The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (18 page)

Back in London the Todds threw a sixth-wedding-anniversary party for Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, inviting Noel Coward, Debbie and Eddie, Michael Wilding Sr., Louis Jourdan and his wife Quique, and Ann and Kirk Douglas. Bearded for his role in
The Vikings
, Tony was embraced by Coward, who said, “Hello, you bearded beauty!” The Todds later attended a party given by Coward, who described it in his diary on June 23, 1957, as “a free for all at the Dorchester which was a terrific success.” In the same month Coward noted that he caught Eddie’s opening at the Palladium and was rehearsing Michael Wilding in the West End production of
Nude with Violin
. “He stumbles and stammers and gets into an increasing frizz at each rehearsal,” Coward wrote. “I shall beat the fuck out of him.”
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Elizabeth and Mike fixed Wilding up with a millionairess, but she put him to work as the maître d’hotel of a restaurant she owned in Brighton, which promptly flopped, as did Wilding’s marriage to the heiress.

“Elizabeth told me that in England Todd used to play poker with the guys,” Eddie Dmytryk recalled. “He wanted her there, but she would be asleep someplace or sit outside, and he’d be inside with the guys. Every once in a while he’d come outside and give her a kiss and go back in and play, and she had to stay there and wait for him. Bette Davis once said, ‘It took me three husbands to find out that the kind of a guy I would marry is the kind of a cad I’d learn to hate.’ Bette’s spouses were all weak sissies who couldn’t handle her, and she wanted to be handled. I think Elizabeth needed to be handled, needed a strong man.”

It was certainly what she wanted, but probably the last thing she needed. She once told Monty, “I yearn for a big strong guy to look after me, to buy me lots of jewelry and to pay my bills,”
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but her greatest need, of course, was to develop her own strengths and take charge of her life. Todd had bankrupted his second wife, Joan Blondell, taking her for $3 million, and he was already into Elizabeth for $100,000 to cover gambling debts. If he were really the strong character she thought him to be, he’d never have exposed her, while pregnant, to so many dangers. She was still recuperating from back surgery when he involved her in extensive travel and drum-beating for his movie, which made her pregnancy life-threatening for herself and the child she was carrying. After a final party in their Dorchester penthouse suite on July 4, attended by Wilding Sr., who laughed when Elizabeth said she’d lost their passports, the Todds rushed off to catch the boat train to Southampton, where the U.S. consul issued temporary passports. Crossing the Atlantic aboard the
Liberté
, Elizabeth went into labor, but the shipboard doctor didn’t know how to perform a cesarean. Todd called her New York gynecologist, yelling that she was having pains every five minutes. Finally the doctors decided to knock her out with drugs, and fortunately the contractions stopped.

Eddie and Debbie returned on the
Queen Elizabeth
, as did Noel Coward, who noted in his diary that he won $1,000 in joint gambling on board with Eddie. When Eddie went to the ship’s steam room and stripped for his daily massage, Coward inevitably showed up and tried to hit on him. “Just let me pat you once, dear boy, just let me touch it a little,” Coward said, but Eddie turned him down. On the Fishers’ return to Hollywood Eddie decided to get a divorce, but just as he was preparing to move out, Debbie told him, “I’m with child.”

Back in the United States, the Todds moved into a twenty-three-room Westport estate leased for the summer. Truman Capote, whom Elizabeth met at a Manhattan dinner party, came up for the weekend and found Elizabeth at her happiest and most jovial. She and Todd were lying on the grass with “clouds of golden retriever puppies,” and later Capote and Elizabeth had long conversations about fiction. “She was a connoisseur of obscure novels by great writers and introduced me to P. G. Wodehouse,” Capote said. They also discussed Monty, and Truman realized she “was in love with him . . . but Monty at this time was going crazy on pills, making scenes, and letting cheap tricks rip him off. As for Mike Todd, he was the only man Elizabeth married who had the balls to tell her to go fuck herself when she got out of hand.”

