The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (23 page)

Then, as unlikely as an ant upsetting an applecart, Elizabeth’s pretentious hairdresser, Sydney Guilaroff, temporarily shut down production at Pinewood. A relatively minor functionary who received $1,000 a week in salary plus $600 in expenses, he cost
Cleopatra
hundreds of thousands of dollars in delays. Guilaroff—who by his own admission couldn’t get along with the British hairdressers’ union—manipulated Elizabeth into insisting that he remain on the picture. The
London Times
ran a photo of the gigantic $600,000 set at Pinewood with the caption: “This is the set that Mr. Guilaroff closed down.” Guilaroff’s value to Elizabeth was as an incorrigible snoop who repeated every snippet of gossip he heard on the set. As a result, she always knew exactly what was going on. She also needed Guilaroff for moral support. Though still a young woman, she was near the end of her rope. Pills, cigarettes, and alcohol undoubtedly had decimated her immune system and left her open to opportunistic infections.

Years later, Eddie explained, “The real cause of her illness was her desire for painkilling pills. She’d be popping pills and drinking most of the day.”
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She also smoked like a chimney, despite a lifetime of respiratory ailments. Shirley MacLaine recalled, “Sydney would light her cigarette and she would draw the smoke long and deep into her lungs with . . . low-down basic oral gratification.” According to Guilaroff, her health was undermined by Eddie and Dr. Max Jacobson, whom Eddie brought to London as his drug supplier.
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Cleopatra
’s major troubles began the day that Elizabeth filmed a nude scene in forty-degree weather at Pinewood Studios and came down with a cold. Walter Wanger’s hope of finishing the film by February 14, 1961, was dashed. On November 13, 1960, Lord Evans, physician to Queen Elizabeth II, was called to Elizabeth’s suite at the Dorchester Hotel, where he told her that she had been poisoned by an abscessed tooth. Other doctors arrived, and she was given an anesthetic. The tooth was extracted as she lay on the floor of the suite. She continued to complain of various maladies, but some of her symptoms were faked, according to Eddie, to get drugs from doctors. She knew how to induce a respiratory attack if that was what it took to get a fix. Some of her doctors were in league with her and made up diseases to justify her prescriptions.
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In the end, the Fishers were no better than two junkies, browbeating their doctors into giving them drugs. Eddie was on Librium, and Elizabeth sometimes passed out from a combination of pills and booze. When they ran out of drugs one day, they called one of their doctors to the suite. He produced a bottle of pills, but Elizabeth yelled, “That’s the wrong one, you cock-sucker. Don’t try to give me that fucking shit. Give me the right one.”
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Eddie, who’d been taught how to give intravenous injections by Dr. Jacobson, finally started injecting Elizabeth with morphine, sometimes giving her two shots a night. In addition, “she was eating Demerol like candy,” Eddie alleged.
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When her fever soared one day to 103 degrees, she was rushed to the London Clinic by ambulance. Dr. Carl Goldman and his medical team thought she might have meningism, an inflammation of the three membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord. Acute fever is a frequent symptom of this illness, which is sometimes associated with binge drinking, smoking, and stress.
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Doctors insisted she quit working for a period of months. After a week in the hospital, she returned to the United States with Eddie. Her illness cost Fox $2 million. Although Lloyds of London footed the bill, the insurer demanded that Fox fire Elizabeth and hire Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, or Shirley MacLaine in her place. “No Liz, no Cleo,” said Wanger. Both she and the production were eventually reinsured.

The turning point in the Fisher marriage occurred when the couple stopped in Munich on their way back to London. At 4 a.m., Eddie threatened to leave Elizabeth by dawn if she didn’t stop passing out on him. Snatching a bottle of Seconal from her night table, she said, “Oh yeah, you’re leaving in the morning? Well, I’m leaving right now,” and swallowed a handful of pills.

“Are you crazy?” he screamed. “What about the children?”

She replied, “You’ll take care of the children.” She was buckling at the knees and foaming at the mouth. In the next suite, Kurt Frings heard the commotion and called a ninety-year-old doctor who could be trusted not to snitch to the press. He injected her with an antidote, and Eddie gave him $1,000 to keep his mouth shut.

