ELIZABETH TAYLOR

Barbara, Irene Bevan, Marlene Dietrich, René Chevalier, Axel Dotti, Dorothy Squires and Roger Normand, que vous dormez en paix. Lucette Chevalier, Jacqueline Danno, Héléne Delavault, Tony Griffin, Betty and Gérard Garmain, Annick Roux, John and Anne Taylor, Terry Sanderson, Charley Marouani, David and Sally Bolt. Also a very special mention for Amália Rodrigues, Joey Stefano, those hiboux, fadistas and amis de foutre who happened along the way, and mes enfants perdus.

Very many thanks to Bill Campbell and the munificent team at Mainstream. Likewise my agent Guy Rose and his lovely wife, Alex. Also to my wife, Jeanne, for putting up with my bad moods and for still being the keeper of my soul.

And finally a grand chapeau bas to Elizabeth, for having lived it.

Any initial romance between the two was, however, short-lived. In November 1918, when Francis turned 21, he was offered an apprenticeship with entrepreneur Howard Young, his uncle on his father’s side. Young, who hailed from St Louis, had amassed much of his fortune from shrewd oil investments and ploughed this back into a successful art-dealing business. The following year, he and Francis opened the Howard Young Gallery in Manhattan.

Sara, meanwhile, had left home to study acting in Kansas City and changed her name to Sara Sothern. By 1922, she was playing a minor role in a Los Angeles production of magician–illusionist Channing Pollock’s The Sign on the Door (1921). Pollock next put her into The Fool (1925), at 18 playing the part of 15-year-old Crippled Mary Margaret – aka Mary Magdalene – in this modern version of the St Francis of Assisi story. The critical panning this received coincided with Sara’s meeting with the great Russian actress and silent-movie icon Alla Nazimova, a close friend of Rudolph Valentino and the doyenne of Hollywood’s closeted lesbian clique.

That Sara had even been acknowledged by this powerful, feisty woman almost certainly means that she would have been invited to join Nazimova’s infamous lesbian ‘sewing circle’. This met regularly at The Garden of Alla, Nazimova’s mansion on Sunset Boulevard, where the ‘baritone babes’ included both of Valentino’s wives, Lili Damita (who later married Errol Flynn) and Dolly Wilde (Oscar’s niece, described by the hostess as ‘the only Wilde who likes women’). Even so, Sara’s membership of Nazimova’s circle must have been fleeting for, despite its dreadful reviews, The Fool opened on Broadway at the end of the year. Here, the lead was played by James Kirkwood, already a name in the New York gay community – many years later, Sara’s daughter would appear in his There Must Be a Pony (1986).

In September 1926, The Fool opened at London’s Apollo Theatre. The sensation in the British capital at this time was the outrageous Tallulah Bankhead, another Nazimova aficionado affectionately known as the ‘Queen of the Gallery Girls’ – in other words, London’s ‘uncloseted’ lesbian community. Tallulah was in the middle of a nine-month run of another piece of hokum, The Creaking Chair. For a while, she and Sara competed for the attention of the Sapphic Sisterhood, an organisation run by a woman named Fat Sophie. Any rivalry ended, however, when Tallulah bobbed her famous, lovely waist-length hair one evening before going on stage. Her ‘galleryites’ very quickly followed suit, and Fat Sophie set her gang onto Sara to ‘crop’ her outside the Apollo – their revenge, they said, on this fake for attempting to emulate their heroine. When The Fool closed in March 1925, Sara returned to New York. Several flops followed, including Arabesque, an unlikely pairing with Bela Lugosi. It was here, early in 1926, when she was thinking of giving up the stage, that Sara bumped into her former beau, Francis Lenn Taylor.

