Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Elizabeth

  was sick and tired of making movies and that she just wanted to be a regular child—a request that seemed appropriate for a young woman in her position. Sara, though, took her daughter’s cry for help as a sign of ingratitude. “But you’re not a regular child, and thank God for that,” she told her. “You have a responsibility, Elizabeth. Not just to this family, but to the country now, the whole world.”

  Elizabeth looked to Francis for help, but he just didn’t have it in him. The only way for him to be there for his child would have been to stand up to his wife, and apparently he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he held his tongue, not saying a word. Elizabeth fled from the room, crying.

  When recounting this upsetting story, Francis later told Stefan that he viewed the moment as defining for all concerned. It was painfully clear to him that Sara had become so invested in the future of Elizabeth Taylor, movie star, that nothing would stand in her way of even bigger success with her—even her daughter’s own happiness. Also, Elizabeth’s feelings for him had also come into focus. “I could see that she’d lost all respect for me that night,” he told Stefan. “It was as if a dagger had pierced my heart.” Years later, Elizabeth would blithely state, “You know, my real fathers were Benny Thau [a top-level MGM executive], and Jules Goldstone [her agent].” How sad that she would end up feeling that way, especially considering her father’s understandable problems and his utter inability to address them. He wouldn’t have hurt her intentionally for the world. Yet he had done just that, and she would never forget it.

  Part Two

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  FINDING HER WAY

  Early Suitors . . . and

  Howard Hughes

  E lizabeth Taylor has said that one of the biggest challenges she faced during her adolescent years was her lack of peers. Youngsters her own age seemed too immature when contrasted with the adults in her world. She didn’t know how to respond to them. Older children somehow seemed too worldly to her. She presumed that their experiences were more varied than any she’d known, her having been locked up within the walls of MGM for so many years. Therefore, without anyone to help define her personality, she really was on her own. She was her—and her mother’s—own creation, not just on the screen but in her private life. By the time Elizabeth was about sixteen, Sara had become preoccupied with her daughter’s social life—her dating life, specifically. True to her complex nature, there were a couple of paradoxes at work with Sara: As much as she wanted Elizabeth to remain a little girl, she also wanted her to be viewed by the public as popular and desirable. Moreover, it was as if she wouldn’t let Elizabeth out of her sight for ten minutes, yet she wanted her to date. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to state that she wanted people to think Elizabeth was dating. In other words, she was concerned about Elizabeth’s public image and worried that unless she was photographed on some young man’s arm soon, the public would begin to think that maybe she wasn’t dating material, and how would that look? The problem was that the roles played by Elizabeth’s costars—

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  Elizabeth

  usually not even the costars themselves—had become the only

  “people” with whom Elizabeth had developed relationships, and those parts were scripted by adults. In the real world, young men were immediately unsettled upon first contact with her. While not impervious to her beauty, they were fearful of her, reluctant to approach her. Plus, everyone knew about her mother’s protective nature, and no one wanted to tangle with her. Today, when asked if she ever had to deal with the “casting couch”—giving out sexual favors for movie roles—Elizabeth laughs and says, “By the time I was old enough, no one dared.”

  Despite her formidable image, she was actually extremely naïve when it came to romance. She had a screenwriter’s view of it. All she wanted was to fall in love and have the kind of head-overheels experiences she’d acted on the screen, to know that by the end of the story everyone would be forever happy. Indeed, when it came to matters of the heart, a film’s fantasy was truly her only frame of reference. She wasn’t going to be finding boyfriends on her own, that much was clear—not that anyone wanted her to do so anyway. It was at Sara’s urging that MGM set Elizabeth up on her first date, when she was sixteen. It was to be with a young chap they found for her, an all-America football player, the tall and handsome Heisman Trophy winner Lieutenant Glenn Davis, just out of West Point. Tall, with reddish brown hair, he was all muscle and swagger. Doris Kearns, wife of MGM publicist Hubie Kearns, brought Davis to the Taylors’ new Malibu retreat for a Sunday brunch. For Sara, as soon as she met the twenty-threeyear-old Davis it was true love—even if Elizabeth seemed at first shy and ambivalent. “When I saw that frank, wonderful face, I thought, ‘This is the boy.’ I felt such a sense of relief,” Sara later wrote. “My worries were over.”

  At this time, the summer of 1948, Elizabeth was making Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s autobiographical account of her life with her three sisters in Concord, Massachusetts, in the 1860s. Taylor would appear in the film (which turned out to be fairly mediocre), with June Allyson, Margaret O’Brien, Janet Leigh, and Finding Her Way

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  Peter Lawford, as the snooty and anxious Amy, complete with strawberry blonde wig. “I liked playing the role of a young girl in love,” she said of her part. During filming, she and Glenn saw each other from time to time, mostly at the Taylors’ summer home. One weekend, he bought Elizabeth her first gift of jewelry. Oddly, the piece somehow ended up in Sara and Francis’s joint will in the 1960s: “To our beloved grandchild, Liza Todd, we bequeath the cultured pearl necklace with 69 graduated pearls, given to Elizabeth by Glenn Davis.” When Elizabeth told a reporter that she and Davis were “engaged to be engaged,” it became a big story and no one questioned it at the time, not even Davis (who years later would say, “We were not engaged, nor were we engaged to be engaged.”) It was as if Elizabeth was easily able to glide from the role she was playing in Little Women to the one she was playing in real life, without anyone taking issue with it or even thinking twice about it.

