How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  Eddie concurred. "She was a woman who loved men as much as they loved her and was not shy about it." She described sex as "absolutely gorgeous" and told Eddie that she "loved being sexual." Fisher would joke to friends that Elizabeth had "the face of an angel and the morals of a truck driver." In the breathless, often self-serving prose that defines his memoir—which nonetheless seems largely on the mark—Eddie revealed, "We'd make love three, four, five times a day. We'd make love in the swimming pool, on Mexican beaches, under waterfalls, in the back seat of a limousine on the way home from a party. There is nothing more erotic than a moonlit beach and Elizabeth Taylor. We fit together as perfect sexually as we did mentally."

  That last statement, some say, could be taken literally. "Eddie was hung like a horse," said the same skittish and anonymous friend. The actor Dennis Christopher recalled that when he starred with Elizabeth on stage years later in The Little Foxes, he once asked her if she wanted to see his Eddie Fisher impersonation. When she said yes, he turned around to reveal an "enormous, ridiculously large cucumber" stuck down his tight pants. Elizabeth screeched with laughter. "How did you know?" she asked. Christopher replied that he'd always heard the rumors but had never known for sure—"until now."

  For Carrie Fisher, after she grew up and came to understand the whole situation, the story of her father comforting Elizabeth in her grief had a decidedly humorous twist. "My father consoled Elizabeth with his penis," Carrie quipped. "You can say it with flowers or you can..." Her voice trailed off, her point made.

  As for Elizabeth, after a week of quite possibly the best sex she'd ever had, it's no surprise that she would return to Los Angeles with her hormones still raging and prepare to do whatever it took to make Eddie her next husband. In that brief, heady moment, Eddie Fisher held everything she wanted: continuity with the Todd organization, prodigious sex appeal, and a celebrity that, if not quite a match for hers, would certainly prevent him from being dwarfed by her own fame. There was no fear that he'd be relegated to being "Mr. Elizabeth Taylor" like Hilton and Wilding. Instead Eddie could hold his own like Mike Todd. He was a huge recording star, boasting more consecutive top hits than even Elvis Presley would achieve. His television show, named Coke Time for its sponsor, aired twice weekly on Wednesday and Friday nights, and pulled in some of NBC's biggest audiences. The show was also broadcast over the radio on sixty-eight different stations.

  Eddie's popularity was a bit of an anomaly, for his throwback style had more in common with Al Jolson and Tin Pan Alley than current favorites like Frank Sinatra or Perry Como. And while the arrival of rock and roll—championed by Presley, Chuck Berry, and Bill Haley and his Comets—threatened to make his sound permanently passé, there was an undeniable magic to Eddie's voice. "I sang to the ladies I fell for," he recalled. "I used to be friendly with a lot of men, macho men, and they wanted to hang around me to find out my secret. There was no secret. I just showed up with a clean shirt and a sweet song." And all around the world, ladies swooned. Including the fairest of them all.

  Born in South Philadelphia in 1928, just three and half years earlier than Elizabeth, Eddie was a working-class Jewish kid whose father, well educated in Russia, resented how he had ended up laboring in leather factories in the land of opportunity. His frustration was taken out on his wife and kids. One of Eddie's earliest memories was running around the house shutting all the windows so the neighbors wouldn't hear his father shouting. The Fishers, al ways short on cash, sold produce on the street to make ends meet and were forced to move twenty times in ten years. It was a hard-scrabble childhood, so different from Elizabeth's. From a very young age, Eddie longed for security and acceptance and power and money—and the kind of appreciation that he found when his mother pushed him forward to sing at synagogue. The accolades of the rabbi and all the nice ladies convinced Eddie that he had what it took to break out of his miserable life: a golden voice.

  And so he made his way to local radio contests, and then to the hotels and resorts of Pennsylvania and New York, crooning for newlyweds on their honeymoons. One day at Grossinger's, the most famous resort in the Borscht Belt, he was heard by Eddie Cantor, who hired him for his national radio show. In 1952 Fisher recorded his first number one hit, "Wish You Were Here." After a stint in Korea, he landed his television show, which was an instant smash. Around the same time, he was embraced by Mike Todd; with the showman's support, Eddie's career was made. Mike would always be Eddie's hero, so much so that when his son was born, Eddie named him Todd.

