How to Be a Movie Star (38 page)

"Although Liz and I have been cast in the villains' roles, with Debbie as the heroine, there are just a few things wrong with all the reports that have come out about us and the picture created in the public's mind," Eddie complained to the press. Art Buchwald was one of the few journalists who provided a platform to explain what those "few things" might be. Eddie said: "The legend that [Debbie and I] were the ideal couple was to blame more than anything else for what happened when Elizabeth and I announced that we were going to get married. I'm just a guy whose marriage was at an end. I knew it. Debbie knew it. Our friends knew it. The public didn't know it. Debbie's studio wouldn't admit it. So I was happily married, as far as the public was concerned, long after I was unhappily married."

The problem was, no one cared to hear the truth. The fiction sold so much better.

In the midst of all this,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
opened in New York at Radio City Music Hall. Unlike
Giant,
there was no gala East Coast premiere; Elizabeth remained sequestered in Beverly Hills. But that didn't stop the crowds from showing up. If MGM had worried that the scandal would deter people from seeing the movie, their fears were relieved by the lines that snaked around the corner from the theater all the way down Seventh Avenue. Fans started gathering at daybreak, jamming into the lobby and spilling out onto the street. The first show was scheduled for 10:30 in the morning, and all six thousand seats sold out. Ushers in their crisp white jackets and bow ties did their best to find seating for every one who showed up, but even then there was an overflow. Anxious patrons waited in the street for one of the next shows—1:22, 4:17, 7:17, and 10:11. Every seat was filled at every screening. In between shows the famous Rockettes kicked up their legs—but who cared about them when Liz Taylor was up there on the screen, her larger-than-life image filling up that enormous, darkened theater, her heaving breasts and hourglass hips barely contained in a clingy white slip for most of the film's 108 minutes?

"Ferocious and fascinating," wrote the
New York Times'
Bosley Crowther after seeing the picture—and Elizabeth, who "quite obviously has the proclivities of that cat on the roof," was "terrific as a panting, impatient wife wanting the love of her husband as sincerely as she wants an inheritance."
Variety
praised her "well-accented, perceptive interpretation," and
Time
was impressed by her "surprising sureness."

There had been doubts from the beginning that director Brooks could pull off this adaptation of Williams's play. Despite the steady erosion of the Production Code over the last few years, the homosexuality of Brick could still not be mentioned or even clearly alluded to. That left many moviegoers wondering why a stud like him didn't want to pounce all over a woman as sexually irresistible as Elizabeth's Maggie. The "logical conflict" of the play, as Crowther said, was missing, yet in its place was a tour de force of "visual and verbal displays of vulgar and violent emotions." In other words, one stopped asking
why
and was instead just carried along by the power of the performances: Elizabeth, longing and libidinous; Newman, bitter and boiling; and Burl Ives, duplicitous and dispirited as the dying Big Daddy.

It's remarkable how well Elizabeth holds her own alongside such acting heavyweights. She does more than that, actually. She carries the picture. She is the cat, after all; she is the star. All those early doubts about her acting now seemed like so much needless anxiety. "People sometimes forget that Elizabeth Taylor wasn't just a great movie star, but occasionally a very fine actress as well," said the writer Gavin Lambert.

And never finer than here. As Maggie, she is both scheming and sincere, predatory and pitiful. Even at her most aggressive, spitting curses at her husband or at the "no-necked," monstrous children around her, she never loses our fascination or sympathy. She would be rightly praised for her big, hot-blooded scenes—the shrill "Maggie the Cat is alive!" for example—but even more affecting are the smaller moments, as when Newman asks her what victory might mean for a cat on a hot tin roof. "Just stayin' on it, I guess," she says in a small but confident voice. "As long as she can." Whether she was drawing on the emotion of Mike's death to inspire her, as she would claim, or simply reaching down deep to discover her own gifts, as she had in
A Place in the Sun,
she is superb.

