How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  Once upon a time the schoolhouse had been a private dining room for Irving Thalberg, the MGM powerhouse producer and boy wonder who had died in 1936. Seven years later a four-foot-tall picket fence surrounded the wooden structure, with red, white, and blue petunias planted along its side. Inside there were two rooms, a classroom with regulation desks and a blackboard, and an adjoining study room, with soft, stuffed chairs where older students frequently sat. Miss McDonald moved easily back and forth.

  She was assisted by Dorothy Mullen, a mother of two, who worked individually with students, and by Caroline "Muzzie" McPhail, whose job was rounding the children up and counting heads before class. The children might fear Miss McDonald, but they adored Muzzie. When the day went badly, "Muzzie ... was someone whose shoulder we could cry on," said Jean Porter, the teenaged costar of Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble and another classmate of Elizabeth's. Muzzie understood child actors; her own son had been one and was now playing bit parts on the lot.

  Although the curriculum was approved by the Los Angeles Board of Education, and standardized tests were given to ensure that the studio kids measured up to their civilian counterparts, the lessons in the Little Red Schoolhouse "weren't particularly tough," Anne Francis said. At the Professional Children's School in New York, she'd been "loaded with homework." Not so at MGM, where teachers rarely taught anything past simple mathematics and basic English composition. Sara, not surprisingly, sugarcoated Elizabeth's education, calling the MGM school "wonderful," but Elizabeth herself would later dismiss her years there as "my so-called education." Her classmate Dean Stockwell was more blunt. About Miss McDonald, he said, "She didn't teach me shit."

  Part of the problem was the haphazard school day. If a film was shooting in the morning, the child went to school in the afternoon. If the shoot was later in the day, then the schedule was switched. Children often would be called out of class if they were needed for a scene; Dorothy Mullen would troop along beside them down the alley to Lot Two, textbook in hand. "Between camera takes," Elizabeth said, "you'd cram in ten minutes, twenty minutes of study, going out to act, then being led by the ear back to school and snapping your brain back into being a student." Often she found herself taking tests in full makeup and costume, hunched down under an arc lamp, one eye on her paper and the other on the set, alert for her next call. So long as students managed to get three hours a day of schooling—in class or on the set—they were meeting the requirements of the law. "We were doing in that time what normal kids did in six," Elizabeth said.

  Such a routine must have had a peculiar effect on the young girl. The boundaries of "real life" blurred. What was more "real" to Elizabeth—the school or the scene, memorizing her times tables or her lines? How could ordinary life ever compare to what transpired behind the camera? And what of childhood? Was Elizabeth a kid or did she just know how to play one? And were those youngsters whom Elizabeth and her friends played on screen real—or was "real" a description that could only apply to the children she saw outside the studio gates?

  In press releases and publicity, the MGM child stars were portrayed as just like children everywhere, learning their lessons, playing at recess, preferring dogs and games and climbing trees to making movies. Yet, in fact, the kids who made their way through the Little Red Schoolhouse were anything but innocent. As a teenager, Jackie Cooper was seduced by Joan Crawford; Judy Garland was already popping pills to control her weight. The all-American children they played on the screen were in direct contrast to the more worldly lives they led at the studio. Dean Stockwell said that he and his classmates were "kids ... out of place in time and ties and culture."

  At a time when other girls her age thought only about dresses and dolls, Elizabeth was already the breadwinner in her family. "I paid the bills," she admitted. "People weren't buying art. It was hard on my father." She might not have mastered fractions or compound sentence structure, but she learned other things, like how to make money and live among adults. Cameramen swore blue streaks around her; wardrobe ladies gossiped about affairs as they fitted her in costumes; agents hammered out tough deals in front of her. By her early teens, Elizabeth was already cursing like a sailor and haggling with her mother over the terms of her allowance.

  Although Elizabeth insisted that she envied Howard's going to a "real" school, it's unlikely that she would have fit in there very well. Even in the studio classroom Elizabeth chafed against the rules and regimentation, as inconsistent as they were. "I was in constant rebellion," she said. She'd escape to the bathroom and hide out. Eventually Miss McDonald caught on, instructing her to write on the blackboard the exact times of her departures and returns. Once the little actress wrote, "E exits bathroom, 10:06, mission accomplished." She was reprimanded.

