The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (10 page)

As a heterosexual, Elizabeth lacked, for Wilding, the necessary ambivalence, ambiguity, and AC/DC latitude afforded by Dietrich—to whom he’d one day return. He knew from the start that they were mismatched. As he continued to waffle, Elizabeth grew impatient and started dating Tab Hunter, an athletic young leading man who was quickly becoming the teenage rave of the early 1950s. He was in England at the time, filming
Island of Desire
with Linda Darnell, but he would make a stronger impression a few years later, playing a U.S. marine in Leon Uris’s
Battle Cry
. Ironically, like many other macho heartthrobs who carried the burden of public sex fantasies in the fifties, Hunter was one of the targets of a “confidential” exposé of Hollywood gays.
⁴³
He had a close relationship with Anthony Perkins and appeared frequently on the set of Perkins’s movie
Fear Strikes Out
.
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Aware she was seeing Tab, Wilding at last asked Kay Young for a divorce. He didn’t love Elizabeth, but her sensational performance in
A Place in the Sun
convinced him she was a beauty who surprisingly could act. It also convinced him he could use her to boost himself into major stardom. For the second time, Elizabeth was headed to the altar with a man who didn’t love her. Wilding confessed as much to his frequent costar Anna Neagle, who was married to his agent, Herbert Wilcox. “He told us that, as Elizabeth’s husband, he would have a bigger career in Hollywood than Herbert could give him here,” Neagle recalled. “He wanted to be a truly international star . . . He saw himself starring with this girl who had the most wonderful success in
A Place in the Sun
.”
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Elizabeth’s motives were equally self-seeking. She was convinced she could cannibalize what she called Wilding’s “abundance of tranquility, security and maturity—all of which I desperately need.”
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Both were looking outside themselves for strengths that could come only from within, and such spiritual vampirism did not bode well for their relationship.

Before Elizabeth, he’d attracted other glamour girls such as Rita Hayworth and Paulette Goddard, as well as male admirers. In London during the first phase of WWII, Wilding and Stewart Granger, Elizabeth’s costar in
Beau Brummell
, shared a flat and had sex one night during an air blitz. Granger recalled their liaison at dinner one evening in the early 1980s. “People will say we were both queer, and we weren’t. It was just the kind of thing that happened during the war.” According to Boze Hadleigh, author of
Hollywood Gays
, Granger was bi-sexual. Wilding served as best man at the Texas wedding of Granger and Jean Simmons in 1950. Later, when Granger caught Howard Hughes simultaneously ogling Jean and Elizabeth, he said, “Well, Howard, which one would you like? Take your pick.”
⁴⁷

Though Wilding was aware that his marriage to his first wife had failed because he’d been unable to give of himself, he was drawn to Elizabeth as though by an undertow. He took her to the Savoy Grill and to the Mirabelle, the Ivy, and the Caprice. As a lover he had stamina to spare. According to Alexander Walker, author of
The Shattered Silents
and film critic of the
London Evening Standard
, “He gave tireless satisfaction in bed.”
⁴⁸
Soon she began to forget about Nicky—and about Donen—and she no longer complained of colitis. Her zest for living returned in full force. She wanted Michael Wilding and was determined to have him. Elaine Dundy in a 1998 interview unwittingly shed light on how Elizabeth could have fallen in love with a bisexual who later drove her to distraction, describing her as a sweet but shallow young woman whose conversations were restricted to hairdressers.

When Wilding arrived at the Savoy to take Elizabeth to dinner one night, she wasn’t yet ready, and he later wrote, “Unpunctuality is a sort of disease with Liz.” She invited him into her bedroom, where she was still making up. When he complained that she used too much makeup, she burst into tears. “It’s to make me look older,” she said. “If only I was older, you would ask me to marry you.” When he again mentioned their age difference, pointing out that she might later feel she’d made a mistake, she snapped, “Tomorrow I’m flying to California. When I’m gone you’ll see who’s making the mistake.”
⁴⁹
At the airport, she told him, “Goodbye, Mr. Shilly-Shally. Let’s forget we ever met.”

