How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  Eighteen thousand people were jamming into Madison Square Garden on the night of October 17, 1957, for a "Private Little Party"—as the two thousand lights on the giant marquee spelled it out—being thrown by "Mike and Liz." Most of the men wore rented tuxedos and the women stumbled around in high heels. Many a mink stole was stepped on as the crowd pushed and shoved their way inside. Dick Hanley, hovering by the entrance, was so anxious that he started to sweat. His boss had thrown many a successful social gathering before, but never for this many people from so many walks of life. Ordinary Joes and Janes, who had been randomly se lected to attend, knocked shoulders with movie stars and socialites. Hanley just held his breath and hoped for the best.

  The Garden was decorated by British production designer Vincent Korda (The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Thief of Bagdad) in various hues of blue and pink. At one end a forty-foot tall Oscar made of gold chrysanthemums towered over everything. In the center sat an enormous cake, thirty feet wide and fourteen feet tall, made with two thousand eggs and fifteen thousand dollars' worth of cake batter. Workers had to carry the cake into the hall in pieces and assemble it right there on the floor. The famed Symphony of the Air, conducted by Arthur Fiedler, tuned up as people filed in to their seats. It was all to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Around the World in Eighty Days, which by now had grossed nearly sixteen and a half million dollars. A replica of the balloon used in the movie by David Niven and Cantinflas hovered over revelers' heads. The party, with its elephants, kangaroos, performing horses, Philadelphia Mummers, and Scottish bagpipers—all coordinated by Ringling Brothers–Barnum and Bailey—would be Todd's biggest public relations feat yet.

  If, as Hanley prayed, nothing went wrong.

  "Because it was the beautiful public who made Around the World in Eighty Days the great success it is," Todd had announced in advertisements in all the New York papers, "I would like to invite 1,000 wonderful people from the New York area to attend our little birthday party in Madison Square Garden on Thursday, October 17, as my guests." At the Rivoli Theatre on Broadway and Forty-ninth Street, tens of thousands came by to drop their names into a box. One thousand lucky winners were called the day before the event with the exciting news that they could hobnob with Mike and Liz and their famous friends for a night. Similar drawings were held at various theaters around the country, with two winners chosen from each theater to be flown to New York, put up at a swanky hotel, and then escorted to the party. It made for a large number of hoi polloi mixing in with the elite of Broadway and Hollywood. "Hope to see you at the party," Mike had ended his ad.

  He sure did. "Everyone in town wanted to get into the Garden that night," said Miles White. "Not just ordinary people, but big shots, too. If they hadn't been invited they were begging for tickets. There was a crush of people at the gates trying to get in."

  Having sent more than ten thousand invitations, Mike had made sure that "everybody who was anybody" got invited. Spotted entering the Garden were Tony Curtis, Ginger Rogers, Shelley Winters, Beatrice Lillie, Elsa Maxwell, Walter Winchell, and, of course, Hedda Hopper. If someone wasn't on the list, it was a deliberate omission. Glenda Jensen recalled a "major British actor" who was incensed that he hadn't been invited, and Mike, for whatever reason, remained adamant about not letting him in. Nonetheless, the actor finagled a ticket from somewhere and made sure to be there. To miss the biggest social gala in ages was unimaginable to those who counted themselves as "somebody."

  The invitations, which had arrived in mailboxes about two weeks earlier, were designed to look informal and low-budget. Printed in a cursive typewriter font, they included a perforated rsvp postcard—the latest in smart, efficient party-throwing. "It seems the party grew from a few chums to an international exposition," Mike cheekily informed his guests. "Therefore we now have logistics, statistics, and other departments functioning and they want to know, 'Are you coming?'" He promised "no blood tests, fingerprints, or other information required. Just make an X." Then he added, "Sorry, Liz says black tie, so all the boys should look pretty."

  There was also a postscript from "Liz" herself: "Girls, if you want to sit and look pretty, wear everything. But if you want to mix and mingle, don't wear a big flouncy ball gown. I did at one of Mike's parties and it was a mistake. Wear short evening dresses."

