The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (16 page)

Elizabeth was on the threshold of two of her strangest sexual, a-loving relationships—Mike Todd and Eddie Fisher. Born in 1928 in Philadelphia, Eddie was a child of the Depression whose Russian Jewish family, originally named Fisch, moved twenty times during his boyhood, and whose father he described in 1999 as “a nasty, abusive man, a tyrant.” Eddie’s unresolved issues with his father underlay his dependence on such older men as Mike Todd and mobster Sam Giancana. “I just like hanging around with tough guys,” Eddie said, adding that he loved Giancana “like a brother.” Spoiled as a child by his mother, Katie Fisher, who called him “Sonny Boy,” Eddie seemed never to appreciate fully how hard his father worked to support seven growing children. Joe Fisher slaved in a leather factory and a delicatessen and finally peddled fruits and vegetables from the back of his car, but Eddie was still kvetching in 1999 that Joe did nothing to help his career. What Eddie really resented was that he could never earn his father’s respect even after stardom.
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If Eddie had a redeeming feature, it was his smooth, clean, lyric baritone voice. By the early 1950s, he’d scored twenty-two consecutive hit recordings, notably “Anytime” and “I’m Walking Behind You.” While playing the Paramount in Times Square for $7,500 a week, exhausted from performing five shows daily, he became a patient of Dr. Max Jacobson, a “feelgood” doctor catering to Broadway and Hollywood stars. Max gave him intravenous shots of a “vitamin cocktail,” one in his arm and one in his buttocks. Eddie didn’t know that the shot included methamphetamine, only that “a wave of sunlight passed through my body.” The date was April 17, 1953, and he remained an addict for the next thirty-seven years.
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His loveless 1955 marriage to Debbie followed a studio-arranged meeting at Metro, where she was filming
Athena
. Sexually they could not have been less compatible, as both would later reveal in their respective memoirs. She was virginal, and he was like a sexual pirate, taking all and giving nothing, according to Debbie, who tolerated him because he was useful to her socially. The daughter of a mechanic and a washerwoman, she’d grown up behind a gas station in El Paso, Texas. After proving her versatility in films as a comedian, dancer, singer, and actress, she hungered for respectability. As the “hot young couple,” she and Eddie were taken up by “a society unlike anything either of us had ever known,” she wrote. “They loved having us. The Goetzes, the Goldwyns, the Warners, the Mervyn LeRoys.” Eddie spent his time with his male cronies, who resented Debbie and excluded her from their card games, which lasted till dawn. “Only guys with guys,” she mused. To rumors that he was gay, Eddie once yelled, “I am not a homosexual!”
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Compared with the youthful, glossy-haired Eddie, middle-aged Mike Todd was hardly a sex object, but Elizabeth thought Todd the more attractive of the two men. Though short, he was powerfully built, virtually steaming with energy. What he lacked in youth and stereotypical male beauty, he more than made up for in his bristling virility and Machiavellian tactics. At twenty-four, Elizabeth was half his age. Kevin McClory remained a formidable competitor for Elizabeth’s affections. Though still married to Wilding, she seriously contemplated marrying Kevin, though he warned her that on his “meager finances” he could not give her a lavish Beverly Hills home with a pool. An even bigger mistake was telling her that he’d expect her to wash and iron his shirts. He was about to give her a twenty-dollar gold locket as an engagement present when a coworker, Don Tomlinson, saw it and warned, “That’s not enough.”
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As Mike Todd began to move in on Elizabeth, he treated McClory brutally. Todd invited Elizabeth, Wilding, and McClory to a party he threw for Edward R. Murrow, who was filming the prologue to
Around the World in 80 Days
. When Todd spotted McClory helping himself to a huge mound of caviar, he told him to go easy on the beluga or there wouldn’t be any left for the “real” guests. Wilding left the party early, but Elizabeth stayed on until 2 a.m. In white satin and diamonds, she again eclipsed Evelyn Keyes, who wore a Mexican skirt and blouse.
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The day following another of Elizabeth’s separations from Wilding, Todd cornered her at Metro and proposed. Startled and overwhelmed, she “ran away from Mike, a couple of thousand miles away,” she recalled. “I left immediately for Danville, Kentucky, to do
Rain-tree County
.” In her absence, the ruthless Todd banished McClory to Mexico City, presumably to work on a bullfighting scene for
Around the World in 80 Days
. Todd also got rid of Evelyn Keyes, sending her to Mexico with McClory and later to Caracas on a trumped-up mission to “look at some theaters to select one for Todd-AO [his wide-screen system].” The way was now clear to woo Elizabeth without interference. “He behaved like a shit,” said Keyes, who’d helped finance Todd’s film.
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“The real love of Elizabeth’s life was Mike Todd,” Jean Porter Dmytryk recalled during our 1998 interview. “If he was alive they’d be together today.” When informed that Todd beat Joan Blondell, his former wife, to a pulp, Mrs. Dmytryk said, “Maybe he did. Elizabeth and Mike Todd had fights but they made it up. They loved each other.” When Elizabeth was given a two-week vacation, Todd sent a chartered plane to fly her to New York. At the airport, she ran down the steps into his arms and they kissed for the first time. From that moment on, they both knew that they were getting married. When she returned to Kentucky for some retakes, she proudly showed off the ring he’d given her. “Don’t you think you should get divorced before you think about getting married again?” Eddie Dmytryk asked. It stopped her in her tracks. She still hadn’t made any firm plans to seek a divorce from Michael Wilding. Perhaps because of the two children they shared, they kept trying to recapture their early passion. But with Elizabeth running around outrageously and Wilding sleeping with Marie McDonald, Dietrich, Montgomery Clift, Stewart Granger, and an assortment of strippers from a Hollywood burlesque house, their efforts to restore their family life were halfhearted at best.
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“It just isn’t ring-a-ding-ding any more,” she told Wilding.

