The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice (10 page)

Out of respect for her mother, with whom she lives, Gloria refuses to return home naked under an expensive fur. Her mother works hard to ignore Gloria’s idiosyncrasies, but this might be too much to overlook. She asks Steve for help. “I’m all she has,” Gloria tells him, referring to her mother. “So we have to lie to each other.”

Reluctantly, Steve’s girlfriend, Norma, lends Gloria a suit, snidely remarking that it “shocks easily.” Norma is a tedious, self-righteous blonde—Debbie Reynolds without the talent. Of course Gloria gets the better of Norma in their exchange. But the problem is, Gloria permits Norma to frame the conversation with her bourgeois notions of morality. Had Gloria come of age in the 1990s, she might have critiqued those notions, as well as the lack of self-consciousness with which Norma embraces them.

In part one of
BUtterfield 8
, Gloria is so out-of-step with society that she seems like a time traveler from the future—a visitor from the 1980s or early ’90s, when academic theories of gender explored the social construction of heterosexuality. During these years, a new discipline—queer studies—emerged at universities. This discipline looked at groups that had been marginalized by their sexuality: gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people. It embraced prostitutes as “sex workers,” who exposed the tacit economic transactions of heterosexuality. Before this line of thinking, even a suffragist like Rebecca West (1882–1983), who defined “feminist” as an antonym of “doormat” and defiantly bore an out-of-wedlock child, was dismissive of female sex workers. West resisted looking at the ways in which their transactions with straight men might be more honest than the identical but veiled transactions within a heterosexual marriage.

I can imagine a latter-day Gloria contributing to an anthology such as Jill Nagle’s
Whores and Other Feminists
, a groundbreaking 1994 collection of scholarship from the intersection of queer studies and feminism. I envision Gloria defiant, explaining to Norma that what Norma calls “moral” is simply the oppressive “norm of white procreative heterosexuality.”

I picture Gloria using words like those of contributor Eva Pendleton, a professional prostitute who at the time of publication was earning a Ph.D. in American studies at New York University: “Heterosexuality as a social system depends upon the specter of unchastity in order to constitute itself. The ‘good wife’ as a social category cannot exist without the ‘whore’… Each of these othered positions exists to reinforce the norm of white procreative heterosexuality.”

Norma’s priggishness, Gloria might also have added, probably has less to do with principles than with paranoia about social class. As filmmaker and pornography scholar Laura Kipnis wrote, notions of “propriety” and “bad taste” arose during the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, which codified rigid rules as a way to “separate themselves from the noisy lower orders.” Because their social positions are inherited, aristocrats can be indifferent to such rules. And Bohemians define themselves in contrast to the rules,
pour épater la bourgeoisie
, as the saying goes.

In
BUtterfield 8
, although Steve means well, he is too dim and conformist to be a useful friend to Gloria. He clings to a galling 1950s misconception: parents who deviate from traditional gender roles will inevitably warp their kids. Steve explains this to Norma: when Gloria was a little girl, her father died and her mother went to work—so of course Gloria turned out badly. Such propaganda dominated mid-twentieth-century pop culture, reaching its apotheosis in
Rebel Without a Cause
, when James Dean’s character has no choice but to fall in with a delinquent crowd. He once saw his dad wearing an apron.

Gloria did, in fact, suffer as a teenager, but not because her mother worked. When Mrs. Wandrous tried to return to a traditional housewife role, the man to whom she was engaged molested Gloria. Gloria enjoyed the sensations but felt sullied by them—a conflict common to abuse victims and one that psychotherapists often successfully treat. Gloria’s Freudian analyst, however, never addressed Gloria’s problems, but this wasn’t entirely his fault. The Production Code forbade him from improving her mental health. For
BUtterfield 8
to obtain its seal of approval, Gloria had to be portrayed as “sick,” E. G. Dougherty, a Code official, told Pandro S. Berman, the film’s producer.

The revelation of abuse opens the film’s unfortunate second section. Abruptly, Gloria becomes infected by patriarchy—or, in the vernacular of the 1950s, “respectability.” She begins second-guessing everything that is clean and noble and strong inside her. She starts saying things like, “By some miracle, I’m like everybody else. I’m in love.” Mann must have found this line as comical as I did. When she says it, he frames her head with a plate on the wall, so that she appears to have a halo.

