How to Be a Movie Star (17 page)

"It was quite the party scene," said Clayton, then a thirty-four-year-old bit actor starting over as an agent. "It wasn't every day that ordinary people like us could see Liz Taylor get married in person just like she did on the screen."

Elizabeth Taylor, now properly eighteen years old, was finally giving the fan magazines the payoff they'd been clamoring for—and, not coincidentally, just in time for the release of her picture,
Father of the Bride.

After a year of jilting her Dear Johns, it was, perhaps, inevitable. So many suitors, so many unsatisfactory endings. It was time to get Elizabeth Taylor hitched. After all, she was now an adult, having graduated from the MGM school in January. To receive her diploma, she'd trooped over to a real high school to sit among teenagers she didn't know, strangers who lived a few blocks and a zillion psychic miles away from her. When the graduation speaker encouraged the students to persevere so they could make it in life, Elizabeth got the giggles. She was already making $2,000 a week.

And at that price she was a girl who couldn't say no—at least to the studio. When Monty Clift balked at continuing the publicity ruse, canny press agents kept the spotlight on Elizabeth through a series of romantic pairings that would climax with the wedding in Beverly Hills. To find the next beau, she was actually raffled off. Paramount staged a contest at UCLA to name the school's "Great Lover" with a particularly inventive crowning touch: The young lothario's prom date would be Elizabeth Taylor. The winner, a handsome blonde sophomore named Bob Precht, was fitted in white tie and tails, and loaned a Cadillac so he could pick up his date. In a lime green taffeta-and-tulle gown designed by Par-amount's top costumer, Edith Head, Elizabeth looked stunning as she waltzed out of her front door. But along for the ride came twenty-five press agents and dozens of photographers, and Precht was barely able to say more than a few words to his date all night. Each time they got up to dance (the prom was held on the Paramount lot with Bob Hope as emcee) they were blinded by camera flares. Afterward, to Precht's regret, there was no goodnight kiss—although Sara did offer a snack of spaghetti and milk when they got back home, all duly recorded for the fan magazines.

"Taking her out isn't like dating a coed," Precht complained to a reporter. "She's from a different world." Elizabeth was quoted as saying that the prom had been "more fun than going to Mocambo"—certainly a disingenuous statement, if she said such a thing at all.

Then came Ralph Kiner, outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates and home-run king, the only National League player with two fifty-plus seasons. Elizabeth was photographed on his arm in December at a premiere, invoking memories of the last athlete passed off as her boyfriend, Glenn Davis. But Hedda called Kiner "a real guy."

But what the public wanted was something that would last. This became glaringly obvious to the Metro publicity department once filming of
Father of the Bride
got under way. In a film far less complex than her last one, directed by the far less demanding Vincente Minnelli, Elizabeth was playing a girl deeply in love and preparing to be married in a lavish ceremony. Elizabeth's fans—it didn't take Einstein to figure out—would adore seeing their heroine in a wedding dress. The problem was that some people still called her a flighty heartbreaker who jumped from beau to beau offscreen. And so the Metro press agents got to work.

"All that engagement press had been very good," said Dick Clayton, referring to the fan-magazine euphoria when Elizabeth announced that she'd marry Davis or Pawley. "Now the studio seemed to be saying, 'Let's give 'em a real marriage.'"

Here lies the origin of Elizabeth Taylor's long marital history and her iconography as a much-married star. MGM's lucrative positioning of her as a bride-to-be in 1950 ensured that romance and marriage would forever be essential components of her fame.

According to Dick Clayton, who drew on his longtime close association with many Hollywood agents and publicists, the studio had decided that "Liz should get married and it should be [coordinated] with the release of
[Father of the Bride].
" MGM publicist Emily Torchia admitted, "There were always marriages made by the studio...[like] that first one of Elizabeth Taylor's." But before anyone could proceed, they needed to figure out who would be her husband. It was like casting a movie.

Enter Conrad Nicholson Hilton, Jr. The tall, handsome playboy son of the millionaire hotelier had met Elizabeth briefly at Mocambo a few months earlier. That introduction would be retroactively assigned by press agents as the start of the romance. For chroniclers of Elizabeth Taylor's life this would present some awkwardness, since this was also the point at which she was supposed to have been head over heels in love with Montgomery Clift. Trying to calculate it all, many concluded that the new guy must have been a rebound romance. But the wedding to Hilton was more like an extended photo opportunity for a picture that needed to be promoted.
Two
pictures, in fact, since by late January a sequel to
Father of the Bride
had already been ordered up even before the first film had been released. So a tremendous amount was riding on all of this. A real wedding alongside the cinematic one could mean another million dollars in profit.

