How to Be a Movie Star (15 page)

Photos of the happy couple holding a plate of hors d'oeuvres were distributed to the press. Swept up by the romance of it all, Elizabeth seems to have genuinely wanted to marry Pawley, even if the studio was already trying to find a way to untangle the knot. An engagement party was one thing; an actual wedding was another. Every time Elizabeth mentioned a date, Metro threw up roadblocks. She had to finish
The Big Hangover
first, they insisted, and then the loan-out to George Stevens and Paramount loomed, and after that she was scheduled to start immediately on a picture called
Father of the Bride.
They might let her
play
a girl getting married, but that was as far as Metro was willing to go.

The bloom was off the rose in a matter of weeks anyway. "Elizabeth saw the pattern of her future life with Bill unfolding," Sara said. "The longer we stayed [in Miami], the more homesick she became for California, the studio, her work, the old life she knew and loved."

Sara was just as homesick, no doubt. That "old life" promised considerably more yield than had yet paid off. The Pawleys might be rich, but the privileges of a Miami socialite were nothing compared to what awaited a top-ranked MGM star. Elizabeth's bosses weren't about to let her break her contract either. Like the rest of the studios, Metro was hurting financially, posting a $6 million decline in profits between 1947 and 1948. The new head of production, Dore Schary, had gambled on an ambitious schedule of sixty-seven pictures that year, compared to just twenty-four the year previous. When profits began ticking upward (by the end of 1949 MGM's income had recovered by more than 50 percent), Schary was hailed as a visionary who rivaled Mayer. Key to Schary's plan to climb out of the red were pictures starring surefire moneymakers like Elizabeth. No way was the studio's teenage princess going to be allowed to retire to Miami, not after so much had been invested in her. Metro wanted its dividends.

No one was all that surprised, therefore, when Pawley announced in September that the engagement was off. No one, that is, but the public—which had now been deprived of a happy ending twice. The fan magazines, with their three-month lead time, were left embarrassed:
Photoplay
didn't have time to stop the presses on their October issue, which featured Elizabeth gushing with love for Pawley.

The press retaliated with a series of unfavorable articles about the star. Columnists started calling her fickle. "She leaves a trail of broken hearts," one reporter chided. "Our Little Liz is turning into a real man-eater." The Metro publicists hadn't anticipated a hostile backlash. Tone deaf, they just kept throwing more boyfriends into the mix. They sent Elizabeth off to the Mocambo with Vic Damone, only to watch in dismay as the gambit misfired. In London the
Sunday Pictorial
called for "a series of resounding smacks behind the bustle of her latest Paris creation," an entreaty that sent Hedda Hopper charging to the rescue. "Besides taking billions of our [war-relief] money," Hedda huffed, "the English now want the pleasure of spanking one of our prettiest screen actresses ... What Elizabeth does is none of their business. I suppose the British would rather have her marry and divorce twice."

Back at the studio, Elizabeth was hurt by this negative turn in her press. "If I were the kind of person they write me up to be, I'd hate myself," she said. But she had now participated quite willingly in two largely counterfeit romances. Even Pawley, whom she had imagined herself marrying, was just another pawn in the end. "We went well together under the palm trees," she'd say. "We had nothing in common in our lives."

Once again experience had demonstrated that the personal would always be public for her. "Elizabeth isn't just any little girl, she's a star," Hedda Hopper explained sternly to the Taylor family at one point. And being a star meant doing some things and forfeiting others all in the line of "duty." Yet as much as Elizabeth understood this, as much as she accepted the compromises and realities that came with her ambition, she remained a bit wistful about it all. A part of her really did want the "happily ever after" of her films—finding a devoted husband in
Little Women,
for example, or fading out with Van Johnson in the last reel of
The Big Hangover.
In real life, however, such rewards were rare for movie stars; and this was a bitter pill to swallow for a sensitive teenager. While her outward appearance was telling the world that she was an adult, she was still, in fact, "an emotional child inside a woman's body"—her own observation. Elizabeth Taylor was no innocent at seventeen. She understood everything that was happening to her. But as often as her life thrilled her, it could make her a little bit sad, too.

Such was her frame of mind when she set out for Lake Tahoe less than two weeks after the Pawley breakup to start work on the Stevens film, now called
A Place in the Sun.

