The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice

by M. G. Lord

Velvet Brown! Who do you think you are?

  —Mickey Rooney as Mi Taylor, a horse trainer in National Velvet

  Why, I am the owner of the Pie.

  —Elizabeth Taylor, confidently, as Velvet Brown

  And does that give you leave to go poking your head out amongst the stars? Mi continues, believing you could take the richest grandest prize a horse ever won?… You’re just a wisp of butcher’s daughter in a cold stable late at night when you’d better to be in bed with a doll.

  TO APPRECIATE THE SLY SEDITION in Enid Bagnold’s novel, National Velvet, one must know how women were treated in the time and place where it is set: England between the two world wars. To glean such knowledge swiftly—as one might from CliffsNotes—one can read Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, a blistering, book-length essay published in 1938.

  In the essay, Woolf—best known for her modernist novels, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse—rages against nearly every British institution that ever demeaned the intelligence or belittled the aspirations or crushed the soul of a woman. There were many—from the primogeniture laws (which precluded daughters from inheriting property) to the voting laws (which until 1928 kept women away from the polls) to the convention of educating sons instead of daughters (which prevented Woolf herself from obtaining a university education).

  Sons needed formal schooling, the reasoning went, because they were expected to support their future wives and children. But what if wives themselves could earn a living? Woolf mocks the notion that wives and husbands share equally in a husband’s income—unless, of course, a wife is insanely altruistic. Otherwise, why would she devote thousands of pounds to “clubs to which her own sex is not admitted” or to “colleges from which her own sex is excluded” or—as Bagnold herself might have wondered—to “racecourses where she may not ride”?

  This brings us to National Velvet—in which a girl jockey leaps over the racecourse gender barrier. Don’t be deceived by the book’s sweet colloquial language or its folksy village setting. It is as fierce a polemic as Three Guineas.

  The actress Elizabeth Taylor was also a product of England in the 1930s. She was born in London on February 27, 1932. Her parents, Francis and Sara Taylor, were American. But until she moved with them and her older brother Howard to Los Angeles in 1939, Taylor’s world was Bagnold’s world was Woolf’s world.

  National Velvet was published in 1935 and sold well enough for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to option it—not necessarily to make a movie from it but to keep the property away from competing studios. Young Elizabeth read the book and loved it, or so she blurted to Clarence Brown, an American director who wanted to film it. The blurt appeared spontaneous—a bubbly remark made during a chance meeting with the director. But it was, in fact, calculated—part of a campaign that she and her mother mounted to cultivate Brown, which also included sending him handmade birthday cards and Valentines. The exchange occurred inside MGM, where Taylor, age eleven, had newly become a contract player.

  After the Taylor family settled in Los Angeles, Taylor’s mother, a former actress, took Elizabeth to auditions, and the little girl bagged minor parts in There’s One Born Every Minute (1942), Lassie Come Home (1943), Jane Eyre (1944), and The White Cliffs of Dover (1944). But Elizabeth wanted more. She wanted to participate in the movie equivalent of the Grand National Sweepstakes. She wanted to portray Velvet Brown.

  Elizabeth quickly charmed Pandro S. Berman, producer of National Velvet. When she came to his office, he admired her spirit. But he told her that she was too small. No audience would accept her as a world-class rider. So Taylor willed herself to grow. Months later, Taylor returned to Berman’s office. And in an incident that MGM publicity exploded into legend, Berman measured Taylor’s height and gave her the part.

  Taylor’s biographers don’t agree on how many—or even whether—Taylor added inches. Whether Taylor truly grew—or her stage mother and MGM connived to create this impression—seems almost irrelevant. Given a choice between a great story and a true story, the 1940s movie press unhesitatingly went with great.

  Fortunately for Taylor, screenwriters Helen Deutsch and Theodore Reeves crafted a script that was even stronger than Bagnold’s book. They pared out extraneous characters and confusing scenes. And they freighted the film with metaphor. National Velvet didn’t just inspire women who yearned to be jockeys. Nor did it merely foreshadow Title IX, the 1972 federal law that created opportunities for women athletes. It spoke to all little girls who refused to let their gender compromise their dreams.

