THE WHOLE TRUTH
AND NOTHING BUT
_The Whole Truth
and Nothing But_
[Illustration]
_HEDDA HOPPER
and
JAMES BROUGH_
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT © 1962, 1963 BY HEDDA HOPPER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
DEDICATION
_To my son, Bill, who never took any sass from his mother and never
gave her any._
I’m told that when you write a book with a title like this, you must
let your readers know something about your life. Well, I was born into
the home of David and Margaret Furry, one of nine children. Seven of
us grew up. Three of us are still here, including my sister Margaret
and brother Edgar, who played a good game of football when he attended
Lafayette quite a while back.
I first saw the light of day in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, a
beautiful suburb of Altoona, which used to live off the Pennsylvania
Railroad and its affiliates. Since railroads have fallen on lean and
hungry years, I don’t know what’s feeding the place today.
My mother, an angel on earth whom I worshiped, named me Elda, from
a story she was reading at the time. Years later, after I’d married
DeWolf Hopper, a numerologist changed Elda to Hedda. My husband,
Wolfie, was much older than my father and had been married four times
before. The wives’ names all sounded pretty much the same: Ella, Ida,
Edna, and Nella. His memory wasn’t as sharp as it had been, and he
couldn’t always remember that I was Elda.
As time went on, this started to irk me, so the numerologist came up
with _Hedda_ Hopper. I asked how much. “Ten dollars.” That’s exactly
how it happened; it changed my whole life. It was the best bargain I
ever made. Wolfie never forgot it, and I’ve never regretted it.
My sister Margaret was my father’s pet. He and I didn’t get on well.
He thought women should be the workers; I believed my brothers should
share the burden. Mother was ill for six years after Margaret’s birth,
and I took on her duties as well as my own, since my older sister Dora
had married. I had to catch a brother by the scruff of the neck to get
any help, but they all helped themselves three times a day to the meals
I prepared. I also did the washing, ironing, cleaning, and helped Dad
in his butcher shop.
When I couldn’t take it any more, I ran away--to an uncle in New York.
I found a stage door that was open, walked in, and got a job in a
chorus, which started a career.
My family now consists of my son Bill, who plays Paul Drake on the
“Perry Mason” TV show without any help from me. When he went off to
war, he’d already attained stature as an actor. On his return--with
a medal for valor which I’ve never seen--not one soul in the
motion-picture industry offered him a job. Hell would have frozen over
before I’d have asked anyone for help for a member of my family.
So Bill went to work selling automobiles for “Madman” Muntz. One day
he woke up to the fact that he was an actor, got himself a part with
director Bill Wellman in _The High and the Mighty_--and asked Wellman
not to tell anybody who his mother was. Bill has a beautiful daughter,
Joan, who’ll be sixteen next birthday.
I don’t like to dwell on death, but when you reach my age (and I’m
still not telling) you realize it’s inevitable. I’ve left instructions
for cremation--no ceremony--with my ashes sent to an undertaking
cousin, Kenton R. Miller, of Martinsburg, Pennsylvania. I’d wanted a
friend to scatter them over the Pacific from a plane, but California
law forbids that. You have to buy a plot.
A salesman from Forest Lawn told me they’d opened a new section and I
could rest in peace next to Mary Pickford for a mere $42,000. “What do
I get for that?” I asked.
“Well, a grave, picket fence, and a golden key for the gate.”
“How do you figure I could use it?”
“Oh, Miss Hopper, that’s for the loved ones who will mourn you.”
That’s when I decided on my cousin.
_One_
I knew Elizabeth Taylor was about to dump Eddie Fisher in favor of
Richard Burton soon after _Cleopatra_ started filming in Rome. Because
in forty years in Hollywood I’ve told the truth--though sometimes only
in part for the sake of shielding someone or other--I wrote the story.
This was in February 1962, one week before the news burst like a bomb
on the world’s front pages.
But Elizabeth, Burton, and I have something in common: Martin Gang,
a topnotch attorney, has us as clients. He saw my column, as usual,
before it appeared, and came on the telephone in a hurry. “Oh, you
couldn’t print that,” he said. “It would be very embarrassing for me to
sue you, since I represent all three.”
I was in Hollywood at the time, not in Rome, so I was wanting the
firsthand information, the personal testimony, which would be important
in self-defense. I deferred to his judgment--and kicked myself for
doing it when the news from the Appian Way began to sizzle.
I’ve known Elizabeth since she was nine years old, innocent and lovely
as a day in spring. I liked, and pitied, her from the start, when her
mother, bursting with ambition, brought her to my house one day to have
her sing for me. Mrs. Sara Taylor was an actress from Iowa who had
appeared just twice on Broadway before she married Francis Taylor, who
worked for his uncle, Howard Young, as a manager of art galleries on
both sides of the Atlantic. When World War II came along, she was in
raptures to find herself with a beautiful young daughter, living right
next door to Hollywood--her husband came to manage the gallery in the
Beverly Hills Hotel.
Sara Taylor had never gotten over Broadway. She wanted to have a
glamorous life again through her child. She had the idea at first
that Elizabeth could be turned into another Deanna Durbin, who had
a glittering name in those days. “Now sing for Miss Hopper,” she
commanded her daughter as soon as our introductions were over and we
were sitting by the baby grand in my living room.
“Do you play the accompaniment?” I asked. “I can’t.”
“No, but she can sing without any. Elizabeth!”
