How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  There had been doubts from the beginning that director Brooks could pull off this adaptation of Williams's play. Despite the steady erosion of the Production Code over the last few years, the homosexuality of Brick could still not be mentioned or even clearly alluded to. That left many moviegoers wondering why a stud like him didn't want to pounce all over a woman as sexually irresistible as Elizabeth's Maggie. The "logical conflict" of the play, as Crowther said, was missing, yet in its place was a tour de force of "visual and verbal displays of vulgar and violent emotions." In other words, one stopped asking why and was instead just carried along by the power of the performances: Elizabeth, longing and libidinous; Newman, bitter and boiling; and Burl Ives, duplicitous and dispirited as the dying Big Daddy.

  It's remarkable how well Elizabeth holds her own alongside such acting heavyweights. She does more than that, actually. She carries the picture. She is the cat, after all; she is the star. All those early doubts about her acting now seemed like so much needless anxiety. "People sometimes forget that Elizabeth Taylor wasn't just a great movie star, but occasionally a very fine actress as well," said the writer Gavin Lambert.

  And never finer than here. As Maggie, she is both scheming and sincere, predatory and pitiful. Even at her most aggressive, spitting curses at her husband or at the "no-necked," monstrous children around her, she never loses our fascination or sympathy. She would be rightly praised for her big, hot-blooded scenes—the shrill "Maggie the Cat is alive!" for example—but even more affecting are the smaller moments, as when Newman asks her what victory might mean for a cat on a hot tin roof. "Just stayin' on it, I guess," she says in a small but confident voice. "As long as she can." Whether she was drawing on the emotion of Mike's death to inspire her, as she would claim, or simply reaching down deep to discover her own gifts, as she had in A Place in the Sun, she is superb.

  The film was a massive box-office success. Going into widespread release in mid-October, it had grossed several million dollars by the end of the year, and by the time it finished its long tour in the spring of 1959, it had racked up an impressive total of $6.1 million. That was enough to land the film in the top ten moneymakers of the year. Although it was half of what Giant had made, it was about equal to Raintree County. And since Raintree had made most of its money in the first months of the same calendar year, the annual Quigley poll of exhibitors named Elizabeth Taylor—no matter what the fan magazines were saying about her—as the most bankable female star of 1958. Soon ads for Cat were carrying the tagline: "Year's most popular actress!"

  Surely Hedda and her true believers weren't pleased. But their demonization of Elizabeth had played a part in the extraordinary success of Cat. Like Eddie's season debut, many people bought tickets to the film just to see how seductive this Miss Taylor really could be. And on that score, she delivered the goods. Her Maggie is a determined sexual aggressor, literally stripping off her clothes for all those thousands of spectators hunched down in their seats looking up at her in the darkened theaters. She is supremely confident of her allure—every bit the slinky, sultry feline her detractors were describing in their outraged letters to newspapers, networks, and corporate sponsors. And when Brick finally succumbs to the charms of his ravishing wife, the two of them falling onto the bed for the final fadeout, the reputation of Elizabeth Taylor, siren, was secure. There were no doubts that she would always get her man.

  And while that fact infuriated some, it delighted many others. If the "value of front-page publicity" had helped Cat's initial screenings, it was the film's inherent quality—and Elizabeth's undeniable appeal—that kept audiences coming back, ensuring that the picture would still be in theaters nine months down the road. For all his popularity, Eddie Fisher had no such enduring star appeal; he could do nothing but watch in dismay as his ratings dropped a little lower every week. But Elizabeth was the object of the world's fascination more than ever, and her drawing power was not lost on Hollywood's moneymen. Just a few days after Cat's premiere, Seven Arts signed her for her first independent picture, an adaptation of another Broadway hit, Two for the Seesaw, for the unprecedented sum of half a million dollars.

