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

by Darwin Porter

  Griffin had disappeared to answer the buzzer, as Roddy was busy in the kitchen. It was Monty at the door, another honored guest. For the first time in his life, the actor had arrived somewhere on time.

  Rushing back to his bedroom, Griffin announced to Elizabeth, “Monty’s here.” Taking one final look for reassurance in the mirror, Elizabeth rose and headed for the living room and Monty.

  “She brushed right past me and went to the side of her co-star in A Place In the Sun,” Eddie said. “At that point I might not have existed. I spent most of my time that day talking to Roddy and Jane, but I cast frequent glances at Monty and Elizabeth, who seemed engaged in some epic battle.”

  Griffin later revealed what was going on between Elizabeth and Monty. “It was her final attempt to get Monty to marry her before he headed back to Hollywood. Even though Monty told me he’d never marry anyone, Elizabeth was persistent.”

  At the end of the party, Eddie went over to tell Elizabeth good-bye, but she was still engaged in her dispute with Monty. She brushed Eddie aside. He later told Griffin that he saw her back in Hollywood when he was visiting the MGM lot. “She was obviously furious and talking out loud to herself. She walked right past me and didn’t even look at me. At that time I could never have believed that one day she’d marry me. You figure.”

  ***

  Griffin returned to Hollywood to accept an engagement at the Cocoanut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel. On his first night back, he was tired from the flight and ordered dinner from room service. There was a knock on his door. Thinking it was a waiter, he opened the door to discover a drunk Nicky Hilton standing there. His clothes were rumpled, “and he looked like he’d come to decaptitate me,” Griffin later confided to Roddy.

  Griffin called Roddy in New York the following day to relay what happened. “Nicky was too drunk to beat up anybody,” Griffin claimed. “The night ended when I stripped him of all his clothes—yes, most definitely his underwear, too—and put him to bed. You did not exaggerate. That’s some equipment on that stud. I spent the night enjoying it while Nicky snored.”

  After that, Nicky no longer viewed Griffin as serious competition for Elizabeth’s affection. According to Griffin, “As he departed, Nicky told me, ‘I’d heard that you might be a fairy. Elizabeth always gravitates to them—take that Monty Clift, for instance.’”

  Griffin called Elizabeth, but didn’t mention his encounter with Nicky the night before. She tried to explain her reasons for wanting to marry Nicky. At no point did she mention love. “I love jewelry,” she said. “Nicky’s rich—or at least his father is. Connie Hilton could buy me all the jewelry my little heart desires.”

  After his singing engagement, Griffin moved into Roddy’s house in Los Angeles. Nicky visited on a few more occasions, but only when he was drunk. “When he’s sober, which is rare, he’s a warm and generous person,” Griffin told Roddy. “But on liquor or drugs, he turns violent. He takes heroin, too, you know. He’s also a racist, ranting about ‘kikes” and ‘niggers’ all the time. One night he beat the shit out of me. I was black and blue. But the next morning he had no memory of it.”

  On another night, Nicky arrived at Roddy’s house in a shiny new black Cadillac which Conrad Sr., had acquired for him. Griffin had never known him to be that wild before. He carried a loaded .38 revolver. For fun, he began shooting out the lights in Roddy’s house until Griffin wrestled the pistol from his drunken hand.

  When Roddy returned to Los Angeles, a check was waiting from Conrad, Sr., as reimbursement for the damages. “For god’s sake, don’t invite him here again,” Roddy told Griffin. “Poor Elizabeth. What hell is heading her way? Should we warn her about Nicky?”

  “You can’t tell a girl like Elizabeth what to do,” Griffin said. “When she wants something, she goes after it, and won’t listen to anybody. She’ll find out for herself. I have a feeling that Nicky will be just the first of several husbands for Elizabeth, and that all of them will be disasters.”

  ***

  Late in 1949, Elizabeth returned to Hollywood and to her sizzling romance with Nicky, who had found plenty of companionship during their separation. She’d been scheduled to begin, almost immediately, the filming of her latest MGM picture, Father of the Bride, alongside veteran actors Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, who’d been cast as her onscreen parents. They had last appeared together in the wisecracking melodrama, Me and My Gal, eighteen years earlier.

