The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (11 page)

When they arrived in L.A. in mid-March 1952, they stayed at first in Elizabeth’s absent parents’ home on Elm Drive. Though Metro had no interest in Wilding, the studio soon realized the only way to lure Elizabeth, now their most valuable star, into re-signing was to stake her husband to a fat contract. MGM hired him for $3,000 a week, with a $2,000 weekly raise after two years. Elizabeth’s contract was about to expire, and she kept Metro waiting until she’d extracted numerous concessions, finally accepting a deal that paid her $5,500 per week. In the interim, she and Wilding were broke, and she was forced to ask MGM to lend her $50,000 to buy a house at 1771 Summitridge in Beverly Hills. She also strong-armed Metro into paying her mother $300 a week as her chaperone, despite the fact that Elizabeth was now twice-married.

The spring of 1952 represented the happiest time of the Wildings’ relationship. In June, they moved into their new home, which consisted of three units connected by roofed walks, high over L.A. All Elizabeth knew of domesticity was how to cook bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee, so Wilding prepared most of their meals and cleaned the house. Granger and Simmons were frequent dinner guests, and the Wildings were often at the Grangers’ Hollywood Hills home, which had become the most popular meeting place for British actors working in California. On June 21, Elizabeth announced she was pregnant. Dr. Aaberg, the obstetrician, told the Wildings to anticipate delivery in January 1953. Metro added two hours to her usual day’s work, hoping to get her next film,
The Girl Who Had Everything
, in the can before her pregnancy began to show. On reading Art Cohn’s script, a rehash of
A Free Soul
, the old Clark Gable–Norma Shearer movie about a lawyer’s daughter who falls for a gangster, Elizabeth pronounced it “crap,” but agreed to film it, later explaining, “I needed the dough.”
⁶²

There was an emotional reunion with Monty when he came to the West Coast to film Hitchcock’s
I Confess
at Warner in 1952. “Elizabeth was wonderful to him, always,” Jack Larson recalled. “Monty adored Michael Wilding.” On August 1, 1952, after completing
The Girl
, Metro placed her on suspension because of her pregnancy instead of wishing her well and expressing their appreciation to her for the prosperity she’d brought to the studio ever since childhood. “Those shit-assed motherfucking faggot cocksuckers,” she said, according to Truman Capote. Metro also placed Wilding on suspension for turning down a costarring role with Lana Turner in
Latin Lover
, and his career further plummeted after his lifeless performance in
Torch Son
g with Joan Crawford. With neither of the expectant parents on salary, they soon fell into debt. Broke, Elizabeth finally cashed in bonds—amounting to fifteen percent of her childhood salary—that her parents had been required by law to purchase and put in escrow for her. The resulting $47,000 enabled her to pay the mortgage and pediatrician’s bills.

Named after her husband and her brother, Michael Howard Wilding Jr. was born by cesarean section on January 6, 1953. Dr. Aaberg hospitalized Elizabeth for five weeks, but she was at last able to get up on February 27, her twenty-first birthday. The joy of motherhood was diminished by financial difficulties, studio sanctions, and a husband who was “flat broke,” she recalled. She sometimes ditched Wilding to slip off to Oscar Levant’s Beverly Hills house with Monty, where the pianist serenaded them with Gershwin tunes as they whiled away afternoons and early evenings. When Monty left for Rome to film
Indiscretion of an American Wife
with Jennifer Jones, Elizabeth grew increasingly restive, unhappy with mediocre roles at Metro, tired of being her family’s breadwinner, and terrified at the prospect of another failed marriage. “The happiest years . . . were when you were so dependent on me,” said the hapless Wilding. “I hate it now. Now I follow
you
around. Now I’m left in a corner.”

Elizabeth had been forced by her pregnancy to turn down
Elephant Walk
, though the role had been designed for her. Vivien Leigh, to whom Elizabeth bore a striking resemblance, got the part and went to Ceylon to shoot on location. Leigh had a nervous breakdown during filming, distraught over her husband Laurence Olivier’s sexual relationship with Danny Kaye and embroiled in a dalliance of her own with costar Peter Finch. Elizabeth finally reclaimed the role on March 19, 1953. While filming in Hollywood she became fond of Finch, whose drinking and hell-raising rebelliousness appealed to her. Eventually he decided to forgo further filmmaking in the United States. Insulted by Paramount’s offer to costar him with Jane Russell in
The French Line
, he returned to England.

