How to Be a Movie Star (39 page)

It was a period of intense anti-Semitism in America; throughout 1959 and 1960, vandalism struck Jewish targets in what one historian has described as a "swastika epidemic." Much of this was the leftover prejudice of McCarthyism, but part of it may also have been a response to the many celebrities who had very publicly converted to Judaism in the last few years: Marilyn Monroe, Carroll Baker, Sammy Davis Jr., and others. Now Elizabeth had joined their ranks—even if, according to Eddie, she never attended any formal service at a temple again.

Her conversion was her decision, and hers alone. Neither Mike nor Eddie had ever asked her to do so. In many ways, it was an act of defiance against her mother, who'd once railed against Stanley Donen (but who nonetheless smiled wide for photographers at the wedding in Vegas) and against her uncle Howard Young, who reportedly had snarled, "What the hell does she see in all these Jewish guys?" But even more, it was a deliberate flouting of the sacred canon of all the scolds who'd taken her to task—not only Hedda and Louella and the fan-magazine writers, but the busy-bodies in the public who'd written such vile letters condemning her. It was Elizabeth's "fuck you" (a favorite phrase) to her critics. This shouldn't imply that her conversion wasn't sincere; Elizabeth was always too heartfelt, too childlike in her enthusiasm, to ever be insincere for very long. But her Judaism does seem to have had a more social than spiritual application.

If she had wanted to stir the pot, she succeeded. Outside her Vegas hotel, protestors carried signs reading
LIZ LEAVE TOWN!
She ignored them, turning up everywhere in white chiffon and diamonds. The protestors were doing her a favor by ensuring that her name stayed in the papers even when she had no picture to promote. Frings's theory that no publicity was bad publicity might be true after all. At Eddie's nightclub shows, she sat front-row center, her head held high, her neck and ears sparkling in diamonds. Audiences came to see her as much as they did Eddie. "It's a double act," Skolsky said. "She's part of it."

Eddie, no doubt, was grateful. His television show had been canceled just weeks earlier. Now his fame depended less on any Vegas act than on the lovely, glittering bride who dazzled from the front row. Not without reason had the judge who'd handed them their marriage license suggested that Eddie sign first. "It will be the last time you will be first for a long time to come."

Seven

A Second Chance on Life

May 1959–April 1961

A
BOARD THE
O
LNICO
, a two-hundred-ton chartered white yacht, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher sailed up the northeast coast of Spain on a very public honeymoon. Their cabin was decorated to look like Christopher Columbus's berth on the
Santa Maria,
and a chef prepared a daily smorgasbord of meats, fish, cakes, and pies. Dropping anchor off the coast of Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera, Elizabeth left the yacht to sashay into the resort town and buy armloads of new clothes. The newlyweds gambled at the casino in Cannes until the early hours of the morning, drinking champagne and winning enough to pay for their suite at the exclusive Carlton Hotel. "I'm so happy, so happy," Elizabeth gushed to reporters. Far away from the sniping and backstabbing of the American fan magazines, it was almost as if she were rubbing her marriage in the faces of her critics.

By the end of the month, with Elizabeth's three children now in tow, the Fishers had settled in England, renting a house at Englefield Green in Surrey, about twenty miles outside London. Reporters waiting at the gate counted forty-four pieces of luggage and made sure to comment on Elizabeth's ermine-lined purple coat and low-cut dress. It wasn't their first brush with a movie star. Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller had spent several months at Englefield Green following their own honeymoon. Stopping to chat, Eddie told the reporters he was weighing some British television offers. But that was blarney. The real reason they were in Eng land was so that Elizabeth could make
Suddenly, Last Summer
for producer Sam Spiegel, her first independent picture.

With both
Busman's Holiday
and
Two for the Seesaw
falling through, Elizabeth had agreed to yet another Tennessee Williams adaptation about the ways in which repressed homosexuality can destroy a family; the first one had done pretty well by her, after all. Kurt Frings had accepted Spiegel's offer on Elizabeth's behalf, provided that she was paid as much as Seven Arts had been promising. Spiegel agreed: half a million. The money was needed to maintain the yachts and the clothes and the chef. For Elizabeth, however, the icing on the project was the chance to play opposite Monty Clift again.

