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when she first mounted the horse named Betty, given to her by Victor Cazalet. She was, she recalls, wearing a “little organdy dress.” The horse threw her off, and she landed in a thorny bush. True to her nature, she got right back on and little time elapsed before she became quite skilled as a rider. She felt that being on a horse, riding bareback, provided her greatest and only sense of freedom from the studios, from her school studies, from her work in films, and even from her mother who often had business on her mind. No one could tell her what to do when she was on a horse galloping away from her responsibilities.
Looking back on National Velvet today, Elizabeth believes she got the role in that movie by “sheer willpower.” She could be right about that. She’d read Enid Bagnold’s book and decided in her young and fertile mind that she wanted to star in the movie version as the fabled Velvet Brown. She and her mother then went to MGM and talked to anyone they could find who was even remotely involved in the project, spreading the word that Elizabeth would be perfect in the role. Finally, they found their way into Pandro S. Berman’s office, the producer of the film, and gave him the pitch. Elizabeth said that she totally identified with the main character—an ambitious young girl who dreams of entering her horse in the Grand National and disguises herself as a boy in order to ride. She was an actress . . . she had the appropriate English accent . . . she could ride horses . . . what else did he need? The problem, as told over the years, was that Elizabeth was too slight in build to pull off the notion that she could masquerade as a boy. She was just a little girl, after all, and she looked like one. Berman just felt that it wouldn’t work out for her. But “I am going to play that part,” the youngster said with steely determination. It’s been famously reported over the years that Elizabeth actually “willed” herself to grow three inches for the part. Elizabeth still believes this is true. Of course, it’s not the case, but it did make for some fun reading back when MGM was promoting the film. In fact, she pretty much ate her way to an additional weight that actually made her look bigger, but not necessarily taller. She Childhood
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recalled, “There was this place called Tips, where they had a thing called a Farm Breakfast—two hamburger patties, two fried eggs, a great big mound of hash-brown potatoes and after that a whole bunch of silver-dollar pancakes. I used to have two Farm Breakfasts every morning at one sitting. For lunch, I’d have steaks and salads, then swim and do exercises to stretch myself.” All of the foregoing is probably true. But a ten-year-old child growing an inch a month for three months by stretching herself and eating an abundance of carbohydrates would have been somewhat of a medical miracle. Still, Elizabeth continued: “In three months, I’d grown three inches. That single-mindedness, or stubbornness if you will, is as much a part of me as the color of my eyes.”
By the time the film was in production, nothing was more important to Elizabeth and her mother than National Velvet. In it she would appear opposite Mickey Rooney, who played the role of the young wanderer who appears at the Brown home one day and winds up training the Pie for the Grand National Steeplechase. They knew that it was the movie that could make Elizabeth a star, and they were right about it. She really was a natural. She has recalled, “The first time I ever had to cry [on film] was in National Velvet. The horse was supposed to have colic, and of course he was Velvet’s life. When the character Mickey played said he didn’t think the horse would live, Velvet cries. I knew the scene and it hadn’t worried me in the slightest. Anyway, when we rehearsed the scene, Mickey put his arm around me and said, ‘Honey, you know in this scene you have to cry.’ And I said, ‘Yes, Mickey, I know.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you should think that your father is dying and your mother has to wash clothes for a living and your little brother is out selling newspapers on the street and he doesn’t have shoes and he’s cold and shivering, and your little dog was run over.’ It was meant to make me cry. Instead, I started to laugh. I didn’t have the heart to say anything to him. The more I tried, the more I could not stop the giggles. When I did the scene, instead of imagining my father drunk and dying and my mother doing the laundry in a snowy stream, all I thought about was the horse being 50
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very sick . . . and the tears just came. But how generous of Mickey to try to help me.” (Of course, Elizabeth is entitled to her own memory about her first screen cry, but the truth is, she was called upon to cry in both Jane Eyre and Lassie Come Home.) Another humorous story Elizabeth enjoys telling has to do with her hairstyle in the film. The director, Clarence Brown, felt that when the time came in the script for Velvet to cut her hair in order to look like a jockey, the only way to achieve realism would be for Elizabeth to actually shear off her own hair. Not in a million years was Elizabeth Taylor going to cut those flowing locks, and she told Brown as much. (And she had good reason: The year before in Jane Eyre, playing a foundling in an orphans’ home, she had to endure a devastating haircut by Henry Daniell, who portrayed the home’s merciless headmaster.) Back and forth they went, director and star, with, of course, Taylor’s mother siding with her. Finally, Elizabeth and Sara went to Sydney Guilaroff—
who would become famous as the MGM hairstylist—and asked for his advice. Guilaroff saved the day by constructing two wigs for her—one that matched her own hair and that Mickey Rooney would be shown whacking at with scissors in the film, and another, a boy-bob, that she would wear over her own unshorn tresses as the jockey who rides the Pie to victory. She went back to Brown wearing the bobbed wig, and of course he said, “You see, I told you that you had to cut your hair in order for this to work.”