  A blandly handsome actor, Don Taylor, who had served in the Air Force during World War II, was cast as her husband-to-be. After having lunch with him, Elizabeth told director Vincente Minnelli, “About all we have in common is a last name.”

  She didn’t like her role, finding it evocative of those ingénues she’d played in MGM films during the late 1940s. Now, in the new decade of the 50s, she wanted meatier, more dramatic parts. “I was tired of playing daughters.”

  Minnelli had told her that Jack Benny had desperately wanted the role of the penny-pinching father, but was turned down, which the veteran comedian found humiliating. He’d even submitted to a screen test to get the part.

  Tracy was perfect for the role, and the script revolved around his trials, tribulations, and the mounting expenses of marrying off his daughter.

  After Katharine Hepburn rejected the part, Bennett was selected for the thankless role of the mother because of her coloring, her dark hair, and certain facial features she shared in common with Elizabeth.

  After meeting her, Bennett said, “An enduring star like me goes through periods. In the 1930s, I was the winsome blonde ingénue. By the forties I was the sullen temptress with raven tresses. Now, for the first time, I’m the chic matron. One day, it will happen to you.”

  Louis B. Mayer was delighted with Elizabeth’s plans to marry Nicky Hilton, and scheduled the release of Father of the Bride as a means of taking advantage of the massive publicity which her real-life wedding would generate. As the aging head of MGM, he was about to be replaced by Dore Schary, who told MGM executives that he viewed Elizabeth “as a surefire moneymaker for MGM in the 1950s.”

  When Elizabeth heard of Mayer’s upcoming departure, she said, “I will shed no tears for the disgusting old shithead.”

  The first day Elizabeth reported to the set of Father of the Bride, Schary came out to welcome her and to introduce her to the film’s director, Vincente Minnelli, who was married at the time to Judy Garland. The unhappy couple had produced a daughter, Liza.

  During the first day of the shoot, Francis dropped by to see his daughter, but ended up spending more time with Minnelli.

  “Vincente and Francis really hit it off,” Elizabeth later told Dick Hanley.

  Elizabeth, however, was genuinely surprised when Francis began showing up on the set every day, not as a means of taking her to lunch, but to spend time, usually alone, with Minnelli in his dressing room.

  Elizabeth often ate lunch in the commissary with Dick, who knew everything happening in and around the studio. “What goes here?” she asked her confidant.

  “My darling,” Dick said. “You’re a woman of the world at this point. Francis and Vincente are having an affair. He and Adrian have broken up.”

  “My father and Minnelli?” she asked in astonishment. “I can’t believe that. The man has the head of a lizard. Not only that, but he wears lipstick, probably a tube of it borrowed from Judy.”

  In later years, Joan Bennett shared her memories of working with Elizabeth. “I was surprised that she was only a teenager, but had taken to downing big highball glasses of Jack Daniels like Frank Sinatra. She seemed very upset about a lot of things.”

  “Nicky Hilton often visited the set,” Bennett said, “and he was nuts. Both Spence and I knew that, but neither of us had the nerve to warn her. Who did? She was hell bent on matrimony at any cost. For her, it was love on the rebound, as Monty had dumped her. Elizabeth didn’t have the right equipment between her legs for Monty, if you’ll forgive my vulgarity. One day, she offered to introduce Nic
ky to Spence and me. Spence told her, ‘Skip it!’”

  Character actor Leo G. Carroll, a cartoonishly serious-looking Brit with an imposing brow, years later, recalled his experience on the film. “Nicky Hilton came by several times, but he seemed hopelessly bored with the making of a film. I had a feeling he wanted to be somewhere else. As for Elizabeth, she was a real princess. Everybody, including Minnelli, catered to her, when he wasn’t lusting after her father. The first week, she arrived at MGM in a shiny new black Cadillac, a gift from somebody, probably Conrad Sr. She told me, ‘A car is the best mode of escape for a girl who feels that the people around her are smothering her.’”

  Schary called her into his office one day and told her that if Father of the Bride became the hit he anticipated, he envisioned casting her in a series of newlywed pictures with Don Taylor.

  “I hope you don’t,” she said. “Newlywed pictures sound more like roles for Janet Leigh. Don is a nice guy, but I find him sexless. There is no chemistry between us. I once invited him to my dressing room and changed my dress right in front of him. There I was, stark nude. You know what he did? He turned his head and looked at the fucking door, which I think he wanted to escape through.”

