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

by Darwin Porter

  Dr. John Davis examined her and asserted that she suffered from “a congenital anomaly of the spine.” To alleviate the pain in her lower back caused by a dysfunctional sciatic nerve, she took heavy doses of Novocaine.

  One scene in Giant called for Elizabeth “to do a lot of jumping and twisting on a bed.” Her always-sensitive back exploded in pain again, as she suffered a ruptured intervertebral disc. She was shot with Novocaine and Hydrocortisone and also given Demerol and Meticorten. “I was a god damn walking pharmacy,” she claimed.

  Stevens didn’t believe in any of her illnesses, calling them “psychosomatic.” On August 12, she returned to the set on crutches.

  ***

  Stevens called Dean’s first shot with Elizabeth on June 3, 1955, “a day that will live in infamy in the annals of cinema history.” It was filmed on an open set at the Worth Evans Ranch, which Stevens had temporarily rented. It was the site of the famous scene where Dean was depicted with a rifle hoisted over his shoulders—he called it “my crucifixion pose.”

  Time and time again, he flubbed his lines. Watching the proceedings, Dennis Hopper said, “That was one nervous queen. He was fucking up big time with another queen (i.e., Elizabeth) of Hollywood.”

  In front of at least 250 onlookers, Dean ruined take after take by freezing up. A total of sixteen shots failed. Suddenly, he broke from the set and walked over to a wire fence in front of the assembled population of Marfa, some of whom had skipped school to attend this first ceremonial film shoot. As everyone looked on, Dean unzipped his jeans and hauled out his penis. Hopper claimed it looked about four inches soft. Shock waves were heard from the crowd as Dean took what he called “a horse piss.”

  He later told Hopper, “I knew if I could piss in front of some two thousand (sic) people, I could do anything. I’m a Method actor.” He returned to the set and did the scene perfectly in one take. Leaving the set, he turned to Elizabeth, “I’m cool, man. It’s cool.”

  Elizabeth later told Dick Hanley, “Jimmy and I in Texas were at first very suspicious of each other. We circled each other like two animals of prey. To him, I was just another Hollywood star, all bosom and no brains. To me, he was a would-be intellectual New York Method actor. We were not prepared to dig each other at all.”

  “But after a while, we found we were just two human beings, and we became intimate friends that involved tender, loving sex in the beginning, none of that kinky shit that Rock talked about. But, as in the case with Rock, we decided that we could hold each other, protect each other from the cold winds, but as friends, not as lovers.”

  Evoking Rock’s relationship with Elizabeth, Dean engaged in playful games with her. “Two kids on the playground,” Stevens called their intimacy.

  However, during moments of manic giddiness, Dean had a tendency to go too far. One day, he grabbed Elizabeth, picked her up off her feet, and turned her upside down so that her skirt fell over her head, exposing her “unmentionable” regions to photographers.

  As she later told Stevens, “Fortunately, unlike Marilyn Monroe on most occasions, I wore my panties that day, or else my twat would be hanging on every bathroom wall in every man’s toilet in America.”

  To Elizabeth, Dean always remained a mystery, but she came to love him. “Sometimes, Jimmy and I would sit up until three in the morning, talking, and he would tell me about his past life, his conflicts, and some of his loves and tragedies. And the next day it was almost as if he didn’t want to recognize me, or to remember that he had revealed so much of himself the night before. And so he would pass me and ignore me, or just give me a cursory nod of the head. And then it took him a day or two to become my friend again. I found all that hard to understand.”

  He told Elizabeth, “I would have been shot down by some yellow boy in Korea, but I escaped the draft—blame my flat feet, bad eyesight, and butt-fucking.”

  Shortly before his death, Dean was said to have confided his most painful secrets to Elizabeth, sordid details of his life he shared with no other. One of those secrets was revealed after Elizabeth’s death in 2011 by writer Keven Ses-sums in The Daily Beast. Elizabeth had granted Sessums an interview in 1997.

  “I’m going to tell you something, but it’s off the record until I die,” she told Sessums. “When Jimmy was eleven, he began to be molested by his minister. I think that haunted him the rest of his life. In fact, I know it did.”

