The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (4 page)

In her sixteenth year she reached her full growth—“five feet four and a half in my bare feet”—and her ideal weight, between “120 and 122 pounds, no more and, certainly, no less.”
¹²
Her infatuation with Lawford was not reciprocated, partly because L. B. warned him of dire consequences should he involve the underage starlet in scandal. Nonetheless, their scenes together in
Julia
were so romantic that the studio decided to continue casting her in mature roles. As a result, she succeeded in bridging a crucial point, adolescence, when most juveniles—Claude Jarman Jr., Butch Jenkins, Jane Withers, Peggy Ann Garner, Margaret O’Brien—stumbled and disappeared from the screen. Unfortunately, Guilaroff tried to make Elizabeth look too mature, slathering on makeup and fussing with her hair.
Time
’s critic complained that although she was “one of the loveliest girls in movies, here she is made-up and hair-done and directed into tired, tiresome conventional prettiness.”
¹³
Shooting on
Julia
was completed on April 9, 1948, and it was an instant hit after opening the following October at the Radio City Music Hall. Otis L. Guernsey Jr., the
New York Herald Tribune
reviewer, called Elizabeth “one of the cinema’s reigning queens of beauty and talent.”

Despite professional success, she remained lonely, isolated, and restricted at home. Her brother’s friends still referred to her as “Howard’s kid sister who is in films.” According to Debbie Reynolds, whom she met that year, Elizabeth wanted simple things like drive-in dates “that would never happen in her life.” Mary Astor blamed Elizabeth’s “cool and slightly superior” demeanor. Again playing Elizabeth’s mother in
Little Women
, Astor found her to be “smug” and unlikable.
¹⁴

In lieu of beaux, Elizabeth practiced kissing every night after she went to bed, hugging and smooching a smooth satin pillow, pretending it was Gable, Lawford, Robert Stack, or Marshall Thompson. Years later Elizabeth said her first
mature
screen kiss, apart from Lassie’s licks, Py’s nuzzles, and Jimmy Lydon’s childish peck, came from Stack, her
Date with Judy
costar, in October 1947. Though she found the blond, well-built, socially prominent actor to be “occasionally patronizing,” she added, “I was kissing Bob Stack and I loved it.”
¹⁵
Jane Powell was the star of the picture, but Elizabeth walked off with it, playing a snooty, man-stealing teenage minx with such sexy insouciance that the
Herald Tribune
’s Guernsey saw in her “a real, 14-carat, 100-proof siren with a whole new career opening in front of her.” Fan clubs sprang up. Between June and November she received 1,065 invitations to college proms—but still no dates.

At last, lanky, likable, curly-haired Marshall Thompson, in his own low-key way as sexy as Stack, asked her out. Born in 1925, Thompson began his career playing juveniles in
Gallant Bess
and
The Romance of Rosy Ridge
in 1945 before graduating to more serious roles in
Battleground
and the TV series
Daktari
. Chaperoned by her mother, Elizabeth went with him to the premiere of
The Yearling
, MGM’s major film of the year. Later he visited the Taylor home, and Elizabeth tried to vamp him by dressing up like Jennifer Jones in
Duel in the Sun
, wearing hoop earrings, a peasant blouse, and a full skirt with a cinched waist. It worked. Thompson held her hand, gazed into her eyes, serenaded her with Frankie Laine’s hit “Golden Earrings,” and then gave her a probing kiss she wouldn’t forget. Janet Leigh, one of Elizabeth’s
Little Women
costars, remembered going to a weekend beach party at the Taylors’ Malibu rental along with Thompson, Roddy, Lawford, Van Johnson, June Allyson, and Dick Powell, and described Thompson as “gentle and sensitive and nice.” At a Christmas dance, Thompson kissed Elizabeth under the mistletoe. When she later described the memorable buss to Richard Burton, he flew into a jealous rage and subsequently confronted Thompson, mistakenly accusing him of giving Elizabeth her first screen kiss. “No, darling,” Elizabeth said, explaining that Thompson’s kiss was “
real
” and decidedly “offscreen.” Burton said, “Well, that makes it even worse.”
¹⁶

