The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (17 page)

Todd was fuming when Elizabeth finally got him on the phone. She’d caused him to lose face among his poker buddies, and he screamed, “You’re not gonna fucking step all over me like you stepped on everybody else in your whole life.” As he cursed, she held the receiver up to Eddie, and for a while they listened together, cheek to cheek. Eddie’s feelings were “jumbled up”; he was aware that her hair felt “kinky,” but he was also “overwhelmed by the scent of her . . . Breathing in her essence . . . was heaven.” When Todd hung up on her, Eddie called him back. Todd warned him to stay out of it, adding, “I just hope you had a good time.”

Though Elizabeth and Eddie were drunk, he drove her to Todd’s house, where Todd came to the door in white silk pajamas. Eddie later wrote, “Bam! he smacked her. ‘What’d I tell you—’ he yelled at her. Bam! All I saw was the bare bottoms of her feet as he dragged her into his bedroom.” The next morning, she rang Eddie and said that Todd had hit her, and asked about sleeping pills, since she was having trouble dozing off. Eddie concluded that “she tolerated being hit, maybe she even needed it to respect a man.”
¹⁶

Through her attorney, she at last informed Wilding she was filing divorce papers, citing mutual incompatibility. Wilding would be allowed reasonable access to their sons, and Elizabeth expected no alimony, which was only sensible, since Wilding was broke. She gave him their house, and Todd later gave him $200,000. The minute MGM heard that Elizabeth had washed her hands of Wilding, the studio fired him, and he moved to a two-room apartment on Sunset Boulevard, “a bottle of vodka my only companion,” he recalled. For a while, he became a recluse.

In October 1956, in conjunction with the opening of
Around the World in 80 Days
on the 17th at the Rivoli on Broadway, Elizabeth flew to New York, leaving her small children with a nurse. Todd gave her the $92,000, 29.4-carat emerald-cut diamond engagement ring he’d stealthily retrieved from the jilted Keyes. “I had a huge rock on my finger,” she recalled. “It was all mad and marvelous.”
¹⁷
On network television, Todd introduced her, telling reporters, “I see you’re curious about my friend. Meet Miss Lizzie Schwartzkopf.” Though the timing, which coincided with the opening of his film, suggested cynical self-promotion on Todd’s part, Elizabeth said in 1997, “Mike Todd gave me the tools to understand love.” He did at times seem like the fulfillment of her lifelong expectation that life should have some great romantic outcome; at other times, he was like a bomb about to explode in her face. Their love affair was one of the most open and unashamed reporters had ever witnessed. When a magazine photographer arrived one afternoon to film Todd in his swimming pool, Elizabeth leaned from a balcony in her nightgown and ordered Todd to come back to bed. He said he’d join her directly, but she yelled, “You come right now. I want to fuck you this minute.”
¹⁸

On the night before Todd’s film opened, he told Elizabeth he was broke and couldn’t meet the rent at the Rivoli. Eddie Fisher gave him a certified check for $25,000, and the doors opened on schedule. Meanwhile Otis Chandler of the L.A. Times Corporation offered Todd $25 million for the picture or fifty percent of the gross for $15 million. Fisher and Todd’s son, Mike Todd Jr., urged him to take it, but Elizabeth told him to hold out. He listened to her.
¹⁹
The film was a smash hit by the standards of the time, bringing in $29,600,000 on a $6.3 million investment. “All this and Elizabeth Taylor too,” Todd said. “How’s that for lucky?” His luck would soon run out, but for the brief time he had left, he seemed happy with her despite the dangerous game she played with her husbands. “I will get away with murder if I can,” she confessed. “I used to try, out of my perversity, sometimes to drive Mike mad. I’d be late, deliberately just fiddle around and be late, and I loved it when he would lose his temper and dominate me. I would start to purr because he had won. Mike was strong, which was very good for me.” Yet their relationship was beset with disaster from the start.

It began with an accident aboard Lord Beaverbrook’s yacht that felled Elizabeth in November 1956. Her footing on board what she called “this huge, cumbersome sailing houseboat” as they returned from Nassau to the United States was probably not the steadiest. “The boat lurched and I went flying out into the air, feet out, and landed straight on my tail about six steps below,” she said.
²⁰
In excruciating pain, she flew with Todd to New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, where she was diagnosed at Harkness Pavilion with three crushed spinal discs. Todd took her to Dr. Dana Atchley, one of the best internists on the East Coast, and Dr. Atchley turned her over to Dr. John Lattimer, a top orthopedic specialist. The ruined discs were removed by surgery, and replacements were made from bone in her pelvis and hip.

