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

by Darwin Porter

Born in London in 1916, Finch had a buoyant, devil-may-care kind of rugged individualism. The illegitimate son of a Scotsman, he had endured a tumbleweed childhood traveling from England to France and on to India before settling in Australia.

  Finch had been “discovered” by the Oliviers, Laurence and Vivien, during their triumphant sweep through Australia. In 1948, as part of an arrangement with the Old Vic, the Oliviers set out to bring a trio of plays to Down Under— School for Scandal, Richard III, and The Skin of Our Teeth, the latter a huge success for Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway.

  Bored to some degree with each other, and jaded at this point about promiscuous adventures outside of their marriage, both actors were immensely attracted to Finch. Before long, on location in Australia, Finch launched secretive affairs with each of them.

  Aged thirty-six, the bisexual Finch was “compulsively unfaithful” to his wife. “Finchey never met a hot young woman or a nice piece of boy-ass he didn’t want to fuck,” said Stewart Granger.

  “I may be wrong,” said Dick Hanley in later years, “but I think Finch prepared Elizabeth for the entrance of Richard Burton into her life. Talk about hell-raisers. If Finch had stayed on in Hollywood, I believe that Elizabeth would have divorced Wilding and married Finch. He was more her kind of guy. Or, as Finch phrased it himself, ‘Elizabeth loved my sense of obstreperous camaraderie.’”

  After meeting her, Finch said, “On screen, I play your caddish spouse, but off screen, I’m prepared to be your ardent lover.”

  “Check with me later,” she said, heading for her dressing room. Confronted with her rapidly retreating back side, he called to her, “You’ve got a great ass on you, kid.”

  She turned around and almost shocked him. “I can forget about your rear. It is what’s up front that counts in a man.”

  Finch told Elizabeth that in Ceylon, Vivien Leigh had been completely out of control, drinking heavily straight out of the bottle, tearing off her clothes, and running naked through the streets until apprehended by the police. “She would toss dangerous objects at her friends and through the windows, even throw things to hit people in passing cars.”

  Finch also told Elizabeth that when Leigh arrived in Hollywood, she’d thrown this big party for him, to which she even invited Clark Gable to talk about their making of Gone With the Wind. Stewart Granger, Jean Simmons, and David Niven were among the guests.

  “Vivien disappeared upstairs and came down about half an hour later,” Finch said. “She held a pair of scissors in her hand like a character in some Psycho movie. She rushed down the stairs and raced toward Tamara, my wife. I managed to subdue her before she plunged those scissors into Tamara’s heart.”

  Elizabeth was horrified to hear these stories, feeling sympathy for Leigh’s condition. “I pray I don’t end up in some psycho ward.”

  Finch told Elizabeth that the Hollywood of 1953 was such a disappointment to him, not at all like his fantasies of “where blonde cuties would cling to my arms and sexy chorus girls in black velvet shorts and white satin blouses would seductively tap-dance around me.”

  Instead, he discovered that the boom years had ended, and Hollywood was still suffering from the commie witch hunt launched by Senator Joseph Mc-Carthy. It was also battling that new horror that threatened everyone’s livelihood—television.

  On many a night, she left Wilding at home with the baby while she and “Finchey” pursued one of their favorite pastimes—chewing popcorn during the screening of horror movies, followed later by “a roll in the haystack,” as Elizabeth claimed to Dick Hanley. She also claimed, “I made him forget all about Vivien Leigh…at least for a while.”

  After Elephant Walk was wrapped, Paramount offered Finch a seven-year contract which he rejected. “Bloody hell, they wanted me to star with Jane Russell in The French Line. Maybe we could have done a striptease together. I could flash my dick and she could flash her big tits. Why cast me as a Spanish gigolo? Why don’t they get Fernando Lamas?”

  “On the other hand, I’m not so eager to return to London,” Finch told her. “Call me an escapologist. In England, I have to face the joint explosions of Larry and Vivien. As you know, both of them demand that I fuck them constantly.”

  Finch would resurface in her life when she was told that he’d been cast as Julius Caesar in her upcoming 1963 film, Cleopatra.

