Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

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  go wild and destroy everything in their path. The movie is filled with metaphors. During the course of making it, Elizabeth suffered an injury that almost left her blinded in one eye, but she recovered just in time to make Rhapsody, from May through July of 1953. Elizabeth calls this soapy drama another of her “films that never should have been made by me or anyone else.”

  The marital problems continued to mount on an almost-daily basis. Still, the couple did not abandon the relationship, determined to make it work, if only for the sake of their young son. By the summer of 1954, Elizabeth was again pregnant. At this time, they decided to purchase a new property, again funded by her savings since Michael no longer had any money of his own. The architect George MacLean had designed an estate in Beverly Hills, close to David O. Selznick’s home, that he thought was ideal for them. Elizabeth was anxious to see it. But when they got to the address, there was no one present to meet them and give them access to the estate, which was walled and gated. That didn’t stop her. She asked Michael to help hoist her up, and the next thing he knew she was over the wall. She then unlocked the front gate and let Michael into the property. Inside the sizable estate, the garden was landscaped with huge old trees of every variety, from pine to fir. There, the two immediately felt a sense of peacefulness. It was the first time in a while that their problems seemed lifted from them. The couple sat in the garden and enjoyed an impromptu romantic picnic with potato chips and an uncorked bottle of wine left by workers who’d been tending the property. “I think it was one of the most beautiful moments of my life,” Elizabeth later remarked. She bought the house, and within a month reality had once again set in to replace any magic she’d first felt about the property: the mortgage of $2,000 a month.

  “Look, she couldn’t afford it,” said Paul Young. “Jules Goldstone [her attorney] and I met with her and explained to her that something like 75 percent of her nearly $200,000 annual income was going to taxes, and she would never be able to afford the mortgage on her lifestyle. ‘I’m not used to being told I can’t have 114

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  something,’ she told us. ‘From the time I was a little girl, my mother told me I could have anything I wanted, and I always have and I’m most certainly not going to stop now. So your job is to figure out a way to get me this house.’ Still, Sara told me that after Elizabeth and Michael moved into the estate, Elizabeth would lose sleep agonizing over finances and wondering how much more money she would have to make before she would be able to afford her lifestyle. Obviously, the fact that her husband was not contributing a dime did not help matters, and I think it ruined him in her eyes. One day, she brought him into the office to go over some insurance policies, and I have to say that it was a most unpleasant experience. At one point, she handed him a pen and said, ‘Jesus Christ, Michael, stop asking so many questions and just sign the goddamn policy. You make me sick.’ He took the pen and obediently signed. She then stood up and said, ‘Now, let’s go. I have things to do.’ And he followed her out the door like a little puppy. Afterward, I called Francis and said, ‘Pal, I don’t care if your kid is the great Elizabeth Taylor, I wouldn’t want to be married to her for all the tea in China.’ He laughed and said, ‘Oh yeah? Well, just try being married to her mother!’ ”

  Elizabeth’s second child, Christopher, was born on February 27, 1955, which was also Elizabeth’s twenty-third birthday. By that time she and her husband were barely speaking. When Michael turned down the opportunity to tour with a production of My Fair Lady, in the role of Professor Higgins, which made Rex Harrison a star, Elizabeth couldn’t believe it. He was afraid that his epilepsy would get out of control if he were to take on such a grueling schedule, but she thought he was just being lazy and cowardly. “I can’t believe that I would marry a coward,” she screamed at him one day. From that moment on, the marriage was pretty much over, or so said Michael later. “I still loved her,” he said, “but a barrier of silence and rejection had grown between us.” In fact, the Wildings’ marriage was so clearly devoid of passion that sleeping in the same room had become a laughable concept. Though he had his choice of guest rooms, Michael chose to sleep in the liv-Finding Her Way 115

  ing room, on a big violet-colored divan, while Elizabeth occupied the master bedroom. She would cry herself to sleep, heartbroken that another marriage was about to end for her. “I was dead, old at twenty-four,” she later said. “It was just smog and no sunshine. We would wake up in the morning without hope, with nothing to do or talk about, with no reason for living out the day.”

