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

by Darwin Porter

  Dr. Price determined that only a tracheotomy would save her life. But the operation had to be performed in a hospital, although it was very risky to move the patient. He decided, however, that it was worth the chance, and an ambulance was summoned to The Dorchester.

  With dome lights flashing and sirens wailing, she was rushed to the private London Clinic where Dr. Terence Cawthorne awaited her. He performed the life-saving tracheotomy by drawing a scalpel across the soft part of her throat right above her breastbone. Here, he made an incision allowing him to insert a breathing tube connected to a respirator.

  His diagnosis was acute staphylococcus pneumonia, which is most often fatal. She would retain a small scar at her throat for the rest of her life, although she would in most instances cover it with a piece of jewelry.

  Still desperately ill, she was put in an iron lung as a means of controlling the rate of her respiration and linking it to just the right amount of oxygen.

  Seven doctors, including Lord Evans, were at her bedside. Dr. Evans even gave Queen Elizabeth a daily bulletin on his famous patient. It was Dr. Evans who also discovered that she was suffering from anemia, and he ordered blood transfusions, intravenous feedings, and doses of antibiotics. He also prescribed a rare drug, staphylococcal bacteriophage lystate, which Milton Blackstone, Fisher’s agent, personally carried with him aboard a hastily scheduled flight to London.

  While in the hospital in London, Elizabeth had been fed intravenously through her ankle. Regrettably, that caused an infection in her lower leg. As she admitted in her memoirs, “I almost lost my leg…I just let the disease take me. I had been hoping to be happy,” she said. “I was just pretending to be happy. But I was consumed by self-pity.”

  Early on the morning of March 6, 1961, a radio station in Pensacola, Florida, broadcast the news: “Elizabeth Taylor is dead. Doctors in London fought to save her, but it was hopeless. The little girl who won our hearts in National Velvet died a living legend.”

  The news was picked up and broadcast on other stations before a bulletin was issued from London: “Elizabeth Taylor is not dead. She is the hospital in a fight for her life, but is still very much with us.”

  London tabloids began preparing “Second Coming” headlines.

  A few newspapers published her obituary, and Elizabeth got to read a summation of her life. She later commented, “These were the best reviews I ever received, but I had to die to get these tributes.”

  On March 10, the first optimistic bulletin was released, claiming she had made “a very rare recovery.”

  Later, she defined the experience as “absolutely horrifying. When I would regain consciousness, I wanted to ask my doctors if I was going to die. But I couldn’t make myself heard. Inside my head, I heard myself screaming to God for help. I was frightened. I was angry. I was fierce. I didn’t want to die. I stopped breathing four times. I died four times. It was like falling into this horrible black pit. Dr. Evans later told me I lived because I fought so hard to live.”

  Also residing at The Dorchester, author Truman Capote was one of the first guests allowed to visit her after her operation. He recalled it as a “media event, with the streets clogged with fans and the idle curious.” At her request, he slipped in a magnum of Dom Pérignon and some books to read, mostly his own.

  “I visited her in London in the hospital when she had that tracheotomy. She had what looked like a silver dollar in her throat. I couldn’t figure out what held it in place, and it surprised me she wasn’t bleeding or oozing. A few nights later, I went out with Eddie Fisher. The next afternoon, Elizabeth told me that Eddie thought I was trying to make a pass at him. At that moment, she played a trick on me and yanked at the plug in her throat, spurting out champagne—I’d brought her a magnum of Dom Pérignon—all over the hospital room. I thought I was going to pass out.”

  Fans on every continent mourned her, even though she was still clinging to life, but just barely. Mobs of people descended on the London Clinic for around-the-clock vigils.

  Each day, her condition improved until it was finally judged safe for her to leave the hospital, though in a vastly weakened condition.

  On March 27, 1961, Elizabeth, in a wheelchair, made one of the most spectacular departures in England’s history. Wrapped in sable, with a white scarf covering her neck and in preparation for her flight to New York, she was handled with the care of a porcelain doll as London bobbies held back the threatening hordes and a mob of paparazzi. Airport security nestled her into a kind of canvas sling, and lifted her into the waiting plane.

