The Fox version of 1944 would star Joan Fontaine as the mature Jane Eyre, with Orson Welles co-starring as Rochester, his part greatly enlarged from that of the original character as envisioned in the novel by Brontë.
Jane Eyre is the Victorian Gothic tale of an orphan girl who grows up to become a governess in a mysterious (and mysteriously tormented) household in an isolated manor house on the moors of northern England. At Fox, it was helmed by Robert Stevenson, an English film writer and director who is best remembered today for the Julie Andrews musical Mary Poppins (1964), for which he was nominated for an Oscar as Best Director.
Elizabeth was cast opposite other child stars who included Margaret O’Brien (who played the role of Adele Varens) and Peggy Ann Garner, who was cast as Jane Eyre as a young girl. Elizabeth was not impressed. She surprised Stevenson with her rather adult pronouncements about each of her rivals. Elizabeth referred to Garner as “a blonde wisp of nothing,” predicting she’d soon fade from the screen and would end up selling real estate in the San Fernando Valley. A critic had defined O’Brien as “desperately appealing.” Elizabeth satirized that assessment: “She’s desperate all right. Her phony French accent is ruining the movie.”
Because, like many other child actors at the time, she had dropped out of public school as a means of fulfilling her film commitments, Elizabeth was forced to attend MGM’s one-room schoolhouse on the studio lot. “I hated it,” she later recalled. She also didn’t like being bossed around. Even as a twelve-year-old, she referred to Louis B. Mayer as a tyrant. “Everybody was afraid of him. Not me. I defied him and refused to let him push me around. Judy Garland never talked back. She just followed studio orders. They pumped pills into that poor girl to keep her awake or to put her to sleep—and to keep her slim. Judy was an eager, loving person and went along with their plan, which ultimately destroyed her. I wasn’t going to let Mayer do that to me.”
Elizabeth was cast as Helen Burns, a pre-teen who became a friend of the young Jane Eyre (as played by Garner) in the orphanage. Sara fought with Stevenson to get Elizabeth’s part enlarged. He complained to Fox about it, and as a reprimand to Sara, the studio dropped Elizabeth’s name from the film’s credits. A critic for The Hollywood Reporter later interpreted that omission as “regrettable.”
Years later, when Elizabeth showed the movie to her children on TV, she painfully ascertained that her role, and all the footage associated with it, had been cut to make way for commercials. Elizabeth’s performance was restored in later releases, and many diehard fans still remember her portrayal of the tiny, sickly, orphaned waif.
As writer Gina Barreca put it:
“Elizabeth Taylor was no Helen Burns. It seems as if she did every damn thing she ever wanted to do: Made soap-opera appearances as well as defining the characters of Tennessee Williams so entirely that every actress following her in these roles has had to wrestle with Taylor’s portrayals; she married the men she wanted, some times several times; she ate what she wanted and had clothes made to fit her rather than trying to fit into some outfit a thirteen-year-old waif who weighed as much as Helen Burns could wear; she was amazing in But terfield 8, even though the rest of the cast was awful; she made her way, barging through life (even when she wasn’t playing Cleopatra) and made the world hers.”
Young Elizabeth (right) interprets a small role in Jane Eyre. Peggy Anne Garner (left) snagged the bigger role, playing Jane Eyre as a young girl.
In Jane Eyre, Elizabeth, as punishment, had her hair cut on screen for the first time, and she portrayed her first deathbed scene.
She would always remember the first day Orson Welles showed up on the set, arriving with his entourage four hours late. Evoking a 16th-century European monarch, he referred to his staff as “my minions.”
Elizabeth told Garner, “In a few years, I’ll follow Orson’s example, arriving on set with my hairdresser, my secretary, my make-up artist, my costume designer, perhaps a paid lover, and most definitely, one of the many husbands I plan to marry. I’ll put on a bigger show than Orson.”
Welles was introduced to Elizabeth, finding her utterly fascinating. As he’d later recall, “When I read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, I understood his characterization because of my contact with Elizabeth Taylor as a child. I had never encountered anyone like her. She was unbelievable.”
