Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “My family was held hostage by those men,” Francis Taylor told his friend Marshall Baldrige many years later. “There’s not much I could do about it. They were bigger . . . and stronger, too.”

  Actually, as it happened, the entire Cazalet family, not just Victor, became attached to Sara. Victor’s sister Thelma took Sara to the coronation of George VI. His mother, Maud, arranged for little Elizabeth to deliver a birthday gift to the Dowager Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace on the occasion of her sixty-ninth birthday. They also shared a belief in the Christian Science faith; Victor and Sara spent many hours studying the writings of the teachings’

  founder, Mary Baker Eddy. Since Francis wasn’t interested in the philosophy at all, he was alienated from what would become an important influence in the lives of his children. For instance, much has been made over the years, by Sara and then by MGM, of an ear infection Elizabeth had when she was about three, which Sara believed was cured by Christian Science precepts. In one interview, she described what happened when the young girl ran a fever of 103 degrees for three weeks. Her abscessed ears had to be lanced twice a day. Sara says that she stayed up nights with Elizabeth, pacing the floors and meditating for a healing. Finally, Sara says, Elizabeth was concerned that her Childhood

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  mother wasn’t getting any sleep and, in her delirium, suggested that Sara summon Victor Cazalet. Then, Sara recalled, “When he arrived, Victor sat on the bed and held her in his arms and talked to her about God. Her great dark eyes searched his face, drinking in every word, believing and understanding [her emphasis]. A wonderful sense of peace filled the room. I laid my head down on the side of the bed and went to sleep for the first time in three weeks. When I awakened, she was fast asleep. The fever had broken.”

  Who knows if this story is true? Likely, certain elements of it happened—Elizabeth probably did have an ear infection—but did the three-year-old actually suggest that Sara summon Victor so that her mother might get some sleep? The story says a lot, though, about the importance of Christian Science and Victor Cazalet in Sara’s and Elizabeth’s lives. In fact, from that point onward, Sara was even more devoted to the faith, and medicine would only be allowed in the household when Francis absolutely insisted upon it, and usually for his own care, not the children’s. The tale also said a lot about Sara’s vision of her daughter as being wise and thoughtful, even as a tot. And of course, it speaks to Sara’s theatrical ways. She was an actress at heart, and always knew how to tell a good story. In years to come, her daughter would be influenced by Sara’s dramatic nature: Certainly, no one could ever spin a better yarn than Elizabeth Taylor.

  “Bravo!”

  T he Taylors enjoyed a very comfortable lot in life. But what good was comfort, Sara Taylor maintained, without a sense of accomplishment? Francis enjoyed his work at Howard’s art gallery, 22

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  even if he wasn’t making enough money to support his family in the lifestyle to which they’d become accustomed. However, Sara did not have much in her own life to motivate and excite her. She certainly wasn’t like many other women of her time, content with the usual path of the homemaker, soup and sandwiches at the ready for the little ones when they returned home from school for lunch.

  Sara had style and grace to spare. A thin but shapely brunette, she shimmered when she entered a room. She had impeccable taste, scrutinizing every decorating detail of the homes in which she and her family would live—fabric, paint, wallpaper—making sure everything was of the highest quality. She was also the consummate party-giver. She loved and knew good food, though she herself was not much of a cook. (The family always had a chef or some other functionary to prepare meals.) Sara enjoyed hosting carefully choreographed evenings of dining and entertainment in the family home. She was meticulous in the planning of such events; tapers on the table were always burned for five minutes ahead of time so that the wicks would be black rather than waxy white. Every piece of flatware would be polished until it gleamed. Conversations at dinner were always spirited, about politics, the arts, music, and current events. At such gatherings, the Taylors would mix with celebrated figures such as Winston Churchill and Sir Anthony Eden. Sara and Francis thought of themselves as Anglophiles, both developing—or maybe affecting—subtle British accents. They also attended Royal Ascot, the major racing event at which smart fashion was the required dress: top hat and tails for the men, formal wear and hats for women. At one such function, Elizabeth and Sara wore matching blue silk and lace creations by Mainbocher, a famous American designer. Indeed, Sara was used to the best life had to offer, and she believed that she probably would have been a great theater star if she had continued to work at it. But despite her worldliness, she did crave a greater sense of purpose. Her interest in Elizabeth’s future soon became the primary focus of her life. Childhood

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  By the time she was four, Elizabeth truly was lovely, her alabaster complexion offset by dark curls and luminescent blue eyes that, in a flattering light, seemed violet. Also, there was a certain vibrancy about her, an energy, a driving force. She wasn’t like other children. She had something other tots didn’t possess, a precociousness that wasn’t cloying or irritating. She was smart, conversational . . . seeming like an old soul in the body of a small child. Her glowing youth and cameolike beauty were often the subject of attention. Just to help Mother Nature along, Sara would accentuate a mole on Elizabeth’s cheek with an eyebrow pencil.

