Bio - 199 - Elizabeth Taylor: There Is Nothing Like a Dame
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When Monty saw her in the white gown, he said, “Bessie Mae, your tits are fantastic, just fantastic!”
As Elizabeth told her two closest male confidants, Dick Hanley and Roddy McDowall, “I’ve fallen in love with Monty. I know it’s my own misfortune. At first, I denied to myself that he was homosexual. But when he began showing up on the set with hustlers he’d picked up in a bar, I was forced to face reality.”
“We have this incredible bond,” she said. “Our relationship will not die. But instead of lover, it must turn into something else—soul mate, sister, mama, confidant.”
Their intimacy became so close that she’d invite him into her quarters and would take a bath in front of him. As she’d later tell Roddy, “It never excited Monty.”
During the course of the filming, Elizabeth wrote girlish love letters to Monty. Rather callously, he turned them over to his current hustler trick, who saved them and later tried to sell them to a magazine. But there were no takers.
Brenda Maddox, author of Who’s Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor?, brilliantly described another gown designed by Edith Head that Elizabeth wore on screen:
“As Taylor pulls Clift out onto the balcony, compelled by a passion that will send him to the electric chair, she wears a gown of jet-black velvet with a vestigial shred of white broderie anglaise edging her breasts. In the dark, away from the glare of the party, they do a scene that can only be described as oral sex.”
In the flickering light, and almost mirroring their own behind-the-scenes drama, Monty says, “How can I tell you how much I love you? How can I tell you all?”
She responds, “Tell Mama…Tell Mama all!”
Elizabeth had objected to her dialogue. “Who in hell wrote this shit?” she asked Stevens, knowing that he was the one.
Twenty years later, she saw the film again. “Now I understood the line. Stevens wanted to suggest that Monty and I had a relationship so deep it began in the womb.”
When Stevens first viewed the close-ups of Monty and Elizabeth, he proclaimed, “I have mated Hollywood’s most beautiful screen duo. Not since Greta Garbo emoted with John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil (1926) has the public seen two such perfect faces.”
Rarely has a screen couple been photographed so divinely as in the final reel, when Elizabeth visits Monty on death row, where he has been sentenced to the electric chair for the alleged murder of Shelley Winters, his pregnant former girlfriend. In the film, the script called for the character played by Winters to die of accidental drowning, though he made no effort to save her. Aggressive prosecutors convinced the jury it was murder.
In his cell for a farewell, the character played by Elizabeth swears to the condemned man, “I will love you until the day I die.”
The depiction of Elizabeth, tremulous and frightened in a little cloche hat, would be flashed on screens around the world and would become one of her most iconic images.
***
Back in Hollywood for the final takes, Sara invited her old friend, Hedda Hopper, onto the set to watch Monty and Elizabeth make love. At the end of the scene, the columnist, wearing a wide-brimmed, shocking pink picture hat, came up to Elizabeth. “Where in hell did you learn to make love like that? All this time, I’ve been telling my readers you are a virgin. You obviously are not.”
When Hopper left the set, Monty denounced her as “an old gobbler.”
Hopper called Monty “a pantywaist.” She’d long ago learned that Monty was a homosexual when she’d heard that he’d been arrested in New Orleans on a morals charge. In spite of what she already knew, she continued to promote Elizabeth and Monty in her column as “two lovebirds,” predicting that wedding bells would soon be ringing for the beautiful couple.
In a cheap publicity trick, Paramount publicists behind Elizabeth’s back released to the press the news of their upcoming marriage. Across the country, Americans read over morning coffee—CLIFT AND TAYLOR TO WED.
Elizabeth broke down in tears, shouting “Monty will blame me for this. He’ll never speak to me again.”
When Winters was later asked if she felt left out when Monty and Elizabeth became so close, she said, “Like hell I was [left out]! I was making love to both Marlon Brando and Burt Lancaster. Monty was the lonely one, in spite of Elizabeth’s presence. He was the loneliest man I’ve ever known and the best actor, too. Don’t tell Marlon I said that.”