Marshall Thompson remembered Elizabeth as being “shy and quiet” with a “fully developed female body.” They went dancing at the Coconut Grove and the Trocadero, and on Sundays they went to brunch at Roddy’s house. Inspired, Elizabeth turned her daydreams into poetry, writing a verse called “My First Kiss.” “Heavenly bliss,” she wrote, would come “if only you’d love me . . . Our hearts would tenderly kiss, I would know how happy I would be.”
¹⁷
Metro toyed with the idea of costarring her and Thompson as a romantic duo but finally decided that, though Thompson was seven years her senior, he wasn’t sufficiently mature to be a leading man. The studio eventually dropped his contract. He and Elizabeth drifted apart, and he married a girl named Barbara Long. Elizabeth remained friends with both of them. Janet Leigh, who was having an affair with Barry Nelson, recalls double dating with Elizabeth and Tommy Breen, son of the chief Hollywood film censor, and later with Elizabeth and Arthur Loew Jr., a rich playboy whose grandfathers, Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor, had founded MGM and Paramount, respectively. Resembling James Woods and Peter Weller—blond, lean actors of a later generation—Arthur Jr. produced Paul Newman’s
The Rack
and dabbled in writing at Metro. Janet Leigh described him during his dates with Elizabeth as “natural, easygoing . . . comfortable in all situations, and blessed with a superior sense of humor,” but Joan Collins, a later girlfriend, left him because she found their relationship too platonic. In 1948, Arthur owned one of the few TV sets in L.A., and on Tuesday nights Elizabeth came to his apartment to watch “Uncle Miltie” on
The Texaco Star Theater
, often joined by Shelley Winters and Farley Granger. Elizabeth never regarded the young Loew heir as a steady date. She found herself more intrigued with older men. Metro promised to team her with such established stars as Robert Taylor and Clark Gable once she successfully negotiated the chasm between juvenile roles and adult stardom.

Though she had long been hailed as a world-class sex kitten, she wouldn’t begin to go steady until summer 1948. Former West Point football star and Heisman Trophy winner Glenn Davis, now an army lieutenant, was brought to dinner at the Taylor home by Hubie Kearns, the husband of Metro publicist Doris Kearns. A USC track star, Hubie had appeared as an extra in Davis’s low-budget film debut,
The Spirit of West Point
. Everyone was agog to be this close to the legendary all-American halfback, who was known as “Mr. Outside” and was handsome and built like a god. Davis had distinguished himself on the same army team with “Doc” Blanchard, the equally legendary fullback known as “Mr. Inside.” They’d both appeared in the West Point film, but it brought movie stardom to neither.
¹⁸

“I don’t remember much about that night,” recalled Davis, who was in L.A. on leave and to play exhibition football with the Rams before being shipped to Korea for two years. “I just stared at Elizabeth,” he added, “and I think she stared back.”
¹⁹
There was plenty for both to take in: Elizabeth looked ripe and curvy in her jeans during a game of touch football on Malibu Beach, and the twenty-three-year-old Davis was tall, with reddish-brown hair and a winning smile. Soon he was a regular at the beach house. “He was so wonderful—ye gods!” Elizabeth said.
²⁰
As they strolled in Los Angeles one day, she paused at a jewelry store window to admire a necklace of sixty-nine graduated pearls. Davis bought it for her. Later, at Davis’s exhibition football games, while other fans chanted, “We want Davis! We want Davis!” Elizabeth stood in the stands in his letter sweater yelling, “I want Davis!” Turning to her startled mother, she added, “And don’t think I don’t mean it.”
²¹

Janet Leigh, who was now seeing Arthur Loew Jr., double dated with Elizabeth and Davis and later said that Elizabeth had been so starved for romance that she mistook Davis’s moderate interest in her for undying love. Some observers felt Davis wasn’t aggressive enough, that Elizabeth was ready for him to become “Mr. Inside” instead of “Mr. Outside.” “I should have fallen for a busboy,” she said, sounding testy and impatient when a reporter quizzed her about Davis. All too soon, the army shipped him off to the Korean front, but they wrote to each other, and she wore his gold football around her neck for seven months.
²²

During his absence,
Little Women
began production in June 1948 with Elizabeth playing the role that Joan Bennett, her future film mother in
Father of the Bride
, played in a 1933 David O. Selznick production of the sentimental Louisa May Alcott classic. Selznick had changed his mind about remaking the film with Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple. One day, Elizabeth announced her engagement to Davis without even consulting him, telling a reporter they were “engaged to be engaged.” Years later, Davis issued an amazing denial, stating, “That wasn’t at all the case. We were neither engaged nor ‘engaged to be engaged.’” Elizabeth bored her costars by reading Davis’s love letters aloud on the set and confessed, “I liked playing the role of a young woman in love.”
²³
The husky-voiced, thirty-one-year-old June Allyson, who was married to Dick Powell and expecting a baby, played Elizabeth’s teenage sister Jo March, and later recalled that Elizabeth was “crazy” about Davis and intended to marry him as soon as he returned from the Korean War. “There wasn’t anything about being married that she didn’t want to find out,” said June.

