FOUR

ENGLISH WITHOUT TEARS

ELIZABETH EVADED MUCH OF THE PRESS BACKLASH THAT followed her divorce by staying with Montgomery Clift in New York. They are said to have slept in the same bed, though this does not necessarily mean that they were in any way lovers – it is a well-known fact that, prone to nightmares, Monty frequently slept between his best friends, actor Kevin McCarthy and his wife Augusta Dabney, without the slightest hint of sexual activity. Quite simply, with Elizabeth and Monty it was a case of two soulmates helping one another through a difficult patch. They are also known to have only socialised amongst Monty’s circle, sometimes accompanied by Monty’s ‘fuck buddy’, and Elizabeth’s old friend, Roddy McDowall. The trio visited leather bars and gay clubs, where Monty could pick up his favourite rough trade and where, according to both men, Elizabeth could curse to her heart’s content.

It had almost been a case of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire when on the eve of her divorce Elizabeth had made Love Is Better Than Ever with Larry Parks, an actor who had been virtually unknown until playing the Oscar-nominated lead in The Jolson Story (1946) and its sequel Jolson Sings Again (1949). The McCarthy witch-hunt was at its zenith at that time, and just about everyone in Hollywood knew, thought they knew or thought they knew someone who knew a communist. In February 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy’s unproved claim that much of the country had been infiltrated by ‘Reds’ sparked off a wave of mass hysteria that would achieve little other than tarnishing the film community for decades to come and led to a state of paranoia in America in the early 1950s. McCarthy claimed to be in possession of a 205-name list of communists working in the State Department, and it did not take long for ‘sublists’ of alleged allies and sympathisers to appear – few of these more influential, the senator pointed out, than the ones the public were flocking to see each day on their cinema screens.

Heading the HUAC (House Committee on Un-American Activities), which had vetted the script for A Place in the Sun, was Congressman J. Purnell Thomas, who would later be jailed for payroll padding. And in charge of the long-winded Anti-Communist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals was John Wayne, a man who had publicly lampooned gay/bisexual stars such as Robert Taylor, Robert Montgomery and Tyrone Power as ‘unnatural men’. However, whilst these actors had been decorated for their bravery during the Second World War, the supposedly gung-ho Wayne had made any number of excuses not to fight for his country. Wayne’s fanatical right-wing allies included Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Howard Hughes, Hedda Hopper, Lola Rogers (the mother of Ginger), Walt Disney and two of the actors he had mocked, Robert Taylor and Robert Montgomery. One wonders how Wayne slept at night. Opposing the purge, which very quickly got out of hand, were Tallulah Bankhead, Gene Kelly, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, director John Huston, and future president Richard Nixon.

Directors Elia Kazan and Edward Dmytryk (one of the so-called ‘Hollywood Ten’ who had been jailed for their beliefs) were but two who shopped their suspected communist colleagues. Careers were needlessly destroyed: those of playwrights Lillian Hellman and Dashiel Hammet, actor Melvyn Douglas, and actresses Gale Sondergaard and Anne Revere, who had twice worked with Elizabeth. John Garfield, a brilliant actor who had raved over Elizabeth’s performance in A Place in the Sun and had wanted to work with her, died a broken man in 1952 at the age of 39. The worst casualty from Elizabeth’s point of view, however, was Larry Parks, because she was indirectly involved with him when the proverbial blast hit the fan. So far as some of Senator McCarthy’s aides were concerned, if someone was the partner, lover or best friend of a suspected communist – or even of you were someone who played a character on screen who seemed to lean in that direction – it figured that they too might have such tendencies – absolute piffle, of course!

Neither did Elizabeth do herself any favours in the wake of her messy, very public divorce by having an affair with the director of Love Is Better Than Ever, Stanley Donen – so far as is known, her first relationship with a married man. Eight years her senior, Donen had teamed up with Gene Kelly as a Broadway dancer/assistant choreographer in 1941, aged just 17. The two had worked together ever since, their films having included On the Town (1949), which Donen had co-directed. Their subsequent successes would include Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), Funny Face (1957) and Charade (1963). Kelly had just signed Donen for Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and was keen to have his protégé report back with the names of any ‘Reds’ who might be hiding in the closet. It was almost certainly Kelly who shopped Larry Parks to the HUAC.