  In the fall of 1958 the public was dramatically polarized on the subject of Elizabeth Taylor. Some wanted her films banned; others bought tickets to sit enraptured by her image. It's become conventional wisdom that the Liz-Eddie-Debbie affair turned public opinion against Elizabeth, and certainly she was being attacked from many quarters. But for all those hundreds of angry people who took pen to paper to denounce Elizabeth, there were thousands more who did not. We cannot gauge their feelings in the same way we can those of their letter-writing counterparts; if Hedda received any missives defending the star, she did not keep them. But the pro-Elizabeth base seems to have left a record of its own: the box-office receipts of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Even if some of those in the audience remained judgmental of Elizabeth's offscreen behavior, and even if others simply didn't give a hoot about star scandals at all, the rest, perhaps the majority, were sending Elizabeth a message of support—not with letters, but with their pocketbooks. It was this support that she came to understand, appreciate, and, increasingly, rely on.

  By October it was clear to Hollywood insiders that they os tracized Elizabeth at their own risk. Gradually she emerged from her cocoon at Frings's house and returned to the Hollywood social swirl. There were luncheons and parties and discussions of her next picture. "People keep stopping me to ask if Elizabeth Taylor is being snubbed," Hedda Hopper wrote. "My answer is no, because no one in our town snubs success." No matter how much it surely pained her to admit it, Hedda understood the wisdom of being seen hugging the star at a party for restaurateur Mike Romanoff in November. There is no record of what either lady might have said to each other through their clenched-teeth smiles.

  In December, again at Romanoff's, Elizabeth took the next step: She appeared in public with Eddie for the first time. At their side, to blunt any criticism, was Mike Todd Jr. But even if Hollywood stood in awe of Elizabeth's box-office clout, it remained in many ways a small town that liked to gossip, and the latest was that the Widow Todd was pregnant with Eddie's baby. No longer protected from the scandal magazines by her late husband, Elizabeth found herself targeted by Inside Story, which suggested Eddie's divorce wasn't "the only event he and Liz were looking forward to." Reporters noticed that she had gained some weight—especially glaring since her svelte image from Cat was still plastered everywhere. One person who saw her at a gathering at Chasen's restaurant told the scandal rag: "It was really a coming-out party. Liz was coming out all over." Although the pregnancy rumors were never stated up front, the innuendo was strong: "The race to get Eddie Fisher divorced, and married to Liz Taylor, is going neck and neck," one item read. "Odds are they won't make it." There were also rumors that Elizabeth hadn't been hiding out at Frings's house at all, but instead had suffered a nervous breakdown and checked herself into the Menninger Foundation.

  What Elizabeth faced as 1958 turned into 1959 was not a crisis of career, but of public relations. She may not have been snubbed, but she was the target of scorn and rumors. Her record as the biggest female moneymaker in town didn't protect her. Even as the studios fell, image still mattered. And image was still shaped largely through the fan magazines. Since becoming an adult star, Elizabeth had always been depicted as sensual and passionate, but also as sweet and kind; now she was vulgar and coarse, a perception only reinforced by her concupiscent portrayal of Maggie. The Elizabeth Taylor of the fan magazines—a distinct creature from her real self—had gone from saint to sinner in the space of two issues. And sinners could not go unpunished in the world of the fan magazines. "If Taylor was not to be smote in some way," explained the writer Lee Israel, "the world made no sense at all; the lives of the righteous were wasted."

  To counter this, Bill Doll tried to fan some sympathy Elizabeth's way. One entire issue of Photoplay, on the stands in February and March, was secured for this purpose. The cover article—WHAT'S HAPPEN
ING TO LIZ NOW?—presented the star as contemplative and regretful for having caused so much unhappiness. Readers were told that she was just "a shadow of the dynamic person" she once had been. And in a detail sure to stir every mother's heart, Elizabeth was described as heartsick that her boys had to overhear salacious gossip about their mother.

  But was it enough? Or was more smiting still in order?

  The answer came in April. Nearly three thousand fans lined Hollywood Boulevard outside the RKO Pantages Theatre for the annual Academy Awards ceremony. As the stars emerged from their limousines, resplendent in tuxedos and sequined gowns, the crowd let out rousing cheers. Magnanimity was in the air. Ingrid Bergman, returning for the first time since the scandal that had exiled her from Hollywood, beamed as the crowd began to chant: "We want Ingrid!" For Elizabeth, there was more of the same. When she arrived in a filmy, low-cut black dress, clinging fiercely to Eddie's arm, a huge cheer went up—more evidence that the whole world had not turned on her. With a "fixed smile," Elizabeth made her way inside the theater.

