The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice (5 page)

These nonverbal messages are key, because at one point Breen wanted Alice to fix her makeup, straighten her clothing, and deliver a lecture on the sociological implications of unwed pregnancy—not something a bewildered girl would be likely to do. “We feel this story needs a voice for morality, between George and Alice,” Breen wrote. “We think that, at about this page, either one of them, preferably Alice, should take some cognizance of the moral wrong of their predicament, as well as its social implications.”

Breen also muzzled Clift: “George’s line, ‘I’ll think of something,’ together with the action indicated on page 65, will be unacceptable if it suggests George is thinking about consulting an abortionist. This entire element of contemplated abortion is unacceptable and could not be approved.”

Breen seemingly wanted the actors to convey details about pregnancy to the audience through telepathy: “Please rewrite the following speech by Alice. ‘The first night you came here … remember? You said I wouldn’t have to worry. You said nothing would happen, remember?’ Please omit the underlined words in Alice’s line: ‘Well—
it’s happened
.’ ”

A rich girl in Alice’s “predicament” would likely not have had a predicament. Such a girl’s parents could at least afford to offer her a medical way out. But Breen strove to perpetuate Alice’s misery, her tragic lack of options: “Please omit the following dialog—the last line being definitively suggestive of abortion: ‘Oh. No change at all? Oh. Just the same? No, I haven’t thought of anything yet.’ ”

Reading Breen’s letters makes clear Stevens’s directorial choices. He had to find symbolic ways to convey, for example, gnawing sexual desire because Breen would nix anything explicit. A neon sign—VICKERS—pulsates outside George’s window; such a sign might well exist in a town where Angela’s father is a captain of industry. Likewise, George’s seduction of Alice is a tour de force of implication. Stevens conjures, through the urgent beat of a radio song, the moment when Alice’s love and loneliness overcome her restraint. As
Time
magazine explained, “The players, barely visible as dim silhouettes, are no less Stevens’ raw materials than the sounds, shadows and camera movements. And he molds and shapes them into probably the frankest, most provocative scene of its kind yet filmed in Hollywood.”

Stevens doesn’t cut nervously between actors. He plants the camera at a distance, and lingers. Still, his choices leave no confusion about which character we should observe. When, for instance, Alice tells George that she’s “in trouble,” we see the back of her head—the better to focus on George, whose turbulent feelings pass across his face like the shadows of clouds.

Stevens uses close-ups sparingly, heightening their effect. When Clift embraces Taylor, they fill the screen. We cannot turn away. She whispers, “Tell Mama. Tell Mama all.”

When I first tried to watch
A Place in the Sun
, I couldn’t view it all the way through. Stevens had gotten to me. I felt his characters’ pain. I also felt powerless against a vague, inexorable evil to which only now have I been able to put a face: Joseph I. Breen’s.

This has not made watching easier. When George stretches his meager budget to buy a tweed business suit, I always cry. I know he will arrive at his rich uncle’s house and find all the other men in dinner jackets. When George meets Alice, I cry again. She is so unbearably innocent. I even sob when he meets Angela, because I see what Stevens wanted me to see: not a spoiled heiress, but George’s other half.

By the time Stevens gets to the fatal boating accident, events race by like scenery past a speeding car. Stevens ratchets up the stress with sound. At George’s murder trial, the loons, witness to the drowning, fill the courtroom with their eerie calls. In real life, a conviction is not a juggernaut. It is followed by appeal after time-consuming appeal. But this is a movie, and to maximize its drama, Stevens stages a swift death-row reunion with Angela—a scene that is as powerful as it is implausible. Through tears, Angela tells him, “I know I’ll go on loving you for the rest of my life.”

Some critics preferred the simplicity of Dreiser’s novel. Capitalism is bad; the pregnant girl is good; the rich girl is whiney; and the guy is a cad—who, at the end, turns to religion for solace and repudiates his love.

In the film, George is tempted by religion. He even meets with a chaplain. But on the eve of his execution, when Angela enters his cell, all he sees is her scorching beauty. Angela is eros, not agape. She is pagan, not Christian. She mocks Breen—and the institutions that denied Alice a choice. Taylor has gotten to George as she has gotten to us: entering through our aft-brain and lodging in our soul.

