How to Be a Movie Star (26 page)

Dick Hanley was smiling. He knew that his boss despised false modesty. That was Todd's whole reason for this party—to rub his success in the noses of all those in Hollywood who had doubted him. Here was Mike Todd, on the banks of the Thames, hobnobbing not with nouveau riche movie folk but with authentic aristocracy. He'd bussed them in by the hundreds on red double-deckers, their tiaras and jewelry bouncing along on the ride to Battersea. Helping the Duchess of Argyll alight, Todd cracked, "Imagine, a duchess on a bus." The quip went around the globe in an instant, and Mike Todd, the son of a poor rabbi from Minneapolis, was suddenly king of the world.

And at his side was his twenty-five-year-old queen, the radiantly beautiful and visibly pregnant Elizabeth Taylor. Todd, twice her age, helped her onto one of the boats that ferried guests across the Thames. A Spanish singer serenaded her with a flamenco gui tar as she placed her hand to her heart and blew her husband a kiss. From the front came the bells and gongs of Oriental music; from behind, the soulful call of Hindustani strings. Seven different bands played music from the seven different countries visited by Phileas Fogg in the movie, turning the normally quiet waterway into a cacophony of music, laughter, and applause.

On shore it was more of the same. Seven chefs whipped up seven different national cuisines to satisfy every taste. Fish and chips were served in baskets lined with specially printed editions of the
Times,
dated 1873. Giant prawns were brought in from Hong Kong; curry dishes from India; sweet potatoes from Virginia. At the sideshows, partygoers dug their hands into buckets of copper pennies to use for playing the roulette wheel. The coins came courtesy of Todd in order that his guests would not have to pay for a single thing—not even the penny prizes. From caviar to stuffed bears, the entire night was on him. No wonder the champagne was still flowing well past dawn the next day.

Of course, Todd's generosity was matched only by his self-promotion. "An openhanded sort,"
Time
magazine called him, "who would pass out salted nuts at his own hanging if he owned the beer concession." Todd did, in fact, own the concession; after
Around the World
he could do anything he wanted. Hollywood was his. Every studio was ready to open its gates—and its coffers.

At one point, however, his mood darkened. A drunken guest staggered a bit too close to Elizabeth, and Mike suddenly seized him by the collar and nearly shoved him into the river. "My wife is pregnant," he growled. "Will you please be a gentleman?" Raised eyebrows were exchanged between Lord Dalkeith and the Countess of Dartmouth. So
that
was the famous temper of the American showman. Elizabeth joked that she might have the baby right then and there, and if so, she hoped that it was a girl. "I don't know whether the world is ready for another Mike Todd," she said, eliciting a round of laughter.

They'd been married for five months; she was probably seven months pregnant. They'd just come from Cannes, where Europeans had gotten their first glimpse of Todd's film, and where, just for the fun of it, the producer had invited a thousand people to a casino on the Boulevard de la Croisette and imported a circus from Paris. Lions and tigers paced in their cages as guests dined on smoked sturgeon. When Mike brought his wife around to the gambling tables, Elizabeth dropped her hand into his jacket pocket and withdrew a stack of notes. "There must be $10,000 here," she gushed, wide-eyed.

"Pocket money," he told her. "Put it back. And don't count it. It's vulgar to count money."

That much cash in the pocket of Mike Todd could be a dangerous thing, especially in a casino. At the age of fifty, he had already made and lost a million dollars in Chicago's construction industry, gambled away a second fortune, and declared bankruptcy twice. "He was a man who didn't look back," said Susan McCarthy Todd. "There was always something better ahead that he was planning to make happen."

And all he had to do was snap his fingers. Two days after his Battersea Park bash, Todd packed up his wife and entourage and planned to sail back home. His baby, he insisted, would be born on American soil. But at a farewell party in their hotel suite, attended by friends and a scattering of reporters, Elizabeth suddenly appeared in the doorway and announced that she'd lost their passports. Mike exploded.

