The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (3 page)

From the moment
Velvet
opened at New York’s Radio City Music Hall for Christmas 1944, it catapulted Elizabeth into juvenile stardom. Her performance—more natural and relaxed than anything she would subsequently do before the camera or on stage—is one of her two favorites, the other being
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Clark Gable, king of MGM, pronounced that she had achieved the best juvenile work in movie history. The
New York Times
’s Bosley Crowther wrote, “Her face is alive with youthful spirit, her voice has the softness of sweet song and her whole manner is one of refreshing grace.” L. B. Mayer raised her to $30,000 per year. She became the idol and role model of millions of girls, including future columnist and TV personality Rona Barrett, who recalled, “God, she was gorgeous. Those purple velvet eyes. The first time I saw the film, I spent every waking moment staring into the mirror in our apartment wondering if there would ever be a way
I
could look like that.”

To capitalize on the box-office success of
Velvet
, Elizabeth was shoved into another animal opus,
Courage of Lassie
, in which the popular canine, cast as an Allied combatant in WWII, regularly outsmarts the Nazis, with Elizabeth going through another outdoorsy role. Working almost constantly, she had no opportunity to develop real boyfriends, but that didn’t stop her from having imaginary ones. After work at Metro each day, she’d go home around 3 p.m. and play make-believe games with two girlfriends who lived on her block. “We’d make up plays . . . and of course I was really
in
, because I could say, ‘Well, I know Van Johnson, so Van Johnson is going to be
my
boyfriend today. But I’ll let
you
have him tomorrow.’” She and her chums christened themselves “The Three Musketeers.”

Each morning Sara roused Elizabeth from bed in time to go horseback riding at the Riviera Country Club for an hour before reporting to makeup at nine. Natalie Wood was another typically overprotected, isolated child actress, and her mother was perhaps Hollywood’s most dedicated stage mother, “rivaled in protective ferocity only by Elizabeth Taylor’s,” wrote Natalie’s biographer Warren G. Harris.
⁴
Sara Taylor was at once the unsung heroine of Elizabeth’s career and a deceptively soft-spoken adventuress who, still trim and attractive in her late forties, was out for all the power and pleasure she could get. “Sara Taylor had a tremendous crush on L. B. Mayer,” wrote Ava Gardner in her memoir. “Elizabeth must have been aware of it, because her mother never stopped talking about Mayer. I think it’s the reason Elizabeth hated him so much.”
⁵
According to Shirley Temple, L. B. tried to seduce her thirty-seven-year-old mother, Gertrude, while, in an adjoining office,
Wizard of Oz
producer Arthur Freed exposed his genitals to eleven-year-old Shirley. Compared with Sara Taylor, Gertrude Temple was a plain, matronly woman, but no female was safe from the randy execs at MGM. A shocked Shirley giggled at Freed’s exposure, and Gertrude fled L. B.’s office, walking backward. Metro, Shirley concluded, had “more than its quota of lecherous older men.”
⁶
Unlike Gertrude Temple, Sara Taylor had found her element and embraced it wholeheartedly.

Once Sara had penetrated the inner sanctum of Hollywood studios via Elizabeth, she left Francis Taylor for Michael Curtiz, who directed Elizabeth at Warner Bros. in
Life with Father
in 1946. Francis began a gay affair with costume designer Adrian, another closet homosexual, who was married to Janet Gaynor. When her parents separated, Elizabeth said, “It was no special loss. I had felt fatherless for years anyway.”
⁷
According to Guilaroff, “Most difficult of all for Elizabeth was her parents’ separation, which began in the autumn of 1946.”
⁸
By the following summer, Elizabeth and Sara were living in a beach house in Malibu, while her father and brother remained in Beverly Hills. After Sara’s affair with Curtiz ended, she persuaded Francis to return, and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper headlined, “Elizabeth Taylor’s Parents Reunited.” Fourteen-year-old Elizabeth would remain estranged from her father for another six years. “I looked upon my agent, Jules Gold-stone, and Benny Thau of MGM as my two fathers,” she recalled. “I went to them for help and advice.” It is doubtful that Francis was still battering her, since she was now the family’s primary means of support.

She once said she loved her brother, Howard, “as much as any man I’ve ever known.” Howard had grown into a handsome lad, with eyes as uniquely distinctive as her own. The grasping Sara set up a meeting for him with a studio executive, but Howard had already seen that fame didn’t make Elizabeth happy and sheared off all his hair so he wouldn’t have to audition. It was Howard who dubbed Elizabeth “Lizzie the Lizard,” which explains why she came to hate the name Liz.