In October 1953 Michael Jr. was christened in Grosvenor Chapel, Mayfair, and then left with his British grandparents while the Wildings went on a second European honeymoon they could ill afford. The following year Elizabeth again became pregnant. Despite her unrelenting workload, Wilding again went on suspension, turning down the role of a pharaoh in
The Egyptian
. Elizabeth reminded him of his domestic obligations, including medical expenses, taxes, the upkeep of six cars, a mortgage to pay off, interest on their MGM house loan, and a weekly payroll for a household staff of five. Wilding finally agreed to do
The Egyptian
, and when the film premiered in London,
Daily Express
critic Leonard Mosley sadly asked, “What is Hollywood doing to our poor Mike? They have blacked his face, dressed him in a nightshirt and provided him with unspeakable dialogue. What a waste of a great talent!”
⁶³

Though pale, overworked, and afraid of miscarrying, Elizabeth filmed
The Last Time I Saw Paris
in 1954, her fourth movie in twelve months. She clashed with director Richard Brooks, who screamed and cursed at her for wearing full makeup for her death scene. “You look like you’re ready for a fucking premiere,” he said. “Your mouth looks like a bloody cunt.” Jack Larson was with her later that day, at a dinner party in the home of Roland Petit, who was filming
Glass Slipper
with Michael Wilding and Leslie Caron. “Roland lived on Beverly Estates near Tower Road and Elizabeth and Montgomery Clift came down,” Larson recalled. “Roland had been on the set and commented how good Elizabeth looked even without makeup.” Despite her altercation with the director, the film—based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “Babylon Revisited”—was the only one she’d made since
A Place in the Sun
that she wasn’t ashamed of. “
The Last Time I Saw Paris
first convinced me I wanted to be an actress, instead of yawning my way through parts,” she said, and her happiness showed at the November 1954 premiere, which she attended with Monty, both of them laughing as they posed for photographers.
Variety
thought her performance “her best work to date.”
⁶⁴

On her twenty-third birthday in February 1955, Elizabeth’s second child, blue-eyed Christopher Edward Wilding, was delivered by cesarean section at Santa Monica Hospital. Dr. Aaberg advised that she should never attempt motherhood again. She immediately went on a crash diet of ice water and fruit juice, losing thirty-five pounds for her appearance at the Oscar ceremonies on March 30. As one of the presenters Elizabeth made the audience gasp when she came on stage at the RKO Pantages looking almost inhumanly gorgeous in a white silk, organza, and satin gown and a white fur stole. She had a poufy brunette hairdo, stiletto heels, and a constellation of diamonds around her neck and on her ear-lobes. Though she sometimes feigned a distaste for Hollywood, she was its unofficial spokesperson and trademark, and the industry would flaunt her at every opportunity for the next twenty years.

By the mid–1950s, she’d lost all interest in Wilding and said, “I am afraid that after five years my marriage to Michael Wilding has become the relationship for which we were much more suited—brother and sister.” Monty—still the most sought-after male lead in Holly-wood—was a frequent house guest at the Wildings’ and on one occasion brought along Rock Hudson. Monty was so attentive to baby Britches, as the older Wilding boy, Michael, was nicknamed, that friends began to whisper the child was Monty’s son. “I wish he were,” Monty said.

There were times during this period when Elizabeth was with the present, past, and future men in her life at the same time. At the Grangers’ home one day, the guests included Richard Burton, Monty, and Wilding.
⁶⁵

A renowned stage actor in London’s West End, the thirty-year-old Richard had so far failed in Hollywood to match his theatrical success, appearing in forgettable fare such as
The Robe
and
My Cousin Rachel
. When Elizabeth first became aware of him, she was sitting on the far side of the Grangers’ pool, reading a book. Richard was regaling guests with quaint stories from his Welsh past, tipsy and talking a little too loudly. Lowering her book, Elizabeth removed her sunglasses, decided he was a conceited ass, and gave him the “cold fish-eye,” she recalled. He was disappointed when she turned away and began talking with another woman. He’d been eyeing Elizabeth’s breasts, which he’d later panegyrize as “apocalyptic—they would topple empires before they withered.”

