Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  She leaned over to me and said, ‘Isn’t Rock the most gorgeous man you have ever seen? I think he’s homosexual, though. What a shame for all of the women in this theater.’ Then she said,

  ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’ And off we went for more running and being chased.”

  Mike had brought a frivolity to Elizabeth’s life that she hadn’t known before, but as was often the case in her complex story, the joy was often interrupted by the insatiable curiosity of the public. The press was intent on chronicling the evolution of Taylor’s ro-Finding Her Way 131

  mantic life. Trying to figure out what drove her from one man’s arms into another’s with such rapidity and regularity became sport for many journalists. She wasn’t living in a way many people could relate to, which made things all the more exciting. It was impossible, though, for Elizabeth to clarify to anyone, perhaps even herself, just how tremendous an influence Mike was in her life. She was feeling brand-new, reborn. Yet her flair for the dramatic had made her seem like the girl who cried wolf. She had vowed her deep love and undying affection twice before, and so convincingly, that people weren’t able to see that with Todd, it really was different.

  In November 1956, Elizabeth took a fall and hurt her back. She’d experienced spinal problems in the past, but after the accident matters became much worse. She was forced to undergo a four-hour operation. “Three disks were absolutely gone,” she later recalled. “They cut away all the dead bone right down to the nerve center. They took bone from my hip, my pelvis, and from a bone bank and made little matchsticks and formed clusters that finally calcified and became one long column, six inches long.” She was in tremendous pain for, as she put it, “longer than I can remember. It was agony. I was in a hospital bed for two months and had to learn to walk all over again.”

  A barely recovered Elizabeth finally married Mike Todd on February 2, 1957, at the beachfront estate of Todd’s friend Fernando Hernandez (who was a friend of former Mexican president Miguel Alemán). Mike was forty-nine; Elizabeth, twenty-four. Of course, Sara and Francis were present, as were Howard and Mara. In fact, Mara was again one of Elizabeth’s attendants, the other being Debbie Reynolds. Debbie was married to Eddie Fisher, Mike’s close friend and also one of his best men, along with Michael Todd Jr. At this time, Debbie, Eddie, Elizabeth, and Mike were absolutely inseparable; their close friendship was well-known by all.

  A humorous family story: Two days earlier, when Francis, Sara, Howard, and Mara were leaving Los Angeles for Acapulco, they 132

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  were, as always, descended upon by the media. “I’m not saying a word about this one,” Sara told the reporters. However, the press was unrelenting in its desire for some comment from the family. Suddenly, without warning, Francis—who had never said a single word to any media person—grabbed one of the microphones. “I wish for my daughter the same thing that every father wishes,” he announced, “and that is that she will finally find happiness.” Sara, Howard, and Mara looked at him with dumbstruck expressions, as if they simply couldn’t believe he had opened his mouth to a reporter! “I hope that this time her dreams will come true,” Francis concluded, handing back the microphone to its owner and suddenly looking very uncomfortable about the whole thing. “That was very nice, Daddy,” Sara was heard to say as the family walked toward their waiting plane. “But if I had known you were going to make a statement, I would have been happy to write one for you.”

  It was everything Howard and Mara could do to suppress their giggles. Who knows what possessed Francis, but it was the first and last time he ever talked to a member of the press . . . at least that anyone can remember.

  Seven months later, on August 6, 1957, Elizabeth gave birth to a girl, whom she and Mike named Elizabeth Francis, after her father, and nicknamed Liza. When doctors said that Elizabeth should not have any more children, Mike gave them permission to perform a tubal ligation on her. Elizabeth later said she was very upset by the decision, calling it “a huge shock to me.”

  A few months later, to mark the one-year anniversary of Around the World in 80 Days, Mike hosted a party at Madison Square Garden for 18,000 of his closest friends. It was “invitation only”! The cake was fourteen feet high and thirty feet in diameter. CBS-TV broadcast the party live—even though it eventually deteriorated into a food fight. In fact, Walter Cronkite, who covered it as if it was a serious news story, later referred to it as the nadir of his career as a reporter.

