How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

At last she could take it no more. "Don't you dare speak to my mother like that!" Elizabeth shouted, standing up and leaning in over Mayer's high-gloss, custom-designed wraparound desk. "You and your studio can both go to hell!" With a dramatic flair, she spun on her heel and ran from the office straight into the arms of Dick Hanley, whose shoulder she cried on not for the last time.

  Although Benny Thau insisted that she apologize to Mayer, Elizabeth refused. For the rest of her life, she would take pride in telling people how she never again stepped foot inside Mayer's office. Maybe it wasn't only her choice; surely Mayer didn't relish a sequel to such a scene. But neither did he penalize his fast-rising investment, whose pictures had all made money. No doubt Sara, always more willing to compromise than Elizabeth, made all the necessary apologies as her daughter sobbed in Hanley's arms.

  The contretemps with Mayer had occurred some three years before Elizabeth's romance with Bill Pawley, so perhaps studio officials should have been a bit more prepared when the young star insisted that she be allowed to fly to Miami to spend time at the Pawley family's beach house. After all, it had been obvious for some time that Elizabeth Taylor wasn't as malleable as most. Unquestionably cooperative during costume fittings, photo shoots, and makeup sessions, she possessed an independent streak, too—one that allowed her to sidestep the ordeal of pills and pressure that Judy Garland endured within the studio system. Neither would Sara, whatever her ambition, have permitted such treatment of her daughter.

  Even as a teenager, Elizabeth had learned a great deal about self-preservation. Years later when she was making a film called Divorce His, Divorce Hers, she was surprised when the little girl playing her daughter left the set early. The director, Waris Hussein, explained that the girl was only allowed to work so many hours because she was a child. "We didn't have that at MGM," Elizabeth said incredulously. "You had to learn to survive on your own. I managed to do it, but Judy never did."

  Tom Mankiewicz, a friend of both actresses, thought that the difference between Elizabeth and Judy "was one of temperament." Elizabeth came into the business "already strong," he said, while "Judy was emotional, needing affirmation. She sang these songs and you could hear the need and the doubt in her voice. Elizabeth survived the demands of the studio because she was confident that she could get what she wanted on her own."

  By her early teens, Elizabeth had developed a crucial, clear-eyed perspective. "I began to see myself as two separate people," she said. "Elizabeth Taylor the person and Elizabeth Taylor the commodity. I saw the difference between my image and my real self"—an ability sorely lacking in many (if not most) Hollywood stars. "Before I reached my teens I resolved to separate my feelings of self-worth from the public image of Elizabeth Taylor. It was a lesson I never forgot." It also allowed her to do the things necessary to sell the commodity to the public without getting lost in the illusion.

  That's not to say her journey through the studio system was a cakewalk. "A little red schoolhouse across from Stage 20, to me, is an extraordinary kind of confinement for youthful exuberance," George Stevens would say. Indeed, Elizabeth's highly regimented days often left her anxious and fretful. "I would get up early [and] go out on the polo field," she said. "To get some of my steam off ... I would take forty jumps before I would go into work." Many times over the years she would lament never having had a real childhood—"no football games to go to, no proms to attend, no growing-up things."

  There were compensations, of course. Stepping out onto the lot one crisp February morning, Elinor Donahue was awed by the sight of Elizabeth's birthday present from Mr. Mayer: a pale blue Cadillac. "Everyone was talking about it," Donahue said. "'Did you see the car they're giving to Elizabeth Taylor?' We all raced onto the lot, and there was the car with a big red bow wrapped around it. Maybe there wasn't a bow, but that's how I remember it, because it was such a big production in giving it to her." Jane Powell's mother was "huffy" about the gift, Donahue recalled, because Jane had wanted a car, too; but Mrs. Powell had felt girls so young shouldn't be indulged with cars. Mrs. Taylor, on the other hand, "was very agreeable about Elizabeth getting one," Donahue said. Miss Taylor was given a special license to drive the Cadillac so that she didn't have to troop downtown to pass a test with the City of Los Angeles.