"Call the American Embassy!" he shouted. It was left to Dick Hanley, as usual, to calmly remind him that it was the Fourth of July, and the embassy was closed. "Then call the American Consul in Southampton!" Hanley wasn't sure that there was time for new passports to be issued, since they were sailing in a matter of hours. But Todd was confident. "They'll fix us up somehow," he said. After all, he was Mike Todd.

Indeed, they all sailed later that day on board the SS
Liberté,
temporary passports in hand. The consul had opened its doors as a special favor to Mr. Todd. After that, their voyage was uneventful. Given Elizabeth's condition, Todd said that he had put in a special request for calm seas. There were some who took him at his word.

Sailing across the Atlantic, Mike Todd kept the telegraph operator busy, sending out regular dispatches to his publicist, Bill Doll, in New York. The American tabloids were eager for items about Todd and his fabulous London bash and all of the glittery guests who'd been in attendance. They wanted news of his wife and the baby she was expecting even more. Todd complied, sending ship-to-shore messages detailing Elizabeth's daily schedule of lounging on a chaise and eating sliced pears and chocolate peanuts. He wanted the public to be assured that he was treating her like a queen.

How different Elizabeth's life was from just a year before. When she met Todd, she'd been an unhappy wife pining for attention from a distant husband. Mike supplied that in spades, but he gave her even more. In those last few years with Wilding, what Elizabeth had really longed for was liberation from her masters at Metro—a seemingly impossible dream, since it would have meant sacrificing the money and the fame that enabled her to live in the style to which she'd grown accustomed. Enter Mike Todd, whose goals neatly complemented Elizabeth's. Looking to make himself a major Hollywood player, Todd recognized the benefits of being married to Elizabeth Taylor. "She was like the jewel in the crown," said Miles White, Todd's friend and costume designer on
Around the World in Eighty Days.
"He liked having her on his arm because she was a living, breathing, gorgeous symbol that he had made it to the top of the Hollywood pack."

The union of Taylor and Todd occurred because of what each could do for the other. Mike had the wealth that would free Elizabeth from dependence on Metro; she had the fame on which he could trade to make it in the film industry. In many ways their romance wasn't unlike the passionate pairing of another prominent couple nearly twenty years earlier. In 1938 Katharine Hepburn was a star in trouble, branded as "box-office poison" and desperate to climb back on top. Howard Hughes was an aviator with dreams of glory, who had captured the world's attention with a daring and ostentatious around-the-world flight. With this union Hepburn maneuvered herself back on the covers of the fan magazines even as her films were flopping, and Hughes solidified his shy lothario image by having won America's most aristocratic star. "He was sort of the top of the available men—and I of the women," Hepburn wrote. "It seemed logical for us to be together ... We each had a wild desire to be famous."

While Elizabeth did not share Hepburn's "wild desire" for fame, she did have a very strong predilection for a certain way of life—which she had come to expect as her due after being a star for more than a decade. Making movies may never have been a passion for her—but living like a movie star certainly was. Mike Todd was the answer on both counts. Elizabeth knew from the start that the flamboyant showman could be her escape from MGM. She hadn't been in front of the movie camera since finishing
Raintree County
almost a year earlier, and the lack of film work had been absolute heaven. For Elizabeth, Todd held out the promise of a golden future—
not
the future Metro publicists tried so hard to sell to the public, the one that portrayed her as longing for a simple domestic life as a wife and mother—but rather something far more glorious than that: travel and adventure, fabulous parties and even more fabulous diamonds, palatial homes and easy living. Scrimping and saving and sitting home the way she had with Michael Wilding was definitely
not
going to be Elizabeth Taylor's fate.

But she did make the requisite noise about retiring from pictures in favor of home, hearth, and babies. "Mike and I hope to have many children," Elizabeth was quoted as saying in one Metro press release. "I think it's much more important for a woman to be a mother than an actress." She stated it even more plainly elsewhere: "I've been an actress for fifteen years. Now I want to be a woman!"

But even if Todd allowed her to think that way for a time, his wife's retirement from the screen was certainly not part of his game plan. He'd shrewdly placed her on the board of Todd Pictures, Inc., and was already using her name to drum up interest and money for his planned production of
Don Quixote.
Despite the fact that she could barely sing a note, there was also talk of Elizabeth's starring in the next Todd-AO project, the film adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical
South Pacific.
Elizabeth's stardom was, in fact, her dowry, the currency with which her husband planned to do business in Hollywood.

