Elizabeth Taylor Gets Married
As a young teen, Elizabeth Taylor becomes frustrated with her controlling mother and the studio exerting pressures on her personal life. They set her up with a few arranged dates, including a football player and then a rich kid named William Pawley. There is an engagement but Elizabeth Taylor breaks it off. The press wonders if she's a "maneater."
Elizabeth Taylor sees marriage as a way out when she meets 23 year-old Nicky Hilton, son of hotelier Conrad Hilton. They meet while he is visiting the set of A Place in the Sun.
After a short courtship, they marry in conjunction with the release of Father of the Bride further confusing Elizabeth Taylor's understanding of the difference between reality and the movies. MGM even pays for her expensive dress.
The whole event has the promotional feel of another movie release. All of Elizabeth Taylor's movie parents attend the wedding and sit together as if they are really couples: Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett (Father of the Bride), Angela Landsbury and Donald Crisp (National Velvet), Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon (Julia Misbehaves).
"It's What Every Girl Dreams Of"
Elizabeth Taylor makes her first declaration of a desire to retire from making movies to be a wife and mother. They honeymoon on the Queen Mary.
Very shortly after the wedding, Elizabeth Taylor discovers Hilton is actually a jealous gambler, drinker and a wife beater. He hates the fanfare that accompanies all things Elizabeth Taylor. After some pretty violent domestic abuse, they separate after seven months.
Some say her whole personality changes. She is now more moody, belligerent and has developed a penchant for swearing and chain smoking. She also becomes very thin. It's in this state, she starts filming Father's Little Dividend. She also develops an ulcer, colitis, and high blood pressure.
"And suddenly you came along and took the spotlight."
To save her reputation as a divorcee, the studio sets her up on a fake romance with Monte Clift (who Elizabeth Taylor knows is clearly gay). They look great together, however, and play along until Clift says enough. They stay lifelong friends, however.
While making the movie Ivanhoe (for which she receives terrible reviews), Elizabeth Taylor meets the much older British actor Michael Wilding a former matinee idol in England.
"I love you and I must not feel it."
He becomes a witty father-figure to Elizabeth Taylor, in contrast to the abusive Hilton. She pressures him into marriage. She's only 19. Wilding is rumored to be gay also and Hedda Hopper will later try to out him in the 1960s. His lawsuit against her will effectively finish off her career after she unsuccessfully tries to get her gay male friends to corroborate her claims.
Soon after the wedding, Michael Wilding and Elizabeth Taylor have a baby boy. And then another baby boy. The press loves this new motherhood stage.
Afterward she experiences issues with her sciatic nerve.
Elizabeth Taylor then makes the successful film A Place in the Sun with Montgomery Clift. The white chiffon dress she wears in the film becomes the most famous prom dress style that year.
She credits Clift with teaching her how to act.
Do I make you nervous?
Then Elizabeth Taylor makes the very popular movie Giant with Rock Hudson, who was also gay but in the closet.
They became lifelong friends and they all drink profusely in Martha, Texas, due to the heat and stress of working with director George Stevens. Elizabeth Taylor starts to rebel in life and on the set. While she's away, her husband Wilder is busted in the rag Confidential for having a party with strippers at their house. Taylor struggles with bronchitis and a twisting of her intestines. This causes delays in filming. Everyone says she is illness and accident prone.
Big Stars! Big Story! Big Emotions!
Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean do not immediately hit it off. He thinks she is too "Hollywood" but he finally warms to her when filming moves to Hollywood, where Dean dies in a car accident before the movie is finished.
In 1957 Elizabeth Taylor appears in Raintree Country, again with Montgomery Clift, a film that gives her an Academy Award nomination.
During filming the Wildings have a party and Montgomery Clift leaves early, driving ahead of a friend. He hits a utility pole on the winding road below Elizabeth Taylor's house. The friend runs back up to the house and fetches the Wildings. Elizabeth Taylor crawls through the back window of Clift's car to reach him and realizes he's choking on his broken teeth. She pulls them out of his throat. It took a lost ambulance over an hour to get to the scene. Photographers inexplicably arrived first and Elizabeth Taylor shielded Clift's injured body and threatens photographers until they back off. Doctors have to reconstruct Clift's face and they credit Elizabeth Taylor with saving his life. But he is never the same after that. He doesn't look this same or feel the same and he soon will disappear into his addictions.
Clash Interlude
The Wildings experience marriage problems as Elizabeth Taylor grows tired of Wilding's mild-mannered-ness and resistance to engage in melodrama and, likewise, Wilding becomes exhausted with Taylor's tantrums.
