"The doctor said I can carry on with wine and song, but I must give up women."
"Is that Mr. Leeds of the Sob Story Hour? Remember that problem of Mrs. M.S.
we were to discuss on your programme this Sunday?
Well, I think I've solved it."
"Hello, Joe! We were just talking about you!"
"He's the Captain - wasn't he supposed to go down with the ship?"
Cover Close-up
Girl with the Golden Touch
By S.L. Solon
At the age of twenty-five Elizabeth Taylor has had three husbands, plus at least three broken engagements, three children and three mink coats. She is married to Mike Todd, a sort of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile of the film world, and lives a life of gold-plated excitement which makes even Todd's Eighty Days look somewhat pedestrian. She has had so many opportunities, talents, and dollops of luck that she has learned treat her good fortune with a queenly unconcern. It has all been magnificently easy - from her first film part in Lassie Comes Home to last week's expensive present sent from her husband.
Liz is the lass with the golden touch. For her everything appears to have gone right, and yet for some reason it does not all stick together. Just when contentment has seemed assured, it has crumbled in her beautiful hands - like gold dust. Liz believes that now, at last, she knows the answer and she has what she wants. "I didn't know how to be happy," she says. "I needed a husband who could teach me to be happy. Mike has succeeded."
It almost seems as if Liz has had to create her own problems to keep her life exciting. She has insisted on walking on the razor's edge when alongside lay a broad, smooth pathway strewn with flowers. Like the sport she is, however, when these difficulties have come, she has faced them without complaining. She is no cry-baby.
Affectionate as a kitten and playful as a panda, little Liz scorns to hide her emotions in public. Like an Olympian goddess, her loves and trials have been visible for all to see. "I am what I am," she says, "and I have nothing to hide." It is only lately that she has developed a taste for privacy. "There must be some moments when you can get away from it all, let your hair down, walk about your own home in your underwear if you feel like it without having an audience," she says. But if the audience ever fades away, Liz would know how to bring them back. She loves being a public personality.
She was born in London, near Hampstead Heath, on February 27th, 1932, of American parents - Sara Sothern, a stage actress, and George Taylor, an art dealer. She learnt to ride almost as soon as she could walk, and as a child she wrote and illustrated a book about her pet chipmunk, Nibbles. Horses and dogs have remained a passion with her, although several bad falls now prevent her from riding, and she has been plagued with slipped-disc trouble for several years.
Apart from her mother's coaching, Liz had very little formal training as an actress. On and off the film-set she moves with the grace of a stretching panther, and though she may be bundled up in mink, she conveys the impression that clothes are superfluous because they can add nothing to her beauty.
Her voice is rich, vibrant, and pleasing, but it can also be commanding and on occasion sharp. Her sapphire eyes are widely spaced and as candid as sunflowers. Her large, shapely mouth is perhaps her most expressive feature, and she can use it at will like a lash or like a caress. The sophisticated lips in the childlike face exert an almost hypnotic effect on her audience. Qualities like this cannot be learned; they are the jewels of natural stardom.
Elizabeth explains her technique simply. "Usually it isn't at all hard to get a character," she explains. "Mostly I just read my lines through three times at night, and then I go to sleep like a log and don't think more about it. I don't sit down and figure should I do this gesture or should I do that? I know it sounds funny for me to say, but it just seems easy, that's all."
Her entrance into films was easy too. During the war her family moved to Hollywood, where her father signed her up with Universal when she was eight years old. A chance meeting with the producer Sam Marx, who was an air-raid warden, brought her first real film role. Elizabeth's father asked Sam home one evening, and when he saw the bright-eyed child-beauty with the translucent skin, Sam knew he had the actress he was looking for to play in a horse-dog tear-jerker called Lassie Comes Home.
At nine she transferred to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who immediately cut their cloth to the child wonder they hoped would be the successor to Shirley Temple and Margaret O'Brien. Elizabeth more than fulfilled their expectations. They soon realised they had a veritable phenomenon on their hands, for she was a child who could act like a woman, and therefore her range of roles was very large.
A tutor was assigned to her, Miss Birdina Anderson, and Liz, who is clever but no scholar, kept up a running fight with the three R's until she was old enough to dispense with education. Sometimes Liz would object to Miss Anderson's persistence with the unkind remark, "Wouldn't it be nice if Miss Anderson dropped right through the floor."
At sixteen Liz had a big M.G.M. contract, fifteen films behind her, two horses, three dogs, a fine start to a jewel collection, and a dozen suitors. At that time she met Glen Davis, a West Point football hero, and believed she had found real love. "I looked up on the porch and I thought," she remembers, "O ye gods, no! As soon as I was introduced I grabbed Glenn for our side." It was a short engagement and it ended the following year by "mutual consent."