  Elizabeth’s most intriguing visitor on the set was Judy Garland, who on a nearby set was filming Summer Stock (1950), the last picture she’d make for MGM before she was fired. At first, Elizabeth was apprehensive, fearing that Garland was going to pick a fight over her husband’s romantic liaison with Francis.

  Garland carried a flask with her, and appeared tipsy, not drunk. Elizabeth always admired her sharp wit. “Schary told me that Vincente is directing a picture that’s a sort of genial jab at the nuptial rites of upper middle class suburbia in America. I also heard somewhere that Mayer wanted it edited into a depiction of a typical American family in that bracket. What a joke!”

  “I don’t quite understand,” Elizabeth said.

  “Oh, I’m sure you guys will pull it off brilliantly,” Garland said, “but let’s hope the American public never discovers what’s really going on behind all this happy schmaltziness.”

  “I’m aware,” Garland continued, “that my husband and your father have become the dearest of pals. But there’s so much more bubbling away at MGM these days. Take Spence, for example, the man who took my virginity when I was fifteen years old, younger than you. He’s a closeted homosexual engaged in a platonic relationship with Hepburn, who’s a secret dyke who long ago put the make on me. Your mother-in law in the film, Billie Burke, is another closeted lesbian who, when she was married to Flo Ziegfeld, used to seduce only the most beautiful of showgirls.”

  Garland continued: “Joan Bennett is an elegant whore. She and Spence first slept together back in 1932, when they made She Wanted a Millionaire (1932). She’s fucked everybody from Bing Crosby to Errol Flynn. She even fucked John Emery, Tallulah Bankhead’s former husband. He’s known for having the biggest dick in Hollywood. Bennett gave Myron Selznick—David’s brother— blow-jobs, and right now, she’s shacked up with Jennings Lang, her agent. And there will be hell to pay if her husband, Walter Wanger, finds out.”

  [Garland was right about a looming scandal. On December 13, 1951, Wanger did indeed find out, and shot off one of Lang’s testicles, for which Wanger received a four-month prison term.]

  “What? No scandal about Don Taylor?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Not really. Dick Hanley told me that Don is a chronic masturbator, sometimes five times a day. He told Dick that he finds his right hand more satisfying as a sexual outlet than someone else’s genitals.”

  “You left out one of the stars in the picture…namely me,” Elizabeth asked, provocatively.

  Movie star Elizabeth Taylor as a fantasy bride at a fantasy wedding for MGM

  “Oh, darling, you are as pure as the drifting snow…emphasis on ‘drifting.’”

  Tracy later told Bennett, “That Hilton boy will be the first of Elizabeth Taylor’s many husbands. I suspect she’s the marrying kind.”

  On the final day of the shoot, Elizabeth told Tracy that, “Every time I walked down the aisle to the altar with you, I was living it. It was like I was rehearsing for my own upcoming marriage. Nicky is going to treat me like an angel and make love to me morning, noon, and night.”

  “Sounds tiring to me,” Tracy quipped. “Never be too romantic, or too unrealistic entering into marriage, or into any relationship for that matter. Remember, someone else, not you, is writing the script.”

  Oscar night—March 29, 1951—was celebrated at the RKO Pantages Theater in Los Angeles. Father of the Bride had been nominated for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and, for the performance of Spencer Tracy, Best Actor.

  The film, however, produced no winners, and at least one very sore loser. “That fucking Academy didn’t nominate me, and I was the one who made that god damn movie,” Elizabeth said.

  One reviewer interpreted Father of the Bride as “a 1940s comedy released in a humorless decade, the 1950s.”

  Right before Christmas of 1949, Nicky was ordered by his father, Conrad Sr., to attend a business conference in Houston, Texas. He didn’t want to go, but his father insisted. He would return in time for Christmas, which the Hilton family planned to celebrate with the Taylors.

  Monty Clift had flown into Los Angeles to discuss a movie deal, and he invited Elizabeth to a party hosted by the author, Norman Mailer. Mailer was celebrating the upcoming cinematic adaptation of his bestseller, The Naked and the Dead, originally published in 1948 when the author was twenty-five years old, about the physical and emotional carnage of World War II. Monty was considering starring in the movie version of the novel, which would focus on a screenplay by Lillian Hellman.