Elizabeth spent most of her time that summer on her back in bed, wearing a metal back brace that helped her carry the baby high, near her rib cage, to prevent pressure on her spine. The baby’s unusual position affected Elizabeth’s heart and she had to be given digitalis, but the drug jeopardized the fetus’s heart. In danger of a ruptured uterus, she was rushed to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in premature labor on July 28, almost losing the baby for the third time. Todd moved into the hospital and prayed by her bedside in Hebrew. Her doctors advised an abortion but she said, “Not on your nelly.”
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She spent two weeks in an oxygen tent, and her doctors recommended a premature delivery before Elizabeth reached term, but she told them, “She’s not cooked yet.” The baby was due October 15. Todd told reporters she was in terrible pain and added, “If she can hold out for two and a half weeks, it’ll be seven months and that could do it . . . She’s crying all the time.” She insisted on being taken off digitalis despite doctors’ warnings that she’d become comatose. “If I had not gotten off the digitalis,” she said, “our child wouldn’t have had a chance to survive.”

A cesarean was performed on August 6, 1957. Elizabeth was attended by a team of eight that had been assembled by Dr. Dana Atchley. They included an obstetrician, a pediatrician, a diagnostician, two neurologists, a resuscitationist, and two other physicians. Born at 12:03 p.m., Elizabeth Frances “Liza” Todd appeared to be stillborn but rallied after Dr. Virginia Apgar, the resuscitationist, worked on her for fourteen minutes and thirty seconds. “It was a miracle,” Todd told reporters. Near death, the frail, motionless, four-pound, fourteen-ounce infant remained in an oxygen tent for two months, and Elizabeth had to undergo tubular surgery to prevent further pregnancies. “It was the worst shock of my life,” she said, “like being killed.”

Returning to California in September, they moved into a temporary home, a twelve-room white-stucco villa at 1330 Schuyler Road in Coldwater Canyon, up behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. There seemed to be no escaping Todd’s movie; their next-door neighbor played “Around the World” on his piano every day at the cocktail hour. Elizabeth didn’t particularly like her new home, calling it a “big, dark, Mediterranean-type house.” There was a circular staircase, a fortresslike living room they seldom used which was “arched and singularly gloomy,” and a large sunken tub in which Todd and the Wilding boys ducked one another, splashing and squirting water pistols, “just having a marvelous time horsing around,” she recalled. In the master bedroom, French doors opened onto a balcony overlooking the stone terraces below. The Todds luxuriated in an enormous powder-blue-and-gold rococo bed that came with the house. To defray his gambling expenses and the cost of the gifts he lavished on her, including the Cartier tiara that required armed security guards to transport it from place to place, Todd was eager for her to get back to work.

“You had to go to Mike if you wanted anything,” said Metro producer Pandro Berman. “She was plastic in his hands. She had no thoughts of her own in those days.” Though Elizabeth was content to let her career languish, Todd announced he was putting her in Cervantes’s
Don Quixote
as the scruffy, shrewish Dulcinea, with Cantinflas playing Sancho Panza and Fernandel in the title role. Later, Todd decided to use Mickey Rooney as Sancho Panza and John Huston as Quixote, and he put his son and Art Cohn to work developing a script. Mike Jr.’s heart was broken when his father rejected the script and decided to shoot the film with nothing more than art director Vincent Korda’s production sketches. Nothing came of the project.
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In the fall of 1957, Todd hosted a $250,000 party at Madison Square Garden in New York to celebrate the first anniversary of
Around the World in 80 Days
. He made the mistake of letting a buddy of Eddie Fisher’s handle all arrangements, and it turned into a debacle. The theme was supposedly America as a melting pot, but when Senator Hubert H. Humphrey tried to rehearse his speech shortly before the party, Elizabeth told the future U.S. presidential candidate, “You can’t say anything like that—it’s too corny.” To shut her up, Todd’s son, Mike Todd Jr., kicked her in the shin. When she asked him later why he’d kicked her, he said it was imprudent to insult a prominent member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Well, nobody told me who he was,” Elizabeth said, “and besides, it
is
a corny speech.” The party disintegrated into a near riot when eighteen thousand guests scrambled for food and house prizes. Standing next to Eddie, who thought the fiasco “incredible fun,” Todd and Elizabeth were both drunk and Elizabeth was crying. Embarrassed and humiliated, they made a hasty exit, but Eddie was happy as long as he could be with them, later writing, “We were a great team, Mike and I and Elizabeth.”
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The Todds resumed their globe-trotting on November 1, Todd promoting his movie by flaunting Elizabeth at openings in the Far East and elsewhere. The Wilding boys and Liza Todd were left in Todd’s spacious rented house in Palm Springs with Art Cohn and his wife and Mike Todd Jr., his wife Sarah, and their two children. Despite taking her away, Todd was critical of Elizabeth’s role as a mother, saying, “She has let it become a contest between herself and the nurse.” He said he often wanted to tell her, “Don’t compete with the nurse. You’re the mother. Let the children know you’re the mother.”
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Tense and angry after his movie flopped in Japan, Todd was disinclined to indulge Elizabeth’s temper and tardiness. Their public fights were a running joke in the media. In the presence of an Associated Press reporter, she flew at Todd in a rage, complaining that he’d put her nemesis, Dietrich, in
Around the World in 80 Days
. Despite Todd’s denials, she suspected that he and Dietrich had been lovers.
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At the airport, nose-to-nose with Todd, Elizabeth screamed, “Fuck you” over and over. Signs of marital wear and tear continued to surface after they returned to Palm Springs. Elizabeth checked into the hospital on December 17, 1957, to have her appendix taken out. Todd stayed with her for a week, taking a connecting suite, but he was fed up with playing nurse-maid and told reporters, “No more hospitals.”
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He was having trouble mounting a worthy successor to
Around the World in 80 Days
, his grand schemes for filming classics by Cervantes and Tolstoy coming to naught, despite a trip he and Elizabeth made to Moscow in early 1958 to hammer out a coproduction deal for
War and Peace
.

