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pening to her daughter, at least according to one of Elizabeth’s closest relatives. That relative explained:
“As I recall it, when Elizabeth returned from her honeymoon, she and Nicky had a stopover in New York. Sara had a very bad feeling about things, just a mother’s intuition. She just . . . knew. She asked Ivy Hewett, who was one of Uncle Howard’s secretaries, to call upon Elizabeth at the hotel the newlyweds were staying at, just to check up on her, and then report back everything she saw. So Ivy made a date to meet with Elizabeth at a restaurant. When Elizabeth showed up, she was wearing a long-sleeved blouse with a see-through sort of material and, sure enough, you could see bruises and black-and-blue marks all over her arms. It was as if she knew that Sara had sent Ivy to check on her and was deliberately passing on a message. Surely she could have worn a sweater if she really didn’t want the bruises to be seen. Ivy was shocked. She immediately reported it back to Sara. As soon as Elizabeth returned to California, Sara confronted her, and she readily admitted that Nicky was hitting her. However, Elizabeth insisted that she could handle it and she begged her not to tell Francis. As far as I know, Sara did so promise, and she kept that promise. For the duration of the marriage, Sara and Elizabeth tried to figure a way out, but it wasn’t as easy as just ending it. There were concerns about MGM, about divorce, about Elizabeth’s public image. Also, Elizabeth was terrified that Nicky would kill her if he knew she was thinking of leaving him. It was a nightmare. During this time, Elizabeth’s suffering was also Sara’s.”
Within a short time, Nicky let it be known that he was uncomfortable with the relationship Elizabeth had with Sara, and was also threatened by it. Earlier, while on their honeymoon, Elizabeth was unpacking her things when Nicky teased her about a floppy hat she had brought along with her.
“My mother gave it to me,” Elizabeth said, “so I’ll need to wear it in a few pictures.”
“But it’s a hat for a little girl,” he remarked. Finding Her Way
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“I must always be a little girl for my mother,” she told him. It was just the kind of sentiment that infuriated Nicky Hilton. The same Taylor relative who related the story of Sara’s learning of her daughter’s abuse relayed this story as it was told to him by Sara:
A few weeks into the marriage, Elizabeth and Nicky went to the Taylor home in Beverly Hills for dinner. Francis was in New York visiting his uncle Howard. One can imagine that it must have galled Sara to have Nicky Hilton in her home considering what she knew about him, but when a mother is in such a difficult situation with her daughter she does what she has to do to at least keep an eye on things even if she can’t change them. While Sara was in the kitchen, Nicky began to argue with Elizabeth. At first she responded in hushed tones, attempting to keep the row private. That became impossible, however, as Hilton’s voice bellowed through the house while he laid into his teenage bride. He was drunk and out of control. Sara was eavesdropping out of concern from the kitchen.
“You make me sick,” Nicky hollered at Elizabeth. As he turned to walk away from her, Elizabeth grabbed him by the arm and, in one quick and violent move, apparently twisted him around and slapped him across the face with everything she had in her. She hit him so hard that he nearly lost his balance. Looking in from the kitchen, Sara was shocked beyond measure.
Elizabeth locked eyes with Nicky and snarled, “Don’t you ever turn your back on me. Ever!”
Nicky took Elizabeth in from head to toe. Then, with a thunderous sound, his opened hand landed on his wife’s beautiful face. At that moment, Sara said, she burst into the room just in time to see her daughter aloft from yet another blow. Elizabeth landed in a heap in the corner of the room. “You hit me,” she managed to say through her tears. “How dare you!”
“Get out of my house, now, you bastard” Sara screamed as she ran to her daughter’s side. “And don’t you ever come back!” she added. “You’re nothing but a coward. You hit a lady.”
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“No I didn’t,” Nicky said plainly. “Tell her, Elizabeth. Tell her you’re no lady.”
