One of her final schoolgirl crushes was directed at singer Vic Damone, following his 1947 appearance, at the age of nineteen, on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, where he sang “Prisoner of Love.” Impressed both with him and with his voice, Milton Berle secured two nightclub bookings for him, which eventually led to a contract with Mercury Records.
Elizabeth thought he looked adorable, with black, close-cropped curly hair and a slim physique, very Italian-looking to her. She fell in love with his voice—and the image of the man himself—when she heard his first release. One by one, she’d collect recordings of the more than 2,000 songs he recorded over the years, beginning with his “I Have But One Heart.”
Farley Granger
Throughout the course of 1948, she listened faithfully to his weekly radio show, Saturday Night Serenade, and adjusted her own schedule so she wouldn’t miss a single broadcast.
She read about him in the fan magazines, learning that he’d been born in Brooklyn, the only boy in a family that otherwise included four girls, and that he’d started singing lessons at the age of ten.
She began dating him after he appeared at the Mocambo in Los Angeles. In her column, Hedda Hopper wrote, “Fickle Elizabeth Taylor has fallen in love again, this time with the handsome young crooner Vic Damone, who is giving Frank Sinatra’s fading career a push toward oblivion.”
Elizabeth dated Damone only briefly, finding the man of her fantasy different from reality. He announced that he had no objection to a future wife of his having a career, though in the same breath, he claimed he wanted a household “filled with bambini.”
He didn’t seem to know how to spend money, telling her, “Everything happened so fast. One day, I was singing for subway fare. The next day, I’m hauling in $5,000 bucks a week.”
“Vic was adorable,” Elizabeth recalled in later years. “A dear man. But in 1950, he was drafted, and another beau came along.”
“Vic seemed a very insecure man, in a hurry to get some place,” she said. “Even though I stopped seeing him, I always like his music. My favorite recording of his remains ‘On the Street Where You Live.’ He was a young Sinatra with a touch of Mel Tormé.”
In the years to come, Elizabeth read about Damone’s five marriages, including one to Pier Angeli whom he “stole” from James Dean. Damone also had a long-term liaison with Diahann Carroll, the African-American singer.
“Those people who draw up lists of movie star lovers always include Vic on the list of men who seduced me,” Elizabeth said. “I deny categorically that he ever fucked me—at least I don’t think that he did. But who knows? It was a long time ago, and so many men have had the privilege. How can one remember who seduced one and who didn’t? Ask Peter Lawford. He’d agree with me.”
***
Unknown to Elizabeth one night at the Mocambo, a handsome, rich young man, the heir to a hotel dynasty, sat observing her throughout the evening. He was having drinks with Peter Lawford and Judy Garland, both of whom he’d previously seduced.
Vic Damone
“See that girl over there at the far table?” he asked. “That’s Elizabeth Taylor. I’m going to marry her whether she likes it or not.”
His name was Conrad Hilton, Jr. Everybody called him “Nicky.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Elizabeth and Monty
SEARCHING FOR A PLACE IN THE SUN
As the 1940s faded into the 50s, Elizabeth became embroiled in the biggest soap opera of her life, far more intriguing and a lot more complicated than any of the movie scripts she’d been offered.
For many years, Howard Hughes, the aviation hero and RKO movie mogul, would stalk Elizabeth, hovering in her background and spying on her. He became obsessed with her.
Sometimes, Elizabeth would be directly involved in the dramas whirling around, and usually catalyzed by, Hughes. On other occasions, she voyeuristically watched as the brohahas unfolded from afar—blackmail, bribery, threats of murder, violent beatings, broken hearts, failed marriages, the secret production of sex films, bisexuality, and rampant adultery.
As a young man, Hughes had married Texas socialite Ella Rice, but that union soonafter collapsed. And although he had abandoned hope that Ava Gardner would ever marry him, as he moved deeper into his forties, he once again had marriage on his mind.
Among the bevy of movie stars he considered for conquest and wedded bliss, Elizabeth and Terry Moore topped the chart.
Terry and Elizabeth were friends, though not particularly close. On several occasions, they showed the same taste in men—Glenn Davis, Nicky Hilton, and later, Robert Wagner.
