In the wake of the Errol Flynn home eviction party, Elizabeth began a clandestine affair with John Agar, who, after his marriage to Shirley Temple in 1945, had generated a headline: AMERICAN PRINCESS MARRIES PRINCE CHARMING.
Their secret liaison was launched during the waning months of the rapidly deteriorating “storybook” marriage between Agar and Temple. Elizabeth and Agar never dared go out in public together, and only a handful of her closest friends knew she was dating the handsome, young, and athletic former member of both the Naval Air Corps and the Army Air Corps.
Elizabeth’s rendezvous with Agar were usually conducted at the home of Roddy McDowall, at the apartment of Dick Hanley, and on occasion in Marion Davies’ guest cottage at the Hearst compound in Beverly Hills.
“I find him irresistible,” she told Roddy. “That square jaw, those blue eyes, and that handsome face…”
The actor stood six feet, two inches, the son of a meat packer from Chicago. “He packs his own meat,” Elizabeth jokingly told Dick.
“If he makes it big in the movies in the 1950s, he’ll be another William Holden.”
Temple had first met Agar in 1943, as her home was next door to the Agar family’s. Joyce Agar became her friend, and one day Shirley invited Joyce’s older brother, John, over for a swim. At the time, he was twenty-four, and she was only fifteen, so he didn’t pay her much attention. He was not a movie buff and had never seen one of her pictures.
When he left for seven months of basic training in Texas, she wrote him nearly every day. She’d developed a powerful crush on him. He began to take her seriously during his furlough for the Christmas holiday of 1944. The following year, when Temple turned seventeen, they were married.
“Shirley and I had our first fight on the morning I woke up after our honeymoon night,” Agar said to Elizabeth. “I accused her of not being a virgin.”
During his affair with Elizabeth, Agar found her to be a good listener to his professional and private woes.
“I married a little girl who had been worshipped by millions in the 1930s. To her, it must have seemed like the universe revolved around her. Now that all that attention is fading, our storybook marriage is a joke.”
Eleven years older than Elizabeth, Agar was very experienced in the bedroom. “I think he was broken in early in life by a lot of older women, perhaps in Chicago,” Elizabeth told Dick. “He’s a great lover…at least when he’s sober.”
Agar had never wanted to be an actor until David O. Selznick, who held Temple’s contract, suggested that he might go over big in the movies because of his good looks and charm. His first picture, Fort Apache (1948), had starred Temple. John Wayne was the real star, and John Ford was the director. Wayne took up for Agar and befriended him, but Ford attacked him viciously during the making of Fort Apache, or so Agar told Elizabeth.
Ford’s biographer, Ronald Davis, wrote: “Psychologists might suggest that Ford feared the feminine side of himself and lashed out at pretty boy types. An even darker interpretation might infer that the director’s need for dominance was a form of seduction.”
Regrettably for Agar and his marriage, the young actor became a close drinking buddy of Wayne’s night after night. The bond became so close that The Duke insisted that Agar appear in five more of his movies: Sands of Iwo Jima (1949); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); The Undefeated (1969); Chisum (1970), and Big Jake (1971).
“I think Wayne went for me big time,” Agar told Elizabeth. “I ended up spending more time with him than I did with Shirley. I also hung out with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. All the closeted homos in Hollywood seem to go for me. A lot of Hollywood’s big stars carry dubious sexual reputations from when they were young, unknown actors struggling for recognition.”
“As you probably already know, it’s called the casting couch,” Elizabeth said. “I never had to actually lie down on it, because I became a star when I was only a child. If I’d launched my career at the age of twenty, I might have had had to suck as much cock as that blonde trollop that everyone’s talking about, Marilyn Monroe.”
Agar admitted he could be a brute, bringing home other women with Temple in the house and even beating her. As Temple herself revealed in her memoirs, she ended up on the floor on several occasions, “a disheveled woman with an aching heart and a crumpled spirit. It was growing ever harder to keep the lamp of love lit.”
In spite of knowing the details of these stories, Elizabeth remained defensive of Agar, even in the aftermath of his arrests for drunk driving. “He’s always portrayed as such a Bad Boy in the press,” she said, “but I have found him to be a young man with good manners, always a gentleman, rather soft spoken, and with tremendous respect for women.”
“I’m sure that’s how you see him,” Roddy said. “In fact, I think you and John Wayne are the only stars in Hollywood in love with Agar.”
The only public comment Wayne ever made about Agar was, “John is just too good looking for his own good.”
One night, Agar asked Elizabeth if she respected him less because he was not faithful to Temple. “I mean, I live in her shadow. I turn to other women because they make me feel like a man. The Temples have castrated me.”
“I don’t believe that a man or woman should remain faithful in a marriage,” Elizabeth said. “It’s a middle class concept. All adventurous people have a roving eye.”
On another occasion, Agar told her he’d met a tall, good-looking guy in a bar, an aspirant actor named Rock Hudson. “He’s a homo, but said he’d love to meet you because he is your biggest fan.”
Ironically, both Agar and Hudson would end up working together in one of Wayne’s movies, The Undefeated (1969), and Elizabeth, of course, would become one of Hudson’s all time best friends.
Years later, Hudson would tell Elizabeth that he was nervous about meeting Wayne, who had a reputation for “faggot bashing.”
“I met Duke in his dressing room as he was applying natural lipstick and wearing heels to make himself look taller,” Hudson said. “We got along fine and played bridge together. John Agar told me what Wayne had said about me one day. He told Agar, ‘Look at that face on Rock Hudson. Too bad it’s wasted on a queer. You know what I could have done with a face like that on the screen?’”
When Agar’s divorce from Temple was finalized, he’d wanted to marry Elizabeth, but by then, she’d moved on to other lovers. Actually, she told Dick Hanley the real reason for their breakup: “One drunken night, John told me his dream was to marry a long-legged model.”
“But no such luck for me,” Agar later recalled. “I ended up marrying Shirley Temple and dating Elizabeth Taylor, two gals with stumps for legs.”
***
After Little Women, Elizabeth vowed that she’d played her last juvenile teen role. “From now on, I plan to appear on the screen as an adult, playing love scenes with grown men, even though I’m still sixteen,” she told Dick Hanley.
“I adored Elizabeth,” Hanley said, “but she was a scheming little vixen. She was not willing to prostitute herself to Louis B., whom she still despised, but her attention focused on the Veep, Benjamin Thau, whom we called Benny. He was actually responsible for her contracts and, in the main, for the roles assigned to her.”
Instead of passively waiting for roles, Elizabeth decided to lobby for them. She was learning a lot just from listening to the gossip every morning in the make-up department, where she was talking to Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn, Lana Turner, and Lucille Ball.
One morning, one of her favorite actresses, Barbara Stanwyck, arrived on the lot for the filming associated with East Side, West Side (1949), which also contained roles for Ava Gardner and Nancy Davis. Stanwyck was married at the time to one of the screen world’s most talked-about “pretty boys,” Robert Taylor.
Stanwyck checked out Elizabeth and told Hepburn, “No woman, if the Taylor dame can be called that, has a right to look that gorgeous at five o’clock in the morning.”
In one of the many ironies of Elizabeth’s life, she would, within a matter of months, be playing the role of wife, onscreen, to Stanwyck’s real-life husband, Robert Taylor.
Sidney Guilaroff, the prominent hairdresser who had styled Elizabeth’s hair for National Velvet, noticed her checking out Nancy Davis (later, Mrs. Ronald Reagan), who was co-starring with Ava Gardner and Stanwyck in East Side, West Side.
When Elizabeth had finished her make-up and was heading for coffee with Guilaroff in the commissary, she wanted to know more about Davis. “She certainly won’t challenge Ava or Lana for movie roles,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe she could get some minor parts—perhaps a housewifey thing, or the girl next door. And she looks old enough to be my mother.”
At this point, Judy Garland joined their table, having overheard their talk. “Nancy Davis is Benny’s new protégée,” Garland said. “She’s a ripe twenty-eight years old, if she’s a day, and Metro, as you know, rarely hires gals over twenty-five. Nancy, or so I hear, has a special talent. She visits Benny’s office every morning to give him a state-of-the-art blow-job.”
Garland’s statement can’t be lightly dismissed as mere gossip. The famous biographer, Anne Edwards, visited Thau in 1983 when he was dying at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Los Angeles. He admitted that Nancy was known during the late 1940s for performing oral sex, her lucky conquests including not only Thau, but Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. Tracy had been her main sponsor at MGM.
Elizabeth was still dating Peter Lawford, on occasion, and he was also romancing Nancy Davis. He confirmed that “Nancy gives great head, and you know what an oral type I am.”
Ironically both Lawford and Davis were also romancing actor Robert Walker, who had been married to Jennifer Jones until producer David O. Selznick made off with her.
Not to be upstaged by Davis, Elizabeth asked Dick to arrange a private meeting between Thau and herself, and the MGM executive welcomed her, because he viewed her as the studio’s best prospect for major stardom in the 1950s.
Thau later told Dick, “She really came on strong to me. I believe all I had to do was unzip and she’d go for it. But she was so young, and I’d already been serviced that morning by Nancy. Actually, her little rendezvous with me was completely unnecessary. I was going to contact her that afternoon with some good news. Mayer had agreed to cast her as the wife of Robert Taylor in a movie to be shot in London.” It was Conspirator, eventually released in 1949.
“I ran into Elizabeth when she’d just come out of Thau’s office,” Garland recalled. “She was almost hysterical at being assigned her first adult role.”
“How was sucking Benny’s dick?” Garland asked in her typically blunt fashion. “Did he say you were better than Nancy?”
