Transcriber's Note

Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking them and selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/or stretching them.

All captions are below their photographs, despite how they may appear on some ereaders.

The Table of Contents below was added by the Transcriber, as the original book did not have one. Other [Notes] are at the end of this eBook.

CONTENTS

[One]
[Two]
[Three]
[Four]
[Five]
[Six]
[Seven]
[Eight]
[Nine]
[Photographs
] [Ten]
[Eleven]
[Twelve]
[Thirteen]
[Fourteen]
[Fifteen]
[Sixteen]
[Seventeen]
[Eighteen]
[Nineteen]

THE WHOLE TRUTH
AND NOTHING BUT

The Whole Truth
and Nothing But

HEDDA HOPPER
and
JAMES BROUGH

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

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.

Even Garbo had some odd quirks when the cameras stopped rolling. She used to go regularly to the house of some friends who had a big, secluded pool. Before she arrived, all the servants would be dismissed, and her host and hostess would take themselves off for an hour or so, too. Then Garbo undressed and, naked as a jay bird except for a floppy hat, swam gravely round and round in the water. Katharine Hepburn is another home nudist, presumably finding it better than air conditioning for keeping cool in summer. After all, it’s nature’s way. Didn’t we all come into the world stripped to the pelt?

Under stress, the deep-down desire to show themselves to an audience can take strange turns. Once in front of the crowded long bar of the Knickerbocker Hotel, an actress whose career had run into trouble—she was happily remarried in 1958—began to strip. This was Hollywood, remember, so hot-eyed stares were the only help she got from anybody in the room. When she was down to her shoes and stockings, and the rest of her clothes lay discarded on the barroom floor, she gave a shriek and ran down the front steps out onto Ivar Avenue. Then at last somebody remembered to telephone the police.

More recently an agent from one of the big television studios called at the hotel apartment of a much-married woman whose name still spells glamour to any serviceman of World War II. His mission was to sound her out about doing a TV show. She greeted him in a bathrobe and asked him to run the hot water for her before they talked business. She locked the outside door behind him. The following morning his conscience began to stir. “I’d better leave now,” he said. “The office will think I died.”

“You can’t go,” she cried. “I’m so lonely.” She kept him there three days.

The town has always been full of lonely, frustrated women who have let their few years of basking in the sun as movie queens blind them to reality forever. You can start with Mary Pickford, who used to talk a blue streak about a wonderful girl protégé whom she said she was going to make over into a movie sensation. I had to try to disillusion her. “You’re fooling yourself, Mary. What you should do is hire a press agent. All you really want is to keep your name alive.”

Gloria Swanson is another who can’t see straight today where her career as an actress is concerned. As a businesswoman in the dress industry she’s not nearly as sharp as Joseph P. Kennedy was when he was a movie tycoon and she was his reigning queen. She’d made a hit in Sunset Boulevard and her reputation was on the rise again when I suggested she might do a movie version, written by Frances Marion, of Francis Parkinson Keyes’ Dinner at Antoine’s. Not a chance. “I couldn’t possibly play the mother of an eighteen-year-old daughter,” she snapped. “The part’s too old for me.” At the time, she was the mother of two daughters and a son, and she had two grandchildren.

Most of the unhappy ones have no husbands. One unfailing cause of that brand of misery is lack of female charity. They turn their backs on the facts of life and refuse to forgive their husbands a single act of infidelity—I believe every man married to a movie queen deserves one break in that department.

Barbara Stanwyck lives in a two-story mansion with her only company an elderly maid, the books she reads by the score, and the television set which hypnotizes her into watching old movies into all hours of the night. You don’t see her around town much any more because people forget to ask her down from the ivory tower in which she’s locked herself. When you do invite her out, there are roses from her the next day and thank-you notes so pathetically grateful they’d melt a stone.

Up to the day in 1951 that she divorced Robert Taylor, she was one of the happiest women alive. He was such a handsome slice of man, highly desirable, a full-size star. When he went to Rome for eleven months to make Quo Vadis with Deborah Kerr, women everywhere mobbed him. But Barbara loved to act. The Taylors didn’t need the money, but she worked all the time, going straight from one picture into another, instead of taking time out to join her husband in Italy.

