The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (21 page)

Said actress Joanne Jacobson in 1999, “Ketti Frings told me that when Elizabeth left, she had to paint the room black.” Elizabeth obviously needed more space for her children and pets, especially her Yorkshire terrier, Theresa, who slept with her.

To escape the fifties stigma of “shacking up,” Eddie took an apartment on Sunset Boulevard but left it in the middle of a housewarming party and never came back. Elizabeth leased Linda Christian’s Spanish-style stucco house on Copa de Oro Road in secluded Bel Air, where Eddie could come and go unnoticed.

He paid dearly for his carnal holiday. The ratings for his Chesterfield show plummeted. Oddly enough, he was still expressing surprise forty-two years later that the world disapproved of his sleeping with his best friend’s widow less than six months after his death. Elizabeth could be equally naive. In an interview with Hedda Hopper, she committed a monumental gaffe. The columnist asked her why she and Eddie couldn’t have waited a decent interval before falling in bed together. According to Hopper, Elizabeth snapped, “Mike’s dead and I’m alive. What do you expect me to do, sleep alone?” In the movie colony and throughout the Western world, she soon came to be regarded as a dark vamp and home wrecker—quite justifiably so. It was not the first or last family she’d torpedo. Carrie Fisher was so devastated that she remarked years later, “I’ve always said that if I wasn’t Debbie Reynolds’ daughter, I’d make fun of whoever was.”
⁵

On January 8, 1959, rumors circulated that Elizabeth had cracked up and was in the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. “I’m going with Eddie to Chasen’s so that everyone can see me and know I am not a mental patient,” she said, but photographs of her at the time show dark circles under her eyes, and she was putting on weight at a rate no movie star could afford. In Beverly Hills and even on the freeways, people blocked Elizabeth and Eddie in traffic and hurled insults. Elizabeth went to Guilaroff in tears and said she couldn’t understand why everyone was turning against her. Writer Joe Hyams observed, “She can’t believe that someone else’s husband is a luxury that even she will have to pay for.”

Most of their old L.A. friends snubbed them. “I’d just been a very bad girl and broken up a marriage,” Elizabeth recalled. “Natalie [Wood] and R. J. [Robert Wagner] were about the only people in the industry who’d talk to me.” Monty was another. Having forgiven him for his dislike of Todd, Elizabeth went out with him and Eddie one night, taking along a priest who was the cousin of one of her friends. “By dessert, the priest was playing with Monty under the table,” Eddie related. “Elizabeth didn’t care what Monty did, because she was crazy about him.” At another club one evening, Elizabeth spotted Rock Hudson holding hands with one of the top pop singers of the day. Shaking her head she whispered to Eddie, “To think that I had . . .” Eddie assumed she’d once been in love with Rock.
⁶

Elizabeth’s pal Oscar Levant, commenting on Eddie’s leaving Debbie for Elizabeth, quipped, “How high can you stoop?” Eddie’s fans continued to turn on him. His million-dollar career as a popular recording artist vanished. In the following decade, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy remarked during her feud with
Look
over a book about JFK’s assassination, “Anyone who is against me will look like a rat—unless I run off with Eddie Fisher.” On NBC’s
Dateline
in 1999, reporter Keith Morrison recalled that Elizabeth and Eddie had been “two of the most hated people in America.” There were of course exceptions, such as Rona Barrett, who admitted she fantasized nightly that she was Elizabeth, and “Eddie [was] smothering me with kisses.” When Rona became a gossip columnist and met Eddie, he told her, “I wouldn’t date a Jewish broad if my life depended on it. They think they’re doing you a big favor when it comes to sex . . . The
goyishe
dames are different. They’re always happy to do it.” Ironically enough, Elizabeth, a
shiksa
(non-Jewish girl), was studying to convert to Judaism, influenced by Mike Todd’s rabbi, Max Nussbaum, who helped her cope with her grief.

Despite Elizabeth’s bad press, her career continued to flourish as Eddie’s declined. Studio chiefs knew she was the industry’s hottest feminine star, ranking as its current number two money-maker, just below Glenn Ford.
Cat
was a box-office bonanza, the most profitable movie in Metro history. Even
Time
, a frequent detractor, had to admit, “Elizabeth Taylor plays with surprising sureness.” She continued to have her pick of the best scripts, including
Two for the Seesaw
and
Irma La Douce
, but daringly chose Tennessee Williams’s controversial
Suddenly Last Summer
, which dealt with the heretofore taboo subjects of homosexuality, cannibalism, and mental illness. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, one of the best directors in the business, announced the film would be shot in England the following year.

