How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  And all he had to do was snap his fingers. Two days after his Battersea Park bash, Todd packed up his wife and entourage and planned to sail back home. His baby, he insisted, would be born on American soil. But at a farewell party in their hotel suite, attended by friends and a scattering of reporters, Elizabeth suddenly appeared in the doorway and announced that she'd lost their passports. Mike exploded.

  "Call the American Embassy!" he shouted. It was left to Dick Hanley, as usual, to calmly remind him that it was the Fourth of July, and the embassy was closed. "Then call the American Consul in Southampton!" Hanley wasn't sure that there was time for new passports to be issued, since they were sailing in a matter of hours. But Todd was confident. "They'll fix us up somehow," he said. After all, he was Mike Todd.

  Indeed, they all sailed later that day on board the SS Liberté, temporary passports in hand. The consul had opened its doors as a special favor to Mr. Todd. After that, their voyage was uneventful. Given Elizabeth's condition, Todd said that he had put in a special request for calm seas. There were some who took him at his word.

  Sailing across the Atlantic, Mike Todd kept the telegraph operator busy, sending out regular dispatches to his publicist, Bill Doll, in New York. The American tabloids were eager for items about Todd and his fabulous London bash and all of the glittery guests who'd been in attendance. They wanted news of his wife and the baby she was expecting even more. Todd complied, sending ship-to-shore messages detailing Elizabeth's daily schedule of lounging on a chaise and eating sliced pears and chocolate peanuts. He wanted the public to be assured that he was treating her like a queen.

  How different Elizabeth's life was from just a year before. When she met Todd, she'd been an unhappy wife pining for attention from a distant husband. Mike supplied that in spades, but he gave her even more. In those last few years with Wilding, what Elizabeth had really longed for was liberation from her masters at Metro—a seemingly impossible dream, since it would have meant sacrificing the money and the fame that enabled her to live in the style to which she'd grown accustomed. Enter Mike Todd, whose goals neatly complemented Elizabeth's. Looking to make himself a major Hollywood player, Todd recognized the benefits of being married to Elizabeth Taylor. "She was like the jewel in the crown," said Miles White, Todd's friend and costume designer on Around the World in Eighty Days. "He liked having her on his arm because she was a living, breathing, gorgeous symbol that he had made it to the top of the Hollywood pack."

  The union of Taylor and Todd occurred because of what each could do for the other. Mike had the wealth that would free Elizabeth from dependence on Metro; she had the fame on which he could trade to make it in the film industry. In many ways their romance wasn't unlike the passionate pairing of another prominent couple nearly twenty years earlier. In 1938 Katharine Hepburn was a star in trouble, branded as "box-office poison" and desperate to climb back on top. Howard Hughes was an aviator with dreams of glory, who had captured the world's attention with a daring and ostentatious around-the-world flight. With this union Hepburn maneuvered herself back on the covers of the fan magazines even as her films were flopping, and Hughes solidified his shy lothario image by having won America's most aristocratic star. "He was sort of the top of the available men—and I of the women," Hepburn wrote. "It seemed logical for us to be together ... We each had a wild desire to be famous."

  While Elizabeth did not share Hepburn's "wild desire" for fame, she did have a very strong predilection for a certain way of life—which she had come to expect as her due after being a star for more than a decade. Making movies may never have been a passion for her—but living like a movie star certainly was. Mike Todd was the answer on both counts. Elizabeth knew from the start that the flamboyant showman could be her escape from MGM. She hadn't been in front of the movie camera since finishing Raintree County almost a year earlier, and the lack of film work had been absolute heaven. For Elizabeth, Todd held out the promise of a golden future—not the future Metro publicists tried so hard to sell to the public, the one that portrayed her as longing for a simple domestic life as a wife and mother—but rather something far more glorious than that: travel and adventure, fabulous parties and even more fabulous diamonds, palatial homes and easy living. Scrimping and saving and sitting home the way she had with Michael Wilding was definitely not going to be Elizabeth Taylor's fate.

