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

by Darwin Porter

  Elizabeth recalled being invited by producer Joe Naar to Arthur’s house for his birthday celebration. “Janet was Arthur’s date that night, and Peter Lawford was my escort. Before the drunken party ended, I was propositioned by Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Sammy Davis, Jr. I had truly arrived in the adult world. A drunken Sammy told me that I had not experienced life until I’d sampled black dick. Gene Kelly spent most of the evening going after Peter. I’m sure Frank Sinatra would have gone for me, but he was out of town. I called that party a prehistoric gathering of the infamous Rat Pack.”

  Naar recalled Elizabeth looking gorgeous in yellow chiffon, “a real lemon meringue pie. She was sixteen going on thirty. I saw the guys clustering around her. She turned down Jerry Lewis, but I think she set up something in the future with Martin. I thought she might one day cross that bridge with Sammy, but I don’t think she was quite ready for that type of biracial experience yet.”

  ***

  Short of cash, Errol Flynn was forced to give up his home on Mulholland Drive, which was being put on the market at a “sheriff’s sale.” Flynn’s business manager, Al Blum, had died, and records revealed that he had embezzled thousands of dollars from the star. Flynn’s first wife, Lili Damita, was in hot pursuit of him for back alimony payments.

  He had run out of money in Europe producing an independent picture, William Tell, and creditors were after him. He’d given a role in that movie to his long-time friend and former roommate, Bruce Cabot, who was also suing him for back pay. Flynn’s personal belongings had been seized, including two of his automobiles.

  As part of the rituals associated with his departure from his “farm” on Mul-holland, Flynn decided to invite A-list Hollywood to a party there. He included the silent screen vamp Gloria Swanson, then shooting Sunset Blvd., Joan Bennett, Ann Miller, Clark Gable, Joan Fontaine, Virginia Mayo, Jack Benny, James Stewart, Dorothy Lamour, George Cukor, Walter Pidgeon, Van Johnson, Jennifer Jones, Greer Garson, Jane Wyman, Loretta Young, Robert Young, and David O. Selznick.

  Huge water lilies floated on the pool, and guests dined on roasted pheasant served on silver plates provided by Romanoff’s. Entertainment included white mice races and hillbilly skits by Judy Canova. A lookalike transvestite, an exact image of Louella Parsons, went around the room revealing deadly secrets about other Hollywood stars. Alexis Smith was revealed as a closeted lesbian, and Dorothy Lamour was exposed as a former prostitute who used to work for the most notorious madam in New York City, Polly Adler.

  Elizabeth was escorted to Flynn’s party by Robert Stack, whom she was dating less and less frequently. Janet Leigh arrived at the party escorted by Arthur Loew, Jr, Elizabeth’s former beau.

  At one point, Leigh whispered to Elizabeth, who already knew her way around Flynn’s house, “I want to see that famous boudoir.”

  Elizabeth had just heard that Shirley Temple and “her living doll of a husband,” as Elizabeth referred to John Agar, had arrived at the party.

  She decided to show off Errol’s boudoir to both Leigh and Arthur Loew and, at the same time, “to repair any damage to my make-up before presenting myself to Miss Temple.”

  Leigh and Arthur were amused by Flynn’s bedroom, where the bed rested on an elevated platform like a throne. Mirrors sheathed the walls and ceiling. Leigh wrote in her memoirs, “As the wolf said to Little Red Riding hood, ‘The better to see you with, my dear.’”

  Elizabeth had played roles on the screen that were considered right for Temple, so there was jealousy there. David O. Selznick had pitched the idea of Temple starring in Little Women, as he’d also tried to seduce her, as she related in her memoirs, Child Star.

  But eventually, the producer dropped the plan, suggesting that she go to Italy, change her image, and appear as “a film vamp, a sex symbol in an Italian vineyard.”

  Elizabeth’s role in Life With Father had also been suggested as a vehicle for Temple, who was trying to hold onto a film career as she matured.

  For Elizabeth, there was also the lingering resentment she harbored for Temple “for having taken John Derek from my clutches.”

  In Flynn’s boudoir, Elizabeth excused herself to go into the toilet as Leigh and Arthur Loew returned to another part of the house.

