How to Be a Movie Star (18 page)

"It was as the soft rays of the setting sun streamed through the stained-glass windows that Monsignor Concannon pronounced the words that made Elizabeth and Nicky man and wife," Louella Parsons breathlessly reported. Outside the church, the newlyweds embraced passionately on cue for the adoring crowd. Police had to forcibly push back the throngs so the limousine could speed away with its celebrated passengers. Fans chased after the limo, throwing white roses. One woman fainted, overcome with joy. As Elizabeth and Nicky headed for a gala private reception at the Bel-Air Country Club, they left behind a raucous crowd, broken street-lamps, overturned signs, and half a ton of trash. "I'd prefer a gang war to another Hilton-Taylor wedding," groaned the Beverly Hills police chief at the end of the day.

Father of the Bride
went into wide release all across the nation just as Elizabeth and Nicky sailed off on their European honeymoon. Living up to everyone's hopes, the picture was a runaway hit, raking in more than $4 million and ending up the sixth biggest film of the year. Already the machinery was in place to start the sequel as soon as Elizabeth returned to work. Despite the acting accolades for Bette Davis in
All About Eve
and Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard,
the sheer number of magazine covers and newspaper articles about Elizabeth made her the true star of the year. And, thanks in no small part to its violet-eyed princess, MGM saw its profits spike up for the second year in a row.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors at Paramount, George Stevens was doing his best not to pay attention to all the headlines. He had 400,000 feet of film to edit down into a two-hour picture.
Father of the Bride
had started shooting after
A Place in the Sun
had wrapped, and it was already showing in the nation's theaters. But Stevens and his editor remained hunched over their cans of celluloid in a darkened room. "I think this is the best thing I've ever done," the director told a reporter who came by asking what was taking so long. "The story is there—on film—when we can get the best of it together."

Elizabeth, in marrying Nicky Hilton, had brilliantly mastered one key aspect of movie stardom. George Stevens, his eyes bleary in a darkroom across town, was getting ready to offer something a little bit more.

In her office high above Hollywood Boulevard, Hedda Hopper was spitting mad. Her assistants knew to keep their distance. She banged around the office, slamming drawers, throwing newspapers (usually the
Examiner,
which carried Louella), and bouncing obscenities off the walls like tennis balls. On this day in the early winter of 1951, what had her in such a state was Elizabeth Taylor—the girl she'd spent the better part of the last ten years prodding, promoting, and praising. All that was about to change.

"Hedda felt Elizabeth let her down," said longtime Hopper legman Robert Shaw. It began, Shaw said, with the marriage to Nicky Hilton, which was supposed to be "a happily-ever-after kind of thing"—at least as Hollywood defined it, which meant a respectable few years anyway. Divorce was commonplace, even expected, in the movie capital. Hollywood realists—who included Hedda—knew that even as the happy newlyweds waved to the crowd, the marriage would last only so long. But Elizabeth had left Nicky less than
six months
after their glamorous wedding. There were stories of drinking on Nicky's part, and gambling, and other women (including his father's ex-wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor). But in Hedda's mind nothing could justify the way Elizabeth had so callously damaged her public image. Such childish behavior only made a mockery of all the hard work that so many people had done on her behalf—Hedda chief among them.

Capping Hedda's outrage were the stories coming off the set of Elizabeth's latest picture,
Love Is Better Than Ever.
Her spies reported that the young star was having an affair with the director, the married Stanley Donen. Barely nineteen and separated from her husband, Elizabeth had crossed a line—and Aunt Hedda was planning to tell her so. Calling for her driver to whisk her over to Elizabeth's new "bachelor girl" apartment on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, Hedda was "all set to give her a verbal slugging."

But Hedda didn't know the half of it. The Hilton marriage had crumbled for reasons even more disturbing than drinking, gambling, and other women. "Nick kind of got a kick out of beating the shit out of me," Elizabeth admitted years later. He was a spoiled rich kid, whose promises of respecting his wife's career were soon forgotten as he found himself resenting her greater fame and celebrity. When he drank, he thought nothing of hitting her. Once Elizabeth was hurt seriously enough to cause a miscarriage, she said. Beauty was no protection from Nick Hilton. Stardom was no shield. And Elizabeth was just eighteen years old.