The film was a massive box-office success. Going into widespread release in mid-October, it had grossed several million dollars by the end of the year, and by the time it finished its long tour in the spring of 1959, it had racked up an impressive total of $6.1 million. That was enough to land the film in the top ten moneymakers of the year. Although it was half of what
Giant
had made, it was about equal to
Raintree County.
And since
Raintree
had made most of its money in the first months of the same calendar year, the annual Quigley poll of exhibitors named Elizabeth Taylor—no matter what the fan magazines were saying about her—as the most bankable female star of 1958. Soon ads for
Cat
were carrying the tagline: "Year's most popular actress!"

Surely Hedda and her true believers weren't pleased. But their demonization of Elizabeth had played a part in the extraordinary success of
Cat.
Like Eddie's season debut, many people bought tickets to the film just to see how seductive this Miss Taylor really could be. And on that score, she delivered the goods. Her Maggie is a determined sexual aggressor, literally stripping off her clothes for all those thousands of spectators hunched down in their seats looking up at her in the darkened theaters. She is supremely confident of her allure—every bit the slinky, sultry feline her detractors were describing in their outraged letters to newspapers, networks, and corporate sponsors. And when Brick finally succumbs to the charms of his ravishing wife, the two of them falling onto the bed for the final fadeout, the reputation of Elizabeth Taylor, siren, was secure. There were no doubts that she would always get her man.

And while that fact infuriated some, it delighted many others. If the "value of front-page publicity" had helped
Cat
's initial screenings, it was the film's inherent quality—and Elizabeth's undeniable appeal—that kept audiences coming back, ensuring that the picture would still be in theaters nine months down the road. For all his popularity, Eddie Fisher had no such enduring star appeal; he could do nothing but watch in dismay as his ratings dropped a little lower every week. But Elizabeth was the object of the world's fascination more than ever, and her drawing power was not lost on Hollywood's moneymen. Just a few days after
Cat
's premiere, Seven Arts signed her for her first independent picture, an adaptation of another Broadway hit,
Two for the Seesaw,
for the unprecedented sum of half a million dollars.

In the fall of 1958 the public was dramatically polarized on the subject of Elizabeth Taylor. Some wanted her films banned; others bought tickets to sit enraptured by her image. It's become conventional wisdom that the Liz-Eddie-Debbie affair turned public opinion against Elizabeth, and certainly she was being attacked from many quarters. But for all those hundreds of angry people who took pen to paper to denounce Elizabeth, there were thousands more who did not. We cannot gauge their feelings in the same way we can those of their letter-writing counterparts; if Hedda received any missives defending the star, she did not keep them. But the pro-Elizabeth base seems to have left a record of its own: the box-office receipts of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Even if some of those in the audience remained judgmental of Elizabeth's offscreen behavior, and even if others simply didn't give a hoot about star scandals at all, the rest, perhaps the majority, were sending Elizabeth a message of support—not with letters, but with their pocketbooks. It was this support that she came to understand, appreciate, and, increasingly, rely on.

By October it was clear to Hollywood insiders that they os tracized Elizabeth at their own risk. Gradually she emerged from her cocoon at Frings's house and returned to the Hollywood social swirl. There were luncheons and parties and discussions of her next picture. "People keep stopping me to ask if Elizabeth Taylor is being snubbed," Hedda Hopper wrote. "My answer is no, because no one in our town snubs success." No matter how much it surely pained her to admit it, Hedda understood the wisdom of being seen hugging the star at a party for restaurateur Mike Romanoff in November. There is no record of what either lady might have said to each other through their clenched-teeth smiles.

In December, again at Romanoff's, Elizabeth took the next step: She appeared in public with Eddie for the first time. At their side, to blunt any criticism, was Mike Todd Jr. But even if Hollywood stood in awe of Elizabeth's box-office clout, it remained in many ways a small town that liked to gossip, and the latest was that the Widow Todd was pregnant with Eddie's baby. No longer protected from the scandal magazines by her late husband, Elizabeth found herself targeted by
Inside Story,
which suggested Eddie's divorce wasn't "the only event he and Liz were looking forward to." Reporters noticed that she had gained some weight—especially glaring since her svelte image from
Cat
was still plastered everywhere. One person who saw her at a gathering at Chasen's restaurant told the scandal rag: "It was really a coming-out party. Liz was coming out all over." Although the pregnancy rumors were never stated up front, the innuendo was strong: "The race to get Eddie Fisher divorced, and married to Liz Taylor, is going neck and neck," one item read. "Odds are they won't make it." There were also rumors that Elizabeth hadn't been hiding out at Frings's house at all, but instead had suffered a nervous breakdown and checked herself into the Menninger Foundation.

