Bio - 199 - Elizabeth Taylor: There Is Nothing Like a Dame

by Darwin Porter

  Davis remembered their first dinner together. “Elizabeth and I didn’t have much to say to each other. I stared at her, and she stared at me. We seemed to like what we saw.”

  “I never saw much of Francis Taylor,” Davis recalled. “Sara was clearly in charge. Francis was always in his bedroom. I heard he had a drinking problem.”

  The next morning, Elizabeth called Dick Hanley, who was on a three-day leave from Louis B. Mayer’s office. “Glenn is yummy—oh, god, what a guy!”

  “We have an expression for that in America,” Dick said. “Built like a brick shithouse.”

  “You Americans can be so unromantic,” she responded.

  The next day, she showed Glenn the sights of Beverly Hills. She went window shopping with him, passing a jewelry store. A necklace of sixty-nine graduated pearls caught her eye. He asked her to come into the store with him where he purchased the expensive necklace for her.

  As the years went by, Elizabeth eventually presented the necklace to her mother. In her will, Sara bequeathed it “to my beloved granddaughter, Liza Todd.”

  After Elizabeth’s weekend with Glenn Davis, their coming together was referred to as “spontaneous combustion” in Hedda Hopper’s newspaper column.

  Davis invited Sara and Elizabeth to be his guests at an exhibition football game, where the Los Angeles Rams battled the Washington Redskins. Rams fans (who included Elizabeth) shouted, “We want Davis! We want Davis!”

  Then Elizabeth turned to her mother. “And god damn, I mean that. I’m gonna have him, too.”

  “Glenn was in our bungalow at Malibu every minute that Elizabeth was there,” Sara claimed. “Those lovebirds sure saw a lot of each other that summer.”

  During their long talks together, it seemed that Davis maintained ambitions of Hollywood stardom after his scheduled return from Korea. He’d already appeared in one film with Felix (“Doc”) Blanchard, The Spirit of West Point, about the Army’s championship football team.

  At MGM, Dorismae Kearns speculated that Davis was using the spotlight focused on the time he was spending with Elizabeth as a means of launching himself as an actor.

  The publicist was largely responsible for generating headlines that appeared across the nation: ALLAMERICA HERO DATES MGM’S TEENAGE STAR.

  Roddy McDowall claimed that Peter Lawford was jealous of Elizabeth for snaring a stud like Davis. The actor called Davis and invited him for a weekend at a house where he was staying at Laguna Beach. Davis had seen three of Lawford’s movies and seemed impressed with the invitation.

  But Elizabeth protested vehemently, warning Davis that if he accepted Lawford’s invitation, “You might have to sing for your supper.”

  “You mean he’s that way?” Davis asked. Elizabeth nodded her head. That night, Davis called Lawford and cancelled their “date.”

  Officially, Davis later told reporters, “Elizabeth and I didn’t drink or smoke, and I never laid a hand on her. We kissed and stuff like that, but we certainly didn’t sleep together.”

  Because he knew otherwise, Roddy mocked Davis’ comment, having been delivered a full report from Elizabeth. “Glenn might not have laid a hand on her, but he screwed her royally with his handlebar. He’s right about their not sleeping together. When they were in bed, they were too busy fucking to get any sleep. I admire him, though, for being a gentleman and trying to protect Elizabeth’s reputation.”

  Davis told Hubie Kearns, Doc Blanchard (his football-playing comrade), and Dick Hanley, “I scored with Elizabeth on every date. I don’t know where she learned all her tricks, but she’s a woman of the world, even at her age. In fact, she was the aggressor.”

  To Davis’shock, Elizabeth announced to the press that she and Davis “were engaged to be engaged.”

  “That was news to me,” Davis later said. “I hardly knew her. We’d never talked about marriage.”

  Elizabeth told both Dick and Roddy that she was falling in love with Davis and didn’t “want him to die in some swamp in Korea from some communist bullet.” Then she placed an emotional phone call to Howard Young, her father’s rich and aging uncle, and begged him to contact one of this best friends, General Dwight D. Eisenhower with the intention of arranging an exemption for Davis from military service. Young said he didn’t like to do that, but agreed to intervene for “my favorite gal.”

  He did speak to the general and reported back to Elizabeth a few days later. “Ike saw National Velvet, and he thought you were wonderful. But he’s always had a strict policy against granting requests such as yours. He thinks a young man must serve his nation in time of peace or war. There is nothing more I can do.”

