How to Be a Movie Star (24 page)

Indeed, a month after the
Confidential
exposé of the Mature affair, Elizabeth was being called by one fan magazine "the beautiful wife that Mike Wilding is desperate to hold on to."
Look
magazine went so far as to describe a romantic all-night romp through Paris that "Mike" took "Liz" on during the filming of
Zarak.
All of this wasn't so different from the time Sammy Davis Jr.'s agent planted a story with
Confidential
that Sammy was having an affair with Ava Gardner. While Middle America might recoil from a mixed-race romance, Davis's standing within the industry instantly shot up—so much so that he sent Harrison a pair of gold cuff links as thanks. "The scandal magazines weren't always about hurting careers," the publicist Alan Cahan agreed. "Sometimes they could help."

What couldn't be helped, however, was the Wilding marriage. The strain was showing. At one magazine photo shoot, Michael suggested that Elizabeth move over to get the best light. "I know how to pose for a picture," she snapped at him. "When you have taken as many pictures as I have,
then
you can tell me how to pose. Meanwhile, just be quiet, Daddy"—a uncanny echo of Sara talking to Francis.

Four years earlier, Michael Wilding had been the perfect mate. But the job was done. Elizabeth had blossomed into a popular, even beloved star, heralded not only for her beauty and glamour but also for her motherhood and deep commitment to family. As the real woman rebelled—finding that living a charade was too frustrating—it became increasingly evident that Wilding's serviceability had run its course. "She needed someone bigger than Wilding," said Henry Baron. In Hollywood marriages lasted only so long as they were useful, said Dick Clayton, and "when Taylor needed a new image, her publicists would look around for something new on the romantic front." Something new—something to shake things up—but just what that would be depended on the kind of star that Elizabeth Taylor, now twenty-four, was going to become. And at the beginning of 1956, as the world awaited the release of
Giant,
that was still unclear.

Wilding had to have realized that he'd come up short in the deal. He was left with little—except, of course, for two sons, which surely counted for something. But the MGM contract had disintegrated after only three pictures, none of them major hits, and he was back working in British productions like
Zarak..
Wilding never fit in in Hollywood and, indeed, was never all that comfortable as an actor. "I feared it," he admitted. "I was not a born actor and the art of acting never came to me easily."

The marriage was over but for the technicalities. Wilding was weary of trying to keep up with his wife. He told his friend, the costume designer Noel Taylor, that "he went broke trying to satisfy Mrs. Wilding's whims and extravagant tastes." Another confidant of Wilding's told the reporter Aline Mosby that the actor was "restless to be back with his older, sophisticated crowd in London, where he would not be Mr. Elizabeth Taylor." Another friend suggested that the marriage had never stood a chance of longevity. "Mike Wilding was too subtle and sophisticated," this friend said. "He was a pixie who liked to drink and have fun. He wasn't exactly rich either."

And what was becoming apparent was that no matter what kind of star Elizabeth Taylor was set to become, a rich husband sure would help.

Even though she was new to Hollywood, Shirley MacLaine knew a few things about the glamorous residents of the movie capital that others did not. Letting herself into her Malibu beach house, she was followed by her husband, businessman Steve Parker, and her two friends, Kevin McClory and Elizabeth Taylor. And what the foursome found after their night out on the town was MacLaine's dog getting sick all over the floor. Without a moment's hesitation and ignoring the lovely dress and expensive shoes she wore, Eliza beth got down on her hands and knees, and helped Shirley clean up the mess.

It was more than just Elizabeth's refreshing lack of movie-star pretension that MacLaine understood. She was also aware that Elizabeth was having a serious affair with McClory and that they'd spoken of marriage once she could be divorced from Wilding. Indeed, it was on that night in the early spring of 1956, while he watched Elizabeth on the floor cleaning up after a sick dog, that he decided she was the woman for him, McClory admitted.

