How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  Yet for all the theatrics, Elizabeth's grief was real. For three days she vomited everything she tried to eat. "She had never experienced any kind of real loss before," said one person close to her who asked for anonymity. "That such a thing could happen to her was unthinkable, and she grieved for Todd with as much passion as she had loved him." Bolting out onto the lawn screaming in her nightgown, Elizabeth was forcibly brought back inside the house by Dick Hanley and Dr. Kennamer. After discovering she'd consumed several bottles of vodka on her own, Sydney Guilaroff made a beeline to Elizabeth's room and cleared away all of her pill bottles. Guilaroff would maintain a vigil on the floor beside her bed for several nights, reaching up to take her hand whenever she called out Mike's name.

  Her life with Todd had been over the top; why shouldn't her grief be the same? Fainting into her brother's arms at the funeral wasn't any less genuine for all the histrionic effect it had on the public. Melodrama was the stuff of Elizabeth's life. When she finally steeled herself to return to work a few weeks later on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she was greeted with flowers from director Richard Brooks. On her thank-you note she took a pen and extravagantly crossed out the embossed "Mrs. Michael Todd."

  Elizabeth would insist for the rest of her life that if only Mike had lived, their marriage would have lasted forever. But Mike Todd Jr. wasn't so sure. "He said the marriage might have lasted only if Dad never had a financial downturn," Susan McCarthy Todd revealed. What if Don Quixote had been a flop? What if Todd's creditors had finally started demanding payment? After all, Todd-AO, so profitable in mid-decade, would eventually go the way of other fads of the fifties. Would Elizabeth have been content to remain Mrs. Mike Todd if Mr. Todd was no longer king of Hollywood?

  But for the moment, she still took refuge in the Todd organization, on which she had come to rely, especially as she eyed life beyond the gates of MGM. Midori Tsuji became her assistant and traveling companion, Bill Doll her de facto personal publicist. It had been the Todd office that had coordinated the publicity around her return to filming Cat and made her latest New York travel arrangements. And it had been Todd protégé Eddie Fisher who had met her when she stepped off the plane.

  Oh, how Hedda steamed when she read that. Not long ago she'd extolled Elizabeth as "a lost lamb ... staring at a door that Mike would never again walk through, a little widow who has the sympathy of the world." But all that sympathy was about to evaporate, Hedda suspected, if the reports she was getting out of New York were true. Her spies insisted that they were. Elizabeth Taylor, the sainted Widow Todd, had taken up with her late husband's friend who, with his wife, Debbie Reynolds, made up America's Sweetheart Couple. Hedda was nearly apoplectic.

  Making the situation even worse was that Elizabeth had lied to her aunt Hedda, telling her that she was only stopping over in New York on her way to Europe. Just days before Hedda had waxed lyrical over Elizabeth's "beauty, talent and youth" in her column. So it was with considerable indignation that she read Earl Wilson's column in the New York Post on August 29, 1958: "Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher were dancing it up at the Harwyn [nightclub] this morning, Eddie having been Mike Todd's close friend and now sort of an escort service for Liz." Wilson reported that they'd also seen the play Two for the Seesaw with Henry Fonda and Anne Bancroft the night before at the Booth Theatre. That was enough to send reporters on a hunting expedition to discover if a romance was indeed blooming between Taylor and Fisher. It seemed that there might be.

  "Hedda was outraged by Liz Taylor's affair with Eddie Fisher," said Robert Shaw. "When I got confirmation of it, she hit the roof. She kept yelling into the phone, 'That bitch! That slut!' She was very good at passing moral judgments."

  In the last few days, despite the Soviets' launch of Sputnik, the vote for Alaskan statehood, and the arrest of Dr. Martin Luther King in Alabama, the top headlines in many newspapers were the rumors of "Liz and Eddie." Could they be true? Liz—so soon after Mike's death? Eddie—so soon after Debbie had given birth to his son?

  For MGM, the stories were tumbling out at the worst possible time, since Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was set to open in New York in less than two weeks and would go into general release soon thereafter. The limited Los Angeles opening on August 29 had been wildly successful, with critics agreeing that Elizabeth's performance surpassed anything she had ever done before. So enormous hopes were riding on the picture. The trade publication Boxoffice predicted: "The ready-made market should result from the provocative nature of the original and more importantly because this is the picture that top-lining Elizabeth Taylor was making when her husband, the late Mike Todd, met his tragic death. That event and her return to work were so widely and sympathetically publicized that most theater patrons are eager to witness the results."