The Taylors’ beach house in Malibu was an ideal setting for teenage socializing and dates for Elizabeth, but apart from the Three Musketeers, she had few friends and was shunned as an oddball by her peers, who made her feel paranoid. There were no dates, no proms, no football games. Howard, who attended Beverly Hills High, said, “Get your own dates. You got to take chances like other girls. Call up a boy, get turned down, maybe, like any other girl,” but she demurred, knowing that nice girls in the 1940s waited for boys to make the first move. Finally Sara prevailed upon Howard to invite forty friends to a Saturday cookout, but Elizabeth found herself marooned on the beach as the guests flirted and drifted off two by two. She felt “completely lost,” she recalled.

Ironically, there were disturbing parallels in the films she was making. In
Cynthia
, a surprise hit, she played a sickly, neurotic teenager who finally rebelled against her domineering parents, portrayed by Mary Astor and George Murphy, and found acceptance among her high school contemporaries. Adolescent moviegoers identified and instantly embraced Elizabeth as America’s Teen Queen. Costar Jimmy Lydon gave Elizabeth her first screen kiss—“politely pecked, like a handshake,” she commented, dismissing it as a child’s kiss. It was “humiliating,” she added, “being kissed on the screen first before real life.” According to Lydon, she was distracted over having been trapped into being her family’s breadwinner. Costar Mary Astor also noted her agitated state, which Elizabeth had already begun sedating with mild sedatives “to calm her nerves,” Astor said.
⁹

It became evident between Elizabeth’s fourteenth and fifteenth birthdays that she was blossoming into a major sex object, boasting a thirty-five-inch bust, thirty-four-inch hips, and a twenty-two-inch waist. Metro hastily drew up yet another contract on January 18, 1946, giving her $750 per week and her mother $250 per week plus a bonus of $1,500. When Elizabeth was loaned to Warner Bros. for
Life with Father
, Metro charged Warner $3,500 a week for her services but pocketed everything over $750, thanks to the patently corrupt studio system. In her role as Mary Skinner, she played the girl who wins the family’s eldest son, Clarence, portrayed by Jimmy Lydon. Her performance—one of her least effective—suffered because of her mother’s affair with Curtiz.

Sara took Elizabeth for a vacation in England after the wrap, and Howard stayed behind with his father. On Elizabeth’s return, she resumed a crushing workload. When she at last objected to the exploitive drudgery of her childhood and adolescence, Sara shamed her for not being grateful. Elizabeth began to fall into fits of depression and call in sick, missing work. Her mother actually encouraged this behavior after discovering that Irene Dunne had “menstruation privileges”—days off during her period, provided by contract. Sara demanded the same rights for her daughter, though she never blamed Elizabeth’s absences from work on menstruation but rather on colds or sinus infections. On subsequent pictures, Sara always demanded the “Irene Dunne” clause.

Elizabeth became known as a nervous, somewhat difficult girl who might or might not show up for work. Alarmed, L. B. ordered a close watch kept on her by the studio doctors, fearing he’d lose her as Metro’s top potential money earner. “She could play Dracula’s daughter and draw crowds,” he commented. “If the moviegoers are married, they want exactly that kind of daughter. If the moviegoer is a single girl, she wants to be just like Elizabeth. And if it’s a single man, then he wants to meet Elizabeth.” Innately shrewd, Elizabeth knew her value. She immediately snapped back whenever Mayer insulted her or her mother. When it was rumored she was to appear in a musical, Sara took her to L. B.’s office to inquire if Elizabeth should begin taking singing and dancing lessons. The touchy, hot-tempered executive felt that the mother was being pushy. “You’re so goddamned stupid you wouldn’t even know what day of the week it is,” he yelled. “Don’t try to meddle into my affairs. Don’t try to tell me how to make motion pictures. I took you out of the gutter.”

“Don’t you dare to speak to my mother like that,” Elizabeth said, standing up and facing the CEO. “You and your studio can both go to hell.” Mayer, who had destroyed two-time Oscar winner Luise Rainer for much less, blanched and broke into a sweat. He was stunned not only by the adolescent’s anger but by her precociously foul mouth. He wisely said nothing, knowing that every studio in Los Angeles wanted her and would shell out more for her than the $30,000 he was paying. Terrified by what she’d done, Elizabeth burst into tears and ran out of the office. She collided with L. B.’s gay secretary, Richard Hanley, who let her weep on his shoulder. Sara remained in Mayer’s office, doing whatever she could to pacify the Big Daddy. A message was relayed that Elizabeth should march back in and apologize, but she refused, saying, “He was wrong.”

