Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  quired by the studio.” The contract could be renewed with the agreement of both parties. Sara would be absolutely diligent in depositing Elizabeth’s balance in an account for her, and it’s fair to say that her husband had virtually nothing to do with any of this business.

  There was one big surprise in this scenario, upon which no one had counted. Suddenly, little Elizabeth had an opinion, and who would have imagined that to be the case since she had been so agreeable up until this time? However, it was just a matter of time before her mother’s example was bound to influence her and encourage her to at least hint at a decisive nature. When told about the deal with Universal, she dug in her heels and said, “But I want to be with MGM!”

  Elizabeth’s interest in MGM had come after a chance encounter a couple of months earlier. She had a playmate whose father, John W. Considine Jr., just happened to be a producer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. When Sara found out, she sprang into action and invited him and his wife, Carmen, to the requisite meal at the Taylor home. After dinner and drinks and no small amount of persuasion from Sara, John finally agreed to take the entire family on a tour of the MGM lot. It was an exciting morning when the Taylors, Elizabeth with her dark hair bound in pink and white ribbons, showed up at MGM. She was enthralled by the actors and actresses she met, most of them in colorful, whimsical costumes. The bright lights and imposing cameras, the elaborate sets . . . it all seemed like some kind of miniature fantasy world, and before she knew it she wanted to be a part of it. “Everyone looked so happy and seemed to be enjoying themselves,” she would later remember. “The child actors ran about playing tag. It was like a little playground, but somehow so much more exciting because, well, it was the movies. It was noisy and bustling and chaotic and . . . thrilling. Oh, yes, I was hooked. And my mother? Her eyes were darting about even more than mine.” As for her father, Elizabeth recalls his walking about with his hands thrust in his coat pockets and an expression on his face that suggested a cer-40 Elizabeth

  tain amount of bemusement, not so much at what he was seeing but at his wife’s and daughter’s reaction to it. Elizabeth said he didn’t share their enthusiasm for the magical world of picturemaking, “but we didn’t expect that he would. But Howard had fun,” she added.

  Amazingly—and if anyone ever doubted the Taylors’ good fortune, all they needed to hear was this story from Sara, and she told it every chance she got—who should walk onto one of the sets being visited by the family but the head of the studio himself, the fearsome and legendary L. B. Mayer. Momentarily humbled by his presence, Sara soon recovered her senses and took command of the situation. She was about to suggest that Elizabeth sing for him, when he beat her to it. “I want to hear this little girl sing,” he decided. So sing she did—“Blue Danube” in a high-pitched voice—

  and . . . well, she was not very good. No matter how you packaged it—a pretty dress, deep blue eyes, luxurious black hair, and loads of enthusiasm—the fact of the matter was that the young Elizabeth Taylor was not a singer. Still, she gave it her all, and Mayer must have been at least a little impressed because he turned to Considine and said, “Sign her up!” Everyone was elated. However, in the weeks to come, the Taylors were taught their first tough lesson about show business: Nothing is a done deal until it’s a done deal.

  After that day, John W. Considine suddenly became difficult to reach. The MGM contract was not forthcoming. Could it be that Mayer had told Considine to sign Elizabeth just to avoid an embarrassing moment? His words—“Sign her up”—rang in Sara’s ears for weeks. She couldn’t fathom what might have occurred to change his mind. When Mayer then refused to take her telephone calls, she went from sad and confused to indignant and angry, and then she abruptly pushed L. B. Mayer and his MGM Studios out of her mind altogether. She wasn’t one to dwell on an empty promise and had already, in her view, spent far too much time lamenting one. “Oh, the heck with him,” she told Elizabeth. “He doesn’t know what he’s missing. One day he will come to us. And Childhood

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  then, we shall see what we shall see.” True to her determined nature, Sara was then off on her next mission—the next important contact for whom she would plan the next big meal. To all outward appearances, Elizabeth, too, never gave MGM another thought—until she was presented with the opportunity to sign with Universal, and so it was a bolt from the blue when she announced her desire to be with MGM. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, though, since Elizabeth had actually seen MGM and didn’t really know much, if anything, about Universal. However, it didn’t much matter what Elizabeth wanted in this regard. She was nine. She’d get over it.

