How to Be a Movie Star (6 page)

In mid-February, Jack Brodsky still wanted to "bottle it up" as long as possible because the public would "crucify her and picket the theaters if she breaks up another family." Yet less than three weeks after making that dire prediction, Brodsky was "hoping and praying" that the sideshow didn't end before the picture was finished after he saw the enormous interest generated by the affair. He no longer denied to reporters the tales of the couple's clandestine meetings and may have even spread a few stories himself. A wire from the Fox front office affirmed the wisdom of the strategy: "We've been on page one of the
Daily News
and the
Mirror
for five days in a row. That's better than World War II!" Dorothy Kilgallen was certain that Fox must "appreciate the invaluable publicity Liz gets every time her private life explodes onto the front pages." Even Mankiewicz came around. A framed newspaper cartoon on his wall said it all. Two suburbanites are standing on a train platform in front of a poster advertising
Cleopatra.
"What really annoys me the most," one says, "is that I know I'm going to see it."

But they all still understood the risk. The final impact of the affair on the film remained a big unknown. The world was changing, but that much? Would the public really come out to see an adulterous couple flaunt their lovemaking on the screen?

Walter Wanger, who years before had shot his wife's lover in the testicles, suggested removing one of the principals from the scene. On March 10 C. O. "Doc" Erickson, the production manager for the film, was waiting outside Wanger's office as the producer concluded an emergency meeting with Eddie Fisher. Columnist Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper's most hated rival, had just announced the collapse of the marriage. It was "no secret," Parsons wrote, "that Elizabeth has fallen madly in love with Richard Burton." (Not to be outdone, Hedda came out with essentially the same story a few days later.) It was a crestfallen Eddie who emerged from Wanger's office. Turning to Erickson, Wanger said, "I think I've convinced him to go back home to the States. There's nothing here for him but further embarrassment." Erickson was sympathetic to Eddie. Even people who had disliked him for the airs he'd assumed as Elizabeth's consort were suddenly sympathetic. "We all just felt so terribly sorry for Eddie," Erickson said.

Increasingly delusional, Fisher continued to insist that he and his wife remained "very much in love." But it wasn't just love that bound him to his bride. Like everyone else, he wanted a piece of the action. Eddie had dreams of becoming a great Hollywood producer. He'd been trying to package a deal for the two of them for some time, negotiating with Warners to make
The Gouffe Case,
in which Elizabeth would star with none other than Charlie Chaplin. Eddie was going to make $2,000 a week—a major sum in 1961—and there was talk of four more pictures in four years. Eddie—a kid from the tenements of South Philadelphia—would be set for life. But only if he remained Mr. Elizabeth Taylor.

Pacing around his Cinecitta office ashen-faced, Eddie was barely conscious of the phones ringing off their hooks. His bags were packed, but he was refusing to leave. He was getting desperate. Dorothy Kilgallen, whose inside sources resulted in scoops that left Walter Wanger flummoxed, wrote confidently in her column that "Eddie's friends think it won't be long before he resumes his singing career so long neglected while he danced attendance on Liz." Meanwhile Elizabeth was in a back room of the suite, refusing to see anyone and drinking Bloody Marys brought in on a tray by John Lee. Insisting to Eddie that the phones needed to be answered, Dick Hanley typed up a brief statement that read: "Mr. and Mrs. Fisher have no comment at this time." Handing the statement to Hank Moonjean, who had a desk in the same suite, Hanley instructed him to read the words to whomever called. Moonjean obeyed. And every time Elizabeth heard him read the statement from the other room, she screamed for another Bloody Mary. Finally John Lee, who was always a bit daft, approached Eddie and said, quite seriously, "You know, if this keeps up, you are going to have to get more
tomato juice!
"

Eddie left Rome a few days later, arriving in New York on March 21. The situation, he told friends, had become "unbearable." His wily agent, Milton Blackstone, arranged an appearance for him as the mystery guest on the television game show
What's My Line?—
"a neat stroke of public relations," Dorothy Kilgallen called it. Eddie predicted on air that the winner for the Best Actress of 1962 would be "Elizabeth Taylor Fisher" for
Cleopatra,
but as Kilgallen acidly remarked the next day, "Nobody who knows the scene at Via Appia Pignatelli in Rome is convinced that Liz will still be Mrs. Fisher when that Oscar-time rolls around." Richard Burton, she told her readers, was now the man at Elizabeth's side.