  The question on everyone's lips was whether she would win the coveted statuette. Of course she'd been nominated; how could she not have been? There was widespread belief that she had given the best performance that year; her competition was weak, with her only real rival Susan Hayward in I Want to Live! But Academy voters have always been a conservative lot; for all of Hollywood's liberal politics and cosmopolitan live-and-let-live attitudes, a cautious core has defined the town from its very beginning, when Jewish immigrant moguls sought above all else the approval and acceptance of America's middle-class heartland. And right now, despite the cheers on Hollywood Boulevard, that heartland was not happy with Elizabeth Taylor. When the award for Best Actress was announced, Hayward's name was inside the envelope.

  Some felt that the passionate, redheaded star had earned it, having been bypassed once too often after powerhouse performances. Others felt that the award rightly belonged to Elizabeth for a picture far weightier and more complex than Hayward's prison drama. Yet no matter how much money Elizabeth might be bringing in for them, the industry was not going to reward a home wrecker rumored to be pregnant by another woman's husband. "Liz lost the Oscar at Grossinger's," Sidney Skolsky astutely observed.

  But for Elizabeth, the time for hiding, bowing, and scraping was over. On May 12, once the divorce with Debbie was final, she married Eddie Fisher at a Las Vegas synagogue. "There's nothing blue about this wedding," she jubilantly told reporters, explaining that while she might be wearing something old and something new, there wasn't a stitch of blue. "I broke with tradition." She certainly had—and in more ways than just her choice of apparel. A few weeks earlier, she'd announced her conversion to Eddie's (and Mike Todd's) Jewish faith.

  So much for the darling little English girl who'd once been held up as the ideal—the "prize," as George Stevens had called her—desired by every American man. If the bluenoses were scandalized before, now they were enflamed. "A traitor to Jesus Christ," one woman called Elizabeth in a letter to Hedda Hopper. A poster for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in Arlington, Virginia, was spray-painted with the word "Jewess."

  It was a period of intense anti-Semitism in America; throughout 1959 and 1960, vandalism struck Jewish targets in what one historian has described as a "swastika epidemic." Much of this was the leftover prejudice of McCarthyism, but part of it may also have been a response to the many celebrities who had very publicly converted to Judaism in the last few years: Marilyn Monroe, Carroll Baker, Sammy Davis Jr., and others. Now Elizabeth had joined their ranks—even if, according to Eddie, she never attended any formal service at a temple again.

  Her conversion was her decision, and hers alone. Neither Mike nor Eddie had ever asked her to do so. In many ways, it was an act of defiance against her mother, who'd once railed against Stanley Donen (but who nonetheless smiled wide for photographers at the wedding in Vegas) and against her uncle Howard Young, who reportedly had snarled, "What the hell does she see in all these Jewish guys?" But even more, it was a deliberate flouting of the sacred canon of all the scolds who'd taken her to task—not only Hedda and Louella and the fan-magazine writers, but the busy-bodies in the public who'd written such vile letters condemning her. It was Elizabeth's "fuck you" (a favorite phrase) to her critics. This shouldn't imply that her conversion wasn't sincere; Elizabeth was always too heartfelt, too childlike in her enthusiasm, to ever be insincere for very long. But her Judaism does seem to have had a more social than spiritual application.

  If she had wanted to stir the pot, she succeeded. Outside her Vegas hotel, protestors carried signs reading LIZ LEAVE TOWN! She ignored them, turning up everywhere in white chiffon and diamonds. The protestors were doing her a favor by ensuring that her name stayed in the papers even when she had no picture to promote. Frings's theory that no publicity was bad publicity might be true after all. At Eddie's nightclub shows, she sat front-row center, her head held high, her neck and ears sparkling in diamonds. Audiences came to see her as much as they did Eddie. "It's a double act," Skolsky said. "She's part of it."

  Eddie, no doubt, was grateful. His television show had been canceled just weeks earlier. Now his fame depended less on any Vegas act than on the lovely, glittering bride who dazzled from the front row. Not without reason had the judge who'd handed them their marriage license suggested that Eddie sign first. "It will be the last time you will be first for a long time to come."

