The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (6 page)

She was drawn to him not only spiritually and intellectually but professionally. A budding rebel herself, she venerated him as the first Hollywood figure to defy the powerful studio system and win. Having resisted studio pressure to play conventional romantic heroes, he was at the zenith of his career as a loner and renegade, playing such complex offbeat characters as Steve, the idealistic GI who befriends little Karel, an orphaned survivor of the Holocaust, in Fred Zimmerman’s
The Search
, and Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the ultimate 1950s outsider, in
From Here to Eternity
.

Elizabeth had been an instinctive child star, an innocent who acted straight from the heart, and later a pretty starlet in lightweight films who never thought much about her dramatic potential. Her part in
A Place in the Sun
, drawn from Dreiser’s novel
An American Tragedy
, was a challenge—that of Angela Vickers, a rich girl who comes between George Eastman, played by Monty, and Alice Tripp, a poor factory girl he’s gotten pregnant, played by Shelley Winters. It was acting for which Elizabeth had no proper training or experience. When shooting commenced at Lake Tahoe in October 1949, Stevens ridiculed her timid efforts, pointing out that this was not
Lassie Comes Home to a Place in the Sun
. He made her leap into the icy lake for a scene with Monty, take after take, until Sara screamed that Elizabeth would never be able to have babies. “As far as I know,” Shelley Winters later commented, “Elizabeth never stopped having babies.” Under Stevens’s relentlessly exacting direction, Elizabeth finally started sobbing and ran from the set. Monty rushed to her rescue. In the following days, he began to teach her how to project an air of mystery and fascination in her role. He told her to hold back some of her energy and power, sharing his theatrical training with her. Jack Larson explained in 1999 what that training consisted of:

“He was very knowledgeable. He had been given an education from great people; he learned from Thornton Wilder, in whose
Skin of Our Teeth
Monty appeared on Broadway. He’d played Henry, Mr. Antrobus’s son [he also appeared as George Gibbs in Wilder’s
Our Town
on Broadway in 1944], and Wilder adored him obviously and shared anything he knew with Monty. And then he worked with Alfred Lunt in
There Shall Be No Night
. All that he knew from Lunt about acting he was very generous with; also he was an instinctual actor.” Though Monty was never a member of the Actors Studio, he was directed by Elia Kazan, one of the pioneers of Method acting, in
The Skin of Our Teeth
in 1942, and would be the first of his generation of actors to popularize the moody, self-conscious style later exemplified by Brando, Dean, Kim Stanley, Shelley Winters, Ben Gazzara, Paul Newman, and Geraldine Page. In Monty, Elizabeth had found a master teacher.

“It was my first real chance to probe myself,” she recalled, “and Monty helped me . . . It was tricky because the girl is so rich and so spoiled it would have been easy to play her as absolutely vacuous, but I think she is a girl who cares a great deal.” She began to study Monty, noting that the key to his acting was “concentration.” During a scene, he’d become so emotional that he’d lose control of himself physically, and she found this to be contagious. When he would start to shake, she would start to shake. “Monty is the most emotional actor I have ever worked with,” she said. Sexually, she was intrigued and mystified, but some instinct told her to go slowly. “I really didn’t know then what being a homosexual was,” she recalled in 1997. “But I just knew . . . well, I don’t know how I knew.” She probably sensed it the first time Monty told her he could mimic the Angela Vickers part for her, showing her exactly how to deliver her lines, as well as demonstrating all her expressions and gestures, including her behavior in their love scenes together. While enacting her role in private sessions, he became the essence of alluring femininity, telling her that Angela possessed a great and unshakable inner conviction that she was going to succeed in winning George Eastman.

Elizabeth was equally sure that one day she’d win Monty himself, despite her intuitive awareness of his homosexuality and other difficulties he was struggling with, including his repressive Presbyterian background and Sunny, his anxious, over-controlling mother. Even when Elizabeth was exhausted after an arduous day’s filming, she would make Monty a cup of tea and take it to his room. Apprehensive but flattered that a lovely woman desired him, he told her, “I’ve found my other half!” She begged him to rehearse her for the next day. As he acted out a love scene that was to be shot in closeup, he again took the part of Angela, and she fed George Eastman’s lines to him. He did everything for her but get in drag. She gradually absorbed his interpretation of her role by osmosis, transforming Angela from a shallow ingenue into a fascinating creature of smoldering, eternal womanliness. As Elizabeth blossomed into an actress of depth and sensitivity, she sparked Monty’s best performance to date. His passive intensity, in contrast to her subtle feminine aggression, was the apotheosis of fifties alienation, setting a standard of contained, explosive energy that would galvanize American acting for decades to come. “Bisexuality . . . underpins great acting,” wrote Michael Billings in his book,
The Modern Actor
. Clearly it underlay Elizabeth’s emergence as an actress under Monty’s aegis.