When he arrived home after nearly a year, Barbara disposed of him, while he found a much younger bride, Ursula Thiess. She has now had two children by him, although now they’re having difficulty with an older child by a former husband.

At fifty-five, Barbara remains a talented actress and a mighty attractive woman, though she gets thinner all the time. She’s kept her appetite for work, but suitable parts aren’t easy to find—I don’t rate her last role as a Lesbian madam of a New Orleans brothel in A Walk on the Wild Side as worthy of her. I have begged her to kiss Hollywood good-by and go to Europe. “There’s nothing for you here. I guarantee you wouldn’t be over there twenty-four hours without having at least two offers for pictures.”

But Barbara stays on; with her maid, her books, and Helen Ferguson, her press agent and one of her closest friends.

* * * * *

Dinah Shore used to say, in one of those standard quotes that queens come up with when life is sunny, “My family means more to me than anything in the world—nothing will ever interfere with that.” Then George Montgomery, her husband went off to work on his own, and seventeen years and 362 days of a good marriage went out the window.

Her place of purgatory now is an oversized mansion, built on a $75,000 lot, near that of Richard Nixon. There she sits in melancholy, alone much of the time, by the pool, which is equipped with a waterfall; or perhaps in the living room, which is proportioned somewhat like Grand Central Station. It’s a great spot for brooding, but nevertheless she kept on singing on her shows “It’s Great to Have a Man Around the House.”

On the face of it, this used to be a couple that could never be divided. Certainly her reputation overshadowed George’s, a situation which usually creates continual problems. It’s hard on a husband when his house is invaded most nights by writers and directors who’ve come to discuss the new picture or new TV show with his wife. He has to sit and listen to them fuss over her with: “Now, darling, you’re looking a little tired and you have to work tomorrow, so you’d better take a pill and go to bed early to catch up on your beauty sleep.”

George, however, didn’t resent Dinah’s success. Though he never quite made film stardom and his own Western series died young on TV, he had his furniture factory, where he worked alongside his employees, and he went on making low-budget pictures. He steered clear of the parasitic life so many husbands enjoy when the woman is combination breadwinner, wife, mother, and working head of the family.

When the husband carries the title of “agent” in Hollywood, it’s a safe bet that he knows next to nothing about the business and is living off his wife. It’s also odds that he has a mistress to while away those long afternoons when he isn’t at the race track or propping up a bar. What can the wife do about it? If she wants to keep her home and family together in some semblance of order, she’s powerless. Daddy must be allowed to continue as “agent,” even if it ruins her.

When you’re a wife as well as an actress, you have to think of your husband, too, not only about your career. Maybe Dinah didn’t think hard enough. George, who in the past had given up several jobs to travel with her, went to the Philippines alone to make a picture and was gone three months. While he was away, she heard rumors that he was seeing a great deal of his leading woman. He hadn’t been back in Hollywood long before she released the announcement that she was filing for divorce.

Only minutes after she’d finally decided on that step, she went on the air with no detectable strain showing as she sang and clowned in her TV show.

She is a forty-five-year-old woman with two children still in school. She is up to her ears in work most of the time. The fact that good men don’t grow on trees is something most women don’t realize until it’s too late. Chances are that a new husband would be second-rate by comparison with George. Could be that thought has struck home with Dinah, too.

* * * * *

Inside the blonde head of tragedy’s child, Marilyn Monroe, fame and misery were mixed up like tangled skeins of knitting wool. She was an unsophisticated, overly trusting creature whose career was always professionally and emotionally complicated beyond her power to control it. She was used by so many people.

She let herself be surrounded by such a clutch of nudgers, prodders, counselors, and advisers that the poor child developed an inferiority complex so ruinous that she was terrified to walk onto any movie set for stark fear she’d fluff a line or miss a cue. She never did have confidence in herself. Toward the end of her life, she couldn’t sit and talk to you without her fingers twisting together like live bait in a jar.