“Oh, Judy, I didn’t have to do that, although I would have. In my next movie, I’m going to star opposite Robert Taylor, and I’ll be able to say that I did it based on my talent, and not by just moving from zipper to zipper!”
***
Elizabeth, accompanied by Sara, sailed from New York to England aboard the Queen Mary in October of 1948 to begin the filming of Conspirator. Because of her age, and because technically, as a seventeen-year-old who hadn’t yet graduated from high school, she had to carve out time for lessons with a “schoolmarm”—in this case, the white-haired Birtina Anderson, whom MGM kept on its payroll—to at least maintain the illusion that she was proceeding with the “normal” life of an American teenager.
“Between love scenes with Robert Taylor, I had to meet with Birtina, who thought I was a horrible student in English, algebra, and history.”
Because Elizabeth had dual nationality, both American and British, the question of her being granted a work permit did not come up.
An MGM limousine waited at Southampton to drive them to London and their suite at Claridges, where red roses and orchids awaited them.
Back in her hometown of London, Elizabeth was shocked at the devastation wreaked by the bombings of World War II. Entire neighborhoods of the city had been destroyed during the Blitz. But at Claridges, the most prestigious hotel in England, everything was elegance itself, especially the suite assigned to Sara and Elizabeth.
She was introduced to Percy Rogers, a very effeminate version of Roddy McDowall, with a solitary wisp of dyed blonde hair that fell across his forehead. He’d been hired by MGM as an “expediter” specifically assigned to Sara and Elizabeth.
“Miss Taylor, you are my favorite movie star. I’ve adored all of your films. Anything you want in London, I’ve been ordered to get it for you.”
“How about Prince Philip?” she asked.
“Oh, you sweet darling, you have a wicked sense of humor. Prince Philip is on my list, too. You know, he fucks around, don’t you? I want him first, then I’ll pass him on to you.”
“You’re my kind of guy,” she said, kissing him on the cheek in front of a rather disdainful Sara.
The next morning, after an English breakfast in Claridges dining room, Sara stayed in the suite while Percy drove Elizabeth to the Taylor family’s former home on Wildwood Road near Hampstead. She was shocked to find the house in disrepair. He asked her if she wanted to go inside, informing her that it was now occupied by the Women’s Voluntary Services, but she declined. “I’d rather remember it as it was.”
Back at Claridges she told Percy, “I want you to escort me everywhere. But don’t get your hopes up. I don’t put out, at least not for you.”
“Oh, my dear, that’s something you, with your ghastly plumbing, will never have to worry about.”
That weekend, Percy drove Sara and Elizabeth to the estate in Kent associated with the late Victor Cazalet, where they were entertained by his sister, Thelma.
The Taylors were welcomed warmly as part of the family. There was much talk of London before the war and loving memoires of Victor were shared. “I also miss Francis so much,” Thelma said. “I wish he could have come.”
“He simply can’t afford it,” Sara said. “Even though Elizabeth is a movie star, she doesn’t make that much money.”
“She will one day,” Thelma assured Sara.
On the following Monday at around noon, Percy escorted Elizabeth and Sara to a luncheon at London’s Ritz Hotel, where they met the British director Victor Saville, one of the founding fathers of British filmmaking. Having been associated with MGM since 1941, he’d previously directed such classics as Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), and worked closely with such stars as Greer Garson, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, Errol Flynn, and Hedy Lamarr.
Saville was so supportive of Elizabeth, and so complimentary of her, that she felt she’d have a good working relationship with him.
Thirty minutes late, the star of the picture, Robert Taylor, finally showed up.
Before becoming the pretty boy of MGM in the 1930s, he’d trained as a cellist in Nebraska, where he was known by his birth name, Spangler Arlington Brugh.
Elizabeth knew Robert’s image only through two pictures she’d seen— Camille (1937), where he’d co-starred with Greta Garbo, and Johnny Eager (1942), with Lana Turner. Elizabeth was startled at how his face had changed since World War II. No one would accuse him of being a pretty boy ever again.
As critic David Thomson put it, “Taylor’s history is like that of Tyrone Power: of hollow, gorgeous youth dwindling into anxiety. But in Taylor’s case, there is something touching in his decline. For he became not plainer, but harsher: Churlish, peeved, disagreeable—no more than that, never enough to make him an absorbing villain.”
A villain was what MGM had miscast him as in Conspirator, where he played a British officer spying for the Russians and married to an unsuspecting, twenty-one-year-old American, as portrayed by the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth.
“Just think,” Elizabeth said to Robert, “You’ve had girlfriends on the screen who have included Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Jean Harlow, Vivien Leigh, Joan Fontaine, and Hedy Lamarr—and now you get me.”
He looked her over. “And how lucky I am.”
Robert regaled his luncheon table with stories about his early days at MGM. “After several months of studying with MGM’s acting coaches, I was told to go back to my family farm in Nebraska. That made me so god damn sore, I stayed on in Hollywood.”
“I remember in 1937 when MGM tried to counter your pretty boy image by releasing photographs of you shirtless, revealing hair on your chest to prove your ‘ He-ness,’ as it was defined at the time,” Saville said.
“I’d rather forget that,” Robert said.
Before leaving, Robert told her, “We have love scenes coming up in the film, but would you at least give me a peck on the cheek as a preview?”
“Of course I will,” Elizabeth said, kissing him on the mouth.
“Aren’t there laws about making love to a minor like Elizabeth?” Saville asked.
She smiled at him. “Laws are only made to be broken.”
Later, Percy told Elizabeth, “I used to have the hots for Robert Taylor. But in my fantasies, I’ve moved on to dream about younger men.”
Elizabeth eagerly awaited her first kissing scene with Robert. She later said that she closed her eyes and pretended it was Glenn Davis.
“Robert isn’t as good a kisser as Glenn is,” she told Percy. “But he did give me some advice. He told me to powder down my lips before kissing him. That way, I wouldn’t smear his make-up. How unromantic!”
Much MGM publicity was generated by that first kissing scene. The word got out that to conceal Robert’s “enormous erection,” he’d ordered cameraman Freddie Young to shoot him only from the waist up.
Reportedly, Young mocked those remarks. “Taylor couldn’t produce a big hard-on if his life depended on it—call that one ‘Princess Tiny Meat.’”
Elizabeth wrote Roddy, complaining about having to do schoolwork while co-starring in a film. “It’s hard to concentrate on algebra when Robert Taylor is sticking his tongue down your throat.”
Robert told Saville, “That Elizabeth Taylor is stacked. I didn’t realize it until she appeared in one scene in a négligée. Good god, she is just a child, but I can’t help myself.” He later told Saville that he slipped her back to his hotel suite and seduced her.
“How was it?” Saville asked.
“I’ve had better,” Robert said. “I told her that if she didn’t shave her legs, I would do it for her.”
During the shoot, Elizabeth was asked how she felt about very young actresses appearing on the screen with middle-aged men. “Hollywood thinks nothing of romantically pairing older men with young girls,” she said. “But you never see the reverse. Imagine seeing Roddy McDowall on the screen making love to Barbara Stanwyck.”
One scene that Saville shot with both Taylors didn’t go over with Dore Schary at MGM’s home office in Hollywood. Schary ordered that the director reshoot it. “When Elizabeth’s robe flies open in a scene where she’s struggling with Bob, we see far too many of her God given assets,” he wrote. “Please try to keep in mind that this is not a blue movie.”
When the rough cut of Conspirator was rushed back to MGM, Pandro S. Berman was not impressed with Elizabeth’s first venture into an adult movie. “She has the face for it, but doesn’t possess the strength of voice to go with it. It was like she was half child, half grown woman. I advised MGM to hold up the picture for a while until her career was more secure.”
Ultimately, when the film was released in 1949, the critics agreed with Berman, although many claimed that Elizabeth delivered a fine performance in an otherwise mediocre movie. Conspirator, evaluated by the box office as a flop, did nothing to advance the post-war career of Robert Taylor.
Even though the two Taylors failed to excite audiences, it would not be the last time they would be cast together in an MGM film.
During the filming of Conspirator, Elizabeth blossomed as a social flower in London, meeting people who would alter her life forever.
***
One noonday, Elizabeth and Percy Rogers were enjoying some fish and chips at the MGM canteen in London, and he was filling her in on all the movie and theatrical gossip of the West End. She obviously could not have known it, but two of her future husbands—Richard Burton and Michael Wilding—would also be having lunch that day in the canteen.
During that era, MGM talent scouts were successfully luring the most talented British stars, both male and female, to Hollywood. Among those solicited, Deborah Kerr was already in California, and such actors as Stewart Granger, Wilding, and Burton would soon be on their way to America, too.
Orson Welles, whom Elizabeth had known since the days of filming Jane Eyre, had stopped by her dressing room earlier that morning. He was having lunch with Wilding.
In his memoirs, The Wilding Way, the British actor recalled the first time he spotted Elizabeth, although he associated the circumstance with the wrong year of 1951. That was when she returned to England to film Ivanhoe, once again with Robert Taylor as her co-star. Wilding actually met her when she was filming Conspirator in MGM’s London commissary in 1948.
“I was aware of her beauty,” Wilding wrote. “Instead of asking the waitress for the salt, she sashayed down the whole length of the canteen to pick it up from the counter. All eyes focused on her, and I’m sure that was her intent.”
Wilding claimed that Welles, his luncheon partner, raised a satirical eyebrow and quipped, “The girl didn’t ought to do that, you know. Upsets the digestion.”
Back at her table, Elizabeth asked Percy the identity of the man dining with Welles.
“He’s an actor, Michael Wilding, under contract to Henry Wilcox, the producer. I think he’s making a picture with Wilcox’s wife, Anna Neagle.”
