How to Be a Movie Star (42 page)

The old studio system was coming to an end; Lana Turner, one of the last MGM contract stars, described her last days there as "working amid the ruins." The fabled wardrobe and prop departments were thinning out, and hundreds of studio workers lost their jobs. The old publicity department, with its constantly ringing telephones and whirring mimeograph machines, fell silent. But with
Butterfield 8,
studio execs showed that they might still have one last hurrah—courtesy of freelance press agents, the heirs of the old studio publicists. These agents were put in charge of various parts of the country to coordinate local campaigns—not so different from what Todd had done with
Around the World in Eighty Days.
Full-size cardboard cutouts of Elizabeth wearing a mink coat over a formfitting slip were distributed to theaters for lobby displays. Radio disc jockeys were coerced into airing "Salutes to Eddie Fisher" with promises of tickets to special screenings of the film for their listeners.

Perhaps the most creative promotion involved the phone company; the film's title, after all, was a phone number. Special telephones were installed in theaters, reachable by dialing BU-8 "no matter what the actual exchange destinations may be." Persuading Ma Bell to go along with the scheme was easy because the company was offered the opportunity to publicize its newest phone equipment in theaters. The scheme was brilliant and simple. Ads in local papers featured Elizabeth in her sexy pose next to an enticement to call BU-8. Curious members of the public would call in, and theater employees would answer with a studio-prepared script describing "Gloria, the most desirable woman in town." The
Motion Picture Herald
was rightly impressed with this "useful ex ploitation hook." These creative efforts, so successful with
Butterfield 8
and other big pictures like
Ben-Hur,
would anticipate and inspire today's precisely orchestrated promotional campaigns, with their ubiquitous ad placements and broad merchandising tie-ins.

Not surprisingly,
Butterfield 8
was yet another colossal box-office hit for Elizabeth Taylor. And this time she carried the picture entirely on her own. There was no Montgomery Clift or Rock Hudson or Paul Newman or Katharine Hepburn or Tennessee Williams to help her along.
Butterfield 8
was Elizabeth's picture all the way—a throwback to the kind of woman-centered film that Hepburn or Bette Davis or Joan Crawford once made.

And despite her loathing of the script, Elizabeth is exceedingly good. The scene where she describes being sexually abused as a teenager is remarkable. Her coiled emotion bursts forth with just the right amount of horror and shame; it could easily have been a melodramatic moment, but it's not. The beginning of the film is a delight and feels honest—Elizabeth is very good at throwing out bitchy lines. Only with the sappy ending does she turn maudlin and, as a consequence, not as believable.

Still, was it enough to finally win her that Oscar? To win over the bluenoses in the public? It remained to be seen. But change was definitely in the air.

Time
magazine scribe Ezra Goodman thought that by the time of
Butterfield 8
more people were taking "long-range stock" of the scandal. He noticed that the fan magazines were "warming up to Liz again." One publication actually scolded its readers: "The true love that exists between Liz and Eddie is the only thing that can make her find forgiveness in her heart for the fans who didn't stick by her when she needed them most." Columnist Earl Wilson observed that Elizabeth's experience set a precedent for the emerging new Hollywood: "It seemed the thing to do ... was to create such an outlandish personality for yourself that the public had to grant your every exigency. Eventually you would get away with holy hell."

"I think the Bad Girl image was finally starting to lose its stigma," said Gavin Lambert. "After the studios started fading away, the public seemed to change its outlook somewhat toward its movie stars. They could see through manufactured public images ... The remarkable thing about Taylor was that she was always very authentic, and the public came to admire that about her, no matter how many marriages she had."

The repressive fifties were giving way to the rebellious sixties, symbolized by miniskirts and
Playboy
magazine and the young, progressive-thinking family in the White House. Elizabeth's great achievement during this period was that she made the public want her
as she was;
she made being sexy, independent, and defiant of cultural norms the desirable way to be. Some stars gauge what the public seems to want, and become that to sell their movies and their images. Elizabeth did exactly the opposite. By not conforming to the traditional picture of woman or star—by not trying to be Debbie Reynolds—she made the public want to buy what she already had to sell. Given her personality, to smile and fake her way through an artificial public persona would have been intolerable. After all, she never tried to be that ordinary housewife.