Parks could have extricated himself from a tricky situation, as many did during this silly political soap opera, by repeating a stock statement at his impromptu hearing: ‘I respectfully decline to answer the question [that I am a Communist] on the grounds that this is privileged information under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.’ Instead, he admitted that he had once been a member of the Communist Party. Threatened with incarceration (the Hollywood Ten had served up to twelve months in jail, depending upon the gravity of their ‘crimes’), Parks was compelled to name, or invent, twelve Reds and was promised that he would be allowed to continue with his career. He refused, and for him it was the end of the road. Love Is Better Than Ever would be assigned to oblivion, and he made just two more films – his swansong being Freud (1962) with Montgomery Clift – before his death in 1975, at which time he was running his own real-estate firm.

Elizabeth was never summoned before the HUAC, though not through lack of trying on Howard Hughes’s part. Having already been twice rejected by her, the tycoon had obviously not learned his lesson. Despite the power his enormous wealth generated, even Hughes would not have dared report Elizabeth to the HUAC without some proof, even fabricated, so he ‘leaked’ her name to committee member Hedda Hopper – the method in his madness being that he would ‘rescue’ her, marry her and they would live happily ever after. Elizabeth might have coped with the absurdity of this had it not coincided with her affair with Stanley Donen hitting the headlines. Mrs Donen – the dancer Jeanne Coyne – filed for divorce and threatened to cite the 19-year-old Elizabeth as co-respondent, which, of course, she had every right to do. There then followed a nasty, very public argument with Sara Taylor when Elizabeth took her lover home to meet the family – this also ended up on the front pages.

Shortly after this episode, Elizabeth was rushed into hospital. Depending upon which report one heeded, she was either suffering from exhaustion or it was because of a suicide attempt. No sooner had she recovered from this ordeal than she was once again diagnosed with colitis and a peptic ulcer.

Despite the trouble caused by her relationship with Stanley Donen, Elizabeth refused to give him up, and when she turned up for the premiere of Father’s Little Dividend clutching his arm, MGM stepped in. She had been contracted for a cameo role as herself in Callaway Went Thataway (1951) with Fred MacMurray and Howard Keel, but after that nothing major was planned other than the release of A Place in the Sun later in the year. The studio held an emergency meeting, and it was decided to get her out of the country as soon as possible so that they could put an end to her affair with Donen with her out of the frame. She was signed up as Robert Taylor’s love interest in Ivanhoe (1952), scheduled to begin shooting in England during the summer.

Medieval dramas, musical revivals, biblical spectaculars and period thrillers were on the rise again at this time because of the McCarthy hearings. The studios, so as not to be caught out, opted for non-contemporary, non-political themes: Quo Vadis (1951) was amongst the first and was followed by Scaramouche (1952), The Prisoner of Zenda (1952) and Knights of the Round Table (1953). Another massive threat to the movie industry was the new medium of television – despite the cynics’ claims that this ‘newfangled contraption’ would never take on, in the spring of 1951 one-in-five American homes possessed one.

Some organisations, such as NBC, attempted to draw away some of the rapidly escalating advertising funds from the television network by launching radio programmes such as The Big Show, a $50,000-a-time, 90-minute extravaganza hosted on Sunday evenings by the no-holds-barred Tallulah Bankhead. This featured the most dazzling array of stars ever assembled in a single studio, from all walks of life. The likes of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Édith Piaf were treated with the utmost respect, but Tallulah went out on a limb to offend artistes she regarded as ‘jokes’. Ethel Merman, whose contract insisted that no reference be made to her age, was greeted with, ‘Hello, Ethel, darling. And may I say, you don’t look a day over 60!’ Tallulah might only have been ribbing when she threatened to inform her listeners on live radio that Elizabeth had once been married to ‘the biggest man in the hotel trade’ – an indiscreet reference to Nicky Hilton’s legendary endowment, which she had personally sampled. Even so, Elizabeth was taking no chances, and Tallulah got to ‘interrogate’ his stepmother/mistress Zsa Zsa Gabor instead.

