, unfolds almost as a dramatization of the last two years of Elizabeth's life. Making that point clear, Eddie Fisher was cast as the man so besotted with her that he is ready to leave his sweet blond girlfriend (played by Susan Oliver, clearly chosen for her resemblance to Debbie Reynolds). "What are we going to do," Oliver asks, "
you
, me, her—the three mixed-up musketeers?" Later, when Eddie kisses her, Oliver complains: "You can't kiss me thinking I'm Gloria anymore." All of this would have seemed very familiar stuff to those who'd followed the scandal in the fan magazines.

"I get it," says Gloria's lover, played by Laurence Harvey. "You pick the man. He doesn't pick you. You also drop the man when you want." Gloria replies coolly, as many people thought Elizabeth might reply in real life: "Yes. And without a parachute." But Gloria is forced to admit later, in the film's most famous melodramatic moment: "Face it, Mama! I was the slut of all time!" It was a line that could've been lifted directly from many of the letters to Hedda.

The script of
Butterfield 8
went even further than simply dramatizing Elizabeth's life. It also made her pay for her "sins" of the last year and a half. Screenwriter John Michael Hayes, a pro at adapting material to suit both censors and audiences (he'd scripted
Peyton Place
and would later work on
The Children's Hour
), clearly understood that Gloria couldn't get off scot-free the way her real-life counterpart had. One minute Gloria is having a grand old time kicking up her heels, the next she's mouthing platitudes about the "utterly conventional" being the truly beautiful. Girls who "kick up their heels," she is explicitly warned, are doomed. And so, of course, Gloria is killed in a car accident. The studio seemed to be hoping that audiences on both sides of the Liz-Eddie-Debbie scandal would flock to see the picture: one side to delight in Elizabeth's free love and high living, the other to take satisfaction in her punishment.

There was no satisfaction, however, in Eddie's performance. Producer Pan Berman wrote to Hayes asking him to rewrite Eddie's scenes to make them easier to play. Scenes that would "normally be clear in the hands of most actors [seem] dubious when played by Eddie Fisher," Berman said. But Elizabeth had insisted on her husband being cast. During filming, she displayed a "fetish" (Berman's word) for Eddie's character to be consistently portrayed as treating her solicitously. She knew the public was going to be reading a lot of autobiography into the film, and that much she wanted to control.

It's understandable that she wouldn't be happy making the film. "A walking time bomb," first assistant director Hank Moonjean described her. She started to doubt her decision to film in New York instead of Hollywood. If they were back on the Metro lot, they wouldn't have to stomp on the soundstages to scare away the rats the way they did at the Gold Medal Studio in the Bronx. And scenes outside Gloria's apartment, shot in Greenwich Village at Sixth Avenue and West Tenth Street, brought the inmates of the adjacent House of Detention for Women to their windows, where Moonjean said they yelled "all sorts of epithets" at Elizabeth, swathed in her fur coat with emeralds dangling from her ears. "Ah, fuck you!" the glamorous star shouted right back at the hecklers, which, of course, simply set off a whole new round of hoots and whistles.

It was a new world making movies in the poststudio era. It would take some getting used to. Depressed, Elizabeth just didn't show up on the set some mornings, and Moonjean would be sent to fetch her. "Her servants knew me," he said, "so I'd just go up to her room and wake her up. I must say that never have I seen anyone as beautiful first thing in the morning as Elizabeth Taylor. No makeup, no hair fixed. She'd say, 'Why don't you put coffee on?' and we'd sit there and talk, and pretty soon the studio would send a car looking for
me
too!

"But here's the thing," Moonjean added. "She might have hated the movie from the very first day but she didn't sabotage it. Once she got to the set, she worked very hard, gave it her best. On the set, she was a model of cooperation." About a month into the shoot, the Screen Actors Guild called a strike against the studios that was scheduled to begin Monday, March 7. Director Mann rushed to get as much filmed as he could. "Elizabeth worked right up until 11:59 on Sunday night when they pulled the plug," Moonjean said. "She didn't need to do that."

The high regard in which she was held by the crews on her pictures did not cross over into the press. Even after a year and a half, she was still the most popular villain in the newspapers and fan magazines. This despite Kurt Frings's well-known ability to contain scandal. At the same time as his client's troubles, he was dealing with some sensational headlines of his own. Actress Mary Murphy, best known for her part in
The Wild One,
had filed a com plaint with police that Frings had kicked her in the abdomen and bitten her thumb when she refused his advances. But before police got around to arresting the agent, Murphy had a change of heart and dropped all charges. "Kurt sweet-talked her," said a friend of Elizabeth's. "He knew how to escape unscathed."

Yet he didn't manage quite the same success for his client. Editorials deplored Elizabeth's exorbitant salary, calling a million dollars unmerited for any actor, but especially for her: "A lot of citizens are old fashioned enough to think that somehow it flies in the face of public morality." And just as filming on
Butterfield 8
began,
Motion Picture
ran a cover feature "exposing" how cold Elizabeth was in person, even to her children. The magazine told of her struggle to be a "lady," instead of the hard-drinking, foulmouthed nymphomaniac the fan magazines regularly made her out to be.

Elizabeth's press only got worse. Soon came a cover of
Photoplay
featuring Debbie and two of the saddest-looking children ever captured by the camera, Carrie and Todd Fisher, with their bottom lips protruding so far as to nearly reach the collars of their shirts. Inside, Debbie promised to reveal
WHAT I TELL MY CHILDREN ABOUT LIZ AND EDDIE
. Then came another sensational headline in
Motion Picture
—
EXCLUSIVE! DEBBIE THREATENED!
—with a photo of an angry Elizabeth cropped next to a photo of a demure Debbie, giving the clear implication of
who
was doing the threatening, even if the article inside revealed nothing of the sort. (The threat wasn't from Elizabeth, but from "hangers-on" who were apparently keeping Debbie from getting back into the swim of life.)

Yet it's a fact that most fan-magazine stories contained a glimmer of truth, some thread that led, however tenuously, back to real life. Elizabeth
was
hard-drinking and foulmouthed, and her practice of motherhood was definitely of the laissez-faire kind—though no one who knew her would ever call her "cold," especially not toward her children, who were petted and fussed over when she saw them. But the fact that she wasn't out being photographed with them constantly in her arms—the way Debbie was with Carrie and Todd—allowed housewives across the country to make their own judgments. It was clear that Elizabeth Taylor was not the kind of involved, children-first mother they believed themselves (and Debbie) to be. And in some ways, they were right.

A similar strain of truth was spied in another series of fanmagazine pieces that started appearing around this time. Word was seeping out that things weren't all that rosy in the Fisher marriage.
HOW MUCH CAN EDDIE TAKE FROM LIZ?
blared one headline. Elizabeth was depicted as being embarrassed that her fame outweighed his and was pushing him to become a bigger star. "Must Eddie now take from Liz what he reportedly would not take from Debbie?" the article asked. While the piece may have gotten the specifics wrong, it does capture an underlying reality. Elizabeth was waking up to the fact that Eddie Fisher could never replace Mike Todd—and this couldn't be disguised for long in the fishbowl of Hollywood.