It was a sweet moment for Elizabeth when, the crucial scene shot and in the can, she was able to pull that wig off. Rescreening the newly released DVD of National Velvet today, it is as irresistible as when it was made more than sixty years ago. There is nothing dated about the film, nor one false note in Elizabeth’s performance. Its popularity has endured, and in 2003 it was selected by the Library of Congress for its permanent film collection. Watching it, one is struck not only by the timelessness of the story, but also by its parallels to the life experiences of Elizabeth and her mother: Dreams can become reality despite the intervention of fate—or perhaps because of it. As a young girl, Childhood
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Velvet’s mother—played by the wonderful Anne Revere—
dreamed of swimming the English Channel. Nothing or no one could dissuade her. She swam the cold and choppy Channel in a competition—and won! Mrs. Brown never spent the prize money of 100 sovereigns, keeping the gold coins in a leather pouch in a trunk in the attic. Now it is Velvet’s time to dream—of entering the Pie in the Grand National. She has no doubt that she will win. The entrance fee would be paid by Mrs. Brown’s secret treasure, which she turns over to a breathless Velvet in a powerfully emotional scene. “Everyone should have a chance at a breathtaking piece of folly at least once in his life,” she says. Dark-haired, willowy, and ineffably graceful on and off her fourlegged costar, young Elizabeth beautifully acquitted herself in this, her first major film. As twelve-year-old Velvet, she seems like an old soul, but when she runs about the seaside Sussex pastureland (actually Pebble Beach in Northern California) chasing after the Pie dressed in her middie-blouse and pleated skirt or riding the handsome gelding sans saddle, jumping the stone fences at full gallop, she is the very embodiment of the child that Enid Bagnold must have envisioned as Velvet Brown. Though she was still a few years away from the kind of fully ripened femme fatale that ancient nations went to war over, the movie’s called-for hair bob and racing silks were unable to fully transform her into a jockey-boy. With her oh so delicate features, including her heliotrope eyes and the apple pinkness of her cheeks, plus the simple sweetness of her disposition, she just could not erase the line separating little boys from little girls.
Unfortunately, it was because of her work on National Velvet that Elizabeth would be doomed to spend the rest of her life dealing with tortur
ous pain in her spine. She took a fall from her horse during the filming of the movie. It was, actually, a scripted fall. Most theatergoers assumed that the studio had used a stunt double for Elizabeth when Velvet Brown took that spill. However, it truly was Elizabeth. She hit the turf on her back and actually bounced off it. Unfortunately, the damage done to her back dur-52 Elizabeth
ing the tumble would be the catalyst for a myriad of very serious spinal problems that would plague her for the rest of her days. National Velvet was released in New York City on December 14, 1944, in order to qualify for the Academy Awards of that year. It was issued nationally on January 26 the following year and was an immediate hit, grossing over $4.25 million, equal to about a third of all the money brought in by the remaining twenty-nine MGM
releases in 1944. The film’s reviews and Elizabeth’s personal notices were glowing. “[She imbued] the character with such a burning, tempered with a sweet, fragile charm, that not even a splendidly restrained Mickey Rooney could steal scenes from her,”
enthused the New York World-Telegram & Sun. At Academy Award time, the film copped two of the three statuettes for which it was nominated, including a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Anne Revere, as the wise prophetess/ Brown family matriarch. Director Clarence Brown received the fourth of five nominations he would eventually get as Best Director, but he would go winless every time. MGM rewarded Elizabeth with a lucrative long-term contract, establishing her as one of its top child actresses, along with the younger Margaret O’Brien. Elizabeth now wryly says that if she had known that she would have to sign a contract with MGM, she might not have grown the necessary three inches for the film. “I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” she says.
