The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (20 page)

Two shocking altercations broke out before the service began. One of Todd’s brothers, a cabdriver from Long Beach, California, named Carl Goldenborgen, hollered that Dick Hanley had barred him from Todd’s residence in Beverly Hills after the plane crash and should now be expelled from the funeral. When another of Todd’s brothers, David, attempted to reason with him, Carl yelled, “I dare you to throw me out. I will not be here while Hanley is here.” Finally, he was calmed down by yet another brother named Frank. The second altercation concerned where the photographers should stand. It erupted in an unseemly pushing-and-shoving match.

Throughout the half-hour service, the crowd outside kept yelling, “Liz, Liz. Come on out, Liz. Let’s have a look.” Todd Jr., who shared his father’s penchant for hyperbole, rose to speak a few words and called him “the greatest human being who ever lived.” Pale and withdrawn, Elizabeth sat like a robot until attendants started to lower the casket into the ground. “Oh, no, no, no,” she cried. “Mike, Mike, you cannot leave me here alone.” At the end of the service, she asked everyone to leave the tent so she could kneel and pray beside the grave. After a few minutes, she walked out by herself. The woefully inadequate police guard was unable to control the ten thousand onlookers, who stormed at her with a savage roar straight out of Nathanael West’s
Day of the Locust
. As her brother tried to protect her, souvenir hunters ripped the black veil from her face and then jerked whole strands of hair from her scalp. Todd Jr., Eddie, and Kennamer surrounded her, and she began to sag like Vicki Lester at Norman Maine’s funeral in
A Star Is Born
. Somehow she rallied and made her way to the limo, with Howard and the others doing their best to clear a path through what looked to her like a flock of “black gray birds.”
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Todd Jr. returned to L.A. with Elizabeth, and she took to her bed again. In constant attendance, Guilaroff bunked on her bedroom couch. His motives were highly suspect. He used Elizabeth to impress his friends, sometimes dragging them along to Schuyler Road. Another visitor to Elizabeth’s bedroom whose motives were less than pure was Eddie Fisher, who was determined to play “an important role in her recovery,” he wrote. He was jealous when he realized that she’d begun to see Arthur Loew Jr. and urged her to spend more time with her stepson, Mike Todd Jr., but what he really wanted was to spend more time with her himself. He was in love with her but not yet ready to admit it.
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Before Mike’s death, Elizabeth had agreed to present the best short subjects and documentary awards at the Oscar telecast on March 26 at the RKO Pantages Theater. Helen Rose called her that morning and said, “Elizabeth, about that white dress you meant to wear tonight?” “Forget it,” Elizabeth said. Jennifer Jones went on in her place, also agreeing to accept Elizabeth’s Oscar should she win for
Raintree
. Bill Lyon and Howard and Mara Taylor arrived and tried to persuade Elizabeth to come downstairs to watch the telecast. She finally appeared in the living room in her housecoat, without makeup, and her only jewelry was Todd’s twisted gold wedding ring, which had been returned to her. One of the first Oscars of the evening, for scientific and technical innovation, went to Todd-AO, the precursor of the wide-screen systems in use today. Elizabeth would have been by Todd’s side had he lived to accept it. She said nothing, but tears streamed down her cheeks. As the end of the show approached—the announcement of the best actor and actress Oscars—she said, “I am not going to win. Joanne Woodward is going to win. Nothing is going to go right for me now. Nothing will go right for me from now on, because Mike is gone.” Ironically, Woodward was certain that Elizabeth was a shoo-in, but it was Woodward, the wife of her
Cat
costar Paul Newman, who took home the prize, for
The Three Faces of Eve
. Elizabeth turned from the TV set and told Lyon, “Order a corsage of white orchids right away. Have them sent to the Beverly Hilton before the Academy party, and Bill, tell the florist to have the card read: ‘I am so happy for you. Elizabeth Taylor Todd and Mike, too.’” Then she broke down and had to be carried upstairs by Lyon and Howard Taylor. Later, she told Eddie Fisher, “I only care what Mike would have thought had I won.”
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Mike Todd Jr. remained closeted with Elizabeth. His father’s estate was split between them. After the debts were paid off, Elizabeth received $13,000. Of necessity, she returned to work at Metro on April 14, less than a month after Mike’s death. She had lost twelve pounds and looked stunning in Helen Rose’s short white chiffon dress with a low neckline and a waist nipped in by a two-inch satin belt. The cast showered her with red roses, and the crew, some of whom had worked on her pictures for nearly twenty years, brought her bunches of violets. Her grief lent a new intensity to her acting. She delivered a moving, superbly controlled performance that delighted Tennessee Williams, who said, “I loved her in
Cat.
She was the best in the film. I think she is—can be—a great actress.” Burl Ives agreed, calling her “the best of the bunch.”
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At home, Elizabeth would call Mike Todd Jr. to her room several times every night, saying, “Mike can’t be dead. I don’t believe it.” Her stepson was three years her junior, and as he later diplomatically put it, he was “very uncomfortable” at Schuyler Road. Trying to deal with his own grief, he found her sorrow damaging to his “state of mind.” Nonetheless he established a company, Todd and Todd, with her, and she played a bit part in his gimmicky movie
Scent of Mystery
, featuring a new process called “Smell-o-Vision.” His close involvement with Elizabeth ended when he rang his wife and told her to join them, and Sarah Todd wasted no time in whisking her husband away.