After the shooting of the last scene of A Place in the Sun, Elizabeth expected Monty to make plans for the continuation of their relationship. Emotionally drained, he told her he was flying to New York for a drive to Connecticut, where he would be a guest of the notorious Libby Holman at her estate, “Treetops,” set on fifty-five acres of grounds between Greenwich and Stamford.
Libby was nearly twice Monty’s age. Noël Coward referred to her as a “fag hag,” and told anyone who would listen that she’d been a star of Broadway musicals during the late 1920s.
When Holman heard of Monty’s growing friendship with Elizabeth, she was very resentful, denouncing Elizabeth as “a teenage limey nympho.”
Holman wasn’t one to cast aspersions on others. Even though she’d never been officially declared guilty in any court, the torch singer had been implicated in the controversial suicide (or murder?) of her first husband, Zachary Smith Reynolds, the 22-year-old tobacco heir. He was a homosexual, as was her second husband, actor Ralph (pronounced "Rafe") Holmes, twelve years her junior, who also committed suicide or was murdered.
Like everyone else in America at the time, Elizabeth had already read about Holman’s notorious life. She warned Monty, “Please be careful of her. She’s the Black Widow. You may be the next one murdered.”
Actress and stage personality Tallulah Bankhead confessed to being Holman’s occasional lesbian lover. Holman and Bankhead frequently shot barbs at each other, Tallulah observing, publicly and frequently, “I entertain Libby only between murders.” Holman responded in kind, at one time saying, “Tallulah’s voice is a mixture of British and Pickaninny.”
As journalist John Parker wrote, “As Monty Clift’s personal conflicts over his Hollywood career and his homosexuality intensified, Libby became a willing participant with him in long bouts of experimenting with drugs and strange sexual excursions into strip joints and whorehouses, which went against his apparent leanings, but satisfied her perverted whim. Monty told of wild scenes at Libby’s magnificent home, filled with the aromas of erotic eastern perfumes and joss-sticks, topped up with marijuana and pep pills.
When Monty departed from Hollywood after the filming of A Place In the Sun, Elizabeth told him, “Look, Monty, I’m always here for you whenever you need me.” He said nothing else, but gave her a gentle kiss on the lips and walked away.
She ran from the set in tears and stayed in her dressing room for two hours.
Many years later, Monty made a confession to Frank E. Taylor, the producer of The Misfits, in which he was starring with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in the last picture either Monroe or Gable would ever make.
“I did try to have sex with Elizabeth one time, but couldn’t rise to the occasion,” Monty said.
Libby Holman
Taylor herself claimed, years after Monty’s death in 1966, “He also confessed to me that he had a small penis and that that was the secret tragedy of his life.” In the first and unexpurgated edition of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, he referred to Monty as “Princess Tiny Meat.”
“Is nothing sacred?” Monty asked when he read that and before he called his lawyer to get the reference removed in the subsequent edition.
Elizabeth asked Paramount to let her attend a special screening of A Place In the Sun with Dick Hanley. At the end, she gave her own movie review to Dick: “Monty is the most sensitive and magnetic actor on the screen today. He’s not afraid to be vulnerable. At first, he draws the audience in with his sheer beauty, but it is his barely concealed torment, as reflected on his face and in his body movements that keeps that audience glued to their s
“We may go to bed together in the future, but it’s all too obvious that we’ll have to conduct a ménage à trois with some trick of his,” she told Dick at dinner that night after seeing the movie.
Returning to Metro, Elizabeth bombarded Benny Thau’s office and virtually demanded that he lobby for her to get the lead role in I’ll Cry Tomorrow, the story of a nightclub singer, Lillian Roth, and her lifelong struggle with alcoholism. “I can pull it off,” Elizabeth said. “Hell, I’ll become a drunk just to get the part.”
She was bitterly disappointed when the role went to that fiery redhead, Susan Hayward. “Dame Bitch,” became Elizabeth’s name for Hayward.
“Deanna Durbin is a fading memory, and Margaret O’Brien grows more obsolete every day,” Elizabeth said to Thau. “A Place In the Sun will change my movie life. No one will ever call me a child star again, except in a historical reference.”