  The summer of 1956 found Elizabeth Taylor restless and ready to find entertainment outside her crumbling marriage. Kevin McClory, an assistant to movie producer Mike Todd, took a bold move in asking her out. In the guise of a business meeting to discuss a future film project, McClory began to wine and dine Taylor. Soon they were seeing each other on a regular basis. She may not have felt a deep romantic connection with him, but just the possibility of a life beyond her loveless marriage gave her a newfound energy. “I’m in a restaurant with my wife, and who walks in but Elizabeth with this other guy,” says Paul Young. “I thought that he was a business associate until I saw them holding hands and kissing over their meal. My wife thought it was a shocking display coming from both a married woman and a celebrity. However, she couldn’t keep her eyes off it. Elizabeth seemed a little tipsy, and at one point she got up to go to the ladies’ room, bumped into someone else’s table, and spilled a bottle of wine all over it. She signed a napkin and handed it to the couple as an apology. ‘I can’t believe you represent her,’ [my wife] told me, very bothered by it all.

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ I said. ‘I represent her father.’ My wife said, ‘Well, he needs to take her over his knee and give her a good spanking.’

  Later, as they were walking out of the restaurant, Elizabeth made a point of bringing the man to our table. Holding hands with him and being very affectionate, she introduced him as Kevin McClory. Then she said, ‘It’s time for Mr. Wilding to go back to England where he belongs, don’t you agree? Therefore, my father will be in touch with you shortly about the dissolution of my marriage to him.’ Very formal, ice cold. So, my wife, never one to hold her tongue, looked Kevin up and down, head to toe, and said to Elizabeth, ‘Oh really? So, you’re still married, are you, my dear?’ Eliz-116 Elizabeth

  abeth gave her a look that could boil water, and shot back, ‘Obviously, my dear, or you would have read about it in all the papers.’

  And with that, she turned and walked away. Her gentleman friend followed, trying to keep up. Before she left the restaurant, she turned back to us and gave my wife another killer look. The next day, I got a telephone call from Francis, who said, ‘My daughter is absolutely furious with your wife for insulting her last night. She told me, “Mr. Young’s wife has a big fat mouth and I hate her.” ’ I explained what happened and he said, ‘Well, if she’s going to date before she’s even divorced, she deserves everything she gets.’ ”

  On June 30, Kevin invited her to join Mike Todd and a group of his friends for a weekend of sailing on the Hyding, a 117-foot yacht that Todd had chartered. She was happy to go, Elizabeth said, eager to escape the degenerating situation at home. Somehow or another, no one seems to remember exactly how, there was one guest on board whom Elizabeth did not expect: Michael Wilding. Leave it to Elizabeth to find herself on a cruise with both her husband and the man she was dating, but such was her life at the time. Even though she was just twenty-four, her world had never been short on intrigue.

  When they boarded, Elizabeth recalls that Mike Todd went straight for the bar, while most of the guests greeted her, cooing over the young star. Her husband wandered about the yacht, trying his best to avoid his wife. She spent most of the cruise talking to Kevin, and occasionally catching the eye of their host, Mike Todd, who seemed unable to keep his eyes off of her in her pink toreador pants and pale blue sweater. As the ship headed out into the open sea, Elizabeth began to feel
seasick, “and since I’ve never been shy about complaining, I’m sure I carried on a bit.” Todd heard that she was unwell and suggested she have a cocktail to treat her symptoms. After he escorted her to a bar in the ship’s cabin, the two were seen in animated conversation. At one point he sarcastically told her, “Honey, you are a latent intellectual.”

  She froze for a moment, then announced, “That wasn’t very nice.”

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  “Yes, I know,” he responded. “I figure you’ve had your fill of nice.”