Theirs was a ‘lavender’ courtship, clearly setting the stall for things to come. Photographs of Sara Sothern taken at the time in The Little Spitfire, her latest play, show her with close-cropped hair and looking decidedly butch – a true protégée of Nazimova. Francis, at 28, was already a promiscuous homosexual. Why the couple decided to date may have baffled their friends: even in those days, homosexuality was less frowned upon in artistic/theatrical circles than in Hollywood, so neither would have encountered serious problems pursuing their respective careers. Howard Young, however, had offered Francis the management of a new gallery about to open in London and had apparently made it clear that if his nephew was going to relocate overseas and extend the company’s good name, it would be as a family man. Naturally, he chose Sara to be his bride, and when she married him at the end of 1926, it was on the proviso that she give up the boards for ever. For the rest of their marriage, Sara would resent this and never miss out on an opportunity to remind her husband who wore the trousers in the Taylor household.

The Taylors, like their daughter, never did things by halves. The Great Depression, felt by much of the world, did not affect them at all. According to an interview she granted The Ladies Home Journal in February 1954, Sara claimed that she had arrived in London in February 1929, two months ahead of Francis, to go house hunting. This might well have been one of her ‘tall tales’, one to hammer home the fact that she was boss. Another was the description of the property she settled for: Sara might have seen ‘tulips almost three-feet high, forget-me-nots and yellow lavender violas’, but it is unlikely that there had been ‘flaming snapdragons and roses’ in early March.

In fact, it was the politician Victor Cazalet, who had met Sara during the London run of The Fool, who found the Taylors their first home: 11 Hampstead Way was a two-bedroom Victorian cottage, backing onto the heath. Using this as a base, the pair travelled back and forth to the Continent, snapping up valuable works of art for well-heeled clients. And when Sara introduced her husband to the wealthy 38-year-old bachelor famed for his stance on anti-Semitism, it was love at first sight. Not only did Cazalet become Francis’s lover, he became the Taylors’ unofficial sponsor – with Sara more than willing to ignore what they might have been getting up to in private so long as Cazalet was helping Francis to feather their nest by introducing them to all the right connections.

When Sara learned that she was pregnant towards the end of 1928, she made up her mind not to be a regular housewife – a characteristic that would be handed down to her daughter. The Hampstead home might have been on the small side, but she hired a cook, a maid and a chauffeur, and upon the birth of her first child in June 1929 – baptised Howard in honour of the Taylors’ benevolent uncle – she hired a nurse to look after him.

Naturally, the Hampstead house was by now overcrowded, and the Taylors bought Heathwood, a large mock-Tudor property on nearby Wildwood Road, courtesy of Uncle Howard. The house had around a dozen rooms, servants’ quarters, a tennis court and access to a private wood. Some 50 years down the line, their daughter, unable to bear anyone else having something that had once been hers, failed in an attempt to buy it back.

The Taylors socialised with the St John’s Wood–Chelsea artists’ clique, becoming friends with Laura Knight, Augustus John and John Flanagan, Gracie Fields’s paramour with whom she had recently set up home in Augustus John’s former studio. Leaving little Howard at home, Francis and Sara travelled extensively to auctions at home and abroad, snapping up Old Masters for the gallery, which were sold at a huge profit. This stopped in the autumn of 1931 when Sara discovered that she was pregnant again. On 27 February 1932, she gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth Rosamond – the first name in honour of both her grandmothers (Sara’s mother had recently died), the second after Grandmother Taylor’s maiden name.

The little girl appeared to have been born with a cowl and was suffering from hypertrichosis – a coating of fine, dark facial hair, though this disappeared by the time she reached three months. The condition, of course, might have been pure invention, enabling Sara when persistently reminded in later years that Elizabeth was far more beautiful than she had ever been to say something along the lines of, ‘Well, she wasn’t always so!’ In early pictures, Elizabeth’s eyes, an unusual shade of violet, appear sunken in a head that looks too large for her body on account of her shoulders being too narrow. Neither does she appear to have been baptised: as a half-hearted Christian Scientist, Sara disapproved of such ‘rituals’. Victor Cazalet, Francis’s amour – and probably Sara’s too – insisted upon being Elizabeth’s godfather – in an unofficial capacity, owing to the lack of ceremony – with the added advantage that he was also a Christian Scientist.