That same day Eddie swallowed a handful of Seconals with vodka (an echo of Elizabeth's own overdose and a foreshadowing of Kilgallen's own death three years later) and was admitted to Gracie Square Hospital on East Seventy-sixth Street. The press reported that he'd suffered a nervous breakdown and was being given shock treatments. In fact, he was beating his blues by becoming addicted to speed.

That explains the bizarre press conference that he called on March 30 at the Pierre. Before coming downstairs, Fisher was shot up with a full dose of what his doctor, Max Jacobson, called his "vitamin injections." Jacobson was known as "Dr. Feelgood" to a roster of celebrity patients that ranged from Tennessee Williams to President John F. Kennedy, and what he was really administering was amphetamines. The shot sent Eddie "through the roof," skyrocketing him to "the heights of elation." With a cocky swagger he faced the hundred or so newsmen gathered in the hotel's Sapphire Room.

Natty in his checkered sports jacket and gray slacks, Fisher sat on a sofa, coolly facing a battery of microphones while television lights flickered on overhead. "Elizabeth and I," he insisted, "have never been happier." As a special surprise, he phoned Rome and left word for his wife to call back and confirm everything that he was saying. Reporters cast doubtful glances at each other. For fifteen minutes Eddie—high and seemingly delusional—cracked jokes and denied any problems in his marriage. Then word came that Elizabeth was on the line. With a wink and a grin, Fisher told the reporters that he'd be right back. He took the call in an anteroom.

When he returned, he was pale and shaken. Elizabeth, he announced, would not be making a statement as he'd promised she would. "You can ask a woman to do something and she doesn't always do it," he said, all his bluster and swagger gone.

"Say, Eddie," lobbed one reporter, "did you know that an Italian newspaper has just published a photo of Burton and your wife kissing offscreen?"

"Really?" Eddie laughed, trying to feign disbelief. "I'd like to see it."

The next morning he got his wish. On the front page of the
New York Daily News,
under the banner headline
FIRST PHOTOS LIZ AND BURTON,
was a grainy telephoto shot of a man and a woman standing beside a car. They were kissing. And despite the poor quality, it was obvious they were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

The enterprising Elio Sorci, who had taken those sensational shots of Ava Gardner, had once again scored a coup. Hiding all day under a car across the street from the Cinecitta studios, he had jumped out just at the right moment, that fleeting second when Richard's lips touched Elizabeth's to bid her good night. The photo had first appeared in
Lo Specchio
before making its way to New York; Elizabeth had certainly seen it. No wonder she told Eddie that she wanted nothing to do with his press conference. The truth could no longer be avoided; even Fisher, high or low, must have understood this as he slunk out of the Sapphire Room, cameras flashing, a beaten, pathetic figure.

"The 'kissing picture' of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton," as Dorothy Kilgallen referred to it, "was merely their way of 'making it official' for Mrs. Burton and Eddie Fisher, in case they hadn't received the message already."

Finally, it seemed, Eddie had heard it loud and clear.

"Let's order fettuccine!" Elizabeth Taylor suddenly proclaimed, throwing her hands into the air during an impromptu party at her villa. "With gobs and gobs of cheese sauce!"

Roddy was there with John Valva. So was Dick Hanley with John Lee. And Tom Mankiewicz and Elizabeth's children. And Richard Burton—a regular fixture at Elizabeth's villa now that Sybil, in a strategic retreat, had taken their children and returned to London.

Elizabeth was feeling giddy. Eddie's departure had liberated her. Not that she didn't have compassion for him. "I was, I suppose, behaving wrongly because I broke the conventions," she said. "I felt terrible heartache because so many innocent people were involved. But I couldn't help loving Richard. I don't think that was without honor. I don't think that was dishonest. It was a fact I could not evade."

She also wasn't completely blasé about the possibility of another scandal. Many times she cried in Hank Moonjean's arms, "afraid of what the world was going to say." She had been through it all before when Eddie had left Debbie to be with her and the press had been brutal. "She knew she might have to go through it all over again, and it terrified her," Moonjean said. "But she couldn't help it. She was in love. That's all she knew."

