How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  But then James Dean was killed on September 30 while driving his Porsche 550 Spyder near Cholame, California. On the lot the next day, Elizabeth reacted dramatically to the news, snapping at Stevens for not appearing emotional enough and then "losing her breakfast in the makeup department." Those present attributed her vomiting to distress over Dean's death, but her doctors said that she might actually be suffering from appendicitis or an ovarian cyst. There was also the possibility, they said, that she'd sustained some serious damage from her caesarean section back in February.

  On the night of October 2, Elizabeth was admitted to UCLA hospital. Dr. Robert Buckley grimly told Stevens that she was "more ill than she had ever been" in the twelve years he had been treating her. The Giant company was forced to suspend shooting once again on October 3, with MGM agreeing to release Warners from further payments for the use of their star until Elizabeth was able to return to work.

  The film was far behind schedule by now. Once again, it was Andre who tried to fix things. He spent hours trying to get Elizabeth's doctors on the phone. When at last he reached them, he urged that they delay any "exploratory operations" and simply focus on getting their patient well enough "to finish the picture." Surprisingly, the doctors agreed to his request. Any major treatments could be put off until the end of shooting, they said. Andre was delighted. Only two interior scenes, including the final sequence with Hudson, were left to do, along with some loops with Elizabeth that he estimated would take about three hours. Dr. John Davis thought Elizabeth could handle that, and "following completion of the picture [she would be readmitted] to the hospital [to] correct all conditions which now exist with her."

  Yet it's clear from private medical reports filed with Warners' insurance company that Elizabeth's doctors knew very well by this point that she wouldn't need to return to the hospital. The various fears of appendicitis, ovarian cysts, peritonitis, or caesarean complications had all turned out to be groundless. Dr. Davis finally concluded that Elizabeth was suffering from "extreme nervous tension" brought on by both the news of Dean's death and "the extreme mental duress she was put under by the director at this time." Although the primary diagnosis was volvulus, a twisting of the intestine possibly due to stress, Davis also listed bronchitis, suggesting that Elizabeth's cold from the previous week had simply gotten worse. (Viral bronchitis can also sometimes produce gastrointestinal symptoms.) On October 5 Tom Andre got the welcome news that Elizabeth's fever had broken and that the "obstruction in her intestine" had been relieved. On Saturday, October 8, Davis told Andre that "he saw no reason—unless something new came up—why she would not be able to [resume] work on Tuesday."

  Something new frequently did come up, but they all hoped for the best. Studio chief Jack Warner had been kept apprised of "the Taylor situation" in regular memos. So it was with great relief, felt from top to bottom, that Elizabeth returned to the set on October 11. She was a bit hoarse but otherwise no worse for the wear. That shouldn't imply that she hadn't suffered through her ordeal. Dr. Davis stressed to Andre that "she had been a very sick girl all week." Though it would appear much ado had been made over a bad case of bronchitis, the star had suffered no less for the histrionics. When a doctor once told her that he could find no physical cause for an ailment, she shouted back, "Then why do I feel this terrible pain?" Elizabeth Taylor never faked an illness. She suffered through them all, even if someone else—someone who hadn't grown up with a constant flutter of attendants and caregivers around her—might have required less attention and less treatment for the same ailment.

  She also demonstrated once again that she wasn't exactly powerless against the authoritarian system that governed her life. Stevens rode everyone hard, but it was Elizabeth who ultimately determined when she showed up for work and which days she got off. After the director had offended Elizabeth by refusing to call a halt to filming after Dean's death, he had no choice but to suspend production three days later when she checked herself into the hospital.

  Of course, Elizabeth's absences from the set also meant that the studio's profits were undercut. Losses directly attributable to her illnesses totaled $44,309.40. It's not likely that Elizabeth lost much sleep over that. She might have considered it payback for the long, difficult shoot that she'd had to endure. She might be their chattel, but she was no mindless sheep to be herded along by the rigid studio machine.

