The Hollywood mogul who made an enemy of Elizabeth Taylor: “Your studio can go straight to hell”
If you’ve seen a picture of a woman – any woman – in the 1950s, they probably have the same haircut as Elizabeth Taylor. She probably dresses like her, too. This is not a coincidence; she occupied a level of pervasive and persuasive fame unique to the period. In the nascent analogue age, prior to social media, there were very few films, magazines, TV shows, and the like that received national – let alone international – syndication.
Unless you were born sometime prior to the end of World War II, you’ll have to rely on the first-hand accounts of your grandparents to understand how much more amplified celebrity was to the average person. There were local celebs for every person in every little town, but only a few with near universal addresses.
We still have a thriving celebrity culture with a handful of names that everyone on the planet knows—statistically, there are more people than in the Golden Age of Hollywood because there are more people—but we’re sequestered into so many niches with the advent of the internet and the accelerating proliferation of entertainment media that there will probably never be another Elizabeth Taylor.
She’s famous for a lot of things, more than can fit in a biography calibrated in page numbers for an airport bookshop, let alone a modest article. For her movies first and foremost, but also for her scandals and controversies, for her charity work, and for her numerous marriages. Most prominently, her on-again-off-again marriages (in the plural) to Richard Burton.
The “marriage of the century” between Taylor and Burton is of particular interest, referring back to our early musings on the permutation of fame between that century and ours. Celebrity marriages are now treated with cynicism, if not yawning apathy. We figure they’re going to fail – for which Taylor and Burton may have been the progenitor, as theirs did. Twice.
But at the crest of her fame, it wasn’t just Taylor’s personal life that caused her trouble—it was the studios, too. In the three-volume BBC documentary Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar, Sharon Stone recounts that Taylor was “groomed” like a horse in the studio system. This is still common practice today, and the more we learn about the way that the Hollywood assembly line brings up young talent, the less we want to know about it.
Taylor herself said that it’s “no coincidence” that insiders call it the “MGM stable… like we’re animals, not people”. She was only 15 when she swore at MGM head Louis B Mayer, saying, “You and your studio can go to hell!” as she recalls. She wasn’t fired because even as a teenager, Taylor possessed a special kind of celebrity.
Her early films were popcorn successes, but she’d go on to sink fishhooks into a rare composite body of universal celebrity and critical acclaim with films like Cleopatra (despite its renown, considered a flop due to its preposterous budget) and acclaimed auteur ventures like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which established her as a serious actor. She even won a ‘consolation prize’ Oscar for Butterfield 8, which no one liked. Including herself, calling it a “piece of shit”.
There was nobody quite like Elizabeth Taylor, and whether it was on screen or offset, she demanded a certain amount of respect from her peers, and no matter the fancy office or highly prized chair, she saw everyone as a peer.
