Elizabeth
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Marshall heard the excitement in Francis’s voice when he rang. Francis said that he was apprehensive about being alone with sixyear-old Elizabeth for an entire day, so he had decided that they would spend it shopping. He couldn’t go wrong there, he reasoned. Then he planned to take her to the Theatre Museum, which houses the world’s leading collection of material relating to the British stage. He asked Marshall to meet them afterward for lunch at the famous Harrods department store, and to bring along his younger sister who was about Elizabeth’s age.
“When we got there, they were already seated and waiting for us,” Baldrige recalled. “Elizabeth was such a pretty girl with long ribbons in her hair that matched her white dress. Francis was in his usual three-piece suit with a bow tie. He was very distinguishedlooking, as always, but he also looked uncommonly tired. After we joined them, I watched them interact for an hour at the table. They seemed to adore each other. There was no strain between them. Still, I recall Francis nervously crushing out one cigarette after another, as if he was on edge. Elizabeth and my sister got on famously, talking about dance classes. Elizabeth was completely animated and, I thought, very mature and adult-seeming for such 30
Elizabeth
a young girl, quite the little conversationalist. She was very proper in her eating, the perfect young lady. I thought she would be much more reserved, from what Francis had told me about her. He had said she was very shy. I didn’t think that of her at all.
“After the meal, we took the girls shopping. Elizabeth found a hat that she said she just had to have, a big white, floppy thing totally inappropriate for a little girl and much too big for her head. It was on sale for a couple of pounds. Francis said, ‘I’ll buy it for you as a treat,’ and she said, ‘No, Daddy, I have my own money.’
She opened her purse and gathered a few pence that she had saved. He told her to keep her money, and bought her the hat. After he paid for it, he knelt down and placed it on her head. He gave a quick peck on the cheek. She then ran off with my sister to a full-length mirror. The two of them took turns trying on the hat and giggling at their reflections as they made funny poses.”
As the girls played, Marshall asked Francis how he felt the day had thus far gone for him.
“This is both a happy and sad day for me,” Francis answered, according to Marshall’s memory. “Happy because I have a chance to spend some time with my daughter. Sad because I know this is a rare opportunity for me.”
“Why do you say that?” Marshall asked.
“Because my dear wife won’t let me near her,” Francis answered, his expression now grim. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped the back of his neck as he often did when he was upset, an old habit. “She wants her all to herself. She dotes on her day and night. It infuriates me.” He concluded that he might actually be able to have a wonderful, nurturing relationship with his only daughter, “if only I could steal her away from Sara for five minutes.”
Marshall reminded Francis that Elizabeth was his daughter as well as Sara’s. He warned him that he should endeavor to change the situation because, truly, Elizabeth would one day be the one to bear the consequences of it.
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“It’s no use,” Francis said, the pessimism apparent in his voice.
“Please don’t think I haven’t tried.”
Suddenly, Elizabeth and Annabelle came running up to them.
“We want ice cream now,” Elizabeth announced, grabbing her father’s hand.
“Then ice cream we shall have,” Francis told her. And off the two happily went, with Marshall and his sister following close behind.
“I Think I Might Want to
Be an Actress”
I n the spring of 1939, the American embassy in London sent a disturbing notice to all citizens of the United States residing in Britain, warning them that a war was about to break out, that they were in imminent danger, and that they should return to America as soon as possible. It was not an easy decision for the Taylors to make. They had a good life in Britain. Should they stay there and hope for the best, or should they return to their native home? Marshall Baldrige recalls, “Francis did not want to go. He liked his life in England. But Sara had decided that the family should move to California. At the same time, Howard decided that the gallery should move to America. Once they decided as much, it was all over for Francis. ‘I guess I have to go, but I want you to come with me,’ he told me sadly. ‘I need your support. Sara and Howard will completely destroy me in America.’ I didn’t want to leave London, my family, my sister, who I adored. ‘My God, Francis, I just can’t go,’ I told him, ‘but maybe one day I will meet you there.’ He 32
Elizabeth
had tears in his eyes. I felt awful. I knew that I was throwing him to the wolves. My heart went out to him.
