How to Be a Movie Star (44 page)

Elizabeth understood the position that she occupied, and what it meant, and what it had taken to get there. With Max Lerner, her friend and occasional lover, she talked about writing a memoir: "I'll do the recalling, you do the heavy thinking." Growing close again as Elizabeth convalesced from her surgery, they tape-recorded some conversations that eventually led to an article some years later in which Lerner referred to Marilyn Monroe as a "myth"—a creature made and destroyed by Hollywood—but Elizabeth as a "legend." Though Lerner intended the distinction as a compliment, Elizabeth took offense, even if much of it was tongue in cheek. "You have a nerve saying that Marilyn was a myth and I'm just a lousy legend," she told him. When Lerner replied, "Both of you are forces," she let him off the hook.

"Narcissistic," Lerner called her, looking back. "Self-referential." But that's to be expected; all great stars must be such things. And since Elizabeth's sexuality was the engine of her fame, and Lerner himself admitted that "a good deal of sexuality comes from the concentration on self," it's perhaps fortunate—for Hollywood, for the world—that Elizabeth Taylor was as self-referential as Lerner claimed she was. While she may not have chased fame simply for fame's sake the way so many others did, from Crawford to Hepburn to Reynolds, Elizabeth understood very well the power and position that she had achieved in Hollywood, and, indeed, by 1961, around the world. And it was a distinction that she prized, guarded, and very much enjoyed.

In the end, the only one who would ever pay any real price for the scandal that had so transfixed the public for two years was its lone male player—poor, luckless Eddie. That July, he opened an act at the legendary Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It was to be his big comeback, and Elizabeth's first outing since she'd had plastic surgery on her neck to remove the tracheotomy scar. Rex Kennamer sat solicitously by her side. The whole audience glittered: In attendance were John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Lucille Ball, Kirk Douglas, Danny Thomas, Groucho Marx, Yul Brynner, and Jerry Lewis. And the Rat Pack, with whom Eddie was supposed to be pals: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Law-ford, Sammy Davis Jr., and Joey Bishop.

Maybe the star-studded crowd intimidated the kid from South Philly, because he forgot the words to several songs. "Come on, Eddie!" Martin shouted from the audience. Sinatra put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. Eventually Eddie dared them to come up onstage if they thought that they could do a better job, and they did, cocktails in hand, singing a couple of songs and bantering jokes back and forth. Retreating to the bandstand, Eddie smiled gamely, but he was clearly embarrassed to be upstaged by the Sinatra "clan." The next day, the reviews of the show were snarky. Eddie Fisher had become a joke, and his wife, his friends, and his public knew it.

With his television show canceled, his nightclub act withering, and his marriage to the woman of his dreams crumbling before his eyes, Eddie knew only misfortune in the wake of the infamous triangle of 1958. And it would get significantly worse over the next eighteen months when the international spotlight followed him and his wife during the tumultuous filming of
Cleopatra.

But all that was in the future. For the moment, all that mattered to the Fishers was that Elizabeth had regained the respect of the industry and the love of the public. She was supreme, the greatest star in the world. She could do anything she wanted to do now. Anything.

And so she went to Rome and fell in love with Richard Burton.

Eight

No Deodorant Like Success

April 1962–July 1965

N
O MATTER THE STORIES
flying across the Atlantic about the scandal on the set of
Cleopatra
—or maybe, in fact,
because
of them—George Stevens wanted one actress and one actress only to play Mary Magdalene in his epic production of
The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Sitting at his desk at Desilu studios in Culver City, he insisted to his associate producers that Elizabeth Taylor was the only one he could see in the role. Thirteen years earlier, planning
A Place in the Sun,
Stevens had held a similar conviction that no one else could better animate the character he had in mind. Now, planning what he hoped would be his magnum opus, he once again wanted Elizabeth. Who better to play the whore who became a saint, the woman of the streets exalted by the Son of God?

Of course, the director expected some naysayers. In his files were letters that had flowed in to him after Hedda Hopper had announced the possibility of Elizabeth's casting in September 1960. One woman from Texas had angrily condemned the idea since Elizabeth was now a Jew—apparently forgetting that Mary herself had been Jewish. From Oregon had come this plea: "Surely you can find an actress of good moral character for the part." And a writer from Iowa had exclaimed, "A woman like Liz Taylor in a story of Christ—never, never, never!"