  “Oh thank you, Uncle Howard,” Elizabeth said before bursting into tears and hanging up.

  Davis invited Elizabeth to a dinner with his football playing friend, Felix (“Doc”) Blanchard, who had been the first ever junior to win the Heisman Trophy. At the time, he was studying at, and played football for, West Point. He later joined the United States Air Force.

  Dick Hanley arranged for Elizabeth to see a film, The Spirit of West Point, that had co-starred Davis and Blanchard. Both of the athletes had portrayed themselves in this dramatization of two All-America football players at West Point. Davis hoped that the film might lead to a contract as a romantic lead in Hollywood, but it didn’t happen. Blanchard, on the other hand, planned to devote his career to the military.

  Years later, Elizabeth wrote that her romance with Davis was “so childish. We were just two sweet children. It was not a big, hot romance.”

  After he read her memoirs, Davis resented her dismissive tone, reporting to Blanchard and others, “Hell, I was fucking her. We weren’t two innocent sweet children. She was crazy for it. By the time I married Terry Moore, I was much wiser about these Hollywood stars. Of course, in both the cases of Elizabeth and Terry, Howard Hughes was waiting to move in for the kill.”

  On September 8, 1948, Elizabeth captured the attention of America when she kissed Davis good-bye before his departure for military service in Korea. In front of photographers, he gave her his lucky gold football chain, which she wore for a time around her neck. “She told the press, “Just call me a war bride.”

  Davis’ tour of duty lasted seven months, during which period he wrote to her frequently, addressing her as “Mona Lizzie.” She answered as many of his letters as she could.

  Upon his return, Elizabeth showed up at the Los Angeles airport to welcome him home, embracing him and kissing him for the benefit of the cameras. She even shed “a tear of joy.” When a photographer didn’t capture this welcome home tableau, Elizabeth repeated it.

  She didn’t want to immediately drop Davis, and for that reason, she invited him to the Academy Awards Ceremony. But he didn’t seem to fit into all the glitz and glamour.

  MGM, through Howard Strickling, announced to the press that Elizabeth’s relationship with Davis was ending because of a conflict of interest in their careers. Privately, Stickland said, “Davis went from the frying pan into the fire. He fell in love with Terry Moore on the rebound, and entered a disastrous marriage to Howard Hughes’s girlfriend (or wife) depending on which story you want to believe.”

  Most biographers were led into believing that Davis just disappeared from Elizabeth’s life after their romance came to an end. But that was not what happened. She actually wanted him out of her life, because she was pursuing other men, but Davis kept reappearing. Later, she referred to their final farewell to each other as, “the long goodbye.”

  ***

  During the time Glenn Davis spent in Korea and still hadn’t proposed, Elizabeth was receiving at least a dozen marriage proposals per week, most of them from young men in American colleges. Her fan mail rose to one-thousand letters a week. Harvard University sent her a Valentine, claiming that its male students had voted her “The Girl We Would Never Lampoon.” In later years, Harvard students would not honor that old promise, viciously lampooning her.

  On the home front, Sara somehow man
aged to learn that Davis had only $20,000 in savings. She quickly changed her mind about him as a prospective bridegroom for Elizabeth. She sat her daughter down for a “heart-to-heart” talk.

  “Maybe in the future, you’ll become the greatest screen vamp of all time,” Sara told her. “But whereas man supposes, God disposes. By 1954, you could be a has-been. You know how fickle public taste is. Now is the time you should strike it rich, and entice a man of great wealth into marrying you.”

  “What are you saying, Mother? Are you trying to pimp me out to some old goat?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with marrying a rich man,” Sara said. “Greer Garson did it and now she’s a billionaire in Texas…or is it New Mexico, one of those rattlesnake-infested states.”

  Davis’ friend, Hubie Kearns, claimed that “Elizabeth was desperately in love with Glenn. But that didn’t preclude some harmless dating on her part. I set her up with George Murphy—not the movie star—but USC’s quarterback. That didn’t go anywhere. I also arranged a date for her with Bill Bayliss, a member of the USC track team. He turned out to be a deadhead and didn’t have anything to say to her. She called me the next day and denounced me for arranging a date with such a ‘dud.’”