5

1951–1955

A PLACE IN THE SUN wrapped in 1950, but it wasn’t released until 1951, which left Elizabeth in an odd limbo. To the world at large, she was still the glossy bauble in
Father of the Bride
and its sequel,
Father’s Little Dividend
. But under the tutelage of Clift, acclaimed for his method acting, Taylor’s craft had evolved significantly. Stevens, too, had pushed her—once literally, off a rock into Lake Tahoe. He shot the film’s summer holiday scenes there in the fall. The temperature rarely topped forty degrees. And when Taylor balked at taking an icy swim, Stevens gave her a shove.

Back in Beverly Hills, Taylor’s mother, Sara, was less concerned with her growing credibility as an actress than with her marketability as a bride. Sara loved that millionaires were buzzing around her eligible daughter. She stoked the flames of the Wedding-Industrial Complex, making sure Hedda Hopper knew just how popular Elizabeth was. Soon, however, from the swarm of suitors, a special one arose: Nicky Hilton. And in a ceremony even more over-the-top than the one in
Father of the Bride
, he and Elizabeth were married.

The November 1950 issue of
Modern Screen
reveals the vast disconnect between real-life Hollywood and its engineered fantasy. In a five-page, stream-of-consciousness ramble, Hopper described the newlyweds on their honeymoon—from their love shack in Pebble Beach (a long way from
National Velvet
) to their voyage on the
Queen Elizabeth II
. Hopper dropped every imaginable name—from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to composer Richard Rodgers to Butch, Elizabeth’s recently deceased poodle.

“Nick’s every bit as close to his dynamic dad as Elizabeth is to her doting mother,” Hopper wrote. “Sara Taylor used to sigh to me, ‘I always have to stay dressed up even when I go to bed the nights Elizabeth goes out.’ Because no matter what time she came in, Liz raced right upstairs—usually bringing her dates along with her—to tell Mama all.” The unfortunate word choice—“tell Mama all”—may have stuck with Hopper from an advance screening of
A Place in the Sun
. But I doubt she used it with deliberate irony. Irony seems outside her skill set. For example, during the filming of
A Place in the Sun
, with barely a gasp of incredulity, Hopper reported plans for a musical version of Dreiser’s novel—with Bing Crosby as the murderer.

Unfortunately, two months into the marriage, Elizabeth did have much to tell Mama—about Nicky clobbering her. And Sara faced a daunting choice—between Hilton’s millions and her daughter’s well-being. Sara chose her daughter, and Elizabeth and Hilton divorced.

Elizabeth was not single for long. Disillusioned with young rakes like Hilton, she fell for an older one, actor Michael Wilding, twenty years her senior. They married in London in 1952. Her fans were thrilled, and all had hopes for “happily ever after.” Or nearly all. Actress Marlene Dietrich, an ex-lover of Wilding, despised Taylor and was bitter about the marriage, which she attributed to cheap physical attraction. “It must be those huge breasts of hers,” Dietrich told her daughter, Maria Riva. “He likes them to dangle in his face.”

Wilding, some say, married Taylor to advance his lagging career—or at least get a toehold in the United States. But if so, the strategy failed. MGM gave him a few parts, including a painful paring with Joan Crawford in
Torch Song
in 1953. But by 1955, the Wildings had two sons, Michael Howard, born in 1953, and Christopher Edward, who arrived two years later. And the role Wilding mostly played was dad.

After
A Place in the Sun
, Elizabeth’s value skyrocketed—so high that it seemed unlikely ever to go down. But between 1952 and 1956, MGM managed to slow its climb, by casting her in a series of duds, including
Elephant Walk
,
Love Is Better than Ever
,
Ivanhoe
,
Beau Brummell
, and
Rhapsody
, a film that Elizabeth herself said “should never have been made by me or anybody else.”

Taylor’s worst film from this period had the best pedigree:
The Last Time I Saw Paris
, “inspired” by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s splendid short story “Babylon Revisited.” “Inspired” is the word Hollywood uses when it buys a work and makes it into something altogether different. This is not always bad; the film versions of
National Velvet
and
A Place in the Sun
were very strong. This was not the case with
The Last Time I Saw Paris
.