But then had come Elizabeth's near death in London and the public restoration symbolized by the Academy Award. The letters against her died out. Stevens moved forward with his plan. Elizabeth was intrigued by the idea, but only if the terms were right. Stevens was offering $50,000 a week for five weeks. While that meant a quarter of a million dollars for what was essentially a supporting role, Kurt Frings was not impressed. Elizabeth was now the highest-salaried female star in the world, and would only be satisfied with $3 million at the break-even point. Why not make a film called
Mary Magdalene
that starred Elizabeth, Frings suggested, instead of "this Jesus picture"?

Stevens blew his top. His notes reveal that he thought a deal was close until Frings tried to "spike" it. "Cheapskate agent makes a cheapskate out of G.S." the director scrawled across one page. "[Frings] obviously doesn't want any of his clients in my pictures, and I am astonished at the lengths he will go to keep them out."

His hostility toward the pugnacious agent, however, didn't dampen his enthusiasm for Elizabeth. She remained his first choice for Mary Magdalene even as the filming of
Cleopatra
seemed to drag on forever. According to his notes, Stevens may have been preparing to offer her 10 percent of the gross. But the scandal with Richard Burton, then exploding in Rome, would eventually change everything.

The problem was that the lovers hadn't just gone public. They were
flaunting
their affair, heedless of scandal and seeming to revel in the headlines and round-the-clock publicity. Elizabeth may have developed a new addiction by this point, one that pumped her up even more than vodka or chocolate fudge: the adrenaline-producing rush of public drama. With Eddie Fisher removed from the picture, the front pages of the London and New York tabloids bannered daily developments of what was coming to be known as "Le Scandale." it's Liz or me: wife to burton. Liz, burton romp as sybil waits alone. Liz and burton off to paris. One moment Burton was cabling Sybil in London to say that he had no plans to divorce her; the next he and Elizabeth were sashaying down the Via Veneto in the wee hours, paparazzi in tow, cameras flashing. Strolling arm in arm, they moved from the posh George's restaurant to the raucous nightclub Pipistrello, famed for its "twist" band. Elizabeth, reporters observed, was in "a gay party mood," wearing a low-cut polka-dot dress and a huge Cossack-style fur hat. With Mankiewicz
père
and
fils
in tow, the couple ended their night at the Little Bar, knocking back shots until three thirty in the morning. "I can choose any man I like," Elizabeth was reported as boasting to a friend. "I don't see why everyone is making such a fuss."

But the world was indeed making a fuss. "Probably no news event in modern times has affected so many people personally," Art Buchwald joked, though the truth lay not far underneath his humor. "Nuclear testing, disarmament, Berlin, Viet Nam and the struggle between Russia and China are nothing comparable to the Elizabeth Taylor story."

If Elizabeth thought that she'd endured the height of public scrutiny during the affair with Eddie, she quickly discovered otherwise. On the night of April 15, five hundred torch-bearing university students packed the road outside her villa, chanting for "Liz." Rumors flew that they wanted to kidnap her. A few nights later Elizabeth broke down in tears when the paparazzi cornered her on the Via Veneto. The constant attention, until now so carefully tended and tolerated, had simply become too much for her.

"Who could really be prepared for that kind of publicity, that level of attention?" Tom Mankiewicz asked. "Not even Elizabeth, who'd grown up with it, who knew better than anybody how to deal with it." Burton, when he wasn't torn by guilt over Sybil and his two daughters, seemed to thoroughly enjoy the ride and the notoriety that it generated for him. He egged Elizabeth along and kept their excursions in front of the cameras. Yet for all their shrewd media manipulation, even "Liz and Dick" didn't fully grasp the powerful response their romance had evoked.

In the hushed and hallowed halls of the Palace of the Governorate of Vatican City, a sandal-wearing Jesuit priest was handed an official bulletin that had been prepared, debated over, and finally approved by the top leaders of the church. As the morning fog lifted, Vatican Radio echoed across the cobblestone streets, decrying those who would treat marriage as "a game which they start and interrupt with the capricious make-believe of children." A week later
L'Osservatore della Domenica,
the weekly magazine supplement of the Vatican newspaper, was even more direct. Though it still refrained from mentioning Elizabeth by name (the open letter was addressed to "Madam"), the unnamed writer criticized the star for adopting a child while living a life of "erotic vagrancy." Some sources speculated that the words were those of Pope John himself; at the very least, they had his approval. "Your motive, madam," the writer continued, "is that when a bigger love comes along you kill the smaller love."