Nicky showed no regret as he walked out the front door, leaving mother and daughter on the floor and in tears. After seven months, the Hiltons separated. They divorced in February 1951. Elizabeth, who was making about $2,000 a week, did not ask for alimony. “I don’t need a prize for failing,” she remarked at the time. Failure. It was a word Elizabeth wasn’t used to having applied to her, in any way. Her mother had been pushing her toward excellence for so many years that the idea of actually not succeeding at something was enormously upsetting to her. It filled her with the most intense feelings of inferiority, of worthlessness. In fact, she would never forget the way it made her feel and would often think back on this time as the beginning of all of the true heartache in her life. Not surprisingly, her perceived failure at being a good wife and at having a happy marriage took its toll. Her divorce would be the first in the Taylor family. By the time she began work on the set of Father’s Little Dividend (the sequel to Fa- ther of the Bride), she had lost twenty pounds, become a chainsmoker, and was suffering from high blood pressure, colitis, and an ulcer—all in just a few months. In time it would become clear that whenever there was turmoil in her life, she would inevitably become extremely ill. Indeed, for decades to come, a vicious pattern would be repeated: deathly sicknesses and dramatic recoveries almost always linked to upheavals in her personal life.
“The collapse of my marriage was a dreadful blow to my selfesteem,” Elizabeth said many years later. “And like everything else in my life, the entire fiasco was played out before the public. I reported back to the studio and found comfort in keeping busy. If I could not be the perfect wife in reality, I could continue to create illusions on the screen. Father’s Little Dividend followed Father of the Bride and in the sequel my celluloid counterpart became a mother. I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, only it was in 35millimeter rather than life.”
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It would actually take years before Elizabeth would hint at the horror she experienced as Nicky’s spouse; in her 1965 memoir she didn’t mention any of the beatings. Because she wanted to maintain some privacy about the matter—and also because she was ashamed—she didn’t even tell the judge all of the awful details when he asked why she was divorcing Nicky. She just said that he had been “mean” to her, had told her to go to hell, and had called her mother derisive names. She got her divorce, but she wondered what the press would have thought about her decision—which was, for the most part, criticized—if they had only known the truth.
Many years later, Elizabeth finally revealed a secret she had kept for almost half a century: The final beating she endured as Hilton’s wife had caused a miscarriage. “I left him after having a baby kicked out of my stomach,” she said sadly. “I had terrible pains. I saw the baby in the toilet. I didn’t know that I was pregnant, so it wasn’t a malicious or on-purpose kind of act,” she hastened to add, seeming to want to protect Nicky, even after all this time. “It just happened. He was drunk. I thought, ‘This is not why I was put on earth. God did not put me here to have a baby kicked out of my stomach.’ ”
Elizabeth’s Anger
A fter her marriage to Nicky Hilton ended, Elizabeth Taylor was not only physically ill but also angry . . . at herself, at Nicky, at fate . . . and at everyone around her, including her parents. In fact, she was now more argumentative than ever with Sara, their relationship straining at the seams. Elizabeth, who would turn nine-90 Elizabeth
teen in February, was in full-fledged rebellion mode and would seemingly do anything she could think of not only to horrify Sara, but also to assert her independence from her. She was definitely changing. For instance, she had in the past employed colorful language in expressing herself—and often shocked her fellow students and teachers with it during classes at the MGM schoolhouse. But now she was swearing more than ever, and out of anger rather than just to surprise
and shock others. She had also started smoking cigarettes and, even more disturbing given her father’s problem, drinking alcohol. Though she suffered terrible stomach problems as a result of the stress in her life—and she was on a strict diet of baby food!—she refused to rest. She seemed to be careening out of control. “At this time, my efforts to climb back on my cloud were failing,” she recalled. “I was still on a treadmill, breathlessly running too fast—full of panic, fear, self-doubts. I was floundering, doing impulsive things, not caring whether I was headed for disaster, letting myself get swept along.”
Once she was divorced from Nicky Hilton, there would be a string of brief romantic entanglements for Elizabeth, including one with married suitor Stanley Donen, the director of the film she was making at the time, Love Is Better Than Ever. The movie is a black-and-white marshmallow of a musical in which she plays, of all things, a dance teacher. It would be shelved for two years because Larry Parks (her costar) was in trouble with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, after admitting he’d flirted with the Communist Party when he was younger. (Parks had become a major box-office star with The Jolson Story and its sequel, Jolson Sings Again.) Finally released with little fanfare in 1952, if remembered at all it is mainly for bringing together Elizabeth and Stanley.