It struck me as a terrifying thing to ask a little child to do for a
stranger. But in a quivering voice, half swooning with fright, this
lovely, shy creature with enormous violet eyes piped her way through
her song. It was one of the most painful ordeals I’ve ever witnessed.
I remembered seeing the four-room cottage--simple to the point where
water had to be heated on the kitchen stove--in which Elizabeth was
born. Little Swallows was its name, and it sat in the woods of her
godfather, Victor Cazelet; his English estate, Great Swifts, was in
Kent. She had a pony there and grew to love animals like her chipmunk,
“Nibbles,” which ran up my bare arm when she brought it around on
a visit one day. I screamed like a banshee, but Elizabeth was as
patronizing as only a schoolgirl can be.
“It’s only a chipmunk; it won’t hurt you,” she promised scornfully.
You couldn’t have wished for a sweeter child. She would certainly have
been happier leading that simple life close to woods and wild things to
be tamed, maybe through all her years. But her mother had been bitten
by the Broadway bug, and few women recover from that.
Once the family was settled in Hollywood, Mrs. Taylor maneuvered the
support of J. Cheaver Cowden, a big stockholder in Universal Pictures,
to get a contract for her daughter at that studio. Elizabeth was there
for one year, but studio chieftains always resent anybody who’s brought
in over their heads through front-office influence. They made sure the
girl got nowhere fast. Her mother tried everything to find her another
job, but it was her father who happened to land her at MGM through a
chance remark he made to producer Sam Marx when they were patrolling
their beat together as fellow air-raid wardens. She was given a bit in
_Lassie Come Home_, then blossomed in _National Velvet_ with Mickey
Rooney.
I remember the day she cinched in her belt, which showed her charms to
perfection, and Mickey turned to me and said: “Why, she is a woman.”
“She is fourteen,” I replied. He started toward her. I caught him by
the seat of the pants. “Lay a hand on her, and you will have to answer
to me. She is a child.”
He looked hard at me and said, “I believe you would beat me up.”
“I sure would.”
Victor Cazelet, on a wartime mission for the British Government to New
York, wanted desperately to get to California to see the godchild he
adored. Though he was a millionaire in his homeland, strict currency
controls meant that he hadn’t any dollars to pay the fare. He was
staying as a house guest of Mrs. Ogden Reid, owner of the New York
_Herald Tribune_ in those days, but he had qualms about borrowing from
her.
When he telephoned me, I had what I thought was a brain wave: “What
about Victor Sassoon? He’s rich as Croesus, and he’s holed up through
the war at the Garden of Allah.” I wanted to call him at that exotic
sanctuary on the Sunset Strip, where the likes of Scott Fitzgerald,
Robert Benchley, and Humphrey Bogart used to frolic before it was
demolished to make way for Bart Lytton’s bank.
“He doesn’t do anything for anybody,” Victor warned me, but I couldn’t
be convinced until I spoke to Sassoon myself. Lend Cazelet dollars just
to visit his godchild? “Certainly not,” growled the old tightwad. “He’s
got plenty of money of his own.”
So I booked Victor into the Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles to give a
lecture to earn his passage money west. He stayed with the Taylors
for a week, which was the last he saw of Elizabeth. Several months
later the Nazis shot down the plane he was in, believing that Winston
Churchill was aboard. They were halfway right. Victor was on a mission
for his friend Winston Churchill.
I remember Elizabeth visiting my house with Jean Simmons when she was
on her way back from the South Seas and the filming there of _Blue
Lagoon_. They sat together on the long settee in the den, bright as
birds and chattering nineteen to the dozen. I thought I had never seen
two more beautiful young girls.
As the years went by, I saw Elizabeth through many romances and four
marriages, starting with Nicky Hilton. He was a boy, and I don’t
believe he’d had too much experience. On their European honeymoon he
left her too much alone, though everyone wanted to meet his beautiful
bride. When she came home, she took a second-story apartment in
Westwood with a back entrance on an alley. Before she had a chance to
sort out what had happened to her, the parade of suitors began--married
men, stars. Did any of them love her and try to help? No. They used
her. I’m making no excuses for her, but I’m trying to be objective.
Then she was put into another picture. She was exhausted from working
too hard and too fast in the rat race on the sound stages. She was
swamped with advice from everybody. She couldn’t tell true from false.
Thus it went from one man to another, one picture to another, until she
fell in love with Michael Wilding, who was twenty years older than she.
Was she unconsciously looking for a strong father? She loved her own,
but he didn’t stand up to his wife.
When I spoke to her about Michael, she exclaimed, “I love him, I love
him, I love him.”
“You don’t know what love is. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
He’s sophisticated, he’s gracious, but I beg you not to marry him.”
She didn’t listen then or later. She drove Wilding into marriage. “I
_am_ too old for you,” he’d argue. “It will never last, Elizabeth.”
“I love you, and you’re going to marry me, that’s all,” she would say.
Then Mike left for England and Liz followed him. From that marriage
came two sons, Michael and Christopher. After each birth she had to go
to work too soon. Before she could face the cameras, she had to take
off pounds in a hurry, just as Judy Garland did, and it weakened her
health.
Mike was given a contract at Metro, her studio, but when it ran out
it wasn’t renewed. During this time she bought two homes, the second
because the first wasn’t big enough for two children, a nurse, and
Mike’s eighty-six-year-old father, whom she brought over from England
to stay with them. The studio paid for both houses, deducting the money
from her salary, which was standard practice.
I knew the marriage was over when Mike started to criticize her in
public--before strangers, before anyone. She never stopped working. She
was a lady, America’s queen of queens, who loved her children and was a
good mother to them.