  Seven

  A Second Chance on Life

  May 1959–April 1961

  A BOARD THE OLNICO, a two-hundred-ton chartered white yacht, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher sailed up the northeast coast of Spain on a very public honeymoon. Their cabin was decorated to look like Christopher Columbus's berth on the Santa Maria, and a chef prepared a daily smorgasbord of meats, fish, cakes, and pies. Dropping anchor off the coast of Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera, Elizabeth left the yacht to sashay into the resort town and buy armloads of new clothes. The newlyweds gambled at the casino in Cannes until the early hours of the morning, drinking champagne and winning enough to pay for their suite at the exclusive Carlton Hotel. "I'm so happy, so happy," Elizabeth gushed to reporters. Far away from the sniping and backstabbing of the American fan magazines, it was almost as if she were rubbing her marriage in the faces of her critics.

  By the end of the month, with Elizabeth's three children now in tow, the Fishers had settled in England, renting a house at Englefield Green in Surrey, about twenty miles outside London. Reporters waiting at the gate counted forty-four pieces of luggage and made sure to comment on Elizabeth's ermine-lined purple coat and low-cut dress. It wasn't their first brush with a movie star. Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller had spent several months at Englefield Green following their own honeymoon. Stopping to chat, Eddie told the reporters he was weighing some British television offers. But that was blarney. The real reason they were in Eng land was so that Elizabeth could make Suddenly, Last Summer for producer Sam Spiegel, her first independent picture.

  With both Busman's Holiday and Two for the Seesaw falling through, Elizabeth had agreed to yet another Tennessee Williams adaptation about the ways in which repressed homosexuality can destroy a family; the first one had done pretty well by her, after all. Kurt Frings had accepted Spiegel's offer on Elizabeth's behalf, provided that she was paid as much as Seven Arts had been promising. Spiegel agreed: half a million. The money was needed to maintain the yachts and the clothes and the chef. For Elizabeth, however, the icing on the project was the chance to play opposite Monty Clift again.

  "There was a joy and a freedom in being able to choose your own projects," said Shirley MacLaine, who, like Elizabeth, was also breaking away from studio control at the time. "The old moguls were essentially hard-fisted authoritarians who had created a system of linked dictatorships to control the creative people. We were supposed to be the children; mad, tempestuous, brilliant, talented, not terribly smart children. We were to be led, guided, manipulated, bought, sold, packaged, co
ddled, and tolerated. But we were not to be allowed to master our own destinies."

  But Elizabeth was now in charge, at least for the moment, and she dove into the project with gusto. It was wild stuff, way over the top. Her character, driven mad by the cannibal murder of her cousin, screams and cries and pulls at her hair. At Shepperton Studios in London, Elizabeth emoted her way through a painstaking re-creation of a New Orleans garden, complete with Venus flytraps. She was solicitous of Clift, who was drinking heavily and a far cry from his once-handsome self, and worshipful of Katharine Hepburn, who played her overbearing aunt. She liked the crew, too, sharing their bawdy humor. "Come here, you asshole!" became her own personal term of endearment.

  But it was with director Joseph Mankiewicz (A Letter to Three Wives, All About Eve, Guys and Dolls) that she forged her closest attachment. "Are you planning to lose any weight?" the director had asked upon meeting her, shaking the flab on her arm and likening it to "a bag of dead mice." All those extravagant meals and bottles of wine onboard her yacht had left the twenty-seven-year-old star a little fleshy, and Mankiewicz suggested that she tone up. Elizabeth didn't take offense. In fact, she was enchanted. And she allowed him to push her in her performance, too, which required her to go from shrinking to shrieking.

  A big, strong-willed man with a sharp wit and an intense focus on his craft, Mankiewicz had recently been through the painful suicide of his wife. Elizabeth found his combination of strength and vulnerability irresistible. She also appreciated his consideration of Monty—which directly refutes Hepburn's famous contention that the director had run roughshod over Clift during the shoot. "Elizabeth wouldn't have tolerated any mistreatment of Monty," said Mankiewicz's son Tom. If the director had abused her good friend, she certainly would never have begun an affair with him—which is exactly what some people believe she did in the summer of 1959.