How to Be a Movie Star (11 page)

But then there was Sara, always righter than anyone. In early July she arranged a meeting with Berman. Sitting across from his desk, she calmly and carefully made her case. None of the other girls could be as convincingly English as Elizabeth. None could ride horses as well. To prepare for the part, Sara informed the director, Elizabeth had been riding for an hour and a half every morning at the studio's stables. The little actress, in a red bow and blue dress, sat there nodding and smiling.

Berman was amused by Sara's superciliousness. But he wasn't swayed. Asking Elizabeth to stand, he measured her against the wall, drawing a little pencil mark over the top of her head. Moving his hand up several inches, he told mother and daughter that Velvet Brown needed to stand at least that tall. Unless Elizabeth suddenly sprouted over the summer, he insisted, she would not be in
National Velvet.

At least that's the way Sara and Elizabeth told the story. And there's likely some truth to it, because in
The White Cliffs of Dover,
Elizabeth does appear too small, too doll-like, to play the plucky Velvet Brown. Yet Berman was far too canny a producer to utterly dismiss out of hand the one girl on the lot who seemed to fit the bill on so many counts. And it's no doubt significant that no other actress's name was floated in the press for the part during the summer of 1943.

Still the Taylors took no chances. Elizabeth, almost certainly, really did embark on a campaign that summer to "grow" the required three inches or so. "There was this place Tip's," she remembered, "where they had a thing called a Farm Breakfast—two hamburger patties, two fried eggs, a great big mound of hashed brown potatoes and after that a whole bunch of dollar pancakes. I used to have
two
Farm Breakfasts every morning at one sitting." Of course, all those calories were more likely to make her grow three inches
wider
instead of taller, and certainly Sara was not going to be a party to that. If she encouraged Elizabeth's appetite, it was simply because she never denied her precious child any kind of instant gratification—and Elizabeth had always loved to eat. During a visit several years earlier to see Francis's parents in Kansas, the Taylors had made a swing down to New Orleans. "It was high time," Sara said, "to introduce the children to the gustatorial delights of Antoine's." Elizabeth was four. She sat in a high chair "dining on oysters Rockefeller and pompano baked in a paper bag." Rarely had Sara seen her daughter so happy.

Children often grow in spurts at Elizabeth's age, so maybe it's true that she really did grow those three inches that summer. More likely, Berman simply decided that clever costuming and lifts in Elizabeth's shoes were easier than teaching another girl to ride or put on truly English airs. There was also the fact that, after seeing a screen test of Elizabeth shot by director Fred Zinnemann, both he and Clarence Brown were convinced that "something quite magical happened between Elizabeth and the camera."

On a day in late September, Sara was summoned to Berman's office and informed that Elizabeth had gotten the part. She burst into tears. Elizabeth clasped her hands and in a loud voice—in- spired no doubt by her mother's Christian Science—thanked God for making it happen. "This is MGM," Berman informed the young supplicant, "not Lourdes."

Hedda Hopper, alerted moments later by a jubilant Sara, was one of the first to report the casting, but it was columnist Harold Heffernan who predicted that Elizabeth and her horse would "rocket to stardom" together. Fred Stanley, in the
New York Times,
echoed studio talking points by praising Elizabeth's equestrian skills, which, he said, had landed her what MGM was calling "the biggest kid part in years."

The star-making machine now kicked into high gear. Soon after being cast, Elizabeth was ordered to report to the studio photographer for publicity shots. Wearing a lacy dress, holding her arms demurely, little Miss Taylor posed against a backdrop of flowers. Even in black and white, the glossy eight-by-ten photographs expertly highlighted her most-discussed feature. An accompanying Metro press release informed editors that Elizabeth's eyes were "the bluest of blue."

This was an era before most stars had personal press agents or managers; the studio offered personalized yet factorylike service. Headed by Howard Strickling, an authoritarian taskmaster, the MGM publicity department employed between sixty and one hundred personnel in offices on both coasts and in satellites throughout the country. There wasn't a lot of turnover; this was the dream team. "Mr. Strickling didn't pay the highest salaries," said publicist Emily Torchia, "but neither did he hire and fire. Many of us were in the department for years." What Strickling did was instill a fierce loyalty in his employees toward the studio and its stars. No one talked out of turn, ever. Even the stars were trained to respect one another's privacy. In interviews and photo spreads, they were unfailingly positive about each other, not to mention the studio. "MGM publicists were like none other in promoting the studio brand," said publicist Alan Cahan.

