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

by Darwin Porter

  To prepare him for his upcoming role in Butterfield 8, Elizabeth decided that Fisher should take acting lessons from Monty. When Monty arrived at their suite at the Waldorf, and after he’d paid his respects to Elizabeth, he began to review the script with Fisher.

  “I was in no great shape myself to take acting lessons,” Fisher later recalled, “and Monty was in even worse shape. As he sat on the sofa with me, he tried to feel my jewels. At the time, I was living on amphetamines from Dr. Feelgood. I went to get Monty another drink. By the time I got back, he’d fallen asleep with a lit cigarette and had set the script on fire. To complicate matters, Elizabeth was taking three or four hot baths a day. In the middle of my lesson, she called me for a waterborne fuck.”

  In a weakened condition in the wake of her recent hospitalization, Elizabeth reported to work in January of 1960 to begin the filming of Butterfield 8.

  The film was heavily censored in the cinematic creation of Elizabeth’s character of Gloria Wandrous. Even so, the script still contained references to how Gloria had been sexually abused as a child—and that she had actually enjoyed the experience.

  Exterior shots of Elizabeth were filmed in the vicinity of Sixth Avenue and West 10th Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.

  On her way to the filming, swathed in fur and laden with emeralds, Elizabeth passed by the nearby house of Detention for Women. As she did, she heard all sorts of catcalls—everything from “LET ME SUCK YOUR PUSSY, BITCH!” to “YOU CHEAP WHORE.”

  The film’s director, Daniel Mann, said that when Elizabeth arrived for work, she looked unattractive. “She was overweight and had dark circles under her eyes. Her clothes had to be constantly refitted, and special undergarments and corsets were employed to hold her body in shape. She had lost the firmness of youth and looked matronly before her time. I also determined that she could-n’t see a thing without contact lenses; she was myopic.”

  Brooklyn-born Mann, a stage actor since childhood, had directed the film versions of Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) and The Rose Tattoo (1955). He had very little flair for visual dynamics, but an excellent ear for dialogue.

  The line Elizabeth delivers to Mildred Dunnock, who played her mother in the film, was the one Elizabeth most objected to: “Face it, Mama: I was the slut of all time!” Mann insisted that she utter that line.

  With his frequent references to the Method acting technique, Mann did not impress Elizabeth. One afternoon, during the filming of a bathtub scene, he told her, with complete seriousness, “Make believe you’re fucking the faucet. That’s the expression I want.”

  After that remark, she gave him the finger and stormed off the set, refusing to work for the rest of the day.

  The title of Butterfield 8 referred to a telephone exchange in Manhattan’s “Silk Stocking” district of the Upper East Side.

  “I will be the screen’s first female Casanova,” she said of her role as Gloria Wandrous.

  Of course, after leading such a tawdry life, Elizabeth’s character in the film had to pay a price. At the end of the movie, her character of Gloria is killed in a car accident. Screenwriter John Michael Hayes concluded, “We can’t let a whore like that live. Even her enemies will flock to the movie to see Elizabeth Taylor die, die, die.”

  On the set of Butterfield 8, Elizabeth met the English movie star, Laurence Harvey.

  At first, he detested her, referring to her as “The Bitch” or “Fat Ass.” But after a few days, he was drawn to her and they became friends, a relationship that lasted until his untimely death in 1973.

  It was ironic, but Harvey and Michael Wilding would each wed the same woman, actress Margaret Leighton.

  After an onscreen night with the character played by Harvey in his bedroom while his wife is away, Elizabeth, as Gloria, awakens after he leaves the apartment the following morning. She is seen putting on a slip and then “borrowing” a mink coat from his wife’s closet. “I’m Venus in furs,” Elizabeth (as Gloria) says before heading out to face the day.

  The actress playing the very rich owner of that mink coat and the wife of the character played by Harvey was the very rich (in real life) Dina Merrill, the only child of Post Cereals’ heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and her second husband, Wall Street stockbroker Edward Francis Hutton.

  Elizabeth found Harvey “very campy and very gay.”

  “I can keep my panties on around Harvey,” she said with a sneer to Fisher. “He’ll welcome blow-jobs from you, though.”