She played in _Giant_ with Jimmy Dean, whom she respected and loved
like a brother. His senseless death shattered her nerves. Her director,
George Stevens, was mad about her and had been since she made _A Place
in the Sun_ for him.
I saw her on her good days and bad. In _Raintree County_ and _Suddenly,
Last Summer_, she got to know Montgomery Clift and admired him. Then he
raced his car down the hill from her home after a drinking bout with
Wilding there, ran into a telegraph pole, and nearly died. Elizabeth
sped after him, crawled into the wrecked car, and held his head in her
lap until the ambulance arrived. Soaked with blood, she rode to the
hospital with him and stayed long enough to know that he’d live.
Then along came Michael Todd, who taught her an awful lot about love
and living. He was one of the most sophisticated and ruthless men in
show business. He had gone through the jungle of Broadway and come out
with many scars.
After Mike had made _Around the World in Eighty Days_, he wanted
someone to help sell it. Who else but the queen of the movies? I don’t
think he needed her more than she needed him, but they fell in love,
and he taught her everything he knew about sex, good and bad. He
proposed to her in the office MGM gave him at the studio when he was
shooting _Around the World_. He said: “Elizabeth, I love you, and I’m
going to marry you, and from now on you’ll know nobody but me.” Only he
didn’t say “know.”
They were married in Mexico, and they started one of the craziest,
fightingest, most passionate love matches recorded in modern times.
She appeared in the newspapers and magazines every day, every
issue. Every facet of their lives was exploited for the benefit of
love-starved fans. Gold poured into the box office for her pictures and
his _Around the World_.
He bought her the world, or as much of it as he could lay hands on: a
new jewel or a half dozen of them every Saturday; a plane; a villa in
France; dresses by the hundred. Whatever she wanted, she got. He knew
he was spoiling her rotten, but he loved to see her face light up when
she saw his presents. For the Academy Award show where he expected her
to collect an Oscar for _Raintree County_, he bought her a diamond
tiara. “Hasn’t every girl got one?” he asked blandly. He gave her a
Rolls-Royce and a $92,000 diamond ring.
“Don’t spoil her,” I told him time and again. “She’s impossible enough
already.”
In return she gave him a daughter. Her pregnancy was heralded like
Queen Elizabeth’s or Princess Margaret’s. She had an operation that
almost took her life. She has two vertebrae in her back that came from
a bone bank. I didn’t know about that until she told me. The baby
arrived, Liza, a dark-eyed witch who at three months could read your
mind.
Mike used to say: “If you want to be a millionaire, live like one.”
For the London opening of his picture, Elizabeth was draped in a
ruby-and-diamond necklace, with bracelet and earrings to match. It was
an occasion straight out of the Arabian Nights.
In London for all the high jinks, I watched Eddie Fisher’s maneuvers to
pay court to Elizabeth in the enormous suite at the Dorchester where
Mr. and Mrs. Michael Todd were registered. Debbie lingered in the
Fisher suite several floors below. I had missed Elizabeth and Mike like
the dickens when they left Hollywood in advance. They made me promise
I’d be in London with them for the _Around the World_ hullabaloo.
When I checked into the hotel, there was a message from Mike inviting
me to see them. I unpacked, changed, then went on up to the top floor,
which was taken up entirely by their double suite. I happened to walk
first into Liz’s half. There she sat, bulgingly pregnant in a white
lace robe, with her bare feet on a coffee table, drinking Pimm’s No. 1
from a pitcher at her side, with the diamond tiara hanging out of a
pasteboard box.
I left Elizabeth and went into Mike’s suite. He was talking to four of
the most prominent newspaper publishers in London about the opening
of the picture, and they were laying out the seating of the theater,
since royalty would attend. Crawling around the floor were Elizabeth’s
two sons, picking caviar sandwiches off a low table and stuffing
themselves. I gathered the children up, took them back to Liz, and
closed the door firmly. Just then Eddie Fisher came in to pay his
respects to Liz. He was in and out all the time.
Mike was frantically busy with two spectacular shows to put on, on
the screen for his premiere and at Battersea Festival Gardens, where
he threw a champagne-and-fun-fair shindig for two thousand people to
celebrate his picture, scoring a triumph that gave him every front page
in London, except _The Times_.
He gave us plastic raincoats, to save us from the pelting rain, but
we didn’t use them. We slithered in mud and scooped coins by the
fistful from ash cans he’d had filled to provide fares for all the
rides. The Duke of Marlborough stood patiently in the rain with Jock
Whitney, waiting to climb on a carrousel. I rode around on my painted
charger with Ali Khan and Bettina ahead of me and, in back, a gaitered
bishop with his wife. Liz wore a Christian Dior gown in ruby red
chiffon. The Doug Fairbankses were there, Deborah Kerr, financier
Charles Glore. Debbie and Eddie showed up together. And the Duchess
of Argyll, classically understating it, observed as the fun began: “I
hear that this is going to be just an intimate little gathering for a
few friends.” The Gilbert Millers, with Cecil Beaton, left before the
fireworks. It was too damp for them.
It was one of the few times I saw Mr. and Mrs. Fisher side by side.
Every time Mike asked me to the top floor, Eddie would be there
but never Debbie; she might just as well have been sitting home in
Hollywood.
The pitcher of Pimm’s, the white lace robe, bare feet on a coffee
table--and Eddie. That was the pattern. Eddie had latched onto Mike.
