How to Be a Movie Star (10 page)

Cazalet's generosity to the Taylors raised a few eyebrows. Most people were aware that the marriage between Sara and Francis, while amiable, was never passionate. Like Sara's earlier "beau" Franklin Pangborn, Francis was discreetly homosexual, pursuing a clandestine affair with the art collector Kurt Stempler. (A letter in Hedda Hopper's files from a childhood friend of Francis's reported "all the girls thought him marvelous, but he seemed not to notice.") He may also have been involved with Cazalet himself, whose sexuality was whispered about in British government circles. Certainly Francis and the unmarried Uncle Victor were inseparable much of the time, attending concerts in Covent Garden and then spending the weekend in the city on their own. But Cazalet was on equally familiar terms with Sara. Some wondered if both Mr.
and
Mrs. Taylor might have been intimate with the good captain.

But when war with Germany seemed increasingly inevitable, the family bid good-bye to Cazalet and his country. On April 21, 1939, Sara sailed with her two children on board the SS
Manhattan;
Francis joined them in December. At first they tried living with Sara's father, who'd relocated to San Gabriel, California, where he ran a chicken farm. But that would never do. And Sara was horrified to discover that she had to learn to drive her own car.

Howard Young once again came to the rescue, arranging to open a gallery in Los Angeles, first at the Chateau Elysée and later on the first floor of the posh Beverly Hills Hotel. By 1941 Francis had saved enough money to buy a house on North Elm Drive in Beverly Hills. No doubt the down payment was augmented by Elizabeth's movie earnings, only half of which her parents were required by law to hold in trust for her. Elizabeth and Howard were enrolled in the nearby Hawthorne School.

"In that inbred little community," Elizabeth said, most of her parents' friends "had something to do with the film industry." At school, "every kid's father was a producer or a director or an actor." Elizabeth couldn't have escaped the movies if she'd tried. At her father's gallery, a range of Hollywood types from David O. Selznick to Greta Garbo regularly made their way through the doors. (It helped that the gallery was located just off the hotel's swimming pool.) Hedda Hopper frequently popped in and became particularly enthused by the work of the Welsh artist Augustus John, whom Francis represented exclusively. Hedda adored Francis Taylor, "a lovely, sweet, kind man," and considered his opinions on art as gospel. Any favors she'd grant Elizabeth in the coming years weren't done for Sara; they were done for Francis.

Hedda was in conspicuous attendance on the night of May 19, 1941, when the Taylors hosted a dinner in honor of Victor Cazalet, whom Hedda informed her readers was a "great-grandson of Queen Victoria" (actually, he was only her godson). Cazalet's lecture afterward at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre on "America and Defense" was attended by some of Hollywood's biggest names: Greer Garson, Basil Rathbone, Mary Pickford, Robert Montgomery, Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Cazalet's visit edged Francis and Sara up a few more notches in screenland social circles.

As the Taylors moved up, more and more people in the industry became acquainted with their precocious daughter. Surrealist painter Oscar de Mejo held his first show at Francis Taylor's gallery, where he'd remember the nine-year-old Elizabeth serving hors d'oeuvres. "[She] had absolutely the most exquisite features, the kind of face Botticelli might have created had he painted her. She emitted an air of ageless, inculpable eroticism, enhanced by the fact that she always called you by name, making you very aware of yourself. 'Won't you have another caviar on toast, Monsieur de Mejo?'"

As Elizabeth's screen career progressed, her appearances at her father's gallery inevitably declined, and, perhaps just as inevitably, a schism emerged in the Taylor home on North Elm Drive. One family friend confided to a reporter that photographs of Elizabeth—some alone and some with Sara—studded each room of the house, while not one picture of Howard was to be seen. "You'd never have known there was a Taylor male around," the friend said. In these years, if Sara spoke to Howard at all for any length of time, it was to encourage him to take a screen test at Metro, a suggestion the levelheaded teenager rejected outright. Howard had seen his sister's life become consumed by their mother's ambition, and he'd recoiled from Elizabeth's dreamy-eyed acquiescence. Howard wanted none of that. At dinner, as the Taylor females prattled on about
National Velvet,
Howard and his father often ate in silence.

Elizabeth's father, once the final authority in her life, ceded his place to the ironclad ambition of his wife. It would be Sara, not Francis, who signed Elizabeth's contract; it was Sara, not her husband, to whom payment would be made.