  He told her that “I fuck women on that odd Saturday, but don’t get your hopes up. You’re not my type, I have this Oedipus complex in that I’m attracted to older women, even that battle axe Hermione Baddeley.”

  In reference to his own homosexuality, Harvey told her, “When I see a man I like, I go after him, never worrying about rejection. “I think Sean Connery is the hottest man in England. He told me I was such a bitch I could play Hedda Gabler.”

  “John Gielgud called me Florence of Lithuania,” he told Elizabeth. “I was born there. I like to do outrageous things,” he said, “especially with a few drinks in me. When I first met that ugly little toad, Peter Lorre, I grabbed him and kissed him, ramming my tongue down his throat. At this party for Princess Margaret, I sat next to Lord Snowdon, her husband of the moment. I placed my hand at his crotch and felt every inch. I told him, ‘I just wanted to find out what turns on Her Royal Highness. I’m not a princess, more a queen.’”

  “You’re my kind of guy, Larry,” Elizabeth said. “I adore you.”

  She also had many serious talks with Harvey, especially about her role in Butterfield 8, which, deep into the shoot, she still detested. She later thanked him for giving her “some sound advice.”

  “Darling,” he said, “I should have been cast as the whore. As heaven knows, I am one myself.”

  During a writer’s strike at MGM, Elizabeth wanted some of the dialogue associated with her character sharpened and extra scenes added. She especially wanted changes in the script to include love scenes between Fisher and her. Prior to her involvement, her character had pursued an onscreen relationship with him that was strictly platonic.

  She approached her friends, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. Williams was rather reluctant to get involved, but agreed to work on some of the dialogue. On the other hand, Capote was delighted. When he came to visit her, she said, “I have to work. I have no money. Eddie has no money. Debbie Reynolds took it all…every last cent.”

  She and Capote conceived of a torrid love scene “under the sheets” between Fisher and herself. Capote came up with a scenario that Daniel Mann claimed was perhaps too hot to film, yet his curiosity was voyeuristically intrigued, and he arranged for the scene to be shot, despite his sense of caution.

  On the set, on the day of the actual filming, both Fisher and Elizabeth stripped completely nude and crawled together under the sheets.

  As Fisher later claimed, “Having the camera on Elizabeth and me and with that faggot, Capote, drooling at the mouth, turned me on. I had sex with Elizabeth. We really went at it. She liked it rough, and I delivered.”

  Later, in his memoirs, he denied that he had a climax, but Elizabeth, in dialogues with Capote, said that he did.

  “It was evident that Fisher was blasting off inside Elizabeth,” Capote said. “From the look on her face, she was also experiencing an orgasm. She was not good enough an actress to fake it.”

  Later, their scene was judged as too hot for the screen, and it ended up on the cutting room floor.

  Any future rewriting that had to be done was given back to John Michael Hayes, who’d been responsible for getting Peyton Place past the censors.

  Liz (center figure) as a tramp and homewrecker coming between Dina Merrill (left figure) and Laurence Harvey (right figure)

  After watching a screening of the final cut of Butterfield 8, Elizabeth hurled her glass of bourbon at the screen. Storming out of the screening room, she went to Pandro S. Berman’s office door, which was part
ially crafted from a sheet of translucent glass. On the glass, in lipstick, she scrawled NO SALE! She was re-creating a scene from the movie in which her character of Gloria writes NO SALE! on the living room mirror after spending a night having sex with the character played by Harvey.

  Dick Hanley had sat with her during the screening of Butterfield 8. “Actually, I liked the picture,” he said. “I thought that tossing bourbon and writing in lipstick was a very erratic and childish way to conclude her long years of association with MGM. After all, it was MGM which made her a star, and Butterfield 8 would bring her an Oscar. I wished she had found a more graceful exit from the studio, but no one tells Elizabeth Taylor how to exit a building.”

  “My final insult from MGM came when I had my last meal in the commissary,” Elizabeth said. “The chef had already renamed the Elizabeth Taylor salad ‘the Lana Turner salad.’”

  After the release of Butterfield 8, one critic wrote, “The innocent little girl from National Velvet is now a full blown whore.”

  [On the night of the Academy Awards presentations, Shirley MacLaine, a friend of Elizabeth’s, went to the ceremony hoping to win for her brilliant acting job in The Apartment. She applauded, but appeared hearbroken when she didn’t win, the Oscar going instead to Elizabeth. Later, MacLaine cracked, “I lost to a tracheotomy.”

