How to Be a Movie Star (20 page)

***

Sitting in the house that the studio had found for her, gigantic electric fans rattling in the windows, Elizabeth read over the latest updates to the script of
Giant.
As angry as she might have been at Stevens, she remained grateful to him for casting her, especially since she knew that he'd wanted Audrey Hepburn first, and when he couldn't get her, he had hoped for Grace Kelly. Elizabeth had been his third choice. "Dearest George," she'd cabled the previous May. "Thank you so much. I hope I will be everything you want Leslie to be."

For
A Place in the Sun,
Stevens had never wanted anyone other than Elizabeth. But
Giant—
the story of three generations of Texas cattle ranchers and oilmen that was based on Edna Ferber's epic novel—was as big and sprawling as
A Place in the Sun
had been small and intimate. The simpler style that had served Elizabeth so well on the earlier film was never going to work here. For
Giant,
she needed to act in big, broad gestures that could command the wide screen of CinemaScope, but she had to be careful never to come across as garish or theatrical.

It was a heady challenge. The role of Leslie Benedict was a big, meaty one, with heart and spunk and passion. In a key scene, this former delicate flower from the verdant hills of Virginia stands up to the rough-and-tumble Texas cattlemen and demands to be treated as their equal. Not since her last project with Stevens had she been called on to do this much real
acting.
Despite all the acclaim she'd received for
A Place in the Sun,
no Academy nomination had materialized; no great follow-up parts had come from Metro. Instead they kept putting her in lightweight trifles like
Callaway Went Thataway
(1951),
The Girl Who Had Everything
(1953), and
Rhapsody
(1954). In
Elephant Walk
(1954), filling in for Vivien Leigh at Paramount, all she had to do was scream effectively when the pachyderms attacked.
Beau Brummell
(1954) was simply an excuse to dress her up in exquisite period costumes. The
New York Herald Tribune
called her a "china doll."

Only in
The Last Time I Saw Paris,
released in November 1954, did Elizabeth actually have to act, to apply some of the lessons Monty Clift had taught her. Based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the film reunited her with Van Johnson from
The Big Hangover,
but now Elizabeth was billed first. As the independent spirit whom Johnson tries to tame, Elizabeth was playing a character more multilayered than usual. For a change, she had to learn "more than just glib dialogue." Director Richard Brooks drove her hard, sometimes pushing her to tears. Despite the film's overlong script and a bland performance from her costar, Elizabeth proved quite creditable in the part. She was, in fact, playing a variation on her public image: a sweet, basically decent girl who loves jewelry and clothes maybe a little bit too much, and who craves attention so much that she jumps into fountains to get her name into print. At one point she turns to her aspiring-author husband and asks, "Will you still worship me when you're famous?"

In real life, everyone knew how much her husband worshiped Elizabeth. She'd married Wilding on February 21, 1952, a week before her twentieth birthday, in a ten-minute ceremony at the Caxton Hall registry office in London that was as simple as her first one had been extravagant. The only thing the two weddings had in common was the mobs gathered outside. Despite the fact that most Londoners were still in mourning for King George VI, who'd died just two weeks earlier, three thousand people waited outside the registry for the newlyweds. When they emerged, a roar of applause rattled the windows along the street. In the crush of fans, Elizabeth lost her hat; several people hopped onto the running boards of the car and held on as the couple sped off for their reception at Claridge's. Safe upstairs at the hotel, Elizabeth and Michael could hear the constant chanting of "Liz! Liz!" from below. The new Mrs. Wilding wanted to wave from the balcony, but Mr. Wilding balked. "We are not royalty," he said. But Elizabeth knew better. After she coaxed him outside, they basked in the cheers for nearly half an hour.

Michael refused her nothing. He wasn't wealthy like Hilton, and that would take some getting used to for Elizabeth. But her new husband did his best to give her everything she wanted. The image that emerged from fan magazines suggested absolute devotion. According to the official publicity surrounding their marriage, it was Elizabeth, nineteen, who proposed to Michael, thirty-nine, who found himself absolutely unable to refuse her teenage charms. Wilding's adoration offered an important contrast to Nicky Hilton's disinterest, which had threatened to devalue her stock as an alluring screen goddess. The publicity around her second husband was intended to rectify that situation.