  Dorothy Mullen would remember Elizabeth as a "fair" student. Mary McDonald added, "I wouldn't put her in the same intellectual category as Einstein, but she wasn't stupid." Elizabeth's problem was not a lack of intelligence but a lack of disciplined concentration. If the subject didn't interest her, she simply tuned it out. To pass tests she relied on the same photographic memory that she used to learn her lines in a single morning. "Just before an exam," she said, "I would memorize the points I thought they would ask me about. Of course, two weeks later it was gone, so I really didn't absorb anything ... And I knew, even then, that I was cheating myself."

  But some lessons were more important. After school let out at noon (or later, depending on shooting schedules), there were dancing and voice lessons. In a rehearsal studio off Stage Five, Sara tied Elizabeth's tap shoes and then watched from the sidelines as her short, chubby-legged daughter struggled to keep up with the likes of Kathryn Grayson and Donna Reed. Sometimes Elizabeth didn't have time to change out of her leotards before running across the alley to the Thalberg Building for voice lessons with Lucille Ryman, who doubled as an MGM talent scout. Ryman lined the girls up in front of her—Elizabeth, Donna Reed, Susan Peters, Margaret Kerry—and made them repeat certain phrases. "Park the car in the yard." "Boogie woogie bugle boy." Regional accents were obliterated. The goal, Kerry said, was for all of them "to come out sounding identical." Eventually, especially once British pictures became less popular, Elizabeth's accent was painstakingly transformed into what she called "Americanese": the unmistakable cadence of Hollywood speech, with its perfectly modulated pitch and tone, properly all-American. The girls also learned the "Metro walk": sucking in the stomach, squaring the shoulders, and stepping off on the right foot.

  "What mattered to the studio was that a star could sing and dance and speak and act like a star," said Elliott Morgan, the longtime head of research at MGM. "They didn't care if they couldn't spell or add a list of figures. And really, did anybody? So long as the stars looked good and sounded good up there on the screen, nothing else mattered."

  ***

  But the trick was getting Elizabeth up there on the screen. Despite all the glances being cast her way, there was still no final decision on Elizabeth's being cast in National Velvet. Sara decided that the time had come for the final push.

  In June 1943 Pan Berman took over from Mervyn LeRoy as the Velvet producer. Berman had made it clear to Clarence Brown that he felt that Elizabeth was too small to play a teenaged girl who passes herself off as a young man. Sara refused to be deterred by such a trivial matter as her daughter's height. With school out for the summer, the Taylor females had plenty of time on their hands to strategize. Berman was Obstacle Number One. He was an efficient filmmaker who'd begun his career at RKO, where he'd paired Ginger Rogers with Fred Astaire and turned Katharine Hepburn into a star. Arriving at MGM, he'd quickly distinguished himself with Ziegfeld Girl, and in a bit of inspired casting, teamed Lana Turner with Clark Gable in Honky Tonk. This was a man who knew how to make successful movies. If Berman thought an actress was wrong for a part, she probably was.

  But then there was Sara, always righter than anyone. In early July she arranged a meeting with Berman. Sitting across from his desk, she calmly and caref
ully made her case. None of the other girls could be as convincingly English as Elizabeth. None could ride horses as well. To prepare for the part, Sara informed the director, Elizabeth had been riding for an hour and a half every morning at the studio's stables. The little actress, in a red bow and blue dress, sat there nodding and smiling.

  Berman was amused by Sara's superciliousness. But he wasn't swayed. Asking Elizabeth to stand, he measured her against the wall, drawing a little pencil mark over the top of her head. Moving his hand up several inches, he told mother and daughter that Velvet Brown needed to stand at least that tall. Unless Elizabeth suddenly sprouted over the summer, he insisted, she would not be in National Velvet.

