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

by Darwin Porter

  Mailer went on to assert that “Hollywood is all wrong for Monty. It brings out all sorts of fear and guilt in him about who he is. He should be back in New York.”

  Then the author went over to a fruit bowl and handed Elizabeth a big fat banana. “Put this in your bloomers to protect yourself.”

  She looked astonished. “What in the hell for?”

  “Fredric March over there is drunk and going around feeling up the young women,” he said. “When he reaches between your legs and feels that banana, he’ll think you’re a man in drag.”

  On the night of the party, Mailer was living with the French writer, Jean Malaquais, and they were working on a script together, Lonelyhearts, for Samuel Goldwyn. All three of them wanted Monty to play the lead in this script based loosely on Nathanael West’s novel of the same name. Ultimately, Gold-wyn would reject their script, defining it as “un-American.”

  In 1958, Monty would star in a much different and much weaker film called Lonelyhearts, also loosely based on West’s novel. Dore Schary wrote the screenplay.

  At one point, Shelley approached Elizabeth in panic. “You’ve got to help me. Burt Lancaster is just arriving, and he’s threatened to beat the shit out of me if he ever catches me with Marlon. I’m leaving with him now to avoid bloodshed.”

  “What shall I tell Marlon?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Oh, tell him I’ve gone to have a miscarriage. Anything.”

  Shelley hurried off, having stridently informed Lancaster that she needed to be driven to another party immediately. In her haste, she grabbed Elizabeth’s beaver coat.

  Later, Elizabeth made excuses to Marlon, who agreed to drive Monty and Elizabeth back to their respective homes. Throwing a fit when she discovered that someone had stolen her coat, Elizabeth stood in the pouring rain with Monty while Marlon fumbled, trying to find his keys. By the time he located them, all three of them were dripping wet.

  Marlon invited them to his home, where he lit the logs in his fireplace and went to find robes for them until their clothes were dry.

  The next day, Shelley called, wanting to find out what happened. Elizabeth explained that someone had stolen her coat and that she’d become soaked, and later caught a cold. “At Marlon’s, we pulled off our clothes to dry, and one thing led to another,” Elizabeth said.

  “What in hell does that mean?” Shelley asked.

  “If you must know, we had a three-way,” Elizabeth said.

  “I can believe that Marlon would fuck anything that moves, but I find it hard to believe that you got plowed by Monty,” Shelley said.

  “Actually, as it turned out, Marlon fucked both Monty and me,” Elizabeth said.

  “I don’t know if you’re making up this story just to upset me…or what.”

  “Every word is true,” Elizabeth said.

  Two weeks later, a photo of Shelley was taken as she was being escorted to a movie premiere by actor John Ireland. She was wearing Elizabeth’s beaver coat.

  ***

  For the Christmas holidays of 1949, Conrad Hilton, Sr., invited Elizabeth, Sara, and Francis to a hotel he’d recently purchased on Lake Arrowhead.

  On Christmas Eve, the Hiltons and the Taylors opened their presents, Elizabeth discovering that Nicky had given her a super expensive set of diamond earrings with dangling white pearls.

  On Christmas Day in the hotel’s library, Nicky asked Francis for permission to marry Elizabeth, who was still seventeen and had not yet finished high school.

  “I’d be delighted if you took Elizabeth as your bride,” Francis said. “You can give her so many things.”

  Elizabeth spent the rest of the night alone with Nicky, who used the occasion to propose marriage to her. She accepted, but cautiously, agreeing to his proposal only after he’d promised to let her continue with her film career.

  Nicky was Roman Catholic, and he wanted Elizabeth, even though she had little enthusiasm for it, to join the Catholic church. She did agree to sign a document that she would rear any of their children in the Catholic faith. She also had to sign a document that she would never practice birth control or get a divorce.

  Francis wanted his daughter to have a high school diploma, but MGM’s little red schoolhouse was not legally qualified to provide one. Howard Strickling, head of MGM publicity, solved the problem by making an arrangement with Los Angeles University High School, where Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth’s future rival in love, was already enrolled as a bona fide pupil.

