How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  And though Elizabeth didn't get the part, Hedda continued going to bat for her, suggesting that she might be a rival to singing child star Deanna Durbin (even though Elizabeth's singing had Hedda covering her ears; "one of the most painful ordeals," she called it). After Elizabeth's first movie, a trifle for Universal called There's One Born Every Minute, Hedda wrote that Elizabeth "walks off with a fat role" (even though it was barely a bit). In October 1942 she'd devoted the whole first half of her column to Elizabeth, proclaiming her "one of the most beautiful children I've ever seen." Most recently, she'd written that Elizabeth had been "so good" in her first MGM picture, Lassie Come Home (even though if you blinked, you missed her), that she'd been snatched up by Fox for Jane Eyre, starring Joan Fontaine. Hedda felt she'd done quite enough. Little Elizabeth Taylor had gotten more ink from her than many older actresses with bona fide résumés.

  Hedda had first met the Taylors while they were living in England. After Sara's stage career was over, she'd married art dealer Francis Taylor (whom she called "Daddy," despite being two years older than he was) and moved with him to London, where he ran a gallery on Old Bond Street. The Taylors lived in a redbrick house opposite the vast green stretch of Hampstead Heath. It was here that Sara gave birth to a son, Howard, in 1929, and on February 27, 1932, to a daughter, Elizabeth Rosemond.

  When Elizabeth was four, the family also acquired a country retreat near Cranbrook in Kent, where Hedda made their acquaintance. The house came courtesy of Francis Taylor's patron, Victor Cazalet, a Conservative member of Parliament who was a captain in the British Army. Hedda was friends with Cazalet's sister, Thelma Cazalet-Keir, also a Conservative MP. On weekends, the Taylors' driver motored them out of the city and into the rolling Kentish hills, where their cottage was located on Cazalet's estate. When Hedda was visiting once, Sara and little Elizabeth ambled up through the gardens to the main house for tea. The meeting wasn't apparently all that memorable: Sara would bring a letter of (re)introduction from Cazalet-Keir when she showed up at Hopper's office in Hollywood a few years later.

  Hedda never cared much for Sara, seeing her as something of a climber. Of course, it took one to know one. Hedda was a butcher's daughter from Altoona, Pennsylvania, who'd run away from home as a teenager. She was bitter over being born poor and always having to fight her way; decades later she was still resentful of never having had a bicycle as a child. "When I was called the best-dressed woman on the screen, I had to laugh," she said, "remembering the days when I wore a pair of overalls, an old sweater, and an apron, and went into the cooler to cut off a quarter of beef and carry it out over my shoulder to the chopping block."

  Hedda seemed to resent Sara's greater success in obtaining the finer things in life. Through Francis Taylor, Sara had acquired two homes, servants, and access to London society. Marriage to the respected stage actor DeWolf Hopper had given Hedda some cachet, but the divorce had left her high, dry, and a bit less than desirable. In Hollywood she tried to cultivate a sophisticated image, but there was still something garish and provincial about her. It wasn't just her hats. Her home in Beverly Hills had been filigreed to death by the former set designer Harold Grieve. On the walls of her office hung originals by Picasso and Renoir, "denoting Miss Hopper's appreciation of art," as one press release made sure to report—yet these were offset by bare radiators and scarred doors. Hedda's airs were often belied by the political tirades for which she was prone, right-wing rants about communists and socialists and "people who wanted to take away everything she had worked so hard to achieve," according to one friend.

  Sitting at her typewriter, Hedda glanced over the dozens of press releases that had accumulated on her desk. Once more that name caught her eye: Elizabeth Taylor—cast in Metro's upcoming The White Cliffs of Dover. Relenting, she gave the girl another blurb, though she got her age wrong, writing that the eleven-year-old was nine. Fact-checking was never Hedda's strong suit. Gossip was. That's what made her so powerful. "Gossip," noted Time, "has become as indispensably bound up in the making of U.S. movies as cameras, kaolin smiles and surfboard-sized eyelashes. For Hollywood is a town doing a business based on vanity." Everyone involved understood that: Hedda, Sara, and even little Elizabeth herself, sitting at her school desk dreaming about fame.