Hughes’ pimp, Johnny Meyer, regularly scanned the popular magazines of the day, looking for beauties with large breasts who might tempt his boss. Hughes became fascinated by Terry when he saw her picture in Look, and he became even more intrigued when he spotted Elizabeth’s photo in both Time and Life magazines.
As the 1950s dawned, Terry found herself locked in battle with Marilyn Monroe for the title of Hollywood’s sexiest starlet. Many fan magazines, however, awarded that title to Elizabeth. Hughes had already seduced Marilyn, even going so far as to hire her as a player in a pornographic film with his heartthrob of the moment, Guy Madison.
Hughes had had affairs with both Madison, whom he called the “handsomest man in movies,” and with Monroe. In 1946, he gave each of them $10,000 to make a “blue movie loop,” as he described it, for him. As Madison told his gay agent, Henry Willson, “Getting paid $10,000 to fuck Marilyn Monroe is not the worst gig in this town.”
The film was shot at 7000 Romaine in Los Angeles, with Hughes assisted in its production by his pimp, Johnny Meyer. “Guy had a gay streak in him, but he didn’t show it that night,” Meyer said. “Monroe was really turned on by Marilyn. When he stripped off his pants and presented her with a long, straight, thick tool, she squealed with delight and went to work polishing it. I had to practically pull him off Monroe when Howard called ‘cut.’ I never saw the finished product. Boss man kept it for his own viewing pleasure. He later acquired a blue movie loop of Elizabeth Taylor and this gangster boy. But Elizabeth would be set up for that one, not knowing about a concealed camera in the bedroom.”
As Meyer proclaimed, “Boss was always a sucker for some gal with big tits and a schoolgirl face.” Terry, Elizabeth, and Marilyn Monroe each fitted that category. According to Meyer, in Hughes’pursuit of these blossoming beauties, Hughes set out to recapture his lost youth.
His pursuit of Terry became particularly aggressive when she went on a twenty-six city tour promoting her film, The Return of October (1948), starring Glenn Ford. From Indianapolis to Buffalo, Hughes would suddenly fly there to chase after the starlet.
Before he tried to insinuate himself into the lives of Elizabeth and Terry, proving that power and money talk, Hughes had already compiled one of the longest list of seductions of both actors and actresses in the history of Hollywood.
Over the years, the revolving door to his bedroom had admitted some of the most beautiful and talented men and women in Hollywood—Billie Dove, Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, Ginger Rogers, Robert Stack, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, Bette Davis, Paulette Goddard, Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth, Katharine Hepburn, Faith Domergue, Hedy Lamarr, Kathryn Grayson, Ingrid Bergman, Gene Tier-ney, Carole Lombard, and Marilyn Monroe.
But whereas Terry had been an easy conquest, Elizabeth had repeatedly eluded the net he’d cast for her.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1949, aboard his yacht, Hilda, Hughes married Terry in a ceremony conducted by his captain, Carl Flynn. The yacht was more than five miles off the coast, and the legality of such a marriage would later come into question.
A few days later, Terry called Elizabeth, informing her that although her husband refused to let her release the news officially to the press, she was now Mrs. Howard Hughes. She lived with her new husband in a bungalow within the garden of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Hughes deserted her f
or weeks at a time while he pursued other conquests.
***
Terry was one of the luscious bombshells of the 1950s, hailed as having “a schoolgirl face mounted on an atomic chassis.” She had attracted Hughes when she was only fifteen years old. Since their “marriage” at sea had little or no legal recognition, Hughes felt free to propose marriage, soon after, to another beautiful actress, Jean Peters, whom he would eventually “officially and legally” marry. On the same day he proposed marriage to Jean, he also proposed marriage to Janet Leigh, who turned him down, as had Elizabeth.
When Terry could no longer tolerate her cheating “husband or non-husband,” depending on how you interpret her union with Hughes, she felt free to pursue Glenn Davis, who was virile, handsome, and young, and who had been a highly visible player for the Los Angeles Rams.