  Elizabeth would be allowed to wear a cap and gown and join in the graduation ceremony, thereby receiving a diploma, even though she’d never attended the school.

  Dozens of students who had legitimately earned their diplomas crowded around her, asking for her autograph.

  Conrad Hilton, Sr., jumped the gun and telephoned Louella Parsons with news of his favorite son’s engagement to Elizabeth. The next morning, the entire world seemingly was aware of the news. Because of the worldwide publicity, Conrad Sr. noted a massive increase in bookings throughout the Hilton Hotel chain.

  News of Elizabeth’s engagement to Nicky soon became the hottest topic of gossip in Hollywood. In her column, Hedda Hopper openly speculated that Elizabeth might not follow through with her plans to marry Nicky. Because she had run out on both Glenn Davis and William Pawley, Hopper had labeled her “Liz the Jilt.”

  When she next appeared in public, Elizabeth was wearing a five-karat diamond engagement ring.

  Her bridal shower was staged by members of the S.L.O.B club, the initials standing for “Single Lonely Obliging Babes.” Partly as a publicity device, Elizabeth and Betty Sullivan had established this Hollywood Club for bachelor girls. Betty was the daughter of the famous New York columnist Ed Sullivan, “Mr. Show Business.”

  Elizabeth officially resigned from her position as the club’s president that day because she was on the verge of losing her status as a “single, lonely, and obliging babe.” After the shower, she asserted, “I got a hell of a lot of loot.”

  Before her wedding, she put through a final desperate appeal to Monty. “Will you come and see me after I return from my honeymoon?”

  “Somehow, Bessie Mae, I don’t think dear Nicky Hilton is my kind of guy. I’ll not be calling on the newlyweds.”

  “But you promised me that we’d always be friends, that you’d always stand by me regardless of what happened to me,” she protested.

  After a mediocre education, the high school graduate is congratulated by her mother, Sara.

  He gently put down the phone.

  Fifteen MGM seamstresses had worked for two months making Elizabeth’s high-necked satin wedding gown, a design by Helen Rose. Like Snow White, she was dazzling. “Her wedding gown didn’t show half as much tit as did Princess Elizabeth when she married Prince Philip,” Rose claimed.

  The gown was decorated with seed pearls and lilies of the valley, with a tight cinch waist to emphasize her slimness.

  The bridesmaids wore organdy gowns in tones of buttercup yellow. In celebration of the season (springtime) they carried clusters of yellow tulips and daffodils.

  For her trousseau, famed couturier Ceil Chapman had called, volunteering his services and creating a chic wardrobe for her upcoming travels on the Continent.

  Acquaintances of Elizabeth, many of whom were not included on the guest list, called Elizabeth and pleaded with her to let them come to her wedding. She agreed to their requests, until she ran out of seating. Patricia Neal called and begged for an invitation. “Okay,” Elizabeth told her, “but you must bring a present—and don’t be stingy, baby.”

  Arriving daily at the Taylor household was what Sara defined as “a queen’s ransom” that included a staggering array of blue Wedgwood china, Swedish crystal, Wallace sterling silver flatware, and initialed Italian linens (only in pink).

  Francis presented his daughter with a Frans Hal painting—the one he had famously acquired between the wars at a flea market in London—and a “Breath of Spring” mink coat. Sara gave h
er a white mink stole paid for by MGM.

  Uncle Howard Young sent a $65,000 pearl ring from New York. To make room for the armada of gifts that had flooded in, Sara was forced to move the furniture out of her living room and even stuff the bedrooms with overflow bounty. It included a forty-five piece sterling silver service from the Gorham Silver Company.

  There is a line in Father of the Bride when Spencer Tracy tells Elizabeth, who’s interpreting the role of his daughter, “You look wonderful, kitten, just like a princess in a fairy tale.”

  She remembered that line. On her real wedding day, she said, “That is exactly how I felt, a real princess in a fairy tale. I just knew, like Cinderella marrying Prince Charming, that Nicky and I would live happily ever after.”

  One hour before Elizabeth was scheduled to depart for the church, her doorbell rang. Sara answered it herself, thinking it was another messenger with wedding gifts. She faced an angry William Pawley, Jr., who barged into the house without an invitation. Sara didn’t feel she could constrain him.