“You’re just like a son to me,” Mike used to say, sincerely attached
to the hero from Philadelphia, happy that Liz had company during her
pregnancy.
The first time I’d ever seen Eddie he’d come sauntering into
Romanoff’s, Beverly Hills, for luncheon surrounded by ten characters
who seemed more familiar with punching bags than pianos. “Who in
the name of God is that?” I asked my table mate. “And who are those
terrible-looking men with him?”
“That’s Eddie Fisher; they’re his handlers.”
“Handlers?” said I. “Is he a prize fighter? I’d heard he was a singer.”
I took him to the Fourth of July garden party at the United States
Embassy in London a few days after Mike’s opening. Jock Whitney, our
ambassador then, sent the invitation, and I invited Mike. But he was
too busy and suggested his protégé, who was standing by, as usual. We
were offered a glass of champagne before leaving, but Eddie declined.
“You know I never drink,” he told Mike blandly. “Nothing but Coca-Cola.”
In my rented Rolls we drove to the embassy. Making our way through the
crowds, I introduced Eddie to Jock and Betsy Whitney, who was looking
very frail after a recent operation. She and I sat for a few minutes
chatting, while Eddie hung around. As we walked away he asked: “Who’d
you say those people were?”
“I introduced you to Mr. and Mrs. Jock Whitney.”
“Who are they?”
“He just happens to be our Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.”
“Oh,” said Eddie, “_oh_.”
In one of the marquees put up for the occasion I was offered some
bourbon and water. “I’d like some champagne,” Eddie told the waiter.
“Sorry, sir, but we’re not serving champagne.”
“Then I’ll take a dry martini.”
“I’m afraid we can’t mix drinks--too many people here today, sir. We
can offer you whisky, gin, vodka, or bourbon.”
“Well, then, I’ll have a scotch and soda,” said my nondrinking
companion.
As we left he walked over to the U. S. Air Force Band, which was
playing there, borrowed the baton, and conducted the orchestra. What
some of the London newspapers said the next morning about that bit of
ham-handed showmanship would have driven a more sensitive man into a
knothole.
Back in Hollywood, Liz started on another picture, _Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof_. Then came the spring day when the plane, _Lucky Liz_, dived into
the desert in New Mexico; the end of Mike Todd was almost the end of
her.
She finished the picture like a trouper only weeks later. The following
July I flew with her to New York. We sat up aboard the airliner until
3 A.M. talking about the happiness she had known with Mike. She showed
me his wedding ring, taken from his finger after death. “I’ll wear it
always,” she said. “They’ll have to cut it off my finger before they’ll
get it off my hand.”
I took her to the first party she went to after Mike’s death. Though
Arthur Loew, Jr., the producer, had her children in his home, she then
had a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When I went in, it looked as
though a cyclone had hit her bedroom. Every dress she owned had been
pulled out of the closets and thrown onto tables, chairs, bed or floor.
She was wailing, “What shall I wear?” as soon as I opened the door.
I picked up a red dress. “This.”
“But it’s the first time I’ve been out. I can’t wear red.”
“Wear it,” I said. On the bathroom window sill, by an open window with
no screen on it, I saw the big diamond ring Mike had given her, left
there unnoticed. I took it in to her. “Did you miss this?”
She glanced at her fingers. “Oh yes. My ring. Thanks.”
“You’ve got to watch things like this, Elizabeth.”
There was not much else to be said then and there to do her any good.
We rolled down to Romanoff’s in her Rolls an hour and a half late.
Everybody clustered around her as though she were a queen. I am sure
she believed she was.
That night she’d taken me up to see Liza, who was quartered in a crib
in a room of Arthur Loew’s house no bigger than a closet, with its only
ventilation provided by a skylight that could be pulled open by a thin
chain. The room was sizzling. “Good Lord, Liz,” I cried. “She can’t get
enough air in here.”
“Oh, she’s all right,” her mother said, turning on the light to wake
her. The baby woke silently--I have never heard her cry. She opened
her eyes wide and looked straight into mine. It was impossible to
believe she didn’t know what I was thinking. My own eyes lowered in
self-protection.
Liz spread the word that she was getting ready to go off on a long
vacation in Europe with Mike’s long-time Japanese secretary, Midori
Tsuji. Eddie talked about having business to attend to that kept him in
New York. Debbie Reynolds believed both of them. Through the closeness
of Mike Todd and Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth and Debbie had become what
Hollywood called “best friends.” Liz, in fact, looked down her nose at
Debbie and usually referred to her as “that little Girl Scout.”
Debbie and I went together to an “all young” party at Arthur Loew’s
home in a new car Eddie had bought her. Elizabeth was away in New York,
restless, without the remotest idea of what she really wanted. One
thing she was sure of--she didn’t want Arthur Loew much longer, though
she knew he was deeply in love with her.
The only guests at that party who would acknowledge to being
middle-aged without a battle were Milton Berle and myself. The house
rocked to the blare of records by Sammy Davis, Jr. There was nothing
else to play. He had sneaked in early and hidden every other album.
Most of the girls had squeezed themselves into Capri pants as tight as
their skins and a hundred times more brilliant.
“Wonder if they can sit down without splitting ’em back and front?”
said Milton.
“Doubt it,” said I--whoever invented Capri pants had his mind on rape.
I left early with Debbie. “What’s keeping Eddie so long in New York?” I
asked, suspicious nature showing.
