Long before she converted to the Jewish religion, Elizabeth was cast in Ivanhoe as Rebecca of York, “the Jewish infidel.”
She had protested to Schary that she did not like the script, and that she did not want to appear in Ivanhoe, and he retaliated by threatening her with suspension. Eventually, she acquiesced, but lobbied, unsuccessfully, for the role of Rowena, the film’s female love interest. But Schary had already contracted with Joan Fontaine to play that part. Elizabeth was therefore forced into the lesser role of Rebecca.
The film was one-fourth shot when she confronted its director, Richard Thorpe, claiming she had been miscast as Rebecca and was pulling out of the role. Briefly, there was talk of replacing her with Deborah Kerr, who had recently co-starred with Robert Taylor in Quo Vadis? But when Schary heard of this, he threatened Elizabeth with “hell and damnation,” and she reluctantly resumed her role as Rebecca.
The plot was so loosely adapted from Sir Walter Scott’s epic novel that the original author might have denounced it if he’d still been around. George Sanders, one of the film’s co-stars, referred to it as “historical hokum,” and Elizabeth described it as “a piece of cachou.”
Even Robert Taylor objected to it, claiming, “I prefer to do Westerns.” During the shoot, he told Thorpe, “I’m getting mighty tired of walking around in an iron jockstrap.”
Returning from the Crusades in the Holy Land, Ivanhoe (as played by Taylor) learns that (the good) King Richard the Lionheart is imprisoned and being held for ransom in Austria. Ivanhoe’s demand that the ransom be paid is ignored when the evil Prince John and his corrupted cronies refuse to relinquish their prestige and power. Joining forces with Robin Hood, whose appearance in the movie is very brief, Ivanhoe selflessly, and for the good of England, rustles up the money to release King Richard, simultaneously re-establishing a relationship with his father, who disowned him years previously.
In the film, Elizabeth was tried publicly as an infidel witch and a seductress who has taken advantage of Ivanhoe, a Christian knight. One critic noted that “Elizabeth Taylor is seen going to the stake with the expression of a girl who has been stood up on a date. So much for martyrdom. Cast her next as Joan of Arc.”
When Robert met Elizabeth on the set, he told her he was furious at the terms of his divorce from Barbara Stanwyck. “The bitch got our mansion and all that was in it except for my underwear. Not only that, the dyke was awarded fifteen percent of all my earnings unless she remarries. Believe you me, that one will never remarry. She’ll suck my balls dry until I die.”
Thorpe, the director, privately told his friends in London that MGM had hired two heterosexual leading ladies, Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Fontaine; three bisexual co-stars—Robert Taylor, Robert Douglas, and George Sanders—and one homosexual Welshman, Emlyn Williams.
I was never invited, but Bob Taylor threw some wild parties with Douglas, Sanders, and Williams,” Thorpe said. “A lot of handsome young Englishmen worked either as extras or as page boys, and they often attended these homosexual orgies. We were always worried that word would reach the tabloids in London. Many guys in the cast and crew, who were basically straight shooters, were willing to hang out with these big name stars, perhaps hoping to advance their careers. They ended up getting sucked dry by my male stars, not the female ones.”
Thorpe had directed Elizabeth before in A Date With Judy and had found her fairly easy to work with, an actress who took directions. But he encountered a very different Elizabeth on the set of Ivanhoe. She looked ghostly thin, complaining of an ulcer. She didn’t give a performance, but sleepwalked through her role, using a voice that was hardly audible. “Her line reads were so incomprehensible we later had to have them dubbed back in Hollywood,” Thorpe said. “We had to hire a voice coach for her.”
At MGM, the word was that her drama coach, Lillian Burns Sidney, dragged Elizabeth “kicking and screaming through the entire Ivanhoe script until she got it right.”
Opening in the summer of 1952, Ivanhoe eventually grossed $6.2 million, making it MGM’s biggest earner for that year. Its premiere in New York set a box office record for the studio. Ivanhoe was nominated for an Oscar as Best Picture of 1952.
Both Elizabeth and Michael Wilding were filming at Borehamwood (aka Elstree) Studio outside London. Wilding was starring in Trent’s Last Case with Orson Welles, who had known Elizabeth intimately.
