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

by Darwin Porter

  According to Britain’s Picture Post in 1954, she was the one Hollywood star that young girls, from secretaries to sales clerks, from nurses to telephone operators, wanted to look like.

  For a 1954 release, almost at the same time as Elephant Walk, MGM hired Charles Vidor to direct Elizabeth in Rhapsody, where she played a rich young woman, Louise Durant, in love with two different musicians—Vittorio Gassman cast as Paul Brontë and John Ericson in the role of James Guest. Veteran actor Louis Calhern, who had seduced Marilyn Monroe on and off screen, and who had previously appeared with her in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), was cast as Elizabeth’s father, Nicolas Durant.

  Against a musical background of Tchaikowsky, Liszt, Debussy, Mendelssohn, and Rachmaninoff, Elizabeth drifts between these two handsome musicians, who seem to love music more than her in a film which by today’s standards looks like a blend between a soap opera and a made-for-TV film.

  When Shelley Winters learned that Elizabeth would be appearing in the movie with her husband, Vittorio Gassman, she placed a telephone call to her. “Don’t fall for the son of a bitch,” Winters said. “He’ll charm the pants off you. When he gets what he wants, he’ll leave you for some sixteen-year-old Roman wench. Both of us love pasta. You’ll mourn his leaving and you’ll gorge on pasta. You’ll get fat and won’t be able to face a camera. Listen to your mother here. I know what a maneater you are, but keep your mangy paws off Vittorio. He belongs to me.”

  Elizabeth knew almost nothing of her two leading men, Gassman and Ericson. Actually, she’d been looking forward to starring in the film with Burton. At first she was resentful of the two actors ultimately cast.

  She found Ericson “very good looking, but rather Germanic and cold. The silly boy still seems to be in love with the girl he’d just married, Milly Coury,” she said. “How very un-Hollywood.”

  There was some talk about how Ericson was going to “become the next big male movie star,” but that dream would never be realized. His film career gradually flickered out, and he became better known on television. His peak fame came in the 1965-66 season when he co-starred as the partner of Anne Francis in the ABC detective series, Honey West, about a female private eye.

  To Elizabeth, Gassman was a far more intriguing specimen. He was born in Genoa to a German father and a Pisan-Jewish mother. In Rome, he’d played Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ Un tram che si chiama desiderio (a.k.a. A Streetcar Named Desire).

  In 1952, Gassman had married Winters, but at the time, Elizabeth met him, that short marriage was nearing its end. Gassman had a roving eye for beautiful women.

  Ten years older than Elizabeth, Gassman in his twenties could have played Romeo. Tall, with black curly hair, he appeared in a perfectly tailored, beige-colored suit from Rome. Although he was intelligent looking, he had not perfected his English yet.

  She had been warned by Director Vidor that Gassman didn’t like anything American, especially American girls. But for a man who detested American girls, he was gracious, charming, and solicitous to Elizabeth.

  He kissed her had, saying, “Lei e una grande artiste. Ho visto Un Posto del Sole.” She gathered that he was praising her performance in A Place in the Sun, the only movie of hers he’d ever seen. She’d never seen one of his movies, not even the celebrated Bitter Rice (1950) ( a.k.a. Riso Amaro; 1949), a film which had been condemned by the Catholic League of Decency.

  The next morning, when she entered her dressing room, she found it filled with yellow roses he had sent. He had obviously learned what her favorite flower was.

  Gassman had written a note (in English), perhaps with some assistance. “These roses must suffice until I can present my heart to you tonight. Shelley does not have to know. Yours forever, Vittorio.”

  After reading that note, Elizabeth told Vidor, “I’m in love. I crave romance. I don’t want to come home any more to that that dull, boring British gentleman stashed there.”

  As Elizabeth would later tell Roddy McDowall, “On my first date with Vittorio, we drove to Malibu and spent the night in some tacky motel room. Let’s face it: Those god damn nosy reporters would never think of looking for a world class movie star like Elizabeth Taylor in a hotbed motel.”

  “He’s a great lover,” she claimed. “During lovemaking, he yells out all sorts of things in Italian. They sound so endearing. I don’t know what he’s saying. For all I know, it’s ‘Take this, you bitch,’ but it sounds like Romeo wooing Juliet.”