That wasn’t surprising in light of the words of wisdom her confidantes poured into her ears: “You cannot worry about unhappiness. There is no such thing as a happy artist. They develop understanding of things that other people don’t understand.”

Marilyn wasn’t visibly suffering from anything the night she stopped off at my house for a last-minute talk on her way to Los Angeles Airport and New York for The Seven Year Itch. Her husband of that era, and one of the real men in her life, Joe DiMaggio, drove her over, but he wouldn’t come in. “I’ll knock on the door when it’s time to go,” said Joe, whom I’d known long before Marilyn.

She was wearing beige—beige fur collar on her beige coat, beige dress, beige hair. “You look absolutely divine,” said I. “Are you beige all over?”

She had started to lift her dress before she murmured: “Oh, Hedda, that’s vulgar.”

“Just thought I’d ask.”

I was a booster of Marilyn’s as far back as All About Eve, when she came on for a few minutes with George Sanders and glowed like the harvest moon. She had an extraordinary power of lighting up the whole screen. No one in my memory hypnotized the camera as she did. In her brain and body, the distinctions between woman and actress had edges sharp as razor blades. Off camera, she was a nervous, amazingly fair-skinned creature almost beside herself with concern about her roles, driven to seek relief in vodka, champagne, sleeping pills—anything to blunt the pain of her existence. When the camera rolled, everything was as different as night from day. Then she became an actress using her eyes, her hands, every muscle in her body to court and conquer the camera as though it were her lover, whom she simultaneously dominated and was dominated by, adored and feared.

She was the original Cinderella of our times, the slavey who’d washed dishes, swept floors, minded babies, been pushed around from one foster home to another without anybody caring for or loving her. But she was always as honest about her whole ugly past as an ambitious actress can be who smells good copy in her reminiscences. She was simultaneously lovely and pathetic most of the time, but she kept a sense of humor. I asked her once about a man alleged to be looming large in her life. “Is this a serious romance?” was the question.

“Say we’re friendly,” she said, “and put that ‘friendly’ in quotes.”

The girl who was rated as the sex goddess supreme used to fight tooth and nail to hang onto the career which she was afraid might slip away from her at any moment. But there was an air of impregnable innocence about her in those calendar pictures. The innocence showed, too, in shots very much like them that her first husband used to carry around when he worked in an aircraft plant in World War II, to flash them in front of his workmates. One of the workmates was Robert Mitchum.

In the first great picture she made, The Seven Year Itch, the same charm of ignorance let her spout double-meaning lines as though she didn’t know what they implied. She had that superb director Billy Wilder telling her what to do. “You had the innocence of a baby,” I told her. “We knew the words were naughty, but we didn’t think you did.”

“I didn’t know?” she said, bewildered. “But I have always known.”

Soon after that picture, she lost the little-girl quality. She was surrounded by people all telling her how to act. They worked up her dissatisfaction with her studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. It’s an old pitch that sycophants make to a star: “You don’t need your studio. You’re bigger than they are. You can have your own production company.” She believed it. Basically simple women like Marilyn, who rise as fast as she did, are pushovers for this kind of mad propaganda.

A leading figure in her new circle was Milton Greene, the New York photographer who set up Marilyn as a one-woman corporation to do battle with her studio, meantime driving himself close to bankruptcy. Milton could take credit for getting her on Ed Murrow’s “Person To Person” television program. After that painful evening I asked her: “How could you possibly go on TV looking like that?”

“Everybody said I looked good.”

“Everybody lied then. You were a mess. You don’t look well in skirts and heavy sweaters because you’re too big in the bust. On that show you should have been the glamour girl you always are. But the glamorous one was Mrs. Milton Greene. This kind of thing will destroy you.”