With profits plummeting as more and more people stayed home to watch television, big changes were being effected by the studio, particularly at MGM. Louis B. Mayer, the invincible tyrant who had made every star but Garbo quake in their boots and whose health was starting to fail, resigned in 1951 and was replaced by the much younger Dore Schary, who had joined MGM as a scriptwriter in 1937. Schary, to cut down on costs, was forced to release some of his major stars so that they could work freelance, including Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and Greer Garson. MGM and the other studios compensated for their losses by searching beyond the confines of Hollywood for ‘package deals’ – outfits comprising directors, producers, lead players, scriptwriters and cameramen, mostly from Europe. Though Elizabeth and her contemporaries might not yet have been aware of the fact, fierce competition was just around the corner – a whole galaxy of stars who were not just pretty faces, but considerably more talented than their American counterparts were on their way: Leslie Caron, Gina Lollobrigida, Vittorio Gassman, Hildegarde Knef, Juliette Gréco, Gérard Philipe and sex-kitten Brigitte Bardot. In short, for every contract player the studio placed on suspension for not toeing the line, two more were waiting in the wings.

It might well be that Elizabeth was threatened with suspension when she tried to get out of going to England to do Ivanhoe, claiming that she had suffered a nervous breakdown – true – but when her pleas fell on deaf ears, following a brief sojourn in New York with Montgomery Clift, she elected to soldier on. On 18 June 1951, she sailed on the Liberté, accompanied by her secretary Peggy Rutledge and MGM publicist Malvina Pumphrey, who had been instructed to keep an eye on her. No sooner had she settled into her London hotel suite than she received a call from Michael Wilding. Sara Taylor later claimed (in an August 1952 interview with Motion Picture) that she had encouraged Elizabeth to set her sights on Wilding – another ‘tall tale’ considering that Sara had bemoaned the family losing out on Nicky Hilton’s wealth, and Wilding was not a wealthy man by any means.

Like Howard Hughes before him, Wilding had been monitoring Elizabeth’s progress from afar, though not for the same selfish reasons. He invited her to dinner, and, as per usual for her, it was love at first sight. Over the next two months, the pair were rarely apart when she was not working on Ivanhoe.

Born in Westcliff-on-Sea in 1912, Michael Wilding had spent much of his childhood in Russia, where his father had worked for British Intelligence. Upon leaving the prestigious Christ’s Hospital, otherwise known as the Bluecoat School, he had aspired to become an artist, but the acting bug had bitten, and he had made his debut in Pastorale, an Austrian film, in 1933. Dashing and debonair, with a clipped accent and slightly slurred (on account of epilepsy) delivery, he had teamed up with Anna Neagle for a tremendously successful series of post-war sugary romantic comedies – most notably Spring in Park Lane (1948) and Maytime in Mayfair (1949) – directed by Neagle’s husband, Herbert Wilcox. All three were insufferable snobs but curiously had mass appeal with the working classes, whom they had always looked down upon.

Wilding had had a very public affair with Marlene Dietrich, his recent co-star in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950), who was understandably peeved to have been shunted aside for a younger model. ‘They said I was jealous because Elizabeth Taylor was much younger than me,’ Marlene told me in 1990, ‘but that’s untrue. I was angry at the time because she wasn’t a star, just a tart with breasts and very little talent. Her voice used to set my teeth on edge!’ Wilding also had a lengthy off-on affair with Stewart Granger, who later sued Hedda Hopper for outing them in her autobiography. This relationship would continue well into his association with Elizabeth.

Worried by the scandal that would erupt by her dating a man old enough to be her father, MGM’s British representatives tried to fix Elizabeth up with golden-boy teen-idol Tab Hunter, who was in London shooting Saturday Island (1952). The move was an attempt to keep an allegedly salacious story out of the press and made this the third time Elizabeth had been used as a stooge-date for a gay man – one who would years later wear his sexuality with great pride. She enjoyed Hunter’s company but made it clear that she was only interested in Wilding. At the end of August 1951, Elizabeth and Wilding became secretly engaged, mindless of the fact that he was still married to the actress Kay Young and that Elizabeth’s own decree would not become absolute until January 1952. Also, as she was still under the age of 21, she would not be permitted to marry without her parents’ permission. With this in mind, she had the gall to send a telegram home, signed ‘Elizabeth and Michael Wilding’.