  Anne Francis, a pretty blonde teenager who'd arrived in Hollywood after appearing with Gertrude Lawrence in Lady in the Dark on Broadway, couldn't help but envy Elizabeth Taylor, the girl who sat next to her in the MGM schoolhouse. Elizabeth was making a big prestige picture starring Irene Dunne, and rumor had it that she was up for National Velvet, too. Anne, meanwhile, hadn't made a single movie since signing with the studio. Every day she simply reported to the schoolhouse and hoped her luck would change.

  But Elizabeth's career had suddenly shifted into high gear. Although Elizabeth's part in The White Cliffs of Dover was small, her startling girlish beauty was already causing comment, just as it had in Jane Eyre. In her first scene in that picture for Fox, she descends a staircase in the background as Peggy Ann Garner, playing Jane, stands on a box in the foreground. Elizabeth is a tiny, unremarkable figure until a sudden luminous close-up takes our breath away. All of our attention immediately pulls away from Garner, the ostensible star. In that moment Elizabeth possesses what film historian Jeanine Basinger has called the "x factor" of potential stardom, "the infrared in the dark of the movie house."

  Glancing over at her in the schoolhouse, Anne Francis had to agree with what people were saying about Elizabeth Taylor. "She was utterly gorgeous, even as a little girl," Francis said. "I was in awe of her. Hers wasn't the beauty of a child."

  In her early pictures, Elizabeth indeed seems to be a miniature adult. Even at ten she stopped grown men in their tracks. Watching her shoot a scene in Jane Eyre, costar Orson Welles turned to a companion and whispered, "Remind me to be around when she grows up." Her first studio contract, with Universal, had been canceled when the casting director decided, "Her eyes are too old. She doesn't have the face of a kid."

  But at Metro that face became her ticket to success—along with her accent. At the height of the war, Englishness was in vogue on the American screen, and Elizabeth was virtually the only young actress on the lot who could authentically play English. Sheridan Morley credited her "accurate memory for the vowel sounds of Hampstead and Kent." The accent would also help with National Velvet; the studio needed a girl with an accent who could ride horses. Even without Sara's campaign to draw attention to her daughter, it was only natural that the higher-ups would begin "casting glances" in Elizabeth's direction.

  "Being in films then," she said, "was like the most magical extension of make-believe. It didn't occur to me that it was a career and that I was making money."

  She'd always been an imaginative child. Playacting for the camera and dressing in costume was not so different from the game she'd been playing with herself all her life. "Walter Mittying," she called it—daydreaming, living out fantasies in her mind. She'd create whole scenarios for herself in which she traveled the world or explored some faraway land. Other times she relived moments from her past—riding her horse in Kent or steaming across the Atlantic on the gilt-plated ship that had brought her to America.

  Looking over at her in the MGM schoolhouse, Anne Francis observed the way Elizabeth's lips moved when she was supposed to be studying, the way her extraordinary eyes, shaded by double rows of eyelashes, seemed to be looking at something that none of the rest of them could see. Elizabeth's fantasies of late were all about being a movie star; yet the little girl's ambition was not so much for herself. Not at this point. It sprang instead from a deep-seated desire to please her mother, still at her side nearly every waking moment. The director George Stevens considered the two of them "in a cocoon."

  Her father, meanwhile, was mostly a background figure. In England it had been different, with Elizabeth very much the apple of Francis Taylor's eye. Back then she would sit in his lap as he read to her or she'd run across the grassy meadows
of Kent into his arms. She physically resembled her father more than she did her mother, inheriting his dark hair and mesmerizing eyes. No question that, early on, Francis could be a stern disciplinarian, but back then he insisted on direct involvement in his children's lives—a practice that would steadily diminish after they came to America and Sara took the reins.

  Like his wife, Francis Taylor hailed from the lower middle class; his father had been a dry goods salesman. Born in Springfield, Illinois, in December 1897, Francis moved with his family to Arkansas City as a young teenager, where he met the two-years-older Sara Warmbrodt. Yet any story that has them falling in love at this time is a publicist's invention. Elizabeth herself would tell stories of her father carrying her mother's schoolbooks, but if he did, it was a rare and probably inconsequential occurrence. Older and consumed by the theater, Sara moved in very different circles than Francis did. Besides, the future spouses overlapped in Ark City for only a few years. In 1915, at the age of seventeen, Francis was rescued from a life of drudgery by his affluent uncle, Howard Young, who ran an art gallery in St. Louis. Recognizing something artistic in his nephew—something that set him apart from other boys his age—Uncle Howard hired Francis as his assistant and brought him to St. Louis.

