Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  beth’s new contract also guaranteed a three-year deal for her new husband, Michael, at MGM—at her direction, of course—it must have seemed to her as if everyone in her midst was profiting from her success, except her father, who, she may also have felt, had also tried to do as much with the recently failed Howard Hughes enterprise.

  The Wilding marriage started out on an easy and romantic note, but their peace would not last long. They had rented a small, two-bedroom home in Los Angeles, but then in the summer of 1952 Elizabeth learned that she was pregnant. Her new MGM contract gave her roughly $5,000 a week, but she was being taxed in the 90 percent bracket. When attorneys and agents and publicists took their shares, she was left with about

  $20,000 a year. In the early 1950s, that was considered a good living—unless you were Elizabeth Taylor. As soon as the studio learned she was expecting—which was just after she finished her film The Girl Who Had Everything—it placed her on suspension: She would not be paid for pregnancy leave. Around the same time, Wilding—who now had a three-year deal with MGM, secured by Elizabeth for him—rejected the studio’s script for Latin Lovers. As a result, he too was placed on suspension. (The role ultimately went to Ricardo Montalban, which made a lot more sense, anyway.) Compounding matters, leaving England had cost Michael just about every cent he owned: Inland Revenue billed him the equivalent of about $100,000. The couple was now living on Elizabeth’s savings. These were show business people, though, and very practical. When Elizabeth found the home they decided they wanted, she went about the business of securing it for them even though they simply didn’t have the money to be able to afford it.

  Elizabeth decided, against the advice of her attorney and accountant, that she wanted to pay for the estate in cash. She explained that she wanted to know that the house was hers and that no one could take it from her if she decided to stop working and could no longer afford the mortgage payments (which, if any-Finding Her Way 105

  thing, shows how insecure she was about her future). The house was listed at $75,000. She had about $20,000 in her bank account, but she didn’t want to spend it because, after all, she and her husband were living on it. Therefore, she went on a mission to raise the balance of the asking price. First she went to the Los Angeles courthouse to finally collect the money that had been put aside for her from her childhood earnings, as per the Coogan Act that stipulated that her earnings during those years had to be deposited in a special account with the courts by Sara (who always did exactly as she was supposed to where this important matter was concerned). At the end of the day at court, Elizabeth walked away with another $47,100. It was still not enough, though. Taylor family history has it that she considered telephoning her uncle Howard on the East Coast to ask him for a loan. “Francis told me that she had second thoughts about that,” said Marshall Baldrige,

  “because she’d learned that Howard had been the one to get rid of Nicky Hilton, and she wasn’t a hundred percent sure how to feel about it. She took it the wrong way. She said, ‘If he was going to tell the world that Nicky beat me, was he considering what that would have done to me and my reputation? How could he do that to me?’ She didn’t get it that, really, Howard was bluffing. He wouldn’t have done it for precisely that reason. However, as shrewd as Elizabeth was in so many ways, she could be just that dense. She would see exactly what was in front of her, and not look any deeper for hidden meaning or a person’s true motivation. So she was actually unhappy with Howard for what he’d done, and decided not to call upon him for a loan.”

  Elizabeth then decided that she would find another way to raise the money, and she did just that from an unnamed executive at MGM. It seems difficult to imagine that she would have asked L. B. Mayer for it, given their tense relationship, but who else would have been able to authorize such a payment? At any rate, she did raise the required funds, further demonstrating that when she wanted something, she was the kind of woman who would find a way to get it. “Yes, I got the money,” she later confirmed, 106

  Elizabeth

  “but only on the condition that I would make an exhausting tour—pregnant, mind you, to promote a picture. I vowed then and there that I would never have to ask anybody for anything.”