For Elizabeth, closure proved impossible as she continued to seek a Mike Todd surrogate. Vacating the Schuyler Road house, she moved into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Carroll Baker, the actress who played Elizabeth’s daughter in
Giant
, was the next tenant at 1330 Schuyler Road, and she found herself “listening to ghosts.” At twilight, the lilting, waltz-time strains of “Around the World” still wafted from the next-door neighbor’s piano. At bedtime, a huge owl swooped in through the French doors on the upstairs balcony and perched at the foot of Carroll’s bed, hooting at her like the bird of doom in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’” Lying in the same powder-blue-and-gold rococo bed the Todds had used, Carroll couldn’t stop thinking of Elizabeth and how she’d writhed in shock and grief on hearing of Mike’s death. Soon, Carroll moved to a house on Maple Drive, leaving the shadows of Schuyler Road for a sunnier part of Beverly Hills.

Making her first public appearance since widow-hood, Elizabeth visited Eddie backstage at the Tropicana Hotel in Vegas on his opening night in June 1958. Her presence at ringside caused a sensation, and later she joined Eddie and Dr. Max Jacobson in the Tropicana lounge. Elizabeth said she was having trouble falling asleep. Eddie took Max up to her suite, where the infamous “Dr. Feelgood” gave her an intravenous shot, a mild sedative. When she still couldn’t sleep, Eddie skipped his opening night party to sit up with her till dawn. “Your graciousness in coming to my opening,” he telegraphed her later, “is only exceeded by my gratitude.”
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By his own admission, the right woman for him was always the next one.

Chapter 6
Eddie Fisher
CLOSURE BY INJECTION

On August 10, 1958, Eddie turned thirty, and Elizabeth asked him to visit her alone, explaining that she wanted to give him something that had belonged to Todd. She’d missed his birthday party at Romanoff’s, explaining, “I have my period, and I just feel awful.” He could tell from her slurry voice that what she really had was a hangover. When he arrived, she was sitting by the swimming pool in a flesh-colored bathing suit, a glass of wine at her side and Liza Todd playing between her legs. She gave him Todd’s gold money clip, and later they held hands in the car as Eddie drove them to the beach at Malibu. Displaying some of the late Mike Todd’s chutzpah, Eddie told Elizabeth he was going to marry her. “When?” she asked. Liza continued to play in the sand near them as they kissed.

After that, they were inseparable, going for long walks and dining at La Scala and the Polo Lounge. Often they brought the unsuspecting Debbie along and held hands under the table. If Debbie was sitting on the other side of him, Elizabeth would take his hand and place it inside her dress. One evening ended with Eddie driving Elizabeth home and Debbie riding with Guilaroff in ominous silence. At a party, Elizabeth followed Eddie from room to room until they found themselves alone; then she threw herself at him. When Van Cliburn told Eddie that one of his dreams was to meet Elizabeth, Eddie arranged for him to play a private concert for her in the Fisher living room. It was a coup worthy of Mike Todd.