  By the end of the summer of 1941, Elizabeth Taylor was on a soundstage at Universal Studios making her first “short” film, a forgettable, sixty-minute trifle first called Man or Mouse but soon renamed There’s One Born Every Minute. It would be released in the summer of the following year. In it, Elizabeth would portray a misbehaving little brat. Years later, on The David Frost Show, she would describe the role as “a beastly child who runs around slinging rubber bands at fat ladies’ bottoms.” Though not much of a screen debut, it was probably as good as any place to begin a storied film career. But then, in what must have seemed like a cruel plot twist to her real life, Elizabeth was dropped by Universal two weeks after she finished the film. The upper-level executives simply didn’t find her that special, and they thought her brief performance was adequate but certainly didn’t qualify as one that suggested a new star in the making. “The kid has nothing,” noted Universal’s casting director, Dan Kelly, in an oft-quoted memo.

  “Her eyes are too old. She doesn’t have the face of a kid.”

  Everyone in the Taylor household was disappointed by the surprising turn of events; even Francis and Howard acted as if they were dismayed by the news. Elizabeth could see through her father’s disappointment, though. When asked by one of her Hawthorn schoolteachers at this time what she had planned for her future, the ten-year-old prodigy remarked, “My father is very much against my being an actress.” However, as everyone well un-42 Elizabeth

  derstood, it didn’t much matter what Francis thought, for it was Sara who was in charge of things. She and Elizabeth had now been given a taste of the movie business, and it was all they needed to whet their appetites for more. For all of their efforts thus far, Elizabeth had $1,800 in the bank, Sara $200. It was a start. They didn’t need the money anyway. At night, Sara would pull out her dog-eared script from The Fool and have Elizabeth act out the part of the crippled girl, which she had played on Broadway. Mother would rehearse daughter repeatedly in the role. It had to be perfect; nothing else would do. Every night, Sara worked with Elizabeth assiduously, forcing her to stay awake when she was exhausted so she could rehearse the script . . . over and over. Finally, Elizabeth began to cry on cue for the scene in which such emotion was required. Sara was well pleased. One wonders, though, if those tears might not have been generated more by the young girl’s sheer exasperation with her mother than by her ability to make believable her acting. A year went by, during which time, in 1943, the Taylors received the horrifying news that Victor Cazalet, a major in the British army by this time, had been killed in a plane crash in the harbor of Gilbraltar. Of course, all of the Taylors were devastated. Sara and Francis did not attend the funeral due to safety concerns during wartime, but it would be many months before either of them would be able to reconcile their close friend’s sudden and tragic passing. To this day, Elizabeth remains very friendly with extended members of the Cazalet family. “My biggest regret,” she would say many years after his death, “is that Victor never had a chance to see my success. Oh, how he would have smiled at it.”

  Actually, Victor Cazalet did know that Elizabeth had been signed to Universal. He was thrilled with the news when Sara called to deliver it before the contract was even signed. “Imagine excitement of Taylors,” he wrote in his diary on April 16, 1941. “Elizabeth has contract for seven years from big Cinema group.”
(Note that Victor had apparently been told by Sara that the contract was Childhood

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  for seven years, when actually it was for six months. But, alas, that was Sara’s way.)

