How to Be a Movie Star (9 page)

Hedda was the kind of woman called "handsome" in her day—tall (5'8") when most women in the business were petite. As she got older, her features sharpened, her lips pursed noticeably. Born a Quaker, she had a schizophrenic attitude about sex. She loved hearing about the stars' sexual transgressions, and her closest friends were all gay or lesbian. But her friend Robert Shaw thought Hedda herself chaste, at least since her son's conception in 1914. After divorcing the actor DeWolf Hopper, she became Hollywood's gossipy maiden aunt—"a Quaker," said Dema Harshbarger, "from the neck down."

Sitting at her desk, kicking off her heels, and putting on more comfortable shoes, Hedda went to work. With long, slender fingers she began dialing, picking and choosing calls to return or ignore. The Chaplin case consumed most of her passion these days; Sara Taylor was just not a priority. Besides, Hedda had already done quite a bit for Sara's child. Back in 1939, when Elizabeth was just seven, Hedda had suggested that David O. Selznick cast her as Vivien Leigh's daughter in
Gone With the Wind.
It still rankled Hedda how disingenuous Sara could be about that whole experience, insisting that she'd never had any thought of putting her daughter in pictures. Sara claimed that it was only after "people on the street" had told her how much Elizabeth resembled Leigh that she had even given it a thought. Hedda scoffed at such baloney. At that point in time, no one had any idea what Vivien Leigh looked like! Of
course
the entire enterprise had been Sara's, right from the moment she'd showed up at Hedda's office with her daughter in tow, obsessed with the idea of getting her into the film.

And though Elizabeth didn't get the part, Hedda continued going to bat for her, suggesting that she might be a rival to singing child star Deanna Durbin (even though Elizabeth's singing had Hedda covering her ears; "one of the most painful ordeals," she called it). After Elizabeth's first movie, a trifle for Universal called
There's One Born Every Minute,
Hedda wrote that Elizabeth "walks off with a fat role" (even though it was barely a bit). In October 1942 she'd devoted the whole first half of her column to Elizabeth, proclaiming her "one of the most beautiful children I've ever seen." Most recently, she'd written that Elizabeth had been "so good" in her first MGM picture,
Lassie Come Home
(even though if you blinked, you missed her), that she'd been snatched up by Fox for
Jane Eyre,
starring Joan Fontaine. Hedda felt she'd done quite enough. Little Elizabeth Taylor had gotten more ink from her than many older actresses with bona fide résumés.

Hedda had first met the Taylors while they were living in England. After Sara's stage career was over, she'd married art dealer Francis Taylor (whom she called "Daddy," despite being two years older than he was) and moved with him to London, where he ran a gallery on Old Bond Street. The Taylors lived in a redbrick house opposite the vast green stretch of Hampstead Heath. It was here that Sara gave birth to a son, Howard, in 1929, and on February 27, 1932, to a daughter, Elizabeth Rosemond.

When Elizabeth was four, the family also acquired a country retreat near Cranbrook in Kent, where Hedda made their acquaintance. The house came courtesy of Francis Taylor's patron, Victor Cazalet, a Conservative member of Parliament who was a captain in the British Army. Hedda was friends with Cazalet's sister, Thelma Cazalet-Keir, also a Conservative MP. On weekends, the Taylors' driver motored them out of the city and into the rolling Kentish hills, where their cottage was located on Cazalet's estate. When Hedda was visiting once, Sara and little Elizabeth ambled up through the gardens to the main house for tea. The meeting wasn't apparently all that memorable: Sara would bring a letter of (re)introduction from Cazalet-Keir when she showed up at Hopper's office in Hollywood a few years later.

Hedda never cared much for Sara, seeing her as something of a climber. Of course, it took one to know one. Hedda was a butcher's daughter from Altoona, Pennsylvania, who'd run away from home as a teenager. She was bitter over being born poor and always having to fight her way; decades later she was still resentful of never having had a bicycle as a child. "When I was called the best-dressed woman on the screen, I had to laugh," she said, "remembering the days when I wore a pair of overalls, an old sweater, and an apron, and went into the cooler to cut off a quarter of beef and carry it out over my shoulder to the chopping block."