In a 1999 interview
Raintree County
scenarist Millard Kaufman recalled that the steamy summertime location shoots took place in Danville; Natchez, Mississippi; and northern Louisiana. “Elizabeth and Monty went through a lot of very bad heat down in the South,” Jean Porter added. “She had corsets, slips and petticoats on. They would keep cool washcloths on their heads to get through their outdoors scenes until they were ready to shoot. It was hard on them, and yet the minute the camera was rolling, you’d never know it.” Kaufman found her to be the fastest study he’d ever known: “Though she would start the day bored, saying, ‘Another day of this hell,’ she’d ask the first assistant, ‘What are we doing today?’ He’d give her five or six pages. She’d look them over and shoot the scene without blowing a single line. What a decent, thoughtful woman; she was so compassionate with Monty, being his mother at her age. She took care of him more than anyone else.”

When the company flew from Kentucky to Mississippi for shots of antebellum ruins, Elizabeth was late, and Kaufman remembered that they had to hold up the plane for her on the runway. “Finally someone brought her out to the plane in a jeep,” he said. Later, she arrived at the Natchez airport in front of hundreds of spectators, one of whom remembered, “Elizabeth apparently had so much to drink aboard the flight that she had to be carried off the airliner into a waiting limousine. Her feet never touched the ground.”
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Eddie Dmytryk took his cast “outside of Natchez a few miles, a wonderful old ruin, with the big pillars, just a natural for the set, a natural metaphor for the South,” he recalled. “Elizabeth had a long scene there, a number of pages, in that heat—and finally she collapsed.” Jean Porter explained, “She was hyperventilating in those corsets,” but Dmytryk said, “Elizabeth could drink pretty well.” When her doctor prescribed forty chloral hydrates for sleep, Monty told her, “Chloral hydrates are a fantastically strong mickey finn.” By the next evening, he had reduced her drug supply by half and was found comatose in his room, a cigarette having burned his finger to the bone.

Elizabeth and Monty dined together nightly in their hotel rooms in Natchez, avoiding the crowds that gathered outside to catch a glimpse of them. The crew was under the impression that Elizabeth was sleeping with Monty, since they often saw him at her door, completely nude. Elizabeth would take him in, give him a shower, dry him off, and tuck him in. Constantly on amphetamines, barbiturates, and tranquilizers, he was no longer able to help her with her acting, as he’d done before his accident. That left her without coaching of any kind.