When Richard approached her, Elizabeth was delivering a tirade about how much she loathed a certain Metro producer, and she noticed that Richard was startled by her language. “Don’t they use words like that at the Old Vic?” she teased.
⁶⁶
He flirted with her “like mad,” she remembered, but he was also making passes at every other pretty girl around the pool. “Ohhh boy,” she thought, “I’m not gonna become a notch on
his
belt.” Richard was “frustrated almost to screaming,” he later wrote, adding that she was “the most self-contained, pulchritudinous, remote, removed, inaccessible woman I had ever seen.” Shortly after that he left Hollywood and returned to stage acting.

In the summer of 1954, the Wildings moved to a new house at 1375 Beverly Estate Drive, high above Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills. “She and Wilding had built what was at that time a high-tech house,” Jack Larson said. “Sliding windows would move, and it had high-tech lighting.” Designed by L.A. architect George McLean and built of steel and adobe, it was aggressively, almost arrogantly modern. From the living room, a glass wall looked out over the valley below. Another glass wall afforded a view of the swimming pool, while a third wall was made of tree bark, decorated with orchids. The fourth wall, forty-five feet in length, was made of fieldstone and had an open fireplace and a bar. The ceiling seemed to be supported by an elaborate driftwood tree. The tone was casual, with cats and dogs scampering about. “Our home is like an animal shelter,” Wilding complained. He felt like a servant when Elizabeth ordered him around over the intercom. When Joan Bennett came to visit one day, she said, “Tell her to go fuck herself.” Wilding tried to correct Elizabeth’s manners, but she informed him, “I’m your wife, not your daughter.” She had radically altered her appearance, getting the short “Italian boy” haircut, a style that made her facial features stand out even more exquisitely.

She visited Roland Petit’s house one afternoon when Jack Larson was there. “She was looking very beautiful,” he reminisced. “She came down for the afternoon with Michael Wilding for a late lunch around the swimming pool. She had on a one-piece leopard-print bathing suit, which showed off her great figure, but she didn’t go in swimming. She was a lovely mother to this one particular little boy, the younger one. ‘You’re extraordinarily beautiful in this sunlight,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ Michael said, ‘it’s so amazing. When she sits down to make up in front of her modern makeup table, every-thing’s always in place, so neat, completely organized by servants. And when she finishes making up or whatever she’s doing—she doesn’t have to do much—there’s this disaster area of turned-over bottles, everything lying around among discarded Kleenex. From this disaster rises Liz Taylor, looking so beautiful.’ He of course adored her.”

The feeling was not mutual. “I’m fed up with working so hard and having to live like this,” Elizabeth told actress Carroll Baker, who came to dinner with her husband, director Jack Garfein. The Wildings employed a live-in nanny for sons Mike and Chris, but there were no nighttime servants. As Elizabeth put out a cold buffet, she explained to her guests, “I can’t afford servants who stay after five o’clock. God, how I hate being poor!”
⁶⁷
The Garfeins complimented their hosts on their “dream house,” but Elizabeth considered it a hovel. “I do believe MGM might give Elizabeth a bonus soon,” said Wilding, “and if they do, we simply must get a better house.”

Unemployed, Wilding hung out at Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica Boulevard while Elizabeth was at work. Like George Hurstwood, the debonair saloon-keeper who destroys himself over an ambitious actress in Dreiser’s
Sister Carrie
, Wilding’s downfall coincided with Elizabeth’s rise to superstardom, which began in the mid–1950s with
Giant
.

Chapter 4
Loving, A-Sexual Partners
JAMES DEAN AND ROCK HUDSON

In 1955, a changing of the guard was about to take place among Hollywood actresses as a younger generation attempted to supplant long-established stars. Elizabeth’s struggle for the juicy role of Leslie Lynnton Benedict in Edna Ferber’s Texas generational saga
Giant
pitted her against her old role model, Jennifer Jones, who was thirteen years her senior, and had won an Oscar more than a decade previously in
The Song of Bernadette
. Jennifer was so determined to win the
Giant
lead that she personally called George Stevens, who was to direct the film for Warner Bros. Studios, but Stevens didn’t cast her. Nor did it occur to him, at first, to cast Elizabeth.