Chapter I: Part 1

THE WHOLE TRUTH
AND NOTHING BUT

_The Whole Truth
and Nothing But_

_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.

A movie queen has to be a born show-off before she wants to act, and when she finds she can get paid for it too, her joy is unconfined. Most of the breed don’t hesitate for a second if today’s producers of soiled sex on celluloid call on them to do a Bardot, without benefit of bath towel. I’m sure Liz enjoyed doing her bathe-in-the-nude sequence for _Cleopatra_. Jean Simmons didn’t object to playing stripped to the waist in one _Spartacus_ scene that Kirk Douglas ordered to be shot in a spiced-up version for European distribution. And those calendar poses didn’t bother Marilyn Monroe. “I was hungry,” she explained, wide-eyed, when I asked her once why she’d sat for them.