She spent part of the time during those rebellious days living in Connecticut with the Greenes, the rest in a three-room suite at the Waldorf Towers. She told me about the joys of adventuring around New York in dark glasses and turban with built-in black curls, going off on a cops-and-robbers round of cafes, theaters, the Metropolitan Museum. Meantime stupid rumors circulated that she was being kept in fantastic luxury by one millionaire or another, but nobody bothered to deny them.

“Didn’t it occur to you,” I wrote, “that great stars pursue their careers in conventional fashion, accepting the experienced judgment of good producers?... How did you rationalize the idea that a photographer who’d had no experience in making theatrical pictures could do better by you than the men who had made you famous?”

Then along came Arthur Miller, a writer held in awe by most of Hollywood, who ended a fifteen-year-old marriage to marry her. They were deeply in love and happy at first. When that ended, she came and sipped a martini in my home. He was, she said, “a charming and wonderful man—a great writer.” And Joe DiMaggio? “A good friend.” I believe Miller loved her, though it was Joe who turned up trumps in the end when she lay dead and deserted in Westwood Village Mortuary. One other man loved her, too—Miller’s father, Isadore.

She said: “I have only married for love and happiness. Except perhaps my first one, but let’s don’t discuss that ever.... I still love everybody a little that I ever loved.” And about being the ex-Mrs. Miller? “When you put so much into a marriage and have it end, you feel something has died—and it has. But it didn’t die abruptly. ‘Died’ isn’t the right word for me,” she said when we talked. But I think she was already dying inside her heart.

She went into Let’s Make Love,—it was a terrible script, in her opinion—out of shape physically and mentally. As her leading man, she had Yves Montand, who was Lucky Pierre himself in getting the role, being choice number seven after Yul Brynner, Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, and Jimmy Stewart had all turned down the part. Montand had performed beautifully in his own one-man theater show, though three quarters of his American audiences obviously hadn’t the least idea what he was talking about, since it was all in French. Opposite Marilyn, he thought he had only a small part after Arthur Miller had been asked to write additional dialogue for the heroine.

During shooting I detected that something strange was happening to Mrs. Arthur Miller, who hadn’t announced yet that she was going to get a divorce. She was falling hard for this Frenchman with the carefully polished charm. Between the end of that picture and the start of her next, The Misfits, the stories spread that he would divorce his wife, Simone Signoret. M. Montand scored high in the publicity sweepstakes. The gossip spread all over town, with some help from the Twentieth Century-Fox promotion department and no hindrance from himself.

Before the prophetically titled Misfits was finished, she became so ill she was flown in from Reno and put into the Good Samaritan Hospital for a week’s rest. She couldn’t even reach Montand on the telephone, and she called him repeatedly, day after day.

The night before he left to rejoin his wife in Paris, I received a tip that he could be found in a certain bungalow in the grounds of Beverly Hills Hotel. “Just knock on the door; he’ll let you in.”

I did precisely that. He was astonished to see who had rapped on his door, but I was invited in. The telephone started to ring almost immediately. He wouldn’t accept the call. “I won’t talk to her,” he told the switchboard operator.

“Why not?” said I. “You’ll probably never see her again. Go on. Speak to her.” But he couldn’t be persuaded. He suggested a drink, and I offered to mix them. I stirred up one hell of a martini to get him talking.

“You deliberately made love to this girl. You knew she wasn’t sophisticated. Was that right?”

“Had Marilyn been sophisticated, none of this ever would have happened. I did everything I could for her when I realized that mine was a very small part. The only thing that could stand out in my performance were my love scenes. So, naturally, I did everything I could to make them good.”

I’m sure that he knew what he was saying no more than half the time. She was “an enchanting child” and “a simple girl without any guile.” He said: “Perhaps she had a schoolgirl crush. If she did, I’m sorry. But nothing will break up my marriage.”

The last time I talked with Marilyn, there was no new man in sight. She owed Twentieth Century-Fox another picture, Something’s Got to Give, under her old contract, but even if she’d finished it it would have paid her only $100,000, where she could have made at least $500,000 elsewhere. Her courtiers made her feel sore over that, though the only thing on her mind should have been the need to make a movie that was good for her after Let’s Make Love and The Misfits. Three flops in a row, and anybody’s out. Marie Dressler said it best years ago: “You’re only as good as your last picture.”

