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

by Darwin Porter

  Now, at the time of her Moscow visit in 1961, he requested a private session with her. She went alone, thinking it might lead to a sexual tryst “with Nikita and all his hairy warts.”

  When she arrived at the Kremlin, she found the Soviet premier sitting with Yekatarina Furtseve, his Minister of Culture. She was also his mistress. The meeting lasted only fifteen minutes. Later, Elizabeth said, “Obviously, he prefers Monroe to me.”

  ***

  JACKIE: “I hate Elizabeth Taylor.”

  ELIZABETH: “Jackie Kennedy is a gold-digging bitch.”

  When her husband was running for President, and even when he occupied the Oval Office, Jackie Kennedy had to face competition not only from Marilyn Monroe and so many others, but from Elizabeth Taylor, too.

  Revelations about the Taylor/JFK affair came to light after the death of Dame Elizabeth in 2011. Details were leaked to the press from her private diaries which may, in time, be edited and published.

  Of course, Hollywood insiders like actor Robert Stack knew that JFK had seduced a much too young Elizabeth after his service in the Navy during World War II.

  Elizabeth had first met JFK in England in 1939 when his father was the United States’Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.

  It appears that Robert Kennedy himself arranged several liaisons between Elizabeth and the President in 1961, as well as enjoying her considerable charms himself.

  But long before the affair with JFK came to light, Jackie knew about it. Her informant was Peter Lawford, who often functioned as a “double agent,” feeding Jack information about Jackie, and supplying Jackie with secret data about her husband.

  Reportedly, Elizabeth was mesmerized by both the Kennedy brothers. (Apparently, Teddy never got around to her.)

  During JFK’s 1960 campaign for president, she had visited him on occasion in a bungalow at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. She also had perhaps three sexual trysts with him in Beverly Hills during the summer of 1961, when she’d had her first fling with Bobby.

  Except for Marilyn Monroe, none of the affairs JFK had were with women as famous as Elizabeth.

  “Kennedy did more than fundraising when he came to California,” Eddie Fisher later said. “Kennedy was widely known for fucking Elizabeth look-alikes like Judith Campbell Exner. I guess on occasion he wanted the real thing—not merely the mock. I had Judy myself. She made herself up to look as much like Elizabeth as she could.”

  “Elizabeth swore to me that her relationship with Jack never went beyond friendship,” Fisher said. “But I never believed her. I’m sure she never believed me when I told her that I was ‘just friends’ with some of the women I was bedding. When Jackie heard of the affair, she said some really vicious things about Elizabeth, so I was told. And you should have heard what my potty-mouthed wife said about Jackie. It was a real catfight waged on two different coasts.”

  The tabloids eventually picked up on the Elizabeth/Jackie rivalry, and sometimes the two “Queens of America” made the front pages of many a magazine, appearing in separate photographs blended together.

  Elizabeth Taylor (top photo), on the lookout for John F. Kennedy and her implacable enemy, Jacqueline Kennedy

  Jackie’s rivalry with Elizabeth really broke out in 1968 when the former First Lady married the Greek shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis. Word leaked out of Greece that “Ari” had originally wanted to marry Elizabeth when he heard that she was breaking up with Richard Burton. “I can give you even bigger diamonds that Richard Burton because I have more money,” Onassis told Elizabeth one night when he was sailing with her aboard his yacht, the Christina.

  When Johnny Meyer, pimp for Onassis, the same position he’d held with Howard Hughes, told him that Jackie might be available to marry him, Onassis decided to make a play for her. “After all, Jackie is an even bigger prize than Elizabeth,” Onassis said.

  When Elizabeth heard about the upcoming marriage of Jackie and Onassis, she told Modern Screen, “It will be the strangest marriage of the century. Mrs. Kennedy is now reduced to taking my rejects.”

  Her comment was never printed.

  Later, Jackie turned down an invitation to sail on another cruise aboard the Christina before her marriage. Word reached her that Elizabeth, who went on the voyage, flirted with Onassis every night over dinner.

  When Jackie confronted the shipping magnate about it, she told him, “It’s either the Taylor bitch or me. Your friendship with this international tramp has to end—NOW!”

  Movie Mirror picked up on this feud, crafting headlines that yelled: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED THE NIGHT LIZ TRIED TO CUT JACKIE OUT!

