Lower photo: Baby Elizabeth, aged ten, in There’s One Born Every Minute
Known for his specialty of singing off-key, Switzer (“Alfalfa”) was dark haired, freckle faced, and known for his foul mouth. He taught Elizabeth “every curse word I’d need until the end of my days.” Perhaps Alfalfa should be blamed for the origins of her soon-to-be-infamous potty mouth.
Alfalfa was the first to experience what became known in Hollywood as “the Liz Taylor curse.” In the years ahead, many of her co-stars would die prematurely. Of course, Elizabeth had nothing to do with these early deaths, including those of Montgomery Clift and James Dean. Even so, gossips labeled her as “The Black Widow.” Hedda Hopper once wrote, probably with bitchery, “The best way to die before your time is to get cast in a Liz Taylor picture.”
Years after his career had peaked, on the night of January 21, 1959, the forty-year-old Switzer went to the Mission Hills, California, home of Moses (“Bud”) Stiltz as part of an effort to collect a $50 reward that Stiltz owed him for retrieving his lost dog. Both men had been drinking, and the encounter ended in a single gunshot wound. Switzer (“Alfalfa”) was fatally wounded as a bullet desecrated his genitals.
In the enquiries and trials that followed, Stiltz was absolved of all charges, claiming he’d killed the actor in self-defense.
Dan Kelly, the casting director at Universal, sat through Elizabeth’s film debut. He reported back to his bosses, “Her eyes are old, and she just doesn’t have the face of a kid. In fact, she has nothing at all. Give me Margaret O’Brien any time.” On Kelly’s recommendation, Universal did not renew Elizabeth’s contract after the inaugural five months.
***
The Taylor household was a sad and gloomy place during the early 1940s. After the U.S. officially entered World War II in December of 1941, affluent patrons no longer invested heavily in art. The Taylors hoped that their daughter’s acting career might recoup some of their much-needed income.
At this point, Howard Young, Francis’ uncle and patron, no long contributed to their welfare, although he did offer a twenty percent commission on any art work Francis sold within his gallery. Otherwise, he did not send checks, perhaps figuring it was time for the Taylors to survive on their own merits.
The mood brightened when Victor Cazalet announced that the British government had instructed him, as part of a secret mission, to visit New York and California during the late spring of 1943. Francis flew from Los Angeles to New York to be on hand to greet Victor. The two men booked a suite at Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where neither of them emerged for the first twenty-four hours.
Casting director at Universal, about Baby Elizabeth: “Give me Margaret O’Brien any day.”
Above: Margaret O’Brien
After concluding his business in Manhattan, Victor accompanied Francis to Los Angeles, where Sara met them at the airport with hugs and kisses. Victor was taken to their new home in Beverly Hills, where he moved into a bedroom with Francis. Sara had her own bedroom.
Elizabeth’s “Daddy” was as loving as ever to “my precious daughter” when she arrived home from school. Victor seemed delighted when Sara falsely told him that Elizabeth had signed a lucrative seven-year contract with Universal. “She also has a spectacular film coming out.” Elizabeth’s picture with Alfalfa had not yet been released.
When Francis wasn’t monopolizing Victor, Elizabeth doted on him, hugging and kissing him and sitting on his lap. Francis had recently tended to be cold and distant to her, sometimes slapping her when he got drunk. Victor was just the opposite, showering affection on her. He’d just arrived from war-torn London, but still, he had brought her some of her favorite sweets, purchased at Fortnum & Mason’s before his departure.
During his days in Los Angeles, Francis drove Victor around for various speaking engagements where he reported on the progress of the war.
Victor’s speeches, based partly on his standing as a godson of Queen Victoria, drew A-list audiences, members of which included English-born Greer Garson, who was at the time the virtual Queen of MGM, as well as Mary Pickford, Basil Rathbone, and Robert Montgomery.
During their evenings together, Victor urged all of the Taylors to return to London when the war ended, assuring them that victory was almost certain, even though at that time in 1943, the war was going badly for the Allies.
Victor assured Elizabeth that the British film industry would undergo a great renaissance after the war ended. “You’ll be an even bigger star in England than you would here in this horrible town dedicated to glitz and glamour.”
