Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (135 page)

Later, their scene was judged as too hot for the screen, and it ended up on the cutting room floor.

Kay Meehan, who was married to Joseph Meehan, the former head of the New York Stock Exchange, was one of Truman’s “swans.” In the wake of the publication in
Esquire
of early chapters from his controversial novel,
Answered Prayers
, all of his other swans had deserted him because of their scandalous and thinly veiled portraits of themselves.

The other swans weren’t returning his calls, but when he phoned Meehan asking if she’d join him for lunch at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, she accepted. She arrived to find Truman on one of the banquettes, engrossed in a head-to-head huddle with Richard Burton.

Because of that day’s heavy rainfalls, she entered the Oak Room like “a drowned rat”
[her words]
. There, she found Truman and Burton going over his lines for his upcoming Broadway appearance in
Equus
(1976), in which he would interpret the role of a psychiatrist.

“A tape recorder was on, and he and Truman were rehearsing dialogue line by line,” she said. “It was obvious that he was picking Truman’s brain. The contrast in their voices was amazing, with his squeaky high-pitched tones and Burton’s husky baritone.”

“I had a fabulous time, and I think Truman was testing me but also rewarding me. After all, all his other swans had flown away, and he was seeing if I were still loyal. He hadn’t told me that Burton would be there. If he had, I would surely have accepted his invitation. He wanted to see if I’d appear at a rendezvous where he’discretion be the only other person there.”

Later, there was speculation among the swans and others that Burton would somehow reward Truman for helping him rehearse his lines in
Equus
. Babe Paley—no longer committed to any sense of discretion about Truman’s private life—openly exposed the idea at parties.

It was later learned that Truman and Burton spent three nights together in a suite at the Plaza, ostensibly to work on the actor’s stage presence and delivery. Gore Vidal later sarcastically remarked, “I’m sure the little midget was rewarded for his services. I’m certain that he wanted to learn firsthand what turned Elizabeth Taylor on. The Devil’s most devious angel just had to know the secrets of everybody who was a media event.”

—Elizabeth Taylor to Truman

In February of 1961, Joseph Mankiewicz, the director, was working almost around the clock to complete the script of
Cleopatra
, to star Elizabeth Taylor. She and her then-husband, Eddie Fisher, flew to London, where filming was to begin.

On March 4, just as the cameras began to roll, illness struck as Elizabeth became incapacitated with a severe case of Asian flu.

Fisher demanded the best care for her, and summoned Lord Evans, the personal physician of Queen Elizabeth. He ordered an oxygen tent for her and a portable toilet, the same one used by Her Majesty when she traveled to remote corners of the Commonwealth.

Fisher also ordered around-the-clock nurses for her. In the early morning hours, a night nurse noticed that Elizabeth’s face was turning blue, and she was gasping for breath. She called the desk and shouted for them to get a doctor quick.

In a touch of irony, some doctors were having a late-night reception at The Dorchester. Among them was Dr. J. Middleton Price, one of the best anesthesiologists in the British Isles. He was rushed to Elizabeth’s hospital suite. “She had turned blue as the sea,” he said, “and was unconscious. I estimated that if I had not gotten there, she would have died in fifteen minutes.”

The doctor picked her up by the heels and tried to make her lose some of the congestion in her chest. That did not succeed. Next, he stuck his finger down her throat, hoping to make her gag and breathe again. Still, nothing happened. He then pounded her chest,

“So the doctor started gouging at my eyes,” Elizabeth related in her memoirs. “He gouged like mad and I opened my eyes…I took a deep breath, which kept me alive.”

Dr. Price determined that only a tracheotomy would save her life. But the operation had to be performed in a hospital, although it was very risky to move the patient. He decided, however, that it was worth the chance, and an ambulance was summoned to The Dorchester.

With dome lights flashing and sirens wailing, she was rushed to the private London Clinic where Dr. Terence Cawthorne awaited her. He performed the life-saving tracheotomy by drawing a scalpel across the soft part of her throat right above her breastbone. Here, he made an incision allowing him to insert a breathing tube connected to a respirator.

His diagnosis was acute staphylococcus pneumonia, which is most often fatal. She would retain a small scar at her throat for the rest of her life, although she would in most instances cover it with a piece of jewelry.