  MacLaine was referring to Elizabeth’s life-threatening surgery in a London hospital during the early weeks of the shooting of Cleopatra.]

  ***

  In Hollywood, Fisher and Elizabeth made plans to go abroad while still living in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Their next door neighbors were Yul Brynner and his second wife, Doris Kleiner, a fashion house executive.

  Elizabeth had first met Brynner at a Hollywood party when William Holden had introduced them. After Brynner walked on his way, Holden said, “He’s one of the biggest shits I’ve come across in show business. He is just a pig.”

  But Brynner had always intrigued her. Like so many actors she knew, Bryn-ner was known in Hollywood circles as a notorious womanizer and part-time homosexual. In Paris, he’d been known for smoking opium and carrying on an affair with the French author, Jean Cocteau.

  Sal Mineo had told her that Brynner had pounded him nightly when he was a young boy appearing on stage with him in the Broadway production of The King and I. He was also known to be in love with Frank Sinatra, one of his best friends. But mostly he was celebrated for his seductions of actresses, including Tallulah Bankhead, Anne Baxter, Joan Crawford, Claire Bloom, Ingrid Begman, Yvonne De Carlo, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Maria Schell. He was infamously linked to Nancy Davis before she married Ronald Reagan. He had also had a long, torrid affair with Marlene Dietrich before he dumped her.

  Fisher had become quite close to Brynner during their residency at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and often Fisher was next door with Brynner when Max Jacobson, their Dr. Feelgood, came to visit.

  Both men, as well as Elizabeth herself, had become dependent on the doctor’s injections of speed.

  James Bacon, the columnist, heard some gossip he could not print in the newspaper, but which he later recounted in his memoirs, although his editor cut it. Nonetheless, the story made the rounds at Hollywood parties.

  According to the tale, Dr. Jacobson had sent a delivery boy, Horace Bryant, with a shipment of drugs and paraphernalia addressed to Eddie Fisher, to Elizabeth’s bungalow.

  Bryant had been told that Fisher was not at home, but that Elizabeth, if he knocked on the bungalow’s door at four o’clock, would accept the delivery.

  Timing his arrival for exactly four o’clock, Bryant knocked on the bungalow’s door. It took a long time before the door was finally opened by Elizabeth, who appeared in a see-through pink peignoir.

  “I could see all the way to Honolulu,” Bryant claimed.

  “She invited me inside, as she was suspicious that someone might be watching. She went over to her purse and removed a hundred dollar bill. I couldn’t believe it was so much, but I was very grateful. From the bedroom emerged Mr. Brynner with a big erection. It had a hood on it, something a Jewish boy like Fisher didn’t have, I’m sure,” Bryant told Bacon.

  “Thanks, kid, for the delivery,” Brynner said to him. “As you can see, I’m busy and three’s a crowd.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” Bryant said before rushing out of the bungalow with his hundred-dollar bill.

  ***

  On June 20, 1960, Elizabeth and Fisher were flying to New York again. She had been given ringside seats for the heavyweight boxing rematch between Ingemar Johansson and Floyd Patterson.

  In her book, Growing Up at Grossinger’s, Tania Grossinger remembered the bout. She sat three rows behind Fisher and Elizabeth.

  “She wore a revealing low-cut blouse that left nothing to the imagination,” Grossinger wrote. “Suddenly, out of nowhere, this man walked over, plucked a breast out of her top, held it up for all to see, and shouted: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you. Isn’t this a beautiful sight?’ Elizabeth was completely nonplussed, and majestically put her tit back where it belonged.” [In her memoir, Grossinger did not identify the man by name.]

  Patterson won in a fifth round knockout. As Elizabeth was leaving with Fisher, she was hissed and booed by the crowd. Several boxing fans shouted “whore” at her.

  Turning to face the mob, she made a clenched fist, a total “Fuck you!” to her detractors.

  The next day, Fisher and Elizabeth sailed from New York to Rome on the maiden voyage of the Leonardo da Vinci. In Rome, they attended the 1960 Olympic Games.