“Very handsome, very debonair,” she said. “When I walked past his table, he looked at me with devouring eyes.”
“That’s because he’s a notorious breast man, but he’s too old for you, my darling. The old sod must be forty if he’s a day. Before the war, he met and married this woman named Kay Young because he said her beauty reminded him of Joan Crawford. But his true love, and this has been so since the war, is actually sitting over in the far corner of the room making eyes at your Robert Taylor.”
Elizabeth stared long and hard at Robert’s luncheon guest. “He’s stunningly attractive, too. What’s his name?”
“Stewart Granger,” Percy said. “He’s a real swashbuckler, our British film industry’s equivalent of your Errol Flynn. He was madly in love with Deborah Kerr before she went to Hollywood. When he made Caesar and Cleopatra, Vivien Leigh fell madly in love with him. But, in spite of all his philandering, his most consistent lover has been Michael Wilding himself. Of course, those two are never faithful to anybody. Stewart right now is obviously making a play for Robert, because he wants to star in pictures for Metro in Hollywood. He knows that Robert can open many doors for him. I have no doubt that those two hot guys will be exploring each other’s bums before Big Ben strikes midnight.”
Elizabeth spent the rest of her time glancing first at Granger, then at Wilding. “When I think of the two, Granger has the most sex appeal,” she said. At the time, of course, it was inconceivable that in a relatively short time, she would be living under the same roof with both men.
“Stewart is in love with Jean Simmons, who is being billed as Britain’s answer to Elizabeth Taylor,” Percy said.
“I saw her play Ophelia opposite Laurence Olivier in Hamlet,” Elizabeth said. “She was very good and very beautiful.”
As Elizabeth looked at the entrance, she spotted Laurence Olivier entering the canteen with a handsome young actor. “What is the deal with those two?” she asked.
“Larry is mad about the boy,” Percy responded. “That’s Richard Burton, an actor from Wales. He’s the biggest whore in the business. He’s seduced all the stately homos in the British theatre, including Noël Coward and John Gielgud. He’s also gone through half the actresses in the theater.”
“I adore British actors,” she said. “They seem to play musical chairs every night. Everybody is sleeping with everybody else, regardless of gender.”
“We’re far more sophisticated about such things than you uptight Americans,” Percy said.
Olivier nodded as he walked by Elizabeth’s table, and she met Burton eye to eye. After he was out of earshot, she said, “I will not become another notch in Mr. Burton’s belt.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Percy told her. “Richard’s got the most seductive voice in the British theater, far more so than Larry. Richard is also generous with his cock. Once in his dressing room, he owed me a favor, so he let me go down on him. Seven and a half inches at full mast, in case you do become interested.”
“That is most doubtful,” she said. “Give me this Stewart Granger any day, even Michael Wilding.”
At that point, she saw Welles, trailed by Wilding, heading toward their table. “Elizabeth, my sweet, dear child, I’d love to drop by your suite tonight to pay my respects to you and Sara. I also am friends with the world’s most intriguing personality, who’s also staying at Claridges and would adore meeting you.”
“I’d be delighted, as always, Orson,” Elizabeth said. “not only to see you, but to meet this mystery guest of yours—no doubt, Winston Churchill himself.”
Welles looked over at Percy. “No need to introduce me to this one. His reputation has preceded him.” Then he turned around to Wilding. “Forgive me, Elizabeth, this is Mr. Michael Wilding.”
“Miss Taylor, an honor,” Wilding said. “Are you real or merely a painting that Leonardo da Vinci did by dawn’s rosy light?”
“I’m just a lonely little chit from Hampstead, wiggling her ass across the canteen, hoping to attract some handsome British gentleman who will invite her out on a fucking date. Is that too much to ask?”
“I’d like to be that gentleman,” Wilding said. “However, the first time a waiter asks, ‘And Mr. Wilding, what will your daughter order tonight,’ I’m out the door.”
She laughed heartily. “I’m at Claridges, and most anxious to escape my mother, Sara. Perhaps you can fix her up with Robert Morley. She just loves bushy eyebrows.”
“I’ll call tomorrow, since Orson here has you booked for tonight,” Wilding said. “In fact, I need a date to take to Lord Mountbatten’s ball in honor of his daughter. Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip will be there. I’m sure they’d love to meet a British girl who went to Hollywood and made good. They’ll probably entice you back to England to make films here on your native soil.”
At that moment, a messenger from MGM stopped at Elizabeth’s table, passing a note to Percy. He read it quickly and looked up at Welles and Wilding. “Sorry, gents, but Elizabeth and I have to go. We just got word that two guests have dropped by the set to call on Elizabeth—Patricia Neal and Ronald Reagan.”
***
During the cold, bleak winter of 1948 in London, four homesick Americans bonded, waiting for the weeks to pass in the bombed-out city, with its deprivations and food rationing, until they could return to sunny California. During their frequent evening excursions, Patricia Neal was escorted by Ronald Reagan, her co-star in The Hasty Heart, and Robert Taylor was Elizabeth’s date. Neal was desperately lonely for the arms of Gary Cooper, and Reagan was still in deep mourning over the end of his marriage to Jane Wyman. At that point in her life, Elizabeth hadn’t quite ended her love affair with Glenn Davis.
For Robert Taylor, his “lavender marriage” to his bisexual wife, Barbara Stanwyck, was over except for the final divorce proceedings.
On the set of Conspirator, Elizabeth had renewed her acquaintance with Reagan and was introduced to Neal. He suggested that Robert Taylor join them that Friday night for a steak dinner at the Savoy Restaurant. In meat-scarce London, Reagan had ordered a dozen steaks flown in from “21” in Manhattan.
In the Savoy Dining Room, Patricia remembered that “Elizabeth was so exquisite, so young, and Robert delighted in teasing her. There seemed some intimacy between them that I could only guess at. I also got the vague suspicion that something had gone on between Ronnie and Elizabeth back in Hollywood, but perhaps I was wrong. He didn’t have a reputation as a child molester.”
The maître d’hôtel arrived with the bad news. The steaks shipped from New York had gone bad, or so he claimed. Reagan suspected that the meat-hungry staff had either consumed or sold them. Nonetheless, he ordered a dozen more, warning the maître d’, “When they get here, I don’t want you coming into the dining room with blood dripping out the corners of your mouth.”
“Over dinner, which consisted of stale mutton chops, Robert amused us with stories of MGM, and Ronnie lobbed complaints about Jane Wyman and their failed marriage,” Neal said. “Elizabeth and I listened patiently.”
“When I starred with Garbo in Camille in ’36, she told the director I was ‘so beautiful but so dumb,’” Robert said. He also told them that when he signed to make The Gorgeous Hussy (1936) with Joan Crawford, Hollywood wags asked, ‘To which of them does the title refer?’”
Reagan claimed that he was going to make a deal with Wyman that each of them should not discuss the other to members of the press. “I was really pissed off when she told reporters that I’m as good in bed as I was on the screen.”
“I read the other day in the papers that she’d made another crack about me,” Reagan said. She told some reporter, ‘Don’t ask Ronnie what time it is, because he will tell you how a watch is made.’”
When Robert took Elizabeth to another steak dinner at the Savoy, Reagan learned that, according to the maître d’, “only six of your steaks went bad this time.”
One night, when Robert did not show up for a previously scheduled dinner, Elizabeth contacted Percy, who told them what had happened. Earlier that evening, Robert had been arrested in a room above the Wounded Pelican, a pub with upstairs bedrooms in Soho. It was a hangout for London homosexuals, who could rent “hot beds” for sex. Robert had been caught with a young hustler from Birmingham.
Both Reagan and Neal seemed very concerned, but Elizabeth less so. She was convinced that MGM publicists, operating on orders from Howard Strickling at headquarters in Hollywood, would hush up the scandal.
Elizabeth had had more than her quota of champagne that night. She mischievously goaded Reagan, “Thank God you didn’t get arrested with Errol Flynn,” she said, “He told me that he went for you big time when you guys made Santa Fe Trail.”
“Errol is such a tease,” Reagan said, looking embarrassed. “He could have told you anything—and probably did—but I don’t go that way. If you ever run into Lana Turner, Betty Grable, or Susan Hayward, they’ll establish my credentials. But in your case, Elizabeth, ask yourself.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” Patricia later said. “I took that to be a confession. So, Ronnie had taken our little teen darling, Elizabeth, to bed. I couldn’t wait to tell Gary.”
Reagan wisely suggested that the next time they had dinner with Robert that each of them make no mention of his arrest, which, as Elizabeth had predicted, was covered up and did not appear in the newspapers.
When reunited as double-dating “couples” again, Neal suggested that Reagan and Robert take Elizabeth and her dancing at a local dance hall in Holborn that she’d heard about, and they agreed.
As Neal remembered the evening, “Elizabeth showed up way overdressed, in a gown designed by Christian Dior. We went to this hall where most of the other patrons were shabbily dressed, still suffering from wartime deprivation. All eyes turned to look at her. The British people still had their wonderful bravado about them. Elizabeth was moved when the patrons sang The White Cliffs of Dover, the name of that wartime movie she’d made when she was a child.”
That weekend, Elizabeth agreed to drive into the English countryside with Robert, Reagan, and Neal, in a large car driven by Hamish Thomson, a young dentist who wanted to show them the Cotswolds. During the slow drive there, Thomson suggested they play a game—“A little quiz I’ve read about in this London magazine. Everybody has to reveal a secret wish.”
Neal claimed that her wish involved Gary Cooper divorcing his wife and marrying her. Robert told them that he hoped Stanwyck would ask for no alimony when she divorced him. Elizabeth shocked the passengers in the car by claiming that her wish involved marrying Michael Wilding. When the game focused on Reagan, he said, “My wish—no, not my wish, my destiny—is to become President of the United States.”