Ivanhoe was an entertaining slice of historical hokum, awash with dodgy wigs and false beards, the kind of fare that appealed to Saturday-morning matinees. Adapted from Sir Walter Scott’s novel, it was ‘Hollywoodised’ and later denounced by Elizabeth as ‘a piece of cachou’. It did well at the box office, however, and was nominated for best film at the Oscars in 1952, losing to The Greatest Show on Earth.

Robert Taylor and George Sanders, at 40 and 45 respectively, were a little too old to play the swashbuckling hero and cheesy villain, de Bois-Guilbert, and Taylor’s Nebraska drawl is out of place in medieval England. Elizabeth makes her appearance almost half an hour into the film as Rebecca of York, the ‘Jewish infidel’ who as an outsider must hide her face in public. Some of the anti-Semitic comments levelled at her transcend fiction, paralleling what was happening in Hollywood at the time, and make for uncomfortable viewing.

Having completed the film, and after spending a few days in the south of France, Elizabeth returned to New York and more shindigs with Montgomery Clift and Roddy McDowall. The trio stayed at the Plaza Hotel, where the management offered them a long-weekend suite free of charge in appreciation of the fabulous reviews earned by A Place in the Sun – although it was actually paid for by Paramount. Michael Wilding had asked Elizabeth to marry him, and, as had happened with Nicky Hilton, the sojourn appears to have been another attempt to ‘cop out’ on her accepting. In Montgomery Clift, Patricia Bosworth quotes an anonymous friend of the actor as telling her, ‘I remember being at Monty’s apartment when Elizabeth phoned from the Plaza, where she was staying, and begged him to reconsider marrying her before Wilding arrived in New York. Monty was sweet [in refusing], but adamant.’

Sara and Francis Taylor might not have entirely forgiven their daughter her trespasses, but MGM flew them to New York all the same. They were celebrating their silver-wedding anniversary, and for a couple of days everyone played happy families. There was controversy, however, after the Taylors left and Elizabeth, Monty and McDowall stayed on at the Plaza for another week – expecting Paramount to pick up the tab. Rather than pay the excess $2,500 – though goodness knows how they managed to run up such a bill in so little time – the trio moved to a cheaper hotel, where in a drunken spree they wrecked their room and ran up another bill. Feeling guilty, Elizabeth paid for the damage and bought gifts for those responsible for cleaning up after her.

Then it was on to ‘Chez Clift’ and more newspaper headlines when Nicky Hilton breezed into town and invited Elizabeth to dinner for old time’s sake. She accepted, the press were of course alerted and less than a week later she was photographed in the same restaurant with Michael Wilding – having learned of her latest ‘calamity’, Wilding felt that she might need a friendly shoulder to cry on.

Wilding had tagged along with Anna Neagle and Herbert Wilcox, who were in America to promote The Lady with the Lamp (1951), their sanitised version of the Florence Nightingale story in which Wilding had a cameo. MGM, who had condemned Elizabeth for her behaviour in New York, saw photographs of her wearing the sapphire ring Wilding had given her (paid for by Elizabeth herself, because his quickie divorce had left him broke) and now declared that she had gone too far by getting involved with a man who was too old for her. They were also annoyed that he was, like Nicky Hilton, a known bisexual – albeit without Hilton’s thuggish traits – and, like Stanley Donen, very much married when his relationship with Elizabeth had begun. There were further complications when Elizabeth and Wilding were seen socialising with Jean Simmons and her husband Stewart Granger, the very man Wilding was suspected of having an affair with.