“A couple of weeks later, a customer of ours came into the gallery and said that Sara had told her that Francis had received a personal telephone call from Joseph Kennedy, who was the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and, of course, patriarch of the famous American Kennedy dynasty. She said that Kennedy had encouraged Francis to relocate his family as soon as possible. She said that this call had made the family realize that they had no choice but to move to the States, and she was so grateful that Kennedy would have taken the time to care about their fate. I was stunned by that bit of news. I couldn’t believe that Francis hadn’t mentioned it to me. ‘What’s this about?’ I asked when I next saw him, ‘Joe Kennedy calling you and telling you to move to the States?’ He looked at me as if I was out of my mind.
‘What are you talking about?’ he asked me. ‘I have never talked to Kennedy in my entire life.’ When I told him what I had heard, he was exasperated. ‘How Sara ever came up with that one, I’ll never know,’ he said. ‘But that’s a whopper, all right, isn’t it?’ ”
On April 3, 1939—weeks after Hitler took over Czechoslovakia—Sara, Elizabeth, and little Howard (along with a nanny named Gladys) sailed to America aboard the SS Manhattan, but without Francis. He stayed behind to wrap up loose ends with the art business.
It was during that eight-day journey to the United States that a new Hollywood film called The Little Princess starring Shirley Temple was shown as part of the activities schedule for passengers. Sara took her children to see the movie in the cruise ship’s theater. Elizabeth, seven years old now, hadn’t seen many films in London and was excited to go to this one. It’s a little startling, in retrospect, to note that The Little Princess was Shirley Temple’s for- tieth movie—and she was just eleven!
If any child ever had star quality on the screen, it was Shirley Temple. She is easily the most famous child star of all time. Elizabeth, as she has recalled it, sat in the dark theater in rapt silence, Childhood
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watching the young curly-haired star with awed fascination. She could sing, dance, act . . . she had an infectious personality. She truly was a wonder. The Little Princess was Shirley’s first Technicolor film, which made it all the more exciting to watch. When the lights came up, a thoroughly impressed Elizabeth Taylor turned to her mother and said the words Sara had longed to hear:
“Mummy,” she whispered urgently, “I think I might want to be an actress. A movie star!”
A New Life in America
I n April 1939, after arriving in New York, Sara Taylor, her children, and their nanny boarded a train to Pasadena, California, where her father lived. (Her mother had died about two years earlier.) Sara had loved Southern California when she worked in the theater there years earlier and, with her heart now set on some kind of career in show business for Elizabeth—though she didn’t yet know what that would be exactly—she felt that settling near the entertainment capital of Hollywood made the most sense. The Taylor family showed up at the doorstep of Sara’s father on May 1, 1939. For the next six months, Elizabeth and Howard were enrolled in the private Willard School outside of Pasadena. In December of that same year, after cl
osing his London gallery, Francis followed his family to America. Darryl Mitchell’s father, Edward, was a dealer on Bond Street who knew Francis, though he had apparently never met Sara. “My dad always said that Francis had seriously considered not joining the family in the States. He had mulled over the possibility of staying in England with Marshall Baldrige’s family,” said Mitchell. “Francis told my dad 34
Elizabeth
that the marriage to Sara was troubled, and that once Sara was gone he was able to breathe freely.
“There was also a strange dynamic between Francis and Victor Cazalet, a lot of confusion as to what Victor’s role was, not only in Sara’s life, but also in Francis’s. He certainly appeared to be happier with Sara gone. However, Francis could not imagine leaving his children. He loved them too much. I often wondered, though, what impact the vague and unusual interpersonal relationships her parents had with Victor Cazalet had on Elizabeth and Howard.
“Anyway, Francis went to America, but only for the children. Also, at this time, Howard gave him the gallery business to operate as his own. So finally Francis owned the gallery business, and that gave him some incentive to start a new life in America.”
