The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice (8 page)

On the eve of all her marriages—to Hilton, Wilding, and now Todd—Taylor professed a deep yearning to ditch acting for motherhood. The yearning, however, never got in the way of her work. On March 2, 1958, she returned to MGM to portray Maggie the Cat in Richard Brooks’s bizarre, craven replica of Tennessee Williams’s
Cat on
a
Hot Tin Roof
.

In the play, Brick, Maggie’s husband, is explicitly gay. He won’t sleep with Maggie because he is in love with his dead best friend, Skipper. In the movie, Brick avoids Maggie for no reason—particularly in light of Taylor’s beauty and what Williams called her engaging “rocket tits.” “Tenn always joked that even
he
would have been able to ‘bounce the springs’ a few times with Taylor’s Maggie,” James Grissom, author of
Follies of God
, told me. “He didn’t feel anyone could understand Brick’s revulsion with the obligation.”

However, by the time MGM made
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, Williams was just “cashing checks,” Grissom said. He didn’t involve himself artistically in adaptations of his work. The studio had paid him $450,000 for the rights—which presumably included the right to mangle his plot and eliminate his characters’ motivations. Nevertheless, when the film came out, Williams flipped. “He advised strangers against seeing the film,” Meade Roberts, a friend of Williams, told writer C. David Heymann. He would stand outside movie theaters, trying to block people from entering.

If Taylor had reservations about the bastardized script, she did not express them. And soon she would find herself in no position to turn down work. On March 21, 1958—barely three weeks into the movie—Mike Todd’s private plane, ironically named the
Lucky Liz
, crashed in New Mexico, killing the man she had called the “love of my life.” Taylor was devastated, by grief of course, but also, because she had chosen not to fly with Todd, by survivor’s guilt.

If ever there were a time to retreat and heal, this was it. But then Taylor made a startling discovery: Todd had left her no financial cushion. The accoutrements of their sumptuous life were almost entirely leased. Todd had a mere $250,000 in the bank. Alone, bereft, Taylor had three children to support. So she mourned—deeply and passionately—for one month and three days. Then she went back to work. In the first scene she filmed after Todd’s death, she spoke an especially resonant line: “I know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”

Far more than any direction she received from Brooks, grief intensified Taylor’s performance—sadly wasted on the gutted script. Grief exposes vulnerabilities. It sharpens feelings. It unlocks doors to the heart. But grief also clouds judgment. And it cries out constantly for balm—without much concern for where the balm is coming from.

Like Taylor, Todd’s closest male friend, Eddie Fisher, was also in mourning. He, too, needed comfort—which his wife, perky actress Debbie Reynolds, apparently declined to provide. To console Taylor in her grief, Fisher rushed to her side. And soon, as Carrie Fisher, his daughter, later wrote, he moved “to her front.” This prevented his returning to Reynolds. “America’s Sweethearts”—as the fanzines had termed Fisher and Reynolds—were no more.

Taylor’s mistake, however, was not sleeping with Fisher. It was failing to grovel before Hedda Hopper. Taylor had genuflected in the past; she knew the drill. But when Hopper rang to ask whether she planned to marry Fisher, Taylor had the temerity to suggest that Hopper was intrusive. So Hopper penalized Taylor, by publishing only a small part of what Taylor had said: “Mike’s dead and I’m alive.” The quote was intended to turn fans against her, which it did.

Fisher bore the brunt of the anger. He lost his lucrative television gig hosting
Coke Time
. Reynolds, in contrast, got a huge career boost. She reinvented herself as the anti-Taylor: a devoted mother; a moral pillar, a
blonde
. In pigtails, without makeup, she held a press conference at her front door to discuss Fisher’s betrayal. The cover of
Photoplay
’s January 1959 issue said it all: Reynolds, long-suffering, appears with her children, Carrie and Todd. The caption: “Can’t daddy be with us all the time?”

Reynolds’s antics made Taylor more defiant. To the chagrin of her mother, Sara, a Christian Scientist, and, for that matter, Fisher, a Jew, Elizabeth studied with Rabbi Max Nussbaum to convert to Reform Judaism, which in April 1959 she did.