When Cazalet moved to Grand Swifts, a magnificent retreat near Cranbrooke in the heart of the Kent countryside, he loaned the Taylors Little Swallows, a 15-room Tudor house on the estate, which they visited most weekends. He also plied Elizabeth with expensive gifts, including a pony for her fifth birthday, which she baptised Betty. This set a precedent in her life that material possessions were all that were required for a person to prove their love and worth. Cazalet also supported Sara’s aspirations for her daughter’s career on the stage – her theory being that with the right amount of push Elizabeth might one day achieve the goals she had once set for herself. Movies were not even considered: in Sara’s opinion, whilst stage actors represented status, movie stars were vulgar.

Sara always maintained that Elizabeth and Howard were enrolled at the grandly titled Madame Vacami Dance Academy – actually run by an unglamorous Mrs Rankin from an attic in Knightsbridge. According to research conducted by Alexander Walker (Elizabeth, 1990), the academy denied that the pair had ever been there. Similarly, Sara boasted that Elizabeth had appeared at the London Hippodrome in a ‘command performance’ before the Duchess of York (later the Queen Mother) and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Elizabeth herself recalled in her memoirs (Elizabeth Taylor, 1965), with typical exaggeration, ‘the isolation, the hugeness, the feeling of space and no end to space’, of her alleged debut stage performance – it was a detailed memory considering she had been just four years old at the time. And, again, it was untrue, as was almost certainly Sara’s admission that she had been a guest at George VI’s coronation a few years later. As for the ‘recital’, this was no more than an end-of-term concert at the local parish hall.

Sara had already placed Howard at the Arnold House Preparatory School, and in September 1937 she enrolled Elizabeth at Byron House in London’s Highgate. No record survives as to how she fared with her lessons or which, if any, were her favourite subjects – only that she lived for the weekends when she could escape to the house in Kent and her pony. This idyll ended, however, as the war clouds gathered over Europe. In the spring of 1938, with Victor Cazalet footing the bill, Sara and her children were put aboard the SS Manhattan bound for New York. During the voyage, very much against her better judgement, Sara permitted them to watch their first movie: The Little Princess (1939), starring wunderkind Shirley Temple. The trio spent several days in the city, then travelled by train to Pasadena, where Sara’s father had a chicken ranch. A few months later, having tied up his business interests in London and bid a presumably tearful farewell to Victor Cazalet, Francis joined them there.

For such self-appointed society folk as the Taylors considered themselves to be, a modest chicken farm was regarded as an inappropriate base from which to conduct their affairs, and in the spring of 1940 they relocated to southern California, where Sara had formerly nurtured her own dreams of stardom. Here, she set about fashioning her children’s futures – though there was no question that Elizabeth would always remain her favourite. Sara and Francis bought a decent-sized bungalow in Pacific Palisades, within a stone’s throw of the ocean, and rented a suite at the Chateau Elysée Hotel, where Francis opened a gallery. Here, he set about amassing a sizeable fortune – selling ‘works of art’ he had mostly purloined in London to gullible clients who might not have recognised a Laura Knight or an Augustus John if it had jumped up and hit them. John, in particular, had been in the habit of making dozens of preliminary sketches before starting on a major work – most of these he screwed up and tossed into the waste bin. Initially, Francis had visited John’s studio with a genuine interest in securing the artist’s paintings to sell on to his clients – but towards the end of the Taylors’ residence in London, he had gone there to rummage through the rubbish. What sketches had been salvageable had been ironed, framed and crated up for the gallery in America – with the artist completely unaware that he had been effectively ripped off by a friend. The deception had not stopped there: with many European Jewish socialites going into exile to evade Nazi persecution at that time, particularly in Germany and France, Francis had ‘relieved’ them of their art treasures, buying them for a song and selling them to wealthy Americans at a vast mark-up. Many years later, one of these would cause Elizabeth considerable embarrassment.