In early 1959, Elizabeth converted to Reform Judaism at Temple Israel in Hollywood and was given the Hebrew name of Elisheba Rachel. Her Christian parents looked on with the same horror they’d have displayed at a witches’ sabbath. Elizabeth insisted “it had absolutely nothing to do with my upcoming marriage to Eddie Fisher.” No doubt she was telling the truth; Eddie told Rona Barrett, “Jewish girls [are] no good for fucking.” Perhaps fortunately for the sake of her conjugal life with Eddie, Elizabeth’s passion for Judaism quickly waned—she and Eddie never went to synagogue, only once observed the high holidays, and she never gave up wearing her cross.

Rabbi Nussbaum officiated at her marriage to Eddie on May 12, 1959, at Temple Beth Shalom in Las Vegas. The bride wore a Jean Louis moss-green chiffon with a hood, high neckline, and long sleeves. Eddie sported a yarmulke and a blue business suit. Sara Taylor wore beige lace, and Katie Fisher wore navy lace. Mike Todd Jr. was best man, and Elizabeth’s sister-in-law Mara was maid-of-honor. A traditional Jewish wedding, it included the
chuppah
(a canopy), the groom stomping on a wineglass, and the signing of the marriage contract. Among the guests were Hanley, Guilaroff, the Fringses, Milton Blackstone, the Eddie Cantors, Dr. Kennamer, and Benny Thau. Robert Evans, the actor and future Paramount president who’d once run a sportswear company, sent Elizabeth one hundred pairs of slacks. Within a few years Evans and Eddie would be competing for a girl named Renata Boeck, “the most beautiful of them all,” according to Eddie.
⁷

At a reception at Hidden Well Ranch, Elizabeth spotted Vernon Scott and told him to “screw off.” He was the UPI reporter who’d refused a ride on the doomed
Lucky Liz
, and recently he’d been criticizing Elizabeth and Eddie in print. On their honeymoon, Elizabeth wanted sex on demand and got it. “I was always happy to play my role,” Eddie confessed. “We’d make love in the swimming pool, on Mexican beaches, under waterfalls, in the back seat of a limousine on the way home from a party. There is nothing more erotic than a moonlit beach and Elizabeth Taylor. We fit together . . . perfect sexually.”
⁸

Cruising the Mediterranean on producer Sam Spiegel’s 120-foot yacht
Orinoco
, the newlyweds sailed from Barcelona to Cannes, enjoying the services of the yacht’s captain, chef, steward, chambermaid, three sailors, three engineers, and a bilingual assistant. Unfortunately their bedroom, a replica of Columbus’s cabin on the
Santa Maria
, was in the prow, and every pitch of the vessel tossed them about. “We had a hard time making love,” Eddie complained. In Torremolinos, Spain, Elizabeth collected her children, who’d been flown in to meet her. Eddie took them all to a bullfight. At one point during the corrida, volunteers were invited to participate. Eager to impress her children, Eddie started for the ring, but Elizabeth said, “You do that, I’ll break your fucking head.”
⁹
Nevertheless, he accepted a red cape and challenged a young bull. To his surprise, the beast ignored the cape and charged him. “Elizabeth saw her entire sex life about to disappear,” he recalled. The bull pinned him to a barricade, but fortunately the family jewels remained intact. As Eddie tried, without success, to ingratiate himself with her children, he shamefully neglected his own. He had to learn from Louella Parsons that his son Todd was in the hospital. Thanks to Debbie’s watchful care, baby Todd soon recovered from his hernia operation.
¹⁰