In response to Taylor’s embrace of Judaism, Reynolds flaunted her Christianity. In 1962, Reynolds published an advice book for girls called
If I Knew Then
. It contains some typical fare: how to be thin, popular, and keep a boy’s mind off kissing. (This was not hard: she prescribes a “kitchen date” with actor Tab Hunter, who today is openly gay.) But the book also has a chapter on how and why girls should talk to Jesus. “Saying grace,” she suggests, “is a wonderful way for a family to make a daily contact with God.”

In 1959, as the Taylor-Reynolds skirmish heated up in Hollywood, producer Sam Spiegel miraculously appeared with a way out. He offered Taylor a lead in
Suddenly, Last Summer
, another Williams play, which he and screenwriter Gore Vidal would not allow to be gutted. He planned to shoot the film a long way from Los Angeles—in London, and on the coast of Spain. And he was brilliant at fending off the press. Shortly after shooting began, gossip columnist Louella Parsons published rumors of problems on the set of
Suddenly, Last Summer
—including an allegation that Taylor had become too fat for her part. Spiegel promptly fired off a telegram of rebuttal. It concluded: SORRY TO DISAPPOINT YOUR INFORMANT BUT NOBODY IS MAD AT ANYBODY AND IF ELIZABETH TAYLOR IS OVERWEIGHT I FOR ONE AM AT A LOSS TO SUGGEST WHAT THERE SHOULD BE LESS OF.

8

Suddenly, Last Summer
, 1959

Insane is such a meaningless word.

—Montgomery Clift as Dr. Cukrowicz to Elizabeth Taylor as Catherine Holly in
Suddenly, Last Summer

Lobotomy is a very specific one.

—Taylor, in reply

SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER is lit with the stark black-and-white contrast of a monster movie or an episode of Rod Serling’s original
Twilight Zone
. It opens in the women’s ward of Lion’s View, a falling-down Louisiana state mental hospital. The inmates—a kaleidoscope of catatonic husks, toothless babblers, and twitchy paranoiacs—inhabit a cylindrical tank called “the drum.” The space is shadowy, menacing, and female viewers would do well to fear it. Lion’s View has hired a new male surgeon. His specialty is the prefrontal lobotomy, an operation in which the right brain hemisphere is severed from the left. An operation that, before it fell out of favor in the 1960s, was overwhelmingly performed on women.

Tennessee Williams knew this operation well. In 1937—the year in which
Suddenly, Last Summer
is set—Williams’s own sister, Rose, age twenty-eight, was lobotomized at the state asylum in Farmington, Missouri, where his mother, Edwina, had incarcerated her. Some Williams biographers believe that Williams’s father, a violent drunk, had attempted to molest Rose, and the girl’s accusations so upset Edwina that she gave Farmington permission to cut them out. (Or, more precisely, to pierce Rose’s brain with an ice pick—the device preferred by many lobotomists, who drove it through the roof of a patient’s eye socket, then tapped it with a hammer.)

Williams’s sister was not the only famous victim. In 1941, Rosemary Kennedy, age twenty-three, sister of future U.S. president John F. Kennedy, was lobotomized at the request of her parents, Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. The girl had been disruptive—exhibiting mood swings (who, at twenty-three, doesn’t?) and sneaking out of her convent school. The Kennedys hoped to excise her rebellion, which they did. The operation left her with infantile intelligence, urinary incontinence, and the inability to speak.

Neuropathologist Walter Freeman and his medical partner, neurosurgeon James Watts, were not stripped of their medical licenses for disabling Kennedy. They gained prestige. In 1949, Freeman nominated António Egas Moniz, the Portuguese doctor who invented the lobotomy, for a Nobel Prize—which, astonishingly, Moniz won. A year later, Freeman broke with Watts when Watts criticized Freeman’s plan to streamline the procedure by substituting electric shock for traditional anesthesia. To demonstrate how well his new technique worked, Freeman barnstormed U.S. state hospitals in a van that came to be known as the “lobotomobile.”

By 1959, however, when the film version of
Suddenly, Last Summer
came out, the press had exposed Kennedy’s ordeal, as well as that of other victims. Audiences knew that a lobotomy was not, as one character suggests, “like having your tonsils out.” But books such as Phyllis Chesler’s 1972 landmark,
Women and Madness
, were still decades in the future. Drawing upon exhaustive research, Chesler documented how male mental health professionals have throughout history pathologized disruptive women. A woman who asserted herself sexually—or rebelled against her second-class societal role—was likely to be labeled crazy and locked up. (Or, in yet more primitive times, incinerated as a witch.)