In late August, Elizabeth deposited her children with Arthur Loew Jr. and flew to New York, checking in at the Plaza. Eddie followed, checking in at the Essex House, having lied to Debbie, claiming his TV sponsor, Chesterfield, needed him in Manhattan for a meeting. When he called on Elizabeth at the Plaza, she dismissed her secretary for the night, and Eddie took her in his arms. “When are we going to make love?” she asked. “Tonight,” he said, and immediately she was off on another a-loving, sexual relationship. “Maybe with Eddie I was trying to see if I was alive or dead,” she wrote five years later. At NBC, publicist Jane Ellen Wayne remembered that starlets who dated Eddie dwelled on “how well endowed he happened to be, and how adept at lovemaking, supposedly among the best in show business—in a class with Frank Sinatra and Gary Cooper.”
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Nobody’s fool, Debbie caught them red-handed at the Plaza, ringing Elizabeth’s suite and getting Eddie on the phone. “Oh, shit,” he said, and Debbie could hear a drowsy Elizabeth in the background asking, “Who is it, darling?” Debbie told him off and hung up. As Eddie remembers it, he was the one who called Debbie, telling her he was with Elizabeth “and we’re in love.” Debbie said, “We’ll talk about it when you get home.”
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Either way, when the
New York Daily News
rang to confirm the rumor, Debbie said, “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” hoping somehow to salvage her marriage. She had daughter Carrie Fisher—future Princess Leia of
Star Wars
and best-selling author of
Postcards from the Edge
—to think of, as well as baby Todd Emmanuel, born on February 24, 1958, and named after Mike Todd.

Eddie was not the only man pursuing Elizabeth. Cary Grant called her at the Plaza and invited her to go on an LSD trip with him. She turned him down for Eddie. They went up to Grossinger’s for Labor Day weekend, staying in Jennie Grossinger’s home. Elizabeth rang Mike Todd Jr. and asked him to join her and Eddie for dinner. That night, at the end of the meal, Eddie excused himself, and Elizabeth said, “I have to tell you about Eddie.” Her stepson assumed that Eddie was “being a nuisance and making passes,” but she told him, “No! No! You don’t understand. We’re in love and we want to get married. We’d like your approval.” Todd Jr. still shared business interests with her.

“Of course,” he said, “I’m delighted,” but later he admitted, “I didn’t think he had a lot upstairs.” Eddie’s gifts lay much further to the south, and he helped the grieving widow to achieve closure through injection.

According to her later lover Max Lerner, “They spent four days and nights mostly in bed together. She said that was how Eddie got her out of her grief.” In a public statement she said, “I’ve felt happier and more like a human being for the past two weeks than I have since Mike died.”
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Back in Manhattan, they took in Broadway plays and went nightclubbing at Quo Vadis, the Harwyn, the Blue Angel, the Embers, and the Colony. New Yorkers paid the lovers little mind, even when they stopped to kiss on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight. But
Life
got a shot of them leaving the Harwyn, and Leonard Lyons and Walter Winchell reported their affair. In the midst of a brewing scandal, they returned to L.A. and moved into the Beverly Hills home of her agent, Kurt Frings, hiding out in a small upstairs room where his wife, Ketti, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Broadway hit based on Thomas Wolfe’s
Look Homeward, Angel
, did her writing. They called it their “love nest,” or sometimes their “womb with a view.” In time, Debbie filed for divorce, later writing, “You can actually feel the pressure when Elizabeth Taylor tells the world that you’re depriving her of a lover.” Elizabeth found herself in complete control of a fairly handsome sex machine who wasn’t costing her any money, who wasn’t beating her up, and who never said no.

“I never challenged her,” admitted Eddie. “I didn’t care—I was getting what I wanted . . . We’d make love three, four, five times a day.” His only complaint was having to catch Elizabeth when she passed out from liquor and drugs. Sometimes she blacked out in the middle of a sentence and collapsed without warning. “It was like catching a dead person,” he said.

Eddie went to Dr. Kennamer with his concerns, and Kennamer told him to get Elizabeth to a psychiatrist. Eddie decided to wait for a propitious moment to spring Kennamer’s suggestion on Elizabeth. One night, they made love in Ketti’s room, had a glass of wine, and Eddie read a love poem aloud to her. It seemed the perfect time to tell her she ought to see a shrink, but he was in for a shock. Elizabeth started throwing things at him, ran stark naked into the street, jumped into her Cadillac, and started the engine. As the car moved down the street, Eddie ran alongside it, screaming at the nude lady behind the wheel, “It’s not you, it’s me. I’ll go to the psychiatrist.” Mollified, she returned to the love nest, and they made up by having sex again.
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