The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (5 page)

At Young’s lavish resort home, Elizabeth met William D. Pawley Jr., who was twenty-eight, rich, socially prominent, and more attractive than most movie stars. With her mother’s full approval, she began to date Pawley though still supposedly engaged to Davis. When the latter arrived in Miami on furlough, she met his plane at the Miami airport and secretly proceeded to see both Pawley and Davis in Florida, at the same time giving an occasional thought to Wilding. Pawley threw her and Davis a lavish dinner party. “The guy was real slick,” Davis said. “He showed her a better time than I did . . . I had no civilian clothes with me, and not very much money.” Davis was worth $20,000 at the time, certainly no pauper but hardly in the same league with a millionaire. He had brought along a ruby-and-diamond engagement ring that was a miniature of his class ring at West Point, but when he realized the game Elizabeth was playing, he said, “Screw it.” Clutching the spurned engagement ring, he left Miami in a huff. Elizabeth subsequently rang him and said, “Please do me one last favor and take me to the Academy Awards.”
²⁶
Having announced their engagement to the world, she was reluctant to face the press at the Oscars without him. On Oscar night he wore his army uniform, and she was resplendent in a beaded gown designed by MGM’s Helen Rose, who’d created her clothes for
Judy
.

They were among the most photographed and cheered couples arriving at the Academy Award Theater on March 24, 1949, for the twenty-first annual Oscar ceremony, emceed by Robert Montgomery. Lieutenant Davis looked uncomfortable when a photographer told him, “Give her a big smooch,” but he complied, blushing in embarrassment and vexation. During the program in the Academy’s 950-seat screening room, Elizabeth glided on stage to present the Oscar for best costume design for a black-and-white picture, and the orchestra struck up “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” For a moment Hollywood, troubled over a U.S. Supreme Court ruling divesting the studios of the theater chains that accounted for fifty percent of their profit, was again the carefree capital of glamour. Elizabeth returned to her seat next to Davis but ignored him and turned to gossip with Ronald Colman, who was seated behind her. Davis looked thoroughly bored. At the end of the evening they said goodbye for the last time. Years later, Elizabeth told her stepson, Mike Todd Jr., “It had all been arranged by Metro for publicity purposes.”
²⁷

A
Time
cover girl in 1949, Elizabeth was on a roll and could have had any man she wanted, including notorious playboy, industrialist, and test pilot Howard Hughes. Tall, dark-haired, and handsome, the forty-five-year-old Hughes had recently acquired a film studio, RKO, and already owned Hughes Aircraft Company in Glendale, California; Hughes Electronics, the largest supplier of weapons systems to the air force and navy in WWII; Hughes Helicopters; and a substantial chunk of TWA. He was equally well known for his ubiquitous conquests of Terry Moore, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, and Gene Tierney. Indefatigable, he now went after Elizabeth, flying her and Sara to Lake Tahoe for the weekend, and offering a six-figure dowry if Elizabeth would marry him. He also bought expensive works from her father’s art gallery. Though Hughes had Sara on his side, Elizabeth brushed him off as an obvious weirdo. “He needed a bath,” she recalled. “I always knew what I wanted and what I didn’t want. Somebody hitting on me made no difference to me. Unless I was interested in them, they could go take a Flying F. I’m not one to be pushed around.” Nevertheless she attended a party Hughes gave for Jean Simmons at the Beverly Hills Hotel at which Elizabeth and Jean, who looked like twins, formed a fast friendship; neither saw Hughes all evening.
²⁸

Not long after Elizabeth’s romance with Glenn Davis, and the truncated one with Hughes, Sara began promoting Elizabeth’s old suitor Pawley as a potential husband, calling him “brilliant, understanding, strong, poised . . . and full of fun.” In May mother and daughter went to Florida to visit the Pawleys at their Sunset Island home. Elizabeth accepted an engagement ring from Pawley the day after they arrived. The $16,000 ring had a 3.5-carat emerald-cut solitaire diamond flanked by two half-carat diamonds. Sara did all the talking at the forty-five-minute press conference she called on June 5, 1949. Bill Pawley sat in stony silence as Elizabeth flashed her diamond for reporters, calling it a “nice piece of ice.” According to one of the Florida reporters present, Pawley cringed. His family had already objected to Elizabeth as vulgar.