He invited her to sit on his lap, and they chatted pleasantly. When it was time for her to go, he grabbed her and slop-pily kissed her, inserting his tongue into her mouth. As she’d later tell Roddy McDowall. “I’ve never tasted a man’s tongue before.” Welles would be the first of many more male tongues she’d taste in her future.
Two views of Orson Welles Top photo: in 1938 Lower photo: in 1949
As Elizabeth was leaving, Welles called to her, “Come back and see me in three or four years.”
He was sincere about that invitation. After she’d evolved into a “full-busted woman” in Welles’ view, after she’d celebrated her fifteenth birthday, he spotted her in the MGM commissary. “I have never found myself attracted to young girls.” Perhaps his memory was sketchy. He seemed to have forgotten that he’d first seduced Judy Garland when she was only fifteen, and he’d also seduced a very young starlet who had recently changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.
“Elizabeth Taylor had something that transcended age,” Welles claimed. “I will never forget how she moved down the commissary table, holding her food tray. I lusted for that young girl and felt, for the first time in my life, like a dirty old man.”
As Elizabeth would later tell Roddy, “Orson invited me back to his dressing room that afternoon in 1949. He said he was going to make a new film, and he had a role in it that would be my most important part to date. I guess I knew what he was going to do. I wouldn’t call it rape, but he forced himself on me. I didn’t enjoy the experience. Actually, he hurt me.”
Years later, in 1969, when Elizabeth was dining with Welles at Maxim’s in Paris, both of them laughed at that experience of long ago.
“I did to you what I had done to me when I was a teenager,” Welles told her. “From my earliest years, I was the Lillie Langtry of the older homosexual set. Everyone wanted me. I’m sorry that film role I held out for you didn’t come about. But you must understand: I always seduce actors I plan to work with. I make them fall in love with me.”
“You didn’t in my case, Big Boy,” she told him. “I don’t mind a certain exchange of body fluids when a man and woman are making love. But a whole bucket of spit—that’s a bit much.”
“Rita always liked it,” he said. He was referring, of course, to his second wife, screen goddess Rita Hayworth.
He spent the rest of the evening in the belle époque setting of Maxim’s telling her about his recent adventures. “I just returned from Morocco where I seduced the number one concubine of the Pasha of Marrakesh. Then I stopped off in Rome, where a gypsy taught me how to walk with a chicken between my legs.”
***
One snowy night in 1996, at the Palace Hotel in Gstaad, in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, Elizabeth Taylor was hosting a drunken dinner party that lasted until two o’clock in the morning. She was, as she put it, entertaining “a cabal of European trash.”
As the champagne flowed after dessert, she proposed a party game. Each of the guests would describe his or her first sexual experience. “Tell it like it is, good or bad, male or female,” she instructed. “I’ll be the last. It’s the privilege of the host.”
Many of the men relayed the details of an early homosexual encounter; three of the women named dear old Dad, and one Austrian countess cited a rape from a German baron.
When it was Elizabeth’s turn, she mocked her biographers, who had claimed that she had been a virgin at the time of her wedding to her first husband, Nicky Hilton. “Like hell I was. I was already a regular little Lolita before then. I got broken in by an actor, Derek Harris. You know him as John Derek. I think I was about twelve years old, but John has always been famous for hi
s taste for ‘quail.’”
In her informal 1964 memoir entitled Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth was more delicate: “At school, I had my first crush. There was the most beautiful boy— to me, then, like a god. One day, we were going down the corridor, and he tripped me, then picked me up and said, ‘Hi there, beautiful.’ Oh, you can’t imagine. I was in such ecstasy. I went to the girls’room and just sat there dreaming. His name was Derek Harris. Later, he changed it to John Derek.”
At her Gstaad dinner party, she continued her confession:
“The event occurred in a little dressing room Roddy McDowall had beside his pool,” Elizabeth said. “All his other guests were in the main house enjoying Roddy’s Sunday buffet. John slowly removed my clothes. He marveled at the size of my breasts, which would have put a grown woman to shame. Then he did a striptease for me. My heart was beating practically out of my chest. For the first time, I was confronted with a male penis. Remember, we didn’t have porn on TV in those days. I was flabbergasted.”
