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

by Darwin Porter

  ***

  After London, where she’d filmed the interiors of Suddenly, Last Summer, Elizabeth’s next picture was to be shot in Hollywood. Accompanied by Eddie Fisher, she returned to her old stamping grounds at MGM. According to the terms of her contract, she owed them one final picture, a film that would be entitled Butterfield 8.

  On September 9, 1959, she and Fisher moved into two rented bungalows on the grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel. She also moved in her three children, along with their nannies.

  She had not yet turned thirty, and already she’d reached a crossroads in her life. Like many stars in the late 1950s, including James Stewart, she was going independent and freeing herself from the influence of Louis B. Mayer and MGM, which had been a stern parent to her since she was a little girl and had first come to work for them.

  She’d always detested Louis B. Mayer, but he was now dead (1957). Now that he no longer controlled her professional life, she attacked him as a “bigoted vulgarian.” To certain of her friends, such as Shelley Winters and Janet Leigh, she claimed that Mayer had tried to molest her when she was a little girl. There is evidence that she made up this charge after Mayer was gone. During her experiences with him, she’d never leveled such a claim. Neither had she told Sara or Francis. Her accusations appear to be untrue. It seemed to be a way of presenting herself as a victim of the studio which had held such power over her.

  When she did arrive at MGM to make her final film, she gave Mayer a backhanded compliment. “If Louis B. were still alive, I wouldn’t be playing a whore in Butterfield 8.”

  ***

  In one of the bungalows, Elizabeth and Fisher entertained Michael Wilding and his current wife, the British socialite, Susan Nell. As part of what would turn out to be a very rare occasion, Debbie Reynolds, the following night, dropped off Fisher’s two young children, Carrie and Todd, as a means of helping to form friendships within their “reorganized” family circle.

  Elizabeth had been back in Los Angeles for less than a week when an invitation arrived to join four-hundred of the top stars in Hollywood to greet Nikita Khrushchev, who was paying a visit to 20th Century Fox where Can-Can was being shot with Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine.

  Elizabeth and Fisher watched as “Richard Burton made an ass of himself” when he threatened to rush to the head table and attack the Soviet dictator for “his malicious attack on capitalism.”

  The following day, a surprise offer arrived for her to appear in an epic even before she’d begun serious talks about her final film at MGM.

  Word had spread across Hollywood that Elizabeth was making her last film for MGM and would be free after that to accept offers from other studios. Nearly every major studio had a movie that might have been suitable for her, but the biggest offer had come in from 20th Century Fox.

  Producer Walter Wanger and Spyros Skouras, the head of 20th Century Fox, had been in production on their upcoming movie Cleopatra for two years. Originally, they had envisioned a fairly inexpensive movie, even using some of the sets featured in the 1917 version of Cleopatra, a film that had starred the silent screen vamp, Theda Bara.

  Joan Collins was at the head of the list of possible stars who might bring Cleopatra to life again. Two Italian beauties, Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, were also in the running. Before settling on Elizabeth as the lead, Fox had also suggested Audrey Hepburn and later, Marilyn Monroe. Skouras, however, thought Elizabeth should play Cleopatra.

  Months later, when Pandro S. Berman at MGM learned about the stars being considered for Cleopatra, he said, “Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn, presumably in a dark wig, would be the worst casting mistakes in the history of Hollywood. Even Elizabeth Taylor is a bit of a stretch.”

  Dick Hanley went by Fox and picked up a copy of the original script. In bed with a headache, Elizabeth asked him to read it to her. Drinking champagne, she sat patiently through the entire reading, only commenting at the end.

  “That is pure, unadulterated shit,” she told Dick. “I hear they want Peter Finch to play Julius Caesar. He’s a hot number. Who do they want to play Marc Antony?”

  “That good-looking hunk, Stephen Boyd,” he said.

  “Boyd is gay, Michael Wilding told me, so you’ll get to cash in on that,” she said.

  “What do you want me to tell Skouras?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to see a headline—LIZ TAYLOR NIXES CLEO—so tell him I’ll make the fucking stinker, but only for a million dollars.”

