How to Be a Movie Star (2 page)

Some people even argue that she spurred the sexual revolution of the 1960s. One of the first big stars to pose nude for
Playboy
(though not fully) and to take off her clothes onscreen (discreetly), Taylor pushed the envelope on all things sexual. Her matrimonial adventures took the sting out of adultery. Her affair with the married Richard Burton—so notorious that it knocked John Glenn's historic space flight off the front page of some newspapers—occurred just as the public was "questioning old values and trying new ones on for size," the anthropologist George O'Neil observed; by its very prominence, O'Neil believed that the affair helped "speed up the revolution in moral standards." Slightly more than a decade earlier Hollywood had exiled the adulterous Ingrid Bergman, but in 1962 Elizabeth Taylor became the biggest star of the year after refusing to apologize for her love affair.

Writer Maureen Orth calls Taylor "the Madame Curie of fame extension." Indeed, from the sweet child of
National Velvet
who masqueraded as a jockey to win the Grand National, to the idealized young woman of
A Place in the Sun
who was worth whatever punishment Montgomery Clift risked on her behalf, to the fiery seductress of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
who slunk around in a revealing white slip, to the foul-mouthed shrew of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
who tore everyone and everything around her to pieces, Taylor created characters in her four decades onscreen that were cannily layered onto her real-life persona. "That's how stars became great," said Hollywood agent Dick Clayton. "They had a little bit of everything for everyone."

But the best part she ever played was Elizabeth Taylor. Film theorist Richard Dyer has suggested that the alchemy of true stardom is produced by the reconciliation of contradictions. Certainly few other performers have exhibited as captivating a duality as Taylor. Watching her with Montgomery Clift in
A Place in the Sun,
critic Andrew Sarris decreed them "the most beautiful couple in the history of cinema," calling their gigantic close-ups "unnerving—sybaritic—like gorging on chocolate sundaes." And yet for all her movie-queen beauty, Taylor was also a good old gal who liked her fun and fried chicken. Stories about her 33.19-carat Krupp Diamond ("Big girls need big diamonds") were balanced by tales of the peanut butter and bacon sandwiches she carried in her bag.

It's exactly this kind of paradox, this melding of the ordinary and the extraordinary, that makes a personality memorable. Elizabeth was a smoldering siren who lured helpless men away from their wives, but she was also a bit of an oddball. Liz Smith recalled the time that the star was invited to dinner by a wealthy admirer. "Who is this person?" Elizabeth asked, insisting that she didn't visit people she didn't know. But when told that the man liked to "dress up in satin ball gowns and stick diamond tiaras over his bald spot," she had second thoughts. "Oh, why, he's one of us then," she said. "Of course I'll go."

She was a star without airs. Mike Nichols said that of all the people he'd worked with, Taylor had the "most democratic soul," treating electricians on the set the same way she would a Rothschild at a charity gala. After making
The Blue Bird
with the star in 1973, director George Cukor told Taylor that she possessed "that rarest of virtues—simple kindness." Tom Mankiewicz, the son of the man who directed her in
Suddenly, Last Summer
and
Cleopatra,
said Taylor could "spot a phony a mile away." In her own press she did her best to walk a careful line between hype and truth. "I try not to live a lie," she told one reporter at the height of the scandal with Burton, when no one was sure what it would do to her career. "I can't be that hypocritical [just] to protect my public."

Her authenticity, of course, became its own selling point. In 1966, while helping shape publicity for Taylor's film
Reflections in a Golden Eye,
no less than Gloria Steinem suggested a campaign featuring the star as the "movie queen with no ego." Despite Elizabeth's palatial dressing rooms and other luxuries, Steinem argued that Taylor set herself apart by being "expert at what she does, un-catty in her work relationships with other actresses, and pretty much willing to try whatever the director asks." After a decade of being known as Hollywood's home wrecker, it would be this more humane, bighearted view of Elizabeth Taylor that would prevail in people's minds. "She is the good-bad girl who gives the audience a sense of breaking the bonds of daily life without casting loose from all moorings," wrote the journalist (and Taylor's occasional lover) Max Lerner.

