“I feared that a scandal was brewing because of Elizabeth spending so much time with that Fisher boy,” Brooks said. “I confronted her. I don’t want to sound greedy, but I was afraid fans would stay away in droves if news got out that Eddie had become the surrogate Mike Todd in her life—yes, including the fulfillment of marital duties.”
The next day, Brooks shared Elizabeth’s response with Paul Newman. It was a shocker, and we have only Brooks’ word for this.
“I’ve known for months that Eddie is in love with me,” Elizabeth allegedly told Brooks. “Even Mike knew that, but he dismissed it as a harmless flirtation. ‘What red-blooded man on the planet wouldn’t fall for Elizabeth Taylor?’ he used to say. But I fear I’ve developed an attachment far more scandalous than Eddie Fisher. I think I’m falling in love with Mike Todd, Jr.”
Often, Elizabeth and Todd, Jr. discussed how the death of Todd Sr. could have been prevented. “I urged him to get rid of that fucking plane,” Todd Jr. said. “I just knew it wasn’t safe. I even gave him an F.A.A. survey to show him that a plane like that was dangerous unless a lot of money was spent on it to bring it up to standards. He wouldn’t listen. ‘I’m too tough to die,’ he told me. ‘I plan to be fucking Elizabeth when I’m eighty-five.’”
“One night she asked me to pull off my clothes and get into bed with her,” Todd Jr. said. “She couldn’t sleep, but I fell asleep since I was exhausted. Sometime in the early morning hours, I woke up with this sensation. She was giving me this fantastic blow-job. I knew it was wrong, but I was too far gone. I had to go for it, and I did. I felt guilty afterward, though.”
“It was a bizarre time in my life,” Todd Jr. told Dick Hanley. “Elizabeth put my Dad’s pajamas under her pillow. She refused to change the sheets where he’d spent his last night with her. She said she wanted to keep them as long as she could, and as long as his odor remained.”
After a few weeks, Elizabeth was seen with Arthur Loew, Jr. Roddy Mc-Dowall, who visited Elizabeth frequently at the time, told friends, “Elizabeth was not romantically interested in Arthur. She was trying to throw the bloodhounds off the scent, which was of Mike Todd, Jr.”
Elizabeth’s agent, Kurt Frings, said, “She went after Eddie Fisher, all right. No question about it. She tried Mike Todd, Jr., first, but his wife Sarah finally said no and put a stop to it before it could develop too far. She got young Mike out of town fast before Elizabeth could move in on him any more than she had already.”
“I was a fool at the time,” Fisher recalled. “One night in the living room, I saw Arthur Loew, Jr. pull off Elizabeth’s shoes and sensually massage her feet. She always said, ‘Art and I are just friends.’ There are all kinds of friends. Like an idiot, I urged her to spend less time with Loew and more time with Mike’s son. That was like sending an innocent lamb to bed down with a she-wolf. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was in love with Elizabeth but wasn’t ready to admit it to myself.”
In later years, Todd Jr. expressed no regret for his brief, rather tumultuous involvement with Elizabeth. “Basically, she was and is a warmhearted, thoughtful, and loving person,” he said. “But because of her background as a child star, she can also be spoiled and self-centered. She has the courage, nerve, and ability to get what she wants and sooner or later to overcome any obstacles to her happiness.”
It was his wife, Sarah, who rescued Todd Jr. from Elizabeth’s clutches. Todd Jr. admitted, “I was very uncomfortable and thought my presence was no longer helping her to reconcile herself to my father’s death, nor was it improving my state of mind.”
In April, Todd’s will was filed for probate. His estate was said to be worth $5 million, but most of that would be consumed by debt. The estate was divided between Elizabeth and Todd Jr., with him receiving his inheritance outright. Her share was placed in trust, an arrangement which had originally been conceived as a means of providing her with an income for life.
Many casual observers thought Todd had left her a rich widow. But as Todd Jr. discovered, her late husband and his father had left a tangled estate. It would take dozens of lawsuits and years to settle. She faced immediate problems with the Internal Revenue Service, as Todd owed thousands in back taxes. Todd Jr. joined with her in filing a $5 million lawsuit against the airplane company which had leased Todd the doomed plane. Negligence was charged. It took five years to settle the claim. In the end, $27,000 was awarded directly to Liza Todd.