  “People would stop me in the streets,” Sara had said, perhaps exaggerating just a bit, “and they would tell me, ‘My God! That child should be in pictures. Why, she’s the spitting image of Vivien Leigh!’ ”

  Elizabeth was used to a privileged lifestyle; it was all she and her brother, Howard, knew. With their nursemaid and cook in tow, Sara and Francis would take the children on jaunts across the English countryside, spending weekends only in the expensive bedand-breakfast establishments in Devon or Suffolk that would allow the presence of their golden retriever, Monty. Of course, the children were spoiled. They were used to attention, and expected it wherever they went. Indeed, both were beautiful and, as such, constantly lavished with compliments. However, they were also well-behaved and polite to all who encountered them. Sara would have it no other way.

  In 1936, Sara overheard some cocktail chatter that Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose—later Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret—attended classes at the noted Vacani Dance School on Brompton Road, near the famous Harrods department store. The next day, she went about the business of enrolling fouryear-old Elizabeth in the same school. Many years later, MGM

  would put forth the story that Elizabeth had attended classes with both royals. Even Elizabeth has confirmed as much countless times over the years. It could very well be that, because she has repeated it so often, she even thinks it’s true. In fact, what actually 24

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  happened was that when Elizabeth began ballet lessons at Vacani, Sara took a look around, only to find that none of the dozen or so students looked very royal. When she questioned Madam Pauline Vacani, who had cofounded the school, she learned that, yes, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose did take classes—but the young ladies did not come to the school. Rather, the instructors went to them. That was a big disappointment. Still, Elizabeth supposedly continued at Vacani. Years later, someone—Elizabeth? Sara?—told the MGM press department that Elizabeth had, indeed, taken her lessons with the young royals . . . and thus a legend was born. At Vacani, Elizabeth was said to have taken to ballet quickly—

  giving flight to even more whimsy. As the story goes, she was selected from her class to be one of the many youngsters to participate in an annual charity recital. It was a memorable night because the Duchess of York (the future Queen Mother) brought her daughters, Elizabeth’s “fellow students” Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, to the show. Thank goodness she had, because Sara, Elizabeth and MGM would play up their royal presence to the hilt for decades to come. It p
robably really was a big night for Elizabeth and Sara. However, it was not the “Royal Command Performance” the public was later led to believe it was when Elizabeth became famous. Even Bosley Crowther, in his history of MGM, The International Motion Picture Almanac, wrote that “when three years old, Elizabeth danced before Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose” as if she were the only one on that stage. Actually, there were dozens of youngsters flitting about the stage in little tutus, and Elizabeth and Margaret Rose just happened to be in the audience. The show was not presented in their honor. Later, MGM decided that Elizabeth had performed for the King—at a Royal Command Performance at the Hippodrome. Of course, no matter how many press releases they decided to distribute with that stunning revelation, the truth was that it never happened. In her 1963 memoir, Elizabeth recalls that night and the applause washing over her after her dance, the acceptance of the Childhood

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  crowd making her feel as though she were born to be on a stage.

  “It was a marvelous feeling,” she wrote, “the isolation, the hugeness, the feeling of space and no end to space, the lights, the music—and then the applause bringing you back into focus, the noise rattling against your face.” (Shades of Sara! That’s quite a memory considering she was only four.)

  In 1954, Sara also wrote about that night in a memoir for Mc- Call’s: “I knew then that there would come a time when she would want to follow in my footsteps. I could still hear the applause of that wonderful night years before when The Fool had opened in London at the Apollo Theatre and I, playing the part of the little crippled girl, had stood alone in the middle of the stage and had taken a dozen curtain calls, while a reputedly staid British audience called, ‘Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!’ ”

  Interestingly, and making matters even more suspect, there are no records of Elizabeth ever having attended Vacani. A diligent private investigator could find no one still alive who worked there at the time, or whose relatives had anything to do with the school, who has any memory at all of Elizabeth, or of Sara. People connected to Vacani certainly don’t deny that Elizabeth attended classes there, but her name could not be found on any program for any performance given at any time. Was the entire Vacani experience just the result of someone’s imagination? Beatrice Edmonds’s mother, Edna, attended Vacani in 1936 and, says Beatrice, had once held firm to her memory that Elizabeth was not a classmate.

  “However, by 1960, she had not only convinced herself that Elizabeth had been a classmate, she’d pretty much made up her mind that she, too, had been in the Royal Command Performance, standing right up there next to her,” says Beatrice with a laugh. “It was just harmless fun . . . a way of having some peripheral connection to a major movie star. Look, if MGM and Elizabeth Taylor could make up stories, I always said, then why not my mom?”

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  Elizabeth

  “Missing a Father’s Love”

  W here his children were concerned, Francis Taylor was rarely demonstrative; he seldom gave Elizabeth and Howard the kind of guidance and attention they would later say they had craved from him. Though they—and especially Elizabeth—had more than enough affection from Sara, with the passing of the years, they couldn’t help but feel sad and disappointed that Francis had maintained a certain emotional distance. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his children. From what he would tell friends and relatives about them—and especially from the way he would boast about Elizabeth when she was on her way to stardom—he did care about them, and deeply.