When Elizabeth revived the next day, they started fighting again. He was no longer equal to the challenge and stress of their relationship, later explaining that she was abusing him, hitting him six or seven times in the face, trying to goad him into beating her. “I’m not gonna hit you,” he said.
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She kept pummeling him until he was forced to overpower her and hold her down on the bed. “Inevitably that led to sex,” he said. Cracking up under the pressure, he persuaded doctors at the London Clinic to give him a completely unnecessary appendectomy just to escape her—surely one of the high points in the unwritten history of human masochism.
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He also faked other ailments, but Elizabeth’s physician, Rex Kennamer, was wise to his stunts and told Elizabeth nothing was wrong with him. She demanded he return to the Dorchester where, according to Eddie, she was overmedicating herself for her back pain. “She needed more and more painkillers just to counter the effects of the painkillers,” he wrote.
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Fox planned to resume filming in April 1961, but in early March, Elizabeth experienced difficulty breathing and broke out in a cold sweat. Dr. J. Middleton Price jammed a plastic tube down her throat and into her trachea, so air could be pumped directly into her lungs from a portable oxygen tank. Rushed to the London Clinic, she was diagnosed with double pneumonia, but one doctor privately told Eddie that her respiratory failure was the result of depressant drugs.
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Dr. Terence Cawthorne performed a tracheotomy, cutting a hole in her air passage above her breastbone and inserting a silver tube connected to a respirator. “She was the most lifeless individual I’ve ever seen,” nurse Catherine Morgan recalled.

Four years later, Elizabeth finally admitted that she’d been trying to kill herself to escape her grief over Todd and the emptiness of her life with Eddie. “My subconscious . . . let me become so seriously ill,” she wrote. “I just let the disease take me. I had been hoping to be happy, pretending to be happy . . . My despair became so black that I just couldn’t face waking up any more, couldn’t face another divorce. My dream world which was Mike was much more satisfactory and much more real.”
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In other words, what came to be known as her heroic “near-death” experience—in which Mike Todd appeared in a vision and wrested her from the clutches of the grim reaper—was nothing but another occasion of too many pills, no better or worse than other celebrities’. Eddie Fisher was with Elizabeth throughout her health crisis and later stated, “Elizabeth’s problems in 1960 were basically the same as they were in 1990. She had become addicted to every pill on the market.”
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In West Hollywood, Joan Collins’s telephone rang in her apartment on Sunset Plaza Drive, where she was with Warren Beatty. Her agent told her to get ready to go abroad—Elizabeth wasn’t expected to live, and Joan was at last going to play Cleopatra, a role she’d lost the previous year. “God, I hope she doesn’t die,” Joan said.

“She won’t,” Warren assured her. “She’s got nine lives, that woman. Don’t worry about it, Butterfly. All you have to worry about is making breakfast.”
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In London, Eddie thought it odd that Elizabeth’s doctors continued to give her depressant drugs when her crisis had been brought on by the same “pills.”
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Interestingly, he did nothing to stop them, though he took credit for saving her life several times. At one point he appeared outside the London Clinic and told reporters, “I’m going to lose my girl.”
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Though Elizabeth was still critical, she used what little breath she had left to beg Eddie, “Make them give me something stronger to sleep. Not like before.”
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On March 10, 1961, doctors announced she’d made a “very rare recovery.”
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By the 12th she was sitting up in bed, entertaining John Wayne and Tennessee Williams and drinking Dom Perignon, even squirting a stream of champagne out of the hole in her throat to amuse Truman Capote.
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On March 27, swathed in sable, a white scarf covering her incision, she emerged from the clinic in a wheelchair. At London airport, she was mobbed by fans and paparazzi, and additional police were mobilized to control the crowd. Finally, she was raised on a canvas blanket to the plane and flown back to America.

