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.