It was sunny but cold on Sunday, October 2, 1949, the day George Stevens's assistant drove out to Truckee, California, to meet the train that was bringing Elizabeth Taylor from Hollywood. A century earlier in these parts, members of the snowbound Donner party had been reduced to cannibalism to survive the Sierra Nevada winter. Elizabeth Taylor, looking out from the windows of her train, had never gone on location like this before.

Belching smoke, the train clattered to a stop along the old tracks. Done up in Dior, the teenaged star stepped out onto the platform followed by her mother and a woman the assistant called a "welfare worker." Because Elizabeth was only seventeen, the state had sent along a watchdog to make sure that she wasn't over- worked or mistreated. To be safe, Stevens ordered his crew not to swear in front of their young actress—a directive quickly forgotten once Elizabeth's own spicy vocabulary livened up the set.

A car took them the twenty-two miles to Chambers Lodge, an old weather-beaten hunting and fishing resort. All along the way they skirted the giant Lake Tahoe, its shimmering azure surface stretching eastward for almost as far as the eye could see. For Dreiser's archetypal story of hope and tragedy—which hinges on what happens one day on a lake—no makeshift watering hole on the Paramount backlot would do. Instead, George Stevens chose this "noble sheet of blue water walled by snowclad peaks," as Mark Twain described Tahoe, "surely the fairest picture the whole earth affords." And so the whole company made the trek up to Tahoe, their heads dizzy from the altitude of 6,255 feet.

Settling into her pine-paneled rooms at the lodge and unpacking the long flannels that Hedda Hopper reported she took with her, Elizabeth quickly became aware that this was going to be a very different kind of filmmaking experience. She heard the sounds of speedboat jockeys enjoying one last romp on the lake before winter drifted in. But if she thought that she might have time to join them, she was wrong. This wasn't some lighthearted romp with Van Johnson on an MGM soundstage. This was a serious picture, and for the first time, Elizabeth was insecure on a movie set. She might be a pro at hitting floor marks and matching her costar in two-shots, but all that craft seemed feeble here. She felt "very much the inadequate teenage Hollywood sort of puppet that had just worn pretty clothes and hadn't really acted except with horses and dogs."

The emotion in the script was certainly heavy. Dreiser had based his novel on the true story of one Chester Gillette of New York, an ambitious young man who had drowned a factory girl pregnant with his child in 1906. The state contended that he had done so deliberately because she had complicated his plan to marry a rich girl. Found guilty, Gillette died in the electric chair in 1908. Two decades later Dreiser used Gillette's story as an indictment of the social and economic disparities in American society. Liberal in his politics, Stevens shared the author's sympathetic approach to the protagonist but differed in his conception of the wealthy young woman who inspires the killing. Stevens reimagined Sondra—now rechristened Angela Vickers because he liked the "ring" to it—as both emotionally and physically compelling. The audience couldn't be allowed to hate the hero who kills for her love; they had to understand his temptation. Angela had to be worth everything, even the electric chair.

But was the actress playing her up to the task? As Elizabeth went before the cameras in Lake Tahoe, the MGM star-making bandwagon continued to roll. After much finagling by Metro publicists, she'd recently made the cover of
Time
magazine. International society figure Elsa Maxwell was drafted to write a flattering piece for
Photoplay
describing Elizabeth as "The Most Exciting Girl in Hollywood." The magazine hit the stands just as the young star arrived at Lake Tahoe. Crew members recalled seeing copies strewn around the set.

It was precisely for such notoriety that Stevens had wanted Elizabeth. Production manager Doc Erickson watched her walk onto the set for the first time in her close-fitting Dior dress and was struck by her sheer presence as she shook hands with the crew. "There was a sense that she knew she was a star," he said. "Not in an arrogant way. She just knew what she was. She carried it with her."

For several days Elizabeth had little to do but walk around shaking hands. Principal photography began on Tuesday, October 4, but the 6:30
A.M.
call was just for Clift and Shelley Winters. Stevens was shooting the scenes that took place at the pier, including the important one where Clift rents the boat to take Winters out on the lake. Elizabeth wandered by at one point, her hair tied up in a scarf. She sat cross-legged and watched her costars work. Clift and Winters "were very intense and concentrated," Erickson said, and no doubt Elizabeth noticed this. These were
actors,
after all—artists from the New York stage, serious about every second of their performances. Elizabeth hurried back to her room to run lines again with her mother.