  Elizabeth was speechless for a moment, but eager to continue the easy conversation with Mike Todd. Occasionally, when her husband would happen by, she would laugh just a bit louder at Todd’s jokes. As the day wore on, Elizabeth and Mike enjoyed each other’s company while she continued to drink champagne, despite her headache and nausea. At one point she handed her empty glass to Todd and asked for another. He smiled at her, saying, “Suit yourself. It’s your head.” When he moved off to grant her request, Elizabeth once again noticed Michael Wilding sitting alone in a corner. She knew then that she would be moving on from him. The kind thing to do was to set this miserable man free. In July 1956, MGM announced that Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding were separating. Elizabeth tried to convince herself that the marriage was not a complete failure, since it had lasted more than four years, and produced two handsome children. But she knew it had truly ended long before the world was told of its demise. It was the avoidance of that truth that had wasted the latter years of her life with Michael. “I am afraid that the marriage with Michael had become the relationship for which we were much more suited—brother and sister,” she later observed. “He was one of the nicest people I’d ever known. But I’m afraid in those last years I gave him rather a rough time, sort of henpecked him and probably wasn’t mature enough for him.”

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  Movies

  O f course, amid all of the personal upheaval in her life, there was Elizabeth Taylor’s astonishing movie career. Many books have been written about her films with her private life as a backdrop to her prodigious career. Entire books have been written about Cleopatra! Important as many of her films may have been, though, it has to be said that a great many of them were inferior projects that she only made either because she was forced to do so by the studio or because she needed the money. In truth, it’s not from those movies that one really learns much about Elizabeth Taylor, other than her growing ability as an actress in a succession of bad films. “Don’t ask me about acting,” she would say. “Someday, I hope to be really good. I’m not learning and developing. I’m trying. I’ve always been an intuitive actress as opposed to an instructed one. I have no technique. I just try to become the other person. Some people act by charts or by the Stanislavski method. I can only do it by forgetting myself completely, even moving or picking up things by impulse. I’ve been good so few times, but I’d like to be good always.”

  That said, Elizabeth was, as everyone well knows, a singularly unique and great movie star, no matter the ratio of good films to bad in her career. By the early 1950s, her talent and undeniable box-office appeal, not to mention her breathtaking beauty, had caught the attention of other movie studios. One such studio was Paramount, who contracted with MGM for Elizabeth’s services to appear in George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun. Based on Theodore Dreiser’s popular novel of more than two decades earlier, An American Tragedy, it had been given an unsatisfactory production under that title by Paramount in 1931. (MGM had previously loaned her to Warner Bros. in 1947 for its big-budget film version of the stage hit Life with Father and would let Warner’s have her again in 1956 for Giant.)

  It was in A Place in the Sun, magnificently filmed on location in Finding Her Way

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  Lake Tahoe and under George Stevens’s insistent and dogged direction of her, that Elizabeth finally rose to the challenge of her craft. In fact, she has said that she really didn’t take acting seriously until she did this movie. Playing opposite Montgomery Clift, her performance as the beautiful, wealthy Angela Vickers was inspired. When Academy Award time rolled around, the black-and-white film received nine nominations, including Best Picture, Clift for Best Actor, and Shelley Winters for Best Actress. It wound up with six Oscars, including one for Stevens as Best Director. Finally, and despite her own Oscar snub, Elizabeth had arrived as an actress, her performance hailed by critics as being the equal of Winters’s. And as a star, she would for the rest of her career be billed above the title. Montgomery Clift became one of her best friends during this time. Handsome, with a shock of dark brown hair and piercing blue-gray eyes, sensuously full lips, and a strong jawline, Monty, as he was called by his friends, was twenty-eight years old when he arrived in Hollywood to star for director Howard Hawks in the classic western Red River opposite big John Wayne. Those who knew of Clift’s sexual orientation had serious misgivings that he could carry off the part of the belligerent foster son of the Duke. But the sensitive-looking Clift not only held his own against Wayne, but earned his grudging respect along with excellent notices from film critics. Clift was cast by George Stevens to star opposite Elizabeth in A Place in the Sun, and audiences fell as hard for him as she did in his unsympathetic role of the ambitious suitor who is sent to the electric chair for murdering his pregnant girlfriend (Shelley Winters) when her condition threatens to disrupt his cushy new life. Taylor and Clift were achingly beautiful and their love scenes were so convincing that they will forever rank as classic examples of young love on the silver screen. Despite the closeness of their personal relationship following this film, Clift’s sexual orientation kept him from giving himself to her. They got along so well, it seemed unfair that he preferred men over women. Some have reckoned that Elizabeth’s attraction 120