  “I laugh at his linguistic mistakes, and I’m teaching him all the dirty words in English I know,” she said. “What’s wrong with Shelley? Didn’t she teach him the English word for fuck?”

  “His nickname for me is Primavera,” she said. “I already know that means Spring. He told me he wants for me to divorce Wilding and go live with him in Rome.”

  “He promises to teach me Italian. I can’t exactly see myself starring in some great epic in Rome, but who knows?”

  Gassman may have had a more accurate sense of her future than she did, except that when Cleopatra was made, he was nowhere around.

  “During the filming of Rhapsody, “Vittorio made love to me at least twice a day—sometimes in my dressing room, sometimes in that seedy Malibu motel room which, if I remember, was painted purple,” Elizabeth told Vidor. “The towels were thin and threadbare, so I bought luxurious red ones.”

  “I found we came from different cultures,” she said. “Michael went away with Bob Taylor for the weekend, and I invited Vittorio over for dinner. He adored my son. I just assumed he liked pasta, being Italian. I had orderd lasagna from some local eatery, with a pizza on the side. I’d put the food in the refrigerator and planned to warm it up for dinner. When he saw me removing the food from the refrigerator, he went ballistic. He told me that ‘electricity kills food.’ He claimed that fresh produce has to be bought every day and never refrigerated. Instead of the lasagna, he cooked some spaghetti for me and flavored it with just olive oil and fresh garlic. It was divine.”

  Later that night, before he retired to her bedroom, he played a record he’d brought to the house. It was a Neapolitan love song titled “Scalinetta,” whose name, roughly translated, meant “Little Steps Leading to Love.”

  “He began to discuss our upcoming marriage—presumably the marriage that would take place after some messy divorce details were handled. He said he wanted to take me to Portofino for our honeymoon.”

  Elizabeth shared details about her involvement with Gassman with very few of her friends, but included Roddy McDowall and Dick Hanley among those in whom she confided. She also revealed what was going on to her director, Charles Vidor, “because he would be a total fool not to see what was happening right in front of him.”

  Vittorio Gassman

  As the shooting ended, Gassman confided to Elizabeth that he wanted to take her away to Palm Springs for the weekend. As a cover-up, Elizabeth mendaciously told Wilding that she was going to go off with Roddy and some of his gay friends.

  To Roddy, she remembered that weekend as “one of the most passionate of my life. By the time Vittorio made love to me that final Monday morning, I was hopelessly, madly, crazily in love with him. For the first time in my life, I learned that a man’s armpits taste like ambrosia.”

  “Oh, baby,” Roddy said. “I could have told you that a long time ago.”

  During their drive back to Los Angeles, from whose airport he was scheduled to fly back to Rome, she said, “We did nothing but talk about our future. He even speculated about what our bambini would look like.”

  She still had a week’s work at MGM. “I didn’t go in until Tuesday. I found a note with one yellow rose. I was from Vittorio. Someone may have helped him with his English.”

  “My darling Elizabeth,

  On my dying day the last memory for me before I depart this earth will be the beauty of your face in the rosy glow of a California dawn. It was surely the light that inspired Leonardo da Vinci to paint the Mona Lisa. Some things are not meant to be.
But the glorious memory of you will linger on forever and ever until we meet again on some distant shore. There we will live and love together through eternity, but for the moment in this mad cesspool called earth, we must follow our separate paths until the road one day leads back to each other.

  Your amante through the ages.

  Vittorio”

  Shelley Winters divorced Gassman in 1954, the same year Rhapsody was released. It is not known if Winters became aware of her husband’s adulterous affair with Elizabeth. She certainly suspected and one night confronted Elizabeth about it at a party.

  Elizabeth staunchly denied it, falsely claiming that she’d fallen in love with the film’s second male lead, John Ericson. “If John’s new wife finds out, that marriage will be over before it begins.”

  Winters could not complain too bitterly about Gassman’s seductions outside marriage, since she was still carrying on with three bisexual actors—Marlon Brando, Farley Granger, and Burt Lancaster.

  In reviewing Rhapsody, a critic for The New York Herald Tribune wrote, “Elizabeth Taylor’s animation is only the animation of the doll with the strings being pulled behind the scenes. Even her evident and genuine beauty seems at times to be fake.”