  [After the death of Onassis in 1975 and Elizabeth’s second divorce from Richard Burton in 1974, Motion Picture magazine began labeling Elizabeth and Jackie as AMERICA’S TWO FALLEN QUEENS.

  The only face-to-face meeting between Jackie and Elizabeth occurred on June 20, 1976, when both of them attended a performance by the legendary British ballerina Margot Fonteyn at Manhattan’s Uris Theater. Backstage, Elizabeth and Jackie awkwardly encountered one another on the way to Fonteyn’s dressing room. Each woman smiled politely at the other. What did the two fabled divas say to each other? Someone who stood behind them revealed, “They said absolutely nothing—not a word.”

  After that, coverage of the two divas in the tabloids became less shrill and less frequent. In the November, 1976 issue of Photoplay, reportage on the exploits of Elizabeth vs. Jackie had been reduced to the last words on the cover, without even a picture, and even that ran beneath the larger headline: THE SALLY STRUTHERS NOBODY KNOWS.

  Ironically, after her marriage to Senator John Warner of Virginia in December of 1976, Elizabeth assumed the same official role that Jackie had once held—that of a U.S. Senator’s spouse.

  Elizabeth told reporters that “John [Warner] is the best lover I’ve ever had. I want to spend the rest of my life with him, and I want to be buried with him.”

  After her divorce from Warner, Elizabeth took a final husband, construction worker Larry Fortensky, whom she’d met in rehab. She married this unlikely candidate on October 5, 1991 at a lavish $1.5 million wedding paid for by Michael Jackson at his Neverland Ranch. Elizabeth said, “At last in Larry I’ve found the kind of rugged individual I’ve been seeking all my life. He’ll still be with me when it’s time to bury me.”]

  ***

  Back in Los Angeles in the summer of 1961, Elizabeth underwent plastic surgery at the Cedars of Lebanon to remove most of her tracheotomy scar. The operation was not successful.

  Fisher returned to his stamping ground, the Cocoanut Grove, at Hollywood’s Ambassador Hotel for a singing engagement which had been offered to him partly, according to local cynics, because of his Elizabeth-related notoriety.

  His act was sabotaged when the Rat Pack took over. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. yelled at him from the audience, interrupting his songs. Fisher became nervous and botched three numbers. “If I were you, I wouldn’t be singing,” Martin called out. “I’d be home fucking my wife.”

  Finally, the Rat Packers mounted the stage, telling filthy jokes about Fisher. Sinatra did a bad impression of Fisher’s singing. Finally, when the three musketeers, who were falling down drunk, left the stage, Fisher was allowed to finish his act.

  “There are those, including Elizabeth, who say that that night marked the end of the Rat Pack,” Fisher wrote in his memoirs. “They were booed off the stage. Each of them, and that includes Sinatra, made an ass of themselves.”

  ***

  By August of 1961, with Fisher’s singing engagement over, he and Elizabeth flew to Rome to begin filming “Cleopatra Segundo” as they called it, even though no film of any consequence ever evolved from the time and money wasted in London on “Cleopatra Primero.”

  Before their work was scheduled to begin in Rome, they had time for a brief cruise of the Greek Islands in that same yacht that Spyros Skouras had lent them for a tour of the French and Spanish Mediterranean ports during their
honeymoon.

  “This was our second honeymoon,” Fisher proclaimed.

  On his private island, Skorpios, Aristotle Onassis was their host for two days and nights.

  Whether true or not, Onassis told friends who included Maria Callas, who repeated it to friends of hers, that both Fisher and Elizabeth, on separate occasions, took sexual advantage of Kostas Cafarakis, the strikingly handsome First Mate aboard the Christina.

  “Many of my women guests—and some of the men, too—went for Kostas,” Onassis said. “He was built like a Greek god, a true son of Zeus.”

  When the story surfaced in a newspaper in Athens, Fisher vehemently denied it and threatened to sue for libel.

  Onassis told him not to bother. “Tomorrow, fishwives will be wrapping the day’s catch in it.”

  “It was the calm before the storm,” Fisher later recalled about their flight from Athens to Rome. At the airport, Dick Hanley was on hand to greet them and drive them to their villa, which would become the scene of great drama.