  Meanwhile, of course, Elizabeth’s film career soared. In 1957, MGM hoped to replicate the success of Gone with the Wind by put-Finding Her Way 133

  ting into production the big-budget Civil War epic Raintree County, in which she would again costar with Montgomery Clift. Elizabeth had to take Monty under her protective wing just to get him through the picture due to his many emotional and physical addictions. Not even the best plastic surgeons money could buy were able to restore his face to what it was before his accident. Only a glimmer of his former beauty remained. Although it fell short of the David O. Selznick masterpiece on all counts, Raintree County earned Elizabeth an Oscar nomination as Best Actress. Mike Todd’s Sudden Death

  I n March 1958, Mike Todd was selected by the Friars Club of New York as Showman of the Year. A dinner was planned in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on the twenty-second. Elizabeth has always said that she was bedridden with bronchitis and was therefore unable to accompany him. She had arranged time off from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which she’d just begun two weeks earlier, in order to recuperate. Her director, Richard Brooks, says that Mike told him that she was actually feeling better and was going to go with him to New York. Brooks says he convinced Todd that the movie’s insurance carrier would be upset that Elizabeth had taken time off the film but was well enough to go on a trip to New York. So it was decided that she would not go. Whichever way it happened . . . she didn’t go with Mike.

  On March 22, feeling on top of the world, Mike soared off in The Lucky Liz, his private plane, into dark and stormy skies. He had kissed Elizabeth good-bye numerous times before leaving, in a manner that could only be described as desperate. “I’m too happy,”

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  he told her, according to her later recollection, “and I’m afraid that something’s going to happen because I’m too happy.” Elizabeth would say that when Mike left her, she had a vague but nonetheless disturbing feeling, a premonition of danger. Perhaps Mike felt the same way.

  It was pouring rain with thunder and lightning throughout the night—“very Macbethian,” she has recalled—and as the hours passed, Elizabeth’s fever increased. The children’s nurse came into her room at five in the morning to apply rubbing alcohol to her back—she was that hot. Mike had said he would call at six in the morning when his plane was set to land in Albuquerque for refueling. However, the call never came; Elizabeth’s instincts would prove to be painfully acute: Mike had been in a fiery plane crash en route to the East Coast. His wedding ring was about the only thing that survived the crash; it was eventually returned to Elizabeth. Also killed in the horrifying tragedy was Todd’s biographer, the journalist Art Cohn, who was very nearly finished with a book he was writing about Mike. (That book, The Nine Lives of Michael Todd, was later completed by Cohn’s wife, Marta, and released posthumously under his name in 1958.)

  “I’m sure Mike conned those pilots into taking that plane up,”

  said his friend the Hollywood columnist James Bacon. “No selfrespecting pilot would have taken the plane up in that kind of weather. The next morning at seven o’clock, my phone rings. It was the AP bureau chief in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He said, there’s a plane down here that’s crashed and everybody’s dead. Mike Todd’s plane. So I had to call up Dick Hanley, who was Mike’s secretary, and Rex Kennamer, who was Elizabeth’s doctor, and the three of us converged on her home. We told her. She started running and screaming through the house, into the street. Doctor Kennamer grabbed her and shot her with a h
ypodermic and knocked her out.”

  Elizabeth recalled, “All I could do was scream ‘No, no, no!’ I ran downstairs crying, frantic, out of my mind and all through the house and out into the street, screaming and crying in my night-Finding Her Way 135

  gown. [“It was a ‘baby doll,’ you know, with the little panties,” she told Larry King thirty-five years later in 2003, adding just a bit of a fancy flourish to the horrifying story.] I fell to my knees in the middle of the street. Screaming, ‘No, no not Mike. Not Mike. Dear God, please not Mike.’ Rex picked me up and carried me into the house. That’s all I can remember because he knocked me out with a hypodermic needle.”

  Elizabeth, just twenty-six at this time, was truly inconsolable. Her mourning was so great that her very life appeared to be in jeopardy as she repeatedly declared she would never be able to live without Mike. There seemed no rescuing her from the emotional abyss. Her director from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Richard Brooks, came to visit her. When it had been decided that Elizabeth would not go on the trip, Mike had asked Richard to accompany him; luckily for him, he had declined the invitation. “Dick [Hanley]

  took me up to her bedroom where she was in a state of absolute screaming nerves,” he later told Peter Lawford.