  Dean biographers have long suspected there was a sexual relationship with the Rev. James DeWeerd, a Wesleyan pastor in Fairmount, Indiana, who had a penchant for young boys.

  The secret that Elizabeth never shared, perhaps because it would portray Dean in a harsh light, was that as he aged, he became a child molester himself.

  When Hudson learned that Elizabeth was having an affair with Dean, he jokingly asked her, “Did he piss on you, or did you piss on him?”

  “Let’s just call it a tinkle-winkle,” she said.

  For sex, after his break with Hudson, Dean turned to local cowboys who worked on the film. The cowboys Dean befriended taught him rope tricks and invited him to shoot rabbits with them, followed by some male-on-male bonding. He confided to Elizabeth, “Not all Texas men have big dicks.”

  Dean had told Stevens, “Sal Mineo has the look of the angels” and would be perfect to play Angel Obregon II, the son of poor Mexican immigrants. The director had agreed with Dean’s assessment of Mineo’s talent and cast him in a small but key role in Giant.

  Mineo had no scenes with Dean in Giant. They became lovers on the set of Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Mineo even bought a rebuilt Mercury like the car Dean had driven in Rebel.

  Mineo later said, “I didn’t really become friends with Elizabeth until Roddy McDowall and I appeared together in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), a big-screen retelling of the epic of Jesus, from his birth through a cinematic reworking of the Resurrection. It was directed by George Stevens, who’d directed me in Giant. Then I became close to Elizabeth. Roddy told me many stories about her. He’d even taken nude photographs of her. He also told me that Richard Burton in Rome during the making of Cleopatra was fucking him before he discovered that banging Elizabeth was more fun.”

  Stevens had offered Elizabeth a cameo role playing Mary Magdalene in The Greatest Story Ever Told. “Wasn’t she that whore who seduced Christ? Hell, I’d be laughed off the screen. Get someone else to play your whore. I read you’ve cast John Wayne as a Roman centurion who oversees the crucifixion of Christ. George, are you on something?”

  Sal Mineo

  ***

  On the set of Giant in Texas, a studio underling rushed Elizabeth the latest edition of Confidential magazine, which ran the headline: WHEN LIZ TAYLOR’S AWAY, MIKE WILL PLAY. It detailed the night Michael Wilding picked up two female strippers at a club in Hollywood and brought them back to the home he shared with Elizabeth in Beverly Hills. In the scandal’s aftermath, Elizabeth told Stevens, “Whether it’s true or not, a woman can’t let an indiscretion break up a marriage.”

  Of course, considering her affairs, she was in no position to chastise Wilding.

  Flying to Texas with their two sons to check up on Elizabeth, Wilding was greeted with a blaring headline—MICHAEL WORRIED ABOUT LIZ AND ROCK.

  When Wilding with his two sons arrived in Marfa, he went to find Elizabeth, perhaps to remind her she was a wife and mother. Not finding her, he was told that she was last seen driving off with a young man.

  “Where in hell do you drive to in this one-horse town?” he asked.

  Instead of Elizabeth and Hudson, Wilding encountered Dean. “I have to be very frank with you,” Dean told Wilding. “I’ve fallen in love with your wife. She’s going to divorce you—and marry me. But, remember, you had your chance. My turn now.”

  He was so shocked that he told Stewart Granger back in Hollywood, “I could only conclude that Dean was poking me in the ribs. He could not have been serious. Elizabeth will no more marry Dean than I’ll take the Queen Mother for my next bride.” />
  On his first night in Marfa, Wilding was allowed to stay at Elizabeth’s rented home, but she didn’t return that night.

  Nick Adams, Dean’s longtime lover, had arrived in Marfa, and Stevens spread the rumor that Dean had fixed Elizabeth up with Adams. “He’s living proof that big things come in small packages,” Dean told Elizabeth.

  Knowing that Wilding would be alone that evening for dinner, Dean brought over some West Texas chili and cold beer.

  Over the chili, Wilding pointedly asked Dean, “Your plans to marry Elizabeth shocked me. I was told you were strictly homo.”