What made Nicky the ideal candidate—aside from his own celebrity, something Pawley had lacked—was how cooperative he was regarding Elizabeth's career. It had been no coincidence that he'd been formally introduced to her by the son of Y. Frank Freeman, the head of Paramount; Hilton understood from the start that this would be a studio deal. Much would be made of Nicky's asking Francis Taylor for Elizabeth's hand—just as her fiancé in
Father of the Bride
asks Spencer Tracy—but no doubt another important meeting took place as well: between Nicky and the heads of MGM. "Of course they'd insist on [meeting him]," said Dick Clayton. "Elizabeth was one of their most valuable properties. They had to make sure they weren't taking too big a risk by marrying her off."

Hilton had his own reasons for wanting in on the deal. Five years older than his bride-to-be, he was not only his father's namesake but also his favorite. Yet Nicky's lack of ambition had often troubled the senior Hilton. Despite his education at the Ecole Hôtelière in Switzerland, the young man's chief claim to fame had been his idea to install pens too long to be easily stolen in all of his father's hotel rooms. Meanwhile, the more industrious younger son, Barron, had already married and sired two children, who would one day expect a sizeable slice of the family fortune. Nicky expected that a spectacular marriage to Elizabeth Taylor would nudge his brother out of the family limelight.

And so he was prepared to be extremely accommodating. "He won't be annoyed because of the things I have to do," Elizabeth told Louella Parsons soon after their engagement was announced in February of 1950. "Nick understands we'll be photographed most places we go and that there will be pictures made of even our honeymoon house. He understands that these things are part of my career and he does not resent them."

Wedding plans unfolded that spring, and it was uncanny how much they paralleled what Elizabeth and Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett (playing her mother) were acting out on the Metro lot. Looking back now, calling it all a coincidence seems the height of naïveté. The press, no doubt, understood the arrangement. Louella Parsons said, "It tickled [Elizabeth] to be going through all those movie angles and problems in real life." Hedda, always keen to signal that she knew the score, wrote just before the engagement was announced, "With all this 'bride' talk, it will be a miracle if they don't push Liz into wifehood and motherhood in real life—as well as reel."

One day toward the end of the shoot, Hedda arrived on the set just as Elizabeth was taking off her wedding dress. "I wish you'd seen the wedding," the young star said dreamily. "The ceremony was so wonderful, I cried just as brides do." Perhaps illusion and reality were beginning to blur dangerously. Or maybe she was just acting, as she was learning to do.

The fact was that just as the onscreen Elizabeth was being fitted for a wedding dress, so too was the real-life Elizabeth flying off to New York with her mother to see the famed couturier Ceil Chapman, who had been tapped to design her trousseau. Just as Spencer Tracy blustered about onscreen as the harried father of the bride, so too was Francis Taylor portrayed in the fan magazines as forever fretting and bellowing. Asked whether he wanted to serve hot or cold hors d'oeuvres at the wedding reception, Francis supposedly huffed, "I won't have cold fish at
my
daughter's wedding"—which sounds nothing like the urbane Mr. Taylor but very much like Tracy's screen persona. When Elizabeth's character Kay was surprised by a diamond ring, Elizabeth herself suddenly sprouted a five-carat square diamond on her finger. All of this was planned so that when
Father of the Bride
was released, audiences would feel as if they were witnessing not movie fiction but the behind-the-scenes preparations for Elizabeth's real-life marriage.

That many of her wedding plans were publicity-driven didn't mean that Elizabeth, ever the romantic, didn't love playing the happy bride on either occasion. For her, it was just one more instance where fame and public image spilled over into real life, blurring—perhaps obliterating—the line between them. The studio's orchestration of her marriage was simply par for the course.

And she liked Nicky well enough. He was dashing and never boring. They ate hot dogs and chili beans and French apple pie on their dates. He bought her beautiful things. At a Beverly Hills jeweler, looking for "something nice" for his fiancée, Nicky was asked, "Blonde or brunette?" He replied, "Platinum and diamonds." The public loved it.