Upon arriving in New York, she checked into the Plaza, which was now a Hilton hotel, and later had a reunion with Monty at Voisin, flashing a sapphire ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. She explained she’d become engaged to Wilding, but Monty was skeptical. Elizabeth had bought the ring herself and was using it as a ploy to lure Monty into marriage, or so he suspected. She checked out of the Plaza and moved into Monty’s duplex, though nightly he brought home tricks he’d picked up on upper Third Avenue. In a quandary, he shouted at Elizabeth during a drunken evening on the West Side, “You are the only woman I will ever love.” Slouching in a chair, she stared at him and crooned, repeatedly, “Baby, oh baby.”
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In London, fearing his last chance for international stardom was slipping from his grasp, Wilding cabled Elizabeth that he was taking the next plane to the United States. He signed the cable “Mr. Shilly-Shally.” In December 1951, she met Wilding at the Burbank airport, accompanied by Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons. By now Granger was succeeding as a romantic lead at Metro in films with Elizabeth, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr. Elizabeth and Wilding stayed with the Grangers in their Hollywood Hills home, and Granger advised Wilding, “Forget you’re forty. I have, and look how happy I am.” Jean Simmons was twenty-two. In the following days, the two couples became indivisible, showing up regularly at Romanoff’s, Chasen’s, and the Mocambo. Granger later said he hated Elizabeth for keeping Howard Hughes on the string so long, teasing and taunting him, and she treated Wilding “shabbily from the beginning,” he alleged.
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Though rumors of a Taylor-Wilding marriage were rampant, Wilding still showed no inclination to propose. Gossip columnists were often useful to Elizabeth as catalysts or hit men, none more so than the ruthless Hedda Hopper. One day, Elizabeth took Mr. Shilly-Shally to Hopper’s home. As they sat in the living room Hopper said, in Wilding’s presence, “Did you know Michael Wilding’s homosexual, Elizabeth?” Mortified, Wilding sat in abashed silence instead of proposing to Elizabeth, as Hopper had hoped to intimidate him into doing. Later, Elizabeth and Wilding related the story to Stewart Granger. When Wilding became agitated, Elizabeth said, “Oh, Mikey, don’t worry about it.” Granger glared at her and started cursing. “Look, you silly bitch,” he snarled, “what the fuck are you talking about? Why didn’t you say anything?”
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Granger then called Hopper and cussed her out, which would shortly bring a terrible retribution down on all of them.

Quite early one morning, Wilding received an ominous telephone call from Humphrey Bogart. “Have you seen Hedda’s column?” Bogey asked.

“No,” Wilding said. “I was still asleep.”

Bogey said, “Then nip downstairs and you’ll get a rude awakening.” In her column and later in a book, Hedda implied strongly that Wilding and Granger were lovers. Wilding later wrote, “Under a photo of Stewart Granger and me larking about on his boat, she had written the caption ‘More than just friends?’” Wilding immediately went to Granger and said he was instigating a libel suit in their joint names, but Granger turned him down flat. “Count me out, pal,” he said. “You might as well sue God. Anyway, the studio wouldn’t permit it. Just remind me, next time we are photographed together in public, not to hold your hand.”
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The threat of scandal horrified MGM. Granger was under contract to the studio and Wilding soon would be when Elizabeth married him and pressured MGM into giving him a job. Metro’s London office was contacted and the head man, Paul Mills, was asked to make discreet inquiries. When Metro demanded, “Are you able to prove that they are
not
homosexuals?” Mills replied, “As far as we know, they are both sleeping with ladies.” Sheilah Graham later reported that Hedda was “anguished . . . going all over town asking known homosexuals to back her up. A gay producer friend of mine gleefully told her to go to hell.”
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Hedda’s son, William Hopper, best known as Paul Drake on television’s
Perry Mason
, was gay, though Hedda could not accept it. While Granger offered no help for the beleaguered Wilding, David Niven rushed to his defense, ridiculing Hopper’s suggestion that Granger and Wilding had a homosexual relationship. Hopper had written, “One doesn’t like to imagine what went on when this pair were living it up together on a yachting trip to the Riviera,” and Niven quipped, “I can well imagine what was going on all right,” suggesting that Wilding and Granger nailed so many coquettes that “the population of the South of France doubled overnight.”
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Risking exposure of his bisexuality, Wilding sued and won, receiving $100,000 in an out-of-court settlement, an apology, and an admission from Hopper that she had made her charge “in a malicious and wanton fashion with complete disregard of the plaintiff’s feelings.”
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Her book publisher deleted the gay passages. Reassured, Elizabeth looked at Wilding over dinner one night at Romanoff’s and said, “Will you marry me?” Wilding later revealed that his first wife, Kay Young, had also taken the initiative. “I was terrified of my own emotions,” he wrote. “It was Kay who finally proposed.”
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At Romanoff’s, without waiting for a reply, Elizabeth asked him to help her decide between two sapphire rings she was considering. Wilding was down to his last $20, his recent divorce having exhausted his meager savings, but he reluctantly helped her select a ring. Later, when he started to slip it on her finger, she stopped him and said, “I think that’s the finger it should go on, Michael, the engagement ring one.” In her usual impetuous, take-charge manner, she announced their engagement at a press conference around New Year’s. “That makes it official, doesn’t it?” she said. “It’s leap year, isn’t it? Well, I leaped.”
⁵⁸

