The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (19 page)

Elizabeth went back to work in February 1958 and soon discovered that the role of Maggie the Cat, who marries a closet homosexual jock but can’t get him to impregnate her, was one she could easily relate to. Her personal experience of homosexual ambivalence in relationships with Roddy, Monty, Rock, and James Dean gave her tremendous insight into the part. “I love Elizabeth,” said the gay Tennessee Williams, whose play was essentially a tragedy about the “mendacity” of families that refuse to accept their gay offspring, and of the gays who then force themselves into sham marriages to conceal their true nature. Costar Paul Newman didn’t like Elizabeth at first, resenting her inertia at rehearsals, but when he saw the torrents of emotion she unleashed the minute a camera was pointed in her direction, he changed his mind, lauding the “ferocity” of her “instinctive” acting. She was paid $125,000, and Newman, who’d recently made his film debut in the role Dean was to have played in
Somebody Up There Likes Me
, received $25,000.

Shortly after her twenty-sixth birthday, Todd moved his offices to Metro to be near her. Principal photography on
Cat
began on March 12, and the Todds watched the daily rushes together in the projection room. They lunched together every day, and were joined on one occasion by Mickey Rooney; Eddie’s boyhood friend Joey Foreman, who was now working as a comedian; and Art Cohn, who was writing the script for
Don Quixote
and also completing his biography,
The Nine Lives of Mike Todd
. The Todds were planning to fly to New York, where Mike was to be roasted by the Friars Club as Showman of the Year, but Elizabeth contracted pneumonia in late March and was confined to her bed with a 102-degree temperature. “I made him realize he had to go without me,” she recalled. Three thousand people were expecting to see him at the Waldorf-Astoria on Sunday evening, March 24, 1958, including Governor Averill Harriman, Laurence Olivier, Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., and baseball player Jackie Robinson. Todd didn’t want to disappoint them. In Elizabeth’s absence he intended to fly a whole party with him on
The Lucky Liz
, but everyone turned him down, including Richard Brooks; Eddie Fisher, who was filming a Chesterfield commercial in Greensboro, North Carolina; Kirk Douglas; Joe E. Lewis; Joseph L. Mankiewicz, whom Todd had been trying to sign as director of
Don Quixote
; entertainment reporter Vernon Scott; publicist Warren Cowan; and Kurt Frings. AP reporter James Bacon accepted but later canceled, terrified by “the worst night I ever remember in Southern California—thunder, lightning, and torrential rain.” Finally Todd dragooned two of his employees, Art Cohn and Dick Hanley, into accompanying him.

On Friday, March 21, after playing with Michael and Christopher Wilding in the big sunken tub on Schuyler Road, Todd kissed Elizabeth goodbye, and then kept coming back to kiss her again and again. “We had never been apart overnight before,” recalled Elizabeth, who’d once told him, “Whither thou goest, I will go too, buster.” Despite her fever, she tried to get up and make the flight, but Dr. Kennamer absolutely forbade it. “I’m so afraid something’s going to happen,” Todd said. “I’m too happy.” They both cried, and she closed her eyes as he picked up his fried-chicken box lunch and left for the Burbank airport in pouring rain. “I knew I shouldn’t have let him go,” she said later. “I don’t think he really wanted to go.”

At the airport, he went to the plane with Cohn, Hanley, pilot Bill Verner, and copilot Tom Barclay, but at the last minute he turned to Hanley and said, “Go back to the little broad. She might need you.” After Hanley left, Verner gunned
The Lucky Liz
, and Todd rang Elizabeth on his air-to-ground phone, saying he’d call again from their first fuel stop, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and again from Kansas City, where he was picking up Jack Benny following his benefit performance there. Finally he told her, “We’re off, beautiful. Get a good sleep now. I love ya.” At 10:11 p.m., a ton overweight, the old plane lumbered off into a stormy sky exploding with thunder, lightning, rain, and sleet.