  At a party for Benny Thau at Romanoff's a few weeks later—with Dore Schary and Louis B. Mayer seated discreetly at separate tables—Elizabeth gaily made the rounds, Hedda Hopper reported, "and she's forgotten all about illness." When she'd been assessed back in May by the studio's insurer, the Fireman's Fund Insurance Company, Elizabeth had been rated as a "good" risk. No history of illness in the past six months had been reported, and when asked about any present complaints, she had replied, "None." She had told the insurer that in the past three years no accident or sickness had ever prevented her from working. Giant, however, changed all that. After what she went through on that film, Elizabeth learned one more lesson of stardom. To get what one wanted, every weapon in one's arsenal had to be used. All was fair in the game of fame.

  But there was an additional reason for Elizabeth's distress over the past few months. Her marriage was disintegrating. And one scandal rag dared to suggest that her allure had paled against that of the burlesque queen who was rumored to be her rival.

  Jennie Lee, whose forty-two-inch bust had made her the Ba-zoom Girl in the after-dark world of Los Angeles burlesque, peered out between the red velvet curtains. She knew right away that the gentlemen at the front table were upscale types. Jennie figured on doing her special trick for them: twirling the tassels attached to her breasts clockwise, then counterclockwise, and then in opposite directions at the same time in a stunning grand finale.

  The twenty-six-year-old native of Kansas City, Missouri, headlined a show five nights a week at Strip City, a burlesque theater at Western Avenue and Pico Boulevard. Despite the clucking from some of the city's puritans, Strip City was no dive: Jazz lovers flocked from all over to hear the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, and comedians like Redd Foxx often performed between the striptease acts. Still, the place had a certain edge: Foxx's routines were laced with four-letter words, and anywhere whites and blacks mixed was considered outré in 1955. There were also drag queens and gay men. Anyone in search of something a little more dangerous than Mocambo was drawn to Strip City. One of those was Michael Wilding, who was sitting at the table up front with his pals.

  Jennie Lee might not have known who he was right away, but she was a smart cookie. Since arriving in Los Angeles a few years earlier, she'd fought for the rights of "exotic dancers" (she disliked the term "stripper") by organizing her girls and affiliating with the American Guild of Variety Artists. She campaigned to raise the dancers' $85-a-week minimum wage, which she claimed was the lowest in the nation. With a shrewd eye for publicity, Jennie threatened a "cover-up" strike. The girls appeared at a press conference in topcoats and refused to take them off until they got a raise. Jennie eventually won $100-a-week salaries for her hardworking team.

  That summer—while Elizabeth was in Texas—Jennie had organized an exotic dancers' softball team and invited photographers to watch them play in Griffith Park. The girls' picture graced the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Michael Wilding—and the rest of the city—couldn't have missed it. Among the players showing off their gams and softball gloves was one Verena Dale, a voluptuous blonde like Jennie herself. It was Verena who recognized the upscale patrons at the front table. Among them were Michael Wilding, the husband of Elizabeth Taylor, and a well-known Hollywood writer.

  After the show Jennie and Verena and two other girls stopped by Wilding's table. They often flirted with celebrities; Rock Hudson had been there on occasion, as had Dean Martin. Alcohol flowed fast and easy, and at the end of the night Wilding drove Verena to her home on North Hobart Boulevard, less than ten minutes away. According to one of Jennie's protégés, Elizabeth's
husband and his friends returned frequently to Strip City over the next few weeks, and an unlikely friendship developed between these Hollywood uptowners and the freewheeling burlesquers. Wilding became especially fond of the high-spirited Verena Dale. Both had, at the very least, a love of liquor in common. The Associated Press reporter James Bacon, who was Wilding's good friend, recalled that the sophisticated actor was "fond of his Scotch—the drink, not the nationality."

  After the last curtain fell on the night of Wednesday, June 22, Wilding and his writer friend decided to keep the party going a little longer and invited Verena, Jennie, and a male employee of Strip City back to the house in Beverly Hills. The fivesome piled into Wilding's white Cadillac along with the ladies' lacy costumes that they would need to shoot a "strip movie" the next day. Up they drove to Elizabeth's "Snow White" house where, presumably, the two Wilding sons were either fast asleep or away for the evening. There the girls swam in Elizabeth's pool and the men kept the liquid refreshment flowing. At one point Verena jumped up on a cocktail table in a red negligee and did a version of her striptease, minus the usual pasties.