Marshall Baldrige continues the story: “Once his mind was made up, Francis was determined to make a go of it in America with an exclusive offering of paintings by the artist Augustus John. I know Elizabeth would say in later interviews that he had to start all over again with just a couple of paintings, but in fact we packed about seventy of the John oils in crates and sent them ahead to the States, using the transport firm of Pitt & Scott. The intention was that he would open a gallery at the Chateau Elysee in Hollywood, which he did [in 1940]. He also had one very expensive painting, a Frans Hals, which he took with him to America and which the family, and later Elizabeth, would own as part of their collection.”
If anyone thought Sara Taylor would have been happy living on her father’s chicken ranch in Pasadena for very long, that person would have been daft, or so says Stefan Verkaufen. “In fact, as soon as Francis arrived, the family settled in Pacific Palisades, California, in an expansive home leased for them by . . . who else? Howard Young, of course,” he recalls. “A year later [in 1941], Howard bought the family a home in Beverly Hills, a Mediterranean-style estate at 703 North Elm Drive. It was then that I received an excited telephone call from Francis telling me Childhood
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that he had relocated his art gallery to the nearby Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. It was a prime location, one of the most famous hotels and a virtual crossroads of the world with potential clients from all over the globe. He was very excited. ‘It’s mine now,’ he told me of the gallery, ‘and, finally, I have something that belongs to me, and that no one can ever take from me. Not Howard. Not Victor. And not Sara.’ He also said that he and Sara were getting along better, and that he was happy to see her again. I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not.”
Sara had always had vision, brilliance, and enthusiasm like few others. That didn’t change once her family was ensconced in Beverly Hills. She immediately enrolled Elizabeth in singing and dancing lessons after her school day at the Hawthorn Elementary School. Elizabeth’s riding lessons also continued, and thus she would have something in common with the affluent children Sara had envisioned as her friends. Howard, for his part, was clearly not interested in show business and seemed better at sports. That was fine with Sara. As long as Elizabeth had the motivation, she was eager to promote it. At this time, she also enrolled both of her children in Christian Science studies.
Sara also arranged an important “audition” of sorts for Elizabeth with Hedda Hopper. At the time, Hedda, along with Louella Parsons, was one of the leading gossip columnists in show business, renowned almost as much for her outrageous headwear as for her scoops. A mere mention in her column for a young hopeful entertainer all but guaranteed that studio heads and recording company executives would take notice. When Francis came home one day in the fall of 1940 with the news that Hedda had come into his gallery—at the behest of Victor Cazalet, a friend of Hopper’s ex-husband—to purchase an Augustus John, Sara was thrilled. She probably couldn’t contain herself when Francis then presented her with the columnist’s telephone number. (Smart man! Imagine the scene if he had neglected to get her number!) And so, faster than Sara could say, “Make my daughter a star!” she had arranged a meeting between her eight-year-old daughter and 36
Elizabeth
the fifty-year-old showbiz journalist and socialite—at Hedda’s home, no less! Unfortunately, it did not go well. Hedda was unsettled, as she would recount many times in subsequent years, by the manner in which Sara, whom she described as “bursting with ambition,” insisted that Elizabeth stand in the middle of her drawing room and sing. The young girl, her face clouded with worry and tears about to fall from her eyes, sang a sweet song—“Blue Danube”—in a weak and thin tone. As she sang, she nervously fingered her hair and stared into space, careful not to make eye contact with Hedda or even her mother. After her “performance,” Hedda felt she had no choice but to applaud and act as if the heavens had opened up and dropped the sweetest little angel this side of Deanna Durbin. In truth, she found it all a bit disconcerting. “It was one of the most painful ordeals I have ever witnessed,” she later recalled in her autobiography. She said that Elizabeth was “clearly terrified, but I felt that the mother was never going to rest until this child was famous, and I wasn’t having any of it. She wanted to have a glamorous life through her child. I had seen too much misery in child stars. Let a child be a child, that was my motto. And I told Sara Taylor just that: ‘Let a child be a child.’ ”
Be that as it may, Hedda Hopper was gracious enough to give Sara and Elizabeth a mention in her column. She took credit for discovering, as she put it, “a new find—eight-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, whose mother was Sara Sothern, the lame girl in the play, The Fool, and whose father, Francis Taylor, has just opened an exhibition of paintings by Augustus John in the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
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“But I Want to Be
with MGM!”