  The entire Todd operation stayed at the nearby Taft Hotel, where they changed out of their work clothes into their fancy duds. Some of them were just as starstruck as the guests being flown in from the sticks. "What an evening it was," Glenda Jensen said. "I was overwhelmed with the glitter and glamour of the people and events going on." She could scarcely believe that she, the daughter of a coal miner from Nottingham, England, was "mingling with the greats and not-so-greats of Hollywood and Broadway."

  Making it all even more exciting was that the whole world was watching. Todd, always keenly aware of the value of television cameras, had arranged with CBS to broadcast the party live. It meant preempting their highest-rated dramatic series, Playhouse go, and paying Todd $175,000 for the privilege. A young journalist by the name of Walter Cronkite was assigned to narrate. For guests, this wasn't just a chance to attend a fabulous party—it was an opportunity to be on national TV.

  Drinks, Mike promised, would be on the house. The champagne toast that kicked off the evening came courtesy of Renault Champagne. "Product placement," as it's called today, was everywhere. The food caravan that prominently made the rounds of the Garden offered cheeses from Kraft, shrimp from the Atlantic Trading Company, cream sandwich cookies from Burry Biscuit Company, crackers from Sunshine, frankfurters from Nathan's, beer from Pabst Blue Ribbon, and coffee from Chase and Sanborn. Everything was, of course, donated—fifteen thousand doughnuts, ten thousand egg rolls, a ton of Boston baked beans, two hundred gallons of vichyssoise—which meant that not only did Mike escape any costs for the extravaganza, he may actually have come out ahead. And then there were the free gifts being promised to "each and every guest" from such sponsors as Bristol-Myers, Cessna Aircraft, Decca Records, Fiat Motor Company, Guinness of Dublin, Hermes-Paris, Heublein, Olivetti Typewriters, and Vespa Motor Scooters. Raffles would be held throughout the night; the luckiest guests would walk off with an airplane or a new car.

  Mike and Elizabeth arrived from their townhouse on Seventh Avenue just before the show started, and right away the eagle-eyed host saw that things weren't going quite as he'd hoped. Already guests were griping because unscrupulous waiters were charging them five bucks for bottles of wine that were supposed to be free. As Mike hustled emcee George Jessel up onto the rostrum, Elizabeth took her seat—but promptly had her hem torn when Mike Jr. stepped around her and hooked his shoe on her dress. As Dick Hanley had feared, it was all downhill from there.

  The entertainment started with the popular Emmett Kelly, the famous circus clown, trying to sweep up the spotlight on the stage. But the acts that followed were more likely to be hokey than hot: Dieter Tasso, the "world's greatest juggler"; various bands from New York, including one from the city's sanitation department; the San Francisco fire brigade; folk dancers from Hungary; the Monarch Elks of Harlem. The crowd got restless, many preferring to chase after the beer wagon instead of watching the acts. By the time Buck Steele's troupe of ten dogs astride matching palomino horses came out, Todd had left his seat and gone down to the floor, yelling at the organizers to speed things up and to get all those yahoos milling around back into their seats.

  "Dad [became] the unexpected star of the show," Mike Todd Jr. said. "The TV director [Byron Paul] kept zooming in on him, shouting and jumping up and down, waving his fists trying to keep the show going." Millions of television viewers got an up-close glimpse of the angry, cursing Mike Todd they'd previously only read about.

  On the stage Sir Cedric Hardwicke was falling off Tonga the elephant, hanging on for dear life from the howdah on the animal's back. "Disaster struck and struck again," said Shirley Herz. Off to the side of the hall, there was suddenly a buzz of commot
ion. Herz found one of her colleagues threatening a guest with a wine bottle. The guest, disappointed by his raffle win of cheese samples from Kraft, was attempting to push a dishwasher out of the Garden. "He had been promised a gift and he wanted his gift and he was going to take it," Herz said. "He found this dishwasher..."

  Meanwhile Elizabeth was getting pretty antsy herself. During rehearsals she'd told Hubert Humphrey, the senator from Todd's home state of Minnesota, that the speech he was scheduled to give was "corny" and that no one would buy it. Humphrey sat beside her now, frantically scribbling notes in a last-minute attempt to punch it up. All Elizabeth wanted to do was cut the cake—her only scheduled part in the show—and get the hell out of there. This was not the fun night that she had been promised. She wasn't happy that Mike left her alone most of the night, her only company being a politician she considered dull as dishwater. "Nobody told me who he was," she said.