I believe Marilyn realized that the end of her acting career was waiting for her just around the corner. The last scenes she did in Something’s Got to Give looked as though she was acting under water. She was sweet as ever, but vague, as if she were slightly off center. She did little more than the near-nude bathing shots, and she gave a still photographer who was on the set exclusive rights to pictures of the scene because “I want the world to see my body.” Newspaper and magazine readers around the world were promptly granted that opportunity, needless to say.

Arthur Miller once called her “the greatest actress in the world.” She was far from that, in my book. In spite of all her talk about playing Dostoevski heroines or some of Duse’s roles, the sex-appealing blonde remained her stock in trade. And there was something else missing among her ambitions. She ached to have children, though she was physically incapable of it. Twice she lost babies through miscarriages when she was Mrs. Miller. She told friends that she longed for a baby on whom she could shower the attention she never had.

On June 1, 1962, she reached her thirty-sixth birthday, married three times, with still no baby and no husband. Two months later the end came, and all the sob sisters of the world fell to work explaining why. Of course, we shall never know. She took that secret with her. When you’re alone and unhappy, the past, present, and future get mixed up in your brain. You say to yourself: “What’s the use of it all? Nobody loves me. Perhaps I shall never find happiness again.”

She seemed to be touched by forces that few human beings can bear, and her life turned into a nightmare of broken dreams, broken promises, and pain. In a way, we were all guilty. We loved her, yet left her lonely and afraid when she needed us most. Now she is gone forever, leaving us with bitter memories of what might have been. Dear Marilyn, may she rest in peace!

* * * * *

One of the men I loved most above all others was Gene Fowler. He once wrote me a letter from London. “What is success?” he asked. “I shall tell you out of the wisdom of my years. It is a toy balloon among children armed with sharp pins.”

How can anyone say it better than that?

Three

Much as I regret it afterward, I all too often speak before I think. And too many years have gone by for much to be done about it now. For better or worse, I’m doomed to shoot from the hip, to be a chatterbox who’ll fire off a quip if one comes to mind, without much thought about the consequences.

I love to laugh and to make other people laugh. That’s what we’re put in the world for. But I sometimes don’t realize how thin some skins can be. I talked my merry way out of a tête-à-tête with Frank Sinatra, whom I’ve always liked, and I’ll be sorry to my dying day for what was said on the spur of that moment.

The place was Romanoff’s penthouse; the occasion, the crushingly dull farewell party that Sol Siegel, then head of MGM, and his wife gave Grace Kelly before she sailed off to be a princess.

To start with, the arrangement for welcoming guests was peculiar, to say the least. Instead of standing beside Mr. and Mrs. Siegel to say hello, Grace stood in solitary state in the middle of the floor. She was dressed up, rightly, for the fray—white gloves, a beautiful coat and dress. But she stood with her handbag hanging over her arm as though poised for take-off at the flash of a tiara.

Like all the rest of us, I went up alone to wish her well for her future in Monaco. She was regal already, smiling as benignly as Queen Mother Elizabeth opening a charity bazaar.

“If you’ll excuse me,” said I, after three minutes of nothing much, “I think I’ll go and have a glass of champagne.”

That party never did pick up. As the hours dragged by, it grew stiffer and duller and colder, though the champagne flowed and the orchestra played its head off.

Come eleven o’clock I was dancing with Frank. Confidential, the scandal sheet which was the scourge of Hollywood in those days, had very recently printed the doleful reminiscences of one young woman whose expectations, she confided, had been aroused when Frank whisked her off to his Palm Springs hideaway. But hope had crumbled when he spent the night constantly getting up to eat Wheaties.

As the Siegels’ guest, he was as bored as I was. “Let’s blow this creepy party,” he said, “and go down to my Palm Springs place.”