After their return to L.A. in March 1958, director Joshua Logan put Elizabeth up for the role of Nellie Forbush in the film version of the Broadway musical
South Pacific
. “She was freckle-faced and young and very ambitious,” Logan recalled. The film used the Todd-AO sound department, and Todd was keen to see Elizabeth in the lead. Composer Richard Rodgers insisted on auditioning her, and “she was so scared she croaked,” Logan added. Afterward, the director accompanied her downstairs, and when she saw Todd coming, she broke into “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy.” Logan told her she sounded like a seasoned Broadway belter, “quite good, loud,” and asked her why she hadn’t sung that way for Rodgers. “She was just too nervous,” Logan concluded.
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Doris Day, Jane Powell, and Janet Blair also tried out for the part, which eventually went to Mitzi Gaynor.

Though Elizabeth said, “I’m thinking of retiring the commodity known as Elizabeth Taylor, Movie Star,” Todd wouldn’t hear of it. When a production associate asked him how much of
Around the World in 80 Days
’s earnings of $29,600,000 he’d spent, he said, “$29,599,999.99.” One of his expenditures was a $3,000-a-month, long-term lease on a twin-engine Lockheed Lodestar, the same type of plane that Howard Hughes had flown around the world in 1939. Todd named it
The Lucky Liz
. Though he blew a fortune on frills for the plane, he was miserly when it came to important safety equipment. He spent $25,000 to install a new bedroom for Elizabeth, but just $2,000 to update the anti-icing system. Said Todd Jr., “I unsuccessfully prodded him to get rid of the plane in late 1957, when a survey indicated that because of its age—even with the thorough maintenance it received that kept it up to F.A.A. standards—its safety was questionable.”
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The Todds invited the Fishers to fly with them to Palm Springs for Christmas and New Year’s 1957, but as they began to descend for a landing, the pilots informed them that they were arriving in Las Vegas. “Las Vegas?” Todd said. “But we wanted to go to Palm Springs.” They spent the night in the casino, and Eddie noticed that the pilots drank brandy steadily until they all took off at 9 a.m. He tried to persuade Todd to hire a pilot he knew, but Todd, perhaps remembering the mess that Eddie’s friend had made of the Madison Square Garden affair, decided to keep the pilots he had.
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To replenish his depleted coffers, Todd arranged with MGM for Elizabeth to finish her contract by appearing in the film version of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. Again, voice coach Marguerite Lamkin taught Elizabeth how to talk like a Southerner. Eventually Lamkin, a witty clothes horse, married Queen Elizabeth II’s barrister and became a celebrated London hostess and intimate of Princess Diana.