  In her memoir, There Really Was a Hollywood, Janet Leigh wrote about double dating with Elizabeth after they had bonded on the set of Little Women. They agreed to go together to the annual Society of Hollywood Press Photographers Costume Ball, borrowing wardrobes from an MGM storeroom.

  “Elizabeth and I went as Spanish señoritas —Elizabeth in white and me in black. We looked like we were having a ‘Who Can Wear the Lowest-Cut Bodice’ contest. The photographers stood on chairs shooting downward for maximum exposure of our décolletages. Elizabeth and I were exercising the rule, ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it.’”

  Janet’s date was the handsome, San Francisco-born actor, Barry Nelson, who was thirty-two years old. He is known today as the first actor to portray Ian Fleming’s secret agent James Bond in Casino Royale. Playing the agent as an American named “Jimmy Bond,” Nelson appeared in the 1954 TV anthology series Climax, preceding Sean Connery’s iconic interpretation of Dr. No by eight years.

  “At the time, no one had ever heard of James Bond,” Nelson recalled. “I hadn’t read the book or anything like that, because it wasn’t well known.”

  Elizabeth noted that Nelson and Leigh were deeply in love. Or, as Leigh put it, “He released my trapped emotions and freed my slaves. Wisely, tenderly, he opened a fresh depth of feeling in me.” Leigh suffered guilt about her rather notorious past, and she credited Nelson with “defusing my fears. He didn’t dispel my qualms about my shaky past altogether, but he was responsible for my somewhat healthier attitude.”

  “Barry’s the kind of man I’d like to marry,” Elizabeth told Leigh. “A man who you can talk to and share your problems with. All I get are men in awe of me who can say nothing more to me than tell me how beautiful I am.”

  Who is an actress likely to meet when her boyfriend takes her home to meet his parents?

  Joseph I. Breen (photo above) Hollywood censor and enforcer of The Code: “E.T. is a limey slut.”

  Leigh eventually dumped Nelson, comparing her feelings to those of Elizabeth. “Right at this point in our lives, no one man can satisfy us” Leigh said. “Both of us have so many more worlds we want to explore. It’s like I have this deep well of emotions, and I don’t want to stop filling that well. I’ve talked it over with Elizabeth, and she feels the same way.”

  During her first double date with Leigh, Elizabeth was accompanied by Tom Breen, the son of the notorious Joseph I. Breen, Hollywood’s chief censor and enforcer of “The Code,” a strict set of puritanical moral guidelines that Hollywood was forced to follow from, roughly, 1934 to 1954.

  Elizabeth, the first A-list actress who would use the word “fuck” on the screen, visited Tom at the Breen home, where she was introduced to his father. As his biographer, Thomas Doherty, put it, “Shaped by parochial schools, and guided to maturity by the Jesuits, Joseph Breen embodied the restraint, repression, and rigidity of a personality type known as Victorian Irish. This is characterized neither by Leprechaun charm nor whiskey soaked gloom, but by a sober vigilance over the self and a brisk readiness to perform the same service for others, solicited or not.”

  Joseph discussed very briefly some key decisions he’d made over the years. His biggest battle, he told her, was his dilemma over allowing Clark Gable, as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, to say, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” He also told her he struggled a great deal about allowing the word “hell” to be used in World War II movies.

  After his son, Tom, had a few dates with Elizabeth, Joseph concluded that she was “not fit company for my boy.” When he saw her performance as a prostitute in Butterfield 8, he condemned her as a “limey slut.”

  In spite of his father’s objection, Tom continued to date Elizabeth. One of their rendezvous was at Malibu Beach, where she learned for the first time that he’d lost one of his legs in Iwo Jima. He had a wooden leg strapped on. Later, she spent a weekend with him in a wooden cabin overlooking Lake Arrowhead near San Bernardino. He had removed his wooden leg and was lying on a sofa as she tossed some logs into the fireplace. “For God’s sake,” he told her. “Don’t burn my wooden leg.”

  In addition to the massive adulation Elizabeth enjoyed over the years, she would also be subjected to vulgar jokes, and evoked by Joan Rivers during her stewardship of The Tonight Show when she frequently ridiculed Elizabeth’s weight gain.

  When Hollywood discovered that Elizabeth was dating Tom Breen, “the man with the stump,” locker room humor incited some people to (tastelessly) assert, “A horse in National Velvet wasn’t good enough for Liz. Only a man’s stump can fill that cavity.”