  After Elephant Walk was wrapped, the studio wanted publicity pictures. Elizabeth agreed to pose in a Jeep. The photographer wanted to depict them in a wind storm in Ceylon. A wind machine was brought in.

  During the photo shoot, the giant fan blew a steel splinter into Elizabeth’s eye and it became deeply lodged. She was rushed to the hospital, where delicate surgery removed the splinter. Because the surgical technique required that she respond to the instructions issued by the surgeon, she had to remain awake during the eye surgery. She later remembered the sounds of the instruments cutting into her eye, which she compared to the sound of “eating a slice of watermelon.”

  Released from the hospital, Elizabeth returned home to Wilding and her infant son. On the first night back, during playtime with her son, he inadvertently delivered what she later defined as “a knock-out punch.” Within days, her already-injured eye became ulcerated and she was forced to re-enter the hospital to face eye surgery once again, this time as part of a procedure more dangerous than the first.

  In the wake of the operation, both of her eyes were blindfolded, and she had to live in darkness for three weeks during the healing process, as neither of her eyes could tolerate light.

  Of all her friends, Roddy McDowall offered the most comfort, visiting her every day to keep her abreast of what was going on in Hollywood.

  At least she was spared reading a Los Angeles headline: LIZ TAYLOR GOING BLIND.

  During her time in the hospital, she received some shocking news, although later she didn’t appear to be all that disturbed by it. In her absence, Monty had moved into her household, “assuming my role. My housekeeper told me he slept in bed with my husband. I guess Michael was fucking Monty. It appeared that Monty was getting more of a rise out of him than I ever could.”

  Wilding always spoke lovingly of Clift. “I would cry on his shoulder all day, and he would feed Elizabeth soup in bed at night, light her cigarettes, refill her liquor glasses, and hear what a cold, insensitive bastard I was.”

  The gossip in Hollywood involved stories about how Monty, Wilding, and Elizabeth were members of a ménage à trois after she was released from the hospital. But whereas that tale might have been true to some degree in the emotional sense of the word, it was not apparently true in the sexual, or physical sense.

  When she’d first met Richard Burton, she’d thought he was “too bloody much,” and she would return to express that opinion many times in her future. But she was deeply touched when he had come to her hospital bed and recited passages from Shakespeare as a means of easing her long, blindfolded days.

  She considered him an actor of “unquestionable charm—and that voice. Of course, he also makes good out of a routine he’s got down pat—you know, the poor Welsh coalminer’s son among the Hollywood hedonists.”

  At the end of her hospital stay, her doctor removed the bandages and pronounced her eyes in good condition. “Glory to hell,” she said, “I can face the camera again. My new film is called Rhapsody (1954). My co-star will be that Welsh actor, Richard Burton. I’m sure that charming bastard will rate at least a chapter in any memoir I write.”

  ***

  Before the collapse of their marriage, Wilding recalled it as “the happiest time of my life, living in this kind of cloud-cuckoo-land, needing money but spending it like drunken sailors.”

  Louella Parsons was the first to rush into print about the dying embers of Elizabeth’s marriage. She wrote: “When they go out to parties, the Wildings have eyes for everyone but each other.” Hedda Hopper claimed, “The Wildings fight like cat and dog.”

  Humphrey Bogart, of all rogues, warned Wilding, “You�
�re always surrounded by the most beautiful babes at one end of the room, while Liz holds court with all the most attractive males at the other. Married folk didn’t ought to act that way.”

  To accommodate their expanding family, Elizabeth once again obtained a loan from MGM to purchase a more luxurious home designed by her friend, architect George MacLean. Selling for $150,000, it had a dramatic sheer glass wall that opened onto a view of the valley below.

  She also moved in her barnyard of three cats, two poodles, and two tame ducks, none of which was housebroken. Her chief form of décor, according to Wilding, involved the placement of magazines with her picture on the cover in every room of the house. These were supplemented with a huge stack of them beside her toilet bowl.

  Meanwhile, Michael Wilding—“in a fit of madness,” Elizabeth said— turned down the role of Professor Henry Higgins in a nationwide tour of the Broadway version of My Fair Lady. “He earned my eternal gratitude,” said Rex Harrison, who went on to make the role famous.