Freeman was discredited in 1967, when he accidentally killed a woman on whom he was performing a
third
lobotomy. But psychotherapists continued to muzzle troublesome women, using antipsychotic drugs such as Thorazine (developed in the 1950s) instead of surgery.

Nor were psychiatrists unique in their insensitivity. Specialists in all fields, particularly gynecology, tended to ignore women’s feelings. During the 1950s, male obstetricians used “twilight sleep” as an anesthetic for childbirth. The drug didn’t ease a woman’s agony; it just made her forget the pain afterward. Even today, some male doctors remain shockingly indifferent to women’s welfare. This was evident in May 2010, when the American Academy of Pediatrics announced its willingness to serve the Muslim immigrant community by performing clitorectomies on girls. Happily, when blistering, immediate, and widespread criticism met the announcement, the AAP backpedaled.

In
Suddenly, Last Summer
, Elizabeth Taylor battles all the doctors who have ever used science against an inconvenient woman. She portrays Catherine Holly, a trauma victim, whose lost memories, if recovered, might destroy the reputation of her newly deceased cousin, Sebastian Venable. But because Williams created art, not agitprop, Catherine does not have a pat antagonist. Nothing in this movie is black-and-white, except its film stock. Doctors, Williams suggests, don’t always practice medicine in a sterilized operating room; they work in the real world, with all its corruption. Sometimes, doctors can be tainted by this corruption. They can be manipulated by unscrupulous people—of whom there is no shortage in
Suddenly, Last Summer.

Thanks to set designer Oliver Messel, Lion’s View is an unmistakable snake pit. But compared with the New Orleans home of Catherine’s aunt, Violet Venable, the state asylum is as cheery as a Disney theme park. Violet’s overstuffed Victorian house surrounds a dank primeval garden, a tangle of clawlike shrubs and twisted tree-ferns, dripping with Spanish moss. A human skeleton adorns a wall niche. Carnivorous plants devour live flies. There, Violet obsesses on the flesh-eating birds that she and Sebastian, her son, witnessed while he was “looking for God” in the Galapagos.

As portrayed by Katharine Hepburn, Violet is over-the-top, even for a pompous Garden District dowager with deep pockets. She enters her drawing room via a birdcage elevator: “The Emperor of Byzantium, when he received people in audience, would rise mysteriously in the air to the consternation of the visitors,” she explains. “But as we are living in a democracy, I reverse the procedure. I don’t rise; I come down.”

Although Violet is a powerful woman, she is in no way a feminist. She recoils from the company of other women, with whom she feels she has nothing in common. She prefers to be around young men, such as her late son. “We were a famous couple,” she tells Dr. Cukrowicz, the new surgeon at Lion’s View, when he visits her. “People didn’t speak of Sebastian and his mother or Mrs. Venable and her son, they said, ‘Sebastian and Violet.’ ”

Cukrowicz doesn’t raise an eyebrow. As portrayed by Montgomery Clift, he speaks with empathy. Yet his expressions are inscrutable. This may have been inadvertent—Clift’s accident froze half his face. But it heightens his mystery; viewers can’t quickly tell whether he’s benign or not.

Cukrowicz’s boss, who runs Lion’s View, is not benign. He is an emblem of the coldhearted male medical establishment. Desperate to shore up his hospital, he places its needs above those of its individual patients. When Violet offers to donate a million dollars, he leaps, despite a large string attached to the gift. She demands that Cukrowicz lobotomize her niece, Catherine.

The girl, Violet explains, has been in a Catholic sanitarium since she returned from Spain last summer, where she had traveled with Sebastian. Delusional, she now “babbles” obscene things about Sebastian and how he died.

“I can’t guarantee that a lobotomy would stop her—babbling,” Cukrowicz tells Violet.

“But after the operation,” Violet says with a twinkle, “who would believe her?”

Eager to impress the surgeon, Violet shows him Sebastian’s art collection—sketches and paintings of erotic male nudes, including a toothsome Saint Sebastian penetrated by arrows. If Catherine’s babbling includes allegations of sodomy, the viewer will not be surprised.