  With no children of their own, the Youngs practically adopted their nephew. Possibly it was Howard's connections that enabled Francis to avoid registering for the draft during World War I. Instead of heading to the Western Front, Francis accompanied his uncle to New York, where the Howard Young Galleries opened at 620 Fifth Avenue.

  It was in New York that Francis encountered Sara again and remembered her from Kansas. She was thirty-one years old, and when she accepted Francis's offer of marriage, she announced her "permanent retirement from the stage." (The New York Times theater critic wasn't so sure, adding that such was "her present intention at least.") Sara and Francis were married on October 23, 1926, at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. The newlyweds departed almost immediately for Europe, with Francis serving as Young's acquisitions agent, paying calls on private collectors in Paris, Vienna, and Budapest. The Taylors settled in London in 1929 when Young decided to open a gallery there.

  Sara would later exaggerate their status in British society, writing about being invited to Downing Street by Mrs. Neville Chamberlain to view the Trooping of the Colors for the King's birthday—as if this were a personal little get-together with the prime minister's wife when, in fact, Sara was merely part of a larger group of ladies and was included only through the intercession of the family's benefactor, Victor Cazalet. She'd tell similar stories of being invited to Buckingham Palace. Even Elizabeth's ballet lessons took on an added sheen, with Sara insisting that among her daughter's fellow dance students were the young princesses, Eliza beth and Margaret Rose. They were students of the same school, true enough—but the instructors went to the royals, not the other way around. Elizabeth certainly never practiced her pliés and pirouettes with the little princesses.

  Still, it was a privileged, upper-class life that Sara had secured for her children, far from the steam and smoke of the Warmbrodt laundry. Attending the Royal Ascot, Sara and her daughter wore matching blue silk dresses designed by Mainbocher. At home they employed maids, cooks, drivers, and nannies ("There is no one in the world like a good English Nannie," Sara believed). And not only did the Taylors have their country house in Kent, they also leased a beach house in Devonshire during the summer. Elizabeth and her brother grew up in the kind of comfort that Sara had only dreamed about.

  The Taylors owed their lifestyle, of course, to the largesse of "Uncle" Victor Cazalet. They were living, after all, on his estate; invitations to social events and impromptu gifts of clothing and furniture all came courtesy of him. For Elizabeth's fifth birthday, Cazalet presented his self-appointed goddaughter with her own horse.

  Cazalet's generosity to the Taylors raised a few eyebrows. Most people were aware that the marriage between Sara and Francis, while amiable, was never passionate. Like Sara's earlier "beau" Franklin Pangborn, Francis was discreetly homosexual, pursuing a clandestine affair with the art collector Kurt Stempler. (A letter in Hedda Hopper's files from a childhood friend of Francis's reported "all the girls thought him marvelous, but he seemed not to notice.") He may also have been involved with Cazalet himself, whose sexuality was whispered about in British government circles. Certainly Francis and the unmarried Uncle Victor were inseparable much of the time, attending concerts in Covent Garden and then spending the weekend in the city on their own. But Cazalet was on equally familiar terms with Sara. Some wondered if both Mr. and Mrs. Taylor might have been intimate with the good captain.

  But when war with Germany seemed increasingly inevitable, the family bid good-bye to Cazalet and his country. On April 21, 1939, Sara sailed with her two children on board the SS Manhattan; Francis joined them in December. At first they tried living with Sara's father, who'd relocated to San Gabriel, California, where he ran a chicken farm. But that would never do. And Sara was horrified to discover that she had to learn to drive her own car.

  Howard Young once again came to the rescue, arranging to open a gallery in Los Angeles, first at the Chateau Elysée and later on the first floor of the posh Beverly Hills Hotel. By 1941 Francis had saved enough money to buy a house on North Elm Drive in Beverly Hills. No doubt the down payment was augmented by Elizabeth's movie earnings, only half of which her parents were required by law to hold in trust for her. Elizabeth and Howard were enrolled in the nearby Hawthorne School.

