William J. Mann - How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood

How to Be a Movie Star

William J. Mann

Table of Contents

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
BOSTON NEW YORK
2009

Copyright 2009 by William J. Mann

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission
to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
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www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mann, William J.
How to be a movie star : Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood /
William J. Mann.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-547-13464-2
1. Taylor, Elizabeth, 1932 2. Motion picture actors
and actressesUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
PN 2287. T 18 M 36 2009
791.4302'8092dc22
[B] 2009013283

Book design by Linda Lockowitz

Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Prologue: How to Be a Movie Star

1. When in Rome

2. Educating a Movie Star

3. The Most Exciting Girl

4. Acting Out

5. Over the Top

6. Protecting Interests

7. A Second Chance on Life

8. No Deodorant Like Success

9. Rewriting the Rules

Epilogue: How to Stay a Movie Star

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Prologue

How to Be a Movie Star

F OR ONCE THE SUN overhead was the brightest object around. On a warm morning in September 2006, Elizabeth Taylor, seventy-four, left the diamonds at home and boarded a sightseeing boat, the Kainani, off Oahu's North Shore. Wearing a baggy white T-shirt over a one-piece bathing suit, she gripped the arms of her black wheelchair tightly as the craft zipped out of Haleiwa Harbor. Slapping against the waves of the Pacific, the thirty-twofoot Kainani was a far cry from the Kalizma, the floating palace with six cabins and two staterooms on which Taylor had once navigated the world. But a leisurely cruise was not what the two-time Academy Award winner had in mind.

Three miles out to sea, the Kainani arrived at what its captain called "the shark grounds." On another excursion not long before, Elizabeth had sat forlornly while her friends dropped off the side of the boat in a Plexiglas cage to swim with Galapagos sharks. Alone on deck, she'd stewed; the sidelines had never been for her. So she'd insisted on another tripand this time no one was going to stop her from going down.

In the months leading up to this day, the papers had been filled with tales of Elizabeth Taylor being "near death" or half-mad from Alzheimer's. She'd gone on Larry King Live to dispel the rumors, but she knew there were ways of making the point a bit more vividly. So, slowly and determinedly, she rose from that damn chair. Handed a mask, she followed the instructions to spit into it so that the plastic wouldn't fog up underwater. Then she slipped the thing on and bit down on the snorkel. Pushing aides aside, she stepped into the ten-by-six-foot cage. Lured by the engine, the sharks were already circling. With the pull of a lever and a wave from the star, the cage slid below the surface of the ocean.

Of course, this wasn't the first time Elizabeth Taylor had gone head-to-head with sharks. She'd tangled with lots of them: demanding studio heads, overbearing directors, bluenose columnists, greedy husbands. And she'd done so with a shrewdness and a keen understanding of just how a star went about getting what she wanted. "She was always in control," said her friend, photographer Gianni Bozzachi. "She did not seek fame but she knew how to use it. She was very smart. People don't know how smart." Some chroniclers, perhaps too dazzled by the violet eyes and the glittery melodrama of her life, have missed that salient point. Long before our own celebrity age, Elizabeth Taylor carved the template for how to be a movie star. So many of the tricks of the trade can be traced right back to her.

When the cage finally resurfaced, Taylor smiled at the photographer who was there to record the moment. Her scarlet nails, still perfectly manicured, sparkled in the sun. Getting into that shark cage, she later told columnist Liz Smith, was "the most exciting thing" she'd donewhich, given her life, was saying a lot. "To be in that cage and watch the sharks get closer and closer," she told Ingrid Sischy in Interview, "I had no sense of fear." Of course not; sitting across from Louis B. Mayer had been far more unnerving. Within a short time, the photos and news of her adventure had zoomed around the world. Soon there was buzz about an eighth marriage and a possible lead in the film version of the musical Sunset Boulevard. So much for death's door, baby.

Movie starslike automobiles, airplanes, and apple piesare quintessentially American commodities. When we measure what we've given the world, the product of Personalityused to inspire, entertain, endorse, titillate, preach, stoke the flames of our imaginations, and sell, sell, sellmay prove more influential than even the Model T. Elizabeth Taylorfor her performances both good and bad, for her innocence, sexiness, rebellion, honesty, and sheer life forcehas been called the greatest movie star of all. She has become a cultural artifact that transcends temporal value judgments and the hectoring of the moralists who plagued her career. Her life was made into art, soap opera, scandal, tragedy, and even a bit of mytha transformation begun by the starmakers at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio that launched her when she was twelve, and continued by agents and publicists like Kurt Frings, Bill Doll, John Springer, and Chen Sam, and given its final patina by the media, with which Taylor has always had a symbiotic relationship. A creature of newspaper headlines and telephoto images, Elizabeth enjoyed an unprecedented celebrity that made her into an icon of desire, of gusto, of appetites passionately sated, of candor, of courage, of never saying no to big bad life.

With her studio-instilled instinct for presence (not to mention her refusal to suffer even a moment of boredom), Elizabeth Taylor created the model for stardom and turned it into big business. Before "Liz," the paparazzi were just a bunch of aggressive Italian photographers; because of her, they became a worldwide phenomenon. Part engineering, part instinct, part fate, part simply the pursuit of good times, her fame continues to set the gold standard. Britney may break down; Angelina may steal Brad from Jen; Madonna may reinvent herself as saint, shepherdess, horsewoman, or action figure. But no one has done anything that Elizabeth Taylor didn't do firstand without the excess calculation.

Today's stars concoct their lives for public consumption: Was Britney really that crazy or was it just a quirky twenty-first-century way of staying in the headlines? So much in stars' lives is suspect today. Taylor, by contrast, was brought up to be a star; and while she certainly took advantage of every twist and turn in her epic life, she wasn't constantly configuring and reconfiguring her existence for maximum exposurethe way, for example, her first husband's grandniece, Paris Hilton, would do a couple of generations later. For Taylor, stardom came naturally. She had an affinity for the romance of life. Her fame was a roller coaster of spontaneity and strategy, and all the would-be icons who have followed her have attempted to retrace that pattern, manufacturing the kinds of developments that came to Taylor so extempore and that she (or those who worked for her) used so brilliantly to her advantage.

She also understood that riding the headlines was never enough; she knew that fame should be an exchange with the public. And so, for every cover of Photoplay, there was a Giant or a Suddenly, Last Summer. After all the hoopla over her affair with Richard Burton, she made sure there was a Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?