  Though he regularly drew thousands of screaming bobbysoxers at every public appearance, Eddie remained insecure and distrustful of his success. "Somewhere deep inside," said Debbie Reynolds, "I think he always felt South Philly, the little boy who sold vegetables, who sang on the radio on Saturday mornings." For almost two years he'd watched Mike and Elizabeth in awe, dumbstruck by her beauty and envious of the passionate relationship that the two of them shared. Despite what America thought, Eddie had never been in love with his wife. Debbie might be bubbly and lovable in public, but in private she was taciturn and controlling.

  And so when Elizabeth began flashing those gorgeous violet eyes at him after Mike's death, Eddie couldn't believe it. Sure, he was good-looking, and sure, he had legions of teenage girls screaming his name—but Elizabeth Taylor? "Believe me," he said, "I was probably more surprised that Elizabeth was this crazy about me than the rest of the country would be when they found out about us. I'd always felt she was beyond me, definitely out of my league." But there was the Widow Todd, sitting on one side of him at a Hollywood restaurant, putting his hand under her tight black silk dress while Debbie sat on his other side. At a party on another night, she surreptitiously took his hand and placed it on her breast. It was, Eddie said, his "greatest fantasy" coming true.

  Lonely, bored, frightened about her future, and sexually starved, Elizabeth was making it clear what she wanted. And there was one other thing Eddie could do for her. She was unable to sleep as she tossed and turned and relived the night of Mike's crash. "I had the answer for that," Eddie said. One night at the Tropicana lounge, he introduced Elizabeth to Dr. Max Jacobson—"Dr. Feelgood" to celebrity clients like Anthony Quinn, Tennessee Williams, Frank Sinatra, and Truman Capote. Jacobson's "vitamin injections" were, in fact, at least thirty milligrams of amphetamines—otherwise known as speed—combined with steroids, hormones, placenta, and bone marrow. For Eddie, Jacobson's injections had provided limitless energy as he bounded across the stage to shake the hands of hundreds of shrieking girls. But the German-born doctor with the quirky accent could offer the opposite, too: barbiturates that induced sleep or a dreamy euphoric wakefulness, and it was just such an injection that he gave to Elizabeth that night at the Tropicana. She was thrilled and grateful to Eddie for the introduction.

  Both Elizabeth and Eddie thought that their marriage would be treated as par for the course. They expected some moralizing in the press. But divorces happened all the time in Hollywood. The public would quickly move on as it always did, eager to follow the next chapter in their favorite stars' lives. Elizabeth wasn't overly concerned. After all, she'd survived some pretty nasty press when she'd split with Nicky Hilton. Surely nothing could be worse than that.

  Then Dick Hanley showed her Hedda's story on the front page of the September 11 Los Angeles Times.

  ***

  "You betrayed me!" Elizabeth shrieked. "I didn't think you'd print it."

  Holding the phone to her ear, Hedda exuded all the smugness of the morally self-righteous. "You didn't say it was off the record," she purred. "And it had to be printed."

  It was her duty to print it, Hedda believed. This wasn't just the story of one actress or one marriage being broken. This was about Hollywood, about the values it needed to promulgate if it hoped to survive. She didn't like the loosening of morals that she saw all around her. At a recent Hollywood party that she had attended with Debbie Reynolds, no less, Hedda had been aghast at all the young starlets wearing those tight new C
apri pants: "Whoever invented Capri pants had his mind on rape," Hedda sermonized.

  This wasn't the Hollywood that Hedda knew and venerated. "Filthy" pictures like The Moon Is Blue and The Man with the Golden Arm were destroying the industry, she believed, even if she conveniently turned a blind eye to their box-office successes. So she was taking a stand, fully cognizant that, in her front-page story about Elizabeth, she was depicting the girl she'd once petted and fawned over "as being as cruel and heartless as a black widow spider." But to Hedda's mind, Elizabeth deserved it. "This will hurt you much more than it ever will Debbie Reynolds," she quoted herself in the article as telling Elizabeth. "People love her very much because she's an honest and wonderful girl." The implication, of course, was that Elizabeth was not.