“Oh, he’ll be back here tomorrow,” she answered dutifully. Of course he
wasn’t. He took a detour by way of Grossinger’s, that Catskill haven
of rest and romance, where he had married and honeymooned with Debbie.
There, he and Liz had arranged a rendezvous.
Then Liz arrived back in town, and every newspaperman was combing the
thickets trying to find her. Eddie, too, was back home with his wife
and two children, though reporters camping outside their house could
safely assume that the marriage was breaking up, if the shouts they
heard through the walls were any clue. Newsmen looked in vain for Liz
after she whisked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, then ducked out through
the Polo Lounge into a waiting car. I had an idea she would be hiding
out in the house of Kurt Frings. He is her agent, and can take credit
for finishing off the revolution begun by Myron Selznick, a pioneer in
the business of squeezing producers dry and making the stars today’s
rulers of Hollywood. I’d put an earlier call in to her, which she
returned.
“Elizabeth,” I said, “this is Hedda. Level with me, because I shall
find out anyhow. What’s this Eddie Fisher business all about? You’re
being blamed for taking Eddie away from Debbie. What have you got to
say?”
I flapped a hand furiously for Pat, one of my secretaries, who had
picked up the extension, to start taking shorthand fast. Elizabeth’s
voice was innocent as a schoolgirl’s. “It’s a lot of bull. I don’t
go about breaking up marriages. Besides, you can’t break up a happy
marriage. Debbie’s and Eddie’s never has been.”
“I hear you even went to Grossinger’s with him.”
“Sure. We had a divine time.”
“What about Arthur Loew, Jr.? You’ve known he’s been in love with you
for the past six months, and your kids are still living in his house.”
“I can’t help how he feels about me.”
I sighed--I sometimes do. “Well, you can’t hurt Debbie like this
without hurting yourself more, because she loves him.”
“He’s not in love with her and never has been.”
“What do you think Mike would say to this?”
“He and Eddie loved each other,” she said.
“No, you’re wrong. Mike loved Eddie. Eddie never loved anybody but
himself.”
“Well,” she said calmly, “Mike’s dead and I’m alive.”
My voice was rising with my temper. “Let me tell you, my girl, this is
going to hurt you much more than it will Debbie Reynolds. People love
her more than they love you or Eddie Fisher.”
“What am I supposed to do? Ask him to go back to her and try? He can’t.
Now if he did, they’d destroy each other. Well, good luck to her if she
can get him. I’m not taking away anything from her because she never
really had it.”
We went at each other for a minute or two longer before we hung up.
By then, she had said something that sent my anger soaring like a
rocket. I didn’t include that quote in the story I snapped out in five
minutes flat and got it out on the news wires before I could start to
simmer down. I had been very fond of Mike Todd, who had been dead not
quite six months. This is what Elizabeth Taylor had to say that set me
alight: “What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?”
The story ran front page in the Los Angeles _Times_ and many more
newspapers that syndicate Hopper. The Hearst papers, at least in Los
Angeles and San Francisco, paraphrased my scoop and lifted the quotes
without giving me as much as a nod by way of credit.
One of the first people to read it was Elizabeth. She called the next
day, naturally furious, storming over a portrait in print which she
believed pictured her as being as cruel and heartless as a black-widow
spider. I must say I had no regret. If she’d been my own daughter, I’d
have done it. Without a sense of integrity you can’t sleep nights.
“Of course, I didn’t think you’d print it,” she said. “You betrayed
me.”
“You didn’t say it was off the record,” I answered. “And it had to be
printed.”
That was the last time we spoke to each other for a year. At the office
the mail started arriving in stacks, all in Debbie’s favor.
Another call came that day from Debbie. She hadn’t seen a newspaper,
she said. “You can’t stick your head in the sand,” said I.
Debbie, who is as shrewd as she is pretty, knew she had been cheated.
She needed no prodding to be frank. “Obviously, the man loved me. We
had lots of problems the first year and a half we were married. We went
to a marriage counselor for advice. We both wanted to make it work.
When he left for New York, he kissed me good-by and we were very close.
It didn’t mean anything that my husband had to go to New York on a
business trip. I had no reason to be suspicious.”
It wasn’t the moment to tell her once again that Eddie had never
wanted to marry her. In my book, the little baritone from Philadelphia
wanted a reputation as a great lover. He preened in the publicity that
marrying her brought him, but I believe she forced that marriage. His
Svengali, Milton Blackstone, didn’t want it--the men who steer any
entertainer’s career always scheme to keep him single because a wife is
an interfering nuisance in their plans. After Debbie had received an
engagement ring, plus barrel loads of publicity, Eddie answered a call
to Grossinger’s. A friend advised Debbie: “Pack your wedding gown and
trousseau. Get on a plane quietly and go after him, then he’ll marry
you.” She accepted the advice, and Eddie accepted her. At least she got
what she wanted, then.
The storms continued to blow for months. Liz complained to one
reporter, Joe Hyams, that I had “betrayed” her, and swore for the
dozenth time that she wanted to quit Hollywood, though work for the
time being was “therapeutic”--and her pay was rocketing up toward a
million dollars a picture. Debbie applied for a divorce, but that
wasn’t fast enough for Eddie. He got a quick end to their marriage in
Las Vegas. Liz and he were married in that paradise of syndicates and
slot machines on May 12, 1959, after she had embraced his religion and
dragged her parents out of the background to lend a look of dignity to
the proceedings.
Elizabeth’s hatred lasted for a year. But when she had packed to leave
for England and the first disastrous attempt to make _Cleopatra_, she
called. “Hedda, don’t you think we ought to be friends again?”