Wilding’s agent, Herbert Wilcox, ruefully reflected, “All my future plans for Michael would be nullified by the whim and passions of a mere eighteen-year-old girl [
sic
].” On February 14, 1952, Wilcox lunched with Dietrich and they discussed the upcoming Taylor-Wilding nuptials. “What’s Liz Taylor got that I haven’t got?” Dietrich wanted to know. “She was very sad,” Wilcox later wrote. “I didn’t have the heart to give her the obvious answer, namely youth.”
⁵⁹
Dietrich was forty-seven; Elizabeth, nineteen, but age was hardly the issue. Wilding was drawn to dominant women and saw in Elizabeth the ultimate dominatrix. Moreover, he intended to exploit her power and connections to blast his career out of its U.K. confines. Elizabeth was on the rise, while Dietrich was past her prime as an international sex goddess. As Anna Neagle put it, “Michael thought Elizabeth’s stardom would rub off on him somehow.”
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He left for London on February 17, Elizabeth planning to follow him in a week. He had to inform Herbert Wilcox that their twenty-year contract was no longer viable since he would be moving to California, where, he assumed, he’d immediately become a Hollywood star. “If you’ll forgive me saying so,” Wilcox remarked, “I don’t think Hollywood will understand you, or vice versa.” Elizabeth arrived in London on February 21, 1952, checking into the Berkeley Hotel. Metro’s Helen Rose again designed her bridal outfit: an anthracite-gray wool suit with a full skirt and a three-tiered organdy collar and cuffs and a hat of small white flowers. Three thousand onlookers swarmed around London’s Caxton Registry Hall, Westminster, for the ten-minute ceremony on February 27 attended by Wilding’s parents and Anna Neagle and Herbert Wilcox. A reception at Claridge’s was followed by a smaller gathering at 2 Bruton Street, Wilding’s maisonette in Mayfair. Afterward, the newlyweds repaired to Elizabeth’s suite at the Berkeley, where room service brought them a meal of bacon and eggs, soup, and champagne. Subsequently they honeymooned in France and Switzerland, returning to Mayfair on March 2.

When Dietrich heard of the marriage, she called Elizabeth “that English tart,” and conjectured, “It must be those huge breasts of hers—he likes them to dangle in his face.” In New York, Monty gave up all hope of having a wife and family. He increased his intake of Nembutals and Scotch, and got into a brawl at Gregory’s, where another man broke his nose and dislocated his shoulder. Libby Holman, whom critic Brooks Atkinson once described as a “dark purple menace” after hearing her sing “Body and Soul,” replaced Elizabeth as the most important woman in his life.

In London, Elizabeth settled into Wilding’s flat, and they appeared to enjoy quiet evenings, reading the theatrical biography
We Barrymores
aloud to each other. Her public statements could not have been more at variance with reality: though she was busily plotting how to support an indigent husband, she told the press, “I just want to be with Michael and be his wife. He enjoys sitting home, smoking his pipe, reading, painting. And that’s what I intend doing—all except smoking a pipe.”
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In fact, she was trying to form her own production company in England, so that her husband could continue his career there. He was still a top box-office star, much loved by the British, whose leading men do not have to be flawlessly beautiful as long as they’re intelligent and charming, like Trevor Howard, John Mills, and James Mason. But MGM persuaded Elizabeth to return to Hollywood by promising to upgrade her contract.