If the choice of Hilton as husband had been career-driven, then the choice of Wilding was even more so, some believed. "Wilding fixed everything," Dick Clayton said. No longer was Elizabeth the fickle girl shedding a husband after just six months. Now she told the press, "I just want to be with Michael and be his wife. He enjoys sitting home, smoking his pipe, reading, painting. And that's what I intend doing—all except smoking a pipe." It was a picture of domestic bliss that was meant to stifle the carping of moralists like Ida Zeitlin. And it worked, too. The press loved the Wilding marriage, assuring readers that Elizabeth had finally "grown up."
Look
magazine pronounced Michael "everything a doctor could have ordered."

To understand the etiology of the Wilding marriage, it's necessary to consider the full context of Elizabeth's life at the time. In late 1951 she was nearing the end of her MGM contract. Her agent, Jules Goldstone, was encouraging her not to sign again, proposing instead an independent production company, where she'd be able to enjoy more control. As shrewd as Hollywood agents came, Goldstone was a trust-busting attorney who delighted in subverting the autocratic control of the studios. As a founder of the Goldstone-Tobias Agency, he had created one of the first boutique talent agencies in Hollywood. Setting Elizabeth up as an independent would have been a real coup for him. But Goldstone was also smart enough to know that Miss Taylor's reputation needed a bit of sprucing up after her sensational divorce. So it was with real interest that all eyes turned to Michael Wilding in those final months of 1951.

He was a tall, distinguished, even elegant man. Elizabeth had first met him while making
Conspirator
in London some three years before, when she was just sixteen. Zealous publicists would later insist that it was then and there that she'd first fixed her eye on him as a potential mate. (This was at the same time, of course, that she was supposed to have been in love with Glenn Davis and William Pawley, but, as always, the public's short memory served to everyone's advantage.) When Elizabeth again encountered Wilding during the making of
Ivanhoe
in October 1951, she was no longer a schoolgirl but rather a not-so-gay divorcée. Someone—maybe even Elizabeth herself—got the idea that the debonair actor might just be the solution to her public-relations problems. It was true that he was married, but he hadn't lived with his wife, the actress Kay Young, for years. Certainly Goldstone must have agreed to the idea, since he immediately began representing Wilding as well. Sara, too, gave the match her blessing, since it meant that Stanley Donen wouldn't be coming around anymore.

Wilding did indeed fix everything. The fact that Elizabeth's glamorous sapphire and diamond engagement ring was paid for not by him but by the bride suggests that this was an enterprise arranged by interested parties. The alacrity with which Kay Young filed for divorce in November, after years of an amiable separation, also tells the story. The suddenness and unlikeliness of the Wilding-Taylor union left some bewildered—perhaps even the groom himself. "They were married [with] Liz wearing a dove gray suit and Mike wearing an air of surprise," one scribe observed.

Yet like his predecessor, Wilding had his own reasons for agreeing to the marriage. Popular in Britain as the frequent co-star of Anna Neagle in a series of melodramas directed by Neagle's husband, Herbert Wilcox, he had his eye on the kind of big-time American success his friend, the bombastic, flamboyant Stewart Granger, had achieved. Granger lived in a gorgeous house in Beverly Hills and starred in Technicolor swashbucklers for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—including
Beau Brummell
opposite Elizabeth Taylor. But since Wilding was an unknown to most Americans, the independent production company that Goldstone envisioned was not nearly as desirable for him as a contract with MGM.

By November Elizabeth and Goldstone had reversed course. Contract talks were restarted with the studio. But it wasn't just Elizabeth under discussion anymore. When Wilding came to Hollywood in December to ostensibly promote Neagle's film
The Lady with the Lamp,
he was, in fact, meeting with Metro execs. Goldstone made the pitch: If the studio signed Michael, Elizabeth would agree to stay put. Desperate not to lose her, MGM agreed. Elizabeth's about-face would be explained by saying that she'd gotten "cornball sentimental about Benny Thau and all the other nice people at the studio"—so much malarkey when one recalls how intensely she'd always disliked the studio system. But the despised Louis B. Mayer had been toppled and replaced with Dore Schary. A new regime, Elizabeth assumed, could only be better.