  He whistled at the amount, as it was considered a staggering sum at the time.

  When Dick delivered her demand the following day, Skouras bellowed so loud he could almost be heard across the Fox lot. He told his staff, “Any hundred dollar a week call girl can play that whore, Cleopatra.”

  However, in a huddle with Wanger, he suddenly changed his mind. “We’ll increase the budget to three million and use Hollywood’s favorite whore, Miss Taylor herself. Should we keep in the scene where Cleo got fucked by forty-two of her male servants in just one long night?”

  Elizabeth needed money and her Austrian agent, Kurt Frings, promised to get it for her once she finished one more picture at MGM, according to the terms of her contract.

  His clients included Audrey Hepburn, sex kitten Brigitte Bardot, and Lucille Ball, who was the queen of 1950s television. Elizabeth envied Hepburn for taking home $350,000 for her appearance in War and Peace in 1957.

  Simultaneous with the details associated with the Cleopatra project, Frings began to negotiate a deal for Elizabeth to star in Two for the Seesaw, a play that had brought fame to Anne Bancroft on Broadway. There was talk of paying Elizabeth half a million dollars, the largest salary a movie actress had ever received.

  Producer Samuel Marx urged her not to accept the part she’d been offered: That of a little Jewish girl from New York who can’t get a date and falls in love with a traveling salesman who goes back to his wife.

  “Who in hell would believe Elizabeth Taylor can’t get a date?” he said. Eventually, for many reasons, Elizabeth’s link with the Seesaw deal collapsed, and Shirley MacLaine took the role opposite Robert Mitchum, with whom she eventually had an affair.

  With Seesaw gone, Elizabeth turned to her two more pressing films. She wanted to appear as Cleopatra at Fox and then, when her work there was completed, return to MGM to film her last movie at that studio. “I want that million dollars from Fox, and MGM will pay me only $125,000 for Butterfield 8.”

  Lawyers at MGM refused her proposal, telling her that she had to complete her contractual obligations for MGM before she could film Cleopatra at Fox. Their motivation derived partly from wanting to capitalize off the notoriety of l’affaire Fisher in their selection of her as the hooker in Butterfield 8.

  John O’Hara, author of the novel which had inspired the movie, had based his character on a prostitute named Starr Faithful, who had been found dead in Palm Beach on June 8, 1931.

  When MGM had first sent Elizabeth the script of Butterfield 8. she had turned it down, defining it as pornographic. She told her immediate staff, “MGM wants me to play a non-charging hooker. It’s their revenge on me for not renewing my contract.”

  When he heard of her refusal, her longtime friend at the studio, Pandro S. Berman, came to Elizabeth and warned her that, “It’s a new day at MGM. Stars are not handled delicately any more. Our lawyers can make it rough on you. Legally, they can hang on to you for another two years and prevent you from working at another studio. You’ve got to get MGM off your back. Make the fucking movie and then go on as an independent to demand a million dollars for every picture you make in the future.”

  His argument, after about a two-hour discussion, finally prevailed. “Okay, I’ll be MGM’s whore. They’ve fucked me before. Why not one final blast-off?”

  What Berman failed to tell her was the he personally owned a huge share of the movie rights to Butterfield 8.

  Years later, Berman expressed nothing but contempt for Elizabeth. “I went through hell w
ith her. Sure, she had a lot of crummy parts, but all contract players do. I came to despise her. She let herself get fat as a pig. I’ve been a woman chaser all my life, and I never found her sexually attractive. Katharine Hepburn either. Those two!”

  Immediately, Elizabeth seized upon the chance to demand that MGM cast Eddie Fisher in a role within Butterfield 8. MGM had no respect for Fisher as an actor, considering his utter failure in the 1956 Bundle of Joy with Debbie Reynolds. But because of such continuing worldwide press about “Liz and Eddie,” it was decided that the pair might jointly generate another $2 million at the box office.

  She needed the money and won the concession to have Fisher cast in the movie as her song-writing platonic friend, the second male lead. David Janssen was set to play the role, but at the last minute, he was dropped.