  Velvet Brown is a prepubescent avatar of Leslie Lynnton Benedict, Taylor’s character in the 1956 movie Giant. Even in childhood, Velvet is strong and centered, with a deep connection to nature. She loves horses enough to mold “the Pie,” her cherished gelding, into a champion. Velvet lives on the English seacoast—not a balmy surfside playground but a harsh, rocky landscape. A place where toughness and beauty coincide. And where the hills, as Bagnold describes them, tumble down to the ocean, “like the rumps of elephants … like a starlit herd of divine pigs.”

  Clarence Brown, the film’s director, couldn’t shoot the specific rumps and pigs to which Bagnold had referred. During World War II, the English seacoast was fortified against a Nazi attack. So he built Velvet’s village—cobblestone streets and thatched roofs—on a soundstage in Culver City, California. For the film’s exterior shots, he went north, to Monterey County, California, where the coastal breeze is as damp as England’s and the bluffs plummet to the sea. When Velvet gallops there, even jaded viewers feel some magic. They may not believe—as Velvet does—that she rides “an enchanted horse with invisible wings.” But few pick up on the real-life identity of the setting: the ninth and tenth holes of the Pebble Beach Golf Links.

  Bagnold’s characters speak in koans, most of which the screenwriters preserved. But her plot was a mess—in need of Deutsch and Reeves to streamline it. In the book, for example, Velvet doesn’t win one special horse in a raffle, as she does in the movie. Instead, she is inundated with horses. One day, out of the blue, Velvet meets a man she once encountered at an equestrian event. She walks with him through his stable, where he scribbles something on a scrap of paper. He then hands her the scrap, marches off, and shoots himself. In the head. For absolutely no reason. Velvet is of course freaked out. But she perks up quickly. Because the man randomly willed all his horses to her.

  In contrast, the movie unfolds in clear scenes that follow a logical course. Hard to believe, but in 1944, Mickey Rooney was a bigger star than Taylor—so the film initially focuses on him. He portrays Mi Taylor—a damaged youth, unemployed and homeless. Although he was once a crackerjack jockey, Mi refuses to ride, because, we learn later, he survived a racing accident that killed his best friend. The accident rattled him, eroding his confidence. Had a different actress been cast as Velvet, Rooney might have “owned” the picture. But the moment Taylor appears—in a rustic village schoolroom—she magnetizes the camera. And National Velvet belongs to her.

  Bagnold’s Velvet lacked Taylor’s beauty. She was anorexic, or, as Bagnold writes, “thin as famine … like a child model for a head of Death,” which only in recent years has become fashionable in Hollywood. To correct her protruding teeth, she requires a snap-in orthodontic device—which Taylor, in the movie, also occasionally wears. (To make the appliance fit, Taylor’s mom forced her daughter to have her healthy baby teeth extracted—a painful ordeal that, in Kitty Kelley’s view, proves Sara to be a ruthless stage mother.)

  In the film, Velvet bonds quickly with the Pie—abridged from “Piebald” in the book. When the horse bolts from his owner’s meadow—and gallops menacingly toward town—Velvet steps forward to obstruct his path. Terrified, Mi is certain Velvet will be killed. But the horse rears back, sees Velvet, and stops. In an instant. Causing the viewer to realize: this is neither an ordinary horse nor an ordinary girl.

  Velvet’s father, however, is relentlessly ordinary. Not evil, just dull—and filled with his own importance. But b
y an amazing stroke of luck, he snared an extraordinary wife—a generous, accomplished woman who at age twenty swam the English Channel. In Edwardian England, as Virginia Woolf wrote, women of all classes were permitted to have only one career: marriage. Yet instead of chafing at this limitation, Mrs. Brown surmounts it. She taught herself to manage Mr. Brown—to implement her wise ideas by convincing him that they are his.

  Every time he blusters, she teases him. When the Pie falls ill, Mi and Velvet nurse the horse through the night. But the next day, when he shows improvement, Velvet runs to school—and Mr. Brown chides Mrs. Brown for not forcing her to rest. “I like the spirit that makes her want to go out after staying up all night,” Mrs. Brown replies. But when he keeps on criticizing, she stops him: Velvet will “be back in half an hour. This is Saturday and there is no school.”

  Of course Mr. Brown opposes Velvet’s plan to enter the Grand National. It’s preposterous—and they can’t afford the fee. But in her daughter, Mrs. Brown detects an ancient spark—the same spark that set her aflame when her detractors jeered, or “said a woman couldn’t swim the English Channel.” She refuses to let her husband snuff that spark out.