The education of Miss Elizabeth Taylor did actually involve some conventional schooling, though the more conventional it was, the less it held any interest for the girl. Teacher Mary Katherine McDonald was not fond of Elizabeth's constant daydreaming. One day she walked up beside her inattentive student and rapped a wooden ruler across her knuckles. Elizabeth let out a yelp.

That
would keep her focused, Miss McDonald believed. Just because her students were budding movie stars was no reason to coddle them. Forty-three years old and unmarried, McDonald had taught science at a private school before being hired to run the MGM schoolhouse in 1932. The children were terrified of her. As Elizabeth rubbed her knuckles, Anne Francis tensed in her seat. "It was like a year of incarceration," Francis said of her time at what was popularly known as "The Little Red Schoolhouse."

In fact, all of the big studios had schoolhouses known by the same appellation, and none of them were red. The name was a nostalgic reference to the one-room schoolhouses of the past, where children of all ages learned together. As the ranks of child contract players fluctuated from year to year, some studios, like Universal or Columbia, would occasionally find themselves with just one or two students reporting for the fall semester. MGM, however, with its bumper crop of child stars, usually had a full class of between six and twelve students. By the time Elizabeth arrived, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and Roddy McDowall had already passed through the school.

Once upon a time the schoolhouse had been a private dining room for Irving Thalberg, the MGM powerhouse producer and boy wonder who had died in 1936. Seven years later a four-foot-tall picket fence surrounded the wooden structure, with red, white, and blue petunias planted along its side. Inside there were two rooms, a classroom with regulation desks and a blackboard, and an adjoining study room, with soft, stuffed chairs where older students frequently sat. Miss McDonald moved easily back and forth.

She was assisted by Dorothy Mullen, a mother of two, who worked individually with students, and by Caroline "Muzzie" McPhail, whose job was rounding the children up and counting heads before class. The children might fear Miss McDonald, but they adored Muzzie. When the day went badly, "Muzzie ... was someone whose shoulder we could cry on," said Jean Porter, the teenaged costar of
Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble
and another classmate of Elizabeth's. Muzzie understood child actors; her own son had been one and was now playing bit parts on the lot.

Although the curriculum was approved by the Los Angeles Board of Education, and standardized tests were given to ensure that the studio kids measured up to their civilian counterparts, the lessons in the Little Red Schoolhouse "weren't particularly tough," Anne Francis said. At the Professional Children's School in New York, she'd been "loaded with homework." Not so at MGM, where teachers rarely taught anything past simple mathematics and basic English composition. Sara, not surprisingly, sugarcoated Elizabeth's education, calling the MGM school "wonderful," but Elizabeth herself would later dismiss her years there as "my so-called education." Her classmate Dean Stockwell was more blunt. About Miss McDonald, he said, "She didn't teach me shit."

Part of the problem was the haphazard school day. If a film was shooting in the morning, the child went to school in the afternoon. If the shoot was later in the day, then the schedule was switched. Children often would be called out of class if they were needed for a scene; Dorothy Mullen would troop along beside them down the alley to Lot Two, textbook in hand. "Between camera takes," Elizabeth said, "you'd cram in ten minutes, twenty minutes of study, going out to act, then being led by the ear back to school and snapping your brain back into being a student." Often she found herself taking tests in full makeup and costume, hunched down under an arc lamp, one eye on her paper and the other on the set, alert for her next call. So long as students managed to get three hours a day of schooling—in class or on the set—they were meeting the requirements of the law. "We were doing in that time what normal kids did in six," Elizabeth said.

Such a routine must have had a peculiar effect on the young girl. The boundaries of "real life" blurred. What was more "real" to Elizabeth—the school or the scene, memorizing her times tables or her lines? How could ordinary life ever compare to what transpired behind the camera? And what of childhood? Was Elizabeth a kid or did she just know how to play one? And were those youngsters whom Elizabeth and her friends played on screen real—or was "real" a description that could only apply to the children she saw outside the studio gates?