  Benny Thau didn’t want to use Fisher, but told Berman, “She has us by the nuts. At least with Fisher on the set, he might control the cunt. The kid’s a bum, a drug addict, and, to top off matters, a fucking lousy actor. Cast him!”

  Tired of all the conflict raging around her in Hollywood, Elizabeth also demanded that the film be shot in New York. MGM also agreed to that.

  Fisher had spent more than a year without a singing engagement before he was offered a two-week gig at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. He received that contract only because Elizabeth agreed to appear at ringside every night cheering him on.

  Before Fisher was scheduled to participate in the filming of Butterfield 8, he had time to accept an offer for a gig at the prestigious Empire Room at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. His success at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas had prompted the offer. The hotel was also excited by the prospect of Elizabeth, who had agreed to appear ringside every night he was performing in the Empire Room.

  On Fisher’s opening night, she was seated at the head table with Prince Aly Khan, who was visiting New York at the time. Other guests included the world’s heavyweight boxing champion, Swedish-born Ingemar Johansson, and Dick Hanley.

  As Khan listened to Fisher sing love songs to his wife, he secretly ran his hand up her dress, meeting no objections. Dick noted that she also seemed “absolutely enthralled with Johansson. “I was, too, but Elizabeth had more to offer the champ than I did. Aly had another engagement that night, but after Eddie’s first performance, we disappeared upstairs with Ingemar. I was the guardian waiting in the living room while all the action took place in the bedroom.”

  The handsome, solidly built Swede became one of Elizabeth’ least known affairs. Nicknamed “The Hammer of Thor,” Johansson in 1959, the year Elizabeth met him and seduced him, defeated Floyd Patterson by a TKO in the third round.

  She told Dick that Johansson was “an absolute powerhouse in bed. I felt like three pounds of Swedish sausage was pounding inside me. He fucks a woman like he intends to deliver a knockout punch—and he does. He scores a KO. What a guy. No wonder he’s called Hammer.”

  Unlike boxers who were supposed to be in training, Johansson liked the nightclubs of New York. When Fisher was performing, Elizabeth often sneaked off with him. Sometimes, the boxer and the star used Monty’s apartment for their sexual trysts.

  “I can’t get enough of him, and he can’t get enough of me,” she told Dick. She made arrangements for him to train at the Catskill resort of Grossinger’s, Fisher’s favorite place and the site of his earlier, long-ago wedding to Debbie Reynolds. Johansson also told Elizabeth he wanted to be a movie star. She was instrumental in getting him cast as a Marine in the Korean War film, All the Young Men (1960).

  A nude picture snapped of him in a gym shower in 1960 was reprinted on a postcard-sized replica and became one of the best-selling celebrity nudes in the world. Kiosks along the Seine in Paris hawked it to American tourists.

  Long after their affair flickered out, Elizabeth occasionally spoke on the phone to Johansson. It was a tragic sorrow for her to learn that beginning in the mid-1960s, the former champion suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. At the age of 76, he died on January 30, 2009 from complications following pneumonia. At the time, he was living in a nursing home in Sweden as his health deteriorated. For years, he kept an autographed picture of Elizabeth by his bedside.

  When he died, Elizabeth recalled, “He was a real champ in so many ways. After knowing him, I came to realize why Mae West was so hung up on boxers.”

  Ingemar Johansson

  Elizabeth’s nightclubbing came to an abrupt end on October 26, 1959 when she collapsed on Fifth Avenue during a shipping expedition with Dick. “I can’t breathe,” she called to him, gasping for air.

  He rushed to the nearest phone and called an ambulance as onlookers crowded around her. En route to New York’s Presbyterian Hospital, “she still had her wits about her,” Dick said. “She asked me to put lip gloss on her.”

  Within a few hours, she was diagnosed as suffering from viral pneumonia, complicated by a bad case of influenza.

  Bulletins were issued for almost a week. Confined to an oxygen tent, she was in critical condition. While in the hospital, she made a “reckless decision.” She ordered her doctors to reverse an operation in which she had previously had her fallopian tubes tied.