  At least that's the way Sara and Elizabeth told the story. And there's likely some truth to it, because in The White Cliffs of Dover, Elizabeth does appear too small, too doll-like, to play the plucky Velvet Brown. Yet Berman was far too canny a producer to utterly dismiss out of hand the one girl on the lot who seemed to fit the bill on so many counts. And it's no doubt significant that no other actress's name was floated in the press for the part during the summer of 1943.

  Still the Taylors took no chances. Elizabeth, almost certainly, really did embark on a campaign that summer to "grow" the required three inches or so. "There was this place Tip's," she remembered, "where they had a thing called a Farm Breakfast—two hamburger patties, two fried eggs, a great big mound of hashed brown potatoes and after that a whole bunch of dollar pancakes. I used to have two Farm Breakfasts every morning at one sitting." Of course, all those calories were more likely to make her grow three inches wider instead of taller, and certainly Sara was not going to be a party to that. If she encouraged Elizabeth's appetite, it was simply because she never denied her precious child any kind of instant gratification—and Elizabeth had always loved to eat. During a visit several years earlier to see Francis's parents in Kansas, the Taylors had made a swing down to New Orleans. "It was high time," Sara said, "to introduce the children to the gustatorial delights of Antoine's." Elizabeth was four. She sat in a high chair "dining on oysters Rockefeller and pompano baked in a paper bag." Rarely had Sara seen her daughter so happy.

  Children often grow in spurts at Elizabeth's age, so maybe it's true that she really did grow those three inches that summer. More likely, Berman simply decided that clever costuming and lifts in Elizabeth's shoes were easier than teaching another girl to ride or put on truly English airs. There was also the fact that, after seeing a screen test of Elizabeth shot by director Fred Zinnemann, both he and Clarence Brown were convinced that "something quite magical happened between Elizabeth and the camera."

  On a day in late September, Sara was summoned to Berman's office and informed that Elizabeth had gotten the part. She burst into tears. Elizabeth clasped her hands and in a loud voice—in- spired no doubt by her mother's Christian Science—thanked God for making it happen. "This is MGM," Berman informed the young supplicant, "not Lourdes."

  Hedda Hopper, alerted moments later by a jubilant Sara, was one of the first to report the casting, but it was columnist Harold Heffernan who predicted that Elizabeth and her horse would "rocket to stardom" together. Fred Stanley, in the New York Times, echoed studio talking points by praising Elizabeth's equestrian skills, which, he said, had landed her what MGM was calling "the biggest kid part in years."

  The star-making machine now kicked into high gear. Soon after being cast, Elizabeth was ordered to report to the studio photographer for publicity shots. Wearing a lacy dress, holding her arms demurely, little Miss Taylor posed against a backdrop of flowers. Even in black and white, the glossy eight-by-ten photographs expertly highlighted her most-discussed feature. An accompanying Metro press release informed editors that Elizabeth's eyes were "the bluest of blue."

  This was an era before most stars had personal press agents or managers; the studio offered personalized yet factorylike service. Headed by Howard Strickling, an authoritarian taskmaster, the MGM publicity department employed between sixty and one hundred personnel in offices on both coasts and in satellites throughout the country. There wasn't a lot of turnover; this was the dream team. "Mr. Strickling didn't pay the highest salaries," said publicist Emily Torchia, "but neither did he hire and fire. Many of us were in the department for years." What Strickling did was instill a fierce loyalty in his employees toward the studio and its stars. No one talked out of turn, ever. Even the stars were trained to respect one another's privacy. In interviews and photo spreads, they were unfailingly positive about each other, not to mention the studio. "MGM publicists were like none other in promoting the studio brand," said publicist Alan Cahan.

  The publicity office was located just off the lot on the corner of Washington Boulevard and Ince Way. Each publicist in- side was assigned three or four stars and a handful of upcoming pictures. Some specialized in the big newspapers, others handled the smaller heartland papers. Still others took care of the national magazines like Look and Life. Everyone worked with the fan magazines, especially Photoplay and Modern Screen. The eight Los Angeles dailies received special attention, with one publicist making the rounds every day to deliver tips to the newsrooms. In Hollywood there was little distinction made between moving-picture news and reports from City Hall. While East Coast papers traditionally segregated stories about the movies in the entertainment or gossip sections, the Los Angeles papers often treated such items as front-page news.