  Monty suggested that they double date with Shelley Winters and Marlon Brando, and that they arrive at the party as a foursome. Elizabeth agreed, as she was eager to meet Marlon.

  In her memoirs, Shelley Winters provided only a limited hangout, not revealing too many of the details associated with that party. But she was on target when she wrote: “Norman invited everybody in Hollywood, both left and right, and you didn’t do that in 1949. Adolphe Menjou was there, snubbing Charlie Chaplin. Bogart was giving Ginger Rogers the fish eye. Monty, Elizabeth, and Marlon were very uncomfortable.”

  Elizabeth had absolutely no interest in politics, but she was thrilled to be hanging out with the Hollywood elite, feeling very grown up. She was introduced to such stellar members of the A-list as directors Cecil B. De Mille and John Ford, along with composer Leonard Bernstein. She and Judy Garland had a “kiss-kiss” moment together.

  Elizabeth was also introduced to actor Larry Parks, with whom she would soon star in a film. At the time, she didn’t know that J. Edgar Hoover was investigating him for alleged communist activities. She spoke briefly with Gene Kelly and his wife, Betsy Blair. Monty’s friend, Kevin McCarthy, gave Elizabeth a wet kiss on the mouth.

  As proof of her new status as an adult, Elizabeth later claimed, “I was hit upon by several big names, most of whom were drunk.”

  A drunken Bogie accosted her and said, “Hey kid, when are we going to make a movie together? I’m looking forward to our love scenes. The trouble with you, kid, is that you’ve never been properly fucked.” She moved quickly away from him, only to run into another left-winger, actor John Garfield. He told her that “Jewish dick is the best and the biggest” if she wanted to sample it.

  Marlon said to her that the only reason he’d come to the party was to meet Charlie Chaplin. At the star-studded event, Marlon and Chaplin talked for an intense half hour. Regrettably, Marlon got more than he wished for when Chaplin directed him in the disastrous A Countess from Hong Kong, co-starring Sophia Loren, in 1967.

  Marlon brought Chaplin over to meet Elizabeth, and she had a few minutes alone with him, finding him a braggart.

  She later told Marlon, “I found Chaplin disgusting and a bore. I know he’s famous for his love of teenage girls, but he insulted me. He told me he’s good f
or at least six bouts a night, and he also claimed that he has a foot-long penis, which he refers to as the ‘eighth wonder of the world.’”

  “Did you make a date with him to sample it?” Marlon facetiously asked.

  “Not bloody likely,” she answered.

  In one of the bathrooms, one which had been exclusively designated that evening as a ladies’ powder room, Elizabeth encountered Shelley and told her about her meeting “with the great Charlie Chaplin.”

  “Been there, done that,” Shelley said. “As you know, I had this torrid affair with Sidney Chaplin. During that time, I also managed to accommodate both Charlie Sr. and Charles Chaplin, Jr. In other words, I fucked all three of them. So did my former roommate, Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Monroe must make the rounds nightly,” Elizabeth said sarcastically.

  “She sure does,” said Shelley. “One drunken night at our apartment, she even fucked me.”

  “I’m sure she’ll eventually get around to fucking me, too,” Elizabeth said, little knowing the degree to which her words were prophetic. “From the way I see it, Monroe is working her way through every listing in the Player’s Directory, the Screen Directors Guide, and the Producers Guild Book.”

  When Shelley learned that Elizabeth had not met the host of the party— Norman Mailer—she ushered her over to chat with him. Shelley said that she was very grateful to Mailer, who had intervened with George Stevens to get her the role of Alice Tripp in their movie, A Place in the Sun. “I returned the favor to Norman and let him fuck me.”

  Except for Marlon and the host himself, everyone was well dressed at the party. Mailer looked disheveled, wearing a casual print shirt and slacks with socks that nestled down around his ankles. His first words to Elizabeth were, “Welcome to the ugliest city in the world.”

  As Shelley wandered off to pursue John Garfield, Mailer spoke to Elizabeth about their joint friend, Monty. “I love your boyfriend,” he said. “He’s a very sensitive artist, not our typical fucked-up movie star. He’s not cocky, he’s not self-centered, and he plays it low key. He’s like one of us, not some thimble brain movie star cashing in on his looks. The trouble with Hollywood is that there are too many god damn movie stars out here.”