  A rebellious three-way: Taylor, Hudson, and Dean in Giant

  “I don’t want to go through life with one hand tied behind my back,” Dean replied. “Depending on how much rain falls on any given night, I can go either way—male or female. What does it really matter, come to think of it? Sometimes I reward people who do favors for me with sex. I recently flew to Key West to fuck Tennessee Williams. I virtually made him sign a blood oath that he would lobby to get me to play the male lead in all the future adaptations of his plays.”

  “Smart career move, dear boy,” Wilding told him.

  At the end of their chili supper, Dean said, “Elizabeth is likely to be engaged for the rest of the evening. In that case, would you like to go back to my place and fuck me instead?”

  “A tempting offer, but I’m the babysitter tonight,” Wilding said. “Give me a rain check.”

  Wilding claimed that he was still in love with Elizabeth, “but I found the daily tremors of living with such a volcanic creature more and more difficult. After my failure to make it as a star in Hollywood, I felt like James Mason in that role of a has-been in A Star Is Born with Judy Garland.”

  Elizabeth and Wilding quarreled every day they were in Marfa, and he soon flew from El Paso back to Los Angeles, taking their two sons with him.

  “I knew it was over at that time,” he said. “All that remained was bringing down the final curtain.”

  ***

  Back in Hollywood, Elizabeth continued her friendship with Dean, and also “recharged the batteries in my love for Rock, who was going through a troubling time and needed me.”

  As influenced by his gay agent, Henry Willson, Hudson agreed to marry Phyllis Gates, his lesbian secretary. Willson feared exposure of Hudson’s homosexuality in an upcoming article in Confidential magazine.

  During his disastrous marriage to Gates, Elizabeth and Wilding often entertained them at dinner. Gates recalled that Hudson spent most of those evening talking to Elizabeth, while she tried to amuse and entertain Wilding. She claimed that at one dinner in her kitchen, Wilding whispered in her ear, “You know, Phyllis, I wish I had met somebody like you. You’re the person I should have married.” He emphasized that by giving her a pat on the ass.

  Sham intimacy within a sham marriage Phyllis Gates with Rock Hudson

  Gates later wrote a sham memoir entitled My Husband, Rock Hudson. In it, she describes scenes of Hudson’s “passionate” love making. But Hudson reportedly told Elizabeth one night that the marriage had never been consummated.

  “When I returned to Hollywood, Michael and I visited Jimmy at least three times at his little house in San Fernando Valley, and he came to see us,” Elizabeth said. “He seemed engulfed in loneliness The first time he invited us for dinner, he heated up two cans of beans—and that was that. We sat and talked and listened to his music. A few nights later, he came over to our house. He loved our Siamese cats. I knew he wanted something that belonged to me, and I gave him one of the cats. He loved that cat from the very beginning and named it Marcus.”

  On another night, Dean invited Elizabeth for a ride in the pride of his life, a new Porsche Spyder nicknamed “Little Bastard,” that had cost him $5,000, the most money he’d ever spent on anything in his life.

  He took her for a spin through Beverly Hills and rode up and down Sunset Boulevard past The Strip. He turned left onto Hollywood Boulevard, passing Grauman’s Chinese Theater. When they passed the theater with its cement casts of the hands and feet of the stars, Dean told her he was considering having a cast of his erect cock made in the cement instead.

  The next day, Dean dropped in at Elizabeth’s home to tell her goodbye, claiming that he was driving his Porsche, accompanied with a friend, to the road race at Salinas. The date was September 30, 1955.

  “Whatever you do, Jimmy, be safe—just be safe,” she cautioned him.

  At Warner Brothers in Burbank, Stevens had invited some of his stars, including Elizabeth, Hudson, and Baker, to watch the rushes for Giant. At one point, there was an urgent ringing of the telephone. Stevens got up to answer it. Then the cast heard him say, “No, my god. When? Are you sure?”

  As Baker remembered it, “The picture froze. The lights shot up. We turned and looked at George. The phone dangled in his hand. He was white and motionless. Death was present in that room. ‘There’s been a car crash,’ he said. ‘Jimmy Dean has been killed.’”

  An hour later, Elizabeth learned the painful details.

  At 5:45pm, Dean and his passenger, Rulf Wütherich, a German immigrant who knew members of the Porsche family, were speeding Dean’s Porsche Spyder during their approach to an intersection of Highways 41 and 466, one mile east of Cholame in San Luis Obispo County.

