All About Liz :: Biographer William Mann on her star power

Editor's note: Elizabeth Taylor's death today prompted our reposting this April 2010 interview with William Mann, who wrote How To Be A Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood.

William J. Mann meets me with a loan of some white apparel--too small, I fear, until I find to my delight that I can actually get into those skinny trousers and size slender shirt he's got on hand for me to try. He's looking forward to his interview with EDGE, but first he'd like to stop by a local version of The White Party. It's very early September; his new biography of Elizabeth Taylor is set to arrive in shops within weeks; the afternoon is sunny and hot, and the party is a dazzling affair. Form-fitting T-shirts abound, as do strap-on sets of angel wings; just as heavenly are the bartenders and the drinks they are serving.

Mann is standing near a bungalow on the property, a tiny house with a window looking out on the beach. "This is where I wrote my first novel," he says, with a touch of wistfulness. Two men peer out the back door, wondering who it is that's peeking in their window; upon discovering that it's Mann, they break into grins. Mann regales them with the story of the long hours he spend at a desk just at that window, composing The Men from the Boys, the groundbreaking novel of gay romance and relationships that would put him on the literary map.

An hour or so later we're back to Mann's house, the residence he occupies for part of the year (his other home is in Palm Springs). Settling down in the study, we cluster around my iPhone, on which I have installed a free recording app (the preloaded app, I later find out, also works fine for making long recordings, and isn't merely the 12- or 18-second voice memo I had assumed it would be). Mann and I are both a bit drunk. We giggle over the phone, exploring the application and wondering whether it's going to work as it should; I have not tested it. To make sure, I also turn on my digital recorder, a trusty device I at least know how to use.

Mann declares for the microphone that we are buzzed in honor of Taylor.

A few months later, Mann--who is always trim and buff--posts on his Facebook page, "I want my August body back!" So do I, and I probably have more cause than he does; I doubt, after months of Boston winter and with my bike stored in the cellar, that I could fit into those skinny white trousers any longer. A series of delays and urgent projects have kept me from transcribing the interview we did so long ago, and I figure that at this point the only thing to do is to reserve the interview for the release of the paperback edition.

Mann tells me that the paperback of How to Be A Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood is slated for release in time for Mothers' Day, and suggests that a late April posting would be ideal. I fish out my iPhone, find the recording of the interview--still waiting, safe and intact--and don headphones. Suddenly, with Mann's voice in my ears, talking about Taylor, that September afternoon is back in all its giddy glory; now the only challenge will be editing the interview so that our slightly soaked ramblings aren't repetitious and incoherent.

The Greatest Movie Star

William J. Mann: We're both a little drunk in tribute to Elizabeth Taylor, who enjoyed her vodka very much... is this recording?

(EDGE and William J. Mann determine that, yes, the iPhone application is doing its work.)

EDGE: Why Liz Taylor? Why now?

William J. Mann: After I finished [the] Katharine Hepburn [bio], my editor said to me, "We really want to do another book with you." I said, "I'd really like to do another book with you, but what do you think we should do?" We had a lot of conversations back and forth, and one of the things that he was the most interested in from my Hepburn biography was how I had deconstructed, if you will, the myth that Hepburn had created for herself. My editor said, "You know, in many ways, the greatest movie star of all time was Elizabeth Taylor. She was the epitome. She was the quintessential movie star. It would be interesting to know how she did that--how much of that was deliberate invention, how much of it was who she was."

There was a part of me that was, "There have been so many books on Elizabeth Taylor. How can we do something different?" One day he called me up, and all he said to me was, "Hey, I've go an idea for the title of the book: 'How to Be A Movie Star.' " And I said, "That's it!"

She really, more than anybody else, showed us how to be a movie star. And I knew then that I had a structure for the book: I could look at how she took this idea of the movie star, which began for her in the 1940s, during the studio era, and turned it into something that was very modern, very contemporary. I knew then that I could do the book. It was a specific story about movie stardom, and how she had created that paradigm.

An end and a beginning

EDGE: You're talking about modern movie stardom, as opposed to studio era movie stardom.

William J. Mann: Right. Elizabeth Taylor became a movie star at MGM when she was a child, when National Velvet came out. When the studios collapsed, she took those things she had learned so well in the studio system era and applied them to a contemporary [form of] stardom in the 1960s, which was a very independent stardom. In many ways, what Elizabeth Taylor created in the 1960s is the same template, the same blueprint, that people like Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus and Madonna have been using for the last 20 years.