Elizabeth would always remember Victor’s tearful farewell. “Father just clung to him like he’d never see him again. I felt sorry for him that day and in the days to come. I knew how much he loved Victor. He never shared that love with Sara or me, but gave it all to Victor.” Even though she was only nine years old, Elizabeth was a very perceptive child. She told Sara that “Victor and Francis are stuck together like glue.”
Victor Cazalet (left figure in foreground) on May 24, 1943, six weeks before his death, receiving Polish government documents from Stanislaw Grabski (right), an outspoken opponent of the Nazis and a key figure in Poland’s government-in-exile.
That was not said with any disdain. From an early age, Elizabeth seemed very accepting of homosexuality, although she surely knew little about the inner workings of such relationships. She’d later say, “Love of one’s fellow man is too precious a gift to be outlawed in any way.”
Her knowledge of heterosexuality was also extremely limited during those days as well, although that was about to change.
A few short weeks after Victor’s return to a war-torn Europe, the Taylors were notified of his death. On the foggy morning of July 12, 1943, his Liberator bomber, returning from a trip to the Middle East en route to London, stopped for refueling at Gibraltar. The plane crashed almost immediately after takeoff, going down in the harbor. On board was General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the Prime Minister of Poland in exile. Victor was functioning at the time as his aide. Charges of the plane’s sabotage were never proven, although speculation was rampant.
Victor’s death made headlines in London’s Daily Mail, with journalist Ward Price writing that Victor “was one of the gayest and most versatile figures in public life.”
Throughout the rest of her life, Elizabeth maintained her contacts with members of the Cazalet family. Victor’s niece, Sheran Cazalet, asserted, “Elizabeth always arrives dressed in black in honor of Victor’s long-ago death. No plunging décolletage —she knows I don’t allow that.”
No one missed Victor more than Francis. After Victor’s death, he retreated to his blackened-out bedroom, surviving mainly on whiskey and an occasional cup of broth. Both Elizabeth and Sara could hear his cries of anguish at night. On two occasions, Sara had to summon doctors when he threatened suicide. After Francis emerged from his dank cell, he was colder and more distant than ever. He would never allow the mention of Victor’s name within earshot.
To Sara, Francis seemed a lost cause. She turned all her energy toward the promotion of Elizabeth’s stalled career, inviting any possible contact she’d made with members of the film industry to their home in Beverly Hills, into which they’d moved after a brief period in Pacific Palisades. The Mediterranean-style villa would be Elizabeth’s final residence before she left home to marry Nicky Hilton.
While Sara worked behind the scenes to promote Elizabeth’s career, she, along with her brother Howard, attended Hawthorn Elementary School, a short distance from her house. Fellow classmates mocked the British accents of both brother and sister.
Francis Taylor with four-year-old Baby Elizabeth in 1936 on the sands at Brighton
Elizabeth’s agent, who believed in her as “yet-untapped talent,” was none other than Myron Selznick, the brother of David O. Selznick, who had rejected Elizabeth as a candidate for the role of Bonnie Blue in Gone With the Wind.
On her tenth birthday, Elizabeth invited some of her
friends to her parents’ home, where Sara had purchased a large birthday cake. As Elizabeth blew out the candles, she said, “Here I am, only ten years old, and already washed up in the fucking movies.”
Sara seemed (or pretended to be) shocked at the use of Elizabeth’s language. But she’d have to get used to it. One of the film industry’s most unrepentant potty mouths was coming into bloom.
Every morning over breakfast, before Elizabeth went off to school, Sara told her, “You’re going to be a movie star. Any day now, we’re going to meet the right man who will award you a contract. You’re growing more beautiful every day. Someone in Hollywood is going to take note, someone, somebody, some day.”
Sara spoke the truth to her ten-year-old daughter. Her stardom at MGM, a studio that had previously rejected her, was growing brighter and more visible. It came about through a chance encounter.
Samuel Marx, a producer at MGM, lived on the same street in Beverly Hills as the Taylors. At night, he was an air-raid warden supervising government-mandated blackouts which were regularly enforced in an era when an air attacks from Japan were envisioned and feared. Francis also volunteered for duty, and he and Marx often talked about Francis’ daughter, Elizabeth.