Eddie Dmytryk believed in leaving the interpretation of a role entirely up to the actor. “I did not give a concept to an actor,” he said in 1998. “Show me a script that an actor with an IQ of 100 cannot understand—show me one. You don’t have to explain a script to an actor; most actors I work with are very bright. I never in my life have had to tell an actor what something means. They understand it. I want them to make their own characters. I don’t want my characters on the screen; I want their characters, that’s why I cast them. And it’s easier that way.”

His hands-off technique worked with many of the stars he directed over the years—Bogart, Tracy, Brando, Deborah Kerr, Jose Ferrer, Eva Marie Saint, Ginger Rogers, Van Johnson, Dorothy McGuire, Fred Mac-Murray, Robert Ryan, Dean Martin, Clint Eastwood—but not with Elizabeth. Playing a madwoman in
Raintree
, she grossly overacted. Had Monty been able to, he would have restrained her and coached her in his interior style of projecting a part, but he no longer had the will or perhaps even the desire to control her. As a result, she came off as overconfident and garish instead of laying bare her vulnerability and showing her character’s gradual mental and moral collapse. It was one of her least affecting performances. Ironically, it was also the first for which she’d be nominated for an Academy Award.

After
Raintree
, Elizabeth and Monty drifted apart. She was replaced in his circle by a new platonic buddy, Nancy Walker, the lovable, horse-faced comedienne. In Mike Todd, Elizabeth at last met her match—a man who wouldn’t let her humiliate him as she was driven to do with heterosexual men. He’d had plenty of experience in taming shrews before he met the ultimate one in Elizabeth. He understood that she liked to be mistreated and that she regarded fights as foreplay. Though she would not live with him long enough to feel the full force of his violence, other women had.

At a publication party for Joan Blondell’s
Center Door Fancy
in the 1970s at Delacorte Press editorial director Ross Claiborne’s East Side apartment in Manhattan, Joan said she felt lucky to have survived her marriage to Todd with nothing worse than a broken arm and a nervous breakdown.
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She also discussed the weird circumstances surrounding the death of Todd’s first wife, Bertha Freshman Todd, who died of anesthesia poisoning prior to surgery for self-inflicted wounds incurred while chasing Mike around the house with a steak knife in 1947. Todd lied to the press, claiming Bertha had cut her hand while slicing an orange. He came under further suspicion when it was discovered that Bertha’s $80,000 collection of jewels and furs was missing. Mike and Bertha’s son, Mike Todd Jr., concluded, “Mother’s chance-in-a-million fatal reaction to the anesthetic would not by itself have implicated him in her death, but the phony story he used to explain her knife injury did.”
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Though Todd never achieved true distinction on Broadway and was still an unknown quantity in Hollywood, his genius was at last about to flower in several ways in the mid–1950s. A trio of singular triumphs was before him: his manipulation of and marriage to Elizabeth; his promotion of a gimmicky, revue-type movie,
Around the World in 80 Days
, into an Oscar-winning blockbuster; and his revolutionary experiments with Cinerama and Todd-AO that widened and deepened the motion-picture screen and made movies more competitive with television at a crucial juncture when the future of the industry was in question. Of the three achievements, his winning of Elizabeth was the one that made him a household name.

Realizing how demanding Elizabeth was, Todd immediately enlisted Eddie Fisher to help him keep her satisfied. “Elizabeth was incapable of being alone,” Eddie recalled. “When Mike was busy, I became her second choice.” One night, Todd was involved in a high-stakes card game at the home of producer Harold Mirisch. Bored, Elizabeth kept asking when the game would be over. Todd telephoned Fisher, who’d had a fight with Debbie and was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Come over and talk to her,” Todd said. “Tell her how great I am.” Eddie rushed to the Mirisch residence, later explaining, “When Mike told me to do something, I did it.”
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Eddie and Elizabeth played gin and popped a bottle of champagne while the card game went on in another room. Occasionally, Todd looked in on them, and at midnight he told Eddie to take Elizabeth home to pack for a trip to Palm Springs later that morning. They drove to Benedict Canyon, where she and Eddie drank two bottles of brandy and talked until 3:30 a.m. Michael Wilding was still living there, but off in a small room where he subsisted like a hermit. “It was as if he didn’t exist,” Eddie remembered. “Nobody ever mentioned his name . . . His kids even pretty much ignored him.” Finally, Eddie tried to call Todd, but he’d already left Mirisch’s house for home.