  Yet promoting a film was the farthest thing from Elizabeth's mind. Alone in her room at the Plaza, her months of loneliness and grief melted when Eddie smiled kindly at her. Asking Midori to leave the suite, Elizabeth let Eddie put his arms around her. Then she began unbuttoning his shirt. That night they made love for the first time and "couldn't get enough of each other," Eddie recalled. The next day they strolled around the city in a daze, kissing in public on Fifth Avenue, delighting in the kind of anonymity that only New York can offer.

  But they couldn't go unnoticed forever. Reporters perked up when the pair showed up over Labor Day weekend at Grossinger's, the Catskills resort where Eddie had gotten his start and where he'd married Debbie. Walter Winchell hinted heavily at a romance in his column, and soon the whole press corps was after the story. Photographers caught them hurrying into a car outside a nightclub, with actress Eva Marie Saint doing her best to block Elizabeth's face. One gossip columnist sniffed, "Eddie Fisher says Debbie's home with the children. He means while he was out dancing with Liz Taylor. So that sums Eddie up briefly."

  Elizabeth was stung by the coverage. She'd meant no offense to anyone. Eddie had comforted her, and she'd enjoyed it more than she'd expected. And she saw no moral quandary with that. Like much of the press who chattered with such vexation, she knew that Eddie's marriage to Debbie was in name only. Still, she denied the affair on her return to Los Angeles, considering that to be prudent, at least for the moment. Eddie arrived in the middle of the night to avoid the newsmen who were waiting for him. But it didn't matter. On September 8, 1958, the Los Angeles Herald Express emblazoned EDDIE FISHER IS DATING LIZ TAYLOR in bold red letters across the top of its front page—above a headline about Khrushchev's threat to retaliate if the United States attacked Red China. The secret was out.

  On September 10 the Herald ran an "exclusive" interview with Eddie and Debbie landed by Louella Parsons, in which the couple insisted that all they'd had was a "misunderstanding." But the story remained so hot that every newspaper, including Hedda's flagship Los Angeles Times, was rushing to be the first to uncover the truth. No doubt Hedda was peeved that Louella had scooped her on getting to Eddie and Debbie. And likely she was frustrated that it was night city editor Ted Sell, and not she, who'd landed the front page of the Times with a story on the scandal. Hedda fumed. No one, she determined, was going to crack this story but her.

  Finally getting Frings on the line, she told him not to deny that Elizabeth was staying there and insisted on speaking to her immediately. Frings told her he'd call her back. When the phone rang a short time later, it was Elizabeth. Hedda waved frantically at one of her secretaries to pick up the extension and start taking notes in shorthand. "Level with me," the columnist admonished the star, "because I shall find out anyhow. What's this Eddie Fisher business all about?"

  Elizabeth, no doubt with Frings's approval, had decided to come clean. According to Eddie's recollections, he had promised to find a way to marry her by this point, and so apparently everyone figured that further denials would only look pathetic in retrospect. Besides, as Eddie said, "Elizabeth lived by her own rule: She wants what she wants when she wants it." And at the moment she wanted Eddie Fisher.

  "I don't go about
breaking up marriages," Elizabeth replied defiantly to Hedda. "You can't break up a happy marriage. Debbie's and Eddie's never has been."

  Hedda could hardly believe what she was hearing. Was it true, she pressed, that they'd gone to Grossinger's, where Eddie and Debbie had been married?

  "Sure," said Elizabeth proudly, "and we had a divine time, too!"

  Hedda was aghast. She asked if Elizabeth loved Eddie.

  "I like him very much," she said, an interesting choice of words. "I've felt happier and more like a human being for the past two weeks than I have since Mike's death."

  Hedda pressed the point. "What do you suppose Mike would say to this?"

  Elizabeth's answer has become legendary. "Well, Mike is dead and I'm alive."

  Did she really say that? It sounds so much like her plaintive cry in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: "Skipper is dead and I'm alive! Maggie the Cat is alive!" Surely Hedda had seen the picture at its Los Angeles premiere. And even if most moviegoers had yet to see the film, the line would soon be familiar enough. Was there, perhaps, a deliberate echo of Maggie in the interview? Was Elizabeth still caught up in the character—like herself, a lonely, sexually frustrated young woman? Or was Hedda so furious with the star that she manipulated her response to sound like the sexy siren she played on the screen?