  "You'll probably hate me for the rest of your life for this," Hedda went on scolding in print, "but I can't help it. I'm afraid you've lost all control over reason. Remember the nights you used to call me at two and three in the morning when you were having nightmares and had to talk to somebody and I let you talk your heart out? What you've just said to me bears not the slightest resemblance to that girl. Where, oh where has she gone?"

  On some level, Hedda had to have known that that girl had never existed. She had been a creation of studio publicists and their handmaidens in the press, prime among them Miss Hopper herself. Whether or not Elizabeth had ever called Hedda in the middle of the night is immaterial; what the old woman lamented was her own loss of clout and control. But with every newspaper in the country—even her hated Hearst rivals—picking up her story, Hedda had reclaimed a bit of her waning power for a moment. She had scooped Louella and Sheilah Graham and every other columnist. It was a flashback to her glory days, when she had broken news of Carole Lombard's death and Bette Davis's pregnancy.

  Elizabeth was too smart to think that Hedda wouldn't run a scoop when she landed one; what surprised her, no doubt, was the columnist's combative tone and that Hedda was no longer carrying water for her the way she'd done in the past. Like the MGM executives who contended that Elizabeth was still their property, Hedda and her diatribe symbolized the stubborn refusal of old Hollywood to simply roll over and make way for the new. "I must say I had no regret," Hopper said. "If she'd been my own daughter, I'd have done it. Without a sense of integrity you can't sleep nights."

  All during that warmer-than-average late-summer week, people around the country (and then the globe) picked up their newspapers to read about "Liz, Eddie, and Debbie." The scandal trumped all other news: the financial improprieties of Eisenhower aide Sherman Adams, the massive commuter train crash in Newark that killed forty-eight people, even the Supreme Court's landmark decision ordering Little Rock High School to integrate. Elizabeth was stunned by the massive interest. From behind the curtains of Frings's well-guarded house, she watched in disbelief as the furor grew.

  But Debbie Reynolds—like Elizabeth a graduate of Metro's last class of studio-trained stars—was definitely not in hiding. Debbie, a former Miss Burbank, had skyrocketed to stardom with her brisk turn opposite Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain (1952) and then worked her way up the old-fashioned way, gamely playing the perky girl next door in a succession of routine studio vehicles. At twenty-six (just a month younger than Elizabeth), the blond El Paso native was a five-foot-two dynamo—and "one very smart girl who knew how to work any situation," said her friend, the producer Hank Moonjean.

  Indeed. As soon as rumors began reaching her of Eddie and Elizabeth's cavorting in New York, Debbie did two things. First she telephoned her husband (or he telephoned her; their stories differ) and learned the truth. Eddie admitted that he was in love with Elizabeth and wanted a divorce. He also said that he wouldn't be returning on the day he'd originally planned, the Tuesday after Labor Day, but would stay in New York a couple of days longer. Then Debbie called the studio. "And they told her what to do," said Dick Clayton, who knew exactly how the Hollywood studios operated. "At times like these, the star went to the studio and they figured out how to [proceed]."

  On the day that Eddie was originally supposed to arrive back in Los Angeles, Debbie showed up at the airport bright and early, devoid of makeup, her hair pulled back in a girlish ponytail. Reporters took note as she watched and waited, waited and watched, then seemed to give up. Her chin set bravely, she marched past the reporters and returned home. Eddie steamed. "The fact that I'd just told her I was in love with another woman didn't keep her from going to the airport like the loving wife," he said.

  She was met with more cameras at home. Ever since the rumors had begun, reporters were assembling on the well-manicured front lawn of the Fisher house on Conway Avenue in West Los Angeles, their numbers growing as each day passed. Whenever movement was spotted in one of the windows of the house, a volley of questions was shouted. When a friend of Debbie's, the dancer Camille Williams, showed up for support, she was hounded up the driveway and nearly reduced to tears.

  Then Eddie came home. Debbie made sure she was cooking lima bean soup—his favorite. When he walked through the door, the aroma drifted out onto the front lawn. But home-cooked meal or not, there was an argument—overheard by the crowd outside—in which Debbie's chief complaint wasn't so much her hus band's infidelity but the damage that it did to their reputations as America's Sweethearts: "It doesn't look good to have stories like this in the papers! You never see stories like this about me!"