Even if the studio wouldn't have placed Wilding under contract if Elizabeth hadn't insisted, it's apparent that MGM saw the benefit of the marriage. The stories that appeared in the press of Elizabeth and Michael taking a "fishing trip" in northern California with Stewart Granger and his wife, Jean Simmons, were clearly the result of well-timed studio "plants." Such stories allowed the romance to take its place in the headlines, even as the studio officially denied any marriage plans. Within days the newspapers were inundated with romantic stories of "Liz and Mike," and soon the fan magazines had taken up the refrain. As studio publicists cranked out their releases, the press eagerly did its part to obliterate any memory of Nicky Hilton and the embarrassments he'd caused.

That is, all except Hedda Hopper, who let it be known that she did
not
approve. Elizabeth had chosen Wilding without any input from her. Hedda was furious—especially because she believed that she knew something Elizabeth didn't.

"I don't think you know what you're getting into," Hedda lectured the couple, whom she'd summoned for an emergency meeting at her home in Beverly Hills. Elizabeth and Michael sat de murely on the long settee in her den. "In the first place," Hedda argued to her honorary niece, "he's too old for you." Then she delivered the bomb: "And the rumor around town is that Michael Wilding and Stewart Granger are very, very close!"

Hedda didn't make such allegations lightly. "She knew who was gay and who wasn't," said Robert Shaw. "She never made a charge unless she had reason to believe it was true." Plenty of circumstantial evidence backed her up: the long, childless, separate-but-cordial union with Kay Young; the close friendship with Granger; the companionship of Marlene Dietrich, who was known to prefer gay men as escorts; and the idolization of Judy Garland, who made Wilding so nervous the first time he met her that he had to have several drinks to steady himself. There also would have been, Shaw said, more direct evidence collected by Hopper from her network of spies. "She had the dirt on everybody," Shaw said. "She knew where the bodies were."

In Hedda's mind, Wilding's marriage to the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth was like Granger's marriage to the twenty-two-year-old Jean Simmons: a cover-up that took advantage of a young girl. "The Wilding marriage was arranged from the start," Shaw believed, and his impression came directly from Hedda. Others agreed. Elsa Maxwell, when told of the impending marriage, discounted it as a rumor, insisting that Wilding was too "sophisticated" to marry the pretty teenager. Perhaps, then, marriage to Elizabeth Taylor offered another kind of benefit to a man looking to become a big American star.

As she confronted the couple, Hedda turned her gaze to Wilding. "Are you denying it, Michael?" she asked. He just sat there, as Hedda described, "with eyes downcast."

The columnist seemed apoplectic. "Are you going to marry a man like that?" she bellowed at Elizabeth. "Do you know what kind of life you'll have?"

Hedda Hopper has been called homophobic, but that's an oversimplification. With so many gay cronies, she clearly didn't hate homosexuals. To be sure, she had her generation's usual prejudices and wasn't above gay-baiting when it served her purposes. But she held no particular moral objection to gay people. Cole Porter and George Cukor were just dandy in her book—because they didn't make a pretense of who they were. They never tried to
pass.
Of course, homosexuality in Hollywood was kept secret from the general public, and Hedda understood that—but she had no tolerance for phonies within the industry. "If you tried to pull the wool over her eyes," Robert Shaw said, "she resented it." That was why she always despised Cary Grant for marrying all those wives. "Whom does he think he's fooling?" she wrote to the publisher of
Look
magazine. "He started with the boys and now he's gone back to them."

According to Stewart Granger, who would deny having a sexual relationship with Wilding, the bride-to-be was unfazed after the meeting with Hedda. "Oh, Mikey, don't worry about it," she said, brushing off the entire episode. For a girl whose best friends were Monty Clift and Roddy McDowall, marrying a gay man might not have been the worst thing in the world—especially after the horrible Nicky Hilton. Elizabeth thought of Wilding as "an oasis," she said. "He restored all sanity [and] represented tranquility, security, maturity—all the things I needed."

And for all her spite, Hedda could be counted on to keep mum about her accusations, at least in print. It would be years, in fact, before she'd make public what transpired at her house that day in late 1951. Had she written up her charges in her column at the time, as some biographers claim, Wilding's career would have been ruined. The only comment she made in print came a few days after the wedding when she asked Kay Young if she was "as fond of Stewart Granger as Michael is." Wilding's ex-wife took the bait. "Not really," she said. "He has a very strong personality but he doesn't take me in."