  But she did make the requisite noise about retiring from pictures in favor of home, hearth, and babies. "Mike and I hope to have many children," Elizabeth was quoted as saying in one Metro press release. "I think it's much more important for a woman to be a mother than an actress." She stated it even more plainly elsewhere: "I've been an actress for fifteen years. Now I want to be a woman!"

  But even if Todd allowed her to think that way for a time, his wife's retirement from the screen was certainly not part of his game plan. He'd shrewdly placed her on the board of Todd Pictures, Inc., and was already using her name to drum up interest and money for his planned production of Don Quixote. Despite the fact that she could barely sing a note, there was also talk of Elizabeth's starring in the next Todd-AO project, the film adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific. Elizabeth's stardom was, in fact, her dowry, the currency with which her husband planned to do business in Hollywood.

  And surely she understood that. Stepping out of their limousine one day soon after their marriage, the Todds had bantered with reporters, something that they seemed to enjoy. Asked if he looked forward to making pictures with his wife, Todd joked that he'd have it written into her contract that she wouldn't have to report to the set any earlier than four in the afternoon. Suddenly Elizabeth's emerald-studded purse clobbered him over the head. Yet for all her mock offense, no doubt the idea was appealing. Making movies as Mrs. Mike Todd would be very different from slaving away as one of Metro's "chattel." Production would be on her terms—or at least her husband's—and not those of the money-grubbers in the front office.

  That doesn't mean that Elizabeth and Mike weren't crazy in love. In Hollywood the recognition of the mutual benefits of a relationship can be the greatest aphrodisiac of all. Hepburn and Hughes may have contrived their initial meeting for their own purposes, but eventually they developed very strong feelings for each other. The same was true for Taylor and Todd. "I love him madly, passionately," Elizabeth told the press. "Why do I love him so much? Because the first time he made love to me, I think my heart stopped beating."

  And why wouldn't it? Making love to Elizabeth meant giving her gifts, extraordinary gifts. Even before the divorce with Wilding was official, Todd presented her with a diamond "friendship ring" that left her eyes bulging. And the gifts kept coming. Shortly before their marriage Todd had imported an expensive, British-made car that boasted its own bar and stove. "There's no such thing as a happy actress," Todd joked with the press. "But I think I know a girl who's going to be a happy housewife." Asked if he thought that Elizabeth would be happy cooking on an automobile stove, Todd replied, "Well, not exactly. I've bought a yacht, too."

  To mark their official engagement, Mike had presented his bride-to-be with a twenty-nine carat, emerald-cut diamond ring. ("Thirty carats would have been vulgar," he told his son.) There were other rings, too: pearls, garnets, and another diamond (valued at $92,000) that was so big that Elizabeth couldn't get her glove over it when Mike gave it to her at Libby Holman's house. So the glove was left behind; Holman later had it framed.

  The love story of Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Todd would be spun by the press as the spontaneous combustion of two people who meet and discover they are soul mates. Kevin McClory, who had proven so accommodating to his boss's objectives, was never mentioned. Instead, Todd was the knight in shining armor who had rescued Elizabeth from long, lonely nights "pacing through the rooms of her house trying to forget her memories." Just what those memories might be—broken romances, failed marriages, her children losing a father—was better left unsaid, at least in official accounts.

  Yet it's
surprising how, in the age of scandal magazines, these official accounts predominated when it came to Elizabeth and Mike. This most likely was something else that his wife could thank him for: Todd's glad-handing of the press meant that she was off-limits, for now anyway. At Sardi's in New York, Mike often power-lunched with Robert Harrison of Confidential and Harrison's crony, columnist and broadcaster Walter Winchell. Todd was one of the most important sources of news and scuttlebutt for both men—which explains the rather astonishing fact that Elizabeth was, for the moment anyway, not a subject of the scandal rags.