  With Cleopatra delayed once again, Elizabeth was coming home. She predicted to Fisher that “Cleopatra will never sail down the Nile on that barge of hers.”

  Skouras at Fox sued Lloyds of London for three million dollars, but settled for two million, as compensation for the production delays on their attempt to film Cleopatra at Pinewood.

  In a huddle, Wanger and Skouras decided that England was no place to film an exotic epic like Cleopatra. They agreed to scrap $600,000 worth of sets at Pinewood and relaunch the film in Rome in September of 1961, allowing Elizabeth time to recuperate.

  ***

  By April 18, 1961, she was back in Hollywood to receive her Oscar for Butterfield 8, telling the press, “I nearly had to die to wrest this prize.” She’d later write in her memoirs, “I was filled with profound gratitude at being considered by the industry as an actress and not as a movie star. I knew my performance had not deserved it, and that it was a sympathy award.”

  One June 7, 1961, Elizabeth accepted an invitation to fly with Eddie Fisher to Las Vegas for a lavish party at the Sands in honor of Dean Martin’s forty-fourth birthday. She almost turned down the invitation when she learned that Sinatra had also invited Marilyn Monroe, with whom he was having an affair. Fisher talked her into going, claiming that “Frankie will be awfully hurt if we don’t show up. He might get even with us. He takes these rejections personally.”

  Finally, Peter Lawford assured Elizabeth that her contact with Monroe would deliberately be kept very brief. “At ringside, I’ll see that the headwaiter seats you at the far end of the table from Marilyn.”

  But at the Sands, Elizabeth was annoyed when Monroe greeted Fisher with a sloppy wet kiss. She was curious as to what, if any, relationship with Monroe that her husband had had to invite such intimacy. When Monroe shook Elizabeth’s hand, she did not even fake a smile. She was still furious that executives at Fox had considered firing her as Cleopatra and turning the role over to Monroe.

  Later that night, when he was drinking with Rat Packers Martin and Lawford, Fisher admitted he’d “pumped” Monroe on more than one occasion. “What red-blooded male like me would turn her down?”

  “One time when Elizabeth was in the hospital, I had to get it from somebody,” Fisher said. “Or at least that’s what Marilyn told me when she called me for a date. I took the bait. Before the mailman arrived, I’d had the blonde vixen three times.”

  “Our farewell wasn’t all that romantic,” Fisher claimed. “Marilyn told me, ‘Thanks, Eddie. It’s important for me to be reminded of what turns Elizabeth on.’”

  At the Sands, the maître ‘d followed Lawford’s instructions and seated Elizabeth and Monroe at opposite ends of the ringside table, very close to the stage where Sinatra would be singing. Seated with Elizabeth were Dean Martin, the guest of honor, and his wife, Jeanne.

  Elizabeth noted that Monroe was already drunk before the party had really begun. She was talking loud enough to be overheard by everyone at the table. She told Fisher, “I’ll always love Frankie, but I know I can never tie him down. If it were possible, I’d be married to both Joe (DiMaggio) and Frankie at the same time. This is supposed to be a free country, yet bigamy isn’t allowed. It should be legal.”

  Elizabeth whispered to Martin, “I can agree with Marilyn on that bigamy thing. I always seem to be in love with at least three men at once.”

  As the evening progressed, Elizabeth watched in horror as
Monroe made a spectacle of herself, even slobbering on herself.

  Fisher took note of this, too, later asserting, “Marilyn is a beautiful woman, but on that night, she looked like a broken-down and washed-up Vegas hooker. But what did I care? I was married to Elizabeth, the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  At one point, Monroe staggered off to the women’s toilet, returning to seat herself between Patricia Kennedy Lawford (JFK’s sister) and Patricia’s husband, Peter. Then she reached out to fondle Lawford’s crotch. “For old time’s sake,” she said, loud enough for Elizabeth to hear. The other guests also overheard what Monroe then said, as what might have been interpreted either as an insult or as a bemused tease: “What happened to your peter, Peter? It seems to have shrunk.”

  As Sinatra came out onto the stage, Elizabeth didn’t know where to look. Her choices included a view of Sinatra, onstage and singing, or a view of Marilyn, whose ample breasts were literally falling out of her low-cut pink satin dress.