The young man had much to recommend him as a husband for Elizabeth. Born in Dublin, McClory had a passionate Irish temperament that contrasted powerfully with Wilding's passivity, and a quick wit that kept Elizabeth in stitches. His minor speech impediment, to her mind, was simply a touching flaw that endeared him all the more. And McClory was just six years older than she was, another striking comparison to her twenty-years-older current husband. He wasn't rich, unfortunately—but while Wilding was on his way out, McClory was on his way up. After serving as assistant to director John Huston, he'd been snapped up by Mike Todd, the Broadway bigwig whose wide-screen 70mm process had wowed Hollywood with
Oklahoma!
and who was now ready to release the first picture under his own banner, the colossal
Around the World in Eighty Days.
MacLaine had played the key part of the quirky Princess Aouda.

It was during this period, MacLaine said, that Elizabeth was poised between one chapter of her career and another. "They were planning to build her up to be the biggest star at MGM," she said. With advance word on
Giant
causing tremendous excitement, there was a sense that Elizabeth might finally ascend to the absolute top ranks. Although her popularity over the last decade had been prodigious, she had remained a glamorous costar always paired with a bigger male name. When Metro had tried to get her top solo billing for
Giant,
Warners had refused; she'd had to settle for second place after Rock Hudson, with both of them below the title. It was a fair call, since for all her profitability, Elizabeth had not yet broken through into the top ten at the box office. The only women to do so over the last few years were Marilyn Monroe, Susan Hayward, and Jane Wyman. By 1956 there was a growing belief that Elizabeth could join their ranks.

The nature of filmmaking was changing; television, of course, was the major catalyst. As the decade went on and the small screen increasingly siphoned off the movie audience, the studios responded by making films bigger. Gone were the simple seventy-minute programmers made cheaply on the backlot. Now movies got longer—two, three hours—and wider—along with Todd's process, there was CinemaScope, Cinerama, and Vista Vision. Location shoots exploited film's potential for exotic verisimilitude that the stage-bound limitations of the small TV screen could never rival. Elizabeth's latest picture,
Raintree County,
which began shooting in April 1956 and reunited her with Montgomery Clift, was planned by its director, Edward Dmytryk, to rival
Gone With the Wind
as an epic Civil War romance. Shooting took place across Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi. The final cut of the film would run about three hours.

And just as the films were getting bigger so, too, were the stars. With fewer and more costly pictures being made, there was no longer as much room for second-rank stars—the likes of Dennis Morgan or Ann Sheridan, for example—popular players "who kept the factory humming," in the words of historian Jeanine Basinger, churning out profitable pictures without ever really rising to the pantheon of greats.

Now, with the factories no longer humming quite as loudly (within a couple of years, more films would be imported from other countries than were produced at home by Hollywood) only a few rarefied actors remained reliable moneymakers for the studios. Usually these were the extravagant, larger-than-life, over-the-top headliners. This was the era of spectacle stars like Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, and John Wayne, of pop-culture phenomena like Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, and Elvis Presley. The biggest female stars of the period were usually femme fatales oozing the kind of sexuality banned from the sanctity of television viewers' living rooms: Monroe, Kim Novak, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot. Despite notable exceptions like Audrey Hepburn and Doris Day, it was the likes of Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren who would define the va-va-voom 1950s. With Elizabeth's curves and exquisite face, there was every reason to believe that—given the right film roles and the right kind of publicity to go with them—she could surpass them all.

So back to the Metro machine. In the wake of television and
Confidential,
it had gotten a bit creaky, but still it functioned, glamorizing starlets in Hair and Makeup, cranking out breathless press releases, and placing strategic phone calls to Hedda, Louella, and Sheilah Graham. When Shirley MacLaine first walked onto the lot on loan-out from Paramount, she was a twenty-three-year-old kid with big red curls and not a lot of experience. She looked around in awe as she stepped into Sydney Guilaroff's hair salon. There was Greer Garson, she recalled, "swathed in a turquoise blue robe that set off her carrot-colored hair," and Deborah Kerr, "thin-hipped and more bawdy than the world ever knew." In came Audrey Hepburn, "all Dresden," walking her small poodle and gliding along "as if on satin roller skates." Then Debbie Reynolds bounded through the doors, "the pride of Burbank, punching jokes and being cuddly." Sydney, tall and graceful in his finely woven, skintight linen shirts, would pass up and down his row of ladies, "painting and sculpting the beautiful hairstyles."

