How to Be a Movie Star (34 page)

Chroniclers have usually described Elizabeth's romance with Eddie Fisher as simply a case of love on the rebound: the heartache of a passionate widow who turned to her beloved husband's "best friend" for comfort and solace. That's the way the fan magazines would eventually rationalize it, and so that became the standard line adopted by successive biographers. But Fisher was far from being Todd's best friend; he was a sidekick and protégé, an important part of the massive Todd entourage but never really in the big man's league. Still, Eddie remained connected enough to the Todd operation to provide continuity when Elizabeth needed it most. After all, she had staked her whole future on her husband's promises; she couldn't go crawling back to MGM now. On her own, she'd lose her bargaining clout; only if she remained part of the Todd organization could she possibly keep her power. So it was with great delicacy that she solicited Mike Todd Jr.'s support for her match with Eddie. They'd always been friendly, and he liked Eddie, too. "She asked for his blessing," said Susan McCarthy Todd. With great magnanimity Elizabeth's stepson bestowed it. Mike might be gone, but Elizabeth wanted to be treated as if he were still alive.

Staying attached to the Todd operation was also, of course, an emotional thing. It's understandable that a widow might cling to a familiar framework, to the comforting network of associates of her late husband. Hanley and Tsuji were just two of the Todd minions who moved over to her employ. Yet such continuity was also crucial if Elizabeth were to realize the kind of future she'd envisioned for herself: free of studio control, starring in the occasional independent picture in order to keep the diamonds on her ears. Mike's estate, with all his debts, had been worth just $1 million, and only a quarter of that was cash in the bank. It was also split equally between Elizabeth and Mike Jr., and distributed in installments. In other words, it was not nearly enough to sustain the kind of highflying lifestyle she'd become accustomed to, thanks in part to the generosity of her husband's creditors. Revenues from
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
would only go so far; this was before actors started taking a percentage of the gross. So it's no surprise that Elizabeth sued the owners of the
Liz
for $5 million, charging gross negligence in allowing the plane to take off with excess weight.

Lawsuits, of course, could take years to pay off, so Mike Jr. gamely tried to fill his father's shoes. He announced that he would produce another roadshow extravaganza,
Busman's Holiday,
in which Elizabeth would star. And Eddie Fisher, stepping forward with even more temerity, insisted that he could manage her career with all the aplomb of her late husband. Everything, they assured her, would continue as if Mike were still alive.

But there was another reason for the romance with Eddie. Elizabeth hated to be bored. As much as she truly did mourn her husband, playing the grieving widow had gotten tiresome very quickly. After all, she'd gone from jetting around Europe on a moment's whim and clinking champagne glasses with Russian diplomats to moping around the house in her pajamas all by herself in just a matter of weeks.

And in certain rather delicate areas, Eddie even managed to eclipse the great Mike Todd. "Simply put, Eddie was great in bed," said one friend of Elizabeth's, pleading for anonymity when discussing such an irreverent topic. "I don't think the sex with Todd was ever all that fantastic, since he was much older, and then suddenly, wow! Eddie comes along, and she can't get enough."

For all the Todds' passion, more than two decades had separated them in age, and at twenty-six, Elizabeth was long overdue for a regular, fulfilling sexual relationship with a man as lusty as she was. None of her husbands had fully satisfied her in that regard, but the liaisons with Donen and Mature (and possibly others) had given her lessons in how good sex could be. Elizabeth would become increasingly open about her love of sex. "All I can say is I dig sex," she'd say, "and fortunately I never had to go to a teacher!" Her sensuality, she boasted, was something innate: "I guess it's in my genes."

Eddie concurred. "She was a woman who loved men as much as they loved her and was not shy about it." She described sex as "absolutely gorgeous" and told Eddie that she "loved being sexual." Fisher would joke to friends that Elizabeth had "the face of an angel and the morals of a truck driver." In the breathless, often self-serving prose that defines his memoir—which nonetheless seems largely on the mark—Eddie revealed, "We'd make love three, four, five times a day. We'd make love in the swimming pool, on Mexican beaches, under waterfalls, in the back seat of a limousine on the way home from a party. There is nothing more erotic than a moonlit beach and Elizabeth Taylor. We fit together as perfect sexually as we did mentally."