During the era when Elizabeth was dating Davis, Terry had often accompanied them with a man of her own as part of their double dates. In addition, fan magazines of that era often depicted Terry being escorted by some of the pretty boys of the 1950s, many of whom were gay, including James Dean and Tab Hunter.
Starlet Terry Moore (“the girl with the atomic chassis”) with (inset photo) demented billionaire Howard Hughes
After his breakup with Elizabeth, Davis telephoned Terry and asked her to be his date at a football game in the Rose Bowl. One date led to another, and soon, Hedda Hopper was announcing that Davis “had replaced Elizabeth Taylor in his life with the rising young starlet, Terry Moore.”
In a call to Elizabeth, Terry told her that although Hughes was still in pursuit of her, she’d broken off their relationship, referring to him as “a cheat, a liar, and an adulterer.”
The news that Terry had replaced Hughes with Davis disturbed Elizabeth. Although she’d dumped the football hero, she seemed jealous to learn that he was dating a friend of hers.
At the time, the press labeled Davis “the greatest catch in America.” Although she’d been invited Elizabeth opted not to attend the Terry Moore/Glenn Davis wedding on February 9, 1951, at a Mormon church in Glendale. “I’ve been betrayed,” Elizabeth told Roddy McDowall. “Those two must have been carrying on behind my back all along.”
Davis and Terry soon faded from the radar screen, and Elizabeth learned that she was living with the athlete in a modest apartment with a Murphy bed in Lubbock, Texas. Hughes had not given up on her, however. He’d come across a script for a movie entitled High Heels that he felt would be ideal for either Terry, Elizabeth, or Marilyn Monroe.
Using the script as bait, he lured Terry back to Hollywood, with the promise that she would play the lead. Unknown to Terry, Hughes also arranged for Dick Hanley to deliver a copy of the script of High Heels to Francis Taylor’s art gallery, asserting that Hughes was ready to produce the film at RKO with Elizabeth as the star. It is not known if Elizabeth ever read the script or not, as she was already under contract to MGM, which had assigned her a role in Paramount’s A Place in the Sun, an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. Montgomery Clift had been signed as her co-star, with Shelley Winters in a supporting role.
Hughes eventually sold the script of High Heels to another studio. It soon became obvious that Terry had been lured back to Hollywood under false pretenses.
Glenn Davis
Back in Lubbock, Davis was furious at the turn of events and the “theft” of his wife. He, too, flew to Hollywood, where he confronted Hughes one evening at the home of Terry Moore’s parents. Hughes was not a fighter, but Davis was.
Roddy McDowall was the first to call Elizabeth after he heard the news: “Your boy Glenn beat the shit out of Hughes. I mean, he’s seriously injured. He was flown to a hospital in San Francisco as a means of avoiding the press in L.A.” Nonetheless, the story soon broke in Confidential magazine.
After he recovered, Hughes came up with yet another scheme. He called Davis and told him, “There are no hard feelings. In fact, you struck me—no pun intended—as a powerful hunk of American beef. I think I can make a movie star out of you. All the girls in America will dream of going to bed with you every night, but only if you’re a bachelor—not a married man.”
Since his dream had been to become a movie star, Davis telephoned Elizabeth to discuss Hughes’ proposition with her. She warned him that Hughes routinely double crossed people, and she suspected that this offer might be a trick to get him to divorce Terry.
Although Davis sought Elizabeth’s advice, he didn’t follow it. He let Hughes’ lawyers arrange his divorce from Terry. But when he went to sign his contract with Hughes, the RKO studio head had vanished. There was no contract, no stardom. Elizabeth had been right. Davis tried to call her again, but she was never available. Davis faded from her life, and she never heard from him again.
It seemed inevitable that Elizabeth, along with her fellow sex goddesses, Marilyn Monroe and Terry, might be considerd for the same roles. Although all three had lost out on Hughes’ never-realized film project (High Heels), each of these actresses became interested in the publicity surrounding the role of the ingénue in the film version of Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), whose screenplay was based on William Inge’s hit Broadway play. During a visit to New York, Elizabeth had been escorted to the play by Monty Clift. Both of them spent the rest of the night drinking and discussing how she might interpret the role onscreen.