“Slavery!”
Legend has it that L. B. Mayer was so excited about his success with her that he even gave her the horse she rode in the film as a gift for her thirteenth birthday. In truth, she had demanded it, and made it clear that she would not rest until it was hers. A theme of her life had begun: What Elizabeth wants, Elizabeth gets. Pandro Berman told Brenda Maddox, who wrote one of the best Taylor biographies ever published ( Who’s Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor? ), “All the while we were making the picture, this kid is pestering me to give her the horse. ‘Can I have the horse? Can I have the horse?’
I couldn’t give it to her. It wasn’t my horse. It was L. B. Mayer’s horse. So I asked Mayer and he said, okay, let her have the horse. Childhood
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Now fade out and fade into 1959 when we’re doing Butterfield 8 and she is now Elizabeth, the cold-eyed dame. She says to me,
‘Aren’t you the guy who gave me the horse after National Velvet?’
And I say, ‘Yes, I’m afraid that I am.’ And she says to me, ‘You son of a bitch. I’m still paying for feed for that goddamned horse.’ ”
(Berman was not a big fan of Taylor’s, and the reasons for his ill feelings about her will become clear later. Plus, it should also be noted that she may have been joking; not everyone gets her biting humor.) Throughout the history of the film business, people have tried to describe and categorize and duplicate that indescribable quality, that certain something that is the stuff of screen legends, and Elizabeth Taylor certainly has it in National Velvet. Sara saw it on the screen when she went to see the movie, and as she would recall, she couldn’t help but cry at her daughter’s performance. Racked with sobs in the darkened theater, it was clear that she felt an emotion not simply born of the impact of her daughter’s acting ability. Her almost mournful reaction to that now historic movie might be likened to a bride’s mother—happy that her daughter had found love, someone with whom she would spend the rest of her life, but with full knowledge that the bond they once shared was being replaced by a new, more powerful connection. Elizabeth Taylor was hers no longer. She belonged to Hollywood. She belonged to the world. Making a Star . . . a Star!
B y the age of thirteen, Elizabeth Taylor had become a major movie star thanks to National Velvet, earning a salary of $300 a 54
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week—not much today, but at the time a reasonable amount to pay a child actress. In what may have seemed like a nice gesture from the studio, Sara, now forty-nine, continued on the payroll, earning about 10 percent of that amount a year as her daughter’s chaperone and, really, only acting teacher. If in the films Elizabeth would make in the years to come she wasn’t delivering her lines with conviction, Sara, standing on the sidelines, would put her hand on her heart to signal more emotion. If Elizabeth seemed tired during a scene, Sara would smile broadly at her, baring her teeth to indicate a more upbeat demeanor. If she forgot her lines, Sara would tap her head to suggest that Elizabeth needed to concentrate. She also constantly tried to coach Elizabeth to lower the timbre of her speaking voice, but was unsuccessful in that regard. If Sara had proceeded with such tactics in a good-natured way, it may have been easier for Elizabeth to digest her ideas and incorporate them into her acting. However, it simply wasn’t possible for Sara to conduct herself in a way that might be considered relaxed or lighthearted when she was present on the set of one of her daughter’s films. During the course of just a couple of years, Elizabeth’s career had become serious business to Sara. The sense of fun that had been integral to her personality had been replaced by a sense of urgency. It was as if she felt that Elizabeth had to be perfect in each moment because one mistake could ruin everything they’d so far achieved. Of course, that wasn’t the case. No one expected such precision from a thirteen-year-old actress—no one, that is, but her mother. If Elizabeth made a mistake, Sara would visibly stiffen. The expression on her face, grim and irate, would signal to everyone present that she was displeased. Such displays of emotion made it all the more difficult for a young girl who was already under enormous pressure. If only Sara could have been just a little more understanding it would have made everything so much easier. Upon seeing that Sara was upset with something that had occurred, Elizabeth would drop her eyes and become flustered and anxious. Eventually, of course, she would rise to the occasion and do whatever it was she was supposed to Childhood
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do—she was a quick study and did have natural ability—but at what cost to her psyche?