  Todd sure knew who Humphrey was; according to the columnist Earl Wilson, he'd tapped the senator's chest and told him he'd "make him president" someday. It was just the sort of grandiose statement that Todd was known for, and when he'd walked into the Garden earlier that night he was full of such swagger. But by ten o'clock he was running around raving like a madman, with dutiful Dick Hanley following behind, shrilly repeating his boss's orders just in case someone had missed them. That wasn't likely. Todd was loud and forceful, even if some chose to ignore him. When the Mummers decided to take a second loop around the Garden with their banjos and ostrich feathers, Mike blew his top. "Off! Off!" he shouted. "Get those Mummers off!" The head Mummer just lifted an eyebrow and said, "Screw you, sweetie, we dragged our asses all the way in from Philadelphia and we're going around twice."

  The crowd was beginning to revolt. As the French comedian Fernandel performed his comic "glimpse of the future" onstage, fistfights were breaking out in the aisles. People were upset that many big prizes had been "openly and boldly hijacked Chicagostyle." Candy vendors, angered by the unruly crowd, began pelting guests with bonbons; hot dog vendors did the same, staining expensive gowns with relish and mustard. People were slipping on melted ice cream while outraged women gathered their mink stoles and huffily stalked out of the Garden.

  Elizabeth was horrified. "My God, the sight of chic, lacquered women fighting with little kids to get a hamburger," she said. At last she was escorted from her box and up the red-carpeted stairs to the giant cake to slice off the first piece. She scooped up a hand ful of icing and brought it to her mouth. Her husband stood behind her, anxious to get out of there.

  "All hell's breaking loose," recalled Lenny Gaines, an assistant to Eddie Fisher who'd been roped into helping organize the Garden party, "and [Mike] turns and throws some keys up to me and says, 'Here, kid, lock up.' I am standing there with these keys, watching him disappear into the crowd, and I shout, 'Lock what up?'" By now the fighting had reached the very edge of the stage, where Duke Ellington and his orchestra had started to play, ostensibly so people could dance. Gaines told him to just play "The Star Spangled Banner" and be done with it. "It looked like all these guys wearing tuxedos were gonna rip the Garden apart," Gaines said. "They almost did."

  The next day Todd hoped that a chartered boat ride around Manhattan for members of the press and a complimentary bottle of champagne would insure positive reports of the party. This time, however, his storied luck with the fourth estate ran out. "[Mike Todd] gave the public bread crumbs and a circus," lamented the New York Daily News. The Herald Tribune fretted that propagandists in the Soviet Union would use images of the party to denigrate America—"New York fiddling while the country burns." While many people would insist that they'd enjoyed themselves at the Garden, the fact that Todd's "little party" had been a massive debacle soon became the conventional wisdom—in part because thirty-five million people had watched it live. The slugfests and skirmishes had been kept off the television broadcast, of course, but the sense of distasteful ostentation was still readily apparent. "It looked on the whole like a bad circus parade," said television critic John Crosby, "combining both vulgarity and dullness to a stupefying degree."

  Early on there had been some thought given to throwing another bash in Los Angeles for all those who'd been unable to make it to New York. Following the fiasco at the Garden, however, Mike decided to send a "do-it-yourself party kit" to his friends on the West Coast. "It was just to poke a little fun at himself," said his son, "and it was a clever way of keeping the thing going." Or putting the best spin on it. In fact, the best thing the Todds could do at that point was to get out of the country for a while, which they did. Before Elizabeth started on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, there would be one more fabulous trip around the world. Surely better headlines would come of that.

  In Moscow Elizabeth was stuffing herself with chicken Kiev and black caviar, making a mess of her pearl-ornamented white gloves. All eyes at the banquet were on her. The occasion on January 27, 1958, was the Indian embassy's celebration of their republic's ten-year anniversary, but the reason for the party was immaterial to Elizabeth; she was just glad to be having fun and eating decent food. Laughing and sipping Russian vodka, she charmed everyone—even Nikita Khrushchev, who glanced her way several times, though he didn't address her directly. But his wife was certainly curious about the woman with the dazzling eyes in the black cocktail dress, trimmed in fur and sparkling with sequins. "Who is the pretty young lady?" Mrs. Khrushchev inquired.

