How to Be a Movie Star (5 page)

News always traveled fast along the Via Veneto. Sleeping during the day and living by night, the paparazzi heard everything before anyone else. On the night of Saturday, February 17, hours before the AP or UPI reporters got the word, the street photographers learned that Elizabeth Taylor, unhappy on the set, had attempted suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Shopping, it seemed, hadn't quite done the trick.

Hopping on his Vespa, Gilberto Petrucci hightailed it across town. Buzzing in and out of traffic, the photographer zipped along the Appian Way and under the Porta San Sebastiano, arriving at Salvator Mundi International Hospital only minutes after Elizabeth had been carried inside on a stretcher. Crowds were gathering as the ambulance driver, Paolo Renzini, snatched a few minutes of fame by recounting in detail how he'd carried an unconscious Elizabeth from her villa. A few minutes later Joe Mankiewicz was spotted hurrying into the hospital, and the newshounds took off in hot pursuit, cameras flashing. Questions flew. Would Richard Burton make an appearance? Where was Eddie Fisher? And would all this be wrapped up so that the film could finally be finished?

How different from the days at MGM, where studio publicity chief Howard Strickling would never have allowed such scandalous news to leak to the press. And stars and their publicists had not yet mastered the art of using scandal to their own advantage—although they were learning fast. The problem on the night of February 17 was that no one in Elizabeth's camp could get the story straight. For an organization known for its efficiency and for being on message and on time, this was a moment of panic. Awakened at 3
A.M.
by a call from Reynolds Packard of the
New York Daily News,
Fox publicist Jack Brodsky offered no denials when asked if Taylor had suffered a throat hemorrhage related to her pneumonia and tracheotomy earlier in the year. Several news outlets ran with that story, which was apparently a wholesale invention of Packard's. News editors may have recalled how many papers that Elizabeth's pneumonia had sold for them. Meanwhile, completely out of the loop in Palm Springs, Elizabeth's agent, Kurt Frings, tried some damage control on his own, telling the press that the hospital stay was planned well in advance so the star could have a little rest.

By the following morning Brodsky and Walter Wanger had settled on the official line: food poisoning. Wanger announced that he'd also eaten the bully beef at Taylor's villa the day before and that he, too, felt sick. But they forgot one important thing: to check in with Dick Hanley. "Food poisoning?" Dick screeched when contacted by Reynolds Packard. "Where did that come from?" Taylor, he said, was just "tired out." No doubt a few urgent phone calls were hastily placed because Hanley was soon remembering that bloody beef. With the clout of a major movie studio behind them, the players and spinners were even able to get Elizabeth's doctors to back up the story. The eminent
Times
of London quoted the physician in charge of the case as saying Taylor suffered from "a stomach upset which might have been due to food poisoning." (Note the "might have been.") Breathing a sigh of relief, Brodsky wrote to his assistant Nat Weiss, "The food poisoning story ... seemed to go over."

But what really happened was this: The affair with Burton hadn't ended, as Elizabeth had promised Eddie it would. She had fallen head over heels in love. And it wasn't all just a photo opportunity. When Burton had shown up with his hangover on their first day on the set, Elizabeth had helped steady him and, in the process, had looked down into his magnetic green eyes. "And it was like
here I am,
" she said. No matter what it might do to her career or her carefully wrought public image, she couldn't contain her feelings for the volatile Welshman. No way could she end it. "They sneak off at night to an apartment [Dick Hanley's] and have matinees in her dressing room," Brodsky told Weiss. One day Brodsky was scheduled to meet Elizabeth and Eddie for lunch, but Elizabeth didn't show. It was obvious that she had snuck off with Burton. "It was very, very embarrassing to have to sit there with a man whose wife you know is off having an affair," Brodsky said.

Not long after this, Eddie paid a call on Sybil Burton in an attempt to enlist her aid in ending the affair. The smart, savvy Sybil listened politely and thanked Eddie for his concern. A huge row with Elizabeth ensued, with Roddy McDowall charging in and claiming that Eddie hadn't "behaved like a man." Soon the heartbroken Fisher was beating a hasty retreat to Switzerland, where he and Elizabeth had recently bought a house. Sybil, meanwhile, laid down the law, and Burton told Elizabeth that while it had been fun, it had to end.