  The writer, Art Buchwald, traveled with them. He later wrote, “As Elizabeth came into the stadium, a lot of young men crowded around her, more than Fisher could keep at bay. I could not believe my eyes. These guys were feeling her up, grabbing her breasts and the cheeks of her ass. Several greedy little hands reached inside to feel her vagina. Finally, the police arrived to free her. I thought about the cannibal scene in Suddenly, Last Summer. She was being devoured. Elizabeth was no longer an international movie star. She was a living legend, but one unlike Hollywood had ever seen before and may never see again.”

  After their time in Rome, Elizabeth and Fisher flew to London and were installed in suites back at “The Dorch” on Park Lane.

  At long last, production had begun on the much-postponed Cleopatra at Pinewood Studios outside London.

  On their first night in London, Elizabeth invited Peter Finch (cast as Julius Caesar) and Stephen Boyd (playing Marc Antony) for dinner.

  Dick Hanley was among the guests, but “I felt like the odd man out. Boyd flirted with Eddie all night, and it was obvious that Finch was going to renew his conjugal rights with Elizabeth, an affair that had heated the sheets during the filming of Elephant Walk in 1954.”

  “Before the evening ended, I realized why Elizabeth always insisted on two suites at The Dorch,” Hanley said. “After I left, Finch stayed on for a night cap with Elizabeth, and Fisher accepted Boyd’s invitation to visit a hot little club in Soho. The next morning, when I came into Elizabeth’s suite at ten o’clock, Finch was still there, moving around in his jockey shorts. I knew where to find Eddie and Boyd. I was certain they were in the suite next door.”

  “If I thought that was the most outrageous scandal that would happen during the making of Cleopatra, I was dead wrong,” Dick said. “Before that god damn film was wrapped, Elizabeth would scandalize the world.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Cleopatra

  FALLS IN LOVE WITH MARC ANTONY

  CLEOPATRA: “Without you, this is not a world I want to live in.”

  MARC ANTONY: “Everything that I want to hold or love or have or be is here with me now.”

  En route to London in 1960, Elizabeth heard that the Motion Picture Herald had named her the number one box office attraction of America, followed by Rock Hudson, Doris Day, John Wayne, Cary Grant, Sandra Dee, Jerry Lewis, William Holden, Tony Curtis, and Elvis Presley.

  No sooner had she s
ettled into her suite at The Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane in London than Elizabeth picked up the tabloids and read: “It is rumored that Elizabeth Taylor, in London to shoot Cleopatra at Pinewood Studios, is already rehearsing love scenes with the handsome hunk, Stephen Boyd, who plays Marc Antony to her Cleopatra.”

  Seemingly, the London tabloids did not know that Boyd was gay. Perhaps they did, but didn’t want that fact to get in the way of his faux romance with Elizabeth.

  “If Boyd was screwing around with either of the Fishers, it was definitely with Eddie, not Elizabeth,” said Dick Hanley, who’d accompanied her to London.

  “Eddie had his own suite next to Elizabeth’s at The Dorchester, and I saw Boyd coming and going on several occasions—that is, when Freddie was working out or had a boxing match outside London.”

  The reference was to Freddie Mills, a famous British boxer, with whom Boyd had a long affair.

  Shelley Winters, in London filming Lolita, visited the Fishers since she also was staying at The Dorchester. “Elizabeth was spending every evening with Peter Finch while Eddie was drowning in martinis. At one point, Elizabeth got into a screaming match with Eddie, accusing him of trying to run over a drunken Peter with his Rolls-Royce.”

  In a private talk with Winters, Fisher admitted, “I’m trying my hand at producing. I tried to get Irma La Douce for Elizabeth, but it went to Shirley MacLaine. My other job is making love to Elizabeth. I have to have my monster ready any hour of the day or night she wants to get plugged.”

  “If you ever have a dry spell, stroll down to my room,” Winters told him.

  The columnist Max Lerner flew into London, and Elizabeth discreetly renewed her affair with him. When Peter Lawford dropped in to visit her at The Dorchester, she told her old friend, “I’m just crazy about Max because he reminds me of Albert Einstein.”

  When Winters heard of the affair with Lerner, she said, “I always make it a point not to go to bed with men who have bigger boobs than me. Max could pose for a Playboy centerfold with those huge tits of his.”