Dore Schary, who was proving only marginally more popular with his stars than Louis B. Mayer had been, worked behind the scenes, trying to ensure that the Wilcoxes’ visit was briefer than planned, even if this meant ‘pulling’ their film. His plan backfired. When they and Wilding returned to London in the middle of February, Elizabeth gave the gossips something to talk about by travelling with them. She also gave every indication that she might be pregnant, particularly when Wilding announced that he was going to make ‘an honest woman’ out of her as soon as possible.

Hollywood was robbed of cashing in on the publicity this time around when Elizabeth married Michael Wilding on 21 February 1952, six days before her twentieth birthday. She had wanted the ceremony to take place at a church on Victor Cazalet’s estate but was told that this would take around a month to organise. Although waiting would have been the respectful thing to do – King George VI had died two weeks earlier, and the capital was still in mourning – Elizabeth would not hear of it. She was too impatient to wait and, in any case, would not be told what to do, neither then nor in the future.

The ten-minute ceremony took place at Caxton Hall. Because he claimed he was ‘counting the pennies’, Wilding accepted the Wilcoxes’ offer to pay for everything, including the reception at Claridge’s. Elizabeth financed the honeymoon and set a precedent for this particular marriage: each time she saw an expensive bauble that she liked but which Wilding could not afford, she paid for it herself and told everyone that it had come from him.

The bride wore another Helen Rose creation. The Wilcoxes were witnesses, whilst Ben Goetz (the head of British MGM) and his wife stood in for Elizabeth’s parents, who did not attend. Howard Taylor had wanted to be there but was doing military service in Korea. Outside the registry office, the Wildings were cheered by 3,000 fans, many wearing black armbands. And as had happened on the ‘happiest day’ of her life with Nicky Hilton, Elizabeth delivered the speech, variations of which would crop up over the years: ‘All I want is to be Michael’s wife and have his children. I’m never going to put my career first!’

The honeymoon – two weeks in the French Alps and innumerable gratis society parties – is said to have been blissful; certainly, there were no reported arguments. Another month was spent in his plush flat in Mayfair’s Bruton Street – according to Wilding, ‘I was learning Elizabeth the rudiments of the housewife!’ Sara Taylor scoffed at this and in interviews repeated what she had told Photoplay in September 1951: ‘What she can’t do around the house includes almost everything you could mention.’ When the Daily Express’s David Lewin asked Elizabeth if she really was intent on relinquishing her career, she as per usual piped up with the first thing that came into her head: ‘A career is not all that important, anyway!’

Then, it was back home and back to work. MGM had heard the rumour that the fiercely independent, anti-Hollywood Montgomery Clift had tried to persuade Elizabeth to drop off the studio-system bandwagon and spread her wings – or rebel against it, as he had, and accept only the roles she really wanted. They therefore upped her salary to $6,000 a week, loaned her $50,000 for the house in Beverly Hills that had taken her fancy and offered her husband a $3,000-a-week three-year contract, which he certainly did not merit at the time. Prior to leaving England, Wilding also received a £40,000 tax demand that Elizabeth is thought to have paid.

Like the proverbial fish out of water, Michael Wilding did not make it big in Hollywood. His first film there, opposite Greer Garson in The Law and the Lady (1951), was a hopeless rehash of Joan Crawford’s The Last of Mrs Cheyney (1937) and saw both leads panned by the critics. His second (of which more later) was Torch Song (1953) with Crawford herself. It was a part that any good-looking actor with a British accent could have played – it was Crawford’s film, period.

Elizabeth’s first film as Mrs Wilding was the portentously titled The Girl Who had Everything (1953), perhaps MGM’s way of warning her, with the emphasis being on the past tense, what would happen if she failed to knuckle down to marriage number two. Like the Wilding outing, it was a rewrite of an earlier smash, A Free Soul, which had earned plaudits for Cark Gable, Norma Shearer and Lionel Barrymore in 1931. Elizabeth plays rich-girl Jean Latimer, who falls for a handsome Latino (Fernando Lamas), becomes his mistress, then finds out he is a crook being hunted by mobsters who eventually kill him. There is also a very bold suggestion for the time of an incestuous relationship between Jean and her father, played by William Powell. However, with Lamas attempting to step into Gable’s shoes, even though he possessed not one fraction of his raw animal magnetism, and Elizabeth shrieking much of the time and merely looking decorative, the film was nothing to write home about.