"There was a joy and a freedom in being able to choose your own projects," said Shirley MacLaine, who, like Elizabeth, was also breaking away from studio control at the time. "The old moguls were essentially hard-fisted authoritarians who had created a system of linked dictatorships to control the creative people. We were supposed to be the children; mad, tempestuous, brilliant, talented, not terribly smart children. We were to be led, guided, manipulated, bought, sold, packaged, coddled, and tolerated. But we were not to be allowed to master our own destinies."

But Elizabeth was now in charge, at least for the moment, and she dove into the project with gusto. It was wild stuff, way over the top. Her character, driven mad by the cannibal murder of her cousin, screams and cries and pulls at her hair. At Shepperton Studios in London, Elizabeth emoted her way through a painstaking re-creation of a New Orleans garden, complete with Venus flytraps. She was solicitous of Clift, who was drinking heavily and a far cry from his once-handsome self, and worshipful of Katharine Hepburn, who played her overbearing aunt. She liked the crew, too, sharing their bawdy humor. "Come here, you asshole!" became her own personal term of endearment.

But it was with director Joseph Mankiewicz
(A Letter to Three Wives, All About Eve, Guys and Dolls)
that she forged her closest attachment. "Are you planning to lose any weight?" the director had asked upon meeting her, shaking the flab on her arm and likening it to "a bag of dead mice." All those extravagant meals and bottles of wine onboard her yacht had left the twenty-seven-year-old star a little fleshy, and Mankiewicz suggested that she tone up. Elizabeth didn't take offense. In fact, she was enchanted. And she allowed him to push her in her performance, too, which required her to go from shrinking to shrieking.

A big, strong-willed man with a sharp wit and an intense focus on his craft, Mankiewicz had recently been through the painful suicide of his wife. Elizabeth found his combination of strength and vulnerability irresistible. She also appreciated his consideration of Monty—which directly refutes Hepburn's famous contention that the director had run roughshod over Clift during the shoot. "Elizabeth wouldn't have tolerated any mistreatment of Monty," said Mankiewicz's son Tom. If the director had abused her good friend, she certainly would never have begun an affair with him—which is exactly what some people believe she did in the summer of 1959.

"Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I believe they had an affair," Tom Mankiewicz said. "You wouldn't know it from looking at Michael Wilding or Eddie Fisher, but the Elizabeth I knew really, really loved strong men. Mike Todd probably spoiled her forever in terms of strong men. Dad was a strong man—bombastic, smart, confident. She wanted that in a man." The actor Martin Landau, who'd later make
Cleopatra
with Elizabeth and Mankiewicz, also heard stories of an affair between the two. When asked by a friend on the Roman set of that later film if he was having an affair with his glamorous star, Mankiewicz quipped, "Hell, no! That was during our
last
picture!"

Not three months after her marriage to Eddie—a marriage that had rocked her public—Elizabeth was very possibly in the arms of another man. And maybe
two
men: Another off-and-on romance reportedly began during this period with the much-older political columnist Max Lerner, who'd written a piece defending Elizabeth during the Liz-Eddie-Debbie debacle. By Lerner's own admission, Elizabeth would slip out after shooting and meet him in some darkened, anonymous corner in a London pub.

It was unusual behavior for a newlywed who'd just bucked the world to get the husband that she wanted. But Elizabeth was restless. "I think very soon after her marriage to Eddie, she started asking, 'What have I done?'" said one friend. In public, they remained the picture of happiness—no brawls like the ones with Mike Todd—though Eddie often came across as defensive. "Her name is
Mrs. Fisher,
" he angrily corrected newsmen who persisted in calling Elizabeth "Miss Taylor." Elizabeth would respond with her high, girlish laugh. Some friends thought that she was laughing
at
—not
with
—her husband.

Their private life was very different from their public one. Eddie, as his memoirs would reveal, remained hopelessly in love, but Elizabeth seems to have lost respect for her husband very quickly. His career had tanked, and he didn't seem to care. This made for a stark contrast with Mike Todd, which Elizabeth found deplorable. Eddie would admit that he lost his way during these years. He'd regret that, unlike Sinatra or Como, he never built a legacy of "songs that meant something." Instead, he had banked everything on his marriage to Elizabeth, counting on her career to ensure his future as a producer and actor. She was to be his ticket to success and a certain way of life. It wasn't all that different from the way Elizabeth had once counted on Todd.