  Wilding also turned down the role of the Pharaoh in The Egyptian (1954). Ironically, Marlon Brando had also rejected a role in this film. Because of financial pressures, Wilding was forced to reconsider and ended up contracting to star in The Egyptian in what he called “a stuffy nightshirt role,” because of the pharaonic costume he was forced to wear. He dreaded the day shooting began.

  Most of the time Wilding was unemployed, hanging out during the day at Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica Boulevard, a joint which attracted a lot of other out-of-work actors. Sometimes, he made some sexual conquests there in spite of the sign the owner had posted: FAGOTS (sic) KEEP OUT!

  In addition to his homosexual affairs, Wilding also engaged in sexual liaisons with two famous female movie stars of the 1940s. The queen of Cinematic Camp, Maria Montez, born in the Dominican Republic, lives today on the late show as Cobra Woman. Her accent was thick, her acting a joke, but Wilding found her a “hot tamale in bed. I’m one of her kitsch fanciers,” he confessed to Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons. “She claimed I was better in bed than her husband, Jean-Pierre Aumont, whom Vivien Leigh told me ‘hit the spot as a lover,’”

  Montez was not the only adulterous conquest Wilding launched with a movie star sex symbol. He also became involved in a torrid liaison with the buxom starlet Marie McDonald, who was nicknamed “The Body” because of her shapely curves.

  In the years to come, McDonald enraged Elizabeth with her “brazen” public comments about her affairs with Elizabeth’s husbands.

  “Michael swore on a stack of Bibles that I was better in bed than Elizabeth,” The Body proclaimed.

  As one of Hollywood’s most popular pin-up girls of World War II, Mc-Donald also admitted to having a one-night stand with Elizabeth’s future husband, Mike Todd.

  Another future husband of Elizabeth’s, Eddie Fisher, revealed in his memoirs that he had a sexual fling with McDonald in Paris at the end of one of Bob Hope’s Christmas tours to military bases.

  Elizabeth made only one comment about McDonald, in 1966. “I heard she once escaped from a mental hospital in Austria. She was married to a former husband of Debbie Reynolds [a reference to Harry Karl]...She even claimed she was kidnapped by six men and repeatedly raped. Her off-screen life sounded a hell of a lot more intriguing than anything she did on the screen. Too bad she died of a drug overdose in 1965. One shouldn’t speak bad of the dead...so good.”

  ***

  Richard Burton could not wait for Elizabeth to recover from her eye surgery. His role as a musician in Rhapsody was reassigned to the Italian actor, Vittorio Gassman.

  Guess who’s sleeping with Michael Wilding? Marie (“The Body”) McDonald

  Instead of filming Rhapsody, Burton starred in The Robe, based on the best-selling novel by Lloyd C. Douglas. The Robe was an episodic costume drama about a Roman centurion (Burton), who presides over Christ’s crucifixion. Jean Simmons was cast in the female lead. Burton won an Oscar nomination, although his performance seems stiff and superficial today. Victor Mature was cast as his slave Demetrius. The Robe became the first movie ever shot in CinemaScope.

  Elizabeth told Dick Hanley, “Working with Jean will make it easier for Burton to fuck her every day in her dressing room. Thank God Stewart Granger is taking care of the sexual needs of my husband since Mikey and I are now doing it only once a month, if that. I can also thank God Peter Finch came into my life. Before he left, that devil wanted it morning, noon, and night. No wonder Vivien Leigh had that nervous breakdown.”

  One night, when Wilding complained of having a migraine, he stayed home and tended to their baby while Elizabeth accepted a dinner invitation from Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger. Still uncertain of her eye condition, she took a taxi to the Granger’s hilltop home.

  She’d long admired Mature, and had been thrilled by his muscular screen presence in the 1949 Samson and Delilah, in which he’d co-starred with Hedy Lamarr for Cecil B. DeMille.

  For years, she’d read that he was king of the boudoir, and fan magazines had covered his list of conquests that included Alice Faye, Betty Grable, June Haver, Rita Hayworth, Betty Hutton, Veronica Lake, Carole Landis, Anne Shirley, Gene Tierney, and Lana Turner.