In fact, so far as MGM were concerned, Elizabeth had stepped out of line by getting pregnant within two months of her wedding and not announcing her condition until well into the shooting of the film. And rather than grant her maternity leave, as any reputable employer would, Dore Schary put her on suspension as soon as the film was in the can. Unusually, though, rather than stop her salary, they trimmed it to $2,000 a week.

Michael Wilding also suffered Schary’s wrath for failing to toe the line. When he was offered a part in Latin Lovers (1953) with Lana Turner and Ricardo Montalban, he criticised the script and refused to report to the set until his lines had been changed. With no success in Hollywood and while enjoying a much larger salary than most established character actors, Wilding’s should have been a case of beggars not being choosers. He, however, was Elizabeth Taylor’s husband and considered himself to be on a higher pedestal than most mortals, which was why Schary opted to bring him back to earth with a bang. Wilding was replaced by John Lund in The Latin Lover then suspended without pay until the picture was completed.

Montgomery Clift was also having a rough time finding good parts after A Place in the Sun, though this was mostly his own fault. He had turned down Sunset Boulevard (1950), declaring that the scenario of the fading star falling for the younger man smacked of his own relationship with Libby Holman. Monty had played the tortured priest in Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953) with great conviction, and he had moved audiences to tears with his portrayal of the ill-fated Prewitt in From Here to Eternity (1953), securing Frank Sinatra’s comeback by getting him a part in the film, since which time he had rejected one script after another – over 50 by the end of 1952!

Although Monty had refused to see Elizabeth during her marriage to Nicky Hilton – he had not been far out by giving them just six months – he took to Michael Wilding and was a frequent visitor to their Hollywood home. Cynics suggested at the time that Monty had some kind of ulterior motive, that despite his homosexuality he believed that he would marry Elizabeth some day and that in the meantime he was looking out for her. The aforementioned anonymous friend interviewed by Patricia Bosworth went one step further by suggesting that Monty and Wilding were actually competing for Elizabeth’s affections, concluding, ‘Monty felt very loving and protective and rather superior when it came to Elizabeth Taylor.’

There is little doubting that Monty’s professional fussiness rubbed off on Elizabeth during his extended stays with the Wildings. She turned down All the Brothers were Valiant (1953) with Robert Taylor and Stewart Granger – as it happened, another paltry rehash of a Joan Crawford film (Across to Singapore, 1928) – and Roman Holiday (1953), later a huge success for Audrey Hepburn. MGM rewarded Elizabeth by extending her suspension.

On 6 January 1953, Michael Howard Wilding, Elizabeth’s first child, was born by Caesarean section, and the press reported Taylor and Wilding ‘deliriously happy and in love’. Montgomery Clift showered the baby with gifts and constructed a ‘mini-nursery’ in his apartment for when Elizabeth came to stay. MGM released Elizabeth from her suspension only to extend her punishment by loaning her out to Paramount for Elephant Walk (1954). The theme of the film was something of a cross between Rebecca (1940) and the later Giant. Elizabeth plays Ruth Wiley, the new wife of a tea planter (Peter Finch) who has tremendous difficulty fitting in when she and her husband relocate to a plantation in Ceylon. That she was miscast goes without saying, particularly in the scenes where her husband eschews his marital bed to spend time with his drinking cronies because he does not find her attractive. What red-blooded male, the critics unanimously demanded, would not wish to spend the night with Elizabeth Taylor?

