The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (2 page)

Metro’s Little Red Schoolhouse was a pitiful excuse for an educational institution. As a result, Elizabeth would never really have a decent education. In 1999 she described it as “a nightmare. No two kids were the same age . . . When you were not shooting, you went to school.”

Recalling Elizabeth as a child, Porter said, “Elizabeth and I had the same makeup lady every morning, Violet Downer. Elizabeth’s mother was always with her. She was very careful, back of the camera, in the dressing room, or on the set. And always in the makeup room, wherever Elizabeth was. Mrs. Taylor was a very sweet lady. We had lunch together a lot, but when her mother needed to take a breather, Muzzie was there with open arms. Tea was ready in the afternoon, in the commissary, or you could bring it out and have a snack.

“The Little Red Schoolhouse was the domain of Mrs. Mary McDonald, the teacher. She was just murder to everyone. She was a rather stern disciplinarian who always wanted to be sure the kids did their homework. That was good, but she wasn’t anything like a mother.” Elizabeth recalled that, when she was fourteen or fifteen, Mrs. McDonald rapped her hands with a ruler and ordered her to “stop daydreaming!” Thereafter Elizabeth went to the toilet to enjoy her reverie of being swept away by a prince on a white charger, and when Mrs. McDonald scolded her for an absence of fifteen minutes, Elizabeth said, “Oh, Miss [
sic
] McDonald, if you don’t believe me, I suggest you go in and smell.” Asked to evaluate Elizabeth as a student, Mrs. McDonald called her “[no] Einstein, but she wasn’t stupid.”

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor had arrived at Metro’s 187-acre Culver City lot just before the outbreak of World War II. She’d been born on February 27, 1932, at 2:30 a.m., in a house called Heathwood, at 8 Wildwood Road, in a semirural section on the northern edge of London. Her mother, Sara, a vivacious beauty who’d briefly been a stage actress, and father, Francis, an elegantly dressed art dealer with sparkling blue eyes, were American by birth and British by choice. Eerily beautiful even as a small girl, Elizabeth looked as if an adult woman’s head had been incongruously placed on her child’s body. Her rosy skin seemed to glow with its own inner Technicolor, and a double row of long black eyelashes highlighted eyes that were “not violet as publicized,” she later stated, but were “different colors” depending on what she wore. The Taylors had one other child, Howard, born in 1929 and blessed with features as well-defined and striking as his sister’s.

Both children were sometimes subjected to rough treatment from their father. In 1937, one house guest saw Francis Taylor slap Elizabeth across the face—with too much force and too little provocation—and shove her brother into a broom closet under the stairs. To some observers Francis seemed happier with his male companions, and they concluded that his marriage was a cover for an active homosexual life. Sara was four years older than Francis and had been thirty and in fear of becoming an old maid at the time of their marriage in 1926. With Sara’s quite normal connubial expectations, she unwittingly placed Francis under pressure, and when he exploded, it was the children who suffered.
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With war on the horizon, Sara and the children left England and came to L.A. on May 1, 1939, and Francis followed shortly afterward, establishing an art gallery in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he counted collectors like Edward G. Robinson, Billy Wilder, and George Cukor among his clients. The Taylors lived briefly with Elizabeth’s maternal grandfather in Pasadena. The number one topic all over L.A. was
Gone with the Wind
, still in production in Culver City. Sara was advised by almost everyone she met that Elizabeth resembled Vivien Leigh and should try out for the role of Bonnie Blue Butler, Scarlett O’Hara’s daughter. For two years her parents refused to let her work, choosing instead to enroll her in school. Her classmates, who included Norma Shearer’s children as well as Darryl F. Zanuck’s offspring Richard and Darrylin, sometimes poked fun at her British accent, saying, “I cawnt take a bawth on the grawss with the banawnas.” Fortunately the Taylors soon moved into their own house in Pacific Palisades, and both children enrolled at Willard Elementary and later at Hawthorne School at 624 North Rexford Drive. “The children very quickly lost their accents,” Sara recalled, but Elizabeth retained the ability to switch back and forth depending on movie requirements. Darryl F. Zanuck, the mogul who’d reigned supreme at 20th Century-Fox since 1935, dandled Elizabeth on his knee when Darrylin brought her home but pooh-poohed his daughter’s suggestion that he put Elizabeth under contract. Mischievous young Richard Zanuck’s idea of fun was tying Elizabeth up and locking her in the basement.