  But if so, there was more fury to come. After bantering for several more minutes, Elizabeth said something that sent the columnist's "anger soaring like a rocket." In the resulting story, Hedda described the star's comment as "unprintable." But it was more than that. To such a staunch guardian of Hollywood morality, Elizabeth's words were unforgivable and were certainly the reason Hedda wrote the piece with such striking venom. "What do you expect me to do?" Elizabeth had asked her. "Sleep alone?"

  Never in her two decades of reporting had Hedda been so of fended or felt so personally betrayed. "I've known Elizabeth Taylor since she was nine years old," she began her story. "Always liked her. Always defended her. She never wanted to be an actress. That was her mother's project. I've seen her through her marriages to Nicky Hilton, Michael Wilding, and Mike Todd. She had the sympathy of the world after Mike Todd's death. But I can't take this present episode with Eddie Fisher."

  And so she "snapped out" the story "in five minutes flat" and sent it out on the wires around the world. Even without Elizabeth's "unprintable" comment, the story revealed the star's seemingly cavalier attitude toward breaking up America's Sweethearts. It ran on the front page of the September 11 Los Angeles Times under a photo of Debbie in pigtails at the wheel of her car, smiling bravely as her button-eyed daughter Carrie, just twenty-three months old, stared forlornly into the camera from over her shoulder. It was those sad eyes that did the trick.

  All hell was about to break loose.

  Elizabeth had no idea of the tumult that she had caused. Not even after the scene a few days earlier at Los Angeles International Airport when photographers rushed her plane as she descended the steps. She'd kept her chin lowered, her eyes diverted. The afternoon sun glinted off the diamond in her blue turban and the diamond-studded collar of the Yorkshire terrier that she cradled so carefully in her left arm. Dick Hanley was beside her, a protective hand on her shoulder, and Kurt Frings, "nervous in an off-white silk suit," waited at the bottom of the steps to ease her through the mob shouting her name.

  A TWA station wagon whisked them across the tarmac. The photographers sprinted after them in pursuit, cameras bouncing around their necks. A hundred feet away Elizabeth and her entourage slipped into Frings's Cadillac sedan. Only then did she roll down the window and raise her beautiful eyes to the battalion of cameras. The questions bombarded her like machine-gun fire. "Do you know if Eddie and Debbie are breaking up?" "Do you expect to see them?" "Why did you come back to the coast?" And, when she remained silent: "Miss Taylor, won't you please say something?"

  "Hello," she said coolly and rolled up the window. The Cadillac sped away.

  The chase was on. Reporters hopped into their cars, screeching out of the airport onto La Cienega Boulevard, desperate to keep the Cadillac in sight. Running red lights and passing wildly, they followed Frings to his office in Beverly Hills. But their quarry wasn't caught yet. Frings honked and shouted something to a man waiting at a third-floor window, then swung his car back around onto the street and headed north on Beverly Drive. Another madcap chase in and out of traffic ensued until the Cadillac roared into the curving drive of the Beverly Hills Hotel. There Elizabeth and Frings jumped out and dashed into the lobby, leaving their car doors wide open. When reporters followed them inside, they found Frings alone, mopping his brow, his silk suit soaking wet, refusing to say where his star client had gone. Meanwhile, as heated words were exchanged in the lobby, Elizabeth was slipping out the back way into another car. Reporters learned that her baggage "had been delivered to a private home."

  So far only Hedda had found her. Elizabeth felt safe for the moment, ensconced in Frings's marble-and-glass hillside house on Summitridge Drive in Beverly Hills. Frings's wife, Ketti, a recent Pulitzer winner for her adaptation of Look Homeward, Angel, listened wide-eyed to the star's grand tales of passion and adventure. Elizabeth was ecstatic. After so many lonely months sitting around the house, her high-flying lifestyle cut so suddenly and horribly short after Mike's death, she was once again having fun.