  Jennie left soon afterward, leaving Verena and the male employee at the Wilding house. But she had a whopper of a story to sell. The fact that the escapade ended up being splashed across the cover of Confidential, the most notorious scandal magazine of the era, meant that someone had squealed, and the most likely culprit—the only one with any motive—was Jennie. James Bacon, long rumored to be the friend who accompanied Wilding to Strip City, has never acknowledged whether he was there that night, but he did admit to knowing about the "encore party" at Wilding's house, and he was certain that Confidential had been tipped off by one of the strippers. The media-savvy Jennie had cultivated contacts well beyond the fellows at the Los Angeles Times. For a dancer struggling to make a living wage, the payola offered by the scandal magazines for dirt on the stars was extremely lucrative. Even as she slid into the backseat of Wilding's Cadillac, Jennie was probably already counting the cash she could make by letting Confidential know about the impromptu party at Elizabeth Taylor's house.

  The magazine's publisher was Robert Harrison, a flamboyant playboy who drove white Cadillacs and wore white alpaca coats, and whose other publications included the girlie magazines Titter, Wink,, and Flirt. In fact, many of the girls from Strip City, possibly even Jennie and Verena, had posed for Harrison. But it was Confidential that sent the publisher's fortunes skyrocketing. By 1955, midway through a decade that aggressively celebrated and promoted conventional values, the scandal rag was selling four million copies a month. For all the power wielded by Hedda and Louella, the columnists were, after all, dedicated to the advancement of the industry; they happily promoted its necessary fictions. In Burbank, even as Jennie was tattling to Confidential, Warner Bros. publicists were busy preparing a mock column for Dorothy Manners, Louella Parsons's assistant and frequent Hearst substitute columnist. They made sure to include all of the talking points they wanted to pass on about Elizabeth and Giant. "The progressive coming of age of a violet-eyed, twenty-four-year-old mother of two named Elizabeth Taylor is a topic that has occupied Hollywood almost constantly," the studio wrote. "It will perhaps come as a surprise to many that in Giant ... Elizabeth emerges as an actress of great range and power." When Manners's column appeared in print, much of the Warners wording was left intact. Making a busy columnist's job easier was one of the studios' most effective tricks of the trade.

  But Confidential and its copycats—Top Secret, Whisper, Uncensored, Private Lives, and others—heralded a new and very different kind of Hollywood press. Here the studios' much-vaunted publicity machine broke down. Their elaborate mythmaking—with their mimeographs and scripted interviews and ready-to-go columns—was challenged by the rise of the scandal magazines. "What Confidential proved," wrote Time correspondent Ezra Goodman, "was that there was too much pallid, punches-pulled reporting elsewhere and the average, untutored reader was probably wise to it and instinctively knew he was being hornswoggled. He undoubtedly realized that Confidential, in its own way, was giving him a glimmer of truth."

  Harrison was based in New York, so he set up his niece, Marjorie Meade, as head of Hollywood Research, Inc., an information-gathering service that kept Los Angeles private detectives working overtime. These sleuths and spies were the doppelgängers of Hollywood's press agents, evil twins who undid all of their good brethren's hard work. Instead of building up the stars, Confidential was dedicated to tearing them down, "to flipping over the rock of the sleepytime Eisenhower '50s and showing the creepy stuff underneath," according to the son of its editor. In due course, Tab Hunter's lewd-conduct arrest with other "limp-wristed lads" was unearthed and exposed; the sexual adventures of Maureen O'Hara and Dorothy Dandridge were revealed; and the private companionship of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, discreetly ig nored by the mainstream press, was sensationalized. At the eleventh hour, a story exposing Rock Hudson as gay was killed in a quid pro quo deal with Hudson's powerful agents, exchanged for a story about Rory Calhoun's criminal past—and likely a considerable chunk of hush money as well.