One weekend when he wouldn’t be needed in the movie studio the following Monday, Robert went with Stewart Granger to the country house of one of his friends. Neal couldn’t join Elizabeth and Reagan because she’d eaten a slice of West Country ham that had poisoned her. “I’m spending all my time on the toilet,” she told Elizabeth.
Reagan called Elizabeth and asked her to go for dinner and dancing with him at the Ritz Hotel in London, and she accepted, although she would have preferred if Michael Wilding rather than Reagan had invited her.
“That was one very despondent date I had,” Elizabeth told Percy the following morning. “The reality of losing Jane Wyman seemed to have finally settled in. We sat in a remote corner of the Ritz Hotel’s lobby near a potted palm, and he broke down and cried. I held him in my arms and tried to comfort him.”
Reagan later pulled himself together and had dinner with her, but didn’t feel up to dancing. She agreed to go back to his suite with him.
“I thought if I threw him a mercy fuck—a term I learned from Roddy Mc-Dowall—that would cheer him up. But sex was about the last thing on his mind. He spent the rest of the evening talking about how he was going to run for senator from California.”
When Michael Wilding finally called her for a date, Elizabeth quickly dropped Robert, Reagan, and Neal in favor of spending time with this older British actor.
“When I told this trio good-bye, we made some vague promise about getting together in Hollywood,” Elizabeth told Percy. “Actually, I had no plans to see either of them again.”
In the years ahead, Neal would refer to Elizabeth as “that God damn bitch,” blaming her for “stealing the two most coveted roles of my lifetime.”
In the summer of 1958, Neal was in London playing Catherine Holly in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer. Her performance received rave reviews, and she called it the “most thrilling acting experience of my life.”
Producer Sam Spiegel came to see it and was impressed enough to acquire the movie rights, promising Neal that she could repeat her stage performance on the screen.
“Imagine my surprise when I picked up the paper to read that Elizabeth Taylor had signed to do the part with Monty Clift,” Neal said. “Losing that role to Taylor was one of the hardest professional blows of my life. I still cannot talk about it without bitterness.”
“There was more to come,” Neal said. “I was for a time the leading candidate for the role of Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I was ready to sign the contract. Only Bette Davis stood in my way. Guess what? I picked up the morning paper to read that Miss Elizabeth Taylor, cunt from hell, had signed to do the role with her husband du jour.”
Elizabeth herself often discussed the irony of what she called “the second act for Ronnie and me. No Hollywood script, regardless of how far-fetched, would have me playing the housewife of a Republican senator, John Warner, hanging out at the White House with Ronnie, the President of the United States, and Benny Thau’s fellatio artist, now installed as First Lady of the Land, a position once occupied by Eleanor Roosevelt.”
***
Orson Welles, a larger-than-life creature, once claimed, “I have always had the hots for Elizabeth Taylor.” After three postponements, he finally came to visit Sara and Elizabeth at their suite at Claridges.
Settling in for a drink, he lamented how difficult it was for him in post-war Hollywood. “During the war, I could have any woman I wanted. There was no competition. All the men were overseas. Today there are one hundred actors competing for every job. Everybody has a film script to sell. I want to continue making movies, but I have this unfortunate habit of spending all my money on women. No one seems to want to lend me any more dough.”
“Perhaps Louella Parsons hasn’t forgiven you for Citizen Kane and your depiction of her boss, William Randolph Hearst,” Elizabeth said.
“I haven’t forgiven her for all the rotten stuff she wrote about me during my marriage to Rita [a reference to Love Goddess Rita Hayworth],” Welles said. “Of course, much of the failure of my marriage was my own fault. A beautiful woman comes alone, and I can’t resist her. Maria Montez, Judy Garland, Lucille Ball…well, maybe not Lucille.”
“You certainly are known for seducing beautiful women,” Sara said.
“That is so true, yet during my last visit to Hollywood, Guinn Williams, the one they call ‘Big Boy,’ attacked me at the Brown Derby restaurant, accusing me of being a queer. I demanded that he apologize. He didn’t. Instead, he took a knife and cut off half of my tie.”
“Perhaps you should have cut off something of Big Boy’s,” Elizabeth said.
Welles looked startled for a minute. “You do have a wicked sense of humor, which makes you all the more adorable.”
After an hour of exchanging Hollywood gossip, Welles invited Elizabeth, but not Sara, to meet a special guest, who was also staying in a suite at Claridges. Sara seemed miffed that the invitation didn’t include her.
A knock on the door of the “special guest’s” suite summoned a maid from India, dressed in a sari. Elizabeth and Welles were ushered into the living room of the suite where they had to wait fifteen minutes for their host to appear.
“The suspense is killing me,” Elizabeth said, “From the smell of perfume, I gather our host is really a hostess.”
Suddenly, Marlene Dietrich emerged from the bedroom, wearing a silvery gown and draped in white furs, ready for an evening at the Café Royal with Welles.
“Oh, the darling girl with the violet eyes,” she said to Elizabeth.
“Miss Dietrich,” Elizabeth said, standing up. “You are so very lovely.”
“It’s all an illusion, my dear,” Dietrich said. “I’m far too old to still be alive.”
Welles came forward to kiss Dietrich. Then he quoted from Shakespeare, “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale…”
She cut him off. “I know, I know. I’m called the timeless wonder. But time always wins.”
She came over to Elizabeth and held her hand. “Orson and I must be leaving soon, but I really wanted to see you in the flesh. It is true: You are without a doubt the most beautiful girl in the world.”
“But becoming less of a girl every day,” Elizabeth said.
“Don’t wish for youth to go by too quickly, or you’ll regret it,” Dietrich warned. “Oh, to be sixteen again. Didn’t you know, my child, that the dream of every red-blooded man involves crawling into bed with a girl of sixteen?”
“If I didn’t know that, I’m finding it out now,” Elizabeth said.
“I heard that you met with George Bernard Shaw,” Welles said before downing the rest of his drink. “How did that meeting of two legends go?”
“Like you, he’s a genius,” Dietrich said. “You’re well aware that when I meet a genius, I kneel in front of him. Once on my knees, I unbuttoned his fly and removed his penis. I made love to it. Of course, I had to do that before we could sit down and talk.”
Elizabeth didn’t know how to respond to that. “Miss Dietrich, I will treasure meeting you, one of my great honors. You are today’s Helen of Troy, the Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra reincarnate.”
“You are so very kind,” Dietrich said. “But I’m the mere wife of a chicken farmer, my dear Rudy.”
That was a reference to her husband, Rudolph Sieber, with whom she no longer lived but never divorced. “We must meet again soon. I will share with you my secret of vinegar and ice water douches. It will prevent pregnancy.”
She reached down to kiss Elizabeth. Her lips were very, very wet.
Back in her own suite, Elizabeth told Sara, “I simply adore Marlene. I’m sure she’s going to become one of my very best friends.”
“Perhaps you’d rather her be your mother instead of me?” Sara said.
“Mother, jealously doesn’t become you.”
During that evening at Claridges, Elizabeth could hardly have imagined that in a few short years, she and Dietrich would be competing for the love of one man, and that “The Kraut” (as Ernest Hemingway called her) would seduce at least four of her future husbands and many of her lovers.
***
Twenty years her senior, Michael Wilding was still handsome, in an offbeat kind of way. Elegant and polished, he talked, walked, and moved in a manner common to British aristocracy. In many ways, he evoked the decorum of Victor Cazalet, her standard for measuring an English “gent.”
During their first outing together, he took her to The Salisbury, a pub and “watering hole” for many actors in London’s West End. “The food is ghastly, but so English it will make you homesick.” He ordered steak-and-kidney pie for both of them.
After lunch and a walk through Mayfair, he took her to the National Gallery, where he told her that his dream had been to become an artist before “I wandered into acting.”
After the museum, he guided her through some of the war-torn neighborhoods of London, a city still recovering from Hitler’s last desperate attempt to destroy it. He told her many stories of the bravery and endurance of Londoners during their worst hour. At one point, she was moved to tears.
Back at Claridges, she filled Percy and Sara in on the details of her day. Then, after a brief rest, she put on her most revealing dress, since he’d invited her to dinner downstairs in the hotel’s elegant dining room. Over dinner, she said, “I feel like Queen Victoria will walk in the door at any minute.”
She urged Wilding to consider migrating to Hollywood, but he dismissed the idea. “I feel there are few roles for cultivated English gentlemen in post-war Hollywood. I think there would have been more parts for me in the 1930s. Someone wrote in The Times that I was the poor man’s answer to Ronald Colman. I’m not sure there are that many roles for Colman himself these days.”
She apologized for never having seen any of Wilding’s films.
With a sense of self-mockery, he said, “You mean to tell me you haven’t seen The Courtneys of Curzon Street, Piccadilly Incident, Tilly of Bloomsbury, or Spring in Park Lane? At least my next picture will be a change of pace for me. My producer, Henry Wilcox, told me that my sophisticated wit, if I dare call it that, and my English sensibility would never go over in Tinseltown. David Niven is the best example of that. Americans like Gary Cooper and John Wayne…and, I might add, Elizabeth Taylor.”
He told her that Alfred Hitchcock had signed him to film Under Capricorn in New Zealand with Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten. “Hitch said to watch out for Ingrid. He claims she’d fuck a tree. Margaret Leighton is going to be in the film, too. I find her talented but rather toffee-nosed. I don’t go for her at all.” [Ironically, Leighton would eventually become Wilding’s fourth and final wife.]