In Ivanhoe, Elizabeth as Rebecca falls in love with the knight, as played by Robert Taylor. Off screen, another actor whom she mistakenly interpreted as her “knight in shining armor,” Wilding, became the star attraction in her life.
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After filming began on Ivanhoe, Thorpe recalled that Wilding dropped in every afternoon for tea with Elizabeth. “At first, he seemed reluctant to start dating a girl so young,” Thorpe said. “I was there when she got the ball game launched.”
“I wish you’d stop treating me as if I had a child’s mind inside a woman’s body,” she said to Wilding. “Why don’t you invite me out to dinner tonight?”
The next morning, Thorpe asked Elizabeth how her date with Wilding went.
“He has the day off, and he’s sleeping it off at my suite at the Savoy,” she told him. “He hit the spot last night.”
“It was all too obvious to me that he’d seduced her,” Thorpe said. “The gleam in Elizabeth’s eyes reminded me of Vivien Leigh in that scene as Scar-lett O’Hara where she wakes up the morning after Rhett Butler has plowed her royally.”
From London, Elizabeth wrote Janet Leigh. In her letter, Elizabeth described Wilding as “a man with sand-colored hair, a broad forehead, and a narrow chin—a cross between Bing Crosby and King George VI.” In many ways, he reminded her of her childhood idol, Victor Cazalet.
At the time she became involved with him, Wilding, in England at least, was at the peak of his matinee idol charm.
After about a week had passed since the debut of their mutual seductions, Elizabeth joined in the praise of Wilding as a great lover. Wilding’s expertise was discussed one night at a party in the Manhattan apartment of Tallulah Bankhead when Bankhead was gossiping, publicly, with Paulette Goddard: “Michael Wilding, unlike Charlie Chaplin, gives endless satisfaction to a woman in bed,” Goddard claimed. “Even though he’s pushing forty, he has marvelous stamina in the sack.”
“Lucky Liz,” Tallulah said. “The bitch always seems to catch those twohanders, or three-handers, like Nicky Hilton.”
***
Before his involvement with Elizabeth Taylor, and before his box office disaster in Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949), opposite Ingrid Bergman, Wilding had shot Stage Fright (1950) with Marlene Dietrich and Jane Wyman, who had recently divorced Ronald Reagan.
As Dietrich’s biographer, Steven Bach, described Wilding at the time, “he was tall, thin, and elegant as a whip from Asprey’s. He had charm and a dashing way with the ladies. Marlene took one look at Wilding and the laziest gal in town got busy.” In direct competition for the British actor, Dietrich trounced Wyman.
Now, Dietrich faced far more formidable competition in the form of Elizabeth. When not before the cameras, Wilding was dividing his time between visits to Dietrich’s suite at Claridges and Elizabeth’s suite at the Savoy.
It took two or three weeks before nineteen-year-old Elizabeth realized she was competing with forty-nine-year old Marlene Dietrich.
Although Elizabeth had youth and beauty on her side, Dietrich, in her capacity as one of the most formidable femmes fatales of the 20th century, had an allure that had attracted suitors who had included, among many others, Gary Cooper, Howard Hughes, Barbara Stanwyck, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, and U.S. Army Lieutenant General James Gavin.
To members of the press, Wilding appeared reluctant to get too involved with anyone. “I have serious doubts about marrying another actress.”
Actually, Wilding was using the fact that he was already married as an excuse to avoid emotional entanglements. It was believed in London that
he had not seen his wife, actress Kay Young, since 1945.
Partly as a means of making Wilding jealous, Elizabeth went out on two dates with the blonde heartthrob Tab Hunter, who was in England at the time filming Island of Desire with Linda Darnell. These dates, of course, weren’t any particular threat, as Elizabeth knew that Hunter’s heart belonged to a fellow actor, Anthony Perkins.
The Hunter ploy worked, however. Wilding finally got up the courage to ask Young for a divorce, and eventually booked Elizabeth every night. He’d arrive on time at her suite at the Savoy, but she was never ready. “Punctuality was not her forte,” he said. Often, she’d invite him into her dressing room, where she sat in front of her vanity mirror coquettishly applying heavy coats of make-up. He felt she was using far too much make-up for one so young and beautiful. “I understand why Marlene applies so much make-up,” he told Elizabeth. “She’s trying to erase the ravages of time. But you....”