  But even taking a driving test is part of one's coming of age. "Elizabeth felt a part of her childhood had been taken from her," said Mark Miller, secretary to Rock Hudson and a fond acquaintance of Taylor's in the 1950s. "She was shrewd enough to know she'd missed out in some important ways." Anne Francis said that a sense of detachment from the real world was common on the MGM lot: "We were aware of living a very different reality from the rest of the world, and that was sometimes hard to balance." Elinor Donahue, emotional about her experience even sixty years later, said it was both "unreal and wonderful." She said that they all "lived in a fairy tale, but fairy tales come to an end."

  Yet a Cadillac would not have offered much consolation to Elizabeth on the day in 1946 when her father moved out of the house and into the Beverly Hills Hotel, taking seventeen-year-old Howard with him. Mother and daughter were on their own, which they virtually had been for several years, with the Taylor men and the Taylor women living separate lives within the same house. Extramarital affairs were whispered about on both sides. Years later Elizabeth would describe the moment when her "idyllic, happy little family"—the one profiled in Good Housekeeping and Ladies' Home Journal— "fell apart." Francis "erupted," she said, as Sara increasingly "lived her life vicariously" through their daughter. He also resented Elizabeth making more money than he did.

  In some ways, when her soft-spoken father moved out, Elizabeth felt "no special loss." She hadn't been close to him for years. Benny Thau remained her surrogate father, she admitted, and it was to Thau she went "for help and advice." But her parents' separation had an impact on her nonetheless. "It didn't show up at the time," one friend told a reporter. "But...[the rupture in her parents' marriage] played a part in maturing her."

  What the breakup demonstrated was the toll that movie stardom took on personal lives. Francis Taylor's brother John candidly observed that Elizabeth's career was a "point of contention" that aggravated the "basic incompatibility" of her parents. Indeed, Elizabeth had watched for the past six years as the bond between Francis and Sara steadily disintegrated. Never passionate, they had once been at least companionable, with Sara still calling her husband "Daddy." But as his wife became more single-minded in her devotion to Elizabeth's career, Francis built up resentments. According to John Taylor, there had been more than just one separation between husband and wife.

  Metro had a hand in reconciling the Taylors just at the moment their daughter was venturing into the dating pool herself. "Elizabeth learned early," said Dick Clayton, "that image was the most important thing, that love and all of that ... had to be juggled [along with career and stardom]. How could you grow up in Hollywood and not learn that?"

  It was to keep up appearances that the studio finally agreed to allow Elizabeth to head to Florida to see her Bill. But now they had a new problem: how to make it seem as if she hadn't jilted poor Glenn Davis, who was off serving his country in Korea. Fan-magazine readers had bought into the Davis story with a vicarious passion, and now letters to the editor demanded to know "if Liz had penned a 'Dear John' letter to Glenn."

  Hedda Hopper, happy as ever to help, went to bat for Pawley, assuring her readers that he, too, was a war hero, having been a pilot during the war. The columnist spun romantic tales of the heartsick Pawley yearning to fly a plane to be near his beloved. Eventually, since the basic narrative was the same, the fan magazines simply exchanged Davis for Pawley and seemed content with that—especially because they got a much more satisfying payoff this time. On June 6, 1949, Hedda broke the story of the happy couple's engagement. The news was personally phoned in to the columnist by Elizabeth herself. Making it official, Sara sent an engagement notice to the New York Times. Significantly, the engagement was announce
d by only the star's mother. Had Francis declined to get involved because he saw the whole thing for what it was?

  Of course, none of this could have happened without MGM's approval. Elizabeth might buck her handlers from time to time, but an actual engagement would need to be officially sanctioned. Apparently they'd decided to milk the Pawley story for a little more publicity, consenting to an engagement party. Sara, in her official spin, would say that Elizabeth had begged her "to announce the engagement so she could wear her lovely diamond ring in public." She'd claim that she tried to do so quietly, "but when you are in the limelight it is impossible to do anything quietly. You are suddenly surrounded by cameras and publicity." Cameras and publicity, of course, were what everyone, including the studio, wanted—and an announcement in the New York Times and a phone call to Hedda Hopper hardly qualifies as doing it "quietly."