So did Elizabeth. She was getting used to major gems and the kind of life a wealthy fiancé could provide. "Every day I love him better," she gushed to Louella Parsons, clearly not sinking much effort into the script. After all, they would be married in a Catholic church; she wouldn't be going through with it, she insisted, if she didn't think that the marriage would last forever. Catholics didn't allow divorce, after all. Yet while she "studied" the religion, Elizabeth never actually converted. Someone was hedging their bets. Someone was advising her not to take too many chances. The bride would admit to crossing her fingers behind her back as she took her vows.

But the question lingers: Why did the sometimes stubborn and often independent Elizabeth agree to this—the kind of celebrity fairy tale that her new hero, Montgomery Clift, openly despised and never would have tolerated? Well, it was fun, for starters. What young woman doesn't want to be the bride? Besides, she'd been trained not to think too far beyond her next part, and this one sure was a blast. She was feted all over town. The Metro wardrobe girls pitched in to make her bedroom slippers that were wrapped in a box of white satin studded with seed pearls. Hedda Hopper declared that there hadn't been so many lavish bridal showers in Hollywood since Vilma Bánky had married Rod La Rocque in 1927. As usual, Hedda was doing her part, calling the union "ideal," since the couple would live in Beverly Hills and there would be no disruption to Elizabeth's career.

And so, on the late afternoon of May 6, Elizabeth arrived outside the Church of the Good Shepherd in a limousine escorted by an honor guard of off-duty policemen on motorcycles, their sirens blaring. Although it was against regulations for policemen to use sirens while off-duty, Elizabeth had kissed the lead cop on the cheek and said in her sweetest, most seductive voice, "Let's hear it for the bride. Let them know I'm coming." Never underestimate the power of a great entrance. As the limousine and the shrieking motorcycles slowed to a stop in front of the church, the crowd, many of whom had been waiting all day, let out a roar of applause. Elizabeth stepped out of the limo just as regally as Princess Elizabeth had from her carriage a few years earlier. The comparisons were duly made, usually in the American Elizabeth's favor.

"Metro had stage-managed it down to the slightest detail," Dick Clayton said. On his toes to watch Elizabeth walk into the church, he was awestruck at the smoothness of the production. They'd even managed to get her there on time, he marveled. Elizabeth moved with the supremely confident air of someone accus tomed to the eyes of a crowd. With a practiced wave, she turned once and smiled, then gathered her dress to proceed through the front door. "It was almost as if there was an invisible director telling her, 'Okay, now wave, now walk,'" Clayton said. "It was like a movie scene, so slick, so smooth. I couldn't get over it."

Certainly Elizabeth looked every inch the movie star. Her hair had been styled, naturally, by Sydney Guilaroff and her dress designed by Helen Rose. Liberated from the censor for once, Rose had designed the flowing white satin to emphasize Elizabeth's small waist and large bust. "It's about as plunging as anything could be," she gleefully admitted after a description of the dress was "leaked" in advance of the wedding by a "spy" in the MGM publicity department. ("That was standard," said Dick Clayton. "Get what you wanted out there, then smile and blame it on a spy.") Every last glittering detail of Elizabeth's wedding dress was gobbled up by an avid public, many of whom then copied the pattern for their own weddings, from the chiffon at the neckline to the embroidery of seed pearls to the "misty" veil worn over the face.

Inside the church, Metro organizers kept up the cinematic illusion. Studio florists arranged the flowers; studio photographers patrolled the aisles; a studio contract singer trilled "Ave Maria." Elizabeth's attendants, billed as her "girlfriends," were, in fact, fellow contract players like Jane Powell and other girls with studio affiliations (with the exception of Mara Regan, soon to be the wife of Elizabeth's brother, Howard). And the seating plan devised by the studio made sure to place Elizabeth's parents together—
all
of them. Donald Crisp and Anne Revere, who'd played Elizabeth's mother and father in
National Velvet,
sat with each other in one pew; not far away, Greer Garson sat with Walter Pidgeon, preserving the movie family of
Julia Misbehaves.
And, in a place almost as prominent as Sara and Francis, Spencer Tracy was paired with Joan Bennett, reliving the roles they'd just finished in
Father of the Bride.