  “You bastard, you. You’re just like the rest of them,” she screamed at him. “You just came over here to find out when the hell I’m coming back to work, didn’t you? That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  “Elizabeth,” he said, “it’s a movie. That’s all it is. It’s a movie. And it doesn’t mean a goddamn thing as to what you’re going to face now. If you want to come back to work, come back. If you don’t, don’t.” She appreciated his words so much, she melted in his arms.

  Her friend Shirley MacLaine recalled, “I went over there just after Mike died, and Sydney Guilaroff [Elizabeth’s friend and hairdresser] was there feeding her vodka and helping her to the bathroom. She was shrieking and screaming.”

  “Well, I couldn’t leave her alone,” Guilaroff told Cathy Griffin, his biographer. “There was no point in putting a nurse with her because she was sedated, and when she would wake up she would just scream. I held her whenever she was awake. I just stayed with her, tried to make her eat.”

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  Of course, Sara, Francis, and Howard were at Elizabeth’s side during this entire ordeal. Photographers who were staked outside of Elizabeth’s home spent their days waiting to take candid pictures of the grim-faced Taylors as they came and went from the house. All three appeared grief-stricken; at one point Sara collapsed as she walked from their automobile. Howard grabbed her by an elbow just seconds before she would have fallen to the pavement. On their way back to their car that evening, the media descended like locusts upon the Taylors, demanding comments from them about the tragedy. Of course, true to their natures, Francis and Howard wouldn’t utter a single word about any of it. Sara, though, realized that the reporters wouldn’t rest until they got something from them, so she gave them what they wanted. Trembling, she stood before their microphones and cameras, seeming very small and frightened. “Of course, she’s absolutely devastated,”

  she said of Elizabeth. “Why, it’s the worst day of her life, isn’t it? Of all of our lives. Please pray for us all. That’s all I can say, really.”

  Sara slowly backed away from the attention, and was then helped away from the scene by Francis.

  In the next few days, Elizabeth became obsessed with trying to figure out what she was doing the very moment Mike lost his life in the plane. Had she been awake? Asleep? Had she been dreaming? If so, about what? In her grief, she took pills to sleep, pills to stay awake, pills for depression, pills for anxiety . . . so much medication, actually, that few in her circle seemed to be able to keep track of their purposes. Today, when Elizabeth looks back on it, this time is a blazing haze of deep sorrow, abject fear, and seething fury.

  Howard Hughes heard of Elizabeth’s loss and lent her a TWA jet, complete with crew, so that she could fly to Chicago in privacy for the funeral. (Hughes was by this time a friend of Elizabeth’s; after the two got to know one another better, she began to view him as sad and emotionally fragile.) At the funeral, Elizabeth had to be restrained by Howard, lest she literally hurl herself onto the casket. A mob of perhaps 10,000 people pushed forward as the Finding Her Way

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  grieving young widow dressed in black with dangling diamond earrings was escorted to her limousine. They shouted out her name, took photos, pushed and shoved for a better view of her. There was never a private moment for Elizabeth Taylor, even in grief. Her brother appeared to be just as tormented by all of the attention. At the cemetery, the hordes packed picnic lunches and laid their tablecloths among the tombstones so that they could watch the show—in the freezing March weather! It was a big, popcorn-eating sensation for the masses. Elizabeth Taylor: “I remember seeing bags of potato chips in the wind. And empty Coca-Cola bottles. And children crawling over tombstones. And as the car pulled up, they all broke away from their picnic lunches and came screaming like blackbirds to the car—all squawking and screaming and yelling in our ears as if it were some sort of premiere.” When the graveside service was over, things got even worse. The crowd descended upon Elizabeth and Howard as they tried to make their way back to their waiting car. They began ripping at Elizabeth’s clothes as Howard shouted at them to “Get back! Get back!” Finally, when brother and sister got into their car, they discovered that they had somehow lost their driver in the fracas. “They swarmed like insects all over the car so you couldn’t see out the windows,” Elizabeth later recalled of the crowd. The unruly mob then began rocking the car back and forth. Inside, Elizabeth began to scream at the top of her lungs, like a caged animal. It was a terrible scene. One wonders what Mike Todd would have thought of it.