She was next engaged to William Pawley, son of the former American Ambassador to Japan. Instead of Glenn's gold football charm she now had a platinum ring set with square diamonds. This romance also petered out and she was reported going with Montgomery Clift.
Next came an interest in James Dean, with whom she co-starred in Giant. "Would you like to see my new Cadillac?" she asked the fated actor. "Sure, how many rooms has it got?" Dean replied, rather coolly.
Liz chalked up her first marriage, when she was eighteen, to Nicky Hilton, son of the millionaire hotel-owner. It lasted half a year. She later remarked, "My first husband spent the whole six months of our honeymoon at the gambling-tables every day from eight p.m. to eight a.m., so you can understand my feelings about gambling."
A year after her divorce from Nicky, Liz married Michael Wilding, who was more than twice her age. A large, gentle, easy-going type, Wilding make a good husband, and when it broke up after two children and four and a half years Elizabeth described it as having been a perfect marriage. With their different film commitments, they were often apart. Wilding's first intimation that Elizabeth had other plans came from the newspapers. A picture of her with Mike Todd appeared with the quotation, "I love Mike - I love him passionately." Questioned by reporters, Wilding, in a state of bewilderment, said, "I cannot believe Liz would tell anyone of such a private decision without telling me. She is too fine a person to deliberately hurt anyone like that."
Mike Todd, whose three-year marriage to Joan Blondell had ended in 1950, expressed scepticism about show marriages. "To stay married to an actress," he remarked, "you gotta be able to worry about her hair-style." But after a few brief months of public billing and cooing - and Liz's inevitable divorce from Wilding - Todd, who was wary of actresses, married Hollywood's leading lady, and Liz, who hated gambling, married the man whom Damon Runyon called "the greatest natural gambler I have ever known."
Todd, who was born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen, the son of a rabbi, had earned the title of the boy wonder by parleying a series of striptease shows into a great fortune - and then losing it. Hearing one of his creditors complain that he was still smoking cigars although bankrupt, Todd handed him a dollar with the remark, "You're right. Here's the price of the cigar." Later he paid off all his debts and made another fortune, which he promptly invested in his great opus Around the World in Eighty Days.
Of Elizabeth Taylor, Mike said, "She's going to make a career to me or else. I never in my life saw a happy actress in the home." Elizabeth said, "I'd rather be a woman than a film star. A career wasn't my idea. I'm far more interested in being Mrs. Michael Todd than in being an actress." M.G.M. sadly wrote off - for the time being anyway - their potentially most lucrative asset.
As a marriage gift, Mike bought Liz two theatres and followed this up with weekly gifts which included a Rolls-Royce complete with bar, a ring costing £40.000, a Modigliani painting, a diamond tiara, two poodles, and a mink coat. "Mike is so sentimental about anniversaries," she remarks. "Every Saturday we have an anniversary party."
The show world, which is by nature a very inquisitive profession, is watching the Taylor-Todd marriage with affectionate interest. Both Mike and Liz are volatile, egoistical personalities - they would not have got where they are if they were not. Now will it work out in the long run?
Mike says, "They tell me Elizabeth is spoiled, hot-tempered, difficult, but she is also deeply loyal and devoted. So she's spoiled. What man wouldn't want to indulge a girl like her?" Liz says being married to Mike is "hectic but delicious." They have a pact, say both of them, "Whither thou goest, I shall go."
Her two children with Wilding adore Mike, and in the happy give-and-take of show people the two Mikes get along very well and Wilding is a frequent visitor to the Todd ménage. Mike Todd is perfect, says Liz, except for one thing - his gambling. About this Todd isn't too worried. "Look," he insists, "I taught Grace Kelly how to play roulette, and she ended up with a whole casino."
Whether Elizabeth would continue her acting career was "Hollywood's 50,000,000-dollar question. Then it was announced that she would star in the film version of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. "Acting," says Liz, "is just a job which I enjoy while I have it."
NEXT MONTH - Joan Collins
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REFLECTIONS ON A HOLIDAY IN FRANCE
On the Beach: To see a mother of three children still the recipient of lavish affection from her man is really touching - until you realise her man is not her husband.
Bikini may be an island, but it has the most charming surroundings.
At the Casino: Impressive to watch the rather stupid businessmen endeavouring to show their girl-friends how very clever they actually are.
Everywhere: The French have no manners - but they are always polite.
Nevertheless: France is great fun.
GEORGE DUNBAR.
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