Mesmerized by Pawley’s dark, hirsute sensuality, Elizabeth appeared to agree when he insisted she give up Hollywood, telling reporters she was bored with making movies and would rather “make babies” with Bill. It sounded fine in theory, but when Metro sent emissaries to lure her back, she chose career over Pawley. Sara convinced her future son-in-law to be patient until Elizabeth finished two more film commitments. The first,
The Big Hangover
, was undistinguished, but Elizabeth liked her new salary, $2,000 per week, and her costar Van Johnson.
Father of the Bride
, her second commitment, was one of Metro’s most valuable properties, scheduled to start filming January 1950. A third offer turned up unexpectedly, and it was too good to resist. George Stevens, one of the best directors in the world, wanted to cast her in
A Place in the Sun
opposite the number one male star in Hollywood, Montgomery Clift. Paramount arranged to borrow her from Metro. It meant losing Pawley, who walked out on her after they attended Jane Powell and Geary Steffen Jr.’s wedding on September 17, 1949. Elizabeth caught the bridal bouquet and went nightclubbing at the Mocambo with the wedding party.

Nicky Hilton, heir to the hotel fortune, saw her at the Mocambo and found that he couldn’t get her out of his mind. He began plotting ways to meet her, trying to use some of his father’s influential friends to arrange it. For a while, Elizabeth remained completely unaware of his interest. She blew off her Pawley fling with the flip remark, “We went well together under the palm trees.”
²⁹

And then she met Montgomery Clift. Though Nicky wanted to marry her, it was Monty who touched her heart.

Chapter 2
Montgomery Clift
UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

She’d been in a hurry to get married, partly due to lack of self-esteem, and partly to get away from an oppressive atmosphere at home. Of all the men she’d known so far, the one Elizabeth was most serious about was Monty Clift, an intense, brooding, and startlingly good-looking actor who in the 1940s was the forerunner of a new breed of giants who’d ultimately dominate the industry and change the art of movie acting. Monty pioneered a style that was edgy, intense, mutely eloquent, and bristling with a sense of barely contained violence, and in his wake would come Marlon Brando, James Dean, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino. Professionally Monty seemed like a god to Elizabeth, and personally he was the kind of sensitive man she’d been looking for without even realizing it.

Discussing their relationship in 1997, she said, simply, “I loved him,” quickly adding, “but I knew from
A Place in the Sun
that he was gay—probably even more than he did. And I helped him with it. Which is extraordinary because I was only about sixteen, and I didn’t really know anything about it. I turned seventeen during the filming of that movie.” The charismatic twenty-nine-year-old Monty was described in January 1999 by his close friend Jack Larson, a Hollywood contemporary who played Superman’s friend Jimmy Olsen in the popular TV series, and who for many years was the companion of the late James Bridges, director of
Urban Cowboy
and
The China Syndrome
. Interviewed in his vintage Frank Lloyd Wright house perched on a cliffside in Brentwood while he petted and attempted to train his romping, high-spirited, eighteen-month-old dog Dewey, Larson asked rhetorically, “What was Monty like when he first knew Elizabeth? Exuberant. But he was in no sense effeminate. He wasn’t worried about being gay. He was bisexual. Monty had an affair for years with Libby Holman [the Broadway torch singer, accused husband-killer, and Camel cigarette heiress].” When asked if Monty was bisexual with Elizabeth, Larson replied, “No, he liked older women. He had a relationship with Myrna Loy. Elizabeth was in love with him and a wonderful friend to him—always. He loved her and called her Bessie.”

Another friend of Monty’s, Frank Taylor, who produced Monty’s 1961 film
The Misfits
, insisted in a 1999 interview in Key West, “Monty was gay, not bisexual. He was obviously very much in love with his best friend, Kevin McCarthy, something that’s always been denied. They weren’t lovers, but Monty wanted him very much. Monty also loved Kevin’s lovely wife, Augusta Dabney, but as family. Kevin and Augusta had children together and later divorced, and she married [actor] William Prince. During location filming of
The Misfits
in Dayton, Nevada, Monty became close to John Huston’s stepmother Nan Huston, but I never saw any sign of bisexuality. Nan was in her seventies, and had been married to Walter Huston, John’s father.”

Even before Elizabeth and Monty started filming
A Place in the Sun
, Paramount was determined to build the two beautiful young stars into a romantic legend, ordering the reluctant Monty to escort Elizabeth to the world premiere of his latest film,
The Heiress
, in which he costarred with Oscar winner Olivia de Havilland. Monty was so terrified of the prospect of his studio-enforced date that he made his drama coach, the dour Mira Rostova, tag along as a chaperone. Hoping to impress Monty, Elizabeth went to Helen Rose for something “sexy and sophisticated,” and Helen gave her a strapless net gown and a snowy fur cape. When Monty came to pick her up that night, Sara greeted him at the door and was so overwhelmed by Hollywood’s hottest property that she began gushing.