  ***

  At her temporary home, Elizabeth wandered around the fifteen-room Roman mansion, Villa Pappa (sometimes spelled “Villa Papa”), which was faced with pink marble. It stood on the ancient Appian Way, surrounded by gardens and accessorized with an Olympic-size swimming pool and a tennis court.

  To Rome, she’d brought her entourage and her children, even her doctor, Rex Kennamer, who was paid a fee of $25,000 for a six-week visit. A staff of twenty had been hired, even a chauffeur to drive Fisher around Rome in the Rolls-Royce she had purchased for him.

  Before Elizabeth showed up on the set, Hermes Pan, the famous dance director, was already rehearsing the dancing girls for Cleopatra’s triumphant entrance into ancient Rome.

  When Dick checked out the studio at Cinecittà, he told her that wardrobe was planning some seventy costumes for her alone, plus thousands of other costumes for members of a black ballet troupe, swordsmen, chariot drivers, and all the other attendants who, collectively, would recreate the splendor of the ancient world. Irene Sharaff had been brought in to oversee Elizabeth’s vast wardrobe. Her most spectacular costume would be a fifteen-pound ceremonial dress of gold which Cleopatra wears during her entrance into Rome before the mobs.

  Before Cleopatra was wrapped, Elizabeth would not be speaking to Sharaff after the designer had suggested that Elizabeth “was putting on a few pounds.”

  A private beach had been rented from Prince Borghese at Anzio, where American forces had landed in January of 1944 before their march to Rome during World War II, and which, to Fox’s horror, had to be swept clear of any remaining land mines, thereby adding another $22,000 to the budget.

  At her luxurious Villa Pappa, filled with servants, Elizabeth entertained in a grand manner during her first days. “She really thought she was Cleopatra,” said Dick. “She ordered her Italian butlers to color-coordinate everything to match her gown for the evening, and that included candles, napkins, tablecloths, flowers, even cigarette holders and matches.”

  Dick Hanley made all the arrangements for their first luncheon at Villa Pappa, inviting Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth’s sometimes rival, and her husband, Mel Ferrer, to a Roman meal beside the swimming pool. Most of the talk centered around Hepburn winning the coveted role of Eliza Doolittle in the film version of My Fair Lady, a role which Julie Andrews, who had played the character for years on Broadway, had coveted. Audrey told Elizabeth that she would be co-starring with Rex Harrison and planned to meet him while he was in Rome appearing as Julius Caesar in Cleopatra.

  Elizabeth was most gracious to Hepburn—in Dick’s words, “Overly polite, masking her jealousy.”

  At the end of the luncheon, after everyone had kissed each other, pretending affection not felt, Elizabeth went over to the bar and poured herself a stiff drink. With barely concealed rage, she confronted Fisher. “Listen, Mr. Bigtime Producer. You get me that role of Lisa (sic) Doolittle—or else!”

  “I can’t do that,” Fisher protested. “As you plainly heard, Audrey’s got it sewn up.”

  “You little asshole,” she yelled at Fisher. “GET ME THAT PART! I’m warning you!”

  Two views of Audrey Hepburn in the role Elizabeth coveted, My Fair Lady. Top photo: Dancing with Rex Harrison

  “Please, I can’t do it, but I swear I’ll try,” Fisher said. “I’ll try. I’ll meet with Walter Wanger tonight and see what connections he has.”

  Of course, he failed to get her the part.

  Dick said, “Elizabeth never forgave Eddie. Night after night she taunted him for not getting her the role.

  “If only Mike Todd were alive, I’d be signing the contract to play Doolittle,” she yelled at Fisher.

  Eventually, Elizabeth took charge herself, summoning Kurt Frings, her agent, to the Villa Pappa. He was also the agent for Hepburn. He finally convinced her that “the contract with Audrey has already been signed.”

  “Then it’s your god damn fault for not getting me the part.” She refused to speak to Frings for the next five days.

  ***

  After the film’s disaster in England, shooting on the “new” version of Cleopatra began in Rome in September of 1961, with the escalating costs estimated at $20 million spent so far.

  Most of the filming of Cleopatra would be done at Cinecittà, a mammoth film studio originally constructed at the behest of Mussolini.

  Dick got to see a Roman crew designing a Sphinx, 65 feet long and 35 feet high, to be used as a backdrop for Cleopatra’s entrance into Rome. He also said that Plutarch’s description was being used as a kind of instruction manual for the construction of two mammoth barges.

