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.”