  Given the kind of salacious stories that were printed every month about Lana Turner or Ava Gardner, the fact that Elizabeth, under Mike Todd's protection, was spared the scandal-magazine treatment is quite extraordinary because the longstanding rules of the Hollywood press were breaking down by the mid-1950s. The careful balance between studio, star, and public had been thrown off-kilter by the scandal rags, and it never fully recovered, not even after the industry marshaled its forces and brought lawsuits against Confidential, effectively ending its reign. Harrison had made the public aware of the game being played. "Hollywood is in the business of lying," he wrote in one editorial. "Falsehood is a stock in trade. They use vast press-agent organizations ... to build up their stars. They glamorize and distribute detailed—and often deliberately false—information about private lives. They have the cooperation of large segments of the daily press, many magazines, columnists, radio and TV ... practically every medium except Confidential. They can't influence us. So they want to get us."

  Except one man did influence Confidential: Mike Todd. And so the "official version" of his love story with Elizabeth Taylor became virtually the only version in the months leading up to their marriage. Just as Harrison had described in his editorial, Modern Screen ran a piece that was probably lifted verbatim from one of the press releases put out by Bill Doll. According to this article, Elizabeth met Mike at a party thrown by Shirley MacLaine at the Bit of Sweden café (which gave away a bit of the truth, since MacLaine had helped facilitate the affair with McClory). "For the first time in weeks," the article read, "[Elizabeth's] laughter rang out—no longer forced and meaningless, but gay and spontaneous. And Mike, of course, was dazzled by the girl who has been called the most beautiful woman in the world. But it wasn't only her beauty that attracted him. There was something else—something that he wasn't really prepared for. To those who get to know the real Liz comes an amazing discovery—that this girl is not the flibberti-gibbet you'd expect such a beauty to be. She cares deeply about people, and is completely responsive to their needs."

  There it was: the image of Elizabeth and her latest husband that their publicists wanted the world to embrace. But once again, such malarkey does the real Elizabeth a disservice. Columnist Bill Slocum, who traveled with Todd during much of his courtship of Elizabeth, thought what they had was "a marriage of equals." Todd liked to bluster chauvinistically, saying that actresses were like burglar alarms ("They go off for no goddamn reason [and] need a good thumping to stop"). But in the next breath he'd admit that Elizabeth was no "little woman" meekly obeying his every command. "Glamour dames I don't particularly like," he said, "but Elizabeth has a warmth, a schmaltzy quality that's wonderful." For her part, Elizabeth said plainly, "It's nice to be married to someone who thinks I have a brain. That also contributes to making me feel like a woman."

  That Mike Todd was bluff and bombastic, a real man's man, made him even more exceptional to his bride. "I loved it when he would lose his temper and dominate me," Elizabeth said. "I would start to purr because he had won." After Michael Wilding, Todd was a revelation. The important men in Elizabeth's life—from her father to her agent to her husbands to her best friends—had always been gentle, cultivated, sensitive people. The abusive Nicky Hilton might at first glance seem to be an exception, yet he was a pampered weakling, a poser. With Mike Todd, Elizabeth had encountered for the first time a big strong man who didn't simply want to use and overpower her, the way George Stevens—or worse, Louis B. Mayer—had done. Here was a tough-talking, masculine guy who wasn't a selfish brute.

  Todd had another point in his favor where his wife was concerned: He bore no antipathy toward her gay friends. Coming from the tolerant world of the New York theater, Mike knew lots of homosexuals. He'd stood up to his brothers when they'd criticized him for keeping the overtly gay Dick Hanley around him. Mike was a regular at Greenwich Village drag shows, and in Around the World in Eighty Days he strove consciously for the camp sensibility that he had found there. After each actress had tested for the part of Princess Aouda, he'd inquire of Miles White, his gay costumer, "Are they camp?" White would sadly shake his head no. But then Shirley MacLaine came in, and Todd asked if she was camp. "Most definitely," White said. MacLaine got the part.

  Never before had Elizabeth encountered such a man. She found the combination of Todd's tolerant worldliness and roguish masculinity irresistible. "I don't profess to know what makes ladies fall for guys," said Bill Slocum, "but if it's virility, unpredictability, generosity, an utterly magnificent sense of humor, and the gall of a successful second-story man, then Miss Taylor had found herself an ideal man."

