“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.