Her first call was for 9:30
A.M.
the next day for hair and makeup. Clift and Winters had already been up and working for three hours at that point. Elizabeth was right on time for her 10:30 call to the set, reporting to the grassy banks of Cascade Lake, a little less than a mile southwest of the much larger Lake Tahoe. Stevens was preparing to shoot her idyllic lakeside scene with Clift, and though the two stars barely knew each other, the chemistry between them crackled to life the instant Stevens began rehearsals. "She just seemed to come alive when Clift looked at her," Erickson said. With Clift's head resting in her lap, Elizabeth projected an image of mature confidence in her black bathing suit, even if she was still terrified inside.

She was also freezing. Between takes she ran over to Sara, who was waiting on the sidelines with a blanket. The day was sunny, but it was also about forty-five degrees. The next day, when her first call came an hour earlier, the temperature had dropped even lower. That night a couple of feet of snow fell on Tahoe. Looking out of her window on Friday morning, Elizabeth expected the day's shoot to be cancelled, but Stevens's assistant told her to be at the lake by noon. The director was having the snow hosed off the grass. No matter how chilly it was, Elizabeth would still be expected to run playfully into the lake in her bathing suit. Sara was furious, complaining that her daughter was menstruating and that such exposure to cold would leave her unable to bear children. Nobody paid her much mind, least of all Elizabeth. In any event, they only worked a couple of hours. Renewed snowfall ended the day's shoot at 2:15
P.M.

Looking at those first days' rushes, one thing was plainly evident to Stevens: He'd made the right choice in hiring Elizabeth Taylor. Cinematographer William Mellor, whose aesthetic eye Stevens trusted implicitly, had been instructed to shoot passively. "I use the camera to create a mood," Stevens said, but he didn't just mean capturing the play of light and shadow that so defines the visual look of the film. Rather, the director saw his camera as a "passive witness" to the intrinsic beauty of his actors. Stevens thought that Elizabeth's appeal was enhanced by her lack of self-consciousness, a refreshing attribute that shone through in the rushes. "She had this enormous beauty and she was not charmed by it," the director said, in awe. In fact, she "discouraged people being over-impressed by it." That humility was precisely what made the character of Angela Vickers appealing.

Elizabeth would insist that she wasn't so special; Ava Gardner was her idea of beautiful. When she looked in a mirror, she saw "too many freckles," she said, "all the things that were wrong." That didn't mean she wasn't keenly aware of her appearance or how important it was to her career. A reporter for
Photoplay
had caught a glimpse of how Elizabeth really thought about herself when she'd spied the star preening in front of a mirror. Elizabeth appeared quite proud of her small waist, but it was always a struggle to keep it. "I've just got to take off ten pounds," she told the reporter. At 110, the teenager was heavier than she'd ever been. The problem was that she liked "everything that's fattening. I can eat a whole pie."

The pies would continue, but her teenage metabolism and the hustle-bustle of filmmaking kept her svelte. No wonder Stevens insisted that she wear the bathing suit on that cold day at the lake. Her glamour and sex appeal would be a major selling point of the picture. Her costume budget of $6,600 was more than four times that for Winters or Clift, the latter of whom wore some of his own clothes in the film.

Stevens didn't stop with just her finery. He began to push her—and everyone else—hard. One visitor to the set, Phil Koury of the
New York Times,
thought that Stevens drove his actors and his crew "with a sort of benign tyranny and singleness of purpose," which had the effect of uniting the cast "in the same direction—no mean trick in Hollywood." Known for his autocratic nature, Stevens tolerated no dissent. Certainly he got none from his young leading lady, who admitted to a case of "hero worship."

Clift was less easy. He brooded around the set; his deep-set dark eyes seemed to burn holes in the back of Stevens's head every so often. Watching the director rehearse a scene with Shelley Winters, Clift decided that everything was all wrong. "Downbeat, blubbery, irritating" was not how Clift saw Winters's character. He loathed the way she telegraphed her "tragedy from the minute you see her on screen." She should be stronger and more noble than that, he argued. But Stevens wasn't listening. "I know I'm right," Clift griped to Shepperd Strudwick, who played Elizabeth's father. "I'm right and I'll keep saying I'm right."