  Thinking she might solidify her marriage to Fisher by having a son or daughter with him, she wanted to be able to get pregnant again, even though previously, doctors had warned her that bearing another child might threaten her life. She was determined, however, to submit to the surgery.

  For reasons not entirely clear, her fallopian tubes could not be untied.

  ***

  While Elizabeth was undergoing exploratory surgery and told she could have no more children, rumors surfaced about one of the unsolved mysteries of her life. Stories spread that she’d had a “love child” in the early 1950s. But details of the rumored birth would not be revealed in print until after her death when stories about it were published in such newspapers as London’s Daily Mail.

  Celebrity psychic John Cohan was a friend and confidant to Elizabeth for many years, in addition to being her psychic. During one of their sessions, she had revealed to him one of her darkest and most painful secrets. She told him that she’d once given birth, out of wedlock, to a baby girl named Norah.

  According to rumors, since such a birth would have destroyed any actress’s career during the more uptight 1950s, she was forced, based partly on the urging of both Benny Thau and her mother, Sara, to give the baby away.

  “Money changed hands,” Elizabeth told Cohan. “Norah was adopted by a family in Ireland.”

  The child, now a mature woman, of course, knows that Elizabeth was her mother, but is said to resent her for abandoning her. She was once quoted as saying, “I want nothing to do with Elizabeth Taylor.”

  Cohan’s revelations were published by Cindy Adams, a columnist for The New York Post. Adams admitted that she could not confirm either the accuracy of the story or the existence of the daughter, “but I’m reporting it because one can’t ignore the story in case there’s some truth.”

  Elizabeth admitted to Cohan that at the time of the birth, she was involved with three different men and therefore could not be certain who the father was.

  “I am still guilt ridden about having to abandon my child, even to this day.” Elizabeth said to Cohan. She also extracted from Cohan the promise that he was to “say nothing about Norah until I’m gone.”

  The celebrity seer also had other shocking revelations. He said that he and Elizabeth were mutually involved in a short affair “between her marriages to Richard Burton. She told me I was a much sweeter and darling lover than Richard ever was. ‘He was too rough at times,’ she claimed.”

  She also admitted that Mike Todd had been “the love of my life, my soul-mate—and not Richard.”

  As a final bombshell, she claimed, according to Cohan, that she believed that Burton had died from some AIDS-related disease.

  Cohan has been a celebrity psychic to the stars for more than three decades. During much of that t
ime, he has supplied Cindy Adams with his yearly predictions, which have turned out to be surprisingly accurate.

  More revelations about the stars can be found in Cohan’s memoir, Catch a Falling Star: The Untold Story of Celebrity Secrets, published in 2008.

  In his book, he has much to reveal about Natalie Wood, Merv Griffin, River Phoenix, John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Elvis Presley. He even writes about what Mick Jagger and Rudolf Nureyev were caught doing at the Flesh Palace Disco in Manhattan. He also writes about his dear friend, Nicole Brown Simpson, as well as “the love of my life,” Sandra Dee.

  ***

  “On one day, Elizabeth would become obsessed with fear that she was losing Eddie,” said Dick Hanley. “On yet another day, she would be plotting ways to get a divorce that would cause the minimum of bad headlines for her. I never told her, but Eddie was going out with showgirls while she was confined to a hospital bed. He also had some homosexual involvements. During her absence, he even invited me to a small orgy he staged in her suite at the Waldorf with three handsome gay waiters. He assumed that I’d be discreet and enjoy myself, but because of my loyalty to Elizabeth, I didn’t go.”

  When she returned from the hospital to her suite at the Waldorf, and was in bed recovering, Fisher brought Dr. Feelgood (Max Jacobson) for a “medical consultation” in their rooms. The “speed” he injected into her veins caused her to experience sleepless nights, nervous exhaustion, fits of depression, and a dangerously rapid heartbeat.

  “She would go to incredible highs and then plunge to the pits,” Dick claimed. “She would be walking on some mile-high trapeze during the day, then she’d demand sleeping pills to plunge her back to earth. Sometimes, she fell into a coma-like sleep. Once, she slept for an entire day and night.”

  John Cohan Celebrity Seer