  They'd been married in Puerto Marquez, Mexico, on February 2, 1957, less than forty-eight hours after Elizabeth's divorce from Michael Wilding was final. Given the bride's condition, there was no time to waste. Best man duties were shared between Cantinflas, the Mexican star of Around the World, and Eddie Fisher, whom Todd had taken under his wing. Fisher's wife, Debbie Reynolds, was Elizabeth's sole attendant, chosen because Mike had wanted her, not because of any fondness Elizabeth had for her. In fact, Elizabeth regarded Debbie—she of the chipmunk-cheeked smile—as overly ambitious and a little too hungry for fame. She knew that the Fisher marriage, regularly hyped in all of the fan magazines, was as phony as the MGM backlot.

  But even the presence of the Fishers couldn't keep Elizabeth from enjoying her Mexican honeymoon. Guarded at every turn by Mexican soldiers, the newlyweds were saluted by fireworks at the estate of former Mexican president Miguel Alemán. Since Elizabeth was still recovering from a spinal fusion to treat a herniated disc, Todd carried her up to the balcony so that she could watch the pyrotechnics exploding in the night sky. She was glittering in diamonds from her head to her hands. Mike had given her a matching bracelet-earring-ring set as a wedding gift, reported to have cost $80,000.

  This was the picture of the Todd marriage that everyone tried hard to project over the next six months: Elizabeth a fragile, be-jeweled doll carried along in her powerful husband's arms. But occasionally the public got a glimpse of something else—"the part of real life that press agents are paid good money to keep hidden," Mark Miller said. It was inevitable that the publicity would crack from time to time—especially when the subjects in question were as volatile and independent as Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor.

  In the middle of Heathrow Airport, Mrs. Todd was having a meltdown.

  "It's all your fault!" she shouted at her husband in full view of cameramen and reporters. "Now what shall we do?"

  It was four months after their marriage and a month before the gala celebration in Battersea Park. The Todds had been living abroad, leasing homes in London and on Cap Ferrat in southeastern France. The press breathlessly chronicled their lives as glamorous international jet-setters. "Life in Europe is too exciting" for Elizabeth, Hedda Hopper reported, "and she insists on going out every night." Mike was "scattering Yankee dollars as if he had a private mint," one fan magazine reported, and swathing Elizabeth "in luxury such as even she had never imagined."

  But that day at the London airport, the fairy tale suddenly exploded. As reporters watched, mouths agape, the Todds tore into each other once they realized that they'd missed their flight to Nice.

  "For a change it was my fault that we were late," Mike snarled.

  "I'm getting fed up with that line," Elizabeth spit. "I am always getting blamed for the delays. I could hate you for saying
that."

  Todd turned to his assistant, Midori Tsuji, and asked her to charter them a plane to Paris. Elizabeth, in a snit, plopped down in a chair, her bag on her lap. "I don't want to go to Paris," she said, sulking. "Paris bores me."

  At that, her husband spun on her, giving her an Italian hand gesture universally understood to mean "up yours." One lucky photographer for the Daily Mail captured the moment for posterity. Todd's chin juts out at his wife, his fingers point up in the air, and Elizabeth's lips curl in a sarcastic comeback. That one picture, splashed all across the world, seemed to reveal much more about the Todd marriage than all of Bill Doll's carefully prepared press releases. "There's no doubt about what we were saying to each other," Elizabeth admitted later, calling it "the only talking still picture in the world." To the Todds' great chagrin, the photo often ran under the headline Liz says "Paris bores me." The image of the spoiled brat was now enshrined.

  So was the belief, in some quarters, that the Todd marriage was a big sham—or at least a public front for a private deal. But contracts always have consequences in Hollywood. "Sure Mike and I fight," Elizabeth said, trying to put the best possible spin on the row. "But some people just can't tell a fight from a family frolic."

  Was that what Debbie Reynolds witnessed at the Todds' house in Beverly Hills one night? "[Mike] really hit her," Reynolds said. "Elizabeth screamed [and] walloped him right back ... He dragged her by her hair—while she was kicking and screaming at him." Trying to force Todd to release his wife, Reynolds leaped onto his back like a tigress. But she needn't have bothered. "The next thing I knew," Debbie said, "they were wrestling on the floor, kissing and making up."