Two months later, in October 1948, Elizabeth sailed aboard the
Queen Mary
for England and her first adult role in
Conspirator
. Though still only sixteen, she played a twenty-one-year-old American debutante in London who unknowingly marries a communist spy, played by thirty-eight-year-old Robert Taylor. When she arrived at Claridge’s she found a bouquet of red roses from Davis, who was still writing her from Korea. Though now earning $4,000 a month, she was chaperoned by both her mother and Mrs. Birdina (Andy) Anderson, her Metro tutor, who continued to coach Elizabeth in her worst subjects, English, algebra, and history. Weary of being watched and supervised, Elizabeth said her parents loved her “too much. They had no lives of their own, especially my mother.” How could she focus on school, Elizabeth wanted to know, “when Robert Taylor keeps sticking his tongue down my throat?” In their clinches Elizabeth fantasized that Taylor was Davis, while Taylor worried about how to conceal his erections, later instructing cameraman Freddie Young to shoot him from the waist up. Patricia Neal, who was in London filming
The Hasty Heart
with Ronald Reagan, overheard Robert Taylor tell Elizabeth, “If you don’t shave those legs, I’m going to shave them for you.”
²⁴

The public wasn’t yet ready to accept her as an adult. When released in 1950
Conspirator
bombed at the box office, but
Variety
applauded her first effort in a romantic lead, writing, “Elizabeth Taylor comes out with flying colors.” Metro was ecstatic, especially when her bathrobe fell open during a scene with Robert Taylor and the full extent of her breast development became apparent. Viewing the rushes, rutting studio executives rejoiced at the evidence of a full-blown love goddess and the promise of a string of box-office bonanzas. Executive Ben Goetz thought her “so beautiful and so capable there’s no doubt she will develop into one of the greatest stars the screen has known.” Since it was still the post-Victorian, pre–1960s era of timidity, prudishness, and censorship, MGM reluctantly decided to scrap the scene and have it reshot. The original negative was destroyed.

One day she met British matinee idol Michael Wilding, who was filming at the same studio and had eyes that were aqua-blue, her favorite color. Until then, she’d been writing Davis nightly, but soon she was haunting Wilding’s set. Though smitten by her beauty, he remained somewhat aloof, mindful that he was thirty-six and she was sixteen. Estranged from his wife, actress Kay Young, Wilding was dating the bisexual Marlene Dietrich, and he’d been emotionally attached to Stewart Granger since they’d first met in 1930. Wilding had every reason not to complicate his life even further, and noted that Elizabeth “was writing to her soldier boy and among other things she was going to balls. Lord Mount-batten gave one for his daughter Pamela, and on that occasion I was very aware of young Miss Taylor dancing with Prince Philip.”
²⁵
Earlier, at a command performance of Metro’s
That Forsythe Woman
, Elizabeth had been presented to the Prince; his new wife, Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen of England; and her parents, the reigning monarchs. Standing in the reception line next to Myrna Loy, Elizabeth said she was sick from food poisoning and afraid of throwing up on the King. As Their Majesties approached, Myrna reassured Elizabeth by saying she felt a little queasy herself, and the introductions went off without a hitch.

On leaving for America, she stood on tiptoe to kiss Wilding goodbye. “I kissed her very thoroughly,” he recalled. Back in the United States, she celebrated her seventeenth birthday on February 27, 1949, at a party at her great-uncle Howard Young’s home on Star Island, near Miami Beach. A well-known and very successful art dealer, Young had long been a mentor of Elizabeth’s father, Francis, and had helped him get established in the art world. Though Elizabeth’s parents had always benefited from Young’s largesse, Francis had never duplicated Young’s success, and at present was almost entirely dependent on Elizabeth for money.