What Elizabeth faced as 1958 turned into 1959 was not a crisis of career, but of public relations. She may not have been snubbed, but she
was
the target of scorn and rumors. Her record as the biggest female moneymaker in town didn't protect her. Even as the studios fell, image still mattered. And image was still shaped largely through the fan magazines. Since becoming an adult star, Elizabeth had always been depicted as sensual and passionate, but also as sweet and kind; now she was vulgar and coarse, a perception only reinforced by her concupiscent portrayal of Maggie. The Elizabeth Taylor of the fan magazines—a distinct creature from her real self—had gone from saint to sinner in the space of two issues. And sinners could not go unpunished in the world of the fan magazines. "If Taylor was not to be smote in some way," explained the writer Lee Israel, "the world made no sense at all; the lives of the righteous were wasted."

To counter this, Bill Doll tried to fan some sympathy Elizabeth's way. One entire issue of
Photoplay,
on the stands in February and March, was secured for this purpose. The cover article—
WHAT'S HAPPENING TO LIZ NOW?
—presented the star as contemplative and regretful for having caused so much unhappiness. Readers were told that she was just "a shadow of the dynamic person" she once had been. And in a detail sure to stir every mother's heart, Elizabeth was described as heartsick that her boys had to overhear salacious gossip about their mother.

But was it enough? Or was more smiting still in order?

The answer came in April. Nearly three thousand fans lined Hollywood Boulevard outside the RKO Pantages Theatre for the annual Academy Awards ceremony. As the stars emerged from their limousines, resplendent in tuxedos and sequined gowns, the crowd let out rousing cheers. Magnanimity was in the air. Ingrid Bergman, returning for the first time since the scandal that had exiled her from Hollywood, beamed as the crowd began to chant: "We want Ingrid!" For Elizabeth, there was more of the same. When she arrived in a filmy, low-cut black dress, clinging fiercely to Eddie's arm, a huge cheer went up—more evidence that the whole world had not turned on her. With a "fixed smile," Elizabeth made her way inside the theater.

The question on everyone's lips was whether she would win the coveted statuette. Of course she'd been nominated; how could she not have been? There was widespread belief that she had given the best performance that year; her competition was weak, with her only real rival Susan Hayward in
I Want to Live!
But Academy voters have always been a conservative lot; for all of Hollywood's liberal politics and cosmopolitan live-and-let-live attitudes, a cautious core has defined the town from its very beginning, when Jewish immigrant moguls sought above all else the approval and acceptance of America's middle-class heartland. And right now, despite the cheers on Hollywood Boulevard, that heartland was not happy with Elizabeth Taylor. When the award for Best Actress was announced, Hayward's name was inside the envelope.

Some felt that the passionate, redheaded star had earned it, having been bypassed once too often after powerhouse performances. Others felt that the award rightly belonged to Elizabeth for a picture far weightier and more complex than Hayward's prison drama. Yet no matter how much money Elizabeth might be bringing in for them, the industry was not going to reward a home wrecker rumored to be pregnant by another woman's husband. "Liz lost the Oscar at Grossinger's," Sidney Skolsky astutely observed.

But for Elizabeth, the time for hiding, bowing, and scraping was over. On May 12, once the divorce with Debbie was final, she married Eddie Fisher at a Las Vegas synagogue. "There's nothing blue about this wedding," she jubilantly told reporters, explaining that while she might be wearing something old and something new, there wasn't a stitch of blue. "I broke with tradition." She certainly had—and in more ways than just her choice of apparel. A few weeks earlier, she'd announced her conversion to Eddie's (and Mike Todd's) Jewish faith.

So much for the darling little English girl who'd once been held up as the ideal—the "prize," as George Stevens had called her—desired by every American man. If the bluenoses were scandalized before, now they were enflamed. "A traitor to Jesus Christ," one woman called Elizabeth in a letter to Hedda Hopper. A poster for
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
in Arlington, Virginia, was spray-painted with the word "Jewess."