During two years of romantic misery, as Jane Powell and other teenage stars fell in love and became engaged, Elizabeth remained a wallflower. Intimidated by her lush beauty, boys didn’t want to risk rejection by asking her out. She had to rely on Bill Lyon of MGM’s publicity department to take her to Roddy’s eighteenth birthday party in September 1946. Even there, boys shunned her. Bill noticed that she “danced constantly, but with older men.”
¹⁰
Ironically, when still fifteen, she was among the top three winners as “America’s Girl Friend” in a 1947 national poll, coming in behind Shirley Temple and June Allyson. A beaming L. B. announced, “Our child star has suddenly developed an elegant bosom and become a fully formed lady.” Her jutting breasts caused censors to insist an orange be placed in the gap between them, and if the cameraman could see the orange, he had to move the camera back. Studio “B.I.’s,” bust inspectors, regularly patrolled her sets, ordering a higher-cut dress when too much bosom was visible, but as soon as they left, she bared as much as the law allowed, loving to exhibit her assets. Metro gave her an $18,000 raise. She posed for her first cheesecake photo at fifteen, revealing her ripening figure. “As a child I had been dying to get my period because it meant I was growing up,” she recalled. “I loved every second of puberty.”

As a moneymaker she was pampered shamelessly by Metro. When she sprouted a perfectly ordinary adolescent pimple, the studio rushed her to a dermatologist. When she stepped on a nail and punctured her foot, an ambulance was summoned to take her to the studio hospital, sirens blaring. Every time she developed a common cough, a full thoracic examination was ordered. Even on trips to the bathroom, someone always accompanied her out of fear she’d be raped. She quickly came to expect this kind of attention and demand it. Despite her own salty language, if anyone cursed on one of her sets, he was immediately fired.

One morning the young star sat in the makeup and hairstyling department at MGM along with Turner, Gardner, Garland, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Greer Garson, and Nancy Davis (the latter would one day wed Ronald Reagan and become First Lady of the United States). They were all waiting for Guilaroff, and when he arrived Elizabeth told him, “My eye is bloodshot. Look. Won’t it show up in close-ups?” He told her to call the studio doctor and moved on to Ava Gardner. Dr. Blanc, a studio physician, gave Elizabeth an eyewash and told her director it was okay for her to work that day. On another occasion, she complained of a nose irritation. Again Dr. Blanc was summoned, and again he said there was nothing to worry about—she could be made up and go before the cameras. Foot-dragging is a distinctive trait of troubled children, and Elizabeth, beginning in adolescence, would be late for virtually every significant occasion of her life. Lacking self-esteem, she used unpunctuality as a means of bullying others into admitting their need of her.

Once the camera was rolling, she was a consummate pro who got it right on the first take, and around Metro she became known as “One-Shot Liz,” the ideal movie actress. Off-camera, however, she didn’t know what to do with herself, years of child labor having robbed her of a chance to develop a life. Richard Burton, a later husband, said she was “naturally somewhat indolent, not the kind of girl one finds rushing off to play golf and tennis. She can barely move one foot in front of the other. God forbid. She just seems to find everything just too much trouble.” Gorgeous on the outside, Elizabeth felt awkward and ugly on the inside. As a result, she would always have a special affinity with anyone “who has ever felt unloved, unwanted, and ineffectual,” she said.

There was never any letup in her workload. On January 16, 1948, she started filming
Julia Misbehaves
with Peter Lawford and Greer Garson, known as “The First Lady of Metro.” During the shoot Elizabeth was instrumental in the meeting of Garson and her future husband, Texas oil tycoon Colonel Elijah E. “Buddy” Fogelson, whose adopted son, Gayle, had become a friend of Elizabeth’s. She still had “a tremendous crush” on Lawford, now twenty-five.
¹¹
When she turned sixteen in February 1948, Lawford and other cast members threw a birthday party on the set, giving her jade earrings and a silver choker. Metro gave her a complete new wardrobe. Though she didn’t know how to drive, her parents gave her a Cadillac convertible with a set of gold keys and a miniature steering wheel on the passenger side for her to use as Sara taught her to drive. When she got her license Elizabeth gave a new meaning to the phrase “hell on wheels,” driving like she owned the road and sometimes, when parking, hitting the car in front of her and then backing into the one behind, walking off as if it were the other person’s fault.