The turmoil made for a very difficult filming of
Father's Little Dividend,
the sequel to
Father of the Bride,
in which Elizabeth played a happy newlywed expecting a baby. The synchronicity of Elizabeth's art and life had suddenly been sadly perverted.

Had any other outcome been possible? Only in the movies, perhaps. No one had seemed to worry about the wisdom of marrying off an inexperienced teenage girl—still a virgin—who had never been out of her mother's sight. The glamour of the wedding, the tie-in with the movie, and the fervor of the fans had carried them all through on what Elizabeth later called "a pink cloud"—a phrase she would often use to describe the unreality of public life in Hollywood. "I was naïve and knew nothing about sex," she said, though she claimed that "I was ready for love and ready for the experience of lovemaking." What she wasn't ready for was the reality of Nick Hilton's ego—or his fist. For the pampered darling of MGM, blows across the face and the pain of a miscarriage were her introduction to life beyond the studio gates. She grew up almost overnight. "It scarred me," she said of the marriage, "and left me with horrible memories."

And like many real-life princesses trapped in unhappy royal marriages, Elizabeth was expected by some to put up with the indignities and the abuse, to endure her struggles stoically for the sake of her public image. But she was far too strong, far too independent for that, no matter what it might do to the fairy tale.

So she walked out. "Divorcing Nick was the first grown-up de cision I ever made absolutely alone," she said. In January of 1952, the marriage ended as it had begun, staged and orchestrated for maximum benefit. Appearing before a judge at the Santa Monica Courthouse, Elizabeth wept into her white-gloved hands. It was revealed that Nicky had preferred to gamble rather than spend time with her—
her!
The screen's great love goddess! After composing herself in the judge's chambers, Elizabeth emerged to face the swarm of photographers, wearing a brave smile—and a specially designed Ceil Chapman ensemble.

Yet no matter how bravely she smiled or how lovely she looked, Elizabeth was roundly booed. Without knowing the truth of her abuse, the public resented its illusions being shattered. "The fairy tale's over, and the princess of dreams has told it to a judge," fanmagazine writer Ida Zeitlin snarled in
Photoplay.
In an outrageously misogynistic article, Zeitlin placed the fault of the breakup solely on Elizabeth, calling Nicky "an earnest citizen, forging his hardworking way into his father's hotel kingdom." If Elizabeth had settled down and had babies, Zeitlin argued, the marriage would've lasted. Instead, Elizabeth was "willful, flighty and headstrong" and didn't know "the meaning of love." Worst of all was her brazen appearance at a Hollywood premiere on the arm of Stanley Donen, estranged but not yet divorced from his wife. "With the rift from Nicky so new," Zeitlin huffed, "she should have stayed at home, preferably weeping."

"Spoiled brat" now replaced "beaming bride" in Elizabeth's press, just at the moment her psyche was in need of tender care. As the judgments raged, Metro did its best to protect its property. Studio execs were suddenly very willing to besmirch the reputation of the man they'd lionized only months before. The breakup was due, Metro insisted, to Hilton's "gambling and playing around and ignoring her as a wife." The unusually candid official line was no doubt the studio's best shot to end the criticism being leveled at their star without revealing the more damning truths about their matchmaking.

For the moralists in the press—and in 1951 there were many—it was the affair with Donen that made things worse. Had Elizabeth taken Zeitlin's advice and stayed home weeping in her mother's arms, she might have been more quickly forgiven. But that was never Elizabeth's way—especially not now. Marriage to Hilton had been as eye-opening as it was difficult, and she had tasted life beyond Sara's control for the first time. Her mother was pushing for a reconciliation with Nicky, which infuriated Elizabeth, since surely Sara knew about the beatings. Feeling betrayed, Elizabeth resolved not to return to her parents' home despite what the busybodies might have preferred. Instead, the studio found her an apartment so that she could live like a real "modern girl." But because Elizabeth Taylor couldn't live alone (she'd admit to not even knowing how to boil water), they gave her a companion-secretary, Peggy Rutledge, who was billed as her "girlfriend."

With such media scrutiny came another disturbing reality. Elizabeth began receiving obscene threats by mail and by telephone, an increasingly common consequence of celebrity. At one point the police kept her on the line with the caller so that they could try to track him, but they were unsuccessful. Not long afterward, a man was apprehended climbing over the wall of her parents' house. Back at the intruder's motel, the police found charts of Elizabeth's daily movements tacked to the wall. A British citizen, the man was deported—but would surface to stalk Elizabeth again a year later when she was filming in England.