Even after they separated as lovers, Todd Jr. and Elizabeth continued a friendship and a business involvement as heirs to Todd Sr.’s estate. Their chief asset was Around the World in 80 Days, which by 1960 had begun to show its age, belonging, artistically at least, to the transient fads of the 1950s.
Todd Sr. had already managed to squander most of the gross from the film on his worldwide promotion tours and other stunts. Elizabeth and Todd Jr. were lured into believing that the film would eventually earn $85 to $100 million, but the profit fell far below that. Domestically, it earned only $23 million.
In 1968, with Elizabeth’s approval, 80 Days was re-released, but brought in less than a million dollars. In 1971, Todd Jr. sold it as a telecast on CBS-TV for $2 million, although Todd Sr. had always vowed it would never be shown on TV.
Back taxes on the Todd estate were not settled until 1971. “After everything was paid off, there wasn’t a lot in the kitty,” Dick said. Todd Sr.’s once vast estate was reduced to just $13,000.
Even though, presumably, Todd Jr. was no longer sleeping with Elizabeth, he still tried to take over her career, something his father had done. At one point, Todd Jr. called a press conference, announcing plans for another roadshow extravaganza evocative of the most lavish of the events associated with 80 Days. “It’s called Busman’s Holiday, and it’s going to be spectacular. Elizabeth will be the star.”
When Todd Jr. was producing the first and last Smell-O-Vision film, Scent of Mystery (later retitled Holiday in Spain), Elizabeth agreed to appear in an un-billed cameo. The film, a so-called mystery, starred Peter Lorre, Paul Lukas, and Denholm Elliott.
Fans of Elizabeth had to wait till near the end of the film for her brief appearance as “The Real Sally Kennedy.” Her moment on the screen was greeted with gusts of perfume pumped through the air-conditioning system. Many of her fans coughed and choked.
The movie had opened with images of a butterfly flitting through a sweet-smelling peach grove. Later on, a barrel of wine fell off a cart and rolled down a hill, smashing at the bottom, again to an accompanying odor.
In the advertising campaigns associated with his breakthrough in film technology, Todd Jr. announced “First they moved (1895)! Then they talked (1927)! Now they smell (1960)!”
After sitting through the movie, Fisher told Elizabeth, “The scent emanating from that flick wasn’t Chanel No. 5. It stunk like shit.”
Initially, the film was shown only in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.
“If Todd had lived, I think she would have divorced him by the time she shot Cleopatra in Rome,” said Dick. “The affair would have burned out by then because it was too intense. Also, he would have driven her into bankruptcy the way he did with his second wife, Joan Blondell.”
Todd Jr. also doubted whether the marriage might have lasted forever. “The marriage might have lasted only if Dad never had a financial downturn. What if Don Quixote had flopped? Todd-AO faded with the fads of the 1950s. I suspect Elizabeth would have gone on to other lovers, especially Richard Burton, who would have lured her away from my Dad instead of taking her from Eddie Fisher.”
Elizabeth said she could no longer stand living in the Schuyler Road house. She left her children with Loew and moved into a bungalow on the grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Her former beau, Loew was always there for Elizabeth, always willing to take care of her children and solve their many problems while she rushed off to her next adventure in New York or Europe. “I adore Elizabeth,” he said, “and am only too glad to take care of her k
ids.”
***
Quite by chance, the author of this biography, in Ireland in the mid-1970s with travel writer Stanley Haggart, once encountered Todd Jr. in a Dublin pub. He’d come in for a glass of gin and ended up having quite a few.
Todd Jr., spoke frankly about his failed dreams of becoming a big-time showman like his father. During the course of the evening, and after his sixth gin, he admitted that he had once fallen in love with Elizabeth. “I was the one who pulled away,” he admitted, “because I knew our marriage—which would have been possible only after I divorced my-then wife Sarah—would have destroyed Elizabeth’s career. Look what happened to another Oscar winner, Gloria Grahame, when she married her stepson, the son of Nicholas Ray.”