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  to Clift (and his to her) was based in a large part on their mutual physical beauty, which could reasonably be compared—the same dark hair, the same thick, dark eyebrows over light-colored eyes, the perfectly shaped faces, the full, kissable lips—he a male version of Elizabeth, she his female counterpart. If Monty had been heterosexual, there’s little doubt that he and Elizabeth would have married. “We really loved each other,” Elizabeth once told Barbara Walters, “in the fullest, complete sense of the word.”

  In another interview, this one with the gay magazine the Ad- vocate, she explained, “I was 18 or 19 when I helped him realize that he was a homosexual, and I barely knew what I was talking about. I was a virgin when I was married, and not a world expert on sexuality. But I loved Monty with all of my heart and just knew that he was unhappy. I knew that he was meant to be with a man and not a woman, and I discussed it with him, introduced him to some really great guys. It was very hard for men who wanted to come out of the closet in those days. The men I knew—Monty and Jimmy [Dean] and Rock [Hudson]—if anything I helped them get out of the closet. I didn’t even know I was doing it. I didn’t know that I was more advanced than most people in this town. It just never occurred to me.”

  On May 12, 1956, Monty left a gathering at the Wildings’, which had also been attended by Rock Hudson. On his way down a treacherous canyon road, he got in a terrible automobile accident. Elizabeth arrived on the scene shortly afterward to find her friend bloodied almost beyond recognition. His teeth had been knocked down his throat, preventing him from breathing. Without a moment’s hesitation, Elizabeth plunged her hand down his windpipe to clear the blockage. She would have done anything to save him. While she was at his side, photographers began to arrive on the scene. “If you take one picture of this man in this condition,” she told them through her tears, “I swear to God, I will not pose for another photo, ever!” Rock Hudson once recalled it this way: “She prevented the photographers from taking Monty’s picture by the foulest language I have ever heard. She shocked them Finding Her Way

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  out of taking it. She was saying things like, ‘You son of a bitch!
I’ll kick you in the nuts.’ The photographers were saying, ‘Miss Taylor, you shouldn’t be talking like that.’ And then six of us formed a line to hide Monty, and we said to the photographers [Hudson bared his teeth viciously], ‘Take a picture of us. We’ll smile.’ ” The paparazzi backed off. “His head was so swollen it was almost as wide as his shoulders,” Elizabeth later said of Clift’s injuries. “His eyes had disappeared. His cheeks were level with his nose . . . and his upper lip—it was like a spoon had gouged a great big chunk out of his mouth and teeth.” She accompanied Monty to the hospital, not about to leave his side. The incident showed many people another side of her, a facet of her personality that is giving and totally selfless. Though she could be tremendously self-absorbed, she could also be a good and loyal friend, especially to the downtrodden and confused people in her life—as she would demonstrate countless times in the future. In 1956, Elizabeth appeared as Leslie Benedict in the Warner Bros. film version of the best-selling Edna Ferber novel Giant. Her costars were Rock Hudson and James Dean, both of whom she developed a deep feeling for. It was on that set, in Marfa, Texas, that she and Hudson became close friends; the two spent a great deal of time together, drinking and partying. In fact, they created what Elizabeth now remembers as the best drink she’d ever tasted: a chocolate martini made with vodka, Hershey’s syrup, and Kahlúa.

  “How we survived,” she says of their late nights together and early mornings on the set, “I’ll never know.”

  Elizabeth would talk to Rock for hours about her struggles in trying to have both a career and family life, and he confided in her about his life as well. “We used to sit up all night talking about everything,” she has said. “We had no secrets from each other, ever, all through the years.” Of course, as we well now know, Hudson was gay and closeted, his entire life and career an emotional complication for him.