“Why, Frank, I couldn’t do that; I didn’t bring my Wheaties.” The wisecrack popped out without a second’s consideration, and he nearly fell down on the floor. So ended the chances of getting the name of Hopper on the roll call of Sinatra dates, which has included Marilyn Maxwell, Anita Ekberg, Gloria Vanderbilt, Kim Novak, Lady Beatty (who became Mrs. Stanley Donen), and, according to witnesses, a master list of conquests among the female stars at MGM that he used to keep behind his dressing-room door.

He continues to send me gorgeous flowers for Christmas and Mother’s Day, so I guess I’ll be content with that. I got asked up to his handsome new house on top of a Beverly Hills mountain, equipped with lights that fade at the touch of a switch and a telescope through which he studies the stars (celestial variety) in their courses. But I haven’t been invited to Palm Springs again.

Maybe it’s for the best. I consider Frank the most superb entertainer of this age. When he’s in good voice and a good mood, he’s ahead of the field, and nobody can equal his charm. Like almost everybody, his nature has many sides to it—more than most people, because he has more talent than most. But on a host of subjects, we’re far apart, not omitting politics. If I’d gone to his desert house and written about it, we might have seen a beautiful friendship dented.

When Charles Morrison, owner of our best night club, the Mocambo, died, he left a mourning wife, Mary, with a mountain of debt. Like Sinatra, he’d spent it when he had it and also when he hadn’t. Frank telephoned Mary and said he’d like to bring in an orchestra and sing for her, free for a couple of weeks. On opening night he caught fire, and his quips were as good as his singing.

He never worked harder than he did for two months arranging President Kennedy’s inaugural ball. He wanted Ethel Merman and Sir Laurence Olivier for the show, but they were playing on Broadway in Gypsy and Becket, respectively. So Frank closed the two theaters for a night and refunded the price of the tickets to every disappointed theater-goer. After the inauguration Frank and most of his co-workers—including Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis, Roger Edens, and Jimmy Van Heusen—went to Joe Kennedy’s Palm Beach home for a weekend’s rest. I don’t think the President has fully repaid Frank for that memorable evening.

Sinatra swears his private life is his own. Until the recent era of peace with the press dawned, he’d let fly with his fists to prove his point with some reporters. He once told me: “If a movie-goer spends $2.00 to see me in a motion picture, or $10 to watch me perform in a night club, then he has the right to see me at my best. I do not feel, however, that I have any responsibility to that movie-goer or that night-club-goer to tell him anything about my private life.”

He likes to quote something said by Humphrey Bogart, one of his good friends: “The only thing you owe the public is a good performance.” He must have remembered that when Bogey’s widow, Betty Bacall, announced that she was going to marry Frank. A pal with him at the time—he was staying in Miami Beach—told me: “He was so angry he blew the roof off the hotel.” That marked the end of that romance.

Frank has let his temper and temperament explode too often for his relations with many newspapermen and women to be anything but spotty. Believe it or not, that has him chewing his fingernails sometimes. “There are a handful of people who won’t let go of me and won’t try to be fair,” he said, defending himself one day. “And after a thing is over and I fly off the handle, I feel twice as bad as when I was angry. You get to think, ‘Jeez, I’m sorry that had to happen!’”

He isn’t the man he’s usually painted to be. The brandy drinker who shrugs off advice? He was a guest of mine at a small dinner party for Noël Coward, along with the Bill Holdens, Clifton Webb, and one or two others. Over the liqueurs Noël, who’d spent the previous weekend with Sinatra at Palm Springs, said: “I’m very worried about you, Frank. You’re the finest singer since Al Jolson. But unless you cut down on drinking, your career won’t keep going up—it’s going to start running downhill.”

Frank listened as attentively as a new boy getting the business from his headmaster. “I think you’re right, Noël,” he said quietly. And for a long time his drinking tapered off.

Is he the headstrong egomaniac who thinks he owes nothing to anybody? “You know, there’s one thing I wanted to say when I accepted the Oscar for From Here to Eternity,” he said on another day. “I wanted to thank Monty Clift personally. I learned more about acting from Clift—well, it was equal to what I learned about musicals from Gene Kelly.”