  Making herself even more gorgeous than she already was, she heard someone enter the bedroom. She feared it might be Flynn seeking another seduction, and was surprised to see John Agar at the door.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I’m Mr. Shirley Temple, desperate to take a leak. I was drinking in the car on the way here. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “A man must answer nature’s call,” she said, flirtatiously, applying more lipstick.

  “You’re more gorgeous in person than you are in your movies,” Agar said.

  “So are you, Big Boy,” she said.

  At the toilet bowl, he didn’t turn his back to her, but stood to its side. Unzipping his pants, he removed his penis, which he clearly exhibited to her before he urinated.

  As she would later tell Roddy McDowall, “It was love at first sight.”

  Shirley Temple (left and center photo) gets married! to John Agar (center and right photo)

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sex and the Single Girl

  In the wake of the Errol Flynn home eviction party, Elizabeth began a clandestine affair with John Agar, who, after his marriage to Shirley Temple in 1945, had generated a headline: AMERICAN PRINCESS MARRIES PRINCE CHARMING.

  Their secret liaison was launched during the waning months of the rapidly deteriorating “storybook” marriage between Agar and Temple. Elizabeth and Agar never dared go out in public together, and only a handful of her closest friends knew she was dating the handsome, young, and athletic former member of both the Naval Air Corps and the Army Air Corps.

  Elizabeth’s rendezvous with Agar were usually conducted at the home of Roddy McDowall, at the apartment of Dick Hanley, and on occasion in Marion Davies’ guest cottage at the Hearst compound in Beverly Hills.

  “I find him irresistible,” she told Roddy. “That square jaw, those blue eyes, and that handsome face…”

  The actor stood six feet, two inches, the son of a meat packer from Chicago. “He packs his own meat,” Elizabeth jokingly told Dick.

  “If he makes it big in the movies in the 1950s, he’ll be another William Holden.”

  Temple had first met Agar in 1943, as her home was next door to the Agar family’s. Joyce Agar became her friend, and one day Shirley invited Joyce’s older brother, John, over for a swim. At the time, he was twenty-four, and she was only fifteen, so he didn’t pay her much attention. He was not a movie buff and had never seen one of her pictures.

  When he left for seven months of basic training in Texas, she wrote him nearly every day. She’d developed a powerful crush on him. He began to take her seriously during his furlough for the Christmas holiday of 1944. The following year, when Temple turned seventeen, they were married.

  “Shirley and I had our first fight on the morning I woke up after our honeymoon night,” Agar said to Elizabeth. “I accused her of not being a virgin.”

  During his affair with Elizabeth, Agar found her to be a good listener to his professional and private woes.

  “I married a little girl who had been worshipped by millions in the 1930s. To her, it must have seemed like the universe revolved around her. Now that all that attention is fading, our storybook marriage is a joke.”

  Eleven years older than Elizabeth, Agar was very experienced in the bedroom. “I think he was broken in early in life by a lot of older women, perhaps in Chicago,” Elizabeth told Dick. “He’s a great lover…at least when he’s sober.”

  Agar had never wanted to be an actor until David O. Selznick, who held Temple’s contract, suggested that he might go over big in the movies because of his good looks and charm. His first picture, Fort Apache (1948), had starred Temple. John Wayne was the real star, and John Ford was the director. Wayne took up for Agar and befriended him, but Ford atta
cked him viciously during the making of Fort Apache, or so Agar told Elizabeth.

  Ford’s biographer, Ronald Davis, wrote: “Psychologists might suggest that Ford feared the feminine side of himself and lashed out at pretty boy types. An even darker interpretation might infer that the director’s need for dominance was a form of seduction.”

  John Wayne, Shirley Temple, Henry Fonda, and John Agar in Fort Apache (1948)

  John Agar (left) with John Wayne `in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)

  Regrettably for Agar and his marriage, the young actor became a close drinking buddy of Wayne’s night after night. The bond became so close that The Duke insisted that Agar appear in five more of his movies: Sands of Iwo Jima (1949); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); The Undefeated (1969); Chisum (1970), and Big Jake (1971).