And finally, Elizabeth Taylor made her appearance, "chunky and looking ten years younger with no makeup," said MacLaine, who watched her with fascination. "She'd flop into any chair that was vacant, eating a cheese Danish and plopping her feet up on the table in front of her." MacLaine would tease her about her big feet, saying that they looked like a weightlifter's, and Elizabeth would laugh in that high-pitched girlish cackle of hers. Then Sydney would come around to light Elizabeth's cigarette, "and she would draw the smoke long and deep into her lungs with the same low-down basic oral gratification she lavished on the cheese Danish." Another day at MGM had begun.

There was a "camaraderie of shared purpose" among the stars, MacLaine said. "Everyone seemed to understand that our purpose was to go on those screens and be loved by strangers." There was a recognition that it was especially important to gain and keep that love because the movies faced crises that threatened their very existence, that signaled an end might be in sight for their magical world of make-believe.

For Elizabeth,
Raintree County,
based on Ross Lockridge Jr.'s 1948 Civil War bestseller, was supposed to bring huge rewards to both herself and the industry that she had served so diligently, if not always so cheerfully, these last fifteen years. MGM hoped that the picture would even outclass
Giant,
still being painstakingly assembled by Stevens over at Warners. Elizabeth was playing the Scarlett O'Hara–inspired character of Susanna Drake, a tempestuous Southern belle who comes north and steals John Shawnessy (Monty Clift) away from his devoted childhood sweetheart (played by Eva Marie Saint). The film was big and brassy, with all of the heightened Technicolor melodrama so popular in the fifties. At one point the increasingly schizophrenic Susanna makes her way through enemy lines and ends up in a mental hospital down South. There's an implication of miscegenation, and she ends up drowning herself in a swamp. It was supposed to become a classic.

Although Edward Dmytryk was a capable filmmaker—
Crossfire
and
The Caine Mutiny
stand out on his résumé—he was not a master craftsman like George Stevens. More attention was paid to the film's bigness—it was shot in MGM Camera 65, a new process for capturing images in 65 millimeter—than to the overwrought, frequently dull script by Millard Kaufman. Due to the extensive location shooting, the cost of the film skyrocketed: An MGM memo estimated that the difference between filming on location and filming at the studio was $5,800 per day, not counting the cost of extras. Almost from the start Clift sensed that the picture could be a disaster, grumbling that MGM's five-million-dollar extravaganza was a "soap opera with elephantitis."

But worse was to come. On May 12, a particularly foggy night, Elizabeth and Michael, still keeping up the pretense of their marriage, hosted a dinner party at their house. The guest of honor was to be Father George Long, a man of the cloth so modern, Elizabeth gushed to Monty, that he actually said "fuck." (The English priest actually did more than that: He aided and abetted Elizabeth's extramarital affair with McClory by acting as "cover" when the lovebirds were seen around town.) Elizabeth was planning quite the gathering for the good father. In addition to Monty and his friend, the actor Kevin McCarthy, who was then making
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
Elizabeth had invited Rock Hudson and his new wife, Phyllis Gates.

At first Monty declined. Lately he'd been feeling uncomfortable by the awkward middle ground he occupied in the Wildings' marriage. Undeniably fond of his beloved "Bessie Mae," he'd also grown close to Michael, who frequently showed up at Clift's house on his own for long heartfelt talks. But finally Monty agreed to attend the dinner and drove himself up the long winding road to the Wildings' house in Benedict Canyon in a leased sedan.

The party wasn't quite what any of them had expected. Father Long never showed. Wilding wasn't feeling well, so for most of the night he reclined on the sofa, aloof and not saying much. Elizabeth was nervous and chatty, her mind perhaps on the affair that she was carrying on at Shirley MacLaine's Malibu beach house. Soon after midnight Monty decided to head home. His lover, Jack Larson, who was not present, believed that he'd had a couple of glasses of wine with his meal, but that was it; Kevin McCarthy disagreed, saying they'd both made a decision not to have anything to drink at all that night. Either way, everyone involved insisted that Monty was not drunk. Standing in the driveway, he shared with McCarthy his dissatisfaction with the way Dmytryk was directing the picture, shooting nearly everything in giant close-up and chopping the actors' hands out of the frame. Then they bid each other good night, got into their respective cars, and drove off down the hill that Elizabeth called a "cork-twister." McCarthy was in the lead.