“I’ve already met with Cotten,” Wilding said. “We sniffed at each other at first— you know, like two suspicious dogs. Now we like each other. He calls the upcoming film Under Crapicorn.”
Before leaving her that evening, he invited her to accompany him to Broad-lands, Lord Mountbatten’s country estate, where he was hosting a dinner/dance in honor of Lord John Brabourne, who had married his daughter, Patricia Mountbatten. “Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip will be there.” Wilding said.
But before the ball, Elizabeth was privileged to meet the future Queen of England at a command performance of the film That Forsythe Woman, starring her friends, Greer Garson and Errol Flynn.
Standing in a receiving line beside the former screen queen, Myrna Loy, Elizabeth met Queen Elizabeth (the former Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon) and her daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, who in a relatively short time would ascend to the throne after the death of her father, King George VI.
That weekend, in a chauffeured Rolls Royce, Elizabeth was driven to Broadlands with Wilding, Henry Wilcox, and his actress wife, Anna Neagle.
By ten o’clock that night at the ball, arrangements were made for Prince Philip to dance with Elizabeth Taylor. As she’d later reveal to Percy, “I pressed up against him and got the desired response. I think I really excited him, but with his princess in the room, what could he do? I am definitely targeting him as a future conquest.”
By midnight, Wilding was drunk on champagne. He was approached by Lord Brabourne, who informed him that it was his turn to dance with Her Royal Highness, Princess Elizabeth. Wilding protested, “I’ve had too much to drink. I’m afraid I’ll step on her royal toes.” But His Lordship insisted.
At her table, Princess Elizabeth told Wilding, “I’m reluctant to dance with you, having seen you dance on the screen.” Nonetheless, she arose and walked to the dance floor with him as the band struck up a waltz.
“Thank God,” she said. “I feared the band was going to play a rhumba. I can never get the hang of those Latin rhythms.”
After the dance, he dutifully returned her to her table and said, “I’m relieved that I got through the dance without hitting you.”
She gave him a startled look. He’d meant to say, “without kicking you.” But he was so embarassed, he thanked the princess and retreated back to Elizabeth (Taylor).
Wilding saved the last dance for her, holding her tightly in his arms. “I’m going to miss you.”
“Oh, Michael,” she said. “I never want to leave you.”
Wilcox and Neagle spent the night in the same room in a nearby hotel, where separate bedrooms had been assigned to Elizabeth and Wilding. When Elizabeth articulated an account of the night’s events to Percy, she said, “I kept my door unlocked all night waiting for him, but he never dropped in for a visit. In his affair with Stewart Granger, is Michael strictly a bottom?”
“No, he’s both a top and a bottom, Stewart strictly a manly top,” Percy claimed.
“You precious angel,” Elizabeth said. “You do seem to know everything about British actors.”
“It’s my calling in life,” he told her.
Three days later, Percy escorted Sara and Elizabeth to the airport as the first segment of their previously scheduled return to the U.S. Claridges sent a separate London taxi for transport of their luggage.
After exchanging many hugs and kisses with Percy, she disappeared into the VIP lounge at Heathrow. To her surprise, Wilding was waiting there for her. Sara discreetly removed herself to enjoy tea and some movie magazines.
The airplane to New York didn’t leave for another hour, and Wilding sat with Elizabeth, holding her hand and talking intensely with her. No one knows what was said, and she avoided revealing anything to her confidants, but it was obvious that an intense bond had been formed between them.
He was seen giving her a deep throat goodbye kiss. A flight attendant overheard his final words to her and reported his words to the press: “Grow up very, very fast and come back to me.”
***
Elizabeth had first met and befriended Merv Griffin at one of Roddy Mc-Dowall’s Sunday afternoon barbecues.
From the beginning, the future TV talk show host was impressed with her beauty and her kindness. He told Roddy, “She is the least judgmental person I know. She seems to recognize that all people have needs—and that love takes many forms.”
When they were first introduced, she talked to him about the perils of being a child star. “Hedda Hopper told me there is no second act for child stars in movies. ‘What awaits a child star?’ she asked me. ‘A decline in fans. A dwindling bank account. Personal disasters in relationships. Booze. And premature death. Most child stars can’t adjust to life when the sound of applause no longer rings in their ears.’”
Back in New York, Elizabeth was on her own, as her mother had flown down to Florida. Elizabeth later claimed that this interlude in her life was “the beginning of my being an adult, with no parent or chaperone around telling me when I could take a crap.”
Hearing that Griffin was in town, she called and invited him out on a date, with the understanding that it was a brother-sister type relationship of the sort she had with Roddy.
Merv arrived at her hotel suite with three dozen long-stemmed yellow roses, her favorite.
Escorted by him to the Stork Club, she introduced a “New Elizabeth Taylor” to public view, one clad seductively in a gown with plunging décolletage. “Let’s dance the night away,” she told Griffin.
The occupants of the other tables couldn’t stop staring at Elizabeth, who seemed to tune them out. One aspect of her body disturbed Merv. He noticed that her bare arms were peppered with fine black hairs. They were unsightly, detracting from her otherwise stunning beauty.
At two o’clock, they left the club, and he took her back to her hotel, with an invitation for dinner the following night at 21.
The next evening, midway through their meal, Clark Gable walked in with his new wife, Lady Sylvia Ashley, a willowy blonde with a peaches-and-cream complexion and Wedgwood blue eyes. Nancy Davis (later Mrs. Ronald Reagan) had failed to persuade Gable to marry her.
Lady Sylvia pointedly ignored Elizabeth when they were introduced, but Gable leaned over and kissed Elizabeth on the cheek. Then the newlyweds departed quickly for their table.
“What do you think of Lady Sylvia?” Merv asked.
“That gold-digging bitch,” Elizabeth said, “I heard she got her start modeling bras and bloomers. You know, she was once a chorus girl in the seediest clubs in London’s Soho.”
That night, back at her hotel suite, Elizabeth invited Griffin in as a means of continuing their discussion. “I’m thinking about getting married,” she told him.
“Well, I’m an available candidate,” he said, not at all seriously. “Who’s the lucky guy?”
“I have five candidates in mind, and I’m currently conducting auditions. I can’t tell you now. You’ll read about it in the papers. Now I’ve got to get my beauty sleep. ’Night, love, and thanks for a darling evening. You’re sweet.”
***
Later, from New York, Elizabeth flew to Miami, where Francis and Sara met her at the airport and drove her to her Uncle Howard Young’s mansion on Star Island. Reunited with her beloved uncle, she learned that he was tossing a big bash to celebrate her seventeenth birthday, to which he’d invited about one-hundred guests, including the power élite of South Florida.
To the party, he invited a handsome, twenty-eight-year-old bachelor, William Pawley, Jr., whose wealthy father had been the U.S. ambassador to both Peru and Brazil. A pilot during the war, Pawley was the president of Miami Transit. Uncle Howard had selected Pawley as a more suitable beau for Elizabeth than Glenn Davis.
She later stated that she found him “tall, dark, and handsome, with blue eyes that matched my own.” He stood six feet tall, with jet-black hair. Escaping from the party with her, he walked through the Star Island gardens with her, telling her fascinating stories based on his travels in Brazil, Peru, China, and India.
Her discarded beau, Glenn Davis, later claimed that the Taylor family “pushed Elizabeth into the arms of this rich guy, a real slick operator who could show her a better time than I could afford and buy jewelry for her.”
Davis also claimed that Sara and Francis “didn’t have a pot to piss in, and Elizabeth was their meal ticket. Sara was interested in three things—Elizabeth as a money maker, Christian Science, and her blocked bowels. I was later glad I didn’t marry Elizabeth Taylor.”
After meeting Pawley, he booked her for dances, parties, yachting trips, fishing expeditions, leisurely luncheons overlooking the bay, and romantic lobster-and-caviar dinners.
“Sara wanted Elizabeth to marry a guy who lived in a mansion with servants and a swimming pool, and who owned a yacht,” Davis claimed.
In the beginning, Elizabeth seemed dazzled by Pawley, a dashing young man, but problems emerged after only a week. She confided to Francis and Sara that, “He’s already acting like a dominating husband. He even tells me what to wear. I think he prefers high-necked dresses—no breasts showing.”
The Pawley family exerted a powerful influence over their heir. His parents reportedly told him that Elizabeth Taylor was a very vulgar young woman, and they’d much prefer him to marry a Florida débutante from a good family—“not some Hollywood tramp.” Apparently, the Pawleys had hired a private detective in Los Angeles, who had uncovered and reported shocking revelations, including the accusation that both of her parents were bisexuals—and gold-diggers as well, living entirely off whatever profits they could make off Elizabeth. It was also alleged that she had attended sex parties at the home of Errol Flynn, and that she’d engaged in numerous affairs with actors who had included, among others, both Robert Stack and John Derek, even though it was widely implied in fan magazines that she was still a virgin.
At an upscale party hosted aboard the Pawley family’s yacht as it was moored at a dock in Miami’s harbor, family members and much of tout Miami virtually ignored Elizabeth, even though she was accustomed to being fawned over by the press and public alike.
Ignoring the objections of his family, Pawley proposed to Elizabeth and she accepted.
He presented her with her first “white diamond”—a three-and-a-half carat emerald-cut solitary ring for which he paid $16,000. She described it as a “Nice piece of ice,” to the press, uttering that line in an imitation of Mae West.
Once the engagement ring was on her finger, Pawley became even more possessive, claiming that she’d have to give up her career in Hollywood and devote herself full time to being his wife. Amazingly, she agreed, asserting, “I’d rather be making babies than making movies,” to the press.
“I have no intention of becoming known as Mr. Elizabeth Taylor,” Pawley chimed in.