Upon the release of A Place In the Sun, Charlie Chaplin hailed it as “the greatest movie ever made about America.” Writing in American Cinema, Andrew Sarris claimed, “Those gigantic close-ups of Elizabeth Taylor and Monty Clift kissing were unnerving—sybaritic—like gorging on chocolate sundaes.”
The critic for The New York Post wrote that “As for Miss Taylor, she has only to pass a camera to provide abundant reason for a man to commit murder, or any other crime of violence, in her favor.”
Some critics hailed her as “the virgin temptress.” It required the passage of two decades before more modern critics could more accurately describe Elizabeth’s performance: “She’s the ultimate cock-tease,” wrote one reviewer in 1970.
For his performance as a loner and misfit in A Place In the Sun, Monty was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, as was Marlon Brando for his memorable role as the brutish Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. But these Actors Studio candidates ultimately lost to Humphrey Bogart for his role in The African Queen, arguably his greatest performance.
A Place In the Sun had its release date postponed for a year because Paramount did not want to compete with its epic Sunset Blvd. in the Oscar race. That film starred Gloria Swanson as the fading silent screen vamp, Norma Desmond. Monty, ironically, had originally been offered the role of Joe Gillis, but turned it down, the part eventually going to William Holden, launching him into super stardom.
Monty feared that the role would evoke his own real life drama unfolding at that time with the older, richer, Libby Holman.
For the most part, critics had previously condemned Elizabeth’s film performances. But after A Place In the Sun, she was actually praised for her acting, and not just for her beauty.
The critic for Boxoffice wrote, “Miss Elizabeth Taylor deserves the Oscar this year.”
Elizabeth observed, with irony, “I wasn’t nominated because I’m beautiful. If you look like I do, nobody gives you an Academy Award.”
In contrast, Shelley Winters was nominated for an Oscar, but lost it to Vivien Leigh for her memorable portrayal of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams.
After her unrequited love affair with Monty, Elizabeth was depressed, but not for long. “She was too full of life to remain in her bedroom moaning over something that could not be,” Roddy recalled. He telephoned her there and volunteered to escort her to a party with his friends at Lucey’s Restaurant.
At first, she rejected his offer, but he finally prevailed upon her to go. “Forget Monty,” he told her. “The world is filled with gorgeous men, and if you and I play it right, we’ll be able to have most of them.”
“At the restaurant, I’ll introduce you to this handsome rich devil who’s been pestering me to bring the two of you together,” Roddy said. “But there’s a drawback.”
“He’s a serial killer?” she asked.
“Not that,” he told her. “But girls—or boys, as the case might be—usually have to go to the hospital to get stitched back together after a night in the hay with him. I’m talking about Nicky Hilton.”
A Place in the Sun
CHAPTER TWELVE
So This Is Marriage (Nicky Hilton)
WHAT A PIP!
After circling each other for months, Elizabeth and Nicky finally met. It was an Indian summer afternoon in October of 1949. He was awed by her beauty, and had been ever since he’d seen her at Jane Powell’s wedding party at the Mocambo.
He photographed badly, but in person, he was extremely handsome, speaking in a soft Texas drawl. He was tall and broad-shouldered and wore a tailor-made suit from Savile Row in London. He had a reputation as a playboy, and his dark brown eyes suggested mischief and desire at the age of twenty-three.
Even though he looked like he’d just been graduated from college, he was a man of the world, having launched affairs with members of both sexes since he was fourteen years old. He was at ease with people, having spent his teenage years meeting movie stars, industrial tycoons, presidents, senators, and even fading members of the European aristocracy.
Nicky almost never worked, but he held two important positions—one as the vice-president of the Hilton Corporation, and the other as the manager of the swanky Bel Air Hotel, which he referred to as “my fuck pad.”
As it happened, it wasn’t Roddy McDowall, but Pete Freeman, son of Paramount’s chief, Y. Frank Freeman, who introduced Nicky to Elizabeth. He’d invited both Nicky and Elizabeth to a lunch at Lucey’s, a Mexican restaurant on Melrose Avenue across from the Paramount lot.
Elizabeth arrived wearing a violet sheath dress which made her eyes appear more violet than blue.