Elizabeth was overcome. "This was a woman who had always,
always
gotten what she wanted," said her friend Hank Moonjean, the assistant director on
Butterfield 8
and Elizabeth's frequent companion in Rome. "You do not screw Elizabeth Taylor and then dump her. It just wasn't done. She didn't know how to process it in her mind."

On the afternoon of February 17, Walter Wanger had visited Elizabeth, finding her "upset about her life and future." She was also drinking heavily. She had surrounded herself with her usual group of acolytes: Hanley and John Lee, Roddy and John Valva, and the
Cleopatra
hairstylist, Vivienne Zavitz. She told Hanley that life without Richard gave her the feeling of "scenes missing"—a movie-making term referring to the intertitle scenes missing placed in a rough cut of a film. Even in the most personal of crises, this child of the movies thought in cinematic terms.

Increasingly distraught, Elizabeth went up to bed early. When Wanger and Zavitz checked on her a while later and found her passed out cold, Zavitz shrieked, "She's taken pills!" Someone downstairs called an ambulance.

A suicide attempt? That's what Hollywood would believe. Most people laughed off the food poisoning story. Hedda Hopper conspicuously printed
not one word
about Taylor's hospitalization, even when the rest of the papers were filled with it. Certainly the accepted "truth" of that night has become this: Distraught over Burton, Elizabeth took some pills. But the suicide attempt story has never seemed to fit with the full picture of Elizabeth Taylor, the star who rallied from death and ill health so many times, who never gave up anything easily, who had a new baby in the house plus three other children. For a public inured to celebrity suicides, it's been easy to chalk up this episode as just one more failed attempt. But Elizabeth was never, ever Marilyn Monroe. She was never a victim.

When Joe Mankiewicz saw her that night at the hospital, he asked her how many pills she had taken. "Fourteen," she told him in a strong voice. "She'll be fine," Mankiewicz said. "If she can count them, she'll be fine."

Call it a tantrum with pharmaceutical overtones. This was an era, after all, when people routinely washed back handfuls of pills with shots of vodka if they wanted to blot out the world. Elizabeth—drunk and depressed—had made a great show of wondering how she could possibly go on without Richard. But an authentic suicide attempt? Joe Mankiewicz never thought so. "Dad's theory," said Tom Mankiewicz, "was that they could have stopped seventy-five percent of the accidental suicides in the world at that time if by law all sleeping pills had to be suppositories."

Two days after being admitted to the hospital, Elizabeth was discharged wearing a leopard-print fur coat and matching shoes. Eddie was there with Dick Hanley to pick her up in a black Cadillac. Photographers pursued them for the seven miles back to the villa, where Elizabeth graciously turned to face them in her doorway. Flashcubes popped all around. But Eddie refused to stop, slipping inside without looking back.

Far above these earthly dramas, John Glenn was piloting the first American manned flight to orbit the Earth. His landing later that day bumped the goings-on in Rome down a notch in the headlines, but some tabloids still went with Elizabeth on their front page. Leopard fur, they reasoned, sold better than a flight suit.

Meanwhile Richard Burton, seemingly stricken with guilt, put out a statement denying rumors of an affair, vowing "never [to] do anything to hurt [Elizabeth] personally and professionally." Yet the denial fizzled. So far no story had referred to anything more than troubles between Elizabeth and Eddie; Burton himself had not yet been mentioned. His denial, however, inserted his name into the story for the first time. That's not to say the press didn't know what was going on: Dorothy Kilgallen told her readers that "all the preliminary details have been burning on the Rome–New York grapevine for quite some time." Reporters were simply waiting for something concrete to tie Burton to Taylor, and unwittingly Burton had just given it to them. His publicist, Chris Hofer, had convinced his boss that a statement would end it all. But when the denial only ratcheted up the story, all that ended was Hofer's job. Peeved, the publicist told the press that he'd been made "the fall guy."

The gloves were now off. Paparazzi slapped ladders against the sides of Elizabeth's villa and scrambled over the walls. Dick Hanley and the servants had to beat them back with brooms and rakes. At Richard's villa, two-year-old Jessica Burton, soon to be diagnosed with autism, was so terrified by a photographer peering through a window that she screamed nonstop for hours. Ivan Kroscenko offered Jack Brodsky 100,000 lire for a negative of Burton and Taylor together that he could pass off as stolen from the studio. "The paparazzi were everywhere," Tom Mankiewicz said. "They were throwing themselves on the hoods of our cars."