By the premiere of Giant, Elizabeth is with movie producer Mike Todd, a big broker on Broadway and in Hollywood, mostly known for producing and expertly promoting Around the World in 80 Days and developing a wide screen projection called Todd AO.Todd teaches Taylor how to be a cut-throat negotiator. He begins her love affair with expensive jewelry and he can keep up with her love of drama. Elizabeth Taylor will forever list him as one of the loves of her life.
After their wedding, Elizabeth Taylor declares her retirement again for motherhood: "I've been an actress for 15 years. Now I want to be a woman." During the marriage she suffers a nasty fall which requires disc surgery. She spends two months relearning to walk and will experience back issues for the rest of her life. She also becomes friends with Eddie Fisher (Todd's best friend) and his wife Debbie Reynolds. Fisher and Reynolds are in an unsuccessful studio-arranged marriage but according to their public image, they are happily married.
The Todd's have a baby daughter.
Elizabeth is given a hysterectomy unknown to her after the birth. She will never be able to carry more children. Elizabeth Taylor likes that Mike Todd is a "tough talker but not a brute." Their marriage is described as one of equals and Todd's forceful public relations team is able to re-negotiate her final few films with her contract at MGM. Mike Todd says that when he is away from her he feels like one half of a pair of scissors.
Less than a year after the marriage, Mike Todd perishes in a plane crash between Zuni and Grants, New Mexico. The plane is overloaded with excess baggage and ice develops on the wings during a storm over Arizona. His body is unrecognizable and only his wedding ring is recovered. Elizabeth should have been on the same plane but she had just had appendicitis and is recovering from a cold and a 102 degree fever. Elizabeth is devastated. Debbie comes around to baby sit her kids while Eddie and Elizabeth Taylor go to the funeral.
She is barely able to complete her classic performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and work on it is credited with saving her life.
Elizabeth Taylor is nominated again for an Academy Award and a BAFTA.
"Maggie the Cat is alive! Why are you afraid of the truth?"
During this time of mourning in 1958, Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor fall in love. Eddie leaves America's Sweetheart Debbie, who dutifully plays the jilted lover (although she and Elizabeth will later become friends again). Eddie Fisher and Debbie have just had a baby boy and the press love to publish photos of the sad family, including pictures of little Carrie Fisher. The publicity over the affair is reputed to have saved the career of Debbie Reynolds.
You really are a bastard!
This causes a lot of bad press for both of Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor. Eddie Fisher at the time was the host of a well-rated NBC variety show, which after the scandal was renamed The Eddie Fisher Show.
Eddie Fisher Interlude
Elizabeth Taylor is labeled a home-wrecker and femme fetale. Because Eddie Fisher was Jewish (as was Mike Todd, the son of a rabbi) people write anti-semitic letters to NBC and Hedda Hopper. After Todd's death and before her relationship with Fisher, Elizabeth Taylor actually converts to Judaism. Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor are threatened by some with a stoning. Fisher's show receives 7 thousand angry letters a week and ratings soon tank until his show is cancelled.
For a while they hide out from the criticism but eventually get married and Elizabeth Taylor sits front row and center at his live shows and he shows up to her film sets.
Elizabeth Taylor's last successful film of the decade is Suddenly Last Summer with Cliff Montgomery and Katharine Hepburn.
There wasn't a sound anymore. There was nothing.
Elizabeth Taylor is again nominated for an Academy Award.
During the 1950s Elizabeth Taylor has gone from sweet to sultry to vulgar. Tension is building. Something has gotta give.
Richard Burton's Early Films
For the 1952 film My Cousin Rachel Richard Burton receives a Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year and is nominated for the Academy Award.
People love his deep and powerful voice.
Burton is good friends with Dylan Thomas (and during his life he will recite many of his poems). When Dylan Thomas asks Richard Burton for 200 pounds to avoid going on his fateful reading tour of America, Burton refuses. After 18 shots of whiskey, Thomas dies in New York City at the White Horse Tavern. Richard Burton forever feels guilty about this.
You're nothing!
The Robe in 1953 is one of his first successful film roles and he is nominated for an Academy Award.
In 1958 Richard Burton appears as Heathcliff in a televised version of Wuthering Heights.
Some consider Look Back in Anger in 1959 his best role. He is nominated for a BAFTA and Academy Award.
People say he is on track to be as great as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud.
The Poem
Living is all in the lines
and how you lay the lines,
notes in the margins, gutturals, curtain calls.
What's the pick-up today, baby?
Who doesn't know your name?
Rollers in the hair piling up high.
The heart strings zing, zing, zing
taught and stiff and quivering.
The heart is a hopeful motor
that glides and thumps and shakes
all the way to the sea
beyond where any of us can see,
to the open arms...
Norah Jones Interlude