  Rats, stool pigeons, hookers, pimps, and strippers could earn ten grand or more by passing on dirt to Confidential's spies, who were everywhere. It's not surprising that the magazine's editor, the alcoholic, goofball-popping Howard Rushmore, had gotten his start as an assistant to Senator Joseph McCarthy and had testified as a friendly witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Rabidly anti-Communist, Rushmore actually thought that McCarthy wasn't tough enough on subversives; none of that kind of mollycoddling would be allowed in the pages of Confidential.

  It was in the middle of September, just before Elizabeth came down with the bad cold that had turned into bronchitis, that the November issue of Confidential hit the stands with Wilding's little party headlined across the front cover: when liz Taylor's away, mike will play. "There are millions of red-blooded hubbies in this world who think they'd be as faithful as the rock of Gibraltar—if they had the right wife," the article read. "You're an exception to the rule if you never sat in a darkened theater watching the contours of Elizabeth Taylor and vowed you'd always be on time if you had that to come home to." But Wilding, the magazine implied, seemed to know something that the rest of the public didn't. "His high jinks program rolled into high gear within hours after Liz took a plane to Texas," the article continued, describing Wilding as unable to keep his hands off Verena Dale and mentioning his promise to her that she could be his girlfriend. Considering Hedda Hopper's allegations, these likely were exaggerations on the part of the informer, who, after all, wanted Confidential to feel that it was getting its money's worth. Wilding and Dale were probably more drinking buddies than anything else. Yet no matter how many details were true, the main thrust of the article was that not even Elizabeth Taylor was alluring enough to keep her man.

  The "respectable" Hollywood press rarely acknowledged claims made by Confidential, but the industry was always abuzz with them. Copies of all the scandal rags were delivered hot off the press to the desks of every Hollywood producer, agent, and columnist. Hedda Hopper couldn't resist publishing a blind item. "A neighbor of Liz Taylor and Mike Wilding was so incensed over a recent story that appeared in a magazine that she's taking matters into her own hands," Hedda wrote. "If her method works, I'll tell you what she's done." Just what this neighbor had planned—a camera monitor?—is unclear, but Elizabeth couldn't have been pleased by the scuttlebutt. Her handlers at both MGM and Warners likewise must have been horrified by the implications of the Confidential story because it directly undercut their promotion of Elizabeth as a sexy star. If she couldn't keep her man happy, what woman could?

  In private, Elizabeth's response to the article, all sources agree, was blasé. She "chalked it up to one of Michael's playful moods while under the influence," said James Bacon. Asked about it later by Look magazine, she commented, "Whether it's true or not, you can't let an article like that break up your marriage."
But you could go to the hospital—which Elizabeth did about two weeks after the magazine hit the stands. The press made sure to note how Wilding was right at her side, attentive to her every need. Elizabeth's bronchitis seems to have come in handy for more than just leveling the playing field with George Stevens. It also distracted attention away from Verena Dale's red negligee.

  But for all of her apparent open-mindedness about her marriage to Wilding, Elizabeth was distressed. The union had reached the end of its usefulness, and the tricky negotiations for extradition had begun. Elizabeth would admit that husband and wife had lived like "brother and sister" after the birth of Christopher. But that didn't imply a happy sibling relationship. Wilding recalled a "typical row." Relaxing after breakfast with the Times crossword, he was startled when his wife suddenly snatched the paper out of his hands, tore it in half, and lobbed it into the fireplace. "So much for you and your stupid games!" Elizabeth shrieked, trying to bait him into hitting her. "Go on, hit me, why don't you?" she shrilled. When he refused, she groaned, "If only you would. That would prove you are flesh and blood instead of a stuffed dummy!"

  At twenty-three, Elizabeth was too young, too frankly carnal, to live like a sister to her husband. Hedda Hopper might have explained the lack of sexual passion one way, but later on Elizabeth blamed it on Wilding's epilepsy: "It does something to a man." No matter the reason, she was left frustrated by her sexless marriage. Her pals Rock Hudson and Monty Clift had tricks left and right, but she was expected to twiddle her thumbs while Michael worked out the crossword puzzle.