  After the show, Fisher escorted Elizabeth backstage to greet Sinatra. Monroe beat them to it. In full view of Elizabeth, Monroe gushed about Sinatra’s performance and planted wet kisses on his face. Elizabeth noticed that Sinatra was looking at Monroe with disgust. He’d once told Elizabeth, “If there is one thing I can’t stand, it’s a drunken broad.”

  “Then the unspeakable occurred,” Elizabeth recalled. “Monroe was so drunk, she threw up on Frank’s tuxedo.” He ordered a security guard to take her back to his suite. A photographer was standing nearby and attempted to take a candid snapshot, but Sinatra knocked his camera to the floor, stomping on it. He then fled to his dressing room to change into a fresh tuxedo.”

  With Fisher at her side, Elizabeth stood next to the photographer. “Monroe is a mess, isn’t she? How she holds onto her beauty, I’ll never know. She drinks far too much, and obviously can’t hold her liquor. Now, me, I’m a girl who knows how to handle booze.”

  Far more intriguing that Monroe’s drunken debacle at Sinatra’s opening was what occurred the following afternoon when Fisher left the Fisher/Taylor suite to meet with executives from the Desert Inn for a discussion about a possible singing engagement.

  Elizabeth was startled when she picked up the receiver and heard Monroe’s voice apologizing “for my outrageous behavior last night.” After repeated urgings, Elizabeth finally agreed to let Monroe visit her in her suite.

  On that hot Las Vegas afternoon, what transpired between Elizabeth and Monroe is still a hotly debated topic. Years later, in their edition of April 11, 2011, The Globe revealed that the two women engaged in a shared lesbian tryst.

  In her diary, Elizabeth wrote that she was entranced by the way Monroe moved. “She was the sexiest woman I ever met, and her touch was electric,” Elizabeth claimed.

  She later confided to Roddy McDowall, “I wanted to see how far the bitch would go. But she had to do all the work. I felt empowered somehow, like I was the grand diva and she a lowly slave, if that makes any sense.”

  Unless there is something not yet discovered, it’s likely that Elizabeth never had an encounter like that before. If she did, she carefully concealed it. Unlike Monroe, who “could work both sides of the waterfront” (a phrase from Tennessee Williams), Elizabeth was a woman who reserved her charms for men— and a lot of them.

  What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas–or does it? The Globe, April 11, 2011

  A short time later at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Monroe entered the bar accompanied by her masseur, Ralph Roberts. Roddy, Fisher, and Elizabeth were in the bar that night, emptying a few champagne bottles. Elizabeth was overheard telling both Fisher and Roddy, “Keep that dyke away from me tonight.”

  ***

  On July 9, 1961, Elizabeth, in plunging décollétage, sat next to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy at a fund-raising dinner for the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. Behind them sat Rat Packers Joey Bishop, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Peter Lawford. A view of RFK was snapped by photographers gazing down at Elizabeth’s amply displayed breasts.

  When the attorney general finally diverted his gaze, Elizabeth delivered a short speech written by Joseph Mankiewicz:

  “Dying, as I remember, is many things. But most of all, it is wanting to live. Throughout many critical hours in the operating theater, it was as if every nerve, every muscle, as if my whole physical being were being strained to the last ounce of my strength, to the last gasp of breath. I remember I had focused desperately on the hospital light hanging directly above me. It had become the vision of life itself. Slowly, it faded and dimmed like a well-done theatrical effect to blackness.

  I died.

  It was like being in a long dark tunnel with no light at the end. I kept looking for the light. I heard voices urging me to come back into life, to live. The experience was both painful and beautiful, like child birth itself.”

  Elizabeth donated $100,000 to the charity, and her fellow guests, including RFK, contributed a massive total of $7 million that night. After the dinner, Kennedy invited her for a drive with him along the coast. She suggested that they stop at her cottage in Malibu for a midnight swim. No one knows where Eddie Fisher was that night.

  As she was to tell Dick Hanley. “It was one of the most memorable nights of my life.”