Sipping her champagne and enjoying center stage, she said, “John told me ‘if I’d play with it, it would grow.’ He didn’t lie. It grew and then grew some more. Roddy had sorta warned me what to expect, but that was nothing compared to experiencing the real thing. John was a master teacher. He told me to ‘make like it’s a lollipop.’ In less than fifteen minutes this rock hard toy I had just discovered—the male penis—erupted with all this white sticky stuff. I didn’t want to get it all over me, much less taste it. But John could be very commanding. During all the time I knew him back then, we never did it in the missionary position. Another young man would have the honor of deflowering me. Sunday afternoons in Roddy’s cabaña became a ritual for Derek and me. I learned how to do it without choking. But, alas, my competition moved in, although I had a hell of a lot more to offer.”
Producer David O. Selznick had already locked both Derek and Shirley Temple under contract. He cast them in two of his most popular movies. In Since You Went Away (1944), Derek played Temple’s boyfriend. The picture was a big hit, starring Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, and Joseph Cotten. Selznick also cast Temple and Derek in his next picture, I’ll Be Seeing You (1944), starring Ginger Rogers and—once again—Joseph Cotten. Whereas Elizabeth at the time was still a juvenile, she nonetheless coveted both roles, Temple was struggling to move beyond her image as a child star into more mature roles.
Temple, at age sixteen, was four years older than Elizabeth, but Elizabeth was confident that she could summon the reserves to play an older girl. Selznick, motivated perhaps by the fact that he had Temple already “locked down” and under contract at the time, turned Elizabeth down once again, having previously rejected her for the role of the daughter of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind.
I’m growing more beautiful every day,” Elizabeth told her parents and studio officials at MGM. “Temple has lost her cuteness. A few years from now, I’ll look even more gorgeous, and she’ll look like a housewife from Pasadena.”
Suddenly, Derek was no longer available for his Sunday afternoon sex trysts with Elizabeth. He hardly saw her anymore. Roddy told her that Selznick had ordained that his two rising stars be seen together in public for publicity purposes, and that Derek was dating Temple both privately and publicly, escorting her to events which included movie premieres.
“Derek has become a male whore, selling it for ten dollars a session,” Roddy claimed. “Spencer Tracy is one of his best customers.”
At first, Elizabeth seemed shocked. “Don’t be a silly goose. Only women are whores. How can a man be a whore? It’s impossible.”
“Elizabeth, my dear, we have to continue with your sex education,” Roddy said.
To Roddy, she admitted that she was heartbroken. “When I turned sixteen, I planned to marry Derek. I didn’t count on Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm taking a sail on The Good Ship Lollipop. Damn the bitch!”
Sara showed Elizabeth an item in the paper, in which Selznick described how Temple was in the process of entering the second phase of her career. He predicted that as an adult performer, she would exceed her box office success as a child star.
“That’s bullshit!” Elizabeth said. “I will grow out of my child star roles and become the biggest box office attraction in the world. I’ll become on the screen what Louis B. Mayer likes to call a ‘siren.’”
In 1988, when Elizabeth read Temple’s memoirs, Child Star, she became seriously “pissed off” at what the former 1930s box office champion had written about John Derek.
Temple had referred to him as “a self-important young man who had pleasing features, perhaps a little too sensitive for my taste. With a shock of dark hair cascaded artfully over his forehead and his suit shoulders padded to disguise a rather delicate frame, he made a highly photogenic companion.”
“To hell with her,” Taylor said about Temple. “I knew every inch of John’s body. Take it from your mother. That young man didn’t need padding anywhere on his body.”
In her memoirs, Temple had other observations to make about Derek, dismissing his acting and comparing it to “a wooden post.” She did admit to engaging in necking with Derek, but claimed that she soon grew weary of it. “I was not courageous enough to enter into a sexual liaison.”
Derek continued to function as Temple’s escort, however. She recalled that on her fifteenth birthday, he took her to lunch at the expensive Rue Restaurant. “But when the bill arrived, he excused himself to go to the men’s room.” According to Temple, Derek inaccurately asserted that he was the illegitimate son of Greta Garbo, but Temple knew differently. His mother was Dolores Johnson, a minor actress married to Lawson Harris, a songwriter.