In one of the film’s best-known scenes, Elizabeth appeared in a billowing white strapless tulle evening gown, one of the costumes for which Edith Head would shortly win an Oscar. Unable to contain himself, Monty breathed in her ear, “Your tits are fantastic, Bessie Mae, just fantastic.” After that, she found it impossible to repress her own sexual yearnings for him. She invited him into the bathroom with her when she took one of her three daily baths, supposedly to calm her nerves. At first they just talked as he sat beside the tub. “I’m too old for you,” he muttered. “I’m an old man.” He gave her some Benzedrine, and soon she perked up. She felt incredibly close to him, as if she were inside him, looking out at herself. “I told him everything—even the things I’m most ashamed of,” she recalled. She knew he wanted to be mothered, and she knew she could give him that, but she could also give him much more if he’d let her.

Stevens seemed to grasp the evolving nature of their relationship and used it to good effect in their scenes together. He wrote some new lines and gave them to Elizabeth and Monty. She accepted some of the dialogue without question, for example Angela’s observation to George, “You seem so strange, so deep, so far away, as though you were holding something back.” She balked at “Tell Mama. Tell Mama all,” which Stevens expected her to deliver at a crucial moment—just before she and Monty went into a clinch. “Forgive me,” Elizabeth said, confronting the director, “but what the hell is this?” Later, Stevens recalled, “Elizabeth dissolved when she had to say ‘Tell Mama.’ She thought it was outrageous she had to say that—she was jumping into a sophistication beyond her time.” But Stevens remained adamant, and the result was a uniquely compelling love scene that was both carnal and transcendentally lyrical. In Elizabeth’s arms, Monty was enveloped by “the mothering tentacles of the world,” as the film’s associate producer, Ivan Moffatt, son of poet Iris Tree, aptly put it. For the Silent Generation of the 1950s, who still thought that personal transformation could be effected through romantic love, it was the most electrifying love scene of the decade, rivaled only by Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr’s roll in the Hawaiian surf in
From Here to Eternity
. Monty and Elizabeth lit up the screen like heat lightning. Their intimate “Tell Mama” scene became the picture’s trademark and assured Stevens the directing Oscar for 1951.

Monty loved her so much that he tried to go straight for her. “For three days Monty played the ardent male with me, and we became so close,” she recalled. “But just as he’d overcome all of his inhibitions about making love, he would suddenly turn up on the set with some obvious young man that he had picked up . . . I thought he wanted me to play
Tea and Sympathy
with him.” In Robert Anderson’s
Tea and Sympathy
, a hit play and movie of the 1950s, a headmaster’s wife at a boys’ prep school helps an insecure adolescent, who’s been accused of being gay by his classmates, lay claim to his heterosexuality by having sex with him. According to a chauffeur who drove Elizabeth and Monty to the Paramount lot on Melrose Avenue, they made out in the back of his limo. “It was the one time Mrs. Taylor and that Russian lady [Mira Rostova, Monty’s drama coach] didn’t go along,” the driver recalled.

They had other dates, attending a noisy Christmas party thrown by Norman Mailer, who’d rushed to Hollywood the minute his novel,
The Naked and the Dead
, had become an international best-seller. “Monty and Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon [Brando] were very uncomfortable,” said Shelley Winters, who explained that the party turned into a fiasco because Mailer, a newcomer to the Hollywood scene, invited too many incompatible guests, such as Humphrey Bogart and Ginger Rogers, who despised each other. No one could escape the miserable party because actor Mickey Knox’s car was blocking the driveway. Monty got into a fight, and Elizabeth started to leave, only to discover that Shelley had taken her beaver coat by mistake.

Elizabeth and Monty continued to see each other. When they finally tried to have sex, he couldn’t “rise to the occasion,” he told one of his boyfriends. Elizabeth sensed Monty’s discomfort and said, “Look, Monty, I’m always here for you—for whatever you want.” Though he knew he would never find another soul mate like Elizabeth, he also knew that he couldn’t stand the pressure of Elizabeth or any woman who expected him to make love to her every night. After Elizabeth he became more “campy” and “nelly,” his failure with her propelling him into a fully gay life.