  The Browns do not share equally in the household wealth. Mr. Brown controls it. But Mrs. Brown will not back down. She brings Velvet to the attic, where the mementos of her Channel swim are stored. Beneath the dusty medals and crumbling newspaper clippings is a carefully wrapped pouch. It contains gold sovereigns, the award money from her achievement, enough to cover Velvet’s fee. “Everyone should have a chance at a breathtaking piece of folly once in his life,” she says.

  This scene is the heart and soul of Velvet’s story. It disproves the notion that women sabotage other women—and that mothers and daughters have an inborn enmity. Mrs. Brown doesn’t rebel against the role of wife and mother. But she has known the pleasure of achievement—and she wants Velvet to know it too. In the film, to portray Mrs. Brown, Anne Revere wore almost no makeup. Her face is freckled and careworn. Yet she seems to glow—as unvarnished and radiant as truth itself.

  Mrs. Brown embodies what writer Daniel Goleman terms “emotional intelligence.” Although she excels at abstract thinking—she keeps the books for her husband’s shop—she knows when to override reason with feeling. “You don’t think like us,” Velvet tells her mother. “You think back here.” She pats the back of her head—the symbolic repository of empathy, intuition, and compassion.

  After months of arduous training, Mi and Velvet reach the track—only to have their aspirations dashed. Velvet fires the jockey that Mi had hired for the race. The jockey lacked faith in Velvet’s horse. She begs Mi to be the rider, but he refuses—until a long night of soul-searching restores the confidence he had lost. While Mi goes off to find himself, Velvet also looks within, realizing that she has more faith in her horse than Mi does. She is pleased when Mi tells her that he has overcome his fears. But while he was hesitating, she decided: she—not he—will ride the Pie.

  Hair cropped and sporting pink-and-yellow silks, Velvet hurtles into the steeplechase—a whirlwind of dust, sweat, and hammering hooves. Oddly composed, she clings to the Pie, reassuring him of his greatness. All around her horses falter. Once boastful jockeys topple to the ground, their horses piling up around them. Every jump begets another crash. Accidents like the one that so spooked Mi are on the constant verge of happening.

  The crowd thunders—louder than the hooves. When Velvet wins, it roars with astonishment—but not so loudly as it will roar later, when her gender is revealed.

  According to the jacket notes on a recent edition of Enid Bagnold’s novel, Velvet triumphed through “love, courage and the magical power of childhood dreams.” I would have said chutzpah, cojones, and a hatred of injustice. Velvet rode better than most of the jockeys. Her expertise exposed the unfairness of excluding women. She proves that the rule is based on unfounded prejudice.

  Both book and movie cunningly skirt an explicit confrontation over gender discrimination. Velvet slips off the horse after winning but before she leaves the track. This violates the rules, so regardless of her gender, she would have been disqualified. The movie hints that Velvet, like her mother, a former champion Channel swimmer, will savor her fifteen minutes of gender equality then retreat into the home. But the movie can’t commit to this path. Velvet is only twelve years old, so shackling her immediately to her love interest, Mickey Rooney, is out of the question. She has six years to ponder a future like her mother’s and perhaps find an alternative.

  Immediately after the race, Velvet becomes a media phenomenon. Reporters from around the globe descend upon her village. They interview her friends, her parents, even her deranged younger brother, a bed wetter who wears his ant collection in a jar around his neck.

  Lucrative offers pour in for Velvet and her horse. We know they’re not a good idea because her mother hates them and they delight her father. “Do you want to go to America and act in the cinema?” Mr. Brown greedily inquires. Velvet is intrigued, but she ultimately declines. “Pie wouldn’t understand,” she explains. And “I’d sooner have that horse happy than go to heaven.”

  Here Velvet and Elizabeth part company. Like Velvet, Elizabeth loved animals. But her cherished pet, a chipmunk named Nibbles, did not apparently shrink from the limelight. After National Velvet, Simon & Schuster invited Elizabeth to write a book about him—Nibbles and Me—which she illustrated with her own pencil sketches. It chronicles the chipmunk’s adventures, including his accidental swim in “Mummie’s” toilet. But it is not all child’s play. When Nibbles is fatally squished by a broken cage door, Elizabeth meditates on death, in a way that oddly foreshadows the losses she would later have to endure. Moving on, she says, does not imply forgetting: “I knew he would always live in my heart—and that another one would come to me … not to take his place, but to bring the same sense of love to me.”