  "In that inbred little community," Elizabeth said, most of her parents' friends "had something to do with the film industry." At school, "every kid's father was a producer or a director or an actor." Elizabeth couldn't have escaped the movies if she'd tried. At her father's gallery, a range of Hollywood types from David O. Selznick to Greta Garbo regularly made their way through the doors. (It helped that the gallery was located just off the hotel's swimming pool.) Hedda Hopper frequently popped in and became particularly enthused by the work of the Welsh artist Augustus John, whom Francis represented exclusively. Hedda adored Francis Taylor, "a lovely, sweet, kind man," and considered his opinions on art as gospel. Any favors she'd grant Elizabeth in the coming years weren't done for Sara; they were done for Francis.

  Hedda was in conspicuous attendance on the night of May 19, 1941, when the Taylors hosted a dinner in honor of Victor Cazalet, whom Hedda informed her readers was a "great-grandson of Queen Victoria" (actually, he was only her godson). Cazalet's lecture afterward at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre on "America and Defense" was attended by some of Hollywood's biggest names: Greer Garson, Basil Rathbone, Mary Pickford, Robert Montgomery, Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Cazalet's visit edged Francis and Sara up a few more notches in screenland social circles.

  As the Taylors moved up, more and more people in the industry became acquainted with their precocious daughter. Surrealist painter Oscar de Mejo held his first show at Francis Taylor's gallery, where he'd remember the nine-year-old Elizabeth serving hors d'oeuvres. "[She] had absolutely the most exquisite features, the kind of face Botticelli might have created had he painted her. She emitted an air of ageless, inculpable eroticism, enhanced by the fact that she always called you by name, making you very aware of yourself. 'Won't you have another caviar on toast, Monsieur de Mejo?'"

  As Elizabeth's screen career progressed, her appearances at her father's gallery inevitably declined, and, perhaps just as inevitably, a schism emerged in the Taylor home on North Elm Drive. One family friend confided to a reporter that photographs of Elizabeth—some alone and some with Sara—studded each room of the house, while not one picture of Howard was to be seen. "You'd never have known there was a Taylor male around," the friend said. In these years, if Sara spoke to Howard at all for any length of time, it was to encourage him to take a screen test at Metro, a suggestion the levelheaded teenager rejected outright. Howard had seen his sister's life become consumed by their mother's ambition, and he'd recoiled from Elizabeth's
dreamy-eyed acquiescence. Howard wanted none of that. At dinner, as the Taylor females prattled on about National Velvet, Howard and his father often ate in silence.

  Elizabeth's father, once the final authority in her life, ceded his place to the ironclad ambition of his wife. It would be Sara, not Francis, who signed Elizabeth's contract; it was Sara, not her husband, to whom payment would be made.

  The education of Miss Elizabeth Taylor did actually involve some conventional schooling, though the more conventional it was, the less it held any interest for the girl. Teacher Mary Katherine McDonald was not fond of Elizabeth's constant daydreaming. One day she walked up beside her inattentive student and rapped a wooden ruler across her knuckles. Elizabeth let out a yelp.

  That would keep her focused, Miss McDonald believed. Just because her students were budding movie stars was no reason to coddle them. Forty-three years old and unmarried, McDonald had taught science at a private school before being hired to run the MGM schoolhouse in 1932. The children were terrified of her. As Elizabeth rubbed her knuckles, Anne Francis tensed in her seat. "It was like a year of incarceration," Francis said of her time at what was popularly known as "The Little Red Schoolhouse."

  In fact, all of the big studios had schoolhouses known by the same appellation, and none of them were red. The name was a nostalgic reference to the one-room schoolhouses of the past, where children of all ages learned together. As the ranks of child contract players fluctuated from year to year, some studios, like Universal or Columbia, would occasionally find themselves with just one or two students reporting for the fall semester. MGM, however, with its bumper crop of child stars, usually had a full class of between six and twelve students. By the time Elizabeth arrived, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and Roddy McDowall had already passed through the school.