“I’m trying to make myself look older so you might finally get around to asking me to marry you.”
When it became obvious to her that Wilding was stalling, Elizabeth jumped into one of London’s taxicabs and asked to be driven to a jewelry store in Mayfair which had been recommended to her. Once inside, she purchased a large sapphire ring encircled with diamonds. Placing it on the fourth finger of her left hand, she announced that afternoon to the press, “I am engaged to Michael Wilding. Look at the lovely ring he placed on my finger.”
Her aggressive scheme goaded him into proposing to her. “Of course, I’ll have to wait for my divorce to become finalized.”
Friends of both Elizabeth and Dietrich, including Stewart Granger, were amazed that they had linked up as a couple. “Michael always preferred the woman as a dominant partner, and Marlene fitted that role perfectly,” Granger said. “On the other hand, Elizabeth was searching for a father figure, a man who could dominate her. Personally, I didn’t give their relationship much chance, although Michael had a big one, I didn’t think that a mere cock would be enough to maintain a marriage.”
Maria Riva, Dietrich’s daughter, wrote a biography of her mother, in which she maintained that she “preferred fellatio so she could better control the situation.” An entry in Dietrich’s diary was also published: “Michael is inventive in coitus,” she wrote, and I was staining as a result of his steeple chasing and always had to insert a firecracker the minute he dismounted.”
Such an entry requires translation: “Staining” is a reference to bleeding, and “steeple chasing” refers to sexual intercourse. A “firecracker” was her nickname for a tampon.
When queried about Dietrich, Wilding was polite, “I kept asking myself, how could such a goddess find the ideal companion in me?”
Wilding had never before seen one of Elizabeth’s movies, and she made arrangements for him to view National Velvet. She later said, “What a strong-willed and determined girl she was even back then. She says she wants a strong man in her life, but I don’t know who’d wear the trousers. I suspect that in a marriage, she would be passive/aggressive.”
At the studio, he arranged for her to see his 1949 film, Maytime in Mayfair, in which he co-starred with Anna Neagle. Over dinner, after watching the film, he asked, “Well, what do you think of me as an actor?”
She didn’t directly answer the question, but told him, “When you’re up close and looking down at Anna, you evoke a British gent trying to conceal a hard-on.”
As Wilding’s romance with Elizabeth deepened, he made it a point to have dinner with his longtime producer, Henry Wilcox, and his frequent co-star, Anna Neagle, who was married to Wilcox. They had long been his confidants.
“He was very honest with us,” Wilcox later recalled. “He admitted that he didn’t love Elizabeth, but was powerfully attracted to her. Michael was very ambitious in that he wanted to become an international star. He didn’t want to be limited to making films only in England. He knew that by marrying Elizabeth, he would become a household name in America. He looked at me with those piercing eyes of his and said, ‘Forgive me, Herbert, but you can’t make me an international star, and Elizabeth can.’”
Wilcox told him, “If you marry Marlene, you’ll be accused of wedding your grandmother. If you marry Elizabeth, you’ll be labeled a cradle-snatcher.”
Wilding told Neagle, “I’m running after Elizabeth, and she’s desperate to catch me.”
Wilding confided to Wilcox, “I can’t make up my mind. I want both Marlene and Elizabeth.”
“I can hardly feel sympathy for you,” Wilcox said, “having to choose between two of the most desirable and famous women on God’s good earth.”
At a party in London, Elizabeth learned that Dietrich was also having an affair with the terse and acerbic theater critic, Kenneth Tynan, who told Elizabeth, “The secret of Marlene’s mysterious appeal lies in the fact that she has sex without gender.”
When Elizabeth met Wilcox at the same party in Mayfair, she told him that, “Michael can give me security, maturity, and tranquility. That’s what I’m looking for in a relationship.” She would later retract that in a memoir. “I found out that unfortunately, you can’t get those things just by touching someone else.”
Wilding later wrote that, “I dreaded hurting Marlene,” yet he chose an awkward way to announce to her that he he’d rejected her in favor of Elizabeth. He invited her to Dietrich’s one-woman show in London at the Café de Paris, where Noël Coward introduced her every night, asserting onstage that “God has a talent for creating exceptional women.”