“Yes, I should like that.”
“So should I. Let’s get together as soon as I’m back.”
Before she returned, she had nearly died in London with the lining of
her brain inflamed by an infected tooth. The first of the millions that
Twentieth Century-Fox was going to pour down the drain had vanished
in _Cleopatra_. But the women of America, who’d been ready to all but
stone her, forgave everything because of her illness. She had been back
in town forty-eight hours when the telephone rang: “Will you come over,
Hedda?”
“I’d love to. Will Liza be there? I’m anxious to see her.”
Before I left, I wrapped a gift Mike had given me one Christmas along
with other things--a music box that played the theme of _Around the
World_. I took a present for each of the two boys, too. Liz and her
sons were drawing pictures for each other when I arrived. The children
accepted their gifts graciously, then Liza wound her box, the first
she’d ever seen.
After she had played the tinkling little tune over and over, she
gravely allowed each brother one turn apiece. Then she wound it again
and danced with each of them around the room. At last it was my turn.
We held hands tight and waltzed until everyone but Liza was completely
exhausted. But she still went on winding and winding the key to play
the tune again.
Liz looked pale, quite different from the woman I’d last seen. “You
won’t know me,” she said. “I came so near death I’m just thankful to be
alive. I lie out in the sun, listen to the birds sing, look at the blue
sky, and say: ‘Thank God for letting me live.’”
I believed her. She felt in that mood that day. Later, inevitably, we
talked about the telephone call she had made one shattering September
morning in 1958 and how she was “betrayed.”
“I considered you my second mother,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I
loved you better than I loved my mother. You were kinder to me than she
was. That you could do what you did nearly killed me.”
“That one line you spoke did it, Liz. I couldn’t take it. That was why
it was done.”
We had several visits after that before I went on a visit to New York
and she whirled off on a trip to Moscow. When we were both back in
Hollywood again, she was another creature entirely, out most nights
instead of resting and restoring herself to health for her next stab at
_Cleopatra_, in Rome this time.
Champagne was ruled out during her convalescence, so she drank beer.
She’d send her chauffeur down to Dave Chasen’s restaurant to pick up
two quarts of chile, which she’d eat to accompany the beer. When she
left for Italy, she was too fat to fit any of her costumes. Her doctor
had to be flown out from Hollywood to put her on a crash diet so she
could be photographed as the Serpent of the Nile in the most balled-up
motion-picture production of all time.
She won her Academy Award not for _Butterfield 8_ but for nearly dying.
And her studio joined in by putting on a terrific public-relations
campaign against Debbie--with planted stories in fan magazines and
loaded interviews for the newspapers--to clinch sympathy for Liz.
* * * * *
She has become Cleopatra to the life now, and the world is her oyster.
What she wants, she takes, come hell or high water--and this includes
Richard Burton. In the huge Roman villa which she made her home during
_Cleopatra’s_ making, she reigned like an empress, reclining on a
chaise, summoning Eddie to bring guests up to her for an audience. The
honored guest would sit on one side of her with Eddie on the other;
Liz would delicately place a hand on her breast before she spoke a
regal word of greeting.
In the old days the scandal of the past four years would have killed
her professionally. In these changed times it seems only to help her
reputation. The million dollars and more which her _Cleopatra_ contract
gave her was doled out, at her insistence, in installments on every
morning of shooting. She consented to work only after the day’s check
for $9000, drawn on a United States bank, lay snugly in her hand. While
he lasted, Eddie drew $1500 a week for getting his wife to the set
on time. Yet she spends money faster than she makes it. If Twentieth
Century-Fox had gotten ruined, putting more than $35,000,000 into the
picture before there was any hope of completing it, she didn’t give a
damn.
At Liz’s say-so, Eddie had adopted Liza Todd, though Michael Wilding
wouldn’t let him take over the two boys. Even after he knew what
was going on in Rome, Eddie hung on. Allegedly, he’s the one who
told Richard Burton’s wife, Sybil, the truth and drew the Welshman’s
question: “Now why did you have to go and spoil everything?”
Eddie wasn’t his smiling self when he flew to Rome to try to quash the
news of the romance. Liz was in the hospital again; the newspapers said
“food poisoning,” but the real diagnosis was too many sleeping pills.
Even after he landed back in New York, he was still declaring the
marriage to be a happy one--until Liz spelled it out for him in three
words over the telephone.
At last she finished the picture and gave herself the asp, and I
predict that Burton will turn his back on her, after every woman in the
world blamed her once again for taking somebody else’s husband. But
Burton didn’t have to submit in the first place.
Can you picture him passing up Liz and simultaneously collecting more
publicity than ever Mark Antony and Caesar combined received in their
prime? He started the romance with Liz just as Eddie did in his day,
when he was sitting at her feet before Mike Todd was dead.
Men are supposed to be the stronger sex. I do not condone what Liz has
done. I do condemn these fellows who followed her around like puppy
dogs. They took her favors as long as she’d give, then each and every
one of them wanted more.
What’s left for Liz but to go on repeating her mistakes? What’s to
become of her? I’m not a prophet, but I have a terrible suspicion.
_Two_
Right from the beginning, when Hollywood was a sleepy, neighborly
village of white frame bungalows and dusty roads cutting through the
orange groves, every top-rank woman star has been fated to regard
herself as Queen of the Movies in person. It’s as invariable and
inevitable as the law of gravity or income taxes, so you can’t blame
them for it. When an irresistible force, which is flattery, meets
a readily movable object, which is any pretty girl who finds she’s
clicked, then she starts to behave as though draped permanently in
sable with a crown perched on her head.