After
A Place in the Sun
wrapped, Elizabeth was hurt when Monty flew to New York to be with Shelley Winters and take in some Broadway plays. Years later, I asked Shelley to tell me about filming
Sun
. “You must have been very lonely making that film, with Elizabeth and Monty so close,” I suggested. “Lonely!” Shelley scoffed. “I was making love with Burt Lancaster and Marlon Brando. If anyone was lonely, it was Monty—the loneliest man I’ve ever known and the best actor.”

After going to the theater in New York with Shelley, Monty visited Libby Holman, who thrived on the confessions of young men like Monty with sexual hang-ups. Between her torrid lesbian relationships with Du Pont heiress Louisa Carpenter Jenny and Tallulah Bankhead, Libby became Monty’s new obsession.
¹
He stayed with her for a while at Treetops, her lavish estate in Stamford, Connecticut, and then went on to Acapulco with Mira Rostova.

Elizabeth loved Monty so much that she later tried to help him find a stable identity as a gay. “I was eighteen or nineteen when I helped him realize that he was a homosexual,” she recalled, “and I barely knew what I was talking about. I was a virgin when I was married . . . I knew that he was meant to be with a man and not a woman, and I discussed it with him . . . I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t awful. It was the way that nature had made him . . . I introduced him to some really nice young gays.”
²
In 1999 she added that she found him his first real lover.
³
With unwitting irony, Andrew Sarris wrote when
A Place in the Sun
was released in 1951, “Clift and Taylor were the most beautiful couple in the history of cinema. It was a sensuous experience to watch them respond to each other. Those gigantic closeups of them kissing were unnerving—sybaritic—like gorging on chocolate sundaes.”

The film became the pivotal performance of Elizabeth’s career as critics acclaimed it a classic, a reputation it sustained throughout the next fifty years of changing cinema fashions. The
New York Times
’s A. H. Weiler wrote, “Elizabeth Taylor’s delineation of the rich and beauteous Angela is the top effort of her career,” and the
Boxoffice
reviewer unequivocally stated, “Miss Taylor deserves an Academy Award.” When Oscar nominations were announced for 1951, Monty and Elizabeth, who’d carried the picture, were both snubbed, and in 1999 she bitterly reflected, “If you were considered pretty, you might as well have been a waitress trying to act—you were treated with no respect at all.” Shelley Winters was nominated in the best actress category for her starkly moving performance as the drab factory girl Monty murders in order to marry Elizabeth, but she lost the Oscar to Vivien Leigh for
A Streetcar Named Desire
. George Stevens won the Oscar for best directing.

When Elizabeth returned to Metro after her Paramount loan-out, the studio compounded the Academy’s oversight by refusing to give her the more substantial roles that
A Place in the Sun
proved she could handle. She fought hard for the part of the Spanish peasant girl who could devastate men with a sultry look in
The Barefoot Contessa
. So did Jennifer Jones, who went directly to director-producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz. In the end neither won the role, which went to Ava Gardner, who was having an affair with Joseph Schenck, CEO of United Artists, the studio financing the picture. Observing industry protocol, MGM didn’t dare rock the UA boat by putting Elizabeth up for the role.

She also badgered Metro to acquire
I’ll Cry Tomorrow
, nightclub singer Lillian Roth’s best-selling memoir about her struggle with alcoholism, but the studio continued to restrict Elizabeth to mindless, forgettable dross such as
Callaway Went Thataway
,
Love Is Better Than Ever
,
Ivanhoe
,
The Girl Who Had Everything
,
Rhapsody
,
Beau Brummel
, and
The Last Time I Saw Paris
. She was a moneymaker as always, but rarely had a good actress been so totally wasted. The acting muscle she’d developed with Monty atrophied as she meandered through a series of mediocre films, usually playing a cool, rich femme fatale who destroys men or interferes with their fulfillment. She once compared herself to her friend Natalie Wood, observing, “Our technique was just to know your lines, hit your marks, and get out there and do it.”
⁴
There was a vast discrepancy between Elizabeth’s onscreen image and the woman she grew into. On camera she projected an almost regal poise, establishing the classy high-fifties style later epitomized by Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn. Offscreen she was a party girl who could outdrink and outcuss most men, and her personal idol was the earthy queen of Italian neo-realism, Anna Magnani.