How to Be a Movie Star (47 page)

The world was changing rapidly. In June 1962 Stanley Kubrick's film of Vladimir Nabokov's sexually charged novel
Lolita
debuted to strong box office. how did they ever make a movie of lolita? read the film's posters, a coy wink at the evolution in cultural mores. On Broadway, Edward Albee's profanity-laden
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
opened to ecstatic reviews. The long-banned Henry Miller novel
Tropic of Cancer
was finally published in the United States, prompting legal reconsiderations of the definition of obscenity. When photographs of a topless Jayne Mansfield from the film
Promises! Promises!
were published in
Playboy,
publisher Hugh Hefner was arrested, only to be acquitted at his trial, proving just how in flux public sentiment really was.

Elizabeth herself pushed the envelope when she allowed Hefner to publish nude photographs that Roddy McDowall had taken of her on the set of
Cleopatra.
No matter that the photos were tastefully discreet—no nipples or genitals—the very inclusion of a star of Elizabeth's magnitude in a periodical like
Playboy
enflamed moralists across the country. Yet the average fan-magazine reader seemed more titillated than affronted. "Is she modern or immoral?">
Photoplay
asked. The answer, given the way Elizabeth was increasingly being portrayed, seemed to be the former.

Indeed, nowhere was the change in the public mood better illustrated than in the way the fan magazines covered the TaylorBurton affair. To be sure, sensationalism still ruled, but censure and condemnation not so much. the final act that shook the world was showcased in
Modern Screen
with a two-page telephoto spread of Elizabeth and Richard stretched out kissing in bathing suits. In the accompanying story, Elizabeth comes across not as the black-hearted home wrecker of four years earlier but as a fascinating inamorata determined to marry the man she loves.

To the editors' surprise, this new persona delighted readers instead of driving them away. At the height of Le Scandale,
Photoplay
crowned Elizabeth, along with Jackie Kennedy, as one of "America's 2 Queens." Burton benefited, too. Eddie Fisher had been turned into a cad in the public's mind, but Burton was hailed as a sex god. In
Modern Screen,
Radie Harris revealed why women can't resist richard burton: a "knock 'em between the eyes kind of animal magnetism that makes little girls sigh, 'Thank heaven for little boys who grow up to be big little boys like Richard Burton.'"

Editorial attacks still occurred, but with Helen Gurley Brown's
Sex and the Single Girl
dominating the bestseller lists, they seemed relics of a different era. A new relationship between celebrities, the press, and the public was developing. Tabloids like the
New York Daily News,
which depended on front-page sensationalism, grasped the change quicker and better than most others. While the editorial page might still regurgitate the standard line that the affair in Rome was doing "no good" for the movie industry, the paper also acknowledged the "interesting newspaper copy" the story of "Liz and Dick" had yielded, including the "intriguing telescopic-lens photographs which
The News
has been pleased to present to its fascinated (we hope) readers."

This was the point. Those up-close pictures and stories offered a more uncensored glimpse of celebrity lives than ever before, which in turn allowed the public to form its own opinions about its heroes and heroines without the mediating intervention of publicists or press agents. Such a formula had been unthinkable in the old days; such transparency had been considered fatal to careers. Conventional wisdom had held that such reporting could never work to a star's benefit. Elizabeth Taylor turned that thinking upside down. The more the public was let in on her life, the more it worshipped her.

With celebrity coverage no longer consigned only to fan magazines and gossip columns and now spilling across newspapers, radio, and television, Elizabeth's fans were able to track her every movement, her every nightclub date, her every purchase of Dior furs and diamond wristwatches. Consequently, she became less the shadowy black widow that
Photoplay
had fabricated in 1958 and more like an old familiar—albeit flashy and fabulous—friend. By now people expected Elizabeth Taylor to live like the sexy nymphs of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and
Butterfield 8.
No one but the most rigidly puritanical took offense at her affair with Burton. No one but the most rigidly puritanical would ever turn on Elizabeth Taylor again.