  Hundreds of thousands of dollars would be needed to hire charioteers, bowmen, trumpeters, and acrobats who could whirl on their backs. Snake charmers were needed, as were white horses and elephants.

  Fisher later claimed that he recommended Rex Harrison for the role of Caesar and Burton for Marc Antony. “I could have kicked myself afterward.”

  As production began, filming focused almost entirely on the first half of the screenplay, which consisted mostly of scenes between Elizabeth and Harrison in his portrayal of Julius Caesar. Even though Burton had been put on the payroll and flown to Rome, he really wasn’t needed during the first half of the movie, He spent his time “boozing and boffing,” as he graphically put it.

  “Hell, I could have finished my run in Camelot,” Burton told Harrison. “Wanger brought me to Rome months before I was actually needed on camera. But I was getting a paid vacation.”

  Chris Mankiewicz, the then-22-year-old son of the director, Joseph Mankiewicz, was assigned the job of getting Elizabeth to work every morning. On the first day of his assignment, he became familiar with the bizarre household at Villa Pappa. The first person he encountered was Dick Hanley. He was not impressed.

  “Hanley was an angry, embittered, shrill fagola,” Chris maintained. “When I walked in on him, I found him examining Elizabeth’s underpants. At first I thought he was a panty sniffer. But he explained to me in his high-pitched voice that his first job in the morning was to inspect her drawers to see if she had the rag on. Her contract since A Place in the Sun always stipulated that she didn’t have to work if she were having her period.”

  The producer, Walter Wanger, was already on the scene before Elizabeth had arrived in Rome, and Chris was not impressed with him, either. “He was a ludicrous old fop who had shot the balls off his wife’s lover and had gone to prison for it [a reference to the night he shot Joan Bennett’s lover, her agent, Jennings Lang, in the testicles]. Even before Elizabeth arrived on the set, Wanger was showing up at noon, cracking a few jokes, and then wandering off to spend the rest of the afternoon and night chasing after hookers along the Via Veneto.”

  At Cinecittà on the sound stage, Burton was talking with Harrison when “Cleopatra” made her spectacular entrance, attired in a full-length black mink. She was preceded by her advance guard of Eddie Fisher, followed by Dick Hanley; her hairdresser, Sidney Gui
laroff; her chauffeur; her wardrobe lady; her two sons; and her young daughter, Liza Todd.

  Mankiewicz rushed to give her a big kiss. “How are you today, my little darling?”

  “Ready to work,” she said.

  “My Queen, you leave me breathless,” the director said.

  “Of course, I do,” she said. “I was born to leave men breathless.”

  Since Elizabeth seemed to be avoiding him, perhaps deliberately, Burton walked over to her, looking her up and down. “You’re much too fat, luv, but you’ve got a pretty face.”

  Somehow she found this amusing and laughed, a laugh he later compared to “a horse’s whinny.” She walked over and plopped down on Fisher’s lap.

  She turned to Burton. “Everybody, including Roddy, has told me what a brilliant actor you are and an inveterate womanizer. On this film, I hope we’ll see more of the former and less of the latter.”

  “Don’t worry, luv,” he said. “You can keep your panties on and save it for Eddie. I’m not interested.” Turning his back on Elizabeth, Burton walked back to rejoin Harrison about fifty feet away.

  Elizabeth told Dick and Fisher, “This is one leading lady that Burton will never fuck.”

  Mankiewicz came over to join the Fishers. He asked her what she thought of the revised script.

  “I think it is the greatest woman’s role ever written for the screen,” she said. “It may become the most important film ever made, and I fully expect to win my second Oscar. As for you, I have to echo Marlene Dietrich’s remark about Orson Welles. She said he was a genius. I feel the same way about you as a director. You’re not all that hot in the hay, however.”

  “My other leading ladies had only praise for me,” he said defensively.

  She quickly assured Fisher that her intimate relations with Mankiewicz had occurred before her marriage to him, and not during the filming of Suddenly, Last Summer in London. He looked as if he didn’t really believe her.

  “And how do you see the character you’re about to play?” Mankiewicz asked. “Theda Bara played Cleopatra like a vamp, Claudette Colbert played her like…well, like Claudette Colbert, Tallulah Bankhead played her like Catherine the Great, and Vivien Leigh played her like a teenage vixen.”