  Photos of the happy couple holding a plate of hors d'oeuvres were distributed to the press. Swept up by the romance of it all, Elizabeth seems to have genuinely wanted to marry Pawley, even if the studio was already trying to find a way to untangle the knot. An engagement party was one thing; an actual wedding was another. Every time Elizabeth mentioned a date, Metro threw up roadblocks. She had to finish The Big Hangover first, they insisted, and then the loan-out to George Stevens and Paramount loomed, and after that she was scheduled to start immediately on a picture called Father of the Bride. They might let her play a girl getting married, but that was as far as Metro was willing to go.

  The bloom was off the rose in a matter of weeks anyway. "Elizabeth saw the pattern of her future life with Bill unfolding," Sara said. "The longer we stayed [in Miami], the more homesick she became for California, the studio, her work, the old life she knew and loved."

  Sara was just as homesick, no doubt. That "old life" promised considerably more yield than had yet paid off. The Pawleys might be rich, but the privileges of a Miami socialite were nothing compared to what awaited a top-ranked MGM star. Elizabeth's bosses weren't about to let her break her contract either. Like the rest of the studios, Metro was hurting financially, posting a $6 million decline in profits between 1947 and 1948. The new head of production, Dore Schary, had gambled on an ambitious schedule of sixty-seven pictures that year, compared to just twenty-four the year previous. When profits began ticking upward (by the end of 1949 MGM's income had recovered by more than 50 percent), Schary was hailed as a visionary who rivaled Mayer. Key to Schary's plan to climb out of the red were pictures starring surefire moneymakers like Elizabeth. No way was the studio's teenage princess going to be allowed to retire to Miami, not after so much had been invested in her. Metro wanted its dividends.

  No one was all that surprised, therefore, when Pawley announced in September that the engagement was off. No one, that is, but the public—which had now been deprived of a happy ending twice. The fan magazines, with their three-month lead time, were left embarrassed: Photoplay didn't have time to stop the presses on their October issue, which featured Elizabeth gushing with love for Pawley.

  The press retaliated with a series of unfavorable articles about the star. Columnists started calling her fickle. "She leaves a trail of broken hearts," one reporter chided. "Our Little Liz is turning into a real man-eater." The Metro publicists hadn't anticipated a hostile backlash. Tone deaf, they just kept throwing more boyfriends into the mix. They sent Elizabeth off to the Mocambo with Vic Damone, only to watch in dismay as the gambit misfired. In London the Sunday Pictorial called for "a series of resounding smacks behind the bustle of her latest Paris creation," an entreaty that sent Hedda Hopper charging to the rescue. "Besides taking billions of our [war-relief] money," Hedda huffed, "the English now want the pleasure of spanking one of our prettiest screen actresses ... What Elizabeth does is none of their business. I suppose the British would rather have her marry and divorce twice."

  Back at the studio, Elizabeth was hurt by this negative turn in her press. "If I were the kind of person they write me up to be, I'd hate myself," she said. But she had now participated quite willingly in two largely counterfeit romances. Even Pawley, whom she had imagined herself marrying, was just another pawn in the end. "We went well together under the palm trees," she'd say. "We had nothing in common in our lives."

  Once again experience had demonstrated that the personal would always be public for her. "Elizabeth isn't just any little girl, she's a star," Hedda Hopper explained sternly to the Taylor family at one point. And being a star meant doing some things and forfeiting others all in the line of "duty." Yet as much as Elizabeth understood this, as much as she accepted the compromises and realities that came with her ambition, she remained a bit wistful about it all. A part of her really did want the "happily ever after" of her films—finding a devoted husband in Little Women, for example, or fading out with Van Johnson in the last reel of The Big Hangover. In real life, however, such rewards were rare for movie stars; and this was a bitter pill to swallow for a sensitive teenager. While her outward appearance was telling the world that she was an adult, she was still, in fact, "an emotional child inside a woman's body"—her own observation. Elizabeth Taylor was no innocent at seventeen. She understood everything that was happening to her. But as often as her life thrilled her, it could make her a little bit sad, too.

  Such was her frame of mind when she set out for Lake Tahoe less than two weeks after the Pawley breakup to start work on the Stevens film, now called A Place in the Sun.

  It was sunny but cold on Sunday, October 2, 1949, the day George Stevens's assistant drove out to Truckee, California, to meet the train that was bringing Elizabeth Taylor from Hollywood. A century earlier in these parts, members of the snowbound Donner party had been reduced to cannibalism to survive the Sierra Nevada winter. Elizabeth Taylor, looking out from the windows of her train, had never gone on location like this before.