She first met Louis Burt Mayer, who founded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924 and still ruled it like a dictator, during a visit to the studio with her parents. Mayer wanted to sign her, but Sara mistakenly thought Elizabeth would get more attention at a smaller studio and took her to Universal instead. The year was 1941 and, at a salary of $100 per week, Elizabeth played an ear-pulling brat with Alfalfa (
Little Rascals
) Switzer in the B-movie
There’s One Born Every Minute
, but the Universal casting director said, “Her eyes are too old. She doesn’t have the face of a kid.” Universal fired her on March 23, 1942. When asked years later if she’d wanted to be an actress, she replied, “Oh, yes, of course. I did. Because my mother had been an actress. My dad was against it, but Mother and I got together behind his back.” The following October she was given a test option for the role of Priscilla in MGM’s
Lassie Come Home
. The star of the film, in the role of Joe Carraclough, was thirteen-year-old Roddy McDowall, who’d been lovable and heartrending in John Ford’s masterpiece
How Green Was My Valley
, more than holding his own in an all-star cast that included Maureen O’Hara, Walter Pidgeon, Donald Crisp, Sara All-good, and Barry Fitzgerald. Elizabeth and Roddy became instant friends, on screen and off, and he’d remain a stabilizing influence in the treacherous years ahead, someone she could depend on for emotional reinforcement.

And Elizabeth desperately needed support. L.A. and moviemaking proved an ordeal, and she would later tell writer Paul Theroux that she felt like the studio owned her. She was to recall in 1987, “Constantly faced with adult situations and denied the companionship of my peers, I stopped being a child the minute I started working in pictures.” At home, her alcoholic father was increasingly resentful that his nine-year-old daughter was making more money than he was. “He batted me around a bit,” she revealed in 1999. “He was drunk when he did it. He didn’t know what he was doing.” Nonetheless, the effects on her emotions would be far-reaching, endangering every love relationship of her adult life. Despite her father’s resentment of Elizabeth’s superior earning power, he was ready enough to spend the money she earned. Because she was a minor, her finances were handled by her parents, but fortunately the Coogan Act, named after child star Jackie Coogan, stipulated that a percentage of juvenile earnings be placed in trust until she reached the age of twenty-one. The system was far from foolproof. Another Metro child star, Shirley Temple, who moved to the studio from Fox in 1940, later complained that her parents appropriated all of her $3,207,666 gross earnings, leaving her only $89,000. Jackie Cooper, star of
The Champ
, collected only $150,000 of his $1 million earnings. Roddy McDowall once explained, “There are reasons for the money thing with young actors. Number one, one’s own sense of guilt coming from making amounts of money that your parents never even made in their lifetime.” Elizabeth supported her family from the age of nine.
²

Though she had only a supporting role in
Lassie
, millions of children and adults fell in love with her on sight. The
Hollywood Reporter
sagely predicted, “Elizabeth Taylor looks like a comer.”
Lassie
was the story of a boy and his dog, and the salary of the collie playing Lassie exceeded Elizabeth’s by $50 a week. On January 5, 1943, she scored a seven-year MGM contract, beginning at $100 per week and gradually rising to $750 per week.

Her family had moved to a spacious pink stucco Mediterranean-style house with a red-tiled roof on North Elm Drive, walking distance from her father’s gallery in the Beverly Hills Hotel. This would be her home until the day she married.

In March she was loaned out to Fox for a small but highly emotional and visible role as the orphan child Helen Burns in Orson Welles’s
Jane Eyre
, stealing several important scenes from established child stars Peggy Ann Garner and Margaret O’Brien. Though the ten-year-old Elizabeth received no billing, the
Hollywood Reporter
noted, “The little girl Jane befriends in school wins a credit which is regrettably omitted.” On the set, Elizabeth had caught Orson’s eye. “Remind me to be around when she grows up,” he said. It was from the grandiose Welles that she first learned that a star can take over an entire production. The first day of shooting, Welles marched in four hours late, trailing an entourage of half a dozen minions including his agent and doctor, and ordered the cast to do a run-through with him, completely ignoring director Robert Stevenson. Watching Welles and other stars she worked with, Elizabeth soon became ambitious for bigger and better roles.

