The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (9 page)

She started a film,
Love Is Better Than Ever
, the same month and became enamored of her director, Stanley Donen, though Donen was still married to dancer Jean Coyne. A twenty-seven-year-old
wunderkind
, Donen had just codirected
Singin’ in the Rain
, Metro’s definitive musical. Though she and Stanley worked at the studio all day and spent their nights together, the sexual pull wasn’t strong enough to hold her. She still spent hours fantasizing about Nicky and how good their love life had been. On occasion, she and Nicky met and made frantic love, and afterward he begged her to give up her career. She refused, though she couldn’t forget his power as a lover. At a Sunday brunch with Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, Elizabeth and Stanley Donen had a disagreement that ended with Elizabeth pushing a whipped-cream-covered pie in the director’s face.

On January 26, 1951, in a Los Angeles courtroom, she collapsed on the stand after saying she’d been “a virgin not only physically but mentally” before marrying Nicky. Eighteen years old and close to a crackup, she charged “extreme mental cruelty.” Murmuring, “I don’t want a prize for failing,” she did not ask for alimony, but successfully fought for a private property settlement, receiving one hundred shares of Hilton Hotel stock and all her wedding presents. Though busy filming, she checked into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. on February 2, 1951, for nervous exhaustion, ulcers, and colitis, and commuted to MGM until her doctors forbade her to. After recovering, she rented a five-room apartment at 10600 Wilshire Boulevard, a two-story ivy-covered building, and shared her upstairs quarters with a secretary-companion, Peggy Rutledge, who’d formerly worked for Bob Hope’s wife and was recommended by Jules Goldstone as “a nice dame, kind of a society girl.”
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Newlyweds Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis moved in downstairs; Elizabeth had attended the bridal shower along with Ava Gardner, Helen Rose, and Shelley Winters. As a young divorcee, Elizabeth was sought by some of the world’s most desirable bachelors, including Orson Welles, Betty Hutton’s ex-husband Ted Briskin, associate producer Ivan Moffat, millionaire’s son Lin Howard Jr., George Stevens Jr., and Merv Griffin, in addition to Stanley Donen, Warner publicist Leo Guild, and former beaux Tommy Breen and Arthur Loew Jr.

“A lot of people wanted to marry Elizabeth,” Dmytryk recalled in 1998. “Greg Bautzer [the well-known Hollywood divorce lawyer and man-about-town] called Elizabeth and said, ‘Look, you shouldn’t be alone. Come on out to Palm Springs. We have a house out there, and you can have a little time, meet people.’ She said, ‘Fine,’ and they flew out there in a private plane. She went to this house with Greg and then he went off some place and left her alone. In a few minutes there was a knock on the door. She opened it, and there was Howard Hughes. ‘I want to show you something,’ he said, and took her out to this old Chevrolet which he used to drive in those days. He opened a handkerchief or a bandana and it was full of jewels. ‘This is all yours,’ he said, ‘if you’ll come with me.’ She went in the house and called a taxi and had the taxi take her back to Hollywood.”

Nicky spitefully said, “Every man should have the opportunity of sleeping with Elizabeth Taylor, and at the rate she’s going every man will.”
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In fact, she spurned all her pursuers, choosing instead to go on the town with gay friends in New York. “Okay,” Monty said, “now what’s with you and Stanley Donen?” They were “just friends,” she replied, adding a little wearily, “Does that sound familiar to you, my dear, dear friend?”
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They partied nonstop, usually with Roddy at Monty’s favorite bar, Gregory’s, on Lexington Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street. Often joined by a nineteen-year-old, whom Monty was trying to seduce, and Kevin McCarthy, they always huddled in a wooden booth to the right of the bar, chain-smoking and drinking. None of the other customers—pimps, winos, a few undergraduates, and middle-aged women nodding over their drinks—bothered them or even recognized them. One night Monty flaunted a cute chorus boy in front of her, and the next night he came in with a well-bred young woman. He seemed to be saying, “Look Ma—I can—and I must—do both,” Elizabeth confided to
Life
’s entertainment reporter Tommy Thompson, who later wrote the novel
Celebrity
and other books. Monty often hung out at Bickford’s, the all-night gay cafeteria on Fifty-first Street and Lexington Avenue, where he went to get picked up. But he would never find in any man the spiritual twin he’d found in Elizabeth. Finally, he consulted Dr. William Silverberg, a gay analyst, but therapists in the 1950s—even gay ones—didn’t yet know whether homosexuality was a problem or a solution. The more Monty was analyzed, the more he drank.