Todd Jr., after suffering for years from diabetes—he even had one leg amputated—eventually died on May 5, 2002 in Ireland, the victim of lung cancer.
***
Faced with a mounting pile of bills arriving daily from episodes associated with Todd’s promotions and travel worldwide, Elizabeth was also left with three children to rear—two sons from Michael Wilding and the little girl, Liza, from Todd himself.
Elizabeth returned to work on April 14, 1958, at the MGM lot in Culver City. Emerging from a month of seclusion, she had been driven to MGM by Dick. She had not even bothered to phone Richard Brooks. In the back of her limousine, she waited for him to come out of a sound stage and greet her. Dick had gone inside to search for him.
After he got into the limo with her, Brooks studied her face carefully. Her eyes were still red, but she claimed that she was able to go to work. “Mike loved me in the picture, at least what he saw of the rushes, and I want to finish Cat for him. Besides, it’s a hell of a good role, and a gal doesn’t get a lot of those in one lifetime.”
Michael Todd, Jr.
He escorted her to her dressing room, which the crew the next day filled with violets to match the color of her eyes.
On her first day back, Paul Newman emerged from his dressing room to greet her. She kissed him gently on the lips. “Thanks for being there for me when I needed you,” she said.
“She seemed very practical,” Newman recalled. “She had to get back to work. She needed the money.”
Newman was the gallant gentleman, and it was obvious to him that she did not want to continue their relationship after her one-night stand with him. She’d reached out for him in loneliness and desperation. As he told her, “If you need me, I’m here for you. Call me and I’ll come running.”
Throughout the remainder of the filming of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman provided Elizabeth with strong moral—but not physical—support. Their moment of intimacy, conceived and executed at perhaps the worst moment of her life, seemed to have been relegated to a far and distant memory within both of their brains.
In later years, Elizabeth expressed gratitude to him for his good manners during the conclusion of the shooting of Cat. “He was most courtly to me,” she told friends, “a real gentleman. If I were about to have a nervous breakdown, he was by my side, guiding me through a scene.”
“I think Elizabeth gave her greatest performance in Cat,” he later claimed. “She turned out to be a real trouper.”
That was his public position. Privately, he told Brooks, “I really wish I was a free man. In all my life, I never wanted anything as much. To be the man lying in bed with Elizabeth when she woke up in the morning. Those violet eyes gazing into my baby blues.”
Newman remembered with horror the day he sat in a viewing room with Elizabeth, Brooks, and Tennessee Williams. The playwright cringed throughout the screening, and Newman kept shifting nervously in his seat. When the screening was over and the lights came up, Tennessee rose to his feet.
He looked first at Newman. “You looked fabulous without your shirt,” Tennessee said. “One tasty morsel. And Elizabeth, you looked so sexy, no gay man could turn you down.” Then he turned to Brooks. “You emasculated my play. You bastard! I’m going to urge the public to stay away from it.” Then he stormed out of the studio.
On September 20, 1958, when Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened in theaters around the country, Elizabeth was sternly being denounced as “the other woman.” Tabloid fodder for the press, she was accused of breaking up the marriage of America’s so-called sweethearts, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher.
But instead of seguéing “notorious Liz,” as she was called, into box office poison, publicity generated by the illicit romance had movie-goers lining up around the country to gaze upon “this Jezebel.”
Cat was nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay (in spite of Tennessee’s assault), Best Director, Best Actor (Newman himself), and Best Actress (in spite of the negative press out there on Elizabeth).
At the Academy Awards, Newman faced stiff competition from Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones and Tony Curtis, also in The Defiant Ones. It can be assumed that two nominees for the same picture cancel each other out. Therefore, Newman had to measure up against David Niven in Separate Tables and Spencer Tracy in The Old Man and the Sea.
Eventually, Niven, playing a bogus war hero and child molester, walked off with the Oscar. Newman modestly admitted to friends, “I didn’t deserve the win this time. Maybe next time.”
Ironically, Elizabeth lost to Susan Hayward for I Want to Live, a script that Newman had urged Hayward to make. That was not because he really wanted her to interpret the role, but because he hoped she’d reject The Three Faces of Eve so that Joanne Woodward could get the role.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was MGM’s biggest hit of the year, and polls in the autumn named Elizabeth as the number one star in Hollywood. “In this case,” she said, “notoriety works in my favor. Apparently, the public wants to go into a darkened movie house and gaze upon the scarlet woman.”