Though Eddie was now unemployable, both Elizabeth and Debbie found themselves at new peaks of earning power as a result of the scandal. Within a year Debbie’s annual income rose from $75,000 to nearly $1 million. Elizabeth’s salary quintupled. She’d received $125,000 for
Cat
. For
Suddenly Last Summer
, her first independent venture following the termination of her despised MGM contract, she received $500,000. Typical Hollywood salaries at the time ran to Robert Mitchum’s $75,000 for
The List of Adrian Messenger
; Anthony Perkins’s $40,000 for
Psycho;
and Marilyn Monroe’s $100,000 for
Something’s Got to Give
. With major bucks came major power. In
Suddenly Last Summer
Elizabeth saw an opportunity to help Monty, who appeared dazed and drugged in recent flops like
Lonely-hearts
. Pitying him, she talked Sam Spiegel into casting him in
Suddenly
, which she began filming after her honeymoon. She also arranged for Eddie to appear in a scene as a peasant begging her for a scrap of bread. It was an apt symbol of what their relationship became after he failed the test to which she subjected straight men. “Elizabeth’s tough and I’m a softie,” he admitted. She had effectively emasculated him. “To Eddie I was ninety percent mother,” she told reporter Ruth Waterbury. Eddie later confided to Rona Barrett that Connie Stevens, whom he married after divorcing Elizabeth, was “the best fuck I ever had,” causing Rona to speculate, “Liz’s conversion to Judaism must have ruined everything.”
¹¹

On May 25, 1959, Elizabeth reported to work at Shepperton Studios near London, leaving the children with Eddie. They regarded him “as a friend,” she said. Certainly they never mistook him for a parent. The children were “remarkable,” she added, in how they survived her serial marriages and constant travel. “My life should have been murder for them. We’ve lived like gypsies.” After a surfeit of sordid headlines in British tabloids, the Fishers found themselves ostracized in conservative Englefield Green, near Great Windsor. Despite their fifteen-room mansion, Crown House, which included a housekeeper, a chef, a valet, three gardeners, three housemaids, and a nanny for the children, they were “snubbed,” Eddie complained. Though the press made their presence well known, they received no calls or invitations. When they asked their neighbors to drinks or dinner, no one accepted. Finally, they quit the English countryside and checked into London’s Dorchester, famous for its partiality to show folk. The staff knew Elizabeth to be a great tipper, and according to Sheilah Graham, “The hotel maid received a hundred dollars [$500 by today’s standards] every time she unpacked for Elizabeth, and another hundred when she repacked.” Monty visited them at the Dorch and alarmed Eddie by perching on a ledge of the terrace while drunk and stoned, “wobbling a few inches from death.”

In
Suddenly Last Summer
, Elizabeth played Catherine Holly, a young woman used as bait by her gay cousin, Sebastian, to draw boys to him. Cathy is with Sebastian when he’s assaulted on a beach in Spain by a gang of street boys whose sexual favors he’d sought. As she looks on in horror, they tear his body to pieces and eat it. Later Sebastian’s mother, Violet Venable, played by Katharine Hepburn, tries to stop Cathy from revealing the truth about her son’s demise, and Cathy ends up in an insane asylum. Monty played Dr. Cukrowicz, the psychiatrist who saves Cathy from a prefrontal lobotomy. The character of Violet Venable was based on Tennessee’s mother, Edwina, who permitted doctors to perform a lobotomy on Tennessee’s sexually frustrated sister, Rose Isabel. In the movie, Violet attempts to bribe Dr. Cukrowicz into performing the same operation on Catherine. Like “Desire and the Black Masseur,” Williams’s earlier tale of cannibalism,
Suddenly Last Summer
was perhaps the ultimate S&M fantasy of guilty homoeroticism and pleasurable punishment. It struck responsive chords in Elizabeth, for emotional cannibalism typified her straight relationships. Eddie Fisher, who was now seeking a niche for himself in the movie industry as Elizabeth’s producer, was feeding on her fame, and Elizabeth was using him for sex. His usefulness in that respect was quickly coming to an end. Columnist Janet Charlton revealed in 1999 that Elizabeth was contemplating writing a book about Eddie titled
Louse
, in which “she may even claim that he was impotent.” That same year, Tony Bennett’s ex-wife Sandra revealed that she had a two-month affair with Fisher immediately following his split from Elizabeth. “Eddie was a so-so lover,” she said.
¹²

Elizabeth and Tennessee grew ever closer during the production. She taught him how to negotiate for a percentage of the gross and burnish his deals like a Hollywood pro. Before that, he’d been getting five percent of the net profits, and he’d never collected anything beyond his original fees. She told the gay playwright that he was “hopelessly naive” and had “no sense of business.” “I stepped in and tried to act as his agent,” she later said. “I took him in hand! I loved him dearly.” Tennessee followed her advice to the letter, improving all his future deals. In gratitude he wrote a new play for her,
Sweet Bird of Youth
, about an aging movie star and a gigolo, but Geraldine Page landed the role on Broadway and in the film years before Elizabeth finally starred in a television version at the age of fifty-seven.