He was already an alcoholic, and Elizabeth was well on her way to becoming one. In 1998, Cy Egan, a former assistant city editor of the
New York Journal American
, recalled, “She often showed up drunk at nightclubs around Manhattan. She was loud and boisterous.” In the later parlance of alcoholism and recovery, Elizabeth qualified as an adult child of an alcoholic, a victim of her father’s abuse. She later told Barbara Walters, “When I was twenty-one, I called him and asked him to the house. I sat on his lap and buried my head in his neck and we both sobbed and bonded for the first time since I was nine.” Still, husbands and fathers were forever branded in her mind as threatening figures. Only by drinking could she dispel the painful ambivalence she felt toward straight men.

The vagaries of Elizabeth’s life sprang from the compulsions and passions that were driving her. One of them involved a vicious cycle of pain and addiction to painkillers, whether in alcohol or drug form. The never-ending cycle of sickness and recovery explains much of her life in and out of hospitals and between marriages. Every time there was a crisis, there was a medical emergency. Feeding into this pattern was her conflicted history with men, stemming from her father’s brutality. Her loving relationships were asexual and with such gay men as Roddy, Monty, and, later on, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Halston, Andy Warhol, and Steve Rubell, as well as her secretaries Richard Hanley and Roger Wall. Her sexual relationships were “a-loving”—in the sense that any relationship based primarily on sex is a
using
one rather than a loving one—and were with such straight men as Nicky Hilton and, later, Mike Todd, Eddie Fisher, John Warner, and Larry Fortensky or bisexuals like Michael Wilding and Richard Burton. Her inner conflict created its own state of pain, which added to the vicious cycle and blocked her from working out the balance of love and sex that characterizes any healthy erotic relationship.

At the Oscar ceremony on March 29, 1951, at RKO Pantages Theater,
Father of the Bride
was up for best picture, best actor, and best screenplay, but Elizabeth, who was largely responsible for the charm that made it one of the year’s most popular films, was again ignored by the Academy. On April 5, Metro premiered the sequel,
Father’s Little Dividend
, at the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, hoping to capitalize on the success of
Father of the Bride
and the notoriety over the Elizabeth Taylor–Nicky Hilton breakup, and starring the same winning team—Elizabeth, Joan, Spence, and Don Taylor. Joan Bennett later recalled that she was looking forward to doing a long string of sequels with Elizabeth and Spence when a tragedy struck in 1951 that ended both the
Father of the Bride
series and Bennett’s career. By late 1950, Joan’s husband, Walter Wanger, was aware that her feelings for Jennings Lang, her agent since 1948, “went beyond our business relationship,” Joan recalled. Typical of the double standard of the era, the fifty-seven-year-old Wanger had pursued his own infidelities since marrying Joan in 1949, but he warned in 1951 that he’d kill any man who “tried to break up my home.”
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On Friday, December 13, Wanger shot Jennings Lang in the groin and later served a four-month sentence at Castaic Honor Farm north of Los Angeles. In a 1999 interview in Key West, Frank Taylor recalled, “I had lunch with Jennings Lang the day that Walter Wanger shot him. He was in fine spirits as we lunched at Twentieth Century-Fox, and then he went to meet Joan. Walter shot him between the nuts, so his virility was not diminished. That evening I went to dinner at the Walt Disneys. Walt was not usually a humorous man, but that evening was an exception. The whole room was abuzz with news of the shooting, and Walt said, “That’s the first hit Walter has had in ten years.” According to L.A.
Times
writer Paul Rosenfield, Lang “lost one ball (as in testicle)” but capitalized on the publicity, moving from the Jaffee Agency to mammoth MCA. The only one who suffered professionally from the fracas was Joan Bennett.

“That Walter was really something,” Joan told me one night in the 1970s. “He went back to work at Monogram the same day he was indicted, but I never again got a decent role in films. The wonderful series with Elizabeth and Spence, which would have been another Hardy Family—a real annuity for me—was canceled. Walter, being a man, got all the sympathy, and went on to make
I Want to Live!
with Susan Hayward and
Cleopatra
with Elizabeth. I was branded as the vixen who drove men crazy, like the characters I’d played earlier on in the forties, in
The Woman in the Window
and
Scarlet Street
. I had kids to raise, so I went on the stage, replacing Roz [Russell] in
Bell, Book and Candle
.”