Sara, understandably, was not happy about all this. She wanted her daughter back home. Before moving into her own place, Elizabeth had lived briefly with her agent, Jules Goldstone, and his family; Goldstone's son-in-law, Henry Baron, recalled a "schism" between Elizabeth and her mother that would have been unimaginable just a few years before. Sara was particularly incensed over the relationship with Donen, who believed Sara's hostility was rooted in anti-Semitism, which may have been true. Yet the biggest resentment that Sara bore Donen was the way he'd usurped her place in her daughter's life. Donen, a genial twenty-six-year-old who had wowed the critics with his first two films,
On the Town
(codirected with Gene Kelly) and
Royal Wedding,
had been kind to Elizabeth when she needed it. At their first meeting, she had dissolved into tears. "Here was this gorgeous damsel in distress saying, 'Help me,'" Donen said. "Who could resist her? What fool would try?"

He gave her little gifts—a sure way to win Elizabeth's heart—and when she was hospitalized for nervous distress and ulcers, Donen took charge of ordering all her meals, making sure she ate only foods that would not aggravate her condition. Elinor Donahue, who had a small part in
Love Is Better Than Ever,
saw nothing overt between Elizabeth and the director, but everyone was aware of the affair. "They were both in bad moods for the whole film," Donahue said. "Elizabeth was sulky and Donen was very dour." Because of their mutual marital unhappiness, they found some brief solace with each other. The affair didn't last long. But it moved Elizabeth one step farther away from her mother.

Sara didn't take this desertion lying down. She called gossip columnist Sheilah Graham and told her that Donen was both a homosexual and a Communist and "should be run out of town." No doubt she called her old friend Hedda and said the same thing. But while Hedda shared Sara's disapproval of the match, she was starting to feel that maybe all of Elizabeth's troubles could be traced back to her "movie-minded mother." It was "high time," Hedda said in print, that the young star "break the umbilical cord." Of course, Hedda had never really liked Sara. Perhaps, if Mrs. Taylor were out of the way, the columnist could assume an even more influential role in Elizabeth's career.

That was the background to Hedda's decision to give the star a "verbal slugging." Climbing up the back staircase of the newly built apartment complex on Wilshire Boulevard, the old meddler was struck by the modern design—perhaps fitting for a girl as un-traditional as Elizabeth had become. Inside, she demanded a tour, commenting on the sea green paint in the living room and the darker green wall-to-wall carpeting. The place had clearly been styled by Metro's designers, with glass end tables and pink armchairs. The heavy white and gold curtains were always kept drawn. Cigarette boxes and candy dishes were found on every table, but the walls were devoid of any art that interested Hedda. "Dreadful," she sniffed. "And you the daughter and niece of international art dealers."

Dragging out a chartreuse chair that Hedda thought gave the stark modern room "something," she sat down and began peppering Elizabeth with questions. Her heart began to melt when the young star confided that while she might be happy, she wasn't "nineteen happy." Suddenly Hedda reversed course. Instead of a critical piece, her article painted Elizabeth as a misguided, confused teenager—far from the spoiled brat others were calling her. If only Elizabeth had married Bill Pawley, Hedda mused, she might have found true happiness—even though the columnist had been all too glad to see Elizabeth dump Pawley two years before. But the public had a short memory. "If Mamma hadn't interfered," Hedda wrote, "Liz might be a happy young matron today." Blaming Sara for Elizabeth's troubles had become the plan.

In another piece—Hedda got a lot of traction out of that one interview—she actually had the hubris to scold Elizabeth for behavior that she, Hedda, had helped engineer. "You're growing up fast, Elizabeth," Hedda quoted herself telling the star. "You should know that the public felt you were going off the beam when you jumped romantically from Glenn Davis to Bill Pawley to Nicky Hilton at a pace so fast it left us dizzy." Of course, Hedda knew very well that Davis had been a tool of the publicity department, that Elizabeth had had nothing to do with it; and that Hedda herself, along with others, had breathlessly promoted all of those young men. But Elizabeth was the star; it was she who needed to make her mea culpas to the public. And so she did, assuring Hedda that she was going to straighten out her life and her career by saying, "I'm going to learn to assume responsibility."