  Elizabeth’s pregnancy marked the first time her weight had become an issue. She’d always been thin, but with her pregnancy she gained fifty pounds. She’d lose most of it when the baby was born, but her figure was never quite the same, and neither was her appetite. From this time onward, the scale would be one of her greatest foes. Her first child, Michael Howard Wilding, was born by cesarian section on January 6, 1953. The middle name of Howard was in honor of her brother, who had returned home from Korea just in time for the birth. The baby was beautiful, with dark curly hair and deep blue eyes. Elizabeth was thrilled, saying that the newborn had given her a new sense of purpose. “I’ve never felt so important in my life,” she said. The studio, eager to capitalize on the publicity of motherhood for one of its biggest attractions, arranged for Elizabeth Taylor to begin giving interviews as soon as she returned home from the hospital. “We brought a nurse from the hospital to take care of little Mike,” she told a reporter from Screen Life. “But she will leave as soon as I finish my next picture [ Rhapsody]. I intend to take care of him full time, all by myself. Part of the fun is taking care of your own child. Mike and I just simply adore taking care of him. Yes, we still have our five cats and two dogs, and we are trying to get a third dog, a coach dog, to grow up with the baby. They say they are very good with children. You know, I have always loved animals,” Elizabeth said wistfully. “Remember my horse, Prince Charles? And my chipmunk? And my dogs and cats?”

  When Elizabeth ran off to tend to the crying baby, Michael pulled the reporter aside. “Elizabeth has only one regret living up on this hilltop,” he said, referring to their estate. “There’s no street where she can take Michael in a perambulator and wheel him for an airing. She’s such a proud little mother. Isn’t she just the loveliest thing you’ve ever seen?”

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  Two close family friends were guests at a small gathering at the Wilding home in February, during which Elizabeth introduced the new baby to her friends and to those of her parents. Neither wished to be identified, but their story is significant just the same. Sara, now fifty-nine, and Francis, fifty-eight, were also present, as was their son, Howard, now twenty-six.

  “It was like a christening, only more informal, maybe fifty people,” said one of the guests. “Things were changing with the Taylor family. It had been hard for Sara to relinquish control of Elizabeth’s career. At the party, she told me that she felt she’d done her part and done it well. She was tired, anyway, or so she said, and ready to let it go. Just a simple gesture of gratitude from time to time from Elizabeth would have been nice, especially as Sara got older. I know that Sara felt underappreciated but, as she put it to me, ‘You can’t go through life expecting your children to show gratitude. If you do, you will be destined to live with constant disappointment, and have no one to blame but yourself.’

  The truth was that Elizabeth was holding on to a lot of anger having to do with the way she was treated as a child.”

  There was one moment during the festivities that the two family friends will never forget. Even today, more than fifty years later, both say it makes their hearts clench achingly to recall it. It started when Sara picked up the new baby from the bassinet and began to cradle him in her arms, rocking him. “You will be the most perfect child,” Sara said to little Michael in a soft and loving voice. “Just like your mother. Perfect, in every way.”

  “Mummy, no!” came the voice from behind her. It was Elizabeth. With a look of anger on her face, she rushed over to Sara.

  “Give him to me, now!” she ordered.

  “What did I do?” Sara asked, shaken almost to tears. “What in the world . . .”

  “Just give him to me,” Elizabeth repeated, according to the later recollection. Sara t
hen gently handed little Michael to his mother. Elizabeth stared at Sara for a moment. Perhaps remembering that they had guests, she collected herself and said in a voice so 108

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  calm it sounded eerie, “Why, you did nothing, Mummy. Everything is fine. It’s just time for his nap.” Then, without another word, she quickly took the baby upstairs.

  “We all stood in the living room with our mouths open, not knowing how to react to such an outburst,” recalled the family friend. “Clearly embarrassed, Sara took a deep breath to calm herself and then announced, ‘Francis. Howard. It’s time for us to go.’

  After Howard retrieved his mother’s wrap and assisted her with it, the three of them walked out the front door without saying goodbye to anyone. But they had left the door open, and I happened to be the one to close it. It was then that I saw them standing maybe ten feet from the house, huddled together. Sara was in Francis’s arms. She was crying.”

