“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.”