  He headed straight for Elizabeth’s bedroom, where he confronted her behind closed doors for about fifteen minutes. Sara heard Elizabeth shouting at him, but dared not enter the room.

  When Pawley came storming out, she stood silently by until he’d let himself out. Then she rushed to Elizabeth’s bedroom, finding her daughter in tears. “What did he want? Or say?”

  “It’s none of your god damn business,” Elizabeth told her mother. “Now let me get on with this fucking wedding.”

  Among the onlookers gathered at the church, an alert photographer managed to snap a picture of an angry Pawley among Elizabeth’s adoring fans.

  The ceremony was held at the Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills.

  The wedding was scheduled for the afternoon of May 6, 1950. Flanked by a police escort blasting their sirens, she was driven to the church in an MGM limousine. On a bizarre note, an odd choice back in 1950, she demanded that the driver wear a pink uniform.

  Some 5,000 fans, the largest gathering in Hollywood since the funeral of Jean Harlow way back in 1937, turned out in the stifling heat, the thermometer registering 104°F. The police and MGM security guards tried to control the mob. There was a fear that after the wedding, the fans would break through the barriers and rip Elizabeth’s wedding dress to shreds so they could retain a souvenir of the event.

  MGM boasted “more stars than there are in heaven,” and many of the biggest names turned up for Elizabeth’s wedding. Greta Garbo, the former queen of MGM, a figure who had made her last movie in 1941, was invited too, but she cabled her regrets: “I do not believe in marriage.”

  A fleet of black limousines carried the MGM hierarchy. They had been more or less commanded by Louis B. Mayer to attend, even if they didn’t like Elizabeth. In a touch of press agent irony, honored guests included Spencer Tracy, her screen father, and Joan Bennett, her screen mother, sitting with her real parents, Sara and Francis. Bennett, one local wag observed, seemed almost to be competing with Sara for photo ops.

  William Powell summed up the attitude of many MGM stars. “I didn’t particularly like Elizabeth Taylor. But Mayer told me to get my ass over there.” Mickey Rooney showed up, bragging, “I’ve already had her.’ Whether he had or not is still a matter of some dispute.

  Stars came dressed in their finery, including Janet Leigh, Greer Garson, Ginger Rogers, Esther Williams, Walter Pidgeon, Ricardo Montalban, Red Skelton, Peter Lawford, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Margaret O’Brien, Roddy McDowall, Phil Harris, Debbie Reynolds, Gene Kelly, Gloria DeHaven, Fred Astaire, Van Johnson, Arthur Loew, Jr., Rosalind Russell, and Terry Moore, who would later have an affair with Nicky Hilton. Of course, columnists Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, and Sheilah Graham were there, too.

  Mayer, who detested Elizabeth, occupied the most central and visible pew in the church, dabbing at his eyes with a red silk handkerchief. Upon entering the church, he’d told the press, “I feel I’m losing a daughter.”

  Mara Reagan also showed up. She would soon marry Howard Taylor, Elizabeth’s beautiful brother, which caused sadness among Roddy’s homosexual friends, who had hoped that he would join their colony.

  After Monsignor Patrick Concannon pronounced Nicky and Elizabeth husband and wife, “Nicky gave the bride the longest kiss in recorded history,” according to Ann Miller, who showed up as the “date” of Conrad Hilton, Sr. After the kiss continued to embarrassing lengths, the monsignor intervened, warning the couple to “save it for later.”

  The wedding ceremony took just twenty minutes. When it was over, Elizabeth’s name was changed to Mrs. Conrad Hilton, Jr. “He is my darling,” she later told the press. “I shall love no other until my dying day.”

  After the wedding ceremony, Elizabeth and Nicky stood in the doorway of the church, posing for pictures. She begged Nicky “to kiss me once more.” That kiss, too, went on for such a prolonged time that Francis eventually interrupted with the quip, “Get a room, kids.”

  MGM paid for the lavish reception at the Bel Air Hotel, where Sara noted in horror that her daughter could hardly stop kissing Nicky to shake the hands of some six-hundred guests.