As Temple relayed in Child Star, Derek would occasionally use a dangerous-looking knife to furiously stab the air, supposedly aiming it at invisible enemies. Years later, in a summation of her relationship with Derek, Temple claimed, “Not every girl gets to neck with a knife-wielding bastard.”
Despite her rejection of him, Derek really didn’t want to give up on Temple. She recalled that he once pursued her when she went on a family vacation to Palm Springs. “He was like a stalker, spending the night in a sleeping bag in the desert near where I stayed. He was lurking around possessively to see who I was dating.”
Actually, it was Derek’s presentation of two oil paintings—one offered to Elizabeth, another to Temple—that ended both relationships. Temple recalled that her oil painting was “a macabre gift—a bluish face entwined in a surreal-istic background of green seaweed. In his mystical, watery depiction, Mother instantly saw a symbolic likeness between the disembodied face and mine. She forbade me to see John again.”
Elizabeth was given an even more ghoulish painting. Her severed head was floating underwater in a bed of slimy seaweed, the victim of a flesh-eating octopus who was devouring what was left of her nude corpse. When Sara discovered the picture hanging in Elizabeth’s bedroom, she ripped it from the wall and burned it.
Watching as the competition burns and sinks:
(photo above) Shirley Temple in 1944, at age 16, before retiring completely from films in 1950 at the age of 22
“I don’t want my daughter dating such a sick young man,” Sara told Elizabeth and Francis. “He looks like such a clean-cut young man, but I fear he’s really a psycho.”
Derek’s parents also became alarmed at their son’s “dark side,” and sent him to a psychiatrist. Reportedly, the analyst determined that Derek harbored a secret desire for sex with very young girls—definitely under-age—and that he suffered from a distinct sense of sexual confusion, based perhaps on his pastime of renting his body to older homosexual men.
Although Temple dropped Derek, Elizabeth furtively continued her encounters with the handsome young actor during the next two years. It was “a sometimes thing,” Roddy said. “They often saw each other at my house and never went out in public together. She kept it a secret from Sara, who seemed terrified of Derek.”
Years la
ter, Derek would surface once again in Elizabeth’s life during the late 1950s. Having lost his allure as a matinee idol, he wanted to reactivate a fading career. He approached Elizabeth, asking her to use her clout to get him cast as the second male lead in Butterfield 8.
She recalled spending a night with him. “After all those years, we finally got around to doing it in the baby-making way,” she told Roddy. “He screwed the hell out of me, and I loved it. I wanted to keep him on for an occasional roll in the hay, but he got really pissed off at me when I recommended Eddie Fisher for the role he wanted in Butterfield 8. My loss.”
For the rest of his life, Elizabeth followed Derek’s career, including his marriages to Ursula Andress and Linda Evans. He entered another phase of his career when he met a sixteen-year-old, Mary Cathleen Collins, whom he later married and renamed Bo Derek. She achieved fame in Blake Edwards’ film 10. During the course of his respective marriages, Derek photographed all three of his wives for their appearances in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy.
As a mature woman, at one of Roddy’s drunken parties, Elizabeth laughed about her relationship with Derek. “He didn’t mind sharing the charms of his young wives with a wolf pack of horny males. But I’ll always be grateful to him for teaching me how to suck cock.”
***
In the mid-1940s, Elizabeth appeared briefly in White Cliffs of Dover (1944), the story of an American, Susan Dunn, a role played by Irene Dunne, still a big star at the time, who headed a cast that included such formidable talent as Dame May Whitty and Gladys Cooper. Dunne (as Susan) visits England, falls in love with and marries Sir John Ashwood, played by Alan Marshal, “the poor man’s Ronald Colman.” World War I breaks out and, pregnant, she loses her husband, and shortly thereafter gives birth to a son (played by Peter Lawford). During World War II, her son is wounded at Dieppe. As American troops march victoriously through London, her son slips into a coma and dies. Directed by Clarence Brown, it was definitely a weeper.
Bio - 199 - Elizabeth Taylor: There Is Nothing Like a Dame Page 7