  With the studio's backing, Debbie was fighting back. She and the studio believed that this thing could be fixed, that the Sweethearts could be saved. Editors at Motion Picture magazine told of a personal call from Debbie that day, pleading with them not to blame Eddie, insisting that he was "a great guy." She (and the studio) believed that the marriage could be saved, at least for a while—at least until it no longer looked as if Elizabeth Taylor had broken it.

  That was important. To lose her husband to another woman was going to be humiliating; to lose her husband to Elizabeth Taylor when Debbie was a movie star herself was a public ignominy with far-reaching career implications. An actor's stock in Hollywood was a valuable commodity, and Debbie's had just taken a critical hit. Already wags around town were poking fun. "Eddie left Debbie for Elizabeth?" Oscar Levant reportedly quipped. "How high can you stoop?"

  So it was no surprise that the reporters jostling one another for position on Debbie's front lawn would witness a parade of Metro "flacks" going in and out of the house. Although Debbie and Elizabeth were both MGM stars, it was clear who the studio was backing in this situation—even if the big New York premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was just days away. After all, Elizabeth had severed all practical ties with the studio once the filming of Cat had finished, and she was never going to sign another contract with them. Debbie, on the other hand, had just starred in the phenomenally popular Tammy and the Bachelor and was about to begin another important picture, The Mating Game, costarring Tony Randall. Debbie loved the studio as much as Elizabeth loathed it, and as always, Metro took care of its own.

  No doubt it was the studio that arranged for the Fishers to visit a marriage counselor—rather late in the game, but it was good for appearances. To get there, they had to slip out the back way and climb over a wall to reach Camille Williams's waiting car. Eddie, sighing and shrugging, went along partly because Elizabeth was incommunicado and partly because he never could say no to Debbie. As he hiked his wife over the wall in her capri pants (what would Hedda say?), one of those Metro "flacks" was stepping out onto the front lawn to read a statement. "We have never been happier than we have in this past year," he quoted Debbie as saying. "There was no trouble between us until he got to New York." And then the kicker: "I still love the guy."

  But Hedda's explosive front-page interview with Elizabeth changed the arc of the story dramatically the next day. Now headlines blared: DEBBIE: I LOVE EDDIE; MISS TAYLOR: HE DOESN'T. For all Hedda's supposed advocacy of "poor little Debbie," she had placed her so-called friend in an extremely awkward situation. Columnist Irv Kupelnet saw
this immediately, deploring the "untenable positions" that both Debbie and Eddie now occupied because of the way Hedda's story (and those that resulted from it) "blew the case wide open." Now hundreds instead of dozens of reporters took up camp on the Fishers' front lawn. Police had to cordon off the street.

  Of course, the marriage counselor did no good, and Eddie moved out a day later. The press was in an uproar, but Debbie seemed unfazed. When she emerged from the house now, she was cheery. Dressed in dungarees, her hair knotted in a long pigtail, she'd clipped a couple of diaper pins to her blouse. She explained to reporters that she'd just put baby Todd down for his nap. Then she called in to little Carrie, who came stumbling out the door perfectly on cue and ran directly into her mother's arms. As she settled her daughter into the family car, Debbie was asked if it was true that she and Eddie were separating. There was a pause as Debbie slid into the car. Then she turned to face the photographers. Her eyes were moist, but she didn't cry. "He isn't coming home," she said plainly. The tabloids had their picture—and their headline—for the next day.

  "That was Debbie Reynolds's greatest performance," said Mark Miller, who had some key insight into the proceedings from Rock Hudson. Others agreed. Debbie "wasn't quite the 'little darling' she appeared to be," said columnist Earl Wilson. "To put it bluntly, Debbie has more balls than any five guys I've ever known. She pretends to be sweet and demure, but at heart she's hard as nails."

  Debbie would insist that she had acted with complete authenticity. Those diaper pins were stuck in her blouse simply so she wouldn't "forget them"—though she did admit to "obliging" photographers with a picture that came to symbolize the "Rejected Woman" in the next day's newspapers. So obliging was she, in fact, that when one reporter called out that he hadn't gotten a shot, Debbie stopped the car as she was backing out of the driveway and posed again. Eddie griped that she was "playing the martyr thing."