  Belching smoke, the train clattered to a stop along the old tracks. Done up in Dior, the teenaged star stepped out onto the platform followed by her mother and a woman the assistant called a "welfare worker." Because Elizabeth was only seventeen, the state had sent along a watchdog to make sure that she wasn't over- worked or mistreated. To be safe, Stevens ordered his crew not to swear in front of their young actress—a directive quickly forgotten once Elizabeth's own spicy vocabulary livened up the set.

  A car took them the twenty-two miles to Chambers Lodge, an old weather-beaten hunting and fishing resort. All along the way they skirted the giant Lake Tahoe, its shimmering azure surface stretching eastward for almost as far as the eye could see. For Dreiser's archetypal story of hope and tragedy—which hinges on what happens one day on a lake—no makeshift watering hole on the Paramount backlot would do. Instead, George Stevens chose this "noble sheet of blue water walled by snowclad peaks," as Mark Twain described Tahoe, "surely the fairest picture the whole earth affords." And so the whole company made the trek up to Tahoe, their heads dizzy from the altitude of 6,255 feet.

  Settling into her pine-paneled rooms at the lodge and unpacking the long flannels that Hedda Hopper reported she took with her, Elizabeth quickly became aware that this was going to be a very different kind of filmmaking experience. She heard the sounds of speedboat jockeys enjoying one last romp on the lake before winter drifted in. But if she thought that she might have time to join them, she was wrong. This wasn't some lighthearted romp with Van Johnson on an MGM soundstage. This was a serious picture, and for the first time, Elizabeth was insecure on a movie set. She might be a pro at hitting floor marks and matching her costar in two-shots, but all that craft seemed feeble here. She felt "very much the inadequate teenage Hollywood sort of puppet that had just worn pretty clothes and hadn't really acted except with horses and dogs."

  The emotion in the script was certainly heavy. Dreiser had based his novel on the true story of one Chester Gillette of New York, an ambitious young man who had drowned a factory girl pregnant with his child in 1906. The state contended that he had done so deliberately because she had complicated h
is plan to marry a rich girl. Found guilty, Gillette died in the electric chair in 1908. Two decades later Dreiser used Gillette's story as an indictment of the social and economic disparities in American society. Liberal in his politics, Stevens shared the author's sympathetic approach to the protagonist but differed in his conception of the wealthy young woman who inspires the killing. Stevens reimagined Sondra—now rechristened Angela Vickers because he liked the "ring" to it—as both emotionally and physically compelling. The audience couldn't be allowed to hate the hero who kills for her love; they had to understand his temptation. Angela had to be worth everything, even the electric chair.

  But was the actress playing her up to the task? As Elizabeth went before the cameras in Lake Tahoe, the MGM star-making bandwagon continued to roll. After much finagling by Metro publicists, she'd recently made the cover of Time magazine. International society figure Elsa Maxwell was drafted to write a flattering piece for Photoplay describing Elizabeth as "The Most Exciting Girl in Hollywood." The magazine hit the stands just as the young star arrived at Lake Tahoe. Crew members recalled seeing copies strewn around the set.

  It was precisely for such notoriety that Stevens had wanted Elizabeth. Production manager Doc Erickson watched her walk onto the set for the first time in her close-fitting Dior dress and was struck by her sheer presence as she shook hands with the crew. "There was a sense that she knew she was a star," he said. "Not in an arrogant way. She just knew what she was. She carried it with her."

  For several days Elizabeth had little to do but walk around shaking hands. Principal photography began on Tuesday, October 4, but the 6:30 A.M. call was just for Clift and Shelley Winters. Stevens was shooting the scenes that took place at the pier, including the important one where Clift rents the boat to take Winters out on the lake. Elizabeth wandered by at one point, her hair tied up in a scarf. She sat cross-legged and watched her costars work. Clift and Winters "were very intense and concentrated," Erickson said, and no doubt Elizabeth noticed this. These were actors, after all—artists from the New York stage, serious about every second of their performances. Elizabeth hurried back to her room to run lines again with her mother.