While it was without a doubt her great beauty that initially attracted audiences to her and her films, it was Elizabeth’s honesty as a performer that kept them coming back, this according to Richard Brooks, who later directed Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:
“Here’s a girl on the big screen—bigger than life—idolized in thousands upon thousands of dark theaters all over the world by men and women, some who want to emulate her, some who love her, a fantasy, a dream. But she is also so vulnerable that she could easily be hurt. Vulnerability is a counterpart of humility, and Elizabeth really was a humble person. That’s one of the things that made her such a great star. One could ask, well, who could hurt Elizabeth Taylor? She has wealth, she’s affluent, she has men, she’s a power, a turret, a fortress. But she wasn’t, and the audience knew it. It came out of the screen, this vulnerability, and the audience reached out to her and wanted to protect her. That was Elizabeth.”
Of course, like most child stars, Elizabeth would become a bird in the gilded cage of the MGM studio system, totally controlled by the adults in her life at the studio. Luckily, her parents—mostly Sara, but at times even Francis—were both strong-willed and protective, traits that would serve Elizabeth well in years to come and prevent MGM from always having its way with their daughter. After National Velvet, Sara returned from a meeting at the studio and informed Francis that it was time for him to step up and join her in forging their daughter’s future at MGM. “It’s a gentleman’s club,” she told him. “If I smoked cigars, I might have half a chance with Mr. Mayer.” Francis may not have had the showbiz savvy his wife had gained in recent years, but he did look forward to having a more active role in Elizabeth’s new and exciting life. “I think he felt that he may as well join them since he surely wasn’t going to
beat them,” said his friend Stefan Verkaufen. Therefore, with an agenda clearly set by his wife, Francis had a face-to-face with one 56
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of the most powerful men in Hollywood, Mayer, and it couldn’t have gone better.
In an interview with Helen Gurley Brown for Cosmopolitan in 1987, Elizabeth recalled, “When they wanted to change my name to Virginia—don’t ask me why—my father said, ‘no, she was christened Elizabeth and that’s what she’ll be called.’ They said my hair was too dark, that it would photograph blue-black. My father said,
‘You’re not dyeing my child’s hair.’ They wanted to pluck my eyebrows, and again he said, no. L. B. Mayer, none of them, could have fought with my dad and won. They wanted to remove the mole from my face. They wanted to change the shape of my mouth with heavy lipstick. That’s when I said no.”
She later wrote in her book, Elizabeth Takes Off, “Luckily, my strong sense of self enabled me to deal with tyrannical studio bosses like Louis B. Mayer. While I defied the studio and wouldn’t let anyone push me around, Judy Garland never talked back; she followed the studio’s orders. They pumped pills into that poor girl to keep her awake, to put her to sleep, and to keep her slim. Judy, an eager, loving and trusting person, never questioned the company’s motives.”
Indeed, even though Elizabeth was one of the major stars at MGM, she wasn’t like the other actresses there who constantly subjugated themselves to the irascible studio boss. In fact, she wasn’t fond of L. B. Mayer at all; she thought him a hypocrite. She would point out that he constantly encouraged all of the children at the studio to think of him as a benevolent father and come to him with their problems, “but just try to get an appointment with the man. It will simply never happen.” She loathed duplicity in people, even at an early age.
“People often express sadness that the studio system doesn’t exist any longer, but those are usually people who were not in it,”
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