While she was being examined, doctors discovered she was pregnant.
²¹
She remained in the hospital for two months, finally emerging on January 21, 1957, in a wheelchair. Elizabeth and Todd went to Acapulco because Elizabeth needed a quickie Mexican divorce from Wilding. After it was granted, they were married on February 2, with Eddie serving as Todd’s best man and Debbie as Elizabeth’s matron of honor. The Acapulco setting was breathtaking—a hacienda overlooking a bay in an unspoiled, undeveloped peninsula. Among the thirty-four wedding guests were Todd’s son, Mike Todd Jr.; Sara and Francis; Elizabeth’s brother Howard and his wife, Mara; Todd’s cabdriver brother; Mario Morena (the Mexican comedian known as Cantinflas, star of
Around the World in 80 Days
); and Metro’s Helen Rose.
²²
The terrace was decorated with fifteen thousand cut flowers.

Just before the ceremony, Debbie helped Elizabeth, who’d been drinking champagne all day, wash and set her hair. She wore a back brace underneath the cocktail-length, hydrangea-blue wedding dress Helen Rose had designed for her. Cantinflas and Todd carried her down to the terrace as she clutched a bouquet of white orchids. The mayor of Acapulco officiated at the civil service, and Eddie sang “The Mexican Wedding Song.” Then Todd and Cantinflas picked her up again and carried her to the reception, where Todd presented her with her wedding gift, an $80,000 diamond bracelet. Strolling violinists in gaucho costumes serenaded guests as they feasted on baby lobsters, suckling pigs, cracked crabs, tacos, hot tamales, enchiladas, tortillas, guacamole, greenboned fish, ham, caviar, and lemon-and-peach chiffon pie, washing it down with twenty-five cases of champagne. The party was supposed to go on all night but ended abruptly when Todd noticed Elizabeth wincing from pain. “I just had to lie down as soon as the show was over,” she remembered. “Poor Mike had to cater to his crippled old lady.”

The next morning, Todd summoned Eddie to the bridal suite. The groom wanted his best man to look at Elizabeth, who lay seminude on their nuptial bed. Though she had on a short nightgown, Eddie could clearly see every detail of her anatomy. Completely relaxed, Elizabeth accepted Eddie’s presence as if he were part of a ménage à trois, which in a profound sense he was. “This was Mike’s way of bonding with me,” Eddie thought, “his way of proving how close we were.”
²³
The keener-minded Debbie knew better; Eddie “enjoyed watching all of it,” she revealed. “It was what he wanted that he didn’t have with me.”

On the Todds’ sixth-month anniversary, Mike had a furrier bring two coats for Elizabeth to choose from—a diamond mink and a diadem mink. After studying each, Elizabeth said, “I’ll take both”—and got them.
²⁴
He wasn’t always so agreeable. They started fighting in the middle of a dinner party one night, falling to the floor and clawing and pummeling each other. Suddenly they stopped, got up, and went into another room and had sex. When they returned to the dinner table, they acted as if nothing had happened and enjoyed their coffee and dessert.

She finally announced her pregnancy on March 26, 1957. Doctors warned her that the embryo’s pressure on her back, which had been “whittled away and replaced with little matchsticks,” could leave her with permanent curvature of her spine, but she was determined to have Mike’s baby.
²⁵
In the following months, she almost lost the baby three times.

On March 27,
Around the World in 80 Days
won the best picture Oscar at Hollywood’s RKO Pantages Theater. Todd bolted from his seat, raced down the aisle, and then, suddenly remembering Elizabeth, ran back and kissed her before going to the stage to accept the award. “The Academy was really choosing one mammoth advertising binge over another,” wrote Anthony Holden in
Behind the Oscars
, explaining that both
Around the World in 80 Days
and its main rival for the Oscar, Cecil B. DeMille’s
The Ten Commandments
, had spent millions lobbying for votes in industry trade-paper ads and throwing lavish parties. Radiant in the $25,000 diamond tiara Todd had given her, Elizabeth accepted Victor Young’s posthumous award for the scoring of
Around the World in 80 Days
after emcee Jack Lemmon introduced her as “the most beautiful thing Mike Todd left out of
Around the World in 80 Days
.” The day Todd had given her the diamond tiara, she’d taken it into the bathroom to try it on. Later, emerging in nothing but the tiara, she’d jumped on him in bed to show her thanks.
²⁶
“Lemme tell ya,” he said. “Any minute this little dame spends out of bed is wasted, totally wasted.”