  In marked contrast, Bosley Crowther, in an uncharacteristically supportive review in The New York Times got carried away in his overview of Rhapsody: “Her wind-blown hair frames her features like an ebony aureole and her large eyes and red lips glisten warmly in close-ups on the softly lighted screen. Any gent who would go for music with this radiant—and rich—Miss Taylor at hand is not a red-blooded American.”

  ***

  At long last, MGM took Michael Wilding off suspension, and he was told to report to Benny Thau’s office to discuss a new film project.

  Before he departed for his meeting, Elizabeth warned her husband, “Take my advice, don’t commit yourself until you’ve seen the script. He’ll talk you into some second-rate picture and make you think it’s Gone With the Wind.” This contradicted her previouis advice in which she had told him to “take anything thrown at you.”

  At MGM, after a long wait, he was finally ushered into Thau’s office. “Have I got a deal for you. Robert Taylor begged me to give him the role, but I turned the queer down. I said this part is for Michael Wilding. You’ll play a blind pianist opposite Joan Crawford in a script called Torch Song. I predict that it will be the hit of the year.”

  Fired by Harry Cohn from From Here to Eternity because of a dispute over wardrobe, Crawford was eager to do Torch Song (1953), after Benny Thau sent her the script. She signed a contract and agreed to return to MGM, after a decade-long absence, in her first full-length color film. [Because of some technical issue, her hair appeared in the final print as tangerine-colored.]

  In the film, Crawford played the role of Jenny Stewart, a part defined as a “witchy,” self-involved Broadway diva, who clashes with her blind pianist Tye Graham (as played by Wilding).

  She told Thau, “It’s a good part for a woman who no longer is a spring chicken.”

  Wilding didn’t want the role, but couldn’t risk going on suspension again. As a blind pianist, he accompanies Crawford, who was cast as a hard-as-nails Broadway musical star who chews up people for lunch.

  Crawford would later refer to Torch Song as “one of my best bad movies.:” At this stage in her career, she was forty-eight years old and hadn’t danced in fourteen years, even though her body was in remarkable shape. Fearing that her breasts had sagged as she neared the half-century mark, she insisted that wardrobe fit her with a “bullet brassiere.” Her singing voice, never very good even at its best, had to be dubbed by the relatively forgotten singer, India Adams, who sounded something like a pale and watered-down version of Marilyn Monroe.

  The director of the movie was Charles Walters, whose previous successes with Judy Garland included both Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), and Easter Parade (1948).

  There had been speculation that Crawford would try to seduce Wilding, but actually it was Director Walters who went after Elizabeth’s husband, although apparently he did not win the prize.

  This hilariously clichéd melodrama is viewed today chiefly by camp followers, often aging gays, who watch it just for the musical number where Crawford appears on the screen in blackface à la Al Jolson. Gig Young, whom Elizabeth had dated briefly, stars as the second male lead.

  Crawford sings “Two-Faced Woman” in blackface, although many of her loyal fans, embarrassed by her use of blackface, assert that she’s only wearing “tan-colored make-up” as a means of transforming herself into “merely the suggestion” of an Ebony Venus.

  During the 1930s, Crawford had fancied herself as “The Queen of MGM,” despite the fact that her chief rival, Norma Shearer, married at the time to studio boss Irving Thalberg, also claimed that title.

  On the occasion of her return to MGM, Crawford was given a royal welcome from stars past and present. As Director Walters said, “There were so many flowers, it looked like the funeral of a sitting U.S. president.” Ann Blyth, who had played Crawford’s daughter in Mildred Pierce (1945), sent beautiful orchids. Fred Astaire sent red roses. And Clark Gable, Crawford’s longtime lover, presented a basket of chocolate delicacies from Rome.

  Crawford refused to speak to Wilding other than a terse “Good morning,” followed at the end of the day by a staccato “Good evening.”

  Walters could not understand the source of Crawford’s enmity, since Wilding had never been anything but gracious to her. “I finally concluded that Wilding’s mistake was being Mr. Elizabeth Taylor.”

  Wilding’s first day on the set required him to kiss Crawford passionately as part of a love scene. He later told the press, “Kissing Crawford was like kissing Hitler.” That same line would be used by Tony Curtis, as it applied to Marilyn Monroe during the shooting of Some Like It Hot (1959).