Wilding took Elizabeth backstage to Dietrich’s dressing room. In her diary, Dietrich later wrote, “Michael was there last night with Liz Taylor, with Michael sitting rather stiffly in a corner and looking at me quite steadily and sadly. I thought that that could not happen to me, seeing him with another woman. I felt quite sick.”
“Dietrich got that stupid song all wrong—something about ‘Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets,’” Elizabeth later said. “It should be rewritten as ‘Whatever Elizabeth wants, Elizabeth gets.’”
During her evaluation of Dietrich’s performance, Elizabeth told Wilding, “She’s got a throaty kind of glamour, rather old-fashioned for the 50s. But as I understand it, she attracted Hitler and Goebbels. With that perfectly chiseled face, she seems to have discovered the secret of perpetual middle age.”
“Even if I couldn’t compete on the level of youth and beauty with Taylor, I could always upstage her in glamour,” Dietrich told James Stewart, when she was filming No Highway in the Sky with him in England. “Sexual allure is all about glamour and illusion anyway, and I’m the mistress of the genre.”
When Dietrich had filmed Destry Rides Again (1939) with Stewart, these two co-stars had launched an affair, eventually leading to Dietrich getting an abortion.
She claimed that Wilding was the British version of James Stewart—“He mumbles like Jimmy, and is ever so shy. But when Michael is unleashed, he becomes a tornado, his passion suddenly appearing without warning.”
As Dietrich reported to Stewart, “I have to hand it to that Liz creature. Her breasts are bigger than mine, but she has short, stumpy legs. As you well know, I’m celebrated around the world for the shape of my legs. What I don’t often hear about Liz is that she has hair on her arms, lots of black hair. I’m certain that centuries ago, her distant ancestors mated with the Neanderthal.”
During pillow talk with Elizabeth, Wilding expressed his desire to produce a family. “I can bear your children,” Elizabeth told him. “Dietrich is far too old. Besides, she’s already married to some chicken farmer.” She was referring to Rudolph Sieber, whom Dietrich had wed in Berlin in 1924, and had never divorced.
Actually, Elizabeth was not exactly candid with Wilding, since two doctors—one in Los Angeles, another in New York—had told her in the wake of her violent miscarriage, that it was doubtful she would ever have children again.
One night after dinner, when they were talking and drinking, Michael told her he want
ed to confess his darkest secret. She apparently felt that he was going to Out himself to her as a bisexual, exposing his years-on affair with Stewart Granger and others. But it was something else.
“I suffer from epilepsy, and at times I have seizures that cloud my consciousness.”
In the early 1950s, there was a great social stigma attached to epilepsy. Wilding feared that producers would not hire him if word of his disease got out.
“I will love you regardless,” she promised him.
After being dumped by Wilding in favor of Elizabeth, Dietrich flew back to New York when her part of the filming of No Highway in the Sky was finished.
As it happened, because of business commitments, Wilcox was also in Manhattan at the time. Dietrich met with him for lunch, mainly to ask the producer questions about Wilding. “What’s Taylor got that I haven’t?”
Wilcox later recalled, “I was far too gallant to mention the ‘Y’ word.” He was referring, of course, to “youth.”
Not getting a satisfactory answer from Wilcox, Dietrich came up with her own. “Michael tells me he cannot live without me, and then he goes and fucks Elizabeth Taylor. It must be her bovine tits. In bed, Michael likes breasts dangled in his face.”
Then she relayed to Wilcox that one night, she mentioned Wilding’s breast fetish to Noël Coward. “Noël responded that Michael also prefers another and very different appendage dangled in his face.”
***
After finishing Ivanhoe in early September, Elizabeth stayed in London until October 6, 1952, when both Tab Hunter and Wilding escorted her to the airport. She gave Hunter a kiss on the cheek but tongue-kissed Wilding before taking off for New York. “Goodbye, Mr. Shilly-Shally,” she told him. “Let’s forget we ever met.”
In a week, he sent her a cable. AM CATCHING THE NEXT PLANE TO HOLLYWOOD. SIGNED, MR. SHILLY-SHALLY.
***
In New York, Elizabeth and Monty Clift basked in their rave reviews for A Place in the Sun. With Elizabeth picking up the tab, they were spotted at “21” Club, Voisin, and Le Pavillon.
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