And what makes her unique in the Hollywood pantheon is that none of the images that spun around her circled too far from the truth. Garbo's supposed preference for being alone was simply part of a manufactured mystique. Katharine Hepburn's all-American public self (the "Creature," she called it) was crafted to disguise her unorthodoxy and ensure her legacy. But if "Kate" was largely fiction, "Liz" was real—no matter how much Taylor despised the press's ubiquitous nickname. Yet just because the product was more genuine than most doesn't mean that she was above merchandising it; every great star has to be a great peddler as well. Elizabeth knew how to make every scandal work for her and turn criticism on its head. "There's no deodorant like success," she once stated. Her grasp of the tricky business of fame meant that she'd outshine other greats like Garbo and Monroe who never knew how to cope except when in front of the cameras. Elizabeth, by contrast, was equally at home on the soundstage or the world stage. Critic David Thomson once proclaimed Elizabeth "the most ambitious of them all."

True enough—but Taylor's ambition wasn't quite what one might expect. Certainly she knew how to play the game better than most; when her marriage to Eddie Fisher was crumbling, she distracted the press with a shopping spree in Paris, loading herself down with boxes from Chanel, Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent. And even during her frequent hospital stays, the reports issued by her publicists were timed to have the maximum effect on public sympathy. Yet it was never about fame for fame's sake; stardom for Elizabeth was a means to an end. "Taylor seems more to coexist with fame than to dwell within it," the writer Ethan Mordden observed.

Indeed, the primary function of her extraordinary celebrity was to enable the kind of rarefied lifestyle that she considered hers by birthright. The spotlight alone was never enough, the way it was for Hepburn or Joan Crawford. For Taylor fame was merely the currency that allowed her to do what she wanted when and where she wanted. Her friend, the producer Hank Moonjean, remembered being sent to Switzerland to look for a house for her. "Where the
fuck
are you?" the star demanded when she reached him on the phone. She wanted him back in time for a game of hearts she was setting up for the next day. Moonjean told her he'd found a house and that it cost $400,000 (a king's ransom then). "Buy it!" she commanded. But didn't she need to see it? "No, just fucking buy it!" Should he try to negotiate down the price? "No," she cried, "just buy the damn thing so you can get back here and we can play fucking hearts!" What was fame if she couldn't play cards when and with whom she wanted?

Elizabeth once remarked to Dominick Dunne—"without an iota of braggadocio"—that she couldn't remember a time when she wasn't famous. That's key to understanding her. Even though she didn't become a star until the age of twelve, her early entitlement sprang from a privileged childhood as the daughter of middle-class Americans who'd found the good life in British aristocratic circles and who, like MGM a few years later, indulged her every whim. Yet while she was always more a red-blooded broad than a blue-blooded dame (her designation as a Dame of the Order of the British Empire in 2000 notwithstanding), her love for the finer things would serve her well as a movie star.

Of course, such luxury meant that she never experienced "ordinary" life. Shooting a scene in
Butterfield 8,
director Daniel Mann handed his star a couple of eggs and told her to pretend to make breakfast as she stood at the stove. Taylor's eyes grew wide. Holding an egg out in each hand, she implored, "But what do I
do
with them?" She had never made breakfast in her life. Neither had she ever been to a baseball game or a school dance that wasn't arranged by the Metro publicity department. Yet studio press releases, cranked out on mimeograph machines, tried—not always successfully—to create the illusion that Elizabeth was just a simple girl with ordinary dreams.

This is the trap that biographers have sometimes fallen into, swayed by those long-ago press releases into chronicling Taylor's romances and marriages as simply the narrative of a passionate woman's heart. In most accounts, Elizabeth moves from Glenn Davis to Bill Pawley to Conrad "Nicky" Hilton (and beyond) without any other consideration than "love." Yet while Taylor's passion is undeniable, such an approach misses the far more interesting story of how these relationships were used by the studio and later by her own press agents to further her fame—and always with Elizabeth's compliance.