Back at Schuyler Road, Elizabeth worried that he’d left without a coat. As the storm continued to rage, she looked in on Liza, who was fast asleep, and then went into Chris and Mike’s room. “Tell us a story, Mommy,” one of the boys said. Plopping onto Mike’s bed, she drew them close on either side of her and related the tale of Little Goody Two-Shoes, changing Goody’s gender to a boy. Then she told them to go to sleep, turned off the light, and went into her bedroom to await word from Todd. At 2 a.m., Saturday, March 22, she awoke with a start, wondering if she’d slept through his call. After restlessly rolling around their big double bed, she drifted into an uneasy sleep.
⁴¹

At roughly the same time,
The Lucky Liz
was running into trouble over New Mexico. Pilot Bill Verner radioed air traffic control in Winslow, Arizona, that the wings were icing over and received permission to take the plane from eleven thousand to thirteen thousand feet. At the higher altitude the ice accretion only worsened, and the plane headed into an intense storm front. At 2:40 a.m.,
The Lucky Liz
was about twelve miles southwest of Grants, New Mexico, over the Zuni Mountains. Below the mountains lay what the Indians call “malpais”—badlands. Suddenly, the right engine stopped, the master engine rod having failed. “The right propeller was feathered,” according to the Civil Aeronautics Board report. At their cruising altitude, the plane could not stay airborne on a single engine. It spiraled completely out of control, plummeting through thick fog to the floor of the valley at a steep angle of descent, then crashed and burst into flames. There were no survivors; Mike Todd was dead at age fifty. Wreckage and bodies were scattered over the two-hundred-yard, snow-covered crash site, situated between two mountains at an elevation of approximately seven thousand feet. When a search party arrived at dawn, they found bodies burned beyond recognition. Twisted by the impact of the crash, Todd’s gold wedding ring was recovered from the wreck.

In Beverly Hills, Elizabeth’s fever had kept her from sleeping well. At 5 a.m. the children’s maid, Bea, came upstairs to massage her back with rubbing alcohol. She stared at the phone, waiting for Mike’s promised call from Albuquerque at 6 a.m. When the hour came and passed, she rang Dick Hanley and remarked, “It’s the first time since we were married that he hasn’t sent word to me in some way.” At 7:30 a.m., an overwhelming premonition of death swept over her. “
I knew
,” she later wrote. Calling Kurt Frings, she said, “I ought never to have let him fly without me,” but Frings said Todd could take care of himself. “I’m not so sure,” she said.
⁴²

Across town Jim Bacon received a call from the AP bureau in Albuquerque telling him that his name had shown up on the passenger manifest of the downed plane. Bacon assured the caller that he was still alive, thanks to having dropped out of Todd’s party. At around 8 a.m. the coroner’s office in New Mexico rang the Los Angeles Police Department requesting dental records to identify the charred cadavers, and the police contacted MGM security. Metro in turn called Dick Hanley, who gasped, “Oh, my God,” and then, collecting himself, rang Schuyler Road and learned from the governess that Elizabeth had not yet been informed. Hanley called Kennamer, Guilaroff, Debbie, and Eddie, but Eddie had already departed for New York to join Todd at the Friars banquet. Debbie reached him on the phone at Manhattan’s Essex House, telling him that she was on her way to visit Elizabeth. “I told her to stay away,” Eddie remembered. “I didn’t want to share anything with her, even a tragedy.” But Debbie proceeded to Schuyler Road anyway, joining Michael Wilding Sr., Kurt and Ketti Frings, and Sydney Guilaroff in Elizabeth’s living room.

Hanley and Dr. Kennamer had started upstairs to break the news to Elizabeth. At 8:30 a.m. she looked up as they entered her room and assumed the doctor was making a routine house call. “Hi, Rex,” she said, “how are you?” When he said nothing, and both men just stared at her, she screamed, “No, he’s
not
!” She put her hands to her ears and kept screaming, unable to believe that the 414-day joyride of her marriage to Todd was over. Wearing nothing but a sheer white nightgown, she ran to the staircase and screamed, “No, no, it’s not true! It’s not true!” Downstairs, Debbie looked up and saw Elizabeth at the landing, her face “ashen, her violet eyes desperately sad, hair askew and wild—yet still incredibly beautiful, even in tragedy.” Shouting Mike’s name repeatedly, Elizabeth ran downstairs in hysterics, and Debbie stepped back as she darted past her, heading for the door. The small hillside street was jammed with reporters, photographers, television and newsreel crews, and assorted onlookers. Fortunately, Hanley and Kennamer caught her before she got outside and Kennamer knocked her out with a sedative. The two men carried her back to the bedroom as she sobbed, “Why Mike? Why did it have to happen?” Downstairs, Debbie pulled herself together and took charge of Elizabeth’s boys, aged three and five years old, bringing them home with her.

