BOOK REVIEW: The star who was a senator’s wife

HOW TO BE A MOVIE STAR:

ELIZABETH TAYLOR IN HOLLYWOOD

By William J. Mann

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28, 496 pages

Reviewed by Sandra McElwaine

Elizabeth Taylor is willful, capricious, irreverent, mischievous, clever, witty, bawdy, potty-mouthed, melodramatic and extremely cunning. She can also be infuriating; a good interview, if you have the patience to sit around and wait; an amusing traveling companion; and above all a super savvy politician. On a campaign trail, she is a mesmerizing figure, she knows how to work the crowds and rope lines like a pro, and her star power is stunning. There is little doubt it was her celebrity that brought out the crowds and elected her husband, John W. Warner, a former secretary of the Navy, to the U.S. Senate in 1978.

l know this from crisscrossing Virginia with Miss Taylor and her seventh husband to write for an article for Ladies Home Journal when he was running for that Senate seat. It was both a memorable and exhausting experience that culminated in having to help fish a stray diamond and sapphire earring from her amazing decolletage.

So, when I picked up William J. Mann’s book, “How to Be a Movie Star,” I wondered if the author had captured the freewheeling, mercurial nature of the glamorous, lusty actress, who has been creating headlines for more than 50 years. Even though he never interviewed his subject, who is now approaching 80, it soon became clear that the author, Mr. Mann, had done his homework.

Miss Taylor wants what she wants when she wants it and usually manages to get it, often using illness to attain her goals. She was the first woman to earn $1 million per picture and a percentage of the gross. She helped destroy the studio system that she loathed and eventually became the most famous woman in the world, eclipsing even Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

To produce this biography, Mr. Mann read extensively and interviewed a raft of primary and secondary sources, including Miss Taylor’s fourth husband, Eddie Fisher, who ends up sounding like a cad and has written an entertaining chronicle of the golden years of Hollywood crammed with celebrity gossip and inside info.

Her mythical rise to fame at age 12 in “National Velvet” was carefully orchestrated by her domineering mother Sarah, along with the venomous gossipiste Hedda Hopper, who helped to push the beautiful young girl to fame and then savaged her when she became outraged by Miss Taylor’s many marriages.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the formidable role that both columnists and press agents played in the private lives of all the aspiring young stars of the era. Their power was mind-boggling.

When, at 18, Miss Taylor married hotel heir Nicky Hilton, the great uncle of the wacky Paris, MGM created the whole romance and elaborate wedding solely to promote her upcoming film, “The Father of the Bride,” which also starred Spencer Tracy. (The movie was a hit and far more successful than the high-profile marriage, which lasted only six months.)

This admiring tell-all - Mr. Mann is a loyal fan - is basically structured around Miss Taylor’s blockbuster films,”A Place in the Sun,” “Giant,” “Butterfield Eight,” “Cleopatra” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and her tempestuous love life that generated sturm und drang and opprobrium around the globe. According to two of her husbands, Miss Taylor was no slouch in bed. Richard Burton described her as the “most voracious lover he had ever known” and Mr.Fisher claimed “she had the face of an angel and the morals of a truck driver.”

Miss Taylor’s second husband, Michael Wilding, a charming British actor many years her senior, was far too gentlemanly to discuss their intimate life, but he tired of her lavish spending, sexpot image and his role as Mr. Elizabeth Taylor.

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