“How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood”

Salon this week features a book review of “How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood” by gay novelist and Hollywood biographer, William J. Mann. The cover photo is simply stunning and the very definition of voluptuous.

Raised in the studio system at a time when stars’ images, careers and personal lives were approved and manufactured by potentates like MGM head Louis B. Mayer, Taylor, as Mann sees it, ushered in a new age of candor and independence. The studio had groomed her as an idealized, sensual but sweet beauty, and then she went out and stole Debbie Reynolds’ husband, Eddie Fisher, launching a scandal that obsessed the popular press for the better part of the late 1950s. (The infamy of that romantic triangle puts the Aniston-Brangelina soap opera in the shade.)

…The most enjoyable chapters in “How to Be a Movie Star” describe the media circus of the Reynolds-Fisher scandal. Debbie Reynolds, working her girl-next-door image for all it was worth, played the abandoned wife and mother to Taylor’s shameless homewrecker, capitalizing on the barely submerged domestic anxieties of the 1950s. In reality, Fisher’s marriage to Reynolds had been arranged by MGM and had always been loveless. (Their daughter, Carrie Fisher, described the relationship as “basically a press release.”) Posing for photographers with diaper pins on her blouse and tears in her eyes, Reynolds gave the performance of a lifetime; as one columnist later observed, “Debbie has more balls than any five guys I’ve ever known. She pretends to be sweet and demure, but at heart she’s as hard as nails.” Refusing to submit to the studio’s management of the story, Taylor deployed her own press agent to portray her as a devotee of true love. It was the first Hollywood scandal in which dueling versions of the story were presented to the public for vetting, a recipe for endless coverage. Instead of poleaxing the release of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (with Taylor playing a sex-starved hussy in a lacy slip), as the studio had feared, the controversy made it a smash hit.

If the biography is half as fascinating as the review, it’ll be a knockout read.