In press releases and publicity, the MGM child stars were portrayed as just like children everywhere, learning their lessons, playing at recess, preferring dogs and games and climbing trees to making movies. Yet, in fact, the kids who made their way through the Little Red Schoolhouse were anything but innocent. As a teenager, Jackie Cooper was seduced by Joan Crawford; Judy Garland was already popping pills to control her weight. The all-American children they played on the screen were in direct contrast to the more worldly lives they led at the studio. Dean Stockwell said that he and his classmates were "kids ... out of place in time and ties and culture."

At a time when other girls her age thought only about dresses and dolls, Elizabeth was already the breadwinner in her family. "I paid the bills," she admitted. "People weren't buying art. It was hard on my father." She might not have mastered fractions or compound sentence structure, but she learned other things, like how to make money and live among adults. Cameramen swore blue streaks around her; wardrobe ladies gossiped about affairs as they fitted her in costumes; agents hammered out tough deals in front of her. By her early teens, Elizabeth was already cursing like a sailor and haggling with her mother over the terms of her allowance.

Although Elizabeth insisted that she envied Howard's going to a "real" school, it's unlikely that she would have fit in there very well. Even in the studio classroom Elizabeth chafed against the rules and regimentation, as inconsistent as they were. "I was in constant rebellion," she said. She'd escape to the bathroom and hide out. Eventually Miss McDonald caught on, instructing her to write on the blackboard the exact times of her departures and returns. Once the little actress wrote, "E exits bathroom, 10:06, mission accomplished." She was reprimanded.

Dorothy Mullen would remember Elizabeth as a "fair" student. Mary McDonald added, "I wouldn't put her in the same intellectual category as Einstein, but she wasn't stupid." Elizabeth's problem was not a lack of intelligence but a lack of disciplined concentration. If the subject didn't interest her, she simply tuned it out. To pass tests she relied on the same photographic memory that she used to learn her lines in a single morning. "Just before an exam," she said, "I would memorize the points I thought they would ask me about. Of course, two weeks later it was gone, so I really didn't absorb anything ... And I knew, even then, that I was cheating myself."

But some lessons were more important. After school let out at noon (or later, depending on shooting schedules), there were dancing and voice lessons. In a rehearsal studio off Stage Five, Sara tied Elizabeth's tap shoes and then watched from the sidelines as her short, chubby-legged daughter struggled to keep up with the likes of Kathryn Grayson and Donna Reed. Sometimes Elizabeth didn't have time to change out of her leotards before running across the alley to the Thalberg Building for voice lessons with Lucille Ryman, who doubled as an MGM talent scout. Ryman lined the girls up in front of her—Elizabeth, Donna Reed, Susan Peters, Margaret Kerry—and made them repeat certain phrases. "Park the car in the yard." "Boogie woogie bugle boy." Regional accents were obliterated. The goal, Kerry said, was for all of them "to come out sounding identical." Eventually, especially once British pictures became less popular, Elizabeth's accent was painstakingly transformed into what she called "Americanese": the unmistakable cadence of Hollywood speech, with its perfectly modulated pitch and tone, properly all-American. The girls also learned the "Metro walk": sucking in the stomach, squaring the shoulders, and stepping off on the right foot.

"What mattered to the studio was that a star could sing and dance and speak and act like a star," said Elliott Morgan, the longtime head of research at MGM. "They didn't care if they couldn't spell or add a list of figures. And really, did anybody? So long as the stars looked good and sounded good up there on the screen, nothing else mattered."

***

But the trick was getting Elizabeth up there on the screen. Despite all the glances being cast her way, there was still no final decision on Elizabeth's being cast in
National Velvet.
Sara decided that the time had come for the final push.

In June 1943 Pan Berman took over from Mervyn LeRoy as the
Velvet
producer. Berman had made it clear to Clarence Brown that he felt that Elizabeth was too small to play a teenaged girl who passes herself off as a young man. Sara refused to be deterred by such a trivial matter as her daughter's height. With school out for the summer, the Taylor females had plenty of time on their hands to strategize. Berman was Obstacle Number One. He was an efficient filmmaker who'd begun his career at RKO, where he'd paired Ginger Rogers with Fred Astaire and turned Katharine Hepburn into a star. Arriving at MGM, he'd quickly distinguished himself with
Ziegfeld Girl,
and in a bit of inspired casting, teamed Lana Turner with Clark Gable in
Honky Tonk.
This was a man who knew how to make successful movies. If Berman thought an actress was wrong for a part, she probably was.