  “I think Wayne went for me big time,” Agar told Elizabeth. “I ended up spending more time with him than I did with Shirley. I also hung out with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. All the closeted homos in Hollywood seem to go for me. A lot of Hollywood’s big stars carry dubious sexual reputations from when they were young, unknown actors struggling for recognition.”

  “As you probably already know, it’s called the casting couch,” Elizabeth said. “I never had to actually lie down on it, because I became a star when I was only a child. If I’d launched my career at the age of twenty, I might have had had to suck as much cock as that blonde trollop that everyone’s talking about, Marilyn Monroe.”

  Agar admitted he could be a brute, bringing home other women with Temple in the house and even beating her. As Temple herself revealed in her memoirs, she ended up on the floor on several occasions, “a disheveled woman with an aching heart and a crumpled spirit. It was growing ever harder to keep the lamp of love lit.”

  In spite of knowing the details of these stories, Elizabeth remained defensive of Agar, even in the aftermath of his arrests for drunk driving. “He’s always portrayed as such a Bad Boy in the press,” she said, “but I have found him to be a young man with good manners, always a gentleman, rather soft spoken, and with tremendous respect for women.”

  “I’m sure that’s how you see him,” Roddy said. “In fact, I think you and John Wayne are the only stars in Hollywood in love with Agar.”

  The only public comment Wayne ever made about Agar was, “John is just too good looking for his own good.”

  One night, Agar asked Elizabeth if she respected him less because he was not faithful to Temple. “I mean, I live in her shadow. I turn to other women because they make me feel like a man. The Temples have castrated me.”

  “I don’t believe that a man or woman should remain faithful in a marriage,” Elizabeth said. “It’s a middle class concept. All adventurous people have a roving eye.”

  On another occasion, Agar told her he’d met a tall, good-looking guy in a bar, an aspirant actor named Rock Hudson. “He’s a homo, but said he’d love to meet you because he is your biggest fan.”

  Ironically, both Agar and Hudson would end up working together in one of Wayne’s movies, The Undefeated (1969), and Elizabeth, of course, would become one of Hudson’s all time best friends.

  Years later, Hudson would tell Elizabeth that he was nervous about meeting Wayne, who had a reputation for “faggot bashing.”

  “I met Duke in his dressing room as he was applying natural lipstick and wearing heels to make himself look taller,” Hudson said. “We got along fine and played bridge together. John Agar told me what Wayne had said about me one day. He told Agar, ‘Look at that face on Rock Hudson. Too bad it’s wasted on a queer. You know what I could have done with a face like that on the screen?’”

  When Agar’s divorce from Temple was finalized, he’d wanted to marry Elizabeth, but by then, she’d moved on to other lovers. Actually, she told Dick Hanley the real reason for their breakup: “One drunken night, John told me his dream was to marry a long-legged model.”

  “But no such luck for me,” Agar later recalled. “I ended up marrying Shirley Temple and dating Elizabeth Taylor, two gals with stumps for legs.”

  ***

  After Little Women, Elizabeth vowed that she’d played her last juvenile teen role. “From now on, I plan to appear on the screen as an adult, playing love scenes with grown men, even though I’m still sixteen,” she told Dick Hanley.

  “I adored Elizabeth,” Hanley said, “but she was a scheming little vixen. She was not willing to prostitute herself to Louis B., whom she still despised, but her attention focused on the Veep, Benjamin Thau, whom we called Benny. He was actually responsible for her contracts and, in the main, for the roles assigned to her.”

  Instead of passively waiting for roles, Elizabeth decided to lobby for them. She was learning a lot just from listening to the gossip every morning in the make-up department, where she was talking to Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn, Lana Turner, and Lucille Ball.

  One morning, one of her favorite actresses, Barbara Stanwyck, arrived on the lot for the filming associated with East Side, West Side (1949), which also contained roles for Ava Gardner and Nancy Davis. Stanwyck was married at the time to one of the screen world’s most talked-about “pretty boys,” Robert Taylor.

  Stanwyck checked out Elizabeth and told Hepburn, “No woman, if the Taylor dame can be called that, has a right to look that gorgeous at five o’clock in the morning.”