  Well might she ask, for Elizabeth's fame extended only as far as the western edge of the Iron Curtain. Maybe that's why Mike was so fond of Russia—"the only place in the world," reporters quipped, "where Mike Todd is not Mr. Elizabeth Taylor." In Red Square a girl approached Elizabeth and asked for an autograph, thanking "Miss Monroe" for her time. "People were staring at me," Elizabeth said, "but it was because of my mink coat and my knee-high, fur-lined red leather boots. When people came over to our interpreter, they asked if I was a ballerina—the height of Russian glamour. They stared at my hairdo, and my jewels, but otherwise I was ignored."

  But this night Elizabeth's identity was well-known to the ambassadors of Britain, France, Italy, Canada, and Norway, all of whom were in attendance with their staffs. A wry New York Times reporter observed, "For some persons, the film star was an object of more curiosity than were the Kremlin leaders." Elizabeth just laughed and called for a second helping of chicken Kiev.

  They almost hadn't made it to Moscow. First there had been the premiere of Raintree County, which critics, as expected, largely panned, even if the pairing of Clift and Taylor still provided excellent box office. Then it was off to Hawaii before heading to Sydney, where the distractions really set in. Criticized by the Sunday Telegraph for kissing his wife while seated next to the premier of New South Wales, Joseph Cahill, Todd instructed Bill Doll to blanket U.S. press outlets with his furious response: "I would be a phony if, when the urge came, I did not kiss my wife." It was a salvo fired less at the Australians than at the gossipmongers back in America who, in the wake of the Madison Square Garden fiasco, had hinted once again of troubles in the Todd marriage.

  From Sydney it was on to Hong Kong and then to Tokyo, where Elizabeth suffered an attack of appendicitis. Todd announced that they were "canceling the rest of their world tour," and arranged for them to fly home in late November so that Elizabeth could have surgery in Los Angeles. Met by the usual crush of newshounds at the airport, they indulged in some more theatrics, just in case any doubts still lingered about how happy they were. When reporters banged on the windows of their black Cadillac limousine, Mike said cheerfully, "Come on, Liz, get out. The boys want some pictures."

  Sliding out of the car in a tight black silk Chinese dress slit halfway up the thigh, Elizabeth trilled, "Hi there!"—not her usual response when besieged.

  Cameras flashed. "Look at that dress!" Mike exclaimed. "She's gonna start a whole new epidemic! It's liable to bring sex back."

  "Give her a kiss, Mike," a reporter urged.

  Todd put up
his hands. "In Sydney I gave her a little peck and you would have thought the whole economy was gonna collapse. Kissing's trouble."

  "That's trouble?" Elizabeth asked, crawling back into the car.

  "See, that's the way she talks. She says, 'Come on, flannel-mouth, get in here.'"

  A reporter leaned in to see her diamond ring—"as big as a railroad conductor's timepiece"—so Elizabeth hopped out of the car again to show it off. Meanwhile Mike was being asked if he planned to throw any more parties. "No more parties with more than eight people," he quipped.

  "Party!" Elizabeth said. "That's a dirty word." And she slipped back into the car.

  "Come on, honey," Mike said. "They want some pictures."

  Out came Elizabeth for a third time, revealing a "great expanse of satiny leg." She smirked. "I'm getting old just getting in and out of this car."

  Mike was griping about being charged for excess baggage on their flight. "It was Mr. Todd's coats," Elizabeth teased as she posed next to him.

  "It was nothing of the kind," her husband said, giving her a mock stern look. Then they turned and smiled widely into the cameras. Photos were taken all around.

  At least one reporter—Jack Smith of the Los Angeles Times—was wise to their little show. "Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor, well-known man-and-wife comedy team, put on a dizzy domestic farce in one act for the press," he wrote. And it worked, too. Smith's story was featured prominently in the Times with a big photo of the smiling couple. In fact, the airport give-and-take, though clearly staged, offers as clear a window on the private relationship between Mike and Elizabeth as one can find—madcap, showy, querulous, calculated, but always deeply affectionate.

  When Elizabeth underwent her appendectomy a few weeks later, Mike was at her side to comfort her and to tell reporters, "This will be her last time to the hospital." Good thing he was no longer a gambling man.