  In September, the affable Glenn Davis was shipped off to Korea. He left Elizabeth with a little gold football around her neck and his picture on her dressing table to help keep their “love”

  alive. She promised to wait for him. Touching photographs of the two of them kissing good-bye were published around the world.

  “Letters came in bunches from Korea,” recalled Sara Taylor in one of her many articles, “and she spent half her time hanging over her desk writing in return. All of which proves that my daughter’s movie career has given her no degree of sophistication.” Though the meaning of Sara’s observation is unclear, something about it seems oddly critical. In any event, the situation with Glenn Davis was innocent enough, even if it had all been a public relations ruse.

  In November 1948, the Taylor women went to England so that Elizabeth could film Conspirator there with Robert Taylor; Francis and Howard stayed behind in California. In the film, Elizabeth played a twenty-one-year-old debutante who unwittingly marries a communist spy, played by Taylor. It seemed odd casting at the time due to the difference in their ages—she was sixteen, he was 72

  Elizabeth

  thirty-eight—yet it somehow made perfect sense on the screen. At this point, Elizabeth was earning about $1,000 a week for her work in films. When the movie was released in 1950, it would bomb at the box office, though the young actress would be praised for her work, with Variety saying she “comes out with flying colors.”

  Sara and Elizabeth had a wonderful time together in London. From photographs taken during the trip, it’s clear that Sara—still a real beauty with her dark hair and dancing eyes—enjoyed the attention of the press, as if perhaps reliving her glory days in London when she was a theater star appearing in The Fool. Mother and daughter returned to America in February 1949, with Francis meeting them in New York City. From there, they went to Howard Young’s winter home at Star Islan
d, Florida, where Elizabeth would celebrate her seventeenth birthday. It was at Young’s, during a dinner party on March 3, that she met the wealthy William Pawley. At twenty-eight, he was more than ten years her senior, from a socially prominent family. With coal-black hair and deep, penetrating eyes, he had the chiseled face of a Hollywood actor, complete with pencil-thin mustache. Gregarious, funny, and unfailingly polite, he was the kind of young man any mother would approve of for her daughter, and he was wealthy as well. Elizabeth was immediately infatuated with him, and Sara had to admit that he did appear to be a more suitable beau than the financially challenged football player. Therefore, she encouraged Elizabeth in her crush over Pawley, and after a couple of weeks it actually seemed as if the two might have some sort of romance. A dilemma arose, however, when in March 1949 Glenn Davis was granted a furlough from his tour of duty and of course wanted to see Elizabeth. What transpired next may not reveal Sara’s best moment, but it does demonstrate how easy it was for her to become swept away by the cyclone of excitement and publicity her daughter’s career could generate at any time. Glenn telephoned the Taylors from California to ask if he might fly down to see Eliz-Finding Her Way 73

  abeth. Sara picked up the phone and, according to a Taylor relative who is very familiar with what transpired, did not at first know how to treat his request. “She knew that Elizabeth was finished with him,” said the relative, “but as she was about to tell him not to come, something came over her, as she would later tell it. She referred to it as an epiphany, something she didn’t have a chance to think through but rather just act upon in the moment. It hit her that his arrival at the airport would present a valuable photo opportunity for Elizabeth. Before she knew what she was doing she had told him to come on down to Florida. Then she hung up and telephoned MGM’s press department to arrange to have the media positioned at the airport so that the very moment Elizabeth and Glenn were at long last reunited could be the subject of photo essays all over the world. After it was all arranged, she said, she sat down in a chair and thought, ‘Dear Lord, what have I just done?’ But, then she remembered that Davis had film aspirations and had actually played himself in a low-budget film called The Spirit of West Point. So she figured, well, he’ll get some publicity, too, so everyone wins.”

  In Sara’s view, what she’d done was probably comparable to what publicists did every day at MGM for their contract players. Movie studios embellished the truth all the time, so it’s understandable that she would feel that her idea was valid if her goal was just to generate publicity. The problem, though, was that she was a mother, not a publicist, and as such had put herself in a position of exploiting her own daughter’s naïveté and trust, not to mention Glenn Davis’s. If Elizabeth and Glenn had actually been in a legitimate relationship and he was coming home from war to resume his romance with her, then, yes, that would have been a legitimate story to feed to the press. But that was not at all the situation—at least not as far as Elizabeth was concerned. Elizabeth had no experience at all with romance; this was a delicate time for her and surely Sara must have recognized as much. Indeed, according to Taylor family history, Sara wasn’t totally comfortable after she had a chance to consider all of the ramifications of her 74

  Elizabeth

  actions. However, once she put the idea into motion with MGM, there was really no turning back, for her or her daughter. Elizabeth had no problem going to meet Glenn Davis upon his arrival in Florida and acting as if she anticipated a happy future with him in her life. Why would she? She had no frame of reference for real relationships and didn’t even know enough to realize that what she was doing was disingenuous. For her, the experience with Davis at the airport would be just like any number of situations she’d thus far had with the actors she’d worked with at the studio. She was acting, as she saw it, and none of it was real anyway.