That news sent shock waves all the way to Louis B. Mayer’s office. He immediately dispatched MGM producer Sam Marx, who was in Miami Beach at the time, to visit the Pawley mansion for a showdown with Elizabeth.
At first, Pawley didn’t want to let Marx into his home, claiming that he was about to take Elizabeth fishing. But she ran down the stairs and told Pawley that she’d already agreed to meet with Marx, because years before, he had arranged for her first big break in films.
Over tea, Marx told her that he was in Miami supervising the filming of A Lady Without a Passport, starring Hedy Lamarr. “Lamarr looked great in those 1940s films, but she’s getting a bit long in the tooth. Mayer agrees that you are the only one on the lot who can become the Hedy Lamarr of the 1950s. No one else is that beautiful.”
He also told her that Time magazine was planning to put her picture on the cover of its August, 1949, issue. The magazine was going to announce that such golden stars of yesterday—Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford—had reached their “sell-by dates.”
“Time will editorialize that a new type of goddess will soon emerge onto the American landscape—and her name is Elizabeth Taylor,” Marx said.
He also told her that MGM was planning its biggest picture of the year, a vehicle where she’d play a bride, the daughter of Spencer Tracy. He went on to say that Mayer wanted to lend her to Paramount for “the female role of the year,” appearing opposite Montgomery Clift in a film based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.
“If you leave the film industry now, you’ll be remembered, if at all, as a little girl who rode a horse in National Velvet,” Marx said. “Conspirator bombed at the box office. If you must eventually leave Hollywood, make these two big pictures and go out in a blast as the world’s biggest female box office attraction who abandoned everything for the man she loved. Otherwise, you’ll be tossed into the dustbin with Shirley Temple and Margaret O’Brien, two kids who couldn’t make it as adults in film. Do you want to become the forgotten bride of some guy down in Miami, or do you want to reign as the Queen of MGM?” Marx asked her.
That question seemed to cinch the deal for Elizabeth, who told Marx she’d return to MGM. However, before she could star in the two blockbusters he described, she had been cast opposite Van Johnson in a movie entitled The Big Hangover.
After a tearful farewell with Pawley, and despite his objections, Elizabeth flew back to Hollywood with Sara and Francis. When she got there, she told Roddy McDowall and Dick Hanley, “I’m starved for love. Bill and I have agreed not to do it until our wedding night. In the meantime, spread the word secretly that I’m available for dates.”
Pawley telephoned her every day and agreed to fly to Hollywood to escort her to Jane Powell’s wedding to Geary Steffen, Jr., scheduled for September 17, 1949. Elizabeth caught the bridal bouquet. Afterward, the wedding party converged on the Mocambo nightclub, where Vic Damone was the headliner.
Elizabeth had long harbored a crush on him, and the singer joined the bridal party between his sets. When Pawley excused himself to go to the men’s room, she slipped Damone her phone number.
That same night, she told Pawley, “I won’t abandon my career until I play a monster on the screen, a real hellion, for which I will win an Oscar.”
That, of course, was a dream destined to come true.
At that point, Pawley probably realized that Elizabeth was never going to settle down to marry him, but that she planned to continue, hell-bent, on her career. As a means of soothing his frustration and disappointment, he flew to his father’s estate in Virginia. There, he read in Hedda Hopper’s column that his engagement to Elizabeth had been canceled.
After that, partly because of her role in the collapse of previous engagements to both Glenn Davis and William Pawley, Elizabeth began experiencing her first bad press. She was portrayed as a heart-breaking femme fatale, a very-mature teenager flitting duplicitously from man to man.
The writers and editors at Photoplay were particularly incensed with her because of how its October, 1949 issue, meticulously prepared and edited many weeks in advance, had laid out a splashy (and already out-of-date) feature article that showcased Pawley and Elizabeth as two beautiful people madly in love with each other.
The Sunday Pictorial in London attacked her “New Look” in fashion. During the filming of Conspirator, before returning to the United States from London, she’d flown to Paris and acquired gowns from Christian Dior, then, arguably the most sought-after couturier in the world. But despite her haute sense of revised glamour, Sunday Pictorial stated, “For breaking off her most recent engagement, somebody should administer a series of resounding smacks behind the bustle of Elizabeth Taylor’s latest Paris fashion creation. She is a living argument against the employment of children in the studios.”
Pawley had some difficulty getting Elizabeth to return his engagement ring, but she finally shipped it back to him. Her predilection for acquiring and hanging on to jewelry came out in another way, too.
At the Diamond Jubilee of the Jewelry Industry Council, where she functioned as one of the figureheads, she was lent, as a prominently showcased accessory, a $22,000 diamond tiara. At the end of the event, she begged council officers to let her keep it. They simply could not do that, but compromised, allowing her to keep it for one week before she had to surrender it.
After writing Pawley some loving and regret-tinged letters, Elizabeth emerged more or less unscathed from her most recent broken engagement. When reporters at the Mocambo asked her about the breakup, she said, “Bill and I went well together under the palm trees; we looked nice on the dance floor; we loved to go boating. But we had nothing in common.”
Many decades later, during the spring of 2011, the weekly tabloid, The Globe, conducted an interview with the then-elderly Pawley, finding him living in Pembroke Pines, Florida, with relatives. “I loved her with all my heart, and I know she loved me,” he told reporters. “I planned to spend the rest of my life with her. Studio officials wrecked our romance, leaving me devastated. I still haven’t gotten over her, and I’m ninety years old.”
He’d saved her letters, which she had written in purple ink on pink stationery. In one of them, she wrote:
“My heart aches and makes me want to cry when I think of you, and how much I want to be with you and to look in your beautiful blue eyes, and kiss your sweet lips and have your strong arms around me, oh so tight and close to you. I want us to be lovers always—even after we’ve been married 75 years and have at least a dozen great-great-grandchildren.”
Pawley waited until 1974 to get married, a quarter of a century after his engagement to Elizabeth. When his wife died in 2002, Elizabeth, from Hollywood, placed a call to him to extend her sympathies.
Upon Elizabeth’s own death, Pawley told the press, “If Elizabeth had married me, she would not have needed all those other husbands.”
***
An odd request for Elizabeth came in from Benny Thau at MGM. Mayer had hired Stewart Granger, whom they’d planned to launch into major American stardom after his robust success in British films.
Granger was fresh from the beds of Jean Simmons and Michael Wilding, and a recent affair with Robert Taylor during the making of Conspirator. Granger was being seriously considered for the lead role in MGM’s big production of Quo Vadis?
Thau wanted Elizabeth for a screen test with Granger, with the understanding that as a result, she might be selected as the lead, opposite Granger, in Quo Vadis?
She had seen Granger lunching with Robert Taylor at the MGM canteen in London, but they had never been formally introduced.
Granger later recalled, “I found her incredibly beautiful and curvaceous, but was disappointed by her rather squeaky voice. She would have been better in silent pictures. Except for the voice, she had everything else in abundance, and she could speak British to me. In the test, she was my demure slave and I the lecherous Roman conqueror.”
John Huston was set to direct the scene.
Granger had learned that Elizabeth was just past her seventeenth birthday. “I was dressed in a skimpy tunic—shades of Caesar and Cleopatra that I did with Vivien Leigh—and I had my hair curled, Roman style. Huston said, ‘Play the scene like a big buck drunken nigger.’”
“I broke up the crew ogling Elizabeth’s assets.” He later recalled that Huston, as an experiment and test, also filmed a love scene whose footage was later destroyed, like her screen test with Clark Gable. “She pressed that body against me, and I got overly excited. I was lecherous all right. I didn’t know if the bitch was play acting or, perhaps, was desperate to get fucked. I finally concluded that she wanted me to fuck her. Since my precious Jean (Simmons) was away, I made plans to have this hot-to-trot teenager for the night.”
When Elizabeth was allowed to see the screen test, she told Dick Hanley, “Huston wanted to see if Stewart and I had any chemistry between us. We not only had chemistry, we blew up the chemical works.”
“I saw the screen test too,” Dick later said. “I think Mayer should send a memo to future actors appearing in love scenes with Elizabeth. He should order all of them to wear jock straps.”
Originally, Gregory Peck had been offered the lead. He arrived at MGM and dressed in Roman gear, but looked into a full length mirror and decided, “My calves were far too skinny for such a role.”
Both Elizabeth and Granger lost the lead roles in Quo Vadis? Their parts went instead to Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr. When Taylor signed for the lead role, he was shown the screen test of Granger and Elizabeth. The director, Mervyn LeRoy, told Taylor to play the part just like Granger did. “If I were so great and just right for the part, why didn’t MGM use me?” Granger asked. Instead, he was assigned the lead in King Solomon’s Mines, which, coincidentally, starred Deborah Kerr. “Deborah and I renewed our love affair,” Granger later confessed.
As he’d anticipated, Granger found Elizabeth only too willing to go out with him for the night. He informed her that they couldn’t go to any public place where photographers were likely to spot them. “I’m committed to Jean,” he said, “but I’ve always been a naughty lad.”
“Please,” she responded. “I’m used to back alley romances. You’re not my first secret date.” She looked provocatively at him, as he remembered. “Are you going to kiss me or not?” she asked.
“Bloody hell,” Granger said. “The little minx had just gotten into my rented car. We kissed all right. I felt her up—what breasts!—and she fondled my jewels. She got me so hot we skipped dinner and drove to the apartment where I was staying.”
“Instead of dinner, we feasted on each other,” Granger told Huston, who spread the gossip around. “Elizabeth confessed to me that she believed in love at first sight. I told her to pull back, that I was in love with Jean, and that we shouldn’t see each other any more. I didn’t want to break her heart. She was an impressionable seventeen-year-old.”