  At dinner, Elizabeth found him to be charismatic and even better looking and more dynamic than he was on screen. He amused the Grangers and Elizabeth, telling them he’d pressed the imprint of his bare buttocks into a slab of concrete and had it placed outside his dressing room as a symbol of his annoyance at not being invited to place the more conventional imprints of his hands and feet into the concrete in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

  Elizabeth was uncertain of his marital status, remembering that in 1948, he’d wed a divorcée, Dorothy Stanford Berry, but the couple had had so many breakups and reconciliations that she had virtually lost count. As Elizabeth later relayed to Dick Hanley, “I didn’t plan to marry Vic, only to fuck him.”

  “The press likes to label you ‘Luscious Liz’ and me as a ‘Lush Lothario,’” but that’s all crap, of course,” Mature said.

  “Just the other day I read that you’re also called the ‘Technicolor Tarzan’ and an ‘Overripe Romeo,’” she said.

  “Cool it with that ‘overripe’shit,” he said. “I’m ripe for plucking, not ‘over-ripe.’”

  “Plucking, how amusing,” Granger said. “Rhymes with…”

  Mature entertained them with stories of his early days, claiming that after he’d arrived in Hollywood he had only eleven cents left after paying his eight dollar weekly rent. “I wired Dad and asked for money. He wired back that when he had arrived in America from Austria, that was six cents more than he had—and furthermore, he couldn’t speak English, and I could.”

  Victor Mature

  “That’s what’s called ‘tough love,’” Elizabeth said.

  He told the Grangers and Elizabeth that “in spite of my three marriages, Rita Hayworth is the only girl I ever felt I truly loved. Apparently, the way to Rita’s heart is to saw her in half.”

  He was referring to Orson Welles’ magic act in which Hayworth appeared on stage with him and was “sawed in half,” or so it appeared to astonished members of the audience.

  “Every reporter has to write about my muscles, and I’d like to be so much more,” Mature said.

  “It’s better to be written about than ignored,” Elizabeth said.

  “I’ve long ago come to that conclusion,” he said. “But I get tired of being a male striptease. But fuck it all…I make money and have a blast and screw any woman I want. So life is good.”

  At the end of dinner and several more rounds of drinks, Elizabeth announced that she was heading back home. “Jean, would you call me a taxi?”

  “Hell with that!” Mature said. “I’ll drive you home.”

  After everybody kissed everybody else, she got into the car with Mature. On the way back, she warned him, “Better keep your eyes on the road, buster, instead of looking at me.”

  “Don’t blame me becau
se you look so fucking gorgeous men can’t take their eyes off you. I want to see more. Why not stop in at my place for a drink?”

  “You’re on, big boy.”

  She spent five hours at his apartment, and later told Dick Hanley, “Not since Nicky have I had such a deep dicking. Vic is welcome to put his shoes under my bed any time in the future. What a hunk of beef. He is living proof that God did not create all men equal.”

  When the gay author, Gore Vidal, saw a (now famous) nude photo of Mature lying in a bunk during his World War II service in the Coast Guard, he wrote, “If the Germans had seen that picture, they would have surrendered months before 1945.”

  The sun was up when Elizabeth arrived back at her house. Wilding was in the kitchen preparing breakfast for himself and their baby. “Where in hell have you been?”

  “I was afraid to drive at night so I slept over with Jean and Stewart,” she said.

  “That’s odd, because I called Stewart,” he said. “He told me that Victor Mature drove you home.”

  She stared at him. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

  Then she stormed into their bedroom, locking the door behind her.

  ***

  Elizabeth herself defined the pictures she made between 1952 and 1956 as “rubbish movies.” Even so, much of the press hailed her as “the Queen of Hollywood,” or at the very least, “The Queen of MGM.” Grace Kelly, speaking off the record, said, “Elizabeth Taylor was not the Queen of Hollywood since 1952. I was. All of my films made more than $5 million, and Taylor went from one disaster to another. Her movies were so bad I could not sit through them.”

  Elizabeth may not have been the reigning queen, but according to the Picture Post in Britain in 1954, she was at the very least, a monarch. “If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Elizabeth Taylor is the most flattered girl in the world—apart from being the most beautiful. Not since the war, when every girl one saw was Veronica Lake, have the girls of this country striven so hard to look like Taylor.”