  Not even the phone call from Hedda had upset her. Despite the columnist's rants, Elizabeth had always been able to count on Hedda to do right by her. Surely she knew that there would be some carping in the press—there always was when stars got divorced—and some clucking by busybodies who felt that she hadn't spent enough time mourning Mike. But nothing was going to stop her from marrying Eddie. Ever since she was eighteen, Elizabeth had done whatever she pleased, and hadn't the public always followed along eagerly? There was no reason to think it would be any different this time.

  And Frings—her new risk-taking, fast-talking agent—was all for the match. A decade earlier it might have seemed a little too much at once: Mike's death, Elizabeth's romance, Eddie's impending divorce. But now, in this rapidly changing, poststudio, scandal magazine–dominated Hollywood, Frings was actually encouraging his client in her romantic exploits. Old notions of how stars were "supposed to" behave in public were being replaced by a radical new idea: that press coverage—any press coverage—was better than none at all.

  Chroniclers have usually described Elizabeth's romance with Eddie Fisher as simply a case of love on the rebound: the heartache of a passionate widow who turned to her beloved husband's "best friend" for comfort and solace. That's the way the fan magazines would eventually rationalize it, and so that became the standard line adopted by successive biographers. But Fisher was far from being Todd's best friend; he was a sidekick and protégé, an important part of the massive Todd entourage but never really in the big man's league. Still, Eddie remained connected enough to the Todd operation to provide continuity when Elizabeth needed it most. After all, she had staked her whole future on her husband's promises; she couldn't go crawling back to MGM now. On her own, she'd lose her bargaining clout; only if she remained part of the Todd organization could she possibly keep her power. So it was with great delicacy that she solicited Mike Todd Jr.'s support for her match with Eddie. They'd always been friendly, and he liked Eddie, too. "She asked for his blessing," said Susan McCarthy Todd. With great magnanimity Elizabeth's stepson bestowed it. Mike might be gone, but Elizabeth wanted to be treated as if he were still alive.

  Staying attached to the Todd operation was also, of course, an emotional thing. It's understandable that a widow might cling to a familiar framework, to the comforting network of associates of her late husband. Hanley and Tsuji were just two of the Todd minions who moved over to her employ. Yet such continuity was also crucial if Elizabeth were to realize the kind of future she'd envisioned for herself: free of studio control, starring in the occasional independent picture in order to keep the diamonds on her ears. Mike's estate, with all his debts, had be
en worth just $1 million, and only a quarter of that was cash in the bank. It was also split equally between Elizabeth and Mike Jr., and distributed in installments. In other words, it was not nearly enough to sustain the kind of highflying lifestyle she'd become accustomed to, thanks in part to the generosity of her husband's creditors. Revenues from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof would only go so far; this was before actors started taking a percentage of the gross. So it's no surprise that Elizabeth sued the owners of the Liz for $5 million, charging gross negligence in allowing the plane to take off with excess weight.

  Lawsuits, of course, could take years to pay off, so Mike Jr. gamely tried to fill his father's shoes. He announced that he would produce another roadshow extravaganza, Busman's Holiday, in which Elizabeth would star. And Eddie Fisher, stepping forward with even more temerity, insisted that he could manage her career with all the aplomb of her late husband. Everything, they assured her, would continue as if Mike were still alive.

  But there was another reason for the romance with Eddie. Elizabeth hated to be bored. As much as she truly did mourn her husband, playing the grieving widow had gotten tiresome very quickly. After all, she'd gone from jetting around Europe on a moment's whim and clinking champagne glasses with Russian diplomats to moping around the house in her pajamas all by herself in just a matter of weeks.

  And in certain rather delicate areas, Eddie even managed to eclipse the great Mike Todd. "Simply put, Eddie was great in bed," said one friend of Elizabeth's, pleading for anonymity when discussing such an irreverent topic. "I don't think the sex with Todd was ever all that fantastic, since he was much older, and then suddenly, wow! Eddie comes along, and she can't get enough."

  For all the Todds' passion, more than two decades had separated them in age, and at twenty-six, Elizabeth was long overdue for a regular, fulfilling sexual relationship with a man as lusty as she was. None of her husbands had fully satisfied her in that regard, but the liaisons with Donen and Mature (and possibly others) had given her lessons in how good sex could be. Elizabeth would become increasingly open about her love of sex. "All I can say is I dig sex," she'd say, "and fortunately I never had to go to a teacher!" Her sensuality, she boasted, was something innate: "I guess it's in my genes."