With the film wrapped, she flew to New York to make up with Monty, but spent far more time with Fisher, who was fulfilling contractual engagements on the East Coast.
She told Dick Hanley and Monty, “I’m starting my life all over again. God knows where the path will lead me this time.”
***
Contrary to denials, Elizabeth had been sexually intimate with Eddie Fisher before the blossoming of their love affair into full bloom in Manhattan. He booked a site at Essex House, on Central Park South, and she booked an even more luxurious suite at the Plaza Hotel.
Partly because of such subterfuges, their romance initially escaped the attention of the press, although there were reports about how they were from time to time sighted together. Since Fisher was widely recognized as Mike Todd’s best friend, it was assumed that he was merely offering comfort to the Widow Todd. But as it turned out, he was offering far more than comfort.
At the Plaza, after a night of love-making with Fisher, Elizabeth received her first call of the day. It was from Cary Grant. The bisexual actor had always had a crush on her, and he invited her to share an LSD trip with him. She turned him down.
She’d heard from friends that Grant’s popularity at the box office had waned as he moved deeper into middle age. Privately, Louella Parsons told her confidants that “Cary wants to marry Elizabeth as a means of beefing up his heterosexual credentials.”
Elizabeth said to friends, “Cary came on to me several times, but I never gave him a tumble. Everybody from Noël Coward to Doris Duke told me he’s not very well endowed.”
In her dates with Fisher in New York, she often used Dick Hanley as her “beard.” He warned her, “You don’t need Eddie right now. You really don’t. Save your reputation and let me take care of his sexual needs.”
“Oh, Dick,” she said, “You really are so precious. What would I do without you?”
But instead of accepting Dick’s advice, she spent the next four days and nights alone with Fisher in the bedroom of her suite. “Talk about getting to know someone,” she later told Dick, “I feel more like a woman than I’ve felt since Mike died.”
On Fisher’s thirtieth birthday, Elizabeth presented him w
ith Todd’s money clip, which read:
BEING POOR IS A STATE OF MIND.
I’VE BEEN BROKE LOTS OF TIMES
BUT I’VE NEVER BEEN POOR.
He recalled, “I can’t ever forget how her eyes burned into my heart that day: I felt her need for me from the depths of my soul. My feelings were identical to hers.”
Todd had been an older man—forty-nine years old at the time of his death—but Fisher was young, thirty, and passionate. “We made love three, four, five times a day,” he said of the weeks of their love affair. “We made love in the swimming pool, on Mexican beaches, under waterfalls, and in the back seat of a limousine on the way home from a party. There is nothing more erotic than Elizabeth Taylor and a moonlit beach. We fit together as perfect sexually as we did mentally.”
A domestic drama that reverberated around the world: Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher, and Debbie Reynolds
Born in Philadelphia in 1928, Fisher was descended from Russian Jewish immigrants. He referred to his father as “a nasty, abusive man, a tyrant. And they say I’m no actor,” Fisher said. “Imagine me having to sing ‘Oh! My Pa-Pa!’ and look adoringly at the man I hated smiling back at me from ringside.”
Sometimes referred to as “The Jewish Sinatra,” Fisher was four years older than Elizabeth. A popular teenage idol, he was good looking and boyish, although Mike Todd, Jr., claimed, “He didn’t have much upstairs. His talents lay much farther south…and I’m talking Deep South!”
“Eddie was not just Mike Todd’s best friend,” said Dick Hanley. “He worshipped the man and tried to emulate him. Mike would order first in a restaurant, and Eddie would order the same. They drank the same liquor and fucked the same women. In time, they’d even marry the same woman.”
The press called him, “the golden boychik of mainstream pop” or the “dimpled troubadour from Philadelphia.” He rose to the top tier of America’s entertainment industry between 1950 and 1954, a period which some social historians define as the most tepid and conformist five years in the history of 20th century music. Nineteen of his songs reached the Top Ten. When he was drafted into the Army during the Korean War, President Harry S Truman defined him as, “my favorite PFC.”
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