  The lifeblood of the publicity department was on the first floor, where amid piles of newspapers and constantly ringing telephones toiled the "planters"—industrious drones who spent their entire days typing up two- or three-line items on onionskin paper and sending them out via regular mail and teletype, hoping and praying that some editor somewhere would run them. Sitting down with Elizabeth and her mother, a phalanx of Metro planters scribbled into their reporters' notebooks as many tidbits about the girl as they could elicit. Thus commenced the construction of the public image of Elizabeth Taylor, a process that would roll on for the next twenty years, gathering more and more steam, or simply hot air.

  "Young Elizabeth loves animals more than anything except her mother, father, and brother," one plant read. "She has three dogs, two cats, and a menagerie of rabbits." True enough: Elizabeth did have several pets, but surely the Metro planters recalled how phenomenally successful Twentieth Century-Fox had been when the studio based Shirley Temple's public image around her love of animals. With a template already in place on how to create child stars, MGM publicists used it. How excited they must have been to learn of Elizabeth's horse in England, presented to her when she was just five. And so we got the stories about Betty, the horse who could sometimes go "absolutely native," with only little Elizabeth able to calm her. How fortunate MGM was to have such a tale to promote National Velvet. In the script, of course, the young heroine does exactly the same thing.

  Invisible to the public was the worldly little girl who occasionally shocked her classmates with a well-placed "hell" or "damn." As presented by the press, the young Elizabeth Taylor was as innocent as a fawn, though she could also be plucky and precocious. Indeed, when they weren't busy promoting her love of animals, the publicists were hyping Elizabeth's determination, which seemed at times almost otherworldly. Those three inches, true or not, were indelibly imprinted upon the Taylor myth. CHILD LITERALLY GROWS INTO ROLE headlined one item prepared by the publicity department and run verbatim in several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. In these accounts Elizabeth is depicted as "willing herself" into the part of Velvet Brown, with a belief in her destiny as strong as any saint's—an echo, again, of Sara's Christian Science. Fan magazine writer Herbert Howe picked up on this theme, writing that some around the lot claimed that Elizabeth could perform miracles. "The child puts a spell on birds and beasts and studio bigwigs," Howe wrote. "She waved the wand and shot up like Kansas corn three inches. Her doctor said it was not possible, but she said it was if you realized it was God's plan."

  Or her mother's.
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  Dick Hanley's desk sat just past the door that led into the private suite of Louis B. Mayer, the omnipotent godhead of the studio. Only the most privileged ever made it past Hanley's desk. Few but the top stars and directors—and the money men from New York, of course—had ever seen the inside of Mayer's private sanctuary. But today's visitor was a little girl who'd just turned twelve years old—the latest protégé of the studio's starmakers, the newest addition to Mr. Mayer's family of beloved "daughters."

  Dick was thirty-five years old, a native of Indianapolis, the son of an Irish immigrant railroad clerk. As the youngest child of four, he'd been pampered by his parents, who scrimped and saved in order to send him to college while his older brothers trudged off to jobs as tire salesmen and railroad operators. In his early twenties, Dick taught English at a private school, still living at home. But he hankered to get out of Indianapolis. Like so many young gay men, both then and now, Hanley harbored a deep wanderlust, a yen to discover a place where it might be possible to lead a more fulfilling, authentic life.

  So he found Hollywood, arriving in the movie capital at a time when many other men, not so much younger than he, were marching off to war. But a deferment kept Hanley safely stateside. A friendship with Kate Corbaley, the studio's chief reader of scripts, led to an introduction to the formidable Ida Koverman, once campaign secretary to Herbert Hoover and now executive assistant to Louis B. Mayer. Koverman had a job in mind for Dick. Although her boss was notoriously uncomfortable around male homosexuals, Mayer's respect for Koverman overcame any misgivings that he might have had. He hired Hanley as his personal secretary.