Neither Elizabeth, Terry, or Marilyn ever appeared in any movie entitled High Heels, although three foreign film companies used the title for unrelated productions of their own.
***
The producer of Come Back, Little Sheba was Hal Wallis, working in collaboration with Paramount. One day, Elizabeth, without the permission of MGM, called him for an interview, which he willingly granted. The two leads, Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster, had already been cast.
Elizabeth was kept waiting in Wallis’ outer office while he interviewed another actress who wanted the role. When the door to his inner office opened, Monroe emerged. Elizabeth had never seen her before.
There was a look of recognition between them, followed by a hardening of each of their faces into expressions of hostility. She walked past Elizabeth without speaking. As she would later tell Dick Hanley, “Monroe looked like some whore working Santa Monica Boulevard.”
Wallis was polite during his meeting with Elizabeth, and promised he’d give her serious consideration if it appeared that he could persuade Louis B. Mayer to lend her out from MGM.
To her disappointment, Elizabeth later picked up a copy of Variety and read that the role she coveted had been assigned to Terry Moore. Elizabeth was even more disappointed when Terry received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress of 1952.
Coincidentally, about 18 years later, in 1969, Elizabeth did end up working for Wallis when he produced Anne of a Thousand Days, starring Richard Burton. She appeared only briefly, in a cameo.
A trio of men—Nicky Hilton, Montgomery Clift, and Howard Hughes— were about to become semi-permanent fixtures in Elizabeth’s life.
But first, there was Johnny Stompanato.
***
Howard Hughes had never seen any of Elizabeth’s movies, but he was captivated by her image in fan magazines. When he started to pursue her, he was forty-five years old, and she was a tender seventeen. Hughes had shown a tendency, when an actress was that young, of first wooing her parents before moving on to his real prey.
Looking like an unshaven bum, he appeared one day at Francis’ art gallery in Beverly Hills. Before his departure an hour later, he had purchased eight very costly and overpriced paintings as part of the biggest art deal Elizabeth’s father had ever made.
After leaving the gallery, Hughes drove to the apartment of some unknown starlet, and spent approximately two hours with her. Careless about locking doors, he had left the doors to his car unlocked as it stood in front of the apartment building. By the time he emerged onto the street again, he discovered that all eight paintings had been stolen. He didn’t really seem to ca
re, as he hadn’t wanted the art anyway.
Before his departure from the gallery that day, he’d invited Francis and Sara to fly with him to a vacation in Reno, Nevada. As an afterthought, he added, “Oh, and don’t forget to bring along your daughter.”
Before flying to Reno, Hughes called Louis B. Mayer and attempted to purchase Elizabeth’s contract. Then in the waning months of his once-iron-bound grip over MGM, the gruff studio chief informed Hughes that her contract was not for sale. “You’ll have to find another way to seduce her, Hughes,” Mayer told him before putting down the phone.
When Hughes met Elizabeth for the first time at the airport, he was stunned by her beauty, more compelling than any color magazine photograph could ever convey. “A real looker with tits,” he told Johnny Meyer. “I wish I had some way to find out if she’s still a virgin.”
“Have your doctor examine her,” Meyer said.
“Don’t be an ass,” Hughes snapped at him. “What am I going to do? Call her up and say I’ve made an appointment for my doctor to examine your hymen to see if it’s been pierced?”
At the resort in Reno, Hughes met privately with Sara and Francis, telling them that he was prepared to put up a dowry of one million dollars if they would consent to let Elizabeth marry him. Always ambitious for the advancement of their daughter, Sara promised her cooperation. She didn’t seem to be bothered by the difference in their ages.
Francis, however, urged caution. “Elizabeth’s a very independent girl these days. She’ll have to make up her own mind. But I’d love to have an art patron like Howard Hughes in our family.”
Goaded by the encouragement of Sara, Hughes approached Elizabeth later that afternoon. She was clad in a white bathing suit by the hotel pool. Dressed in a rumpled business suit, he came up to her. In the same cardboard box he’d once carried gems for Ava Gardner, he brought a similar unprepossessing package for presentation to Elizabeth.
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