EDGE: The principle that there's no such thing as bad press: any exposure creates interest, and that furthers a performer's career.

William J. Mann: Right. Back in the studio era, of course, bad press meant that people wouldn't come and see your movies. If somebody got a divorce or had an affair, that was bad. Taylor had a very shrewd agent named Curt Frings, who understood this radical notion that there was no such thing as bad publicity. He engineered [the publicity about her relationship with] Eddie Fisher to the point that there were people who were furious with Elizabeth Taylor for breaking up this so-called happy marriage with Debbie Reynolds, and you see that in the letters that people send in to Hedda Hopper--I use some of those letters in the book. You see that there was outrage among conservative Americans. But Taylor had a movie released at that same exact time, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; it was a huge hit, it was one of the biggest hit of the year. If people were really that upset with Elizabeth Taylor, they wouldn't have gone to see that movie.

I argue that [although there are] these hundreds of letters that Hedda Hopper kept in her file that people sent in about Elizabeth Taylor, there's [also] a whole counterpoint to that--and that is the people who were buying tickets to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I think a lot of people learned form that lesson that, 'Okay, maybe bad publicity isn't really what they say it is. We can actually use some of these experiences to our advantage.' "

EDGE: Something that the book makes reference to is Elizabeth Taylor's famously bad health, and how that, too, seemed to feed into her publicity--sometimes at just the right moment to revive interest in her career or give her Oscar chances a boost.

William J. Mann: You know, I really think that with Elizabeth, all of her health issues were real. She never said, "Oh, I think I'm gonna fake an illness today." She was never that disingenuous. She is a woman who is very sincere in everything that she does--she's like a child in many ways. She feels sick? She really feels sick. She's not lying about it. You and I might say, "I can go to work with this ailment," but with Elizabeth Taylor, it's very serious.

The people around her understood that there was a certain way to play these moments. I go into the illnesses that took place during [the production of] Giant--she had fevers, she had sciatica, she had all of these illnesses and ailments. The people around her understood that they could use those experiences to get what they wanted from the studio. The best example was in 1960 and1961; she had an illness at the end of 1960 where fans really rallied around her, and that couldn't have been missed, because fans were gathering in the streets. When, about six months later, she had another, very similar illness, it was played almost exactly like the first illness was. The publicists understood that if they put out bulletins every day updating the public on Elizabeth's health, they would engage the public in her recovery--people would be invested in how she was doing.

Not coincidentally, this was also the period when Academy voters were voting on best actress. I always say that her illnesses were not created, but they were exploited to best possible advantage. Elizabeth won best actress that year, after she had been in the hospital with pneumonia, and she did give a very fine performance in Butterfield 8. Part of it was the fact that the publicists understood that from January to March was the period when they had to keep interest in Elizabeth very much alive--'Is she going to live? Is she going to die?' It's interesting, because The Times of London, which tends to be a more conservative and restrained newspaper, would come out with articles that said, "Elizabeth Taylor is in stable condition." Meantime, the tabloids were reporting that, "Elizabeth Taylor on verge of death!" So you understand that somebody else was coming up with press releases that were a little different that what the official hospital reports said.

The 'X' Factor

slug>EDGE: The title of your book references something that Jeanine Basinger wrote in The Star Machine, her book about the studio system. Basinger said that movie stars are something particular, and special. To be a move star is different than being a film actor. Your book seems to suggest that being a movie star boils down to someone being so by nature, so much so that there's really no other option in life for them. Elizabeth Taylor is a perfect example--I can't imagine her having been anything else.

William J. Mann: The first thing you need to be a movie star is that 'X factor' that Jeanine Basinger has talked about. You see that in people, whether they're a movie star or not; you'll see them at a party and they'll just pop out at you: their personality and their physical appearance, and their energy just rises above everybody else. Elizabeth Taylor certainly had that, right from the get-go. But even some people who have had that haven't necessarily had the luck and the studio backing; there had been some really fabulous people--Madonna, certainly, has had that, but she's never become a movie star because she hasn't had the right people around her to create the right movie for her.

Elizabeth Taylor has been very fortunate because, first of all, she does have that indefinable X factor that makes her so special. But then she also had this incredible team behind her at MGM to move her out of being the child star that she was and into [being] this very popular adult star.

So many of the stars today don't even realize they are following Elizabeth Taylor's playbook, but they are--and it's much more cynical today. They'll show up at a nightclub wearing some outrageously outfit or they'll be out with someone else's boyfriend, and they'll cause headline--it's very calculated.