Hedda seemed to resent Sara's greater success in obtaining the finer things in life. Through Francis Taylor, Sara had acquired two homes, servants, and access to London society. Marriage to the respected stage actor DeWolf Hopper had given Hedda some cachet, but the divorce had left her high, dry, and a bit less than desirable. In Hollywood she tried to cultivate a sophisticated image, but there was still something garish and provincial about her. It wasn't just her hats. Her home in Beverly Hills had been filigreed to death by the former set designer Harold Grieve. On the walls of her office hung originals by Picasso and Renoir, "denoting Miss Hopper's appreciation of art," as one press release made sure to report—yet these were offset by bare radiators and scarred doors. Hedda's airs were often belied by the political tirades for which she was prone, right-wing rants about communists and socialists and "people who wanted to take away everything she had worked so hard to achieve," according to one friend.

Sitting at her typewriter, Hedda glanced over the dozens of press releases that had accumulated on her desk. Once more that name caught her eye: Elizabeth Taylor—cast in Metro's upcoming
The White Cliffs of Dover.
Relenting, she gave the girl another blurb, though she got her age wrong, writing that the eleven-year-old was nine. Fact-checking was never Hedda's strong suit. Gossip was. That's what made her so powerful. "Gossip," noted
Time,
"has become as indispensably bound up in the making of U.S. movies as cameras, kaolin smiles and surfboard-sized eyelashes. For Hollywood is a town doing a business based on vanity." Everyone involved understood that: Hedda, Sara, and even little Elizabeth herself, sitting at her school desk dreaming about fame.

Anne Francis, a pretty blonde teenager who'd arrived in Hollywood after appearing with Gertrude Lawrence in
Lady in the Dark
on Broadway, couldn't help but envy Elizabeth Taylor, the girl who sat next to her in the MGM schoolhouse. Elizabeth was making a big prestige picture starring Irene Dunne, and rumor had it that she was up for
National Velvet,
too. Anne, meanwhile, hadn't made a single movie since signing with the studio. Every day she simply reported to the schoolhouse and hoped her luck would change.

But Elizabeth's career had suddenly shifted into high gear. Although Elizabeth's part in
The White Cliffs of Dover
was small, her startling girlish beauty was already causing comment, just as it had in
Jane Eyre.
In her first scene in that picture for Fox, she descends a staircase in the background as Peggy Ann Garner, playing Jane, stands on a box in the foreground. Elizabeth is a tiny, unremarkable figure until a sudden luminous close-up takes our breath away. All of our attention immediately pulls away from Garner, the ostensible star. In that moment Elizabeth possesses what film historian Jeanine Basinger has called the "x factor" of potential stardom, "the infrared in the dark of the movie house."

Glancing over at her in the schoolhouse, Anne Francis had to agree with what people were saying about Elizabeth Taylor. "She was utterly gorgeous, even as a little girl," Francis said. "I was in awe of her. Hers wasn't the beauty of a child."

In her early pictures, Elizabeth indeed seems to be a miniature adult. Even at ten she stopped grown men in their tracks. Watching her shoot a scene in
Jane Eyre,
costar Orson Welles turned to a companion and whispered, "Remind me to be around when she grows up." Her first studio contract, with Universal, had been canceled when the casting director decided, "Her eyes are too old. She doesn't have the face of a kid."

But at Metro that face became her ticket to success—along with her accent. At the height of the war, Englishness was in vogue on the American screen, and Elizabeth was virtually the only young actress on the lot who could authentically play English. Sheridan Morley credited her "accurate memory for the vowel sounds of Hampstead and Kent." The accent would also help with
National Velvet;
the studio needed a girl with an accent who could ride horses. Even without Sara's campaign to draw attention to her daughter, it was only natural that the higher-ups would begin "casting glances" in Elizabeth's direction.

"Being in films then," she said, "was like the most magical extension of make-believe. It didn't occur to me that it was a career and that I was making money."

She'd always been an imaginative child. Playacting for the camera and dressing in costume was not so different from the game she'd been playing with herself all her life. "Walter Mittying," she called it—daydreaming, living out fantasies in her mind. She'd create whole scenarios for herself in which she traveled the world or explored some faraway land. Other times she relived moments from her past—riding her horse in Kent or steaming across the Atlantic on the gilt-plated ship that had brought her to America.