That last statement, some say, could be taken literally. "Eddie was hung like a horse," said the same skittish and anonymous friend. The actor Dennis Christopher recalled that when he starred with Elizabeth on stage years later in
The Little Foxes,
he once asked her if she wanted to see his Eddie Fisher impersonation. When she said yes, he turned around to reveal an "enormous, ridiculously large cucumber" stuck down his tight pants. Elizabeth screeched with laughter. "How did you
know?
" she asked. Christopher replied that he'd always heard the rumors but had never known for sure—"until now."

For Carrie Fisher, after she grew up and came to understand the whole situation, the story of her father comforting Elizabeth in her grief had a decidedly humorous twist. "My father consoled Elizabeth with his penis," Carrie quipped. "You can say it with flowers or you can..." Her voice trailed off, her point made.

As for Elizabeth, after a week of quite possibly the best sex she'd ever had, it's no surprise that she would return to Los Angeles with her hormones still raging and prepare to do whatever it took to make Eddie her next husband. In that brief, heady moment, Eddie Fisher held everything she wanted: continuity with the Todd organization, prodigious sex appeal, and a celebrity that, if not quite a match for hers, would certainly prevent him from being dwarfed by her own fame. There was no fear that he'd be relegated to being "Mr. Elizabeth Taylor" like Hilton and Wilding. Instead Eddie could hold his own like Mike Todd. He was a huge recording star, boasting more consecutive top hits than even Elvis Presley would achieve. His television show, named
Coke Time
for its sponsor, aired twice weekly on Wednesday and Friday nights, and pulled in some of NBC's biggest audiences. The show was also broadcast over the radio on sixty-eight different stations.

Eddie's popularity was a bit of an anomaly, for his throwback style had more in common with Al Jolson and Tin Pan Alley than current favorites like Frank Sinatra or Perry Como. And while the arrival of rock and roll—championed by Presley, Chuck Berry, and Bill Haley and his Comets—threatened to make his sound permanently passé, there was an undeniable magic to Eddie's voice. "I sang to the ladies I fell for," he recalled. "I used to be friendly with a lot of men, macho men, and they wanted to hang around me to find out my secret. There was no secret. I just showed up with a clean shirt and a sweet song." And all around the world, ladies swooned. Including the fairest of them all.

Born in South Philadelphia in 1928, just three and half years earlier than Elizabeth, Eddie was a working-class Jewish kid whose father, well educated in Russia, resented how he had ended up laboring in leather factories in the land of opportunity. His frustration was taken out on his wife and kids. One of Eddie's earliest memories was running around the house shutting all the windows so the neighbors wouldn't hear his father shouting. The Fishers, al ways short on cash, sold produce on the street to make ends meet and were forced to move twenty times in ten years. It was a hard-scrabble childhood, so different from Elizabeth's. From a very young age, Eddie longed for security and acceptance and power and money—and the kind of appreciation that he found when his mother pushed him forward to sing at synagogue. The accolades of the rabbi and all the nice ladies convinced Eddie that he had what it took to break out of his miserable life: a golden voice.

And so he made his way to local radio contests, and then to the hotels and resorts of Pennsylvania and New York, crooning for newlyweds on their honeymoons. One day at Grossinger's, the most famous resort in the Borscht Belt, he was heard by Eddie Cantor, who hired him for his national radio show. In 1952 Fisher recorded his first number one hit, "Wish You Were Here." After a stint in Korea, he landed his television show, which was an instant smash. Around the same time, he was embraced by Mike Todd; with the showman's support, Eddie's career was made. Mike would always be Eddie's hero, so much so that when his son was born, Eddie named him Todd.

Though he regularly drew thousands of screaming bobbysoxers at every public appearance, Eddie remained insecure and distrustful of his success. "Somewhere deep inside," said Debbie Reynolds, "I think he always felt South Philly, the little boy who sold vegetables, who sang on the radio on Saturday mornings." For almost two years he'd watched Mike and Elizabeth in awe, dumbstruck by her beauty and envious of the passionate relationship that the two of them shared. Despite what America thought, Eddie had never been in love with his wife. Debbie might be bubbly and lovable in public, but in private she was taciturn and controlling.