One night, Marx told Francis that he’d had to fire a young Maria Flynn, who had previously appeared with Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo (1939). Flynn had, prior to her dismissal, been scheduled for a role in a movie, at the time under production, called Lassie Come Home. As it happened, the role of Priscilla, the granddaughter of an English duke (played by Nigel Bruce), was up for grabs.
Describing Flynn, Marx told Francis, “When we filmed a test, she (Flynn) stood a foot taller than our young male lead (Roddy McDowall),” Marx said. “We can’t have that. I’ve seen your daughter, and she seems right, if she can act. Another thing…The part calls for a British accent. That, Elizabeth has.”
Baby Elizabeth: “I could have done it better as Dorothy.” Photo above: “that horrible” Judy Garland from The Wizard of Oz
Francis hurried home that Friday afternoon and told Sara, who immediately dressed Elizabeth for a visit to MGM. It was nearly 6pm when they arrived for a meeting with the film’s then-novice director, Fred Wilcox, but Sara couldn’t wait for Monday morning.
On the way to MGM, with Sara piloting a secondhand Chevrolet with a weak battery, Elizabeth kept saying, “Oh Mommy, Mommy, I’m going to be a bigtime movie star. MGM has all the big stars—Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and that horrible little girl, Judy Garland, who did such a bad job in The Wizard of Oz. I could have done it so much better as Dorothy.”
Wilcox always remembered Elizabeth’s arrival on a set at MGM. “Her mother had dressed her in a purplish cape, which colored her eyes,” he said. “I may have started all this shit about her eyes being violet. She was beautiful, very dramatic, very theatrical. I cast her on the spot. I was doubly lucky when I saw how she bonded with Lassie. She just assumed it was a female dog. But Lassie was a male dog named Pal. The collie became known on the MGM lot as the only star who could play a bitch better than Bette Davis.”
“I thought the mother, Sara, was a nanny,” Wilcox said. “I’d heard that Sara was once a great beauty, but she looked like the stocky matron type in 1942.”
“The collie was getting ninety dollars a week,” Wilcox said. “We raised the dog’s salary to $250 a week. We signed Elizabeth for $75 a week.”
Louis B. Mayer approved of the arrangements, although his early assessment of Elizabeth was dismal. “No dimples like that Shirley Temple twat. No voice like the Judy Garland lez. No voice like the goody-goody Jane Powell, who sings so sweet on radio. And Taylor can’t cry on command like Margaret O’Brien. But sign her up anyway. We’ll see what the limey little bitch can do.”
Rare for a B picture, Lassie Come Home was shot in color. Neither Marx nor Wilcox liked the way Elizabeth looked in color. Marx wanted to dye her hair blonde. “In color, her hair photographed as blue-black. She wore too much mascara, or so I thought. Actually, they were her real lashes. I told Sara to pluck them, but she refused. I also wanted to remove that mole on her face. I even wanted to change her name to Virginia Taylor. But Sara and Elizabeth refused all my requests. Finally, I said ‘to hell with it. Photograph her the way she is.’”
Lassie and Roddy McDowall in Lassie Come Home (1943)
On the second day of shooting, ten-year-old Elizabeth met another child actor, Roddy McDowall, who, at the age of fourteen, had already been in a hit called How Green Was My Valley (1939).
E.T. and Lassie in The Courage of Lassie (1946)
“That god damn collie is going to steal the picture from us,” were his first words to her.
The friendship that formed between Elizabeth and Roddy would last a lifetime. Each of them shared their most private secrets with each other, and as the years went by, those secrets became more scandalous than ever.
“I was enchanted with Elizabeth the moment I saw her,” Roddy later recalled. “What a beautiful child, but her head was almost that of a young woman, an incredible sight. I introduced her to fellow cast members Elsa Lanchester and Dame Mae Whitty, two old ball crackers.”