Elizabeth and Howard were ensconced at a typical Hollywood school, where education came second to their parents’ hobnobbing with the rich and famous who turned up at the gates each evening to collect their offspring. In London, this ‘tiresome’ task had been assigned to the Taylors’ nanny or butler. Here, however, Sara needed to be seen and even learned to drive so that the other parents would not think her socially beneath them. Regular scholars would have hour-long lessons in mathematics, geography and English, but these were often substantially reduced to fit in the ‘essentials’ of Tinsel Town’s education system for Elizabeth: photography sessions, wardrobe and make-up trips, etc.

Sara had always counted upon one or both of her children to provide meal tickets for the future. She had infiltrated London society, working her way into parties and receptions if invitations had not been forthcoming, hoping that Elizabeth or Howard might marry appropriately and elevate the Taylors to the upper classes, where Sara was convinced they belonged. When Howard began displaying rebellious qualities at an early age, Sara concentrated her efforts solely on Elizabeth and applied the same tactics in Hollywood as she had in London, being far more interested in her pretty ebony-haired, violet-eyed daughter becoming the next Deanna Durbin or Shirley Temple than she was in Elizabeth getting good marks at school. Therefore, instead of politicians and the landed gentry, Sara homed in on Hollywood’s ‘royalty’ – working her way through the ranks, she would, one way or another, seduce producers, directors, cameramen and, eventually, one or two of the moguls themselves.

First, Sara decided that the family would have to make the sacrifices necessary for social elevation. Francis, very much under the thumb and to all intents and purposes enjoying being dictated to by this horrendously manipulative martinet, transferred his gallery to the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, and no sooner had the crates been unpacked at the Pacific Palisades bungalow than the family upped sticks and moved to a villa on the more fashionable Elm Drive – Elizabeth’s home until her first marriage. She and Howard were installed in the more upmarket Hawthorne Elementary, a snooty establishment where they were ribbed on account of their ‘clipped colonial’ accents. Howard ignored the taunts or sometimes employed his fists to restore decorum. Elizabeth, who had to be the centre of attention even then, mocked them by affecting a shrill Southern accent, which, frequently and annoyingly, would crop up in her films.

Sara enrolled Elizabeth for after-school song-and-dance lessons. By hook or crook, she acquired her an audition with MGM producer John Considine, who had scored a big hit with Boys Town (1938) and had recently completed Third Finger, Left Hand (1940) with Myrna Loy. Exercising a brief routine, Elizabeth must have impressed him, because Considine arranged for her to audition for the Messiah himself – the all-powerful Louis B. Mayer, who had set Judy Garland on the Yellow Brick Road towards immortality. Mayer was decidedly put off by Elizabeth’s tuneless voice – although this was not a major problem, as she could be dubbed by someone else – but still offered her a contract to be renewed every six months, providing that she lived up to the studio’s expectations. Her starting salary was to be $100 a week, a tidy sum for a nine-year-old girl. Sara rejected the offer. A recent client at Francis’s gallery had been Andrea Berens, the fiancée of Universal’s chairman J. Cheever Cowden, who had purchased several of the purloined Augustus Johns. Sara soon inveigled an introduction to Cowden himself, an audition was arranged and Universal offered Elizabeth the same contract as MGM but with a salary of $200 a week. Sara was also placed on the studio payroll as her daughter’s chaperone/adviser, obligatory in those days when the contractually bound was a minor.

Sara’s victory over Louis B. Mayer was pyrrhic, because although Elizabeth was on a higher salary, Universal had a glut of child stars at that time and did not know what to do with her, which of course prompts the question: why sign her up in he first place? She was given a small part in There’s One Born Every Minute (1942) – heading the credits was child star Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer, unfairly regarded as the first actor to suffer the ‘Liz Taylor curse’. In 1959, Switzer, whose speciality as a member of ‘Our Gang’ was singing off-key, would be shot dead in a drugs-and-drink-fuelled brawl, aged 40. Elizabeth’s film with Switzer was released at end of 1942, by which time Universal had dropped her on account of Sara Taylor’s persistent on-set meddling.

Intent on making Elizabeth’s a household name, Sara unwisely solicited the attentions of Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, Hollywood’s arch-rival gossip columnists – the idea being that if one of these influential ladies reviewed Elizabeth favourably, fame and fortune would be sure