Elizabeth Taylor wasn't that way: she was living her life, and putting it out there. Everybody since has tried to be that same way. During the filming of Cleopatra in 1961, she fell in love with Richard Burton, who was her co-star, and was married. There was an intense interest in this, like "Wow, this beautiful American movie star has fallen in love with this great Shakespearean actors--she's married, he's married, what's gonna happen?"

For a long time, Elizabeth Taylor and Fox, the studio that was producing the movie, said, "Let's try to keep this contained. Let's not show this [to the public.]" But at some point, Elizabeth Taylor [departed from that script], partly because she always lived her life very openly, but also because she trusted the public, which had made her a star. There's this wonderful quote where she says, "They want pictures? Let's give them pictures." And she and Richard Burton walk down the street in Rome, arm in arm, paparazzi everywhere, taking pictures of them--and they are saying, "Here we are."

It's that quality that makes a movie star, that says, "I can trust the public enough to know that I'm them what they want." But she also knew when to say it was enough; she'd flip them the bird, and in those days that meant you couldn't use the photo because no one wanted to [run a photo of someone making that gesture]. She understood the relationship between the public and the movie stars. Now it's become this carnival, this circus.

EDGE: If Elizabeth Taylor established that template, due to her personal originality, then the other side of that was how she seemed to change public morality and what was socially accepted, rather than change who she was.

William J. Mann: The public didn't turn on her after the affair with Eddie Fisher, and she came to believe after that that the public would be with her no matter what. She was prepared to nudge public opinion along a little bit, if necessary. That's why she was so confident during the Cleopatra scandal. People forget today what a bit deal it was back then--a major movie star like Elizabeth Taylor, having a affair with a married man who had children, and flouting it--and in Rome of all, places, with the Vatican right there. This was huge. We cannot understand it today.

And she was not apologizing about it. "I fell in love with him. We're in love. We're doing to divorce our spouses and get married." The world was staggered by such honesty. The conservative element in society would say that she was destroying everything that we value, but Elizabeth Taylor knew that the people who had followed her through her career knew that she was somebody who was looking for love and happiness like anybody else. When she said, "Let's give them pictures," she trusted that the public would move with her--and they did.

I think that, in many ways, the affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s because understood that people fall in love and sometimes it's inconvenient--we have to make room for that.

From 'Scandal' to Sexual Revolution

EDGE: In later years, Taylor herself would refer to the shocked response to her affair with Burton as "Le Scandal," and not in a way that seemed dismissive; she simply understood that this had been a major part of her life's story. Your book sees that scandal as the crux of her life story: you start with her affair with Burton, and then flash back to tell the story of her early career.

William J. Mann: Right. That was the moment. There was no more famous person in the world in 1962 than Elizabeth Taylor. She was the sun and the moon, not just for America, but for much of Europe, and much of the rest of the world. She was able, during that period, to redefine how public lives were lived, and how celebrities determined how they would be in relationship with the public. Before that, so much of public lives were either controlled by studios or record companies or television networks--whoever was [in charge of your career]. Elizabeth charted this brand new course where she said, "I'm going to live my life however I want to live it." Her agents and publicists and managers then took that life and gave it to the public.

I've always said that the difference between the subjects that I've written about over the last couple of years, Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor, is that Katharine Hepburn gauged what the public wanted from her and then gave it to them--whereas Elizabeth Taylor said, "Here's what I have to sell," and she made the public want to buy it. To me, I much prefer the latter. She said, "This is who I am," and made a lot of people want to be just like her. There were a lot of people who were scandalized by her behavior, but more and more people, especially women looked at her and said, "Wow. She's a woman who says, 'I'm not going to be defined my marriage and husbands and whatever. This is what I want. I'm going to make my own choices.' " She was the first, in many ways, who set up that whole notion.

EDGE: Would she have gotten away with that twenty years earlier--say, when Hepburn was running around in men's trousers and shocking people in a similar way?

William J. Mann: Oh no, not at all, I don't think so. Her first marriage, to Nicky Hilton, was so studio engineered--she was 18 years old, she was a virgin, she had never experienced life outside her mother's home. Someone in the studio decides, "We're promoting this film, Father of the Bride, and wouldn't it be great if Elizabeth Taylor, the star of the film, is getting married in real life at the same time!"

So they marry her off to this man, and you go back and you look at the parallels between the marriage and the film, and it's so clear that this was done very deliberately. Quotes from Elizabeth's father in the press sound exactly like Spencer Tracy, who played her father in the film. It's clear this wedding was arranged as promotion for the movie. She convinced herself, "Oh, of course I'm in love with this man." And what's sad is that the people who should have known better, like her mother, like [studio head] Louis B. Mayer, like her agents, pushed her into this marriage that turned out to be abusive and demeaning to her.