To promote Todd’s film overseas, they made a transatlantic crossing in April on the
Queen Elizabeth
with Elizabeth’s sons, Michael and Christopher. Every time the fetus kicked against Elizabeth’s reconstructed spine, she cried out in agony. Todd leased Lady Kenmore’s villa, La Fiorentina, near St. Jean-Cap Ferrat for $20,000 a month (Bill Gates reportedly bought the house in 1999 for $100 million). The Todds’ guests at La Fiorentina, long considered one of the most beautiful houses on the Riviera, included Wilding Sr., William Holden, Gary Cooper, David Niven, and Eddie and Debbie. Eddie poked fun at his wife for her supposedly “righteous attitudes,” and Elizabeth kidded him, saying, “Where’s Debala? You lucky stiff.”

One day, Todd and Eddie wanted to go to Monte Carlo without her, but she pointed out that she was pregnant and didn’t like being left alone. “You go,” she warned, “and if you’re not back in an hour the bedroom door’ll be locked.”
²⁷
Under Todd’s influence Eddie had become a heavy gambler at the crap tables, betting the limit, $7,000 a roll. They didn’t return to the villa for several hours. Todd pounded on her door, but found himself out in the cold that night.

The Todds attended the Cannes Film Festival on May 2, 1957, for the European premiere of Mike’s film. By now Elizabeth had seen it twenty-five times and was complaining that being Todd’s wife “took fifty hours a day.” She got drunk in a bar one night and threw an ashtray at a stereo speaker blaring the French version of the song “Around the World.” She told British journalist Leonard Mosley that he ought to write her biography. “Start it this way,” she suggested. “‘It was 4 o’clock in the morning in a very crummy bar on the French Riviera. The radio was playing ‘80 Days.’ And suddenly Elizabeth Taylor felt sick of everything—of films, of people, above all things, of herself.’ . . . Call it
I Am Twenty-five Years Old and I Do Not Want to Live
.”
²⁸

They went on to Paris for yet another premiere, and Elizabeth was taken up by the Parisian
haut monde
, who made a cult of her. The Todds stayed in the honeymoon suite at the Ritz, overlooking the Place Vendôme, and Todd persuaded the legendary coiffeur Alexandre de Paris to give him a crewcut. Later, Elizabeth had Alexandre cut her hair and they became lifelong friends. Visiting the Right Bank fashion houses, Elizabeth met famous couturiers Givenchy, Balenciaga, Yves St. Laurent, and Marc Bohan of Christian Dior. Todd accompanied her to Dior, where Bohan and Simone Noir fashioned a ruby-colored chiffon dress for her to wear to the premiere of Mike’s film with her ruby earrings and a matching tiara. After the opening, a reception was held for three hundred guests at a Chinese restaurant that seated only one hundred. When the chef walked out in protest, Todd ordered fifty pizza pies from a nearby pizzeria.

In London for the British premiere, they stayed at the Mayfair Hotel and had such a loud set-to that they attracted the attention of the press. “Sure, we had a hell of a fight,” Todd told a reporter in Elizabeth’s presence. “This gal’s been looking for trouble all her life . . . She’s been on a milk-toast diet . . . with men; but me, I’m red meat.”

Annoyed, Elizabeth snapped, “Tell Ol’ Flannelmouth there to stuff it.”

On June 21, en route to Nice, they missed their plane and fought again in front of reporters. “It’s your fault,” she said at the London Airport. “
Now
what shall we do?”

Taunting her, he said, “For a change it was
my
fault that we were late here.”

She whirled on him, hissing, “I’m getting fed up with that line. I am always blamed for the delays. I could hate you for saying that.” Turning to his secretary, he asked for a plane to be chartered to Nice with a two-hour stop in Paris. “I don’t want to go to Paris,” Elizabeth said. “Paris bores me! I will
not
go to Paris.” The plane cost $5,000, and Todd told the pilot to fly them straight to Nice.

As long as Elizabeth watched her figure and stayed lean and shapely for him, Todd indulged her, but his patience had its limits. During the course of their marriage she had to call Eddie Fisher more than once and ask him to go find Todd, who’d stormed out of the house after one of their fights.
²⁹
Submerging his own identity, Eddie let himself become a proxy Mike Todd in Elizabeth’s marriage, and Debbie resented it.