  The governor of California, Earl Warren, showed up at the reception to kiss the bride. He was later appointed as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

  At the reception, it took Elizabeth and her new husband almost four and a half hours to shake the hands of all their guests. Elizabeth soon tired of “all that kiss-the-bride shit.” Nicky was clearly bored.

  As she got into a limousine for the northbound trek toward her wedding night, she whispered to Sara, “Oh, Mother, Nick and I are one now…for ever and ever.”

  On the way to their honeymoon night, Elizabeth snuggled up to Nicky in the back seat of an MGM limousine. “We no longer have to slip around when you want to fuck me. After our so-called ‘wedding of weddings,’ we’re legal now. I’m no longer your bitch, but your wife.”

  He sat solemnly in his seat, staring at the coastal road ahead. As she’d later confide to friends, “I got the feeling that Nicky was sorry he’d married me.”

  A lavish suite filled with flowers had been selected for their honeymoon in a Hilton-affiliated resort on Pebble Beach on California’s Monterey Peninsula, near Carmel. Before arriving at the resort, Elizabeth told Nicky, “I know that some people call me the most beautiful woman in the world. But they need to change that title. Because of you, I am the happiest woman in the world.”

  ***

  The honeymoon was a disaster, hitting Elizabeth like a bolt of lightning and forcing her into a new reality about her husband.

  It began when a bellhop referred to Nicky as “Mr. Taylor.” Nicky slapped the young man, but later gave the manager a hundred dollar bill to give to the bellhop with an apology for his violence.

  In the back of the limousine during the ride to Carmel, he’d been drinking heavily and was already drunk upon his arrival.

  After dinner, Elizabeth retired to the bridal suite, which for some reason contained three bedrooms. She dressed in her specially designed négligée, and waited and waited for Nicky’s return. She spent most of the night sitting alone on the terrace that overlooked the Pacific. She went to bed at 2am and fell asleep.

  Sometime around four in the morning, Nicky came back into the suite and woke her up. She’d never seen him so drunk. He looked half dressed, having come from a room he’d rented for himself and two hookers whom he had patronized before during one of his previous visits to the hotel. Perhaps the prostitutes wondered why he was seducing them on his honeymoon night, in the immediate wake of his widely publicized marriage to “the world’s most beautiful woman.”

  Nicky and Elizabeth indulged in their first of many fights. Finally, he told her to “go to hell” and retreated into one of the suite’s bedrooms, where he slept until noon.

  When he awakened, showered, and dressed, he went down to the lobby, where he found Elizabeth making purchases in the overpriced, on-site boutiques a
nd charging the expenses to their room.

  He apologized for his behavior the previous night, and she forgave him, telling him that she understood that he had “the jitters.”

  That night, the resort’s chef prepared a special seven-course celebratory banquet for them. Nicky drank more than he ate, and Elizabeth had little appetite. Like he’d done the previous night, Nicky did not return to the bridal suite until dawn. He was in a particularly foul mood because he’d lost $100,000 the previous evening when he’d been driven to a private residence where an illegal gambling casino was operated by the mob.

  When she confronted him and started making accusations, he struck her, sending her sprawling onto the floor. As she sobbed, he retreated into one of the bedrooms.

  Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was still Nicky’s lover, later said, “He was truly his father’s son. Connie pursued the most glamorous women on the planet, including moi, but he had no talent for actually living with them once he’d won them over.”

  Once again, on the morning of the third day of his marriage, Nicky apologized for his behavior, and once again she forgave him. Earlier that morning, she’d called Sara, asking her if she should leave Nicky. “Do so and you’ll be mocked and ridiculed in the press. You’ve made your bed. Now sleep in it. I’ve made my own marriage work, in spite of the fact that I married a homosexual.”

  “Over lunch that afternoon, Nicky told her that when he drank, his mood shifted, and he was filled with rage and anger. She pleaded with him to give up drinking. “Without that crutch, I couldn’t get through life,” he confessed.

  That night, after dinner and after three more bottles of champagne in the bar, he returned with her to the bridal suite.