Elizabeth told Roddy that, “My mother, Sara, will stop at nothing until I’m a household name. My brother Howard is even more beautiful than I am. At first, Sara tried to promote him as a child star. She and my father, Francis, got into a bitter fight. He accused her of trying to peddle Howard to a producer who is known for molesting children. Howard would have none of it. The Botticelli angel shaved his head bald the day he was to be screen-tested.”
Jerry O’Connell, a friend of Roddy’s and a journalist for Show magazine, later said, “With gay men later in her life, Elizabeth would play a mothering role, but with Roddy, he was the one she could lean on.”
Sara allowed Elizabeth to attend weekend parties at Roddy’s house, where she would sip lemonade and talk to his friends. They included a young Robert (R.J.) Wagner, her future lover and co-star.
Elizabeth confided to Roddy, “I stopped being a child the moment I started making movies. I became the bread-winner in the family. When Francis got drunk, he batted me around quite a bit, taking care not to ruin my face for the camera, though. I think he was jealous that I was bringing more money into the family than he was.”
When not working on the MGM lot, Elizabeth as a budding child star appeared in newspaper and magazine ads promoting Lux Soap, Whitman’s Sampler Chocolates, and Luster-Creme Shampoo.
After screening an early version of Lassie Come Home, Mayer called Elizabeth into his office, instructing Sara to wait outside. “I sat on his knee,” Elizabeth later told Roddy. “His chubby hand traveled north to Alaska.”
John Derek
Roddy was delighted with such sophisticated dialogue from “a child who grew up before her time, as I did.”
Mayer signed Elizabeth to a seven-year contract at MGM, with a salary which started at $100 a week and which steadily increased to $750 a week.
“That’s just the beginning,” Sara told her daughter. Clairvoyantly, she predicted that one day, Elizabeth would be earning a million dollars per picture.
Roddy was among the first to whom Elizabeth would confide her sexual secrets. She told Roddy that she’d fallen in love with “the world’s most beautiful boy,” at school. He was six years older than her. His name was Derek Harris, and he wanted to become an actor, too.
“He’s the most gorgeous thing God ever put on this planet,” she told Roddy. “One day, we’ll be the screen’s greatest team of lovers.”
One weekend, in desperation, Elizabeth turned to Roddy, who had already told her that he was sexually mature for his age. He’d been having sexual relations with older boys since he’d turned twelve.
“I’m going to lose Derek if I don’t start having sex with him—he warned me,” she said. “I want so much to hold onto him, but I don’t want to have a baby.”
“Yes, having a baby at the age of eleven wou
ld be a scandal, wouldn’t it?”
“You’ve got to help me,” she pleaded. “What am I to do?”
“Don’t despair,” he told her. “There are ways to keep a guy satisfied without getting pregnant. I’ll show you how I satisfy guys. I do certain things to a boy, and they really enjoy it. You can, too.”
“Show me what to do,” she said. “I’ll do anything to hold onto him...anything but that.”
“We’ll go upstairs to my bedroom, where we can have some privacy,” he said. “Believe me, I’m not into doing this with a girl. Just imagine me as a teacher. Better yet, imagine we’re two actors rehearsing for a role. After you’ve learned your lessons, you can invite Derek over, and you guys can slip away to the cabana out back. That way, you can put to use what I’m about to teach you.”
“Oh, Roddy, show me…show me,” she pleaded. “I’ll always be grateful to you.”
And so she was.
Myron Selznick, agent and talent scout, recognized E.T.’s talent
Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, did not
Four views of Shirley Temple with (clockwise from upper left): Ronald Reagan, John Derek, her philandering husband John Agar, and Clark Gable Inset photo: Shirley’s nemesis, Elizabeth Taylor
CHAPTER FIVE
And They Called It “Puppy Love”
LOLITA DOES HOLLYWOOD
After shooting Lassie Come Home, MGM had no immediate film for Elizabeth. To make money on the studio’s $100-a-week investment, she was hired out to 20th Century Fox for $150 a week. MGM profited $50 weekly from the exchange. Fox was remaking the Charlotte Brontë classic, Jane Eyre, having scheduled it for a 1944 release. An earlier version, starring Virginia Bruce and Colin Clive, had been shot ten years before at (the relatively unfashionable and usually low-budget) Monogram Pictures.
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