And so when Elizabeth began flashing those gorgeous violet eyes at him after Mike's death, Eddie couldn't believe it. Sure, he was good-looking, and sure, he had legions of teenage girls screaming his name—but
Elizabeth Taylor?
"Believe me," he said, "I was probably more surprised that Elizabeth was this crazy about me than the rest of the country would be when they found out about us. I'd always felt she was beyond me, definitely out of my league." But there was the Widow Todd, sitting on one side of him at a Hollywood restaurant, putting his hand under her tight black silk dress while Debbie sat on his other side. At a party on another night, she surreptitiously took his hand and placed it on her breast. It was, Eddie said, his "greatest fantasy" coming true.

Lonely, bored, frightened about her future, and sexually starved, Elizabeth was making it clear what she wanted. And there was one other thing Eddie could do for her. She was unable to sleep as she tossed and turned and relived the night of Mike's crash. "I had the answer for that," Eddie said. One night at the Tropicana lounge, he introduced Elizabeth to Dr. Max Jacobson—"Dr. Feelgood" to celebrity clients like Anthony Quinn, Tennessee Williams, Frank Sinatra, and Truman Capote. Jacobson's "vitamin injections" were, in fact, at least thirty milligrams of amphetamines—otherwise known as speed—combined with steroids, hormones, placenta, and bone marrow. For Eddie, Jacobson's injections had provided limitless energy as he bounded across the stage to shake the hands of hundreds of shrieking girls. But the German-born doctor with the quirky accent could offer the opposite, too: barbiturates that induced sleep or a dreamy euphoric wakefulness, and it was just such an injection that he gave to Elizabeth that night at the Tropicana. She was thrilled and grateful to Eddie for the introduction.

Both Elizabeth and Eddie thought that their marriage would be treated as par for the course. They expected some moralizing in the press. But divorces happened all the time in Hollywood. The public would quickly move on as it always did, eager to follow the next chapter in their favorite stars' lives. Elizabeth wasn't overly concerned. After all, she'd survived some pretty nasty press when she'd split with Nicky Hilton. Surely nothing could be worse than that.

Then Dick Hanley showed her Hedda's story on the front page of the September 11
Los Angeles Times.

***

"You betrayed me!" Elizabeth shrieked. "I didn't think you'd print it."

Holding the phone to her ear, Hedda exuded all the smugness of the morally self-righteous. "You didn't say it was off the record," she purred. "And it
had
to be printed."

It was her
duty
to print it, Hedda believed. This wasn't just the story of one actress or one marriage being broken. This was about Hollywood, about the values it needed to promulgate if it hoped to survive. She didn't like the loosening of morals that she saw all around her. At a recent Hollywood party that she had attended with Debbie Reynolds, no less, Hedda had been aghast at all the young starlets wearing those tight new Capri pants: "Whoever invented Capri pants had his mind on rape," Hedda sermonized.

This wasn't the Hollywood that Hedda knew and venerated. "Filthy" pictures like
The Moon Is Blue
and
The Man with the Golden Arm
were destroying the industry, she believed, even if she conveniently turned a blind eye to their box-office successes. So she was taking a stand, fully cognizant that, in her front-page story about Elizabeth, she was depicting the girl she'd once petted and fawned over "as being as cruel and heartless as a black widow spider." But to Hedda's mind, Elizabeth deserved it. "This will hurt you much more than it ever will Debbie Reynolds," she quoted herself in the article as telling Elizabeth. "People love her very much because she's an honest and wonderful girl." The implication, of course, was that Elizabeth was not.

"You'll probably hate me for the rest of your life for this," Hedda went on scolding in print, "but I can't help it. I'm afraid you've lost all control over reason. Remember the nights you used to call me at two and three in the morning when you were having nightmares and had to talk to somebody and I let you talk your heart out? What you've just said to me bears not the slightest resemblance to that girl. Where, oh where has she gone?"

On some level, Hedda had to have known that that girl had never existed. She had been a creation of studio publicists and their handmaidens in the press, prime among them Miss Hopper herself. Whether or not Elizabeth had ever called Hedda in the middle of the night is immaterial; what the old woman lamented was her own loss of clout and control. But with every newspaper in the country—even her hated Hearst rivals—picking up her story, Hedda had reclaimed a bit of her waning power for a moment. She had scooped Louella and Sheilah Graham and every other columnist. It was a flashback to her glory days, when she had broken news of Carole Lombard's death and Bette Davis's pregnancy.