  Mike had always been the man who had helped Elizabeth view the eager throng as just a silly distraction to her true existence, like on that night in Chicago, laughing and dodging fans and paparazzi. That magical evening had ended just as the sun rose, Albert Skinner recalled. The three of them, after slipping into a small diner, shared one giant slice of chocolate cake. Skinner recalled, “Elizabeth watched her new husband for a moment, then said, ‘I’ve never been alone, my entire life. Yet I’ve always felt lonely. But 138

  Elizabeth

  tonight, I feel like I have friends.’ She smiled, then leaned her head softly on Mike’s shoulder. What a moment that was.”

  One talent Mike Todd had with Elizabeth was his ability to present her with another perspective on her life. He somehow managed to create a comic farce of the media whirlwind in which she had been caught up since childhood. What she had seen previously as a never-ending battle could, for a few moments at least, become a game worth playing with Mike leading the way. As powerful a man as he was, Todd was able to treat Elizabeth like the child she’d never really been. And it was during experiences like that crazy night in Chicago, when her cocoon of celebrity was being parodied, that Elizabeth knew for certain that Mike was the man for her. He could make her oppressive world go away and a new, more happy one appear in its place. As grandiose a life as she had led thus far, escapism—true freedom from the stresses and pressures of constant public scrutiny—was invaluable to her. For that reason, she saw Mike Todd as a savior of sorts. And now her savior was gone. As her car finally pulled past the fanatical crowd and out of the cemetery that day, it stopped for a moment while the police escort cleared a path at a nearby intersection. It was then that Elizabeth spotted a young girl standing alone at the curbside, holding a single wilted rose and looking appropriately mournful. Elizabeth lowered the darkened window. As soon as it went down, a myriad of hands bearing large floral offerings waved in her direction—it was as if they had come from nowhere. Undaunted, Elizabeth seemed somehow transfixed as she leaned out just a bit and pointed to the girl. “That one,” she said. The little girl’s mother excitedly led her to the waiting car, offering
her own more plentiful floral arrangement and cooing her praise for the movie star. Elizabeth ignored her and focused on the child. In a sea of confusion and hysteria, she had finally found a bit of humanity: a sad, or maybe even just frightened, youngster reaching out a trembling hand. Elizabeth took the flower, locking eyes with the child. “You’re sweet,” she said quietly. “It’s you I’ll try to remember.”

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  Eddie Fisher

  E lizabeth Taylor almost didn’t make Mike Todd’s funeral. She got the courage to do so from an unlikely source, Mike’s best friend, Eddie Fisher. The two had been inseparable. Eddie considered Mike a father figure and even named his son (born just three weeks before the plane crash) after him. When Elizabeth began dating Mike, the couple continued to enjoy the company of Eddie and his wife, Debbie Reynolds. A waiter who once worked at Chasen’s recalled the ritual of their meals together: “First the women would order, then Todd, then Fisher. Whatever Todd selected, Fisher would ask for exactly the same. If Todd said steak, medium rare, Eddie wanted steak, medium rare. If Todd wanted sole slightly underdone, Eddie wanted the same thing. Then he would talk Debbie into changing her order to what he and Todd were eating, and when it came, Fisher even ate the way Todd did—fast. Elizabeth Taylor, though, was something else. She had a mind of her own. Nobody dared tell her what to have.”

  Eddie had been emotionally devastated by the sudden loss of his good friend, and was one of the few people in Elizabeth’s life who truly grasped the deep impact his death had on her. Early the morning after Todd’s death, Eddie’s limousine passed the throng of reporters and fans outside the Todd estate. He had arrived to escort Elizabeth to Chicago. The night prior, he had come to the same home, only to find Elizabeth wandering in a daze, almost unable to function, appearing drugged and confused. That night he and Debbie explained the plans that had been made for the trip back to Chicago. Elizabeth at first said she was unable to go, contending that her children needed her. Reynolds, though, generously offered to stay behind to look after them, and Taylor was left with little reason to avoid the event. So it was agreed. Elizabeth and Eddie would fly together, and Debbie, the dutiful wife and dependable friend, would remain in Los Angeles.