Still desperately ill, she was put in an iron lung as a means of controlling the rate of her respiration and linking it to just the right amount of oxygen.

Seven doctors, including Lord Evans, were at her bedside. Dr. Evans even gave Queen Elizabeth a daily bulletin on his famous patient. It was Dr. Evans who also discovered that she was suffering from anemia, and he ordered blood transfusions, intravenous feedings, and doses of antibiotics. He also prescribed a rare drug, staphylococcal bacteriophage lystate, which Milton Blackstone, Fisher’s agent, personally carried with him aboard a hastily scheduled flight to London.

During her stint in the hospital in London, Elizabeth had been fed intravenously through her ankle. Regrettably, that caused an infection in her lower leg. As she admitted in her memoirs, “I almost lost my leg…I just let the disease take me. I had been hoping to be happy,” she said. “I was just pretending to be happy. But I was consumed by self-pity.”

Early on the morning of March 6, a radio station in Pensacola, Florida, broadcast the news: “Elizabeth Taylor is dead. Doctors in London fought to save her, but it was hopeless. The little girl who won our hearts in
National Velvet
died a living legend.”

The news was picked up and broadcast on other stations before a bulletin was issued from London: “Elizabeth Taylor is not dead. She is the hospital in a fight for her life, but is still very much with us.”

London tabloids began preparing “Second Coming” headlines.

A few newspapers published her obituary, and Elizabeth got to read a summation of her life. She later commented, “These were the best reviews I ever received, but I had to die to get these tributes.”

On March 10, the first optimistic bulletin was released, claiming she had made “a very rare recovery.”

Later, she defined the experience as “absolutely horrifying. When I would regain consciousness, I wanted to ask my doctors if I was going to die. But I couldn’t make myself heard. Inside my head, I heard myself screaming to God for help. I was frightened. I was angry. I was fierce. I didn’t want to die. I stopped breathing four times. I died four times. It was like falling into this horrible black pit. Dr. Evans later told me I lived because I fought so hard to live.”

Also residing at The Dorchester, Truman Capote was one of the first guests allowed to visit her after her operation. He recalled it as a “media event, with the streets clogged with fans and the idle curious.” At her request, he slipped in a magnum of Dom Pérignon and some books to read, mostly his own.

“I visited her in London in the hospital when she had that tracheotomy. She had what looked like a silver dollar in her throat. I couldn’t figure out what held it in place, and it surprised me she wasn’t bleeding or oozing. A few nights later, I went out with Eddie Fisher. The next afternoon, Elizabeth told me that Eddie thought I was trying to make a pass at him. At that moment, she played a trick on me and yanked at the plug in her throat, spurting out champagne—I’d brought her a magnum of Dom Pérignon—all over the hospital room. I thought I was going to pass out.”

Fans on every continent mourned her, even though she was still clinging to life, but just barely. Mobs of people descended on the London Clinic for around-the-clock vigils.

Each day, her condition improved until it was finally judged safe for her to leave the hospital, though in a vastly weakened condition.

On March 27, Elizabeth, in a wheelchair, made one of the most spectacular exits from a hospital in the history of England. Wrapped in sable, with a white scarf covering her neck, and in preparation for her flight to New York, she was handled with the care of a porcelain doll as London bobbies held back threatening hordes and a mob of paparazzi. Airport security nestled her into a kind of canvas sling, and lifted her into the waiting plane.

With
Cleopatra
delayed once again, Elizabeth was coming home. She predicted to Fisher that “Cleopatra will never sail down the Nile on that barge of hers.”

Spyros Skouras, President at Fox, sued Lloyds of London for three million dollars, but settled for two million, as compensation for the production delays on their attempt to film
Cleopatra
at Pinewood.

In a huddle, Wanger and Skouras decided that England was no place to film an exotic epic like
Cleopatra
. They agreed to scrap $600,000 worth of sets at Pinewood and to relaunch the filming in Rome in September of 1961, allowing Elizabeth time to recuperate.

Chapter Forty-One

“I cannot live alone,”
Tennessee protested to Audrey Wood. “I need to feel the beating of a human heart on the pillow next to mine, even if I have to pay for it.”

Thus, with Frank Merlo long dead, Tennessee began to hire a series of paid male companions. “Love has nothing to do with it,” he said. This lifestyle pattern would continue until his death.