“Sorry about mother,” Elizabeth said later in the limo. “She can be a real pain in the ass.” Press agent Harvey Zim, who accompanied them along with Rostova, later explained, “She looked ravishing, and she was so foul-mouthed and unconcerned about going to this premiere that everybody else relaxed in the limousine too.” Zim and Rostova got out two blocks before they arrived at Grauman’s Chinese Theater (later renamed Mann’s), and Elizabeth and Monty then made a romantic entrance on their own. An Associated Press photographer caught her adjusting Monty’s tie after they stepped out of the limo onto Hollywood Boulevard. Their legions of fans erupted into a near-riot, and Elizabeth and Monty smiled into a hail of flashbulbs as they made their way up the red carpet laid over the hand- and footprints of generations of movie stars in the courtyard of Grauman’s. Waving to the hysterical crowd, they finally disappeared into the zany, pagoda-like theater.

Already a veteran of countless premieres and screenings, Elizabeth had learned from Gable and Spencer Tracy to assume an expression of bland nonchalance while watching herself on screen, but Monty started writhing in horror as soon as the picture began, scrunching down in his seat until he was reclining on his coccyx. Trembling, he grabbed her hand, surprising her, but she immediately intuited his need and leaned over and whispered, “You’re great. You really are.” He groaned, “Oh, God, it’s awful, Bessie Mae.” When she asked later why he called her “Bessie Mae,” he replied, “The whole world calls you Elizabeth Taylor. Only I can call you Bessie Mae.” The movie ended with its startling
in medias res
shot of Monty pounding on Olivia’s bolted door in Washington Square, and the audience burst into applause and bravos. When an enthusiastic crowd gathered around Elizabeth and Monty, he sprang from his seat and said, “Let’s get out of here, Bessie Mae!” He was glowing with elation.

They went on to a party at director William Wyler’s Hollywood mansion, which was bedecked with fresh flowers and aglow with hundreds of candles. As they chatted with Gary Cooper, David Niven, and Selznick, a guest who observed them from the patio later recalled, “Together they were a blinding flash of gorgeousness. Elizabeth’s perfect features were almost freakish—until you were sucked into them like a black hole. Lavender eyes with double lashes—glamorous, mysterious, enigmatic. And Monty! That long ecstatic El Greco face—Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky. She was the goddess of creation and destruction, he could have been the messiah or a serial killer.”

Elizabeth asked Monty to dance and was dismayed when he refused, pleading he didn’t know how. Later, when they danced so gracefully together in
A Place in the Sun
, he explained that he could only dance when acting. Her beauty astonished him, and he later told photographer Blaine Waller, “Her tits! They are the most fantastic.” Elizabeth and Monty, with their dark hair and stunning eyes, looked like twins, and indeed he was her counterpart in profound ways: they’d both been child actors who’d rarely if ever played games with other children, and both felt emotionally lost and disenfranchised, but at the same time enormously enthusiastic about life and hungry for experience. Jack Larson observed in 1999 that Monty’s
joie de vivre
had been downplayed in previous biographies in favor of a dark, morose portrait. According to Larson:

“Monty Clift in life was more like Jerry Lewis than Monty’s screen persona, which was introverted and serious. Libby Holman often referred to his ‘divine madness.’ He was a very serious actor though he always looked for the comedy in parts. His nature was essentially comic, always joking and having fun and doing wildly comedic things. The best example was when he and Libby Holman went to Europe with Kevin McCarthy and his wife, Augusta [shortly after
Sun
]. Monty usually didn’t sail first-class because he liked to mingle with people, but Libby always traveled first-class. Since they were having their great affair, they went first-class on the
Queen Elizabeth
. They sailed to Europe, but Monty didn’t enjoy the trip. When they were sailing back, he disappeared for several days. They’d see him at meals, but he wasn’t spending time with them. They were out on the first-class deck sunning in their chaise longues, and one day Monty suddenly reappeared. Libby said to him, ‘What’s the matter, Monty, does our company bore you?’ Monty said, ‘Yes I’m so fucking bored with this trip that I decided to walk home.’ He jumped overboard. They ran to the rail. What he’d been doing the days he was incognito was preparing his joke, his divine madness. He’d been practicing in the ship’s gym to be able to do this stunt and grab the rail. Kevin McCarthy had a camera and Kevin got the picture which Libby had framed in a beautiful silver frame of Monty ‘walking’ home. He was hanging from the rail and ‘walking.’ He was always doing something like that. He was more fun, and he was brilliant. Elizabeth Taylor found him generous and warm, an overwhelmingly affectionate friend who would always be there for you.”