She is mobbed by crowds, wooed by the world, and flattered without
shame or mercy from the time she puts her dainty feet in the front
gates of the studio in the morning to the time she leaves at night.
She’s surrounded by her own special set of courtiers, all busy
lubricating her ego--hairdresser, make-up man, script girl, wardrobe
girl, still photographer, press agent, drama coach, and interviewers.
Liz Taylor is only one more deluded figure in the scintillating
succession that stretches back to Pola Negri, who liked to go walking
with a leopard on a golden chain, and Gloria Swanson, who rode from her
dressing room to the set in a wheelchair pushed by a Negro boy. But I
once discovered that while movie queens aim to live like royalty, there
was one young and adorable princess who enjoyed living it up, at least
for a day, like the movie stars.
In London soon after V-E day I received an invitation to go down to
Elstree to meet Queen Elizabeth, as she is now known, and Princess
Margaret. They were going to watch the filming of Charles Dickens’
_Nicholas Nickleby_, which starred Cedric Hardwicke. I looked forward
to seeing the princesses, but I admitted to a slight bewilderment about
what I was supposed to do and how I was supposed to do it. But there
were daily columns I had to write, and the day before the visit I was
having tea in the Savoy Hotel with Jean Simmons and her mother.
Jean, a schoolgirl of sixteen, had heard that day that she’d been given
the role of a seductive native girl in _Black Narcissus_, with Deborah
Kerr, and her head was spinning like a top. “I simply can’t believe
it,” she was gasping. “I simply don’t believe it’s true,” when Noël
Coward came in. Noël, a friend for years, was reassuring. “I know the
part,” he told her, “and you’ll be darling in it.”
“Oh, I wonder,” she persisted. “I don’t think I’m old enough.”
Noël turned blandly firm. “My dear, if they chose you, they know you
can do it. So do it. You’re going to be absolutely wonderful, so please
don’t say another word.”
I needed some of his confidence for my own venture next day. I told him
about the invitation. “What do I do when I meet the princesses?”
“You say ‘ma’am’ and you curtsy,” said Noël with all the authority of a
prince of royal blood.
“‘Ma’am’? I’m old enough to be their grandmother, and I’ve never
curtsied in my life.”
“It’s time to learn then,” he said. “Here, I’ll show you. Watch me,
and then you try.” He got up and, with Jean and her mother watching
goggle-eyed, proceeded to stick back his left foot, flex his knees,
and bow his head as gracefully as a dowager duchess. The next day when
I was introduced, I remembered the “ma’am” but decided that maybe I
hadn’t had as much practice as Noël, so I’d better not risk the curtsy.
Strict and stringent food rationing was in force in Britain, yet
everybody on the set had contributed ration coupons for butter,
meat, eggs, and every conceivable delicacy so that the young
visitors--Elizabeth was nineteen, Margaret fifteen--could be served
high tea.
I have never seen two girls dig into food the way they did. You could
swear they hadn’t had a decent meal in years. There was cold lobster
with mayonnaise, white-meat sandwiches of chicken, little French
pastries, strawberries big as golf balls. The princesses tucked into
the lot.
Elizabeth was already very regal and dignified, but Margaret was not
that way at all. Through the windows, we could see a mob of people
waiting outside the studio’s big iron entrance gates. “Just look at
those people out there,” I said. “Don’t you get tired of crowds?”
“Oh, you’ve no idea,” Margaret said. “This goes on every day. You know,
because people have to be able to see us, we can wear only white, pink,
or baby blue. And I’m so sick of baby blue and pink. I can never put on
anything like black, for instance.” She was obviously itching to try
dressing like a _femme fatale_.
“It’s exactly like being a movie star,” I said.
“Do movie stars have to go through this in the same way?”
“Every day. They have mobs around them wherever they go.”
She babbled on like a brook, ignoring the icy looks her sister flashed
her across the table. “We’ve never been to a motion-picture studio
before, and I think it’s fascinating. I do hope we’ll be allowed to
come again.” She helped herself to another strawberry. “And this
tea--delicious! Do they have food like this in the studio every day?”
I explained as tactfully as possible that everyone had donated ration
cards. “They did?” exclaimed the princess. “Well, I don’t care. It was
wonderful, and I’m glad I ate everything.”
* * * * *
The day I’d arrived in London for my first trip stays fixed in my
memory because every church bell in town was pealing. Like the ham
actress I was then--and still am--I wondered if they were ringing for
me. I wasn’t quite correct. It happened to be the day Queen Elizabeth
was born. I thought about it when I went back to London again as a
newspaperwoman covering her coronation. Seeing the standards emblazoned
with “E.R.,” for Elizabeth Regina, that covered London, an American
acquaintance of mine, a Democrat to the hilt, remarked appreciatively:
“I didn’t realize they were so fond of Eleanor Roosevelt over here.”
At the Savoy that coronation evening I got a telephone call from
Reuter’s. The New York _Daily News_ was asking for a special story on
my reactions to the gilt and glamour of London town. “Certainly,” said
I. “Get your typewriter ready.”
“Don’t you want to think about it?”
“No, I don’t have to think. I just want to tell it as I saw it.”
So I talked about the crowds who had slept in the streets, about
the pomp and pageantry of the greatest show since P. T. Barnum. “It
makes President Eisenhower’s inauguration,” I judged--and I’d been
there--“seem like sending off your impoverished relations to the
poorhouse.”