The publicity office was located just off the lot on the corner of Washington Boulevard and Ince Way. Each publicist in- side was assigned three or four stars and a handful of upcoming pictures. Some specialized in the big newspapers, others handled the smaller heartland papers. Still others took care of the national magazines like
Look
and
Life.
Everyone worked with the fan magazines, especially
Photoplay
and
Modern Screen.
The eight Los Angeles dailies received special attention, with one publicist making the rounds every day to deliver tips to the newsrooms. In Hollywood there was little distinction made between moving-picture news and reports from City Hall. While East Coast papers traditionally segregated stories about the movies in the entertainment or gossip sections, the Los Angeles papers often treated such items as front-page news.

The lifeblood of the publicity department was on the first floor, where amid piles of newspapers and constantly ringing telephones toiled the "planters"—industrious drones who spent their entire days typing up two- or three-line items on onionskin paper and sending them out via regular mail and teletype, hoping and praying that some editor somewhere would run them. Sitting down with Elizabeth and her mother, a phalanx of Metro planters scribbled into their reporters' notebooks as many tidbits about the girl as they could elicit. Thus commenced the construction of the public image of Elizabeth Taylor, a process that would roll on for the next twenty years, gathering more and more steam, or simply hot air.

"Young Elizabeth loves animals more than anything except her mother, father, and brother," one plant read. "She has three dogs, two cats, and a menagerie of rabbits." True enough: Elizabeth did have several pets, but surely the Metro planters recalled how phenomenally successful Twentieth Century-Fox had been when the studio based Shirley Temple's public image around her love of animals. With a template already in place on how to create child stars, MGM publicists used it. How excited they must have been to learn of Elizabeth's horse in England, presented to her when she was just five. And so we got the stories about Betty, the horse who could sometimes go "absolutely native," with only little Elizabeth able to calm her. How fortunate MGM was to have such a tale to promote
National Velvet.
In the script, of course, the young heroine does exactly the same thing.

Invisible to the public was the worldly little girl who occasionally shocked her classmates with a well-placed "hell" or "damn." As presented by the press, the young Elizabeth Taylor was as innocent as a fawn, though she could also be plucky and precocious. Indeed, when they weren't busy promoting her love of animals, the publicists were hyping Elizabeth's determination, which seemed at times almost otherworldly. Those three inches, true or not, were indelibly imprinted upon the Taylor myth.
CHILD LITERALLY GROWS INTO ROLE
headlined one item prepared by the publicity department and run verbatim in several newspapers, including the
Los Angeles Times.
In these accounts Elizabeth is depicted as "willing herself" into the part of Velvet Brown, with a belief in her destiny as strong as any saint's—an echo, again, of Sara's Christian Science. Fan magazine writer Herbert Howe picked up on this theme, writing that some around the lot claimed that Elizabeth could perform miracles. "The child puts a spell on birds and beasts and studio bigwigs," Howe wrote. "She waved the wand and shot up like Kansas corn three inches. Her doctor said it was not possible, but she said it was if you realized it was God's plan."

Or her mother's.

Dick Hanley's desk sat just past the door that led into the private suite of Louis B. Mayer, the omnipotent godhead of the studio. Only the most privileged ever made it past Hanley's desk. Few but the top stars and directors—and the money men from New York, of course—had ever seen the inside of Mayer's private sanctuary. But today's visitor was a little girl who'd just turned twelve years old—the latest protégé of the studio's starmakers, the newest addition to Mr. Mayer's family of beloved "daughters."

Dick was thirty-five years old, a native of Indianapolis, the son of an Irish immigrant railroad clerk. As the youngest child of four, he'd been pampered by his parents, who scrimped and saved in order to send him to college while his older brothers trudged off to jobs as tire salesmen and railroad operators. In his early twenties, Dick taught English at a private school, still living at home. But he hankered to get out of Indianapolis. Like so many young gay men, both then and now, Hanley harbored a deep wanderlust, a yen to discover a place where it might be possible to lead a more fulfilling, authentic life.

