Part 2

“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.