There can be no question that Elizabeth was ill, but in retrospect it seems unlikely that she was as ill as the world was led to believe. She seemed to have been determined to extricate herself at any cost from a picture that was shaping up as the worst turkey of all time. The London shoot, which came to be known as
Cleopatra I
, was shut down permanently. Peter Finch had a nervous breakdown and disappeared into a nursing home. According to Elaine Dundy, Finch “just wanted to lie in the sun and drink,” but he posthumously won the coveted best actor Oscar for
Network
. Stephen Boyd went on to other commitments.
Cleopatra I
was history, an aborted film that had been in production sixteen months, cost $7 million, and amounted to only twelve minutes of usable footage. Facing possible bankruptcy, Fox sold off the 260-acre L.A. lot to cover expenses. The Aluminum Company of America snapped it up for $43 million, the biggest real-estate steal since Peter Minuit snatched Manhattan from the Indians for $24. Quickly developed into Century City, the old Fox lot became a bustling office, hotel, and shopping center complex just south of Beverly Hills. Fox had to lease back some of it to continue in the picture business.

In Los Angeles, Elizabeth—her beauty miraculously unaffected by her recent ordeal—attended the annual Oscar ceremony with Eddie. She was one of the five nominees in the best actress category for
Butterfield 8
. As she left for the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on April 17, she turned her seven-year-old son, Chris, over to his father, Wilding Sr. Pretending to weep, Chris used a Coke bottle as a microphone and said, “I’m Mummy collecting her Oscar, and I have to look like I’m crying.” Later, millions watched on television as Yul Brynner announced Elizabeth’s victory. Seated far back in the middle of the auditorium, she screamed, kissed Eddie, and told him, “Take me down the aisle.” She hobbled along on crutches, favoring an ankle still bandaged from an IV tube. Her left foot was so inflamed she needed a size seven shoe on it instead of the usual size four. The long skirt of her evening gown covered her swollen left leg as she and Eddie paused at the steps to the stage. “Walk me to the podium,” she said, but Eddie refused. “No, kid,” he said, “this one you go alone.”

Bob Hope and Burt Lancaster, the year’s best actor winner for
Elmer Gantry
, helped her across the stage, both men looking very concerned. As she delivered a modest acceptance speech, Lancaster reached out at one point to steady her. The tracheotomy scar was clearly visible on her bare throat, and she whispered hoarsely, “I don’t really know how to express my gratitude. All I can say is thank you.” Later, she held court at their bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, receiving the industry’s top actors and directors one at a time. When she was told Sinatra was waiting outside, Eddie braced himself for a vengeful scene, but instead Elizabeth was gracious, spending more time with Sinatra than with John Wayne, whom she liked. Eddie thought her “a hypocrite.”
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Dr. Kennamer told her that she belonged at home in bed, but she insisted on attending the 10 p.m. Oscar party at the Beverly Hilton. Posing for fifty photographers, she said, “I always recover, and now I shall live to be 110.”

Her unexpected appearance on Oscar night, looking gloriously healthy despite her scar and crutches, raised eyebrows. “Liz Taylor in 1960 remains the only example of someone voted an Oscar because the electorate thought she was at death’s door—and then recovering in time to pick it up,” wrote Academy historian Anthony Holden. Critic Peter H. Brown preferred any of the other four nominees—Deborah Kerr, Shirley MacLaine, Greer Garson, and Melina Mercouri—and wrote, “Liz was the sole nominee who obviously did
not
deserve the Oscar.” Huffed MacLaine, “I lost to a tracheotomy,” but for once the jaded MacLaine was being naive. She’d lost to a drug OD.

Still angry at Metro for forcing her into
Butterfield 8
, Elizabeth dismissed her Oscar as “a sympathy award.” But she obviously relished the role of plucky survivor and milked her death-defying London crisis for all it was worth, describing her illness in the most melodramatic terms in a speech at an L.A. Medical Fund dinner. The phony spiel had been ghosted for her by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, whom she’d chosen to replace Mamoulian as director of the revived production of
Cleopatra
.
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Still facing bankruptcy, Fox executives had decided to salvage the picture after realizing that Elizabeth’s renewed popularity might well save the studio from ruin. Shrewdly aware that each increment of fame had its cash value, Elizabeth charged Fox another $1 million to restart production in Rome the following fall. With percentages and overages, she’d eventually realize $7 million.
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