So he found Hollywood, arriving in the movie capital at a time when many other men, not so much younger than he, were marching off to war. But a deferment kept Hanley safely stateside. A friendship with Kate Corbaley, the studio's chief reader of scripts, led to an introduction to the formidable Ida Koverman, once campaign secretary to Herbert Hoover and now executive assistant to Louis B. Mayer. Koverman had a job in mind for Dick. Although her boss was notoriously uncomfortable around male homosexuals, Mayer's respect for Koverman overcame any misgivings that he might have had. He hired Hanley as his personal secretary.

For the next eleven years Dick served Mayer "devotedly [and] loyally," Elizabeth would say, "available twenty-four hours a day." Hanley would never forget the afternoon in late 1943 when the young starlet and her mother passed by his desk on their way into their meeting with the studio chief. Dick had brought a box of cinnamon buns into the office that day, and Elizabeth's nostrils suddenly flared at the aroma. Hanley noticed a gleam in the little girl's eye.

"Would you like one?" he asked.

Of course she would—but even as she stretched out her hand, Sara was urging her onward. It wouldn't do for Elizabeth to greet Mr. Mayer with sticky fingers.

It was a courtesy call, but still the stakes were high. Mayer needed to be thanked, flattered, and bowed down to for agreeing to cast Elizabeth in
National Velvet.
If he liked her well enough, and if the picture performed as well as they hoped, there was a long-term contract on the other side of all this. Nothing could have pleased Sara more.

But Elizabeth wasn't entirely sure. Entering Mayer's office, she was distinctly nervous. She knew that people on the lot called the Executive Building "the iron lung" because "the executives tell you just how to breathe." Even at twelve years old, she was aware that "stars were born and built and died more or less at the whim of L. B. Mayer." The round little man frightened her, and as she took a seat opposite his desk, she kept her eyes fixed on him. "He looked rather like a gross, thick penguin," she said. "He had huge glasses and a way of looking at you that made you feel completely squash-able. You felt his vitality, but you also felt his enormous arrogance, his ego, his overbearing, driving personality. To know him was to be terrified of him."

But that day Mr. Mayer couldn't have been more gracious. He recalled—or
said
that he recalled—an interview he'd had with mother and daughter several years earlier, before they'd signed with Universal. He lamented the fact that they hadn't become part of the MGM family back then. (Sara, in her telling of the story, would always insist that Mayer had wanted to hire Elizabeth at that time, but
she
had turned
him
down—a rather unlikely scenario.) Mayer enthused about his high hopes for
National Velvet,
and with a twinkle in his eye, assured them that he already had other projects in mind for Elizabeth.

When he wanted to be, Mayer could be very charming—and there was no question that Sara was dazzled. It wasn't long before the stars in her eyes were noticed by other people on the lot. Ava Gardner would always believe that Sara and Mayer had had an affair; Francis Taylor's brother was convinced that if the studio chief had ever snapped his fingers, Sara would have left her husband for him. It's not so far-fetched. Sara was used to relying on older benefactors like Victor Cazalet and Howard Young. And having only recently lost Cazalet in a plane crash, she may have been, even unconsciously, looking for someone to replace him, someone who could ensure her well-being in a way that her husband never could and who could play doting godfather to Elizabeth.

But Elizabeth never warmed to Mayer the way her mother did. She found the enforced adulation of the man utterly unnerv ing. His very public birthday parties, held on the enormous Stage Thirty, were particularly egregious. A year earlier, before she'd become a hot property, Elizabeth had stood on tiptoe near the back of the crowd to see "Big Daddy Mayer, the benevolent white father," as she called him, standing up on a dais and beaming as hundreds of his employees sang "Happy Birthday" to him. Afterward he gushed how he considered them all his children. At his side were his top stars, people like Robert Taylor, Van Johnson, Greer Garson, and five-year-old Margaret O'Brien, then MGM's most popular child actress. O'Brien was so successful that she could even opt out of the studio school, taking lessons from a tutor in the privacy of her dressing room.