  She also recorded the events of that night in her diary, and would allow both Dick and Roddy McDowall to read it. She had described her experience in such graphic detail that Roddy was a bit shocked. He said, “Elizabeth, my dear, you should have been a pornographer.”

  As her two memoirs revealed, no one could write more boringly about her own life that Elizabeth. In two of her autobiographical memoirs, she gave almost no details of some of the most infamous events of her life.

  In her diary, however, while relaying her encounter with Robert Kennedy, she may have been more explicit because Peter Lawford had told her that Marilyn Monroe had recorded “steamy passages” in her red diary about her sexual encounters with both President Kennedy and his brother, Robert. “Elizabeth obviously did not want to be bested by Monroe,” Roddy said.

  “I can write with passion, too,” she told Roddy. “After all, I read Forever Amber.” She was referring to the best selling romance written by Kathleen Winsor, who at one time was married to bandleader Artie Shaw after his divorce from Ava Gardner.

  “Bobby and I spent about two hours on the beach in the moonlight,” Elizabeth told her gay friends. “Our bathing suits became too restraining. Bobby finally got to enjoy those breasts he’d been staring at all night.”

  “You’ve got it bad, girl,” Roddy said.

  “When it was over, he kissed me several times and told me I was a goddess,” she relayed, as reported by Roddy and Dick. “Other men have told me that, but coming from Bobby, I really could delude myself into believing it. That night, with Bobby on the beach, I was a goddess. But when I drove home, I found Eddie there and we got into a big brawl. The goddess, I fear, became a harridan.”

  Later, in her diary, she wrote: “It is a shame that when a man and a woman want to be together, they often have to leave each other while they pay homage to people in their lives they’d rather not deal with. Men and women should be free. Even though I’ve been married four times, it was four times too many. I will never marry again— and that’s a promise I’ve made to myself that I will never break.”

  Breast gazing: Elizabeth Taylor with Robert Kennedy in 1961

  In the months leading up to his assassination, RFK, at least according to Dick Hanley, seduced Elizabeth on three different occasions. On one of these occasions, he left the bed of Jackie Kennedy in New York in 1966, flew to Los Angeles, and woke up in Elizabeth’s bed in Beverly Hills the following morning.”

  As she told Dick, “I have known more perfect bodies, but Bobby’s physique thrilled me. He was long and lean, no bulging beefcake. But he moved with such grace…undeniable masculinity. A strong chest, a thin waist, and a cock that was not the biggest I’d ever seen, but one that wa
s gorgeous and knew all the right strokes.”

  ***

  It was a busy summer in 1961. The U.S. State Department asked Elizabeth and Fisher to represent the United States at the Moscow Film Festival, beginning on July 11.

  Decked out in a white chiffon cocktail dress from Dior, Elizabeth made a spectacular entrance. But she almost screamed when she spotted Gina Lollobrigida wearing an identical outfit. As a publicity stunt, Lollobrigida had learned what outfit Elizabeth planned to wear and had instructed her dressmaker to duplicate it.

  To make up to Elizabeth, the House of Dior offered her any gown she wanted from their inventory in Paris. She selected an embroidered number, the most expensive Dior had, one that would otherwise have been priced at $10,000.

  Once inside their hotel suite in Moscow, Elizabeth and Eddie, assisted by Dick Hanley, searched every inch of it, looking for hidden microphones and cameras. “Eddie was convinced that the Soviets had wanted to secretly film them making love, probably for Khruschev’s evening entertainment,” Dick said. “Later, there was a rumor that such a film was actually made, and that it was viewed within the Kremlin. When Elizabeth heard this, she said to me, ‘My first porno.’”

  MOSCOW NIGHTS WITH ELIZABETH AND EDDIE (FUN AND GAMES IN RUSSIA)

  Nikita Khrushchev (left photo) and his mistress, the Soviet Union’s dreaded Minister of Culture, Yekatarina Furtseve (center photo)

  ,,,and a fashion catfight with Gina Lollobrigida

  When Khrushchev had visited Hollywood in September of 1956, as part of an event hosted by Twentieth Century Fox and spearheaded by Frank Sinatra, he’d had a “private” session in his hotel suite with Marilyn Monroe, but had merely shaken hands with Elizabeth.