Stanley was separated from his wife, but that didn’t make it any easier for Sara to accept him in her daughter’s life. She felt strongly that Elizabeth was taking a terrible chance with MGM by being so open about her relationship with Donen, such as attending the Academy Awards show with him in March 1951, and then Finding Her Way
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the premiere of Father’s Little Dividend in April. After all, her contract did include a so-called “morals clause,” which was supposed to discourage her from doing anything that might embarrass the studio. Therefore, mother and daughter had more than a few heated discussions over Donen. However, Elizabeth was not trying to hide anything from anyone, obviously, or she wouldn’t have been so public with Donen. She liked him and wanted to be with him, and that was the end of it, as far as she was concerned. He’d been of great assistance to her during the making of Love Is Better Than Ever, especially on days when she could barely imagine getting through the day, let alone a scene. The romance did not last long, especially since MGM decided to cast her in the film Ivan- hoe, which would shoot in England—far enough from Donen, the studio reasoned, to keep her from getting into more serious trouble with him. At this time, in 1951, there was a good deal of discussion in private circles as well as speculation in the media as to whether or not Elizabeth would even re-sign with MGM since her contract with the studio was about to expire. It was then that the eccentric Howard Hughes made a return appearance to her life, obtaining entrée via an unlikely and rather surprising source: her father, Francis Taylor. Hughes again approached Taylor about the availability of his famous daughter, repeating a familiar refrain: He wanted to start a film company that would finance Elizabeth’s next movies, the next six, he said, to be specific. Whether Hughes did in fact have a plan to resume making films after selling his successful RKO Studios to Desilu, it was clear that he was trying to once again get close to the elusive Elizabeth, who had earlier decided not to give him the time of day. This time, Francis heavily promoted the idea with his daughter until—given her present indecision about MGM—she eventually told him she would “probably agree” to working for a company in which Hughes was invested, at least preliminarily. Therefore, Walden Productions was quickly formed—named after a street near the Taylors’ Beverly Hills home—to be owned by Francis Taylor, Howard Hughes, 92
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and Jules Goldstone, Elizabeth’s attorney at the time. Hughes made it clear that he intended to recruit Francis as an executive producer on Elizabeth’s films, which would basically put him in the driver’s seat in a way that would trump anything his wife had ever done with Elizabeth’s career. People in Francis’s life couldn’t believe that he was actually going to be involved in such an enterprise; it was just so unlike him. “I’m simply trying to carve a little something out for myself for a change,” he explained at the time. “Is there anything wrong with that?”
Howard Hughes was—as is well-known now—extremely paranoid, so much so that he had a telephone line installed in Jules Goldstone’s office to which only he had the number. Its purpose was so that he could negotiate and do business on Elizabeth’s behalf with no one listening in on the calls. He also did everything he could think of to get a meeting with Elizabeth to discuss future projects. He called her and left messages; she never called back. He sent roses; she never acknowledged them. Many observers at the time remained puzzled as to why Elizabeth had such animosity toward this man, whom she really did not know very well. “He needed a bath,” she later explained. “I always knew what I wanted and what I didn’t want. Somebody hitting on me made no difference to me, unless I was interested.” Francis even pleaded with her to, at the very least, consent to having dinner with Hughes. “How are you going to make movies for him if you don’t even know him?” he asked. Elizabeth countered that she had never been social with L. B. Mayer and, in fact, loathed the MGM studio head,
“but that hasn’t stopped me from making movies for him, has it?”
With Hughes, if they were to work together, she decided, it would be a matter of strictly business. She knew where to draw the line, and she wasn’t afraid to draw it.
However, all of the discussion about Howard Hughes would turn out to be for nothing. When Elizabeth chose to renew her contract at MGM, her decision spelled the end of Walden Productions. It had been Francis’s one chance to do something for himself that would have given him a real sense of purpose, of Finding Her Way
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achievement. Also, it would have involved himself in his daughter’s life and career. He was terribly disappointed that things hadn’t worked out. It was a big blow, and it would take some time for him to get over it. He got no sympathy from Elizabeth, though. She seemed somewhat blasé about the entire affair, as if she hadn’t really expected any of it to work out anyway.