Outside the paparazzi kept up their vigil. They camped out boldly in the street, setting up television cameras on tripods. Peering out a window, Elizabeth could see men perched in the trees. Or maybe she no longer saw them. "We eventually got used to all the photographers," said Tom Mankiewicz. "They just became a fact of life." When a car stopped out front and a man hurried up to the doorway, huge arc lamps switched on to illuminate the house. Might it be Eddie come to beg for a reconciliation? Or a lawyer from Sybil come to serve papers on Richard? But it was only the guy delivering the fettuccine.

Washing down her meal with endless glasses of red wine, Elizabeth was fascinated by tales of another Hollywood marriage in trouble. Roddy had just informed her that Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh were separating. "And here I thought they were so
happy
together," Elizabeth said, just as the doorbell rang again.

Blinding white light poured in once more through the windows of the villa from the television crews outside. Reporters once again chased after the man who approached the house. Elizabeth opened the door herself. It was her friend, the writer Meade Roberts. "Meade," Elizabeth said dramatically, her voice barely heard over the furious snapping of cameras and the shouted questions from reporters, "is it really true what I hear about Tony and Janet?"

No irony punctuated her question. She genuinely wanted to hear the latest. Yet as popular as they were, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh never had to deal with the onslaught of attention that Elizabeth was attracting in Rome—attention she was now nearly oblivious to. Without appearing to notice the commotion she'd caused by showing her face, Elizabeth embraced Roberts and brought him inside. Once the door was closed, the lights went off, the paparazzi returned to their trees. This was the way Elizabeth Taylor lived.

All of the people around her—the newshounds, the publicists, Hedda and company, even friends like Dick and Roddy—all of these people lived for her, wrote about her, gossiped about her, chased after her, photographed her, served her, supported her, and waited on her. All of them fed off her stardom, sustained by their sliver of her reflected glory. If not for Elizabeth, where would they be? Who would they be? Their existence revolved around her—her needs, her whims, her illnesses, her romances, her mistakes. She was their sun. And each and every one of these devotees—like those far-flung fans reading movie magazines—believed that they knew her intimately.

It had always been this way, ever since she was a young girl on the MGM lot. "I don't remember ever not being famous," Elizabeth would say. This was a woman whose existence—fact, fiction, and reality, both heightened and harsh—had become conjoined, merging into something that few others, even other movie stars, would ever know the pleasures or costs of experiencing. That's really the key to understanding everything else about her. So famous, so constantly in the public eye, she was, as critic David Thomson has observed, "half asleep from being stared at." Of course, she wasn't really oblivious to the ubiquitous photographers. But she was never Marilyn, cowering in fear; she was never Jackie Kennedy, with whom she was so often compared in these years, pulling up her collar, wrapping a scarf around her face, and donning oversized sunglasses so that she wouldn't be recognized. For Elizabeth, recognition was a fact of her existence, "the air she breathed," said Mike Nichols. Sometimes it was fun. Sometimes it was a nuisance. Mostly it just was.

And then one night she grew tired of eating fettuccine from cardboard boxes and decided that she wanted to play on the Via Veneto. "They want pictures," she suddenly announced, her famous eyes blazing, "so let's
give
them pictures!" Donning her leopard-print fur coat and a matching hat, she took Burton by the arm and headed into the city. The paparazzi went berserk. Stepping out of her sleek black Cadillac, Elizabeth faced them head-on, smiling broadly. The crush of photographers grew so intense that the police had to call in reinforcements; within moments, a jeepload of Carabinieri—the Italian military police—came screeching to a stop beside the couple. Leaping onto the sidewalk, the gendarmes shouted to the crowd to back off, allowing Taylor and Burton to stroll arm in arm down the street.

This was always Elizabeth's way. "Nothing stood in her path when she decided she wanted to go out and have some fun," said Hank Moonjean. If Ava Gardner could do it, why couldn't she? Striding down the Via Veneto on Burton's arm with a pack of hungry photographers at her heels, Elizabeth was a woman liberated.

With the aromas of hot brioche and espresso wafting along the street, the stars held their heads high and didn't blink in the glare of the flashcubes. Passing cars slowed down to gawk at the famous pair. Unlike most of Rome's narrow, twisting roads, the Via Veneto is a wide boulevard; the author Ennio Flaiano described it like being at the beach, with the cars serving as gondolas and conversations at sidewalk cafes "baroque and jocular." This night, all talk ceased as everyone turned to stare at Liz and Dick.