* * * * *
Hollywood’s own candidate for ermine, Her Serene Highness Princess
Grace, was much more stiff and starchy than Her Royal Highness
Princess Margaret, at least for the first five years after marriage
to Prince Rainier. Her husband was struck well-nigh speechless by all
the publicity that went with the wedding. He took a back seat while
the daughter of a millionaire bricklayer from Philadelphia reigned as
regally as Queen Victoria in the comic-opera palace at Monaco, with its
toy-soldier guards parading solemnly outside like bit players in an old
Mack Sennet movie. Any moment I expected a fat tenor to come out on the
balcony and start singing.
In Monaco I saw Grace succeed in cooling off in one cold spell Noël
Coward, Somerset Maugham, and an assorted press corps from England,
Europe, and the United States. We were all there to mark the Monte
Carlo premiere of _Kings Go Forth_ with Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis,
and Natalie Wood, which its producers had decided needed every line of
publicity it could get, since it was no great shakes as a picture.
Frank leveled the toy kingdom like a Kansas tornado. At the movie
opening, Grace, in a simple pale pink dress, couldn’t pull her eyes
off him, while he tore up “The Road to Mandalay” and laid it down
again. A champagne supper was served afterward with the Serenities
in attendance. At the top table, where they sat among a gaggle of
celebrities, there were three empty places. Noël Coward had come from
the Riviera with Somerset Maugham, whom he’d been visiting. But Coward
and Maugham found themselves consigned to sit alone at a side table,
out of Her Serenity’s range.
Grace and Rainier danced until three in the morning. While I was taking
a turn around the floor with Jim Bacon of the Associated Press, the
prince and I felt our bumpers collide, and he promptly marched off the
floor. _Lèse majesté_, no doubt.
Newsmen who’d been flown in for the opening fared worse than Noël.
Not a one was asked into the palace for as much as a cup of tea or a
handshake. Little starlets you never heard of were nervously practicing
curtsies in the hotel lobby, but they didn’t get close enough to Grace
to try them out.
A word or two about the peculiar hospitality you could expect in
Monaco, which is a beautiful spot but with its old glamour lost
forever, appeared in my column some days later.
The next time around, three years afterward, Grace made amends,
proving that a little of the column medicine can do a lot of good. I
was amazed to be invited by Rainier and his princess to attend the
opening of a new hotel, the Son Vida, nestled on a hilltop outside of
Palma de Mallorca. This time, she couldn’t have exercised more charm.
She arrived off Aristotle Onassis’ yacht dressed in white, carrying a
lavender parasol, looking like a billion, though I detected a bit of
restlessness in her, as if the gilt on the gingerbread was losing its
luster.
Rainier was a different man, too, outgoing and chatty where he’d been
withdrawn and shy. He had some money invested in the place, along with
Charles (_Seventh Heaven_) Farrell, of the Palm Springs Racquet Club.
I told the prince what I’d heard from Howell Conant, the New York
photographer who had been taking pictures of the Serenities since they
were engaged: “A lot of people around the palace like Rainier almost
more than Grace now.” The prince loved it. We had a high old time
chuckling over that.
He told me about their children, who were entertained aboard the train
from Monaco by Winston Churchill, whom four-year-old Caroline insisted
on calling “Mussolini,” which Britain’s grand old man took as an
enormous joke.
In return I passed along Bob Considine’s account of how he covered
the wedding of Grace and Rainier in Monte Carlo. Each group of
reporters was assigned a spot to work in; Bob’s crowd drew a showroom
for bathroom equipment. “I found it difficult,” he told me, “to peer
across a bidet at Dorothy Kilgallen and write romantically of love and
marriage.”
Grace badly wanted to latch onto some favorable publicity again.
Throughout her engagement to Rainier she’d had her own publicity agent
to advise her. Rupert Allen, who had taste plus tact, had done the
same job for her while she was at MGM. He left the studio for the
engagement, sailed with her when she went to Monaco, and stayed on at
the palace. Last spring her purpose, which may have stuck in the back
of her mind all along, showed itself: She signed to work for Alfred
Hitchcock, then canceled out because the people of Monaco didn’t like
the idea. I guess when you’ve been a queen, if only in Hollywood, you
find it hard to believe it’s promotion to play a princess, even in
Monaco.
Thanks to her own shrewd sense, or to sound advice from outside,
Grace’s timing was good. The people who go to movies still wanted to
see her. So on top of satisfying her own ego, she could command so much
money from Hitchcock that she finally couldn’t turn him down. She has
inherited some of her father’s respect for a dollar.
I believe Grace caught the movie-making bug again after Jacqueline
Kennedy went off without John F. on her triumphant trip to India and
Pakistan. After all, if a great lady who can’t match Grace for beauty
can score a hit, why shouldn’t Grace get back into the limelight? I’d
bet that if Jackie had the chance to star in a picture, she’d take it.
Wouldn’t you if you were in her shoes?
With one possible exception, there’s been a streak of exhibitionism a
mile wide in every actress I’ve known, starting with Ethel Barrymore,
who set my soul and ambition on fire when I saw her play in _Captain
Jinks of the Horse Marines_. The possible exception is Garbo, who laid
down an iron rule that she would work only on a closely screened set,
and she’d freeze in her tracks the moment her privacy was invaded,
especially if her boss at MGM, Louis B. Mayer, dared intrude with
bankers or visitors from New York.