Tom was dating Elizabeth's stand-in, Marie Devereux, a young English actress with an uncanny resemblance to the star. (The long shots of Cleopatra entering Rome on the Sphinx are actually of Devereux.) Whenever Tom and Marie took a stroll down the Via Veneto, they'd cause a sensation. Photographers would suddenly surround them with exploding flashes, only to turn away and curse in Italian when they realized Marie wasn't "Liz."

The real Elizabeth was still pining, though upright. Shooting scenes with Richard was pure agony, with the star often fleeing to her dressing room in tears. On the night of February 27, Elizabeth's thirtieth birthday, the star was feted in the Borgia Room of the fourteenth-century Hostaria dell'Orso by Eddie, Wanger, Joe Mankiewicz, Kurt Frings, and his wife, Ketti. Elizabeth's parents, Francis and Sara Taylor, had flown in from Los Angeles. Asked by Eddie to dance, Elizabeth gamely tried the twist, the latest dance craze. But she was miserable. Richard had sent flowers, but his card had been accidentally thrown away so she thought he'd forgotten the day. "Sheer horror," she called the night. "The worst [birthday] I've ever had."

Burton was equally moody and difficult. He'd lied to Elizabeth and to Sybil, his steadfast companion and chief booster for the last thirteen years. Suddenly it was all a terrible, heartbreaking scene, far more than he'd bargained for. Dark, angry binges were the result. One night Gilberto Petrucci spotted him leaving a nightclub, and star and photographer made eye contact. Whether Burton recognized him or not, Petrucci wasn't sure, but suddenly the drunken actor lifted one of the brass stands that held the rope cordoning off the door to the club and charged the photographer with it. Petrucci put up his arms to shield his face. Burton threw a sloppy punch. Petrucci just laughed and snapped a picture. "He was too drunk," the paparazzo said, "to make any difference."

Not long after that, still soused, Richard called Elizabeth, told her that he was on his way, and, in front of Eddie, made her choose between them. She chose Richard and ran out of the house in tears. Burton winked at Fisher. Time for Act Two.

***

In Hollywood Hedda Hopper finally found her tongue. (Not that it was ever lost for long.) Sitting at her old black Royal typewriter and freed from any constraints by Burton's PR debacle, she banged out a story that her lawyer could no longer obstruct. In her February 28 column, Hopper wrote: "By this time, Eddie might have started the long walk home." Musing over the photos of the couple returning from the hospital, Hedda remarked: "One look at Eddie's face and you can just skip all those denials about everybody being just dandy friends ... The picture isn't finished but the honeymoon sure is over. Liz loves variety and the possibility that she might add Burton to her list is mighty amusing"—because, as Hedda insisted, Burton was not the type "to fetch and carry." The implication, of course, was that Eddie was.

Hopper's power was waning, but even as she approached her last reel, she could still rally America's conservative heartland. Her files, carefully organized by name and date, were stuffed with hundreds of letters from moviegoers outraged over how Elizabeth had broken up the supposedly happy home of Debbie Reynolds in 1958. For the rural and religious, who recalled Hedda's aggressive, flag-waving crusade against Communism, Miss Hopper was Mother Confessor. Her influence over Middle America guaranteed her continued power in Hollywood. When Elizabeth had failed to win the Oscar for
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and
The Eddie Fisher Show
had been canceled by NBC, some blamed Hedda's campaign against the couple. Now the old girl was gearing up for another whack, clutching a new batch of letters that expressed horror over the shenanigans in Rome. Hedda vowed to friends that this time she was going to "stop that hussy for good."

Yet studio executives were of two minds about the headlines being generated by "Liz and Dick," as the tabloids had begun calling the pair. Yes, they realized that the old guard, marshaled by Hopper and others, would no doubt call for boycotts of
Cleopatra.
Court documents, recently released, do reveal that many of the top brass at Fox were indeed anxious about their stars' behavior. But there was an emerging sense in this new post-studio Hollywood that perhaps there was no such thing as bad publicity. Joe Mankiewicz may have grown weary of the "sideshow" (his word) that
Cleopatra
had become. But among the film's publicists, a very different view was evolving.