In the spring of 1951, Elizabeth touched off a mini-scandal by appearing frequently in public with Stanley Donen, who was still very married. Guarding her as their most valuable commodity, Metro took decisive action to extricate her from Donen’s marital difficulties, in effect banishing her to England to play the role of Rebecca in Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe
, which was to be filmed near London over the summer. She warned Metro that she’d just recovered from a “nervous breakdown” and was in no condition to make a film, but the studio remained adamant.
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She saw Monty again in New York before leaving for London. They both attended a party Roddy gave at the apartment he and Merv Griffin shared in the Dakota. Eddie Fisher was there and recalled that Elizabeth spent most of the evening sitting in a corner with Monty. Elizabeth and Eddie were introduced but she scarcely noticed him. “I fell in love with her that night,” recalled Eddie, “but she was out of my league.”
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After she went abroad, she and Monty continued to exchange letters and long-distance telephone calls. He urged her to take bold chances with her career, to be daring as an actress and stretch her talent. Monty’s lover, a youthful Hollywood actor, moved to New York to be closer to him, though Monty remained guilty about his homosexuality. “He had the ugliest cock I’d ever seen,” recalled Frank Taylor, who had sex with Monty in New York after producing
The Misfits
. “This beautiful face, you know, but there was no cock really; it was all foreskin.”

In consigning Elizabeth to the fusty costume drama
Ivanhoe
, which she dismissed as “a big medieval Western,” MGM again mismanaged her career, costarring her with the wooden Robert Taylor for the second time with predictably mundane results. The London scene she discovered that summer was recalled by novelist Elaine Dundy, who was married to Britain’s leading theatrical critic, Kenneth Tynan. “In the early 1950s, Elizabeth Taylor, John Huston, everyone turned up there because that’s where their frozen assets were,” said Dundy. Working abroad was a legal way of evading heavy U.S. taxes. Since British law required that money earned there must be spent there, Elizabeth checked into the opulent Savoy and pampered herself.

Each day she left the hotel at 5:15 a.m. for the long drive to Metro’s 120-acre Borehamwood studio outside London. Michael Wilding was filming at the same studio, starring in
Trent’s Last Case
with Orson Welles. Though only nineteen, Elizabeth told the thirty-nine-year-old Wilding, “I wish you’d stop treating me as if I had a child’s mind inside a woman’s body . . . Why don’t you invite me out to dinner tonight?”
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Wilding was known to be a vigorous lover, but he tended to lose interest in female conquests rather quickly. Apart from Elizabeth, he currently had two women on the string—his wife, actress Kay Young, and the bisexual Dietrich, who was eight years Wilding’s senior. Dietrich “preferred fellation,” according to her daughter, Maria Riva, who added, “It put into her hand the power to direct the scene.” But Dietrich herself confided in her diary that Wilding was so “inventive” at coitus that she was “staining [bleeding]” as a result of his “steeple chasing,” and she always had to insert a “firecracker [Tampax]” the minute he dismounted. The two stars accepted each other’s homoeroticism. When Dietrich was involved with women, she gravitated to the petite chanteuse Edith Piaf or the severe-looking Spanish screenwriter Mercedes de Acosta. Michael Wilding was a relief for Dietrich from standard Hollywood hunks: she preferred the knightly British type to Americans with whom she’d had sex, including Frank Sinatra, General James Gavin, Adlai Stevenson, William Saroyan, and Edward R. Murrow. Wilding had been Marlene’s leading man in Hitchcock’s 1950 thriller
Stage Fright
. “A British version of [James] Stewart,” Dietrich called him. “He mumbles, is ever so shy, and being English, gets through the film on charm.”

Elizabeth saw Wilding as a strong father figure who’d give her children and make her feel like a woman. Again she was going for the wrong man. Wilding always required a woman to be “the dominant partner,” he wrote. They were both looking for a strong person, and both would be disappointed. The determined Elizabeth hooked him that first date, though he tried to resist her, mindful of their absurd age difference. He later wrote: “Secondly, I dreaded hurting Marlene.”
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He took Elizabeth to see Dietrich’s cabaret act at the Café de Paris. From the stage Dietrich immediately spotted them in the audience and later wrote to Yul Brynner, “Michael was there last night with Liz, sitting rather stiffly in a corner and looking at me quite steadily and sadly, and I thought that that could happen to me, seeing you with another woman and I felt quite sick.” To Maria Riva, Dietrich complained, “He says he cannot live without me and then—goes and fucks Taylor!”
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Dietrich was also involved with Kenneth Tynan, and according to Riva, they’d become “inseparable.” The secret of Dietrich’s mysterious appeal, Tynan wrote, was that “she has sex without gender.”
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