Of course, vamps and femme fatales had been popular in Hollywood as far back as Theda Bara. But the ideal woman had always been the devoted wife and mother; consequently, every major female star—from Marlene Dietrich to Joan Crawford to Debbie Reynolds—was portrayed this way in their studio publicity, whether true or not (and it usually wasn't). Elizabeth turned that paradigm on its head. She made the Bad Girl the ideal. No longer did women just secretly envy her; now they wanted to
be
her. And they said so publicly. "If I could be Elizabeth Taylor for just one day," wrote a reader to a fan magazine in 1961, "I'd live the dreams of a lifetime in twenty-four hours." This letter was very different from what the magazines had been publishing just two years before.

Throughout her career, but especially now, Elizabeth Taylor was proving that true stardom depends on a reconciliation of contrasts: that one could be good and bad at the same time, sexy and sweet, loyal and fickle, compassionate and tempestuous. All of those adjectives describe Elizabeth Taylor, and by 1960, the public was finally acknowledging how much they loved that about her.

The furs, the jewels, the yachts, the trips around the world, and yes, even the men and the multiple marriages—Elizabeth's celebrity was like none before, offering a glimpse into an exciting, magical life that no Good Girl, certainly not little Debbie with diaper pins stuck to her blouse, was ever going to achieve. With the possible exception of Kim Novak, no woman who'd broken into the box-office top ten had ever been as notorious in her personal life as Elizabeth—not even Marilyn Monroe. Most of the women who'd made the list over the last ten years had projected wholesome images: Betty Grable, Esther Williams, Doris Day, June Allyson. But "by the time of
Cleopatra,
" Tom Mankiewicz observed, "every woman in America wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor. And every man wanted her." She was "the gold standard" for a movie star.

Being bad—or at least a little naughty—was now glamorous, thanks to Elizabeth.
Butterfield 8,
with Gloria waking up in a strange bed in a fabulous apartment and absconding with a mink coat, certainly made it seem that way. The audiences flocking to the film weren't coming to see a morality play; Gloria's death at the end was simply a bone tossed to the killjoys, a concession to the last gasps of the censor. What made the film a box-office smash was its celebration of sexual freedom and self-indulgence, which was sold to the public through those seductive posters and those special telephones. The studio was actually goading the public into pretending that they were calling a prostitute. After all those years of Production Code restraint, who knew being bad could be this much fun?

But the question remained whether the industry would reward such badness. When the Oscar nominations were announced on February 28, 1961, the smart betting was that either Elizabeth or Deborah Kerr (for
The Sundowners
) would go home with the Best Actress prize. Hedda Hopper, extending an olive branch, predicted that it would be Taylor's year: "This is the fourth nomination for Liz; I believe she'll win. She is the only woman star who can carry a picture alone."

Yet as much as the tide of public opinion seemed to be turning in Elizabeth's favor, she no doubt understood that there were a few things she could still do to help it along.

It was just past midnight on March 4 when the nurse caring for Elizabeth Taylor, who had once again fallen ill, suddenly noticed that her patient had turned blue in the face. Ensconced in the penthouse suite of London's posh Dorchester Hotel, Elizabeth was recovering from the flu that she had picked up after too many late nights at the Munich Carnival. But now the nurse discovered with alarm that the star had stopped breathing.

A doctor was located within the hotel. Immediately he saw the urgency of the situation. "She might have survived fifteen minutes without attention," he recalled, "but no more." To loosen the congestion in her lungs, he resorted to rather unorthodox measures, holding Elizabeth upside down by her ankles, then pushing at her eyeballs and sticking his fingers down her throat. She gagged a little, which meant air was flowing. Then he called her doctor from the London Clinic, who arrived around four o'clock. An oxygen tank was sent over, as well as a portable toilet—the same one, Walter Wanger was told, that was used by Her Majesty when she traveled to "primitive corners of the Commonwealth."