Nicky was half an hour late, a harbinger of chronic tardiness and irresponsibility to come. But in the meanwhile, Gloria Swanson stopped by Elizabeth’s table, as she was waiting there with Freeman. Swanson was filming Sunset Blvd. for Paramount. “You have a marvelous face, child,” she told Elizabeth. “We had faces during days of the Silents. With your expressive face, you would have made it back when pictures didn’t talk. Today, any little high school debutante can be put up on the screen and called a movie star. Norma Shearer even promoted Janet Leigh. Joanne Dru… please!... Barbara Hale…oh, dear, I’m getting ill.”
Elizabeth told her how honored she was to meet such a great star.
“One final word of advice,” Swanson said. “Take lovers, but don’t marry them. Marriage is a trap for a big star.”
Two days later, Elizabeth ran into Janet Leigh on the Metro lot. She avoided reporting on Swanson’s dig at her, but raved about meeting Nicky Hilton. “He exudes masculinity—what a guy!” Elizabeth said. “He seems like a decent, clean-cut, all-American boy, except when those wild eyes of his undress me, symbolically speaking. We come from very different backgrounds, but we have much in common. We both like hamburgers with onions. That’s not all. We both adore Enzio Penza.”
Penza, a basso profundo from Milan’s La Scala opera house, was currently appearing in two musicals at MGM. Nicky and Elizabeth played his recording of Some Enchanted Evening time and time again.
When he dropped out of Baltimore’s Loyola College at the age of nineteen, Nicky joined the Navy, where he had a number of sailor lovers, most of whom fell for him when they saw him in the shower.
At the time he met Elizabeth, Nicky was involved in a torrid affair with his former stepmother, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who had married Conrad Hilton, Sr. in April of 1942. Because of Hilton Sr.’s ownership of his hotel chain, newspapers had dubbed him “the man with the 100,000 beds.”
The Hungarian bombshell divorced Nicky’s father in 1946, but her affair with Nicky continued. At the Bel Air hotel, she’d make “Dracula Goulash” for him before bedtime. Zsa Zsa once asserted that her stepson had “a ten-inch penis and the sexual stamina of a racehorse.”
Love and publicity, Hollywood style, in the Atomic Age Nicky Hilton with Elizabeth Taylor
After his divorce from Elizabeth, Nicky dated Terry Moore. She told a reporter, “He had absolutely the largest penis—wider than a beer can and much longer—I have ever seen. To make love to him was like fornicating with a horse.”
When he wasn’t dating Zsa Zsa, Nicky was seen with actresses Denise Darcel and Jeanne Crain, or else with socialites like Kay Spreckles and Hope Hampton. Ironically, Conrad Hilton, Sr., had previously dated both Spreckles and Hampton.
After returning home from that lunch at Lucey’s, Elizabeth found a box with three dozen long-stemmed yellow roses. Nicky had taken the time to learn the species of her favorite flower. The card he enclosed read, “To bring back the sun—Nick.”
That night, after repeatedly smelling the yellow roses, Elizabeth called Roddy. “I’ve met that darling man, Nicky Hilton. The most eligible bachelor in America, as you well know. All the girls are after him.”
“And half the boys, too,” Roddy chimed in.
“That’s understandable,” she said. “He’s so sexy. I know he wants me. A girl can tell.”
“I can see a page from the history books now: Elizabeth Taylor married Nicky Hilton, and the couple lived happily ever after—just like in the movies.”
“But, Roddy, some dreams come true,” she said.
“And others are meant merely to be dreamed.”
Nicky and Elizabeth began to date each other seriously, and she described him in glowing terms to Dick Hanley, who knew him.
“Nicky is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Dick warned her. “You see the side he presents to the world. There’s another side to him—a compulsive gambler, woman-beater, alcoholic, closeted heroin addict, sex maniac. It doesn’t matter to him if he’s with a man or a woman. He believes that all cats are gray at night.”
Nicky invited Elizabeth to go riding along Bel Air’s bridle paths, and often took her to the beach and to Hollywood parties. He escorted her to lavish dinners, but on occasion, he dined more modestly at the Taylor home on Elm Drive. For his first dinner there, Sara made her specialty, steak-and-kidney pie. With a fork, he isolated the pieces of kidney, but as a Texan, he ate the chunks of steak.
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