He sits up to take notice of his children, too, if they criticize him. There are three of them, Nancy, Jr., Frankie, Jr., and Tina. He drove up to see me once in a new fish-tail Cadillac that, he said, his son despised. “Frankie wondered what I wanted with all that tin on the back.” Father Frank dragged me out to take a look. I knew he couldn’t live with the car after his boy’s jeers. He sold it one month later.

Can he be at heart the willful, adult version of Peck’s Bad Boy that millions of women have adored since those days when he had them swooning by their radios? Bet your boots he can. As for example ...

Earl Warren was still governor of California when Frank was working at Metro on Take Me Out to the Ball Game. The studio boss was Louis B. Mayer, a big Republican with ambitions to be bigger. Louis was thrilled to bits when a spokesman for Warren asked if Frank could go to Sacramento to attend a convention of governors of all the states which was meeting there. They were eager to have him sing for them as the sole representative of the motion-picture industry. Warren would have his own private plane fly Frank there and back if he’d agree to the trip.

Louis went to work on everybody who was close to Frank, pressuring them to persuade him that the honor of Metro—and the ambitions of Louis—demanded his presence at Sacramento. Frank, for once, seemed reasonable about it. Be glad to go, he said.

Louis was delighted. He gave orders that the picture was to be closed down at two o’clock on the auspicious afternoon. That would give Frank plenty of time to clean up and change out of his baseball suit to catch the governor’s plane, which would be waiting for a three o’clock take-off. “Get a picnic basket made up,” Frank told Jack Keller, his press agent, “with cold chicken and wine, silver and napkins and everything, so we can eat on the plane.”

Keller and Dick Jones, Frank’s accompanist, were ready early, waiting with the basket in his dressing room. Two-thirty came, but no Frank. Three o’clock; not a sign of him. A worried call to Dick Hanley, Mayer’s secretary, established that work on the picture had stopped punctually at 2 P.M. A check of all the gates showed that Frank hadn’t left; his car was parked outside the dressing room.

“He’s probably up in some dame’s dressing room having a little party,” somebody suggested. So a squad of security guards, standing on no ceremony, went bursting in on the stars and starlets, searching for him. Not a trace. By four-thirty Louis was having apoplexy. By five o’clock all hope of delivering Frank to Sacramento had vanished. An hour later Louis was swallowing his rage and his pride, to call Governor Warren and explain that Frank had suddenly and inexplicably taken sick.

The following morning the mystery was solved. Sinatra, in make-up and uniform, had decided at two o’clock that Sacramento wasn’t for him. So he hid in the back of a workman’s truck and rode unseen through the studio gates, hopped off at a stop light, and flagged down a cab to take him home.

After The Miracle of the Bells, which he made for RKO on loan from Metro, he was ordered to San Francisco for a charity opening of that hunk of religious baloney. Frank, who harbors an almost fanatical resentment against being told what to do, went to Jesse Lasky, the producer, whom he admired, and asked: “You won’t be paying the bills?”

“Not I. RKO.”

“That’s all I want to know. I’ll go for you.”

Frank hadn’t taken off his hat and coat after checking into his four-bedroom suite at the Fairmont Hotel before he called room service. “Bring up eighty-eight manhattans right away.” Jack Keller, manager George Evans, and composer Jimmy Van Heusen, who’d all gone along on the trip, were determined not to ask Frank why he’d ordered the cocktails, and he never explained. Four days later, when they checked out, the eighty-eight manhattans stood untouched on the waiter’s wagon.

Meantime, he’d taken the three of them on a shopping spree in the most expensive men’s shop in San Francisco, to buy them alpaca sweaters, $15 neckties, and socks by the box, while the cash register clicked up a score of $2800 for one member of the party alone within forty-five minutes. “Send the lot up to the Fairmont and have ’em put it on my bill,” Frank said.

The whole truth and nothing but

THE WHOLE TRUTHAND NOTHING BUT

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THE WHOLE TRUTH
AND NOTHING BUT