Looking over at her in the MGM schoolhouse, Anne Francis observed the way Elizabeth's lips moved when she was supposed to be studying, the way her extraordinary eyes, shaded by double rows of eyelashes, seemed to be looking at something that none of the rest of them could see. Elizabeth's fantasies of late were all about being a movie star; yet the little girl's ambition was not so much for herself. Not at this point. It sprang instead from a deep-seated desire to please her mother, still at her side nearly every waking moment. The director George Stevens considered the two of them "in a cocoon."

Her father, meanwhile, was mostly a background figure. In England it had been different, with Elizabeth very much the apple of Francis Taylor's eye. Back then she would sit in his lap as he read to her or she'd run across the grassy meadows of Kent into his arms. She physically resembled her father more than she did her mother, inheriting his dark hair and mesmerizing eyes. No question that, early on, Francis could be a stern disciplinarian, but back then he insisted on direct involvement in his children's lives—a practice that would steadily diminish after they came to America and Sara took the reins.

Like his wife, Francis Taylor hailed from the lower middle class; his father had been a dry goods salesman. Born in Springfield, Illinois, in December 1897, Francis moved with his family to Arkansas City as a young teenager, where he met the two-years-older Sara Warmbrodt. Yet any story that has them falling in love at this time is a publicist's invention. Elizabeth herself would tell stories of her father carrying her mother's schoolbooks, but if he did, it was a rare and probably inconsequential occurrence. Older and consumed by the theater, Sara moved in very different circles than Francis did. Besides, the future spouses overlapped in Ark City for only a few years. In 1915, at the age of seventeen, Francis was rescued from a life of drudgery by his affluent uncle, Howard Young, who ran an art gallery in St. Louis. Recognizing something artistic in his nephew—something that set him apart from other boys his age—Uncle Howard hired Francis as his assistant and brought him to St. Louis.

With no children of their own, the Youngs practically adopted their nephew. Possibly it was Howard's connections that enabled Francis to avoid registering for the draft during World War I. Instead of heading to the Western Front, Francis accompanied his uncle to New York, where the Howard Young Galleries opened at 620 Fifth Avenue.

It was in New York that Francis encountered Sara again and remembered her from Kansas. She was thirty-one years old, and when she accepted Francis's offer of marriage, she announced her "permanent retirement from the stage." (The
New York Times
theater critic wasn't so sure, adding that such was "her present intention at least.") Sara and Francis were married on October 23, 1926, at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. The newlyweds departed almost immediately for Europe, with Francis serving as Young's acquisitions agent, paying calls on private collectors in Paris, Vienna, and Budapest. The Taylors settled in London in 1929 when Young decided to open a gallery there.

Sara would later exaggerate their status in British society, writing about being invited to Downing Street by Mrs. Neville Chamberlain to view the Trooping of the Colors for the King's birthday—as if this were a personal little get-together with the prime minister's wife when, in fact, Sara was merely part of a larger group of ladies and was included only through the intercession of the family's benefactor, Victor Cazalet. She'd tell similar stories of being invited to Buckingham Palace. Even Elizabeth's ballet lessons took on an added sheen, with Sara insisting that among her daughter's fellow dance students were the young princesses, Eliza beth and Margaret Rose. They were students of the same school, true enough—but the instructors went to the royals, not the other way around. Elizabeth certainly never practiced her pliés and pirouettes with the little princesses.

Still, it was a privileged, upper-class life that Sara had secured for her children, far from the steam and smoke of the Warmbrodt laundry. Attending the Royal Ascot, Sara and her daughter wore matching blue silk dresses designed by Mainbocher. At home they employed maids, cooks, drivers, and nannies ("There is no one in the world like a good English Nannie," Sara believed). And not only did the Taylors have their country house in Kent, they also leased a beach house in Devonshire during the summer. Elizabeth and her brother grew up in the kind of comfort that Sara had only dreamed about.

The Taylors owed their lifestyle, of course, to the largesse of "Uncle" Victor Cazalet. They were living, after all, on his estate; invitations to social events and impromptu gifts of clothing and furniture all came courtesy of him. For Elizabeth's fifth birthday, Cazalet presented his self-appointed goddaughter with her own horse.