  A Marriage Devoid of Passion

  D espite the children they had together, Elizabeth Taylor’s marriage to Michael Wilding was in trouble after the first couple of years. Not surprisingly, the two had lost their way. There were a myriad of problems, not the least of which was that Michael had begun to take his wife’s illnesses less seriously than he had in the past. By this time, Elizabeth had all sorts of health issues, including a sciatic nerve problem that kept her wheelchair-bound for days at a time. Michael joked that she used hospitals as if they were resorts. However, he was serious when he said that he believed that there were underlying reasons for Elizabeth’s poor health—even if he wasn’t exactly sure what they were at the time. At least as he saw it, his wife always managed to find a way to make her life a misery. For instance, he recalled being stung by a Finding Her Way

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  bee in the backyard and said he pulled out the stinger, “and that was the end of it.” However, when Elizabeth was similarly stung, she swelled up and came down with a fever, “and it turned into a major hospital event. If she gets a cold,” he continued, “she reacts so violently she’s almost dead from pneumonia. She stubs her toe, it’s broken. She bumps into something, she ends up in a cast. It makes no sense. No person is that fragile. There’s something else at work.”

  It’s not so much that Michael believed his wife’s illnesses were psychosomatic—she really was in pain when she said she was—as that he felt there was some subconscious reason for her to continue to find ways to prolong her physical despair. Her Christian Scientist mother, Sara, agreed with him, but she had learned long before to not discuss such matters with Elizabeth. The two of them—Michael and Sara—may have been on to something in trying to understand Elizabeth. It’s also possible that on some level, Elizabeth realized that being terribly ill was one way to control her life. When she was sick and hospitalized, she was away from the studio, didn’t have to make movies she didn’t wish to make—and was also absent from any of the complex responsibilities of her personal life. Being ill also got her the attention of her mother, and she knew that this interest from Sara was focused on her well-being instead of on her career. On some level, it must have made her feel loved. Truly, though, only Elizabeth could know the real reasons for all of the sicknesses in her life—and her public comments about the subject seem to suggest that she hasn’t given it much thought. “Richard says I’m prone to incidents, not accidents,” she would say in years to come, referencing her seventh husband, Richard Burton. One certainly can’t blame observers from speculating about the matter, though. After all, few people have suffered in their lives as much as Elizabeth Taylor—

  and there does have to be some explanation for it other than being

  “prone to incidents.”

  Meanwhile, Michael simply stopped caring about Elizabeth’s physical problems, and she began to feel abandoned and unloved. 110

  Elizabeth

  Their communication had not only begun to sour, it had even become violent. For instance, while they were dining with Frank Sinatra one evening on the Sunset Strip, she insulted Michael about his wardrobe. He told her to shut up. She went to slap him but he seized her wrist in midair and gave it a sharp twist. Elizabeth screamed out in pain. “You broke my wrist! If I have to miss a day of filming because of this, I’ll sue you!” Wilding was indifferent to her outburst. “Oh, screw you, Elizabeth,” he said before walking out of the restaurant and leaving her with Frank. A few nights later at another restaurant in Hollywood, Michael said something that once again displeased her. She swung her arm in a wide arc, her fist finally striking him on the jaw. She wasn’t much more than five feet tall, but her hand could really pack a wallop when she decided to put all of her strength and fury behind it. Michael fell to the floor, as if he were smaller than she—and he wasn’t. In some ways, it seemed that Michael was getting acquainted with the part of Elizabeth that was finally getting even with Nicky Hilton. She was the aggressor now—and somehow to her it felt right.

  Elizabeth even tried to compel Michael to rise—or sink, as it were—to the level of a Nicky Hilton by inciting him to anger. He once recalled a morning when he was quietly doing a crossword puzzle and not paying attention to her. “She snatched the paper from my hand, tore it in half, and threw it into the fire,” he remembered. “ ‘So much for you and your stupid games,’ she said, adding, ‘Go on, hit me! Hit me, why don’t you?’ I told her, ‘I’ve never gone in for hitting hysterical females.’ She moaned, ‘Oh God, if only you would. At least that would prove you are flesh and blood instead of a stuffed dummy.’ ”

  There were many of these kinds of dramatic interactions with Michael, as if Elizabeth had begun to equate melodrama with intimacy. At the very least, she was acting as a character might in one of her more overblown films because, to her mind, that was how people engaged with each other in offscreen relationships as well. Everything was heightened, all emotions raw and unabated Finding Her Way