Hedda Hopper suggested the title of the film most appropriate, because Elizabeth’s weight had ballooned to 150 pounds following the birth of her son. Elizabeth asked for a salary increase, which was refused. Indeed, she was told to consider herself fortunate to be employed, period. Neither had she been first choice for the film. British actress Vivien Leigh, then married to Laurence Olivier, had completed most of the location scenes before collapsing from nervous exhaustion, in what turned out to be the onset of mental illness. Elizabeth’s hell-raiser co-stars Peter Finch and Dana Andrews recognised her as a ‘regular guy’ and invited her to join their ‘Fuck You Club’ – a select group of extras and studio personnel who made it a preoccupation to shock everyone in sight with their foul language and atrocious table manners. For the rest of her life, Elizabeth would belch loudly and break wind in front of dinner guests she believed needed to be put in their place. MGM received $150,000 for loaning her out, around eight times the salary she received from Paramount, and the budget eventually soared to a record (for that studio) $3 million. In an attempt to save on expenditure, Paramount retained all of Vivien Leigh’s long shots, though they are thought to have coughed up for the medical expenses when Elizabeth was hospitalised upon her return to Hollywood. A wind-machine had blown a piece of grit into her right eye, and this had become so deeply embedded that surgery was required to remove it, after which there were complications when an ulcer developed. Elizabeth later recalled that she had been lucky not to lose the eye. The bandages were barely removed when she began work on her next film, Rhapsody (1954). It is interesting to note that her co-star for this should have been one Richard Burton, but he had been reassigned to The Robe (1953) on account of the delay caused by Elizabeth’s injury.

Michael Wilding, meanwhile, had been given the invidious task of supporting Joan Crawford in her first Technicolor film, Torch Song. Joan played musical-comedy star Jenny Stewart – an amalgamation of all the gay icons of the day, collectively baptised as ‘The Victory Red Brigade’ owing to their predilection for the famous Elizabeth Arden lipstick. Édith Piaf, Maria Callas, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Tallulah Bankhead and Joan herself were rarely seen in public without lashings of the stuff. Wilding played her pianist love interest who had been blinded during the war. The film was shot in just 24 days and was directed by Charles Walters, who had triumphed with Judy’s Easter Parade (1948) and Meet Me in St Louis. Walters had planned as near as possible to have an all gay/bisexual production and to present its male characters as essentially weak, whilst the Crawford character would monopolise the proceedings, again reflecting real life. His big mistake was in failing to realise that Joan Crawford/Jenny Stewart would never have given a meek, mumbling and mild man such as Michael Wilding the time of day, let alone lean on him for support.

Joan made it more than clear that she did not want Wilding anywhere near the picture, but the $125,000 fee from MGM helped change her mind. Even so, there were problems as soon as shooting began – caused by Elizabeth, who was naturally apprehensive about her husband working with a nymphomaniac renowned for sleeping with her leading men. In Joan’s defence, however, it must be said that it was only through Elizabeth’s pushing that Wilding had been given the part in the first place. She was shooting Rhapsody on a nearby lot, so she made a point of checking up on Wilding every day to ensure that Joan was not leading him astray. What she did not know was that the director had set his sights on him, though nothing appears to have come of this.

Some years later, Joan told Roy Newquist in Conversations with Joan Crawford (Citadel, 1980), ‘I think Elizabeth Taylor, in one of her rare good films [Rhapsody], is great to watch.’ In the spring of 1953, however, she regarded the young star as an upstart, publicly referring to her as ‘Princess Brat’, and took exception to Elizabeth ‘swanning’ onto her set, without permission, and ignoring her. Joan sent a message to Elizabeth via her publicist which read, ‘You tell that little bitch never to walk in here again without acknowledging me. I want you to teach her some manners!’ She then posted a guard at the soundstage door – at her own expense – to prevent Elizabeth from getting in.

Elizabeth tried to fight back but, aside from her colourful language, was no match for the ferocious, hugely feared but respected Joan, a far greater actress than she would ever be. When Hedda Hopper’s syndicated column reported Elizabeth as having said, ‘Mike Wilding is playing a blind man – that way he won’t have to look at Crawford during their movie,’ Joan hit back with an unprintable comment about Elizabeth almost losing her sight in Elephant Walk. Some years later, when spiralling production costs, largely on account of Elizabeth’s illnesses and indispositions, threatened Twentieth Century Fox with bankruptcy and saw them laying off 200 workers, Joan recalled Elizabeth’s behaviour on the set of Torch Song and told reporters (Sean Considine, Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud), ‘Miss Taylor is a spoilt, indulgent child – a blemish on public decency.’