With her future at MGM rectified, Elizabeth left Los Angeles for New York on business, and then was scheduled to depart for London to film Ivanhoe. While in New York, she stayed for a brief time with her uncle Howard in a suite at the St. Regis Hotel. She’d always had a good and loving relationship with Howard, but Taylor family history has it that their easy rapport was truly tested during this visit. Everyone in the family felt that Elizabeth could have acted a little more contrite that Walden Productions hadn’t worked out for Francis, and it was his uncle Howard who decided to take it upon himself to talk to her about it. In a surprise altercation with his niece as soon as she got to New York, he attempted to defend Francis and even hint at what he had been up against for so many years by being married to the overbearing Sara. It was a bad idea.
“Daddy has no one to blame but himself,” Elizabeth countered angrily, “if he’s allowed Mummy to control him all of these years. It’s too late to come crying to me about it now. I won’t hear of it.” She further stated that she wasn’t going to continue to listen to Howard Young plead Francis’s case because, in her view, if her father really loved her, he would have explained himself to her personally by this time—and he hadn’t done so, “so what does that tell you?” She also said that it was too late for Francis to start taking an interest in her career by suddenly becoming involved as a producer of her films. “Where was he when I was starting out and Mummy and I were looking for work?” she demanded to know. Indeed, during the course of this very heated, thirty-minute discussion about her parents, Elizabeth became angrier, it’s been said, than Howard had ever before seen her.
Upset by the scene, Howard immediately telephoned Sara in Los Angeles—note that he did not call Francis—to inform her 94
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that Elizabeth was harboring a good deal of anger over Francis’s neglect of her. He said that he was actually afraid for her future em
otional well-being. “It’s no good, that kind of anger,” he told Sara, according to a later recollection. Sara thought this analysis was probably the most preposterous thing she’d ever heard. After all, she said, if her daughter actually felt that way, she would be the first to know about it, and she didn’t, so it must not be the case. Before hanging up on him, she told him that he had unnecessarily antagonized Elizabeth, who was already overworked, exhausted, and, actually, still quite ill—so much that there was concern that perhaps she shouldn’t even go to England to film Ivanhoe. “She’s eating baby food, for God’s sake,” Sara told him. “Have some compassion. Who told you to talk to her about this?” she demanded to know. For the record, it’s not known at whose behest Howard decided to have this discussion with Elizabeth, but some Taylor relatives seem to believe that Francis had asked him to intervene. That stands to reason. When word of all of this unpleasantness got back to Francis, he was understandably distraught about it but, true to his nature, did nothing to change the situation Uncle Howard Gets Rid of
Nicky Hilton
I t was while she was in London in the summer of 1952 making Ivanhoe that Elizabeth began to date charming matinee idol Michael Wilding, whom she had first met back in 1948 when she was in England for Conspirator. Wilding was a major star in his native England, a sophisticated man who was listened to and Finding Her Way
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respected in the intellectual, theatrical circles in which he spent his time. When he first met Elizabeth, he was immediately taken by her. He had seen pictures of her, and some of her films, of course, and he knew she was gorgeous. But the reality of Elizabeth, the realness of her person and flesh, left him speechless, as he has recalled it. Actually, she was used to that sort of reaction from people; few who met her for the first time had a different response. There was usually a moment, and she could spot it instantly even if a person tried to hide it, of stunned recognition of her beauty, of her presence . . . and especially of her eyes. She’d gotten used to people looking at her cobalt-blue eyes with great fascination as if trying to determine if they were really that blue, or was it just the way they caught a certain light? It was the way it had always been for Elizabeth Taylor, and the way it would remain.* As they got to know each other, Elizabeth remembers feeling that Michael was the kind of man who could “take care of me, make me feel good about things, about the world.” His conversation was witty and, to a twenty-year-old, profound. In her eyes, and over a very short period of time, he became infallible, just as in the eyes of a child, a father—or at least other fathers, certainly