The White Cliffs of Dover
was her fourth film for Metro in two years. A romantic epic spanning World Wars I and II,
Dover
starred Irene Dunne, Peter Lawford, Van Johnson, and Roddy. The character Elizabeth played had a crush on young Roddy, but in reality she fell in love with the handsome, twenty-two-year-old Peter Lawford. So did the press. When the film was released in 1944 to critical acclaim, much of the praise went to Lawford, whom the
L.A. Times
singled out for “eventual stardom.” Lawford was in the middle of an eight-month love affair with Lana Turner and didn’t pay much attention to Elizabeth. Neither did the critics.

The star of the picture, forty-three-year-old Irene Dunne, did notice something odd about Elizabeth, whose “eyes seemed to look straight through you,” Dunne recalled. Behind the blank stare was a burdened child, preoccupied by tensions at home and batterings by her father, but there was something more. She was developing, even at eleven, into a very determined careerist who had little time for those—like Irene Dunne—who couldn’t serve her. Shrewdly plotting her next move at Metro, she saved her charm for her
Dover
director, Clarence Brown, plying him with greeting cards, hoping to win the starring role in his forthcoming picture,
National Velvet
. She also sought out the picture’s producer, Pandro Berman, and listed her qualifications: she was the right age for Velvet Brown, “going on twelve,” and she loved horses, knew how to ride, and had a British accent. “Sorry, honey, but you’re just too short,” Berman said. She needed three more inches of height for the scenes in which Velvet masquerades as a jockey. “Well, I’ll grow,” she said, but the picture was to start in three months. Stuffing herself on high-protein foods, she showed up in Berman’s office three months later and, according to a Metro press release, three inches taller. In actuality, she’d cleverly devised an older look for herself with makeup, hairstyle, and attitude.

Velvet
began filming on February 4, 1944. Based on a beautifully written novel by Enid Bagnold, author of
The Chalk Garden
, the story focuses on the close-knit, loving family of young Velvet Brown, who dreams of owning a horse she’s seen running wild in the countryside. “The Pirate,” or “The Py,” as Velvet calls him, is a stubborn chestnut beauty with a white star on his forehead and three white socks. Though Velvet is only twelve, she miraculously manages to acquire the horse, explaining, “I arranged it with God.” Mickey Rooney, who turned twenty-three during the shoot, plays a young gypsy jockey con man who wanders into the Brown family’s life, and teaches Velvet how to ride like a professional jockey. This leads to her competing in the legendary Grand National Steeplechase, attended by the Queen.

Elizabeth and Mickey had several intimate scenes together in his bedroom in the Browns’ stable, and some members of the crew noted an almost sexual chemistry between them. Though Elizabeth’s costumes were designed to minimize her formidable chest development, her physical assets were already evident to her coworkers. Metro executive Frank Taylor, interviewed in 1999, said, “Around the time of
Velvet
she began sitting at a table next to mine in the studio commissary. Though still a child she already was a major beauty with those spectacular eyes.” A source close to Rooney said that Taylor and Rooney were involved during
Velvet
, but Elizabeth herself has said that she was a virgin until her marriage six years later. Mickey, though short in stature, was one of Hollywood’s most prized lovers and was being pursued at the time by the sultry Ava Gardner. Wrote gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, “Like several other young actresses in Hollywood who would be fascinated by Mickey—Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland, to name two—Ava was in love with him.”
³
And Ava won him, at age twenty.

Clarence Brown insisted that Elizabeth cut her long dark hair to impersonate a male jockey during the horse-race finale. She went crying to hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff, the crotchety, queenly Metro makeover genie, who’d come to the studio in 1934, giving Greta Garbo, Greer Garson, Joan Crawford, and Norma Shearer their distinctive looks and serving as their father-confessor. Touched by Elizabeth’s tears, he made her a wig, attaching it to her jockey cap so she could save her natural hair. Clarence Brown was completely fooled and even warned Guilaroff not to cut Elizabeth’s hair another inch. She threw her arms around Guilaroff, thanking him, and the actress and hairdresser became friends for life. The only acting Oscar in
Velvet
was awarded to Anne Revere, but it was—and remains half a century later—Elizabeth who was responsible for the film’s magic. Years later she revealed the secret of her acting: “I sweat real sweat and I shake real shakes.” A celestial intensity dances out of her strange azure eyes in the film, almost in mischievous defiance of the executives at Universal who decided to fire her for having a grown-up’s face in a child’s body. Clarence Brown, who’d guided Garbo through seven films to a mythic status beyond stardom, and his cinematographer Leonard Smith knew exactly how to photograph Elizabeth. “There’s something behind her eyes that you can’t quite fathom,” said Brown. “Something Garbo had.”