  Sara Taylor kept young Elizabeth moving on—and on and on. She did not allow the girl to nap on her laurels. Sara wanted more for Elizabeth than a breathtaking piece of folly. She wanted fame and money and achievement. And if some of these things rubbed off on her, she would not protest.

  3

  1945–1950

  BETWEEN 1945 AND 1950, Elizabeth blossomed, to a degree that few beings ever blossom, becoming, in the unlikely words of writer J. D. Salinger, “the most beautiful creature I have ever seen in my life.” Under contract to MGM, she toiled faithfully in roles that didn’t always further the cause of women but did establish the Taylor brand, which could later be put to more constructive use.

  Not all her contract parts were milquetoast, however. Like National Velvet, Cynthia (1947) deals with conquering fear and getting back up on the proverbial horse. The film shows two women teaching a man how to be strong. Taylor plays Cynthia Bishop, a bookish teenager who as a child was plagued by life-threatening illnesses. These bouts so terrified her parents that that they cannot see that she has in adolescence become robust.

  Before Cynthia was born, the Bishops were brave and had ambitions for themselves. But they use her nonexistent illness as a pretext to limit their lives. Cynthia’s father is the greater coward. He lets his brother, a doctor, bully him and impose an absurd regimen on Cynthia: no apples, no fresh air, no singing. (Taylor actually sings in the movie, with a voice evocative of the ukulele-playing 1960s phenomenon, Tiny Tim.) When Cynthia can endure no more, she begs her mother for help, awakening Mrs. Bishop to her husband’s irrationality. In defiance of his orders to lock up Cynthia when it’s cold outside, she lets a handsome boy take her daughter to a dance in a rainstorm. To Mr. Bishop’s astonishment, Cynthia does not die. She thrives—and her strength helps him rediscover the courage he lost.

  In contrast, Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Women (1949), adapted from Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 novel, is a disappointment. In a head-turning blonde wig, Taylor portrays Amy March, one of four sisters who, along with their mother, tend the home fires in New England while their father serves in the Union army
. “The novel is about female ambition,” explains screenwriter Robin Swicord, who adapted a 1994 version directed by Gillian Armstrong that was scrupulously faithful to Alcott—a suffragist and abolitionist, whose feminist mother fiercely opposed the wearing of corsets. In the book, Jo wants to be a writer; Amy wants money; Beth wants a serene home, and only Meg wants a husband. But in LeRoy’s movie, they all want husbands. And that’s just about all he allows them to have.

  In the MGM years, Taylor was often typecast as Daddy’s pampered daughter. In Father of the Bride, she plays an upper-middle-class girl who will never work. She is traded from the hands of one man (her dad) into those of another (her husband). I find the movie vile, but happily, Taylor’s part is minor. It stars Spencer Tracy, who opposes his daughter’s request for a big church wedding. This might have been interesting if he had done this to protest religious hypocrisy or the treatment of brides as chattel. But he is simply cheap. He is also alcoholic—passing out drunk when he meets his future in-laws and worrying that his missteps will be blamed on booze. Nor does he realize that his actions often belie his words. Before committing full bore to the wedding—an insane orgy of haute bourgeois consumption—he tells his wife: “We’re simple people. We live within our means.”

  In real life, however, Taylor could not have been more unlike the stereotype. Far from being Daddy’s spoiled baby, Taylor supported her father, Francis, after World War II dealt a blow to his art business from which it never fully recovered. Taylor is known for having had intense, lifelong relationships with her gay male costars: Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson, Roddy McDowall. But her first intense relationship with a gay man was with her own father, who was the longtime companion of Adrian, the MGM costume designer. On his birth certificate, Adrian had a first name—Gilbert—but perhaps in homage to his famous client, Garbo, he shed it. Adrian did not, however, shed his wife, actress Janet Gaynor, whom he married in 1939, when the studios, in a flurry of antigay housekeeping, married off all personnel who might be vulnerable to that era’s equivalent of “outing.” Like Adrian, Gaynor had some lavender issues to conceal. As one wag told writer Diana McLellan, “Janet’s husband was Adrian … but her wife was Mary Martin.”