  As expected, the scene at the airport turned into a mad one, with photographers jostling for position to get the best photographs of MGM’s winsome star with the all-American boyfriend she had missed so much, and Elizabeth put on the expected good show of chirpy, girlish emotion at the very sight of the slack-jawed Glenn. The next day, photographs of the two were published in newspapers all over the country, the captions indicating that Glenn would probably be offering Elizabeth an engagement ring in the near future, an embellishment that was MGM’s, not Sara’s.

  “I think it was a roller coaster of emotions for Sara,” says the Taylor relative. “She was happy that she had gotten the press she wanted, very impressed with herself for having pulled it off, but also feeling a bit guilty about how easy it had been to manipulate things. I knew her. She was not a venal woman but rather a focused person who, once she set her sights on something, went about the business of doing it, no matter what. I can tell you that Francis was not pleased about any of it. It may have been good publicity, but to Elizabeth it was much more . . . it was her life. Or was it? The lines of distinction were quickly becoming blurred, even for her. She was just sixteen, after all.”

  When Glenn Davis figured out what was going on, he turned around and went back to Los Angeles feeling betrayed and hurt—

  and with a ruby-and-diamond engagement ring in his pocket, a miniature of his class ring from West Point. As it happened, he Finding Her Way

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  had actually intended to ask Elizabeth to marry him and when he saw her obvious enthusiasm for him at the airport he knew that her answer was going to be an unequivocal yes. However, once the couple was away from the panting press, he found that Elizabeth was distant and totally uninterested in anything he had to say. She had changed. The scene was over. What did he expect of her? “I was pretty devastated by the whole thing,” he recalled. He was followed in Los Angeles shortly thereafter, on March 23, by Elizabeth and her parents. The next day would mark the Academy Awards presentation and Elizabeth was scheduled to present the statue for costume design. Someone had to escort her to the awards, and it would, obviously, have to be the young man who’d just been pictured with her in newspapers all over the world: Glenn Davis. He did not reject MGM’s suggestion when the studio called with it. (It’s been reported that Elizabeth was the one to ask him to accompany her, but that does not appear to be true.) Like Sara, he was also caught in the whirlwind of Elizabeth’s life and career, and even he would have to admit to a certain thrill about it. While he and Elizabeth appeared to be the idyllic young couple at the awards show, it was all as much make-believe as one of her movies. However, Elizabeth pulled it off without much of a problem. Anyone who had been watching would have thought that she really did have an emotional attachment to Glenn Davis. Again . . . all acting. This was her first exposure to the notion of dating a member of the opposite sex, and already it had become quite easy for her to separate herself from the truth of it. For her, dating and acting had quickly become interchangeable. Meanwhile, this orchestrated fantasy with Glenn Davis was also her first relationship melodrama, setting the stage for many more in years to come in which she would be involved with one man while on the arm of another.

  It can also be fairly speculated that the fact that Glenn Davis agreed to take Elizabeth to the Oscars might have helped assuage any guilt Sara felt about her original strategy to generate publicity for her daughter. She probably reasoned that he must not have 76

  Elizabeth

  been that hurt by her plan or he wouldn’t have agreed to MGM’s request. Of course, with MGM’s idea he had been in on the joke, whereas with Sara’s he had not. After the Academy Awards show, he and Elizabeth shook hands; it was the last time he would ever lay eyes on her.

  At the end of May 1949, Elizabeth and Sara were houseguests of the Pawley family in Florida. The day after they arrived, William presented Elizabeth with a three-and-a-half-carat, emerald-cut solitaire diamond ring—for which he had paid

  $16,000—her first “white diamond.” Now they were officially, and quite suddenly, engaged. MGM organized a press conference to announce the engagement, and durin
g it Sara reminded reporters that Elizabeth had never really been engaged to Glenn Davis, which was true. “She just wore his gold football, like all the girls out there were doing,” she said. Still, these sudden romantic experiences all must have seemed a tad on the disposable side for Elizabeth: out with one boyfriend and in with the other, and, truly, without much consideration for either of them. In retrospect, it was not a very good impression to make on a naïve seventeen-year-old. At the press conference, she sat with Pawley and didn’t say much other than to describe her ring to one reporter as “a nice piece of ice.”

  Elizabeth’s engagement to William Pawley ended a few months later when he tried to persuade her to give up her career for him. Of course, she would never do such a thing for him—or anyone else—at this time. When the engagement ended, Elizabeth wasn’t upset about it, not in the least. In fact, she told the press that it had to end because she was about to start two new movie projects— The Big Hangover and Father of the Bride—and would be preoccupied with both commitments, which was an odd way to explain the end of a romance but does demonstrate that she hadn’t taken it very seriously. Already there seemed to be many consequences of her having been influenced to play so loosely with people’s emotions, not the least of which was that Elizabeth Finding Her Way