But as steward of his wife's career, Eddie was a failure. He set up the Fisher Corporation to produce films for himself and his wife, but none of his projects ever got off the ground. Still, he tried his best to act like Mike, showering Elizabeth with emerald earrings and diamond-studded evening bags—but they were paid for from their joint account, which these days was being filled more by Elizabeth's earnings than by his own. It's not surprising then that when Eddie gave her gifts, Elizabeth didn't gush quite the way she had done with Mike. After receiving one diamond necklace, she turned it over in her hands and asked how much it had cost. "Fifty thousand dollars," Eddie boasted. Giving her husband a withering look, Elizabeth said, "There's not a decent stone here. You've been taken." So much for filling Todd's shoes. Eddie didn't even know how to buy good diamonds.

As Eddie's mentorship of her career faltered, the Todd organization was also coming apart. Mike Todd Jr.'s attempts at filmmaking—a gimmick called Smell-O-Vision—went nowhere. The once-formidable support team of publicists and lawyers and accountants all went their separate ways. It was Kurt Frings who ran Elizabeth's career now, largely on his own. Though great shows were made of Eddie's reviewing his wife's contracts, it was simply a way for him to save face. Eddie had become irrelevant only a few months into their marriage.

Kurt Frings, however, was rewriting all the rules of Hollywood, and Elizabeth was the beneficiary. No longer content with the record-breaking sum of $500,000, Frings told producer Walter Wanger, who'd inquired about Elizabeth's appearing in his production of
Cleopatra
for Fox, that her asking price was now $1 million. Although much has been made of Elizabeth being the first star to make a million dollars a picture, in fact William Holden had beat her to that sum for
The Bridge on the River Kwai
in 1957. But Elizabeth
was
the first woman to ask for such a salary, and Wanger's initial reaction was to balk. "An unheard-of price for an actress," he wrote in his diary.

Such sexism didn't discourage Frings. He was masterful in positioning Elizabeth as being in the driver's seat in these negotiations; Wanger's diary reveals that it was the star, not her agent, who made the million-dollar demand in a phone call on September 1, 1959. While Mike Todd had certainly toughened her up in the ways of business, no doubt Frings (who, after all, came to her through Todd) had prepped her on what to say. "Kurt worked behind the scenes," said Dick Clayton, who as a fellow agent was privy to the kind of wheeling and dealing that went on. "As a good agent, he'd tell her what he thought was the highest they could get." So he in structed Elizabeth to ask for what Bill Holden had gotten for a similar big-budget movie. It was only fair.

No doubt Frings was aware that Fox's 1960-61 production schedule was budgeted at $60 million; surely they could afford to pay Elizabeth one-sixtieth of that if they really wanted her. The economic walls of the industry were due for stretching, Frings believed. Actors had been left stranded for too long outside those walls even though their drawing power was what brought in the profits. Until now, that money had been collected and controlled by the studios in an effort to sustain their massive operations. But times were changing. When Wanger came back with the news that Spyros Skouras, president of Fox, had refused the million-dollar demand, Elizabeth (with a few tears thrown in for effect) countered that she'd accept $750,000 against 10 percent of the gross.

This counterdemand was clearly a strategy of Frings's, who was well aware of the similar deal given to Holden and John Wayne the year before for
The Horse Soldiers.
He also knew, being a friend of Wanger's, that the producer had never wanted anyone else but Elizabeth to play Cleopatra and was ready to move mountains to get her. So by October 10, according to Wanger's diary, the $1 million asking price was back on the table. And through a bit of sleight of hand on Wanger's part, Elizabeth got it, and possibly more. Fox would pay her $125,000 for sixteen weeks of work, plus $50,000 a week for every week of overtime, plus $3,000 a week in expenses, plus (and this was the revolutionary part) 10 percent of the gross. In the end, if
Cleopatra
had the kind of grosses that everyone was expecting (
Bridge on the River Kwai
had made $18 million), Elizabeth would make much more than $1 million.