And yet this new paradigm was due as much to the woman herself as it was to any shift in public sentiment or standards of press coverage. Elizabeth's decision not to hide, not to eat humble pie, had paid off. This time there was no skulking around in the back of Roddy's car to avoid the press. Instead, gambling that the world had moved on, she had stepped out unapologetically with Burton on her arm. "If part of the world, unfortunately, has some kind of nasty opinion, maybe it's only to be expected," she said candidly. "But, to me, being honest is all a part of being what one is. I don't try to give any illusion, or delusion, at all. It isn't that I don't care. But what I am is my own business."

Her gamble proved on the money. The public did not turn on her. In fact, her honesty and her sheer likability ensured her continued success. The press, so long accustomed to charades and half-truths, found fresh respect for her. After all, this was a new generation of the fourth estate. Conservative mavens like Hedda and Louella and Walter Winchell were no longer calling the shots. The most influential entertainment writers were increasingly younger and more liberal, people like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris and Liz Smith and Rex Reed—the same generation who were chronicling the revolutionary impact of the burgeoning youth culture. Writers like these were far more apt to extol an independent-thinking woman like Elizabeth Taylor than they were to chastise her, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the old guard. "The press has seemed determined to make a heroine out of Elizabeth Taylor," complained one woman in a letter to Iris Blitch, citing a recent issue of
Look
magazine that had praised "her to the skies." But to a new way of thinking, a celebrity who eschewed spin and studio trickery was worth the veneration. She was a heroine indeed.

This was a radically new dynamic. For a star to speak so plainly was unprecedented. "To tell you the truth," Elizabeth told one reporter at the height of the affair with Burton, "I haven't kept track of my so-called 'public image.' I know that, in the American press, I must get
shticklech,
which is a good Jewish word for needles right below the heart...[But] why get a heart attack over [such press]? I suppose [the public] rather regards me as a scarlet woman. I guess I seem so scarlet I'm almost purple." She seemed to truly enjoy flouting convention. One magazine showed her sprawled out on a couch drinking champagne with Richard, asking in the caption below: "So what do the papers say about us now?"

Her nonchalance was refreshing—yet how would it all play at the box office? That was still the unanswered question. In June the
New York Times
reported that Fox had launched a "quiet study" to test Elizabeth's "box-office status" in the wake of Le Scandale. Apparently in cooperation with the studios that had produced them, a number of Elizabeth's old pictures were rereleased, with Fox reportedly keeping a close eye on how well they performed.
(Suddenly, Last Summer,
for example, played at New York's Murray Hill Theatre from May 23 to 28.) Fox, however, denied that the pictures had been reissued as any kind of test, but instead as a straightforward means "to garner extra dollars at a time when Miss Taylor's name is before the public via daily headlines."

For once a studio denial seems more believable than the story being denied. Surely Fox knew the advantages of those daily headlines; Elizabeth and Richard had become what Melvyn Bragg called "a self-contained media event," providing the studio with "unpurchasable publicity." Even Hedda Hopper expected the headlines were only going to help
Cleopatra
in the end: "The public wonders if the latest scandal will hurt the picture. Well, the day headlines popped about the Fisher separation, people lined up at the corner of Hollywood and Vine to buy papers. Scandal is not always a drawback."

And yet the lore of
Cleopatra
has always held that Fox officials were opposed to the Taylor-Burton affair. Previously unreleased court depositions do provide some evidence of that view, with Elizabeth admitting that Wanger had told her that Skouras was concerned about "a wave of public opinion ... being developed by reason of [her] conduct." Yet, significantly, the depositions also make clear that no one ever requested that she and Burton end the affair. In fact, Wanger's expressed opinion on the relationship was apparently so innocuous that Elizabeth "forgot about it two minutes after he had given it." Later, it would be in Fox's interest to claim that the studio had opposed the affair; but most of the execs were probably in agreement with Darryl Zanuck, soon to replace Skouras at the helm, who candidly admitted: "I think the TaylorBurton association is quite constructive for our organization."

On July 14, 1962, after two tumultuous years, Elizabeth finally completed her work in
Cleopatra.
"I told you we would make it, darling," she said to Richard, squeezing his hand. Mankiewicz and his camera crew headed off to Egypt for a few final location shots, then hunkered down in the editing room with thousands of feet of raw footage. Meanwhile, eager fans besieged Fox with requests for advance tickets, offering to pay up to twenty dollars a pop. And Elizabeth and Richard were bombarded with dozens of offers for new film roles, sometimes apart but more often together. There were no more worries about Elizabeth Taylor's bankability.