  Elizabeth wept bitterly when she heard those obscene putdowns, but as the years went by, she would toughen herself against such outrageous assaults.

  Tom Breen faded into Elizabeth’s dating history after Bing Crosby introduced her to Ralph Kiner, the former home-run king of the Pittsburgh Pirates, a team which the singer owned at the time. Kiner took her to the premiere of Twelve O’Clock High (1949), starring Gregory Peck in a World War II story about U.S. flyers in England.

  The next day, Crosby invited Elizabeth and Kiner for lunch at his clubhouse on the golf course. When Kiner went to change into his “whites” for a match on an adjoining tennis court, Crosby propositioned Elizabeth.

  As she’d later tell Dick Hanley, “I told him I preferred older men, and that was the end of that.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for Bing,” Hanley told her. “He’s been seen with this gorgeous blonde model from New York, a gal named Grace Kelly.”

  Sara wanted Elizabeth to date “someone rich,” and arrangements were made for Arthur Loew, Jr. to take her out. A wealthy playboy who later became a film producer, Arthur was the offspring of a maternal grandfather, Adolph Zukor, who had founded Paramount Pictures. His paternal grandfather, Marcus Loew, had founded MGM and the Loew’s chain of movie theaters. His father, Arthur Loew, Sr., had been president of MGM. Born into wealth and privilege, Arthur was in some ways the harbinger of Elizabeth’s first marriage to Nicky Hilton, son of the hotel tycoon.

  During these double dates, Leigh had fallen in love with Danny Scholl, who was a Broadway singer and soon to appear in a 1949 hit called Texas Li’l Darlin’. During his big number, he swung around on stage and his cock popped out. (He’d forgotten to button his fly.) That night, he received a standing ovation.

  Elizabeth and Leigh always enjoyed hearing stories about Scholl, especially in 1966 when he married Corinne Griffith, who was twenty-five years older than he was.

  Scholl invited Elizabeth and Janet Leigh to dinner one night at Griffith’s luxurious home. In the days of the silent pictures, Griffin had been dubbed “The Orchid Lady of the Screen,” and was publicized as “the most beautiful woman ever to appear in movies.” With the coming of sound
, her career failed because she “talked through her nose.”

  Both Leigh and Elizabeth were awed by Griffin’s wealth, a fortune of $150 million (a staggering sum back then), which she’d accumulated in real estate ventures.

  Scholl had been married to Griffin for only a few days. Shortly after that dinner, he contacted Elizabeth and Leigh to tell them that the real estate tycoon was divorcing him.

  Arthur Loew, Jr.

  Ralph Kiner

  In court, Griffin claimed that she was not Corrine Griffith, but her younger sister by twenty years. She said she took her sister’s place upon her death. Eyewitnesses were called to testify that she was, indeed, the silent screen star. The marriage was annulled.

  At a dinner party shortly after Griffith’s death in 1979 at the age of eighty, Elizabeth said, “I envied Corrine Griffith, not just for her money and jewelry, but for her having the balls to play a character called ‘Pussy,’ and that was back in a silent movie made in 1916. My dream is to play in a talkie where I’m called ‘Pussy.’”

  Elizabeth “adored” Arthur Loew, Jr., but interpreted their relationship as more of a friendship than a love affair. Coincidentally, his future girlfriend, Joan Collins, eventually dumped him, finding their dating “too platonic.”

  Every Tuesday night, Elizabeth, Leigh, and others, including Farley Granger and Shelley Winters, would convene at Arthur’s home because he owned one of the few TV sets in Los Angeles. “We’d watch ‘Uncle Miltie’ in drag, or the Texaco Star Theater,” Elizabeth said. “Although Farley would arrive with Shelley, he’d often leave with one of the cute boys at the party, especially John Dall, his co-star in Rope.”

  Arthur and Elizabeth would remain lifelong friends, and she often enlisted him as a babysitter for her children when she had to travel.

  But after only a few dates, she “surrendered” him to Leigh, who was enthralled with him. “He was the most natural, easygoing person,” Leigh said. “He was comfortable in all situations and blessed with a superior sense of humor. He introduced me to the grand social life of Hollywood. He had his regular table at such clubs as the Cocoanut Grove, Ciro’s, and Mocambo’s.”