  After she was thoroughly kissed, Crawford broke from him and marched over for a conference with Walters. She then retreated to her dressing room. Walters then approached Wilding, telling him that, “Miss Crawford says the scene will have to be reshot. Your right shoulder blocked her profile.”

  Crawford and Elizabeth, on occasion, would sleep with the same men, notably John F. Kennedy, Steve Cochran, Rock Hudson, and Tyrone Power. But Elizabeth did not have the slightest fear that the aging screen diva would move in on Wilding.

  When Walters visited Crawford in her dressing room, she opened the door completely nude, but was unable to seduce him, as Walters was more interested in the hot male lover he kept at home.

  Consequently, Crawford never seduced either Wilding or Walters, but turned her attentions instead to Gig Young, whom she found “extremely sexy.” She’d erroneously heard that Elizabeth had had a torrid affair with him, and she set out to conquer Elizabeth’s former boyfriend and not her husband. She invited Young on several occasions to her dressing room for a drink, but he kept rejecting her amorous advances. She reacted with fury, and he shot quickly upward on her “hate list.” As a means of retaliating against him, she arranged for the film’s director to cut his scenes to the minimum. “Since I didn’t produce a hard-on for her,” Young later said, “she castrated me.”

  The one star who didn’t slavishly toady to Crawford on the set was Elizabeth herself, who fancied herself as the new reigning queen of MGM. Elizabeth hadn’t spoken to Crawford since that time she’d visited her home, as arranged by Clark Gable, for “fashion advice” and had rejected her sexual advances.

  On four different occasions, Elizabeth visited Wilding for lunch, since she was shooting Rhapsody on a set located only a short distance away. Unlike the other stars paying elaborate homage to Crawford, Elizabeth ignored her. At one point, she walked right past her without speaking. Or, in Crawford’s words, “Princess Brat came swanning onto my set.”

  Crawford was furious, venting her rage to Walters and demanding that he “bar this little tramp from my set.”

  As a means of preserving peace, Walters talk
ed with both Wilding and Elizabeth, pleading with her not to come onto the set of Torch Song again.

  “If you want to have lunch with Mike, meet him in the commissary,” Walters said. “Your presence on the set is a painful reminder that the Queen of MGM has been dethroned.”

  “Dietrich hates me because I stole Mike from her, and Barbara Stanwyck detests me because Bob Taylor fucked me. The only bigtime screen diva who has not feuded with me is Bette Davis. But I’m sure that dispute lies in my future.”

  As regards that statement in particular, Elizabeth turned out to be a prophet.

  In later years, Crawford claimed, “Miss Taylor is a spoiled, indulgent child—a blemish on public decency.”

  ***

  Before its reincarnation in the mid-50s, Beau Brummell (1954) had previously been released as a silent film in 1924 starring John Barrymore. In the 1950s version, Stewart Granger played the fashion-conscious dandy, an adviser to an 18th-century Prince of Wales, as interpreted by Peter Ustinov. Elizabeth, in a wig and period costume, plays Lady Patricia, the female lead and Granger’s love interest. The costume epic was filmed in England during the summer of 1953.

  On the set, Granger said to his co-stars, “Here comes my friend, Elizabeth Taylor. She’s voluptuous in every way—big tits, big ass, big violet eyes, and a tiny rosebud mouth ideal for sucking dick. Just look at those bosoms— WHOOOA!”

  Back in Hollywood, Jean Simmons had to endure a four-month separation from Granger, who was still her husband at the time. Along with Michael Wilding, Victor Mature, Gene Tierney, and Peter Ustinov, she, too, had been cast in The Egyptian (1954), by director Michael Curtiz.

  In the same year, Ustinov appeared in both Beau Brummell and The Egyptian.

  Elizabeth asked Dick Hanley to visit the Los Angeles set of The Egyptian and relay all the gossip back to her during her involvement with Beau Brummell in England. Like a dutiful servant, he obeyed her. “Here’s the latest. Mature is fucking Gene Tierney—lucky gal. I heard that Stewart Granger is banging you in England, so it’s only fair that Jean is screwing your ever-so-stiff-and-formal husband, Michael Wilding. Don’t you just love Hollywood?”