  It would be in the same year as Cazalet’s death, 1943, that Elizabeth would get her next big break. Her mother would later recall,

  “She sang and danced and begged Daddy and me to please, please, please sign a contract with MGM.” That’s not exactly how it happened, though Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer staff producer Sam Marx recalled the story in a 1975 interview he did with Peter Lawford for a documentary about Elizabeth:

  “I was an air raid warden in, of all places, Beverly Hills. At this point in the story, people generally break up laughing, and I don’t blame them. We were pretty far from the action, you know? One of the other air raid wardens in the unit was Francis Taylor. In addition to being an air raid warden, I was also a producer at MGM. He knew it and he began talking to me about his beautiful daughter. I was starting a film called Lassie Come Home. In it was a charming little girl named Marie Flynn [who had appeared with Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo: A Love Story], and for that reason I had no need for any other girl. So, I wasn’t being very nice to Francis in putting him off. Then, when the first rushes came in, I found that the girl was a head taller than Roddy McDowall. In those days you couldn’t have the girl be taller than the boy, you just couldn’t do it. So, unfortunately for her, we had to take her out of the part. MGM had just made a film [in which] there were seven charming little girls. The casting office agreed to get them to my office at five o’clock. And then I remembered Francis Taylor. I called him at his gallery and told him what was going on. He reported that his daughter was in Pasadena with her mother [visiting Sara’s father], and possibly would get to the studio, but he wasn’t sure. At five o’clock, the casting director ushered in the six girls, all English with their mothers and schoolteachers to watch them, and the whole crowd gathered in my office. I started looking them over to see who we would get to fill this part when my secretary called from outside and said there was another girl who had just arrived. Elizabeth, with her mother. She walked in and 44

  Elizabeth

  was wearing—I still recall—a blue velvet cape. Her blue eyes, the dark hair, the cape, it was like an eclipse of the sun, blotting out everybody who was in the office. This gorgeous, beautiful young girl. We never even tested her. We never even thought to make a test.” Elizabeth had won the role.

  It would be on the set of this film that Elizabeth would meet one of her lifelong friends, Roddy McDowall, who was the thirteen-year-old star of the movie. “On her first day of filming, I recall, they took one look at her and said, get that girl off the set. She has too much eye makeup on, too much mascara,” Roddy once recalled. “So they rushed her off the set and started rubbing at her eyes with a moist cloth to take the mascara off. Guess what? They learned then that she had no mascara on. She has a double set of eyelashes. Now, who has double eyelashes except a girl who was absolutely born to be on the big screen? And the wonderful thing about Elizabeth was that she was so totally unaware of her beauty. At a place, MGM, that was full of gorgeous women, she did stand out as a young girl. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen.”

  Renowned for its movie-star glamour queens, such as Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo, prior to Elizabeth’s arrival, and Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, and Lana Turner during the time of Elizabeth’s signing, MGM was the most powerful and influential of all the film studios at the time. Under the rule of the legendary Louis B. Mayer, the Culver City, California, studio pretty much invented the so-called “star system” whereby its contract players were turned into movie stars by having their entire lives taken over by MGM. They were told how to act, not only onstage but off it as well, and harshly penalized if they misbehaved. An indiscretion could result in the artist being fined, put on suspension, or, worse, having his or her contract canceled altogether. For years, Mayer ruled with an iron fist, manipulating the professional and private lives of everyone who signed on with MGM, pulling strings as if the actors and actresses were mere puppets under his control. He was as feared as he was loved. The actresses were Childhood

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  called Metro Girls, and as such they weren’t allowed to smoke, drink, swear, or have sex before marriage. There was no bending of those rules, and as far as Sara was concerned, nothing wrong with them, either. For now, though, her daughter was just a tenyear-old making a Lassie movie. “I had a great imagination,” Elizabeth recalls, “and just slid into being an actress. It was a piece of cake.” She only had four scenes in the movie—less than ten minutes of screen time. When it was released, she was pretty much ignored by the critics. Still, on the strength of that one film appearance, MGM signed her to a seven-year contract, starting at

  $300 a week.