Eddie had just gotten out of the hospital himself. He'd told his doctors that he'd been having chest pain, but what he really wanted was a little rest and detox from all the pills and booze. In Munich he'd had a humdinger of a fight with Elizabeth, after which she'd swallowed too many Seconals and had to have her stomach pumped. It had been this way for months, the Fishers constantly at each other's throats, exchanging sickbeds as they recovered from binges. But this time his wife's illness was serious, her doctors insisted. With her immune system severely depressed from lack of sleep and ingesting too many substances, Elizabeth's flu had turned into staphylococcus pneumonia, and now her lungs were dangerously congested. She needed to be taken to the London Clinic for a tracheotomy. Otherwise she could asphyxiate and die. Eddie was speechless.

Word had leaked outside the hotel, and aggressive photographers were ready to pounce when Elizabeth was carried out on a stretcher and placed into an ambulance. Their brazenness was scolded in the House of Lords. But now that the word was out, it was received with stunned disbelief by the world. Beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, just twenty-nine years old—her lovely throat cut open and a breathing tube inserted! Would it be permanent? If not, would it leave a hideous scar? No answers were forthcoming. The statement from the doctors simply said, "Her condition remains grave."

Grave.
Standard hospital terminology, but it was a frightening word for the public, especially in America, where Elizabeth's condition would probably have been described as "critical."
Grave
sounded far more serious. Not surprisingly, the headlines on Sunday, March 5, were sensational:
MISS TAYLOR HAS SURGERY TO SAVE LIFE. LIZ AT DEATH'S DOOR IN LONDON.
Based on what little news had been given to the public, it was an overreaction. As the
Times
of London more soberly reported the next day, "The condition of Miss Elizabeth Taylor, the film actress ... had considerably improved last night"—although the paper did add that she was "not yet out of danger."

Inside the hospital, Elizabeth was in and out of consciousness, the tube in her throat pumping in oxygen, a drip system feeding her through her ankle. A throng of reporters took up a vigil around the clinic, pestering each person who went in or out for news of Elizabeth Taylor. To keep them satisfied, doctors began issuing health bulletins every fifteen minutes, even if the news was simply "no change." These bulletins were then read on the radio as soon as they came in. In his hotel room, Walter Wanger listened raptly. He'd written in his diary just days before, "At last everything is going along beautifully. The plan is to start shooting April 4, then to Egypt for the exteriors." Now he spent a sleepless night with the telephone right next to his bed.

That the situation was indeed grave is undeniable. Wanger's own doctor thought that it was serious enough to prescribe a sedative for the producer so he could be "prepared for the worst." But on Monday, March 6, things spiraled out of control when an American news report allegedly announced that Elizabeth Taylor had died. Just where this report was made has never been determined. No such account was found in any of the voluminous clippings about Elizabeth in any film archive. Perhaps it was a radio or television report. Or perhaps it was just one of those stories that spreads so quickly in Hollywood. Alan Cahan remembered hearing it from a publicist friend. "It'll soon be all over the news," he was told. "Liz Taylor is dead in London!"

Spyros Skouras heard the report, too, and placed a transatlantic call to Wanger. "My God," he cried. "How did it happen?" Wanger assured him that it wasn't true.

But the world couldn't be as easily reassured. The story spread like wildfire. Perhaps it was intended to. "I wouldn't be surprised," Cahan said, "if that story of Liz Taylor suddenly dying in London wasn't planted." Dick Clayton thought that it was possible as well. "Press agents are pretty clever like that," he said. And certainly Elizabeth had some very good ones working for her, both on her own and at Fox. A call might have been made, and then another, and soon all of Hollywood would have been buzzing with the tragic news, and then, of course, it would have zoomed around the globe. "We are all very frightened," Wanger wrote that night in his diary, "and, it appears, so is the world. People are crying. Flowers and gifts and 'cures' are coming in from all over."

Whether they planted the story or not, surely Bill Doll or any of Elizabeth's other press agents remembered the "shrieking fans" who had gathered, quite on their own, when the star, said to be suffering from "Malta fever," had been hospitalized just a few months earlier. Witnessing this latest outpouring of affection for their cli ent, they had to be pleased. And they had to know that such sentiment could be harnessed.