“That morning, when I drove her home, she cried all the way there,” Granger recalled.
Years later, he said, “Oh, what tangled lives we actors lead. Other than making films, the second best business in Hollywood is laundering sheets from hot beds.”
***
[Ironically, in a strange twist of fate, and despite the murky dramas associated with Granger, her young age, and the fallout associated with their screen test, Elizabeth ended up in Quo Vadis? anyway — as an extra.
During her honeymoon in 1950 with hotel heir Nicky Hilton, she flew with him to Rome. After she learned that he’d spent the night in a Roman bordello, the newly married couple had a violent argument and he attacked her.
To escape from him, she called Mervyn LeRoy, the newly appointed director of Quo Vadis?, a replacement for John Huston. She begged him to find a place where she could hide from Nicky. When she arrived on the set, he told her that the best place for her to hide was in a crowd scene. He ordered her to go to wardrobe, where she was attired in a toga, and instructed to join the extras. For one entire week, she played the role of a Christian martyr in a replica of the Colosseum.
“I got this fucking job as an extra, while that rat fink, Nicky Hilton, searched all over Rome for me,” Elizabeth said.
As a means of accommodating her, LeRoy had to cut short the involvement in the film of Claire Davis, a British starlet. “I begged Taylor not to accept the role, because I was pregnant at the time and needed the job to qualify for health insurance. She refused to listen to me, claiming that LeRoy would give me another part. He didn’t, and I lost all around. To me, Elizabeth Taylor was spoiled and heartless.”]
***
As a means of coinciding with her new sultry image of herself, Elizabeth decided she wanted to be photographed by Philippe Halsman, who had famously photographed a long-time friend of his family, Albert Einstein, in 1947. Halsman’s other subjects would eventually include Pablo Picasso, Winston Churchill, Judy Garland, Alfred Hitchcock, John F. Kennedy, and Marilyn Monroe.
She was intrigued by Halsman’s background. A Latvian Jew, he moved to Austria with his family when he was a child. In 1928, he was sentenced to four years in prison for patricide, having allegedly murdered his father during a hill-climbing expedition in the Alps. After appeals to Austrian authorities from both Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, Halsman was released from prison in 1931 and kicked out of Austria.
In the United States, Elizabeth Arden used his photograph of model Constance Ford against a backdrop of the American flag in an ad campaign for “Victory Red” lipstick. The image became one of the iconic symbols of War War II.
When Elizabeth met Halsman in 1949, he was collaborating with the sur-realist artist Salvador Dalí.
Elizabeth had been particularly amused by his 1948 Dalí Atomicus, depicting three cats airborne, a bucket of thrown water, and Dalí himself floating in mid-air.
Life magazine arranged for Halsman to photograph Elizabeth in his studio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In the photograph, Elizabeth’s violet eyes appear rather vacant; her figure voluptuous, and three-quarters of her ample breasts are exposed. Her gown was described as “the color of melted money.” Edith Head once ordained that green was not a sexy color for a woman, but Halsman disagreed. He’d later enshrine Grace Kelly in green chiffon against Grecian columns.
“You have bosoms,” Halsman shouted at her during their photo shoot. “Stick them out!” She followed his instructions.
To protect her husband from this teenage femme fatale, Yvonne, Halsman’s wife, made it a point to remain in the studio throughout the photo shoot. “I was struck by the sight of her arms. They were covered with what Philippe called ‘dark eyelashes,’ an abundance of unsightly black hair.”
Elizabeth later recalled, “Philippe saw I had a woman’s body and insisted I exploit it for the camera. In one day, I learned how to pose provocatively. In short, I developed sex appeal.”
On seeing Halsman’s portrait before it was published, critic Richard Roud asserted, “Elizabeth Taylor looks like a girl who would really put out and I mean really put out.”
Yvonne reported that Elizabeth arrived at the photo shoot alone. When it was over, she said, “I have no date for tonight. All the men seemed to assume I’m heavily booked. But no one has called me, even though the papers have reported I’m in New York. I’m facing a lonely evening.”
During her time in New York, Elizabeth made that “lonely girl” remark to a number of people. Somehow, the word got out, because at seven o’clock that night, the phone rang in her hotel suite.
It was from another sultry star, this one male. Actor Steve Cochran, who had thrilled her with his sexiness in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), was on the phone. “What you doing, doll?” he asked.
“Waiting for you to call,” she said, inviting him up to her hotel suite at eight that night.
“I can get there even earlier,” he told her, “because I’m in your hotel lobby right now.”
“Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?” she asked.
“I’ve got a lot to be pretty sure about,” he told her.
As she’d later confide to Dick Hanley, “I knew I was in for some action. When Steve had appeared with Mae West on the stage in Diamond Lil, she’d told half of Hollywood how well endowed he was.”
Additional praise for this tough guy, who portrayed hoods and cutthroats in the movies, came from Joan Crawford, with whom he was to co-star in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950). The stud was not opposed to letting other actors or singers, such as Merv Griffin or Danny Kaye, “service” him, although he preferred teenage girls like Elizabeth, who had long held his attention. After seeing her in National Velvet, he told his producer, Samuel Goldwyn, “I’d like to kidnap that little number and rape her ten times a day.”
As she’d recall to Dick, “Steve and I never left my suite that night. We called room service when we got hungry. He’s really white trash, but glorious white trash. I’ve never been so down and dirty with a man before. He forces a really decent girl to do filthy things. But he made it fun, really exciting.”
She also claimed that Steve wanted “to make it a permanent thing with me, but I turned him down. Every gal should have a few sleazy nights in her life, but not on a regular basis—that’s not my style. He’s one of Hollywood’s really bad boys, and will probably make a lot of police news in his life before he dies young.”
“Frankly, I’m afraid of him. But give the devil His due. He’s the best sex I’ve ever had and may ever have again.”
***
Millions ultimately saw Philippe Halsman’s photograph of Elizabeth in Life magazine, but it captured the eye of one man in particular. The aviation hero and movie mogul, Howard Hughes, became fascinated by her, especially her breasts. He was the man who had developed a cantilevered bra for Jane Russell to wear in The Outlaw (1943), the most erotic Western ever made at that time.
Hughes told his public relations agent, Johnny Meyer, who was actually his pimp, “I’m going to marry Elizabeth Taylor in spite of the difference in our ages. When a man has money, what does age matter to a woman?”
***
When director Norman Krasna, guided by MGM executives, assigned Elizabeth Taylor to co-star with Van Johnson in The Big Hangover (1950), both stars knew, after reading the script, that it was a “silly, boring comedy.” Johnson was cast as a war veteran and an up-and-coming young lawyer who was in a wine cellar in France during a bomb attack, breaking most of the bottles, almost drowning him in a river of wine. Now everytime he gets a whiff of alcohol, he has hallucinations, acts irrationally, and imagines that his dog is talking to him. Elizabeth was cast as the daughter of his boss, who makes it her mission to save him from his dilemma. She denounced her role as “the stooge part.”
Krasna frankly admitted, “I’m a lousy director, But I’ve got bills to pay.” Unlike George Stevens in A Place in the Sun, this director’s camera paid virtually no attention to what the press referred to as Elizabeth’s “burgeoning sexuality.”
Johnson and Elizabeth had been correct in predicting that the only thing big about The Big Hangover was that it was a big flop at the box office. It opened in May of 1950 at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood and at Loew’s State Theater in New York, playing mostly to empty houses. Even so, as a means of holding on to Elizabeth, MGM raised her salary to $2,000 a week.
For the most part, the reviews were bad, The New Yorker asserting that, “Miss Taylor is beautiful and cannot act. This puts her one up on Mr. Johnson.”
Elizabeth had a long-standing crush on Johnson, who in the 1940s had been defined by the studio’s PR staff as “The Boy Next Door.” In real life, he was anything but that, and led a rather active homosexual lifestyle. Character actor Keenan Wynn was Johnson’s lover and best friend. Wynn was married to the former stage actress Evie Lynn Abbott.
When it became apparent that word was rapidly spreading that a hot MGM property like Johnson was gay, Mayer issued a bizarre mandate. He told Wynn that he would not renew his contract if he didn’t divorce Evie so that she could enter into an arranged marriage with Johnson.
Although all parties later regretted being forced into such an arrangement, they agreed to Mayer’s terms. Even after Johnson’s marriage to the former Mrs. Keenan Wynn, her former and present husbands continued their love affair with one another, although Johnson had many dalliances on the side.
Johnson and June Allyson in the late 1940as had been billed as “America’s Sweethearts.” It was Allyson, Elizabeth’s friend, who warned her, “Get over your crush. I used to date Van, and he’s handsome and charming, but our dates were arranged by MGM for publicity purposes. After a premiere, he would dump me back on my doorstep, and run off with his boyfriend of the moment. Van and I are friends, but we’ve had our arguments in the past, especially when we both pursued the same man at the same time. We ran into serious conflict when we fought over which of us was going to sleep with Peter Lawford.”
“The public believes what it reads in those movie magazines,” Elizabeth said. “Thank God our fans don’t know what’s really going on in Tinseltown.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way,” Allyson said. “Thank God I’ve got an understanding husband—one who overlooks my indiscretions.”
She was referring to her marriage to actor/singer Dick Powell, who had been married to Joan Blondell, who had been married to Mike Todd, who would soon wed Elizabeth herself.
“Let’s face it,” Allyson said, “many of us in Hollywood change boyfriends as often as we change our panties.” At the time she made that pronouncement, she was lusting for the handsome actor Alan Ladd, who was himself a bisexual.