Six months later she walks away from the marriage, and MGM is saying to her, "You can't walk away from this marriage because we have a sequel coming out! Your character has a baby! You can't look like you're divorcing this guy!" But she, to her credit, said, "I'm not living this life! He beats me, he's out gambling and drinking." She said no to it.

Twenty years later, of course, the studio is meeting her demands rather than the way it was in 1951, when she met their demands.

EDGE: In the book you note a claim by Taylor that if another of her husbands, Mike Todd, hadn't been killed in a plane crash, she would have stayed married to him. As her biographer, do you believe this? Would a fee spirit like hers truly have settled down with one man?

William J. Mann: Who's to say, but I have some healthy skepticism about that. The relationship with Todd was passionate, but also volatile. I interviewed the widow of Mike Todd's son, and she said to me, "I think the marriage would have lasted--so long as Mike Todd's fortune held out!"

Todd gave Elizabeth an awful lot in terms of her Hollywood career. He had offered to break her out of the studio system--"I'll be your studio, I'll be the guy who determines how long you have to stay on the set." But if Todd had suddenly had a big financial downturn, I can't imagine [the marriage holding up].

I think Elizabeth loved to romanticize her past. Mike died tragically, and of course for the rest of her life she's going to say, "If he'd only lived, we would have been together forever." Maybe, but people who knew her wonder if that really would have happened.

EDGE: And Mike Todd was a big, masculine guy. So when this tough Welshman, Richard Burton, comes along, even if she'd still been with Mike Todd at that point, would Burton still have swept her off her feet?

William J. Mann: I think Burton was her great love. I think he was her soul mate in many ways--they connected on so many levels. I think if she had still been with Mike Todd at that point, Richard Burton would still have had a pull on her.

One of the wonderful things I found out came from a journal kept by one of the producers of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He wrote about this wonderful scene where Elizabeth comes out in her Martha wig, and she's done up in her makeup, with her gray hair to look like she was 48 years old, when she was really 32. Richard Burton says to Elizabeth, "I can't wait until you are really that age."

Now, the sad thing is that their marriage disintegrated long before Elizabeth turned 48, but I think in many ways that Richard was the man she was always looking for: he was strong, he was smart, he was capable. The demands of their careers in Hollywood were [going to work against their staying together], but it's one of the great Hollywood love stories. Even though she found other husbands, and he found other wives after their marriage, there was always this connection between the two of them.

A passion for jewels

EDGE: Another great love story is the one between Elizabeth Taylor and jewels.

William J. Mann: Oh, yeah!

EDGE: Is it the case that one reason we love Elizabeth Taylor so much, why her name is synonymous with glamour, is that she can boast such huge diamonds and make it seem perfectly natural? Or is it the opposite--do we love jewels because of how they look on a fabulous woman like Elizabeth Taylor? Or is she a creature that combines both of those things?

William J. Mann: She said once, "Big girls need big diamonds." She was a big girl, she liked big jewels, and there's that wonderful story where Richard Burton gave her the Krupp Diamond. It's a huge thing, and she's wearing it in a ring on her finger. It's so huge that Princess Margaret sees her at some event and says, "It's so vulgar! May I try it on?" And Elizabeth Taylor takes it off her finger, puts in on Princess Margaret, and says, "It doesn't look so vulgar now, does it?"

That's part of what makes Elizabeth so appealing to me: she loved that stuff, and she made no bones about it. She loved diamonds and jewels, and furs and beautiful clothes, and great food. She just loved life. She didn't pull punches, and there was no false modesty about Elizabeth Taylor. She was never arrogant about being beautiful, or being a great actress, but she would say, "I love my diamonds, I love my yachts, I love this life that Richard and I have," and rather than try to pretend, "It's nothing," she exulted in it. That made her so much more authentic.

EDGE What's your next project?

William J. Mann: I am signed to do [a biography of] Streisand. It's called Hello Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand, and it goes from 1960 to 1969. I am exploring how this very quirky, very untraditionally attractive woman from Brooklyn with crossed eyes and a big nose became this enormous star. That interests me: how did this ugly duckling from Brooklyn become this enormous cultural influence? How did she transform ideas of what we think of as talent and beauty?

The trade paperback edition of How to Be A Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood is now available from Mariner Books. Pages: 528. Price: $15.95. ISBN-13: 978-0-547-386-560