And surely she understood that. Stepping out of their limousine one day soon after their marriage, the Todds had bantered with reporters, something that they seemed to enjoy. Asked if he looked forward to making pictures with his wife, Todd joked that he'd have it written into her contract that she wouldn't have to report to the set any earlier than four in the afternoon. Suddenly Elizabeth's emerald-studded purse clobbered him over the head. Yet for all her mock offense, no doubt the idea was appealing. Making movies as Mrs. Mike Todd would be very different from slaving away as one of Metro's "chattel." Production would be on
her
terms—or at least her husband's—and not those of the money-grubbers in the front office.

That doesn't mean that Elizabeth and Mike weren't crazy in love. In Hollywood the recognition of the mutual benefits of a relationship can be the greatest aphrodisiac of all. Hepburn and Hughes may have contrived their initial meeting for their own purposes, but eventually they developed very strong feelings for each other. The same was true for Taylor and Todd. "I love him madly, passionately," Elizabeth told the press. "Why do I love him so much? Because the first time he made love to me, I think my heart stopped beating."

And why wouldn't it? Making love to Elizabeth meant giving her gifts, extraordinary gifts. Even before the divorce with Wilding was official, Todd presented her with a diamond "friendship ring" that left her eyes bulging. And the gifts kept coming. Shortly before their marriage Todd had imported an expensive, British-made car that boasted its own bar and stove. "There's no such thing as a happy actress," Todd joked with the press. "But I think I know a girl who's going to be a happy housewife." Asked if he thought that Elizabeth would be happy cooking on an automobile stove, Todd replied, "Well, not exactly. I've bought a yacht, too."

To mark their official engagement, Mike had presented his bride-to-be with a twenty-nine carat, emerald-cut diamond ring. ("Thirty carats would have been vulgar," he told his son.) There were other rings, too: pearls, garnets, and another diamond (valued at $92,000) that was so big that Elizabeth couldn't get her glove over it when Mike gave it to her at Libby Holman's house. So the glove was left behind; Holman later had it framed.

The love story of Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Todd would be spun by the press as the spontaneous combustion of two people who meet and discover they are soul mates. Kevin McClory, who had proven so accommodating to his boss's objectives, was never mentioned. Instead, Todd was the knight in shining armor who had rescued Elizabeth from long, lonely nights "pacing through the rooms of her house trying to forget her memories." Just what those memories might be—broken romances, failed marriages, her children losing a father—was better left unsaid, at least in official accounts.

Yet it's surprising how, in the age of scandal magazines, these official accounts predominated when it came to Elizabeth and Mike. This most likely was something else that his wife could thank him for: Todd's glad-handing of the press meant that she was off-limits, for now anyway. At Sardi's in New York, Mike often power-lunched with Robert Harrison of
Confidential
and Harrison's crony, columnist and broadcaster Walter Winchell. Todd was one of the most important sources of news and scuttlebutt for both men—which explains the rather astonishing fact that Elizabeth was, for the moment anyway, not a subject of the scandal rags.

Given the kind of salacious stories that were printed every month about Lana Turner or Ava Gardner, the fact that Elizabeth, under Mike Todd's protection, was spared the scandal-magazine treatment is quite extraordinary because the longstanding rules of the Hollywood press were breaking down by the mid-1950s. The careful balance between studio, star, and public had been thrown off-kilter by the scandal rags, and it never fully recovered, not even after the industry marshaled its forces and brought lawsuits against
Confidential,
effectively ending its reign. Harrison had made the public aware of the game being played. "Hollywood is in the business of lying," he wrote in one editorial. "Falsehood is a stock in trade. They use vast press-agent organizations ... to build up their stars. They glamorize and distribute detailed—and often deliberately false—information about private lives. They have the cooperation of large segments of the daily press, many magazines, columnists, radio and TV ... practically every medium except
Confidential.
They can't influence us. So they want to get us."