Fitzgerald wrote a moral tale about alcoholism. It deals with a self-pitying narcissist who goes on a protracted bender in Paris. There he mistreats his wife and, while drunk, locks her out of their house during a blizzard. As in
Cynthia
, where cold air, not germs, cause pneumonia, the wife gets sick and dies. In the movie, Taylor plays the wife, Helen; Van Johnson, the lush, Charles. And the blizzard in which Charles, intoxicated, gurgles while Helen pounds the front door, is unintentionally hilarious. Yet in Fitzgerald’s story, the lush is justifiably punished. His dead wife’s family takes his child away. The story has a moral core. Richard Brooks, who directed the film and also served as one of its screenwriters, throws out that core—and replaces it with hokum. Charles, newly contrite and occasionally sober, gets to keep the child
whose mother he killed
.

Brooks’s blithe evisceration of “Babylon Revisited” was a harbinger of worse to come. In a few years, he would get his bowdlerizing mitts on Tennessee Williams’s
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, an important Broadway play about homosexuality. And quicker than you can say “Lord Alfred Douglas,” he would hack the homo from the sexuality. He landed a fine cast for this film, including Taylor, and they all performed well—tragically, however, in the service of an inane plot contrived to appease the Production Code Administration.

In 1955, however,
Cat
was far down the road. The Taylor brand was languishing—as was Taylor’s marriage. She needed a film worthy of her gifts. She needed a director who understood her, and who would put her strengths to a higher purpose. She needed George Stevens.

And thanks to Rock Hudson, she got him—as well as a break from her contract with MGM. Stevens had offered Hudson the male lead in
Giant
—a Warner Brothers film that was as strapping and ambitious as the six-foot-five-inch actor himself. For the female lead, Stevens had wanted Grace Kelly, who turned down the part to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco. Uncertain how to proceed, Stevens asked Hudson whom he pictured in the role of Hudson’s character’s wife. Hudson requested Taylor. So in May 1955, Taylor, Hudson, Stevens, and a sexually cryptic newcomer, James Dean, struck out for the punishing flats of Marfa, Texas—a world apart from the glitz of Hollywood—where they would create something extraordinary.

6

Giant
, 1956

You gentlemen date back a hundred thousand years. You ought to be wearing leopard skins and carrying clubs. Politics? Business? What is so masculine about a conversation that a woman can’t enter into it?

—Elizabeth Taylor as Leslie Lynnton Benedict in
Giant

IF GEORGE STEVENS had deliberately set out to make a feminist propaganda film, he could not have achieved a greater success than he did with
Giant.
The movie is based on Edna Ferber’s sprawling novel of the same name—only nominally a portrait of Texas, where the book is set, and more a celebration of its formidable heroine, Leslie Lynnton Benedict, who with cajoling words and gentle force tames a brutal frontier. Leslie also fights discrimination against Mexican immigrants, making the film as timely today as when it came out in 1956.

According to Albert Sindlinger, a market researcher whose firm analyzed film attendance in the 1950s,
Giant
reversed a five-year box-office downturn, “bringing back many people—especially women—who had nearly given up the movie habit all together.”

As the story moves from the 1930s to the 1950s,
Giant
exalts what feminists of the 1970s termed “essentialist” values. Smart and well schooled, Leslie demonstrates that higher education need not transform a woman into a parody of a man. Leslie owns her beauty—for that matter, she owns
Taylor’s
beauty—and displays it to its best advantage. But she is far from a narcissist. In an early scene that defines her character, Leslie overcomes heat, dirt, fatigue, and the racial bigotry of her husband to secure medical care for a sick Mexican child. Leslie embodies the values of the right brain: empathy, compassion, and a belief in social justice. Over time, she introduces these values to the left-brained (and occasionally no-brained) inhabitants of the Lone Star state.

Feminism and social justice have always been closely linked. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founding mothers of American feminism, were both abolitionists. (Though Stanton was not exactly thrilled when freed black men got the vote before women.) In the 1950s and ’60s, a commitment to social justice often prefigured an involvement with feminism. As writer Sara Evans observes in
Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left
, many women became feminists after fighting for racial justice in the American South: “There they found the inner-strength to explore the meaning of equality and an ideology that beckoned them to do so.”