Indeed, the two central memes of Taylor's career—her marriages and her illnesses—were marketed for every last dollar of their commercial value. That doesn't mean they weren't real; it simply means that everyone involved understood the considerable gain that they promised to yield.

It is my job with this book to not only separate fact from fiction, but to also consider the ways in which they inform each other, and to document as best as possible the sometimes practical, sometimes mysterious ways in which Elizabeth Taylor became a movie star—and how she managed to stay on top for four magnificent decades.

How to Be a Movie Star
is not a traditional biography. I do not cover every year of Taylor's life, or every film, or every up and down of every romance. There are plenty of other books that do that. I'm not here to repeat well-known anecdotes merely for form's sake. Instead I take instruction from the book's title. What intrigues me are those areas that haven't been fully investigated before: the mechanics of Taylor's fame and the alchemy that assured her enduring celebrity. By considering these, I hope to understand fame itself a little better. And for that, what better model than Elizabeth Taylor?

For my purposes, I concentrate on (to use Sarris's term) her "chocolate sundae" years, zooming in on key periods of Taylor's life that tell the larger story of her walk with fame: the campaign to be cast in
National Velvet;
the productions of
A Place in the Sun
and
Giant;
the jet-setting celebrity she enjoyed with Mike Todd (back when air travel was still a novelty to most people); the hysterical public reaction to her affair with Fisher; the transformative scandal with Burton; and the behind-the-scenes stories of
Cleopatra
and
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
I fade out with
The Little Foxes
and Elizabeth triumphantly taking her curtain calls on Broadway, basking in the affection of her public.

Her life went on from there, of course; her heartfelt advocacy on behalf of those with AIDS will likely be remembered as her greatest achievement. But after the late 1960s, Taylor ceased being a movie star, strictly speaking. Although she still made the occasional appearance in film or on TV, her fame was now carried along largely by the momentum of the previous forty years. And so grand and glamorous were those years that they could palliate the sometimes painful gaucheries of Taylor's later life: the trips to the Betty Ford Clinic, the marriage to construction worker Larry Fortensky, the friendship with Michael Jackson,
The Flintstones.

To re-create Taylor's many different worlds, I have drawn from sources that were either never previously used or seriously underutilized, such as director George Stevens's personal papers for
A Place in the Sun
and
Giant,
which included Elizabeth's private medical records tucked away in one folder; the FBI files of Mike Todd; the business records of the Todd organization; the hundreds of letters Hedda Hopper received during the Eddie Fisher scandal; the studio marketing plans for
Butterfield 8;
the private letters between Burton and his former lover Claire Bloom; court depositions given by Taylor and Burton when Fox sued them over
Cleopatra;
the journal kept by producer Ernest Lehman during the making of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?;
and Taylor's working script for
The Little Foxes,
complete with her own handwritten notes. For the most part, the quotes I use come from fresh sources, such as transcripts of unpublished interviews with Elizabeth, Burton, George Stevens, Hedda Hopper, and others.

I also spoke with many of Taylor's friends, colleagues, and family, most of whom are here on the record. Only a few asked that their names not be used; I agreed to their anonymity because their proximity to Taylor offered valuable insight. Yet equally as important were those who, even if their connection to the star was tangential, offered commentary on the mechanics of her celebrity. Among these were publicists and agents who described for me the elaborate process of studio starmaking; Elizabeth's fellow contract players who shared their own experiences at the MGM lot and studio schoolhouse; and the original paparazzi who conveyed their unique perspective on the power and allure of fame.

If not the greatest star, Elizabeth Taylor is certainly the last. Her singular journey through the popular imagination tells us everything we need to know about fame and public life in the twentieth century. It also provides some telling insight into what it's become today. The old adage that they don't make stars like Elizabeth Taylor anymore is true. Even when they were making stars like her, she had few rivals. Some years ago, Elizabeth called herself "Mother Courage" and vowed she'd be dragging her sable coat behind her into old age. Whether sable or shark cages, Elizabeth Taylor has kept her word.