Even though no romance ever developed between Johnson and Elizabeth, they became friends and would co-star in a future movie together. She was only mildly surprised when Roddy McDowall called her and announced that he had fallen madly in love with Johnson, and they were “having a wild affair. “He’s got eight inches and gets rock hard,” he assured her.
To celebrate their “engagement,” Elizabeth invited several of her friends to a beach party, based in the vicinity of the Taylor cottage in Malibu. Everybody had a date except her. Peter Lawford heard about it and called her to ask if he could show up with “the love of my life.” He was referring to the handsome young actor, Tom Drake, who had played “the boy next door” opposite Judy Garland in Meet Me In St. Louis (1944).
Elizabeth called Roddy and asked him if it would be all right “to invite your ex.”
“You mean Peter?” Roddy said. “Of course, we’re still friends, even though we no longer bump pussies together.”
Dick Hanley was invited as Elizabeth’s escort. “It is said that the sexual revolution didn’t reach America until the hippie era of the late 1960s,” he recalled years later. “But actually, young stars such as Elizabeth and Roddy launched it in Hollywood in the early 1950s. A lot of good-looking guys and gals of all sexual persuasions were thrown together, and everybody was making it with everybody else’s boyfriend the following weekend. A typical example was Elizabeth and her friend, Janet Leigh. They double dated a lot in those days and often switched boyfriends from weekend to weekend. Elizabeth, believe it or not, often ended up getting Janet’s boyfriends after she’d auditioned them.”
“A case in point involved the notorious gangster, Johnny Stompanato, who was Mickey Cohen’s right hand henchman,” Dick said. “Janet dated him briefly before he took up with Elizabeth. Regrettably, Johnny eventually met Lana Turner, and they began the most notorious affair in Hollywood history. Too bad Lana fatally stabbed him. In his short, sex-filled life, Johnny made a lot of horny women and a lot of gay guys very happy.”
Dick claimed that he was sitting on a beach blanket with Elizabeth the afternoon of her Malibu party when Leigh introduced Johnny to Elizabeth.”
“Janet appeared on the beach with a tall, handsome, dark-haired guy with a great build on him,” Dick said. “He was wearing a skimpy white bikini that was virtually see-through. It looked like a handlebar, and it was still soft.”
Leigh introduced her new boyfriend only as “Johnny,” without including a last name.
When Leigh and Johnny went for a swim, Elizabeth turned to Dick. “I think he wants me. He undressed me with his eyes.”
“Do you think what he’s showing in that bikini is real—or is it padding?” Dick asked.
“I’m sure that sooner than later either you or me—or perhaps both of us— will find out for ourselves,” she said. “Janet shouldn’t have squatter’s rights on Johnny. It looks to me like there’s plenty to go around for all of us.”
Before the end of the party, Johnny spent some time alone with Sara. Elizabeth heard her mother laughing at his jokes.
After her guests had left, Elizabeth went to take a shower. Her mother was in the kitchen preparing supper. “I hope you don’t mind, but I met this charming young man. His name is Johnny. He told me he’s a businessman in Los Angeles, and I suspect he’s very rich. I gave him your phone number.”
“For once in your life, you did something right,” Elizabeth said, unfastening her top as she headed for the shower.
***
In the late 1940s and early 50s, actor Farley Granger was known as “the most beautiful male animal in films.”
Elizabeth had known him when she’d attended a studio-run schoolhouse for its stars under the age of eighteen. Farley, Peggy Ann Garner, and Roddy, among others, were Elizabeth’s fellow schoolmates.
During the making of The Big Hangover, Elizabeth was often a guest at parties thrown by Van and his wife, Evie Johnson, who had become one of the most prominent hostesses in Beverly Hills, on a par with Edie Goetz, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer, according to the Ronald L. Davis biography, Van Johnson: MGM’s Golden Boy.
On two separate occasions, Elizabeth attended these soirées with Judy Gar land, who invariably would kick off her shoes and entertain guests of the Johnsons. “She always drank too much and got out of control,” Elizabeth recalled.
Henry Willson, the most notoriously homosexual talent agent in Hollywood, was a frequent guest at the Johnson parties. On the side, he provided Van with handsome young men eager to have sex with an established star.
One night, Willson brought a young actor he’d recently renamed Rock Hudson. Tall, masculine, and extraordinarily handsome, he was introduced to Elizabeth.
He was so in awe of her, he had almost nothing to say. In time, of course, he would become one of her closest friends and confidants. Later, she’d meet another of Willson’s homosexual discoveries and protégés, Tab Hunter. The studio would arrange publicity dates between them in her future.
Phyllis Gates, who worked for Willson and later entered into a marriage of convenience with Hudson, told Elizabeth, “My boss is a virtuoso at arranging sexual affairs—heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, you name it, he’s a master.”
One night, Dick Hanley escorted Elizabeth to the Johnson home, where she had a talk with Van’s wife and charming hostess, Evie.
Both Elizabeth and Evie bonded over their mutual dislike of Louis B. Mayer, Evie referring to him as “a dictator with the ethics and morals of a cockroach.”
“Mayer told me that if I didn’t divorce Keenan and marry Van, as a means of suppressing rumors about his homosexuality, that he would not renew Keenan’s contract,” Evie said. “I was young and stupid and let Mayer manipulate me. I’m sorry I ever did that.”
“Whatever you do, Elizabeth, don’t marry a homosexual or bisexual husband,” Evie advised her.
“I’ll insist they be straight as an arrow,” Elizabeth said.
One night, Farley Granger called and asked if he could escort her to one of the Johnson parties. Elizabeth was aware, through June Allyson, that Farley and Van Johnson were having a torrid affair.
At the party, which lasted until dawn, she and Farley had far too much to drink. Evie asked him to put Elizabeth to bed in one of their guest bedrooms.
As she would relay to Dick Hanley the following Monday, “I woke up nude in bed with Farley Granger. I found him devastatingly attractive.”
She told Hanley that “before we made an appearance around noon, we did it—and he’s definitely bisexual. A beautiful man and a beautiful lover.”
Both Farley and Elizabeth joined Van and Evie beside their swimming pool for lunch that day.
“I left late that afternoon,” Elizabeth said, “but Farley stayed on with the Johnsons for two more weeks—how convenient for Van.”
“Farley and I dated two or three more times,” Elizabeth later recalled. “But one day I got a call from Shelley Winters. She told me to leave Farley alone or else she’d cut off my left tit. Why not the right one? By that time, I’d moved on from Farley and it didn’t matter. A few months later, Shelley called me in tears, claiming that Farley had met Ava Gardner and was involved in an intense affair with her.”
[In New York in November of 1963, in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Farley met his life partner, Robert Calhoun, who remained at the actor’s side until Calhoun’s death in 2008. Farley himself died in 2011.]
***
In the period preceding her first marriage, Elizabeth seemed to race from one man to another. One reporter asserted, “[Elizabeth] is the Lana Turner of the younger generation, turning into a real man-eater.”
One of her final schoolgirl crushes was directed at singer Vic Damone, following his 1947 appearance, at the age of nineteen, on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, where he sang “Prisoner of Love.” Impressed both with him and with his voice, Milton Berle secured two nightclub bookings for him, which eventually led to a contract with Mercury Records.
Elizabeth thought he looked adorable, with black, close-cropped curly hair and a slim physique, very Italian-looking to her. She fell in love with his voice—and the image of the man himself—when she heard his first release. One by one, she’d collect recordings of the more than 2,000 songs he recorded over the years, beginning with his “I Have But One Heart.”
Throughout the course of 1948, she listened faithfully to his weekly radio show, Saturday Night Serenade, and adjusted her own schedule so she wouldn’t miss a single broadcast.
She read about him in the fan magazines, learning that he’d been born in Brooklyn, the only boy in a family that otherwise included four girls, and that he’d started singing lessons at the age of ten.
She began dating him after he appeared at the Mocambo in Los Angeles. In her column, Hedda Hopper wrote, “Fickle Elizabeth Taylor has fallen in love again, this time with the handsome young crooner Vic Damone, who is giving Frank Sinatra’s fading career a push toward oblivion.”
Elizabeth dated Damone only briefly, finding the man of her fantasy different from reality. He announced that he had no objection to a future wife of his having a career, though in the same breath, he claimed he wanted a household “filled with bambini.”
He didn’t seem to know how to spend money, telling her, “Everything happened so fast. One day, I was singing for subway fare. The next day, I’m hauling in $5,000 bucks a week.”
“Vic was adorable,” Elizabeth recalled in later years. “A dear man. But in 1950, he was drafted, and another beau came along.”
“Vic seemed a very insecure man, in a hurry to get some place,” she said. “Even though I stopped seeing him, I always like his music. My favorite recording of his remains ‘On the Street Where You Live.’ He was a young Sinatra with a touch of Mel Tormé.”
In the years to come, Elizabeth read about Damone’s five marriages, including one to Pier Angeli whom he “stole” from James Dean. Damone also had a long-term liaison with Diahann Carroll, the African-American singer.
“Those people who draw up lists of movie star lovers always include Vic on the list of men who seduced me,” Elizabeth said. “I deny categorically that he ever fucked me—at least I don’t think that he did. But who knows? It was a long time ago, and so many men have had the privilege. How can one remember who seduced one and who didn’t? Ask Peter Lawford. He’d agree with me.”
***
Unknown to Elizabeth one night at the Mocambo, a handsome, rich young man, the heir to a hotel dynasty, sat observing her throughout the evening. He was having drinks with Peter Lawford and Judy Garland, both of whom he’d previously seduced.
“See that girl over there at the far table?” he asked. “That’s Elizabeth Taylor. I’m going to marry her whether she likes it or not.”
His name was Conrad Hilton, Jr. Everybody called him “Nicky.”