Life
magazine put her on the cover naked (cropped at the shoulders) and immediately sold out at newsstands. Inside, Elizabeth was quoted dramatically: "I have paid and Richard has paid through both of our hearts and our guts. Our brains have bled." But there was no bitterness in her voice, only triumph. "I have learned," she said, "that there's no deodorant like success."

Seventy-seven-year-old Hedda Hopper, stiff with arthritis as she made her way down the airplane steps, was not giving up without one last fight.

On tour to promote her memoir,
The Whole Truth and Nothing But,
Hedda was frequently asked to comment about "Liz and Dick." On this day she paused as she stepped onto the tarmac, turning her sharp features in the direction of the questioner and saying, "They are destroying themselves utterly." Then she adjusted her crazy Eiffel Tower hat and walked with a slightly shaky gait to her waiting limousine.

Her book had quite a bit more to say about the pair. Le Scandale had broken just as the memoir was going to press so Double-day had asked for some quick updates. Only too glad to comply, Hedda added considerable material about Elizabeth to the front of the book. She seems to have had a rather specific editorial motive. Since she'd been unable to rally the masses this time, Hedda had settled on another tack. She went after the entire Elizabeth Taylor mystique, suggesting that it wasn't worth the newsprint it had been printed on—even though she herself had done much of the printing.

In the first fifteen pages of her book, Hedda willfully exposed Sara's relentless ambition, portrayed Mike Todd as conniving, rehashed the wrongs done to poor little Debbie, and finally divulged what Elizabeth had said to her after Todd's death ("What do you expect me to do?
Sleep alone?
"). Most incendiary of all, however, was her revelation of the scoop she'd sat on back in 1952: that she believed Michael Wilding to be gay and that she had warned Elizabeth against the marriage.
The Whole Truth and Nothing But
amounted to an all-out broadside against Elizabeth. If one thing didn't stick, Hedda seemed to be hoping, then maybe something else would.

The book came out in November 1962 and spent several months on the bestseller lists in early 1963. Elizabeth had no comment about any of it. But Wilding was furious. Hedda could never understand why; what she'd written about him was "just a little stinking bit," she believed. But, in fact, until the tabloids made "outing" a common tactic two decades later, Hedda's strike against Wilding was the most explicit example of gay baiting in Hollywood history. It was also utterly mean-spirited and thoroughly extraneous. Hedda had no beef with Wilding. He was simply a means to "get" Elizabeth. Wilding decided to get Hedda instead. On April 4, 1963, he blindsided her and her publisher with an unexpected libel suit for $3 million.

Why the suit was unexpected is difficult to comprehend. Hopper's editor at Doubleday, the usually astute Kenneth McCormick, had never asked a lawyer to sign off on the material. Another editor, Margaret Cousins, told Hedda, "I would never have let that pass." But pass it had—into several thousand copies that were now causing cash registers to jingle all across the country. Quite understandably, Wilding feared the effect the book might have on the meager career that he still maintained. In his suit, he charged that Hedda had made her statements in "a reckless and wanton disregard of his rights and feelings with intent to injure his feelings." Of course, Wilding's feelings were the furthest thing from Hedda's mind; he was merely collateral damage in her campaign to punish his ex-wife. Still, the book had subjected him to "hatred, contempt, ridicule and humiliation, and was injurious to his reputation as an actor and entertainer." Wilding vowed to friends: "I'm going to fight this battle and I'm going to win."

He may have had some encouragement in that fight. "Hedda always believed that Liz Taylor was behind Wilding, urging him along," said Hopper legman Robert Shaw. After all, the former spouses had remained friendly, and Wilding enjoyed a good, if often distant, relationship with his two sons. Friends agreed that Elizabeth was infuriated by Hedda's revelations. "She was very protective in some ways of [Wilding]," said one person close to her. "She would have seen this incident for what it was, as an attack on her, and her loyalty to [ Wilding] would have rushed to the forefront."