Though woozy from massive doses of morphine and phenobarbitol, Elizabeth paced her bedroom like an animal, periodically calling out Mike’s name as if he were in the next room. “When her screaming finally stopped, Elizabeth retreated into stony silence,” recalled Guilaroff. “She sat for hours without moving a muscle, staring straight ahead, her lovely face absolutely devoid of expression.” By now, the crowd downstairs included Edith Head, Helen Rose, Irene Sharaff, and, amazingly, Greta Garbo, who emerged from seclusion long enough to tell Elizabeth, “Be brave.”

Samuel Goldwyn arrived and told Elizabeth the afternoon papers were full of tributes. Elizabeth asked to see them, and he went outside and brought the papers back from his car. The most moving tribute was from Hollywood’s preeminent showman, Selznick, producer of
Gone with the Wind
, who said, “Todd was a great showman, one of the greatest of our times. His courage and magnificent gambling spirit did much to revitalize the motion picture industry. The sympathy of the entire world will be extended to his wife and family in their great loss.” When Goldwyn left the house, he told reporters, “I am comforted with the thought she is going to come out of this all right. She has a great future ahead of her for she is the dominating actress in our business.”
⁴³

Elizabeth’s greatest mistake in her marriage to Todd had been subjugating herself to the point that she disappeared as a person, and when he died, nothing was left of her. That was what her grief was really about—not losing him, but losing herself. He had been her refuge, but she had paid a terrible price. Having let Todd solve all her problems, Elizabeth “felt cold and trapped by circumstances and without any of my own resources to find a way out,” she wrote. All she could do was let doctors drug her into insensibility. The irony was that the strong person she always sought was already present in her own being, but undermined by self-loathing and drugs. As Mary Martin once needlepointed on a pillow for Joshua Logan, “If the sun should doubt, it would immediately go out.”
⁴⁴

The Wilding boys stayed with Debbie for the next two weeks. Elizabeth clasped Liza Todd to her bosom, but later on, both Liza and her half-brothers were entrusted to Arthur Loew Jr., who was renouncing his playboy existence for marriage and ranch life in Arizona. Eddie flew back to L.A. and went straight to Schuyler Road. “People I’d never seen before in my life were walking in and out of the house as if they owned it,” he recalled. Elizabeth suddenly appeared in a transparent negligee and drifted through the crowd, a look of total distraction on her face. Finally recognizing Eddie, she told him to come back the following day “so we can talk.”
⁴⁵
In the meantime, Guilaroff kept watch on a couch in her bedroom, “rising to kiss her and trying to comfort her whenever things were at their worst.”
⁴⁶
Elizabeth couldn’t hold down food for three days and, according to Richard Brooks, she threatened to kill herself.
⁴⁷
Guilaroff, Fisher, Helen Rose, and Wilding Sr. managed, in shifts, never to let her spend a moment alone.

Todd’s son, Mike Todd Jr., said she was in “a largely incoherent state” when he rang from New York. The funeral was held on March 25, at the Jewish Waldheim Cemetery in Zurich, Illinois, near Todd’s hometown of Chicago. The young widow wore a black velvet cloche, a small black veil, a black broadtail fur suit, black leather gloves, a mink wrap, and dangling diamond earrings. Attracting a crowd of sightseers estimated at 21,600, the funeral quickly degenerated into a compendium of every movie Hollywood ever made about itself, from
A Star Is Born
to
The Loved One
. Elizabeth ordered a nine-foot, two-ton marble replica of the Oscar statuette to be installed at the grave, but Todd Jr. called it vulgar. It couldn’t be done in any case, after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences threatened to sue over copyright infringement. The funeral was set for 2 p.m., but when thousands of onlookers started lining the streets of Forest Park, it was moved back to noon.

At the cemetery, ten thousand intrepid fans had managed to push their way inside. Stepping from her car in a howling March wind, Elizabeth saw the mob munching potato chips and slurping Cokes, many of them perched on tombstones and crypts to get a better look, and moaned, “Oh, God. Oh, God.” When they saw her, they jumped up from their picnics and started screaming and lunging at her. Howard Taylor and Kennamer half-carried her to the grave, traversing a burlap carpet covered with petals from one thousand white roses. The open grave was under a tent, where chairs had been placed for approximately thirty mourners. When she saw the bronze coffin, she murmured, “I love you, Mike. I love you, Mike.” According to Eddie, she tried to embrace the casket, and others present said Howard restrained her by grabbing her shoulders.