“I was the slut of all time,” she blurts to her mother, who slaps her—which I myself would have done, though for a different reason: words like “whore” and “slut” are merely the flip side of “good wife.” They imply that a woman cannot own her own body. She exists only in relationship to men.

Liggett does not love his wife. But thanks to the Production Code Office, he has sanctimonious friends who try to make him feel bad about this. “You married a lovely woman and you blame her for the life you lead,” one tells him. On the other hand, because Liggett’s wife, Emily, refuses to live in the same city with him, even the censors realized that she might have had a hand in their estrangement. In August 1959, before filming began, E. G. Dougherty demanded that Emily be “re-written so as to eliminate what now appears to be a social, if not moral, justification for Liggett to look elsewhere for his love life.”

No amount of revision could make Geoffrey Shurlock like the script. “Liggett appears to have no recognition whatever of the immorality of his adultery, and its relationship to his marriage,” he grumbled. In the novel, this is, of course, the point. Liggett has not enjoyed sex with his wife since
before
they were married. Soon after the wedding, Emily’s closest childhood friend seduced him. “From that moment on,” O’Hara writes, “he never loved Emily again.” This occurred long before he met Gloria.

O’Hara’s novel is less a character study than a mural—a seamy, sprawling portrait of New York City during the Great Depression. None of his characters represents good or evil; they are just flawed people muddling through an imperfect world. The Gloria that he created was not an avatar of sex-positive feminism; she was a victim of her economic circumstances. Taylor brought a modern sensibility to Gloria, making her more compelling—and seemingly self-aware—than she was originally drawn.

Once Gloria succumbs to conventionality, the vital, animated woman in part one ceases to exist. She might as well be dead; and soon she actually is. In the novel, while fleeing from Liggett, she falls (or jumps) from a steamer bound for Boston. In the film, she crashes her convertible.

Taylor did not want to play Gloria—because of Gloria’s bad-girl behavior, she told the press. And at least one person believed her. “MGM must have thought the image was perfect—Elizabeth Taylor as a whore and homewrecker,” Fisher wrote in his memoir “They wouldn’t let her work on
Cleopatra
or anything else until she made the picture.”

Therein, of course, lies her real motivation. Taylor’s standard fee from MGM was $125,000 per movie. Producer Walter Wanger offered her $1 million to portray Cleopatra. “The trouble had nothing to do with the fact that Gloria was a call girl,” Pandro S. Berman told Brenda Maddox. Taylor simply wanted more money.

Unable to break the contract, Taylor lobbied without success for a stronger script. The screenplay’s flaws, however, were not literary but ideological. O’Hara’s novel had critiqued the society that destroyed Gloria. But Dougherty and Shurlock, who had final say over the movie, viewed Gloria’s rebellion as the problem and punishment as the solution.

After viewing the finished picture, Fisher called it “trash,” which was certainly true of his part in it. In a charitable appraisal, the
Saturday Review
called Fisher “a non-actor, much as certain successful books have been called non-books.” The
Harvard Lampoon
named him Worst Actor of the Year.

Taylor never forgave MGM for delaying her work on
Cleopatra.
She expressed her anger at the studio after seeing a rough cut of
BUtterfield 8
. Before arriving at MGM to watch it, she and Fisher dined at Trader Vic’s, a Beverly Hills restaurant known for its potent cocktails. The couple brought two big cups of Scorpions—a blend of rum, brandy, and citrus juices—to sip during the screening. When the lights came up afterward, Taylor hurled her drink at the screen. Then she lurched to the office of Sol Siegel, MGM’s head of production, and scrawled “No Sale!” in lipstick on his door. Moviegoers, however, did not share her opinion.
BUtterfield 8
became a sensation, earning Taylor both $15 million and her first Academy Award.

For no reason besides coincidence, 1960 was a big year for prostitutes in the movies.
Never on Sunday
(a Greek film set in Piraeus) and
The World of Suzie Wong
(an English film set in Hong Kong) also explored the theme. The Production Code Administration had no authority over foreign films, which was fortunate because Shurlock hated these two. In a letter defending
BUtterfield 8
as a “moral story,” he railed against the idea of prostitution being treated “sentimentally,” as in
Suzie Wong
or, worse, “gaily,” as in
Never on Sunday
.