  There were actually very good reasons for Francis’s apparent lack of affection toward his children, particularly Elizabeth, because he did spend more time with Howard. First of all, he was a man who simply didn’t know how to show his feelings. He felt that overt demonstrations of love were embarrassing. However, a bigger problem had to do with Sara, who had become so absolutely territorial where Elizabeth was concerned that there was almost no way for Francis to have free access to her. Sara had taken Elizabeth for her own, coddling her and treating her like a prized possession. The dynamic between Francis and Sara was such that he really had no power over the situation. The years of being married to Sara—and of being overpowered by Howard Young and Victor Cazalet—had weakened his resolve. He didn’t feel free to express himself because he knew he would be leveled by a criticism or a contradiction. Sara was a formidable woman, and Francis seldom viewed anything as being worth going up against her, even when it came to his own children. With the passing of time, he seemed to shut down emotionally. He’d also mastered the art of appearing to be paying attention when actually he wasn’t listening to a word Sara—or even Howard or Vic-Childhood 27

  tor—was saying to him. “Years of practice,” he would say, only half joking.

  It’s been reported that Francis Taylor was an alcoholic, and even Elizabeth has suggested as much in interviews. Considering what was going on in his life, it’s probably not surprising that he might seek relief in alcohol. At the time, though, his drinking wasn’t given a label. If anything, he was a functioning alcoholic. (Because Mabel Young was also an alcoholic, the family knew a bit about the disease.) “Though Francis was able to conduct business and day-to-day activities without interruption, he started drinking at noon and usually didn’t stop until he went to bed,” recalled Stefan Verkaufen, a young Viennese apprentice art dealer, just twenty at the time, who knew Francis well. “Sara was concerned about it and sometimes quite angry about it, as well. I remember being invited to their home for a dinner party, and Francis was not present when I arrived. She was pacing the floor angrily. He showed up two hours later, telling her that he was in a meeting. I knew Francis and I knew he had been drinking. How? Because that was the only time he truly seemed happy, when he’d had a few drinks. And he was smiling from ear to ear. Sara, however, was not. He later told me that he and Sara had often fought about the drinking. Still, Francis wasn’t going to stop. He made that much clear. He couldn’t manage much in his life, but the one thing he could control was how much he drank when Sara wasn’t around to monitor it. Sara would just have to accept his habit, not easy for a woman who was used to always having her way.”

  Many Elizabeth Taylor biographers over the years have reported that Francis Taylor had homosexual leanings, and that the resultant inner turmoil was yet another explanation for his melancholy in life. Certainly, Sara and Howard would have made his life very difficult if they were ever to have learned such a secret—if, in fact, it was true. However, that said, some things in his life just don’t seem to add up, such as his close friendship with young men such as Stefan Verkaufen from Vienna and Marshall Baldrige in the United Kingdom.

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  Marshall was a young blond and blue-eyed employee of Howard’s at the art gallery in London. Their relationship was unusual in that Marshall was just a teenager in 1938 when he met Francis, who was forty-one, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. (The Victoria and Albert, which is housed in Aston Webb’s grand building, is a museum of the decorative arts, founded in 1852 to support and encourage excellence in art and design.) Marshall, who is now in his mid-eighties, says that he and Francis were, for years, “inseparable,” though he insists the relationship was strictly one of mentor and protégé. Baldrige hoped to one day open his own art gallery. Shortly after Francis met him, he offered the teenager an apprentice position at Howard’s gallery, and he also told him that he had part ownership in the establishment (the veracity of which remains unclear). Francis often complained to Marshall that he felt useless in the household, that he didn’t believe Sara needed him. He feared that if he were to die, Sara would just go on without missing a step. Yes, she would have a period of mourning, he felt, but it would probably last a short time before she would continue with her life, with the help of Howard Young and Victor Cazalet.

  “The Christian Scientist philosophy that Sara had adopted basically taught her not to dwell on her mistakes but to move past them quickly, and I think it caused even mo
re of a barrier between her and Francis,” says Baldrige. “Francis sometimes wanted to talk about their problems, but she felt that even talking about them gave them too much focus. She was not the type of woman to spend a lot of time reflecting on things. She would say that she was too busy for self-examination, always moving forward onto the next thing. So, in terms of communication, Francis didn’t have much in his marriage. Eventually, he wasn’t even interested in trying.”

  Baldrige vividly recalls a Saturday morning that began with an animated telephone call from Francis. He explained the he had asked Sara for a day alone with Elizabeth. Sara’s hold over the family’s seemingly most prized possession had been eating away at Childhood

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  him for some time, not just challenging his already questionable place as head of the household, but creating a wedge between him and the child he longed to know. While Sara may have felt that Elizabeth’s blossoming poise and charisma was mainly due to her tutelage, Francis believed that his daughter’s gifts were, at least in part, a product of his bloodline too. In her, he saw the zest for life his mother had, the drive toward perfection that his father possessed. Though he rarely spoke of his theories regarding his daughter’s powerful persona, at his most candid he would tell all who would listen, “She’s my child first, really. She’s a Taylor, inside and out.” He wanted to spend more time with her. Much to his surprise, Sara granted him her charge for the day. “But her hair needs brushing hourly,” she warned him, “and if she’s touching her face too much, simply say her name very loudly. She’ll know exactly what it means.”