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  as she mistreated her husband, encouraged reciprocity at home, and then acted out similar scenarios at the studio with her costars. The fact that she’d seen such violence in her first marriage didn’t help when it came to differentiating what was and was not acceptable behavior between people. During an interview and photo session the couple did with Pho- toplay, Elizabeth’s public façade seemed to crack. In the pictures, her blue eyes are shrouded by large sunglasses. The lovely nose, red lips, and perfectly sculpted face had always translated into spectacular photographs, and her features did not let her—or the photographer—down on this day. Michael, in a natty black suit and tie, was at her side. “Elizabeth, dear, move slightly over, I don’t think you’re in your best light,” he said, trying to be helpful. In front of the reporter, she snapped at him: “Don’t tell me what to do, Michael. I’m not your daughter, I’m your wife.”

  “But dear . . .”

  It was clear from her curt attitude that more was at issue than just the photograph they were taking at the moment. “I know how to pose for a picture,” she said through a frozen smile. Then, in remarks that seemed reminiscent of Sara Taylor, she said, “When you have taken as many pictures as I have, then you can tell me how to pose. Meanwhile, just be quiet . . . Daddy.”

  “The happiest years of my marriage were when Elizabeth was dependent on me,” Michael admitted later. “Now I follow her around, and I hate it. And,” he added, “I thought I’d be the one to guide this trembling little creature along life’s stony path. It didn’t turn out that way. Not at all. Lately, I’m told to shut up.”

  “Her father, Francis, was concerned enough about stories about her bad temper to mention it to her,” recalled Paul Young, an attorney in Beverly Hills who began working for Francis and Sara at this time. “He and I were having a drink at the Beverly Hills Hotel where he had asked Elizabeth to join us. He was upset. He’d heard that she slapped Michael in public and wanted to ask her about it. She showed up in a foul mood after having a bad day at the studio. ‘That bastard Mayer,’ she said, ‘I swear
to God, one day 112

  Elizabeth

  I will put my hands around his throat and strangle the life out of him.’ She sat down without even saying hello to me. ‘What is it you want to talk to me about?’ she demanded of Francis. ‘I’m worried about you,’ he told her. ‘Your temper. I’ve been reading things . . .’ Elizabeth said, ‘Daddy, you should know better than to believe what you read about me. They’re all lies. Every word.’ He kept pushing. ‘Well, did you slap Michael the other night at dinner?’ She shot back with, ‘So what if I did? That’s my business.’ ”

  At that point she began to cry. Again, Francis was seeing firsthand the effect Nicky Hilton’s brutality was still having on his daughter. While Elizabeth sobbed quietly, hiding her face as best she could, Young excused himself. “I thought it best that I leave. As I rose she didn’t even acknowledge my presence.

  “I was gone for about twenty minutes; by the time I got back she was gone. Francis was very emotional. ‘I’m worried about her,’

  he told me. ‘She’s out of control. I think Hilton ruined her. She hasn’t been the same since she married that bastard.’ At that moment, Sara walked into the restaurant and joined us. ‘Did you speak to her?’ she asked Francis. ‘What did she say?’ Francis told her what happened. She slumped forward in her chair a bit and seemed on the verge of crying. ‘She won’t listen to either of us,’

  Sara said, turning to me. ‘I don’t even know why we try anymore.’ ”

  In the midst of her emotional disarray, Elizabeth still had to continue making movies for the studio without any kind of break. She was about to replace Vivien Leigh in a movie called Elephant Walk for which MGM loaned her to Paramount for $150,000; Elizabeth received her contracted salary of $42,500. In it, she would portray a bride who embarks on an adventure to the jungle with her husband (Peter Finch), a man who has built a plantation right smack in the middle of the ancient path of the elephants’

  walk. One had to wonder how she found herself in these kinds of movies . . . but . . . according to the script, once in the jungle, Elizabeth is tempted by Dana Andrews to leave her alcoholic husband, but in the end decides to stay with him. Then the elephants Finding Her Way