In
BUtterfield 8
, thanks to the hard work of his office, “sin” looks “exactly the way it should, repulsive and degrading.” And Gloria gets what a sinner deserves: “The girl is conscious of her wrongdoing, bemoans her weakness, berates herself to her mother and to her young musician boy friend; and, at the end, in an attempt to flee from falling back into evil, she has an accident and is killed.”

Had Shurlock stopped there, his letter would have exposed him as a bully and a prig. But he continued, revealing himself as an ignoramus.

“In the last century, issues between good and evil were much more clearly drawn,” he wrote, citing Gustave Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary
and Leo Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
as examples of moral tales. “In both these novels, the adulteresses died horribly,” he noted, pleased that they met an appropriate fate. He then suggested that Flaubert and Tolstoy “would have been scandalized at the treatment of prostitution in
Never on Sunday.
”

Shurlock’s interpretation is, of course, exactly the opposite of what the authors intended. Both Flaubert and Tolstoy were sympathetic to their women characters. Their goal was to criticize the bourgeois social conventions that destroyed two healthy, lively, women. Nor would either author have been “scandalized” by
Never on Sunday
. Though they might have gagged at the ending of
BUtterfield 8
. “I love prostitution,” Flaubert famously said, “and for itself, too, quite apart from what is beneath.” (This line is also often translated “quite apart from its carnal aspects.”) Tolstoy was also a lifelong fan, despite the venereal disease he contracted in his youth.

After watching
BUtterfield 8
many times, I can barely recall its final scenes. “The ending,”
New York Times
critic Bosley Crowther wrote, “is absurd.” But I will never forget “No Sale!” scribbled in lipstick or the spike heel grinding into Liggett’s shoe. Taylor breathed life into the defiant Gloria, burning her into our collective memory. Then she sleepwalked through the moralistic
mishegoss
imposed by the Production Code.

Taylor couldn’t rescue Gloria from the censors. But at least she minimized their damage.

10

1960–1962

IN SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER, Elizabeth Taylor gave form and believability to Catherine Holly, a brave trauma victim who stands up to the male medical establishment. In real life, however, actors can be different from the characters they play. Taylor suffered from health problems going back to her adolescence. And perhaps because her mother was a Christian Scientist, for whom medical treatment is anathema, Taylor herself became an ardent consumer of the healing arts.

On the set of
Giant
, she often spent her off-camera time in a wheelchair, tormented by sciatica and numbness in her legs. Her chronic back problems had begun in childhood. While learning to jump horses for
National Velvet
, she took a variety of spills that caused injuries. But her shooting schedule didn’t permit adequate leisure for them to heal. In 1957, after accidentally tumbling down some stairs, she underwent a four-hour surgery at New York’s Harkness Pavilion to fuse the crushed disks in her spine. Her then-consort Mike Todd did his best to make her stay pleasurable. He installed himself in the room next door and purchased a Renoir, a Pissarro, a Monet, and a Frans Hals to liven up her joyless hospital walls. So blissful, in fact, was her doctor-ordered sojourn that within the year—and not long after delivering her daughter, Liza, by cesarean section—Taylor arranged for an unnecessary appendectomy. This time she booked Todd into the adjoining suite and forbade him to leave until she had recovered.

In his memoir, Eddie Fisher writes with odd wistfulness of his time with Taylor and its glamorous backdrops: a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a suite at the Park Lane in Manhattan, quarters designed by Oliver Messel at the Dorchester in London—as well as emergency rooms on two continents. As I read his descriptions, I began to understand. When I needed a break from this manuscript, I stayed at a hotel. But when you live in a hotel, where do you go to escape? To the hospital.

This is only half-facetious. As a child, Taylor supported her parents financially. After Todd’s death, she supported her children—by herself. To survive, her family depended on her; and to support them, Taylor depended on her appearance. She couldn’t look puffy or haggard on screen. She had to look fantastic—or in any event, thin. If her director told her to smile, she had to radiate sunshine. She had to dredge within herself to play a scene with feeling. She was always going, going, going. But if she became really sick—sick enough to die—the carousel stopped. A dead star could derail a film and cost a studio money. In sickness, she could escape her burdens. In sickness, she could rest.