A s weeks turned into months, Sara Taylor continued her show business networking in Hollywood, hoping to meet someone in some social situation who might actually be able to assist her in her quest to make her daughter a star . . . at something. Elizabeth and Howard continued to attend school, while Elizabeth maintained a schedule of singing and dancing lessons. Both children also continued their Christian Science studies: No audition would ever take place for Elizabeth until she and her mother had prayed for a positive outcome to it.
Sara also continued as the consummate dinner-party and cocktail-hour hostess. Because people gravitated toward her anyway, it wasn’t difficult for her to find her place in Beverly Hills high society, and even assist Francis in securing affluent new clients for his art gallery. To inspire conversations about Elizabeth’s beauty, Sara had photos of her daughter taped to the refrigerator in the kitchen, next to pictures of Vivien Leigh. The idea was that, hopefully, guests would remark on the similarities in their features. “Oh, Elizabeth put those photos up there,” she would lie. “But do you really think so?” she would ask. “You know, you might be right about that. I never really noticed.”
Coincidentally, it happened to be at Francis’s place of business that Sara met Andrea Cowden, wife of J. Cheever Cowden, at that time chairman of Universal Pictures. Cowden had come into the Howard Young Gallery to examine the Augustus John paintings she’d heard that Francis had on exhibit there. Sara and Andrea hit it off immediately—especially after Andrea wrote out a check for $20,000 for a few John paintings and sketches. A week later, Andrea attended a formal exhibition of the artist’s paintings at the gallery. She mentioned in passing that she had once actually posed for Augustus John (in London, from which she hailed), 38
Elizabeth
and both Taylors were impressed by the revelation. It was at that time that Sara invited
the Cowdens to the Taylor home for tea. Of course, she had an ulterior motive: She wanted the Cowdens’ assistance with Elizabeth. The afternoon tea party—in February 1941, just before Elizabeth’s ninth birthday—was a great success. Sara had the cook prepare filet of beef Wellington with potatoes and caviar, which, even though it was presented after tea, seemed a lot more like dinner than lunch. It was impressive, just the same. For dessert, there was raspberry parfait with coffee.
Afterward, Francis offered a discount on another Augustus John painting for which Andrea Cowden had expressed great admiration. Sara then told J. Cheever how much she believed in her daughter and how much time and energy she had devoted to seeing her become a success in show business. He was impressed; Sara was difficult to resist. Then, she brought out her precocious daughter, Elizabeth. Many years later, Andrea Cowden would recall, “She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen. She did not walk, she danced. She was so merry, so full of love for every little thing, whether it was a person, an animal, or a flower. She had a lovely singing voice, too. At that time, you didn’t know what she’d be, but you knew she’d be something.” Be reminded: People’s memories do seem to take on a nostalgic glow when it comes to the young Elizabeth Taylor. It’s a bit difficult to believe that Andrea Cowden would have been able to glean so much about the youngster after just one tea party. Suffice it to say, though, that she and her husband were impressed enough; J. Cheever offered to sign Elizabeth to a contract at Universal. One can only imagine Sara’s elation after the Cowdens left the Taylor home that day!
The deal was signed on April 21, 1941: a hundred dollars a week for five months, the money to go to Sara—not Francis, incidentally—on Elizabeth’s behalf. Ten percent of that amount went directly to Sara, as Elizabeth’s “manager,” or, as the contract read, “to assist in the performance of such services as shall be re-Childhood 39