Burton, the "bigger love," laughed off the censure. "He's never been on my party list," he told his brother, referring to the pope. But the Italian papers suddenly found their religion: "We would say that morally she has lost it," declared
Il Giornale d'Italia
of Elizabeth. Even the magazine that had first published the infamous kissing photo,
Lo Specchio,
now pronounced Elizabeth "out of style" in Rome: "No one wants to hear anything more about what she's wearing, her adornments, her illnesses, her scar, her food poisoning, her children, her husbands." The American Catholic press followed the lead of its Vatican counterpart, condemning "the nauseating headlines" coming from Rome and lamenting the disappearance of the old studio morals clause. Nowadays, charged the
Catholic Transcript,
Hollywood rewarded indecency. "Sometimes a star is given the industry's highest honor for portraying a depraved character that calls for hardly any acting at all"—a clear reference to Elizabeth winning the Academy Award for
Butterfield 8.

Almost exactly one year after that triumphant night, Elizabeth's careful rehabilitation of her image now seemed ready to come undone. She stood once again in the crosshairs of public opprobrium, and this time, the harshest attacks weren't confined to the pages of
Photoplay.
After the Vatican weighed in, the Italian government, in the person of Egidio Ariosto, undersecretary of the interior, warned the star against "self-destruction" due to her "amorous and non-amorous conduct."

Ariosto's statement came in response to a highly publicized episode on the night of April 24. After the lovers shocked the world by spending Easter weekend together in unwedded bliss in a seaside bungalow at Porto Santo Stefano, Elizabeth turned up at the local doctor with a bloody nose. When the doctor couldn't be found, she hurried back to Rome alone, setting off a flurry of rumors. Had Burton hit her in a violent quarrel? Had she taken another overdose of pills when he refused to divorce Sybil? Once more, headlines raged around the world. The Roman police concluded that Elizabeth had simply bumped her nose when her car had made a quick stop and she was thrown forward. Still it was enough for the conservative Italian paper
Il Tempo
to declare that her presence in Rome was now "undesirable." Not long afterward, Elizabeth received an anonymous letter threatening her and her four children with death unless she stopped seeing Burton. Roman police began guarding her round-the-clock.

Over the next few weeks the criticism only escalated from all quarters. In remarks leading up to the dedication of his presidential library in Abilene, Kansas, former president Eisenhower asked: "What has happened to our concept of beauty and decency and morality?" He denounced the "vulgarity, sensuality, indeed, downright filth" that was being used by Hollywood to promote itself. Given the timing of his commentary, he could only have been referring to the scandal in Rome.

Backed up by the words of a former president, one U.S. congresswoman called for Elizabeth and Richard to be barred from returning to the country. Iris Faircloth Blitch, a fifty-year-old, four-term Democratic representative from Georgia, took the podium on the floor of the House of Representatives and launched into a ringing denunciation of the two stars. "Communists chuckle," said Blitch, "because the Roman spectacle seems to prove their thesis that capitalists are unscrupulously depraved, wanton and decadent, and that capitalism breeds these undesirable traits." As her belligerent words tinged by her lilting Southern accent echoed throughout the chamber, Blitch urged Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to "take the measures necessary to determine whether or not the two are ineligible for re-entry into this country on grounds of undesirability."

Kennedy took no action on Blitch's request. But the outrage of Washington encouraged Elizabeth's Hollywood critics, who once more took up arms against the star. Hedda, no surprise, led the charge. "Her beauty masks a willful, ruthless nature," the columnist declared, pronouncing Elizabeth "sick—very sick." Hedda wrote smugly that she had not spoken with the star since she'd gone to Rome; unlike four years earlier, when Hedda's infamous interview had uncorked the Liz-Eddie-Debbie scandal, Elizabeth had "done it all on her own this time." At the Academy Awards, where just a year before Elizabeth had been anointed queen, she was now reduced to a one-liner from host Bob Hope: "Whoever would have thought the Italians would learn realism from
us?
"