  As if to reaffirm the correctness of their decision regarding Elizabeth’s talent, MGM then loaned her to 20th Century-Fox for one film, Jane Eyre. She received no credit and was only seen in the film for less than three minutes as a friend of Jane’s—but they were three minutes that revealed the undeniable power of her screen presence. There was something about Elizabeth’s brief performance in Jane Eyre that exhibited the inexpressible onscreen magic that would be Elizabeth Taylor’s for the rest of her career. In the movie, young Elizabeth even had a death scene that was so poignant and real, it is worth repeated viewings. A staggering amount of wisdom was apparent in her acting, far exceeding her years. Suddenly, for no good reason other than just maybe fate and providence and luck, she now seemed to be an actress. She had no formal training other than her mother’s tutoring, yet, she . . . was . . . an actress. She would also appear ever so briefly as a shy country girl in another soap-opera movie, White Cliffs of Dover, again with Roddy McDowall, who in the film grows up to be Peter Lawford. She said “hello” in one scene and “good-bye” in another, and that was pretty much it. Still, she and Sara were not disheartened in the least. It was one of the year’s most popular films. As Elizabeth started making headway in the film business, her father became more disenchanted by the prospects. Marshall Baldrige remembers, “If I recall, he started drinking even more when he got to America and Elizabeth began to take off as an ac-46 Elizabeth

  tress. At that time, if it were left to him, he would just as soon she do something more practical with her life than be an actress. A

  ‘real’ career of some kind would have met with his approval after she had entered adulthood, but he would also have been just as satisfied if she decided to marry, have children, and be a homemaker. He wasn’t at all devoted to her blossoming career in movies, and had a sense—and a foreshadowing one, as it would happen—that she was growing up too fast. He didn’t want her to completely miss out on her childhood, and he suspected that she’d already lost a good portion of it to Sara’s ambition. He told me one story I’ll never forget, which happened during a night when, I guess, he’d been drinking.”

  “Is it really worth it,” Francis asked Sara one night at the dinner table, according to what he later recalled to Baldrige, “all the years you and Elizabeth have invested in this endeavor?”

  Sara, as usual, tried to ignore her husband’s cynicism. Francis continued by observing that if one were to add up all of Elizabeth’s time on the screen in the three movies she’d thus far made, it would probably amount to less than fifteen scant minutes. He was being completely dismissive of the progress Sara had thus far made with Elizabeth and her film career. Sara probably couldn’t believe her husband’s lack of insight. “Daddy, I thank you for your support,” she said, glaring at him. “I thank you for your kindness. And I thank you for minding your own business.” She then rose and left the table.

  “You’re giving our child away, you know?” he called after her. Sara returned to the dining room. “Elizabeth.” That’s the only word she spoke, yet her daughter knew exactly what it meant. The little girl stood and obediently followed her mother out of the room, leaving Franc
is and Howard to their dinner. Father and son would spend many nights in the future just that way—sharing their meals together while the ladies of the house planned for the future.

  Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that Francis Taylor would not have a positive reaction to Jane Eyre. Exiting a Childhood

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  private screening room following a preview of the film, he is said to have walked right past the outstretched hands of studio executives, leaving his wife and daughter to accept all of the glory. National Velvet

  National Velvet was one of thirty pictures released by MGM in 1944. It was one of only four films given the Technicolor treatment, evidence of its prestige and the importance of the production to the studio. Its road to the Culver City back lot was circuitous, to say the least. In 1935, Pandro S. Berman, as RKO’s production chief, had tried to buy the book for Katharine Hepburn, twenty-eight years old at the time. He apparently didn’t move quickly enough and the film rights were acquired by Paramount. But they couldn’t cast it, and sold it to Metro in 1937. Nothing happened with it until Berman, no longer at RKO, arrived at MGM in 1941. He became obsessed with bringing the beloved best-selling novel to the screen. Pre-production would take almost two years, and with a beautifully written script and a cast that included Andy Hardy himself, Mickey Rooney, one of the studio’s most important stars, the only thing remaining was the casting of the film’s central character, Velvet Brown. If Berman was unsure as to who would portray the twelve-year-old girl who disguises herself as a fifteen-year-old boy in order to ride in the Grand National Steeplechase, there were at least two people on the lot—Sara and Elizabeth—who were absolutely sure of who would play that part: Elizabeth Taylor

  Elizabeth had always loved horses, and had ridden before she came to the United States from England. She was about three 48