  In one of the many ironies of Elizabeth’s life, she would, within a matter of months, be playing the role of wife, onscreen, to Stanwyck’s real-life husband, Robert Taylor.

  Sidney Guilaroff, the prominent hairdresser who had styled Elizabeth’s hair for National Velvet, noticed her checking out Nancy Davis (later, Mrs. Ronald Reagan), who was co-starring with Ava Gardner and Stanwyck in East Side, West Side.

  When Elizabeth had finished her make-up and was heading for coffee with Guilaroff in the commissary, she wanted to know more about Davis. “She certainly won’t challenge Ava or Lana for movie roles,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe she could get some minor parts—perhaps a housewifey thing, or the girl next door. And she looks old enough to be my mother.”

  At this point, Judy Garland joined their table, having overheard their talk. “Nancy Davis is Benny’s new protégée,” Garland said. “She’s a ripe twenty-eight years old, if she’s a day, and Metro, as you know, rarely hires gals over twenty-five. Nancy, or so I hear, has a special talent. She visits Benny’s office every morning to give him a state-of-the-art blow-job.”

  Garland’s statement can’t be lightly dismissed as mere gossip. The famous biographer, Anne Edwards, visited Thau in 1983 when he was dying at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Los Angeles. He admitted that Nancy was known during the late 1940s for performing oral sex, her lucky conquests including not only Thau, but Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. Tracy had been her main sponsor at MGM.

  Elizabeth was still dating Peter Lawford, on occasion, and he was also romancing Nancy Davis. He confirmed that “Nancy gives great head, and you know what an oral type I am.”

  Ironically both Lawford and Davis were also romancing actor Robert Walker, who had been married to Jennifer Jones until producer David O. Selznick made off with her.

  Not to be upstaged by Davis, Elizabeth asked Dick to arrange a private meeting between Thau and herself, and the MGM executive welcomed her, because he viewed her as the studio’s best prospect for major stardom in the 1950s.

  Thau later told Dick, “She really came on strong to me. I believe all I had to do was unzip and she’d go for it. But she was so young, and I’d already been serviced that morning by Nancy. Actually, her little rendezvous with me was completely unnecessary. I was going to contact her that afternoon with some good news. Mayer had agreed to cast her as the wife of Robert Taylor in a movie to be shot in London.” It was Conspirator, eventually released in 1949.

  “I ran into Elizabeth when she’d just come out of Thau’s office,” Garland recalled. “She was almost hysterical at being assigned her first adult role.”

  S
tarlet Nancy Davis before she became Mrs. Ronald Reagan in 1951

  “How was sucking Benny’s dick?” Garland asked in her typically blunt fashion. “Did he say you were better than Nancy?”

  “Oh, Judy, I didn’t have to do that, although I would have. In my next movie, I’m going to star opposite Robert Taylor, and I’ll be able to say that I did it based on my talent, and not by just moving from zipper to zipper!”

  ***

  Elizabeth, accompanied by Sara, sailed from New York to England aboard the Queen Mary in October of 1948 to begin the filming of Conspirator. Because of her age, and because technically, as a seventeen-year-old who hadn’t yet graduated from high school, she had to carve out time for lessons with a “schoolmarm”—in this case, the white-haired Birtina Anderson, whom MGM kept on its payroll—to at least maintain the illusion that she was proceeding with the “normal” life of an American teenager.

  “Between love scenes with Robert Taylor, I had to meet with Birtina, who thought I was a horrible student in English, algebra, and history.”

  Because Elizabeth had dual nationality, both American and British, the question of her being granted a work permit did not come up.

  An MGM limousine waited at Southampton to drive them to London and their suite at Claridges, where red roses and orchids awaited them.

  Back in her hometown of London, Elizabeth was shocked at the devastation wreaked by the bombings of World War II. Entire neighborhoods of the city had been destroyed during the Blitz. But at Claridges, the most prestigious hotel in England, everything was elegance itself, especially the suite assigned to Sara and Elizabeth.

  She was introduced to Percy Rogers, a very effeminate version of Roddy McDowall, with a solitary wisp of dyed blonde hair that fell across his forehead. He’d been hired by MGM as an “expediter” specifically assigned to Sara and Elizabeth.