  Some reports claimed that Dean was going 120 miles an hour when he saw a black-and-white Ford sedan making a leisurely left turn onto the highway. It was too late for him to stop to avoid a collision with Donald Turnupseed, a student at California Polytechnic.

  The student escaped with a broken nose. Dean’s passenger, Wütherich, was thrown clean out of the car. He suffered a broken jaw and other injuries, but, unlike Dean, he survived.

  In contrast, Dean’s head was almost severed from his body. He was DOA at Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital. The doctor who signed his death certificate had called Warner Brothers in Burbank.

  In the aftermath of Dean’s death, Wilding sat up until dawn with Elizabeth, “who sobbed the night away.” Not respecting her grief, Stevens demanded that she show up for work the next day to shoot a final scene.

  “That sod!” she shouted at Wilding. “The heartless sod!”

  Although she could barely manage it, Elizabeth showed up as instructed on the set. She was still given to crying fits, but she stumbled through the scene as best she could, with a lot of help from her make-up artist. At the end of the day, she turned to Stevens. “This is the last time I’ll ever work for a god damn ghoul like you!”

  The next day she collapsed, complaining of abdominal pains. An ambulance was rushed to the set and, with dome lights flashing, took her to the hospital. She stubbornly remained there for two weeks, delaying some retakes and holding up production, which faced mounting costs because of her absence.

  Before his death, during the filming of Dean’s final scenes, he had mumbled and in some cases had been virtually incoherent. Stevens called back Nick Adams, Dean’s former lover, who could do a perfect imitation of his voice, for dubbing the sound track, where appropriate, of Dean’s voice.

  One night at three o’clock in the morning, when Elizabeth returned home, she received an urgent phone call from Monty Clift, who was in Los Angeles at the time. He sounded drunk and drugged. Through his slurred words, she understood him to say, “With Jimmy gone, I see no reason to go on living.”

  His words shocked her. At that point she was unaware that Monty had had such a strong bond with Dean.

  “Monty! Monty!” she shouted at him. “Live for me. Live for your Bessie Mae. Have you taken sleeping pills? I’ll be right over.”

  When she arrived at Monty’s apartment, she discovered that he had not taken pills or cut his wrists. But he was drugged and had thrown up on his red satin sheets. She spent the night with him, often cuddling him in her arms like a protective mother, even though he was twelve years older than she was.

  Late the following morning, he confessed to her something he’d never told her
before. “Like so many others, I was in love with Jimmy.”

  ***

  Leaving George Stevens with almost a million feet of film to edit into an appropriate running time for a movie, Elizabeth flew to Europe and on to Morocco. Michael Wilding had been cast as the second male lead in Zarak (1956), an action-adventure film co-starring Victor Mature (the Afghan outlaw who saves the life of a British officer at the cost of his own) and the Swedish bomb-shell, the big-busted Anita Ekberg.

  There was speculation as to why Elizabeth went to Morocco. Ostensibly, it was viewed as perhaps a last-ditch attempt to save her marriage. Dick Hanley took a more cynical view. “The marriage at this point could not be saved. If she wanted to save anything, it was to save Victor Mature from the clutches of Anita Ekberg. At that time in her life, Elizabeth had a deep crush on Vic. But then who wouldn’t go for him?”

  Before her departure for Morocco, Elizabeth had visited MGM to discuss her next assignment. There, she ran into the 1940s swimming star Esther Williams, who had taught her how to swim when she was fourteen years old. Williams said, “I don’t know if Victor Mature is having an affair with that Ekberg woman or not. But I’ve known Victor. Sex with him is like a force of nature.”

  Elizabeth later relayed that quote to Dick Hanley: “Telling me that is like preaching to the choir. What Esther doesn’t know, presumably, is that I have also sampled the love-making techniques of Fernando Lamas. The very mention of his name seems to send a thrill through her.” (As it happened, Williams later married Fernando Lamas).

  From the day of her arrival in Morocco, Elizabeth quarreled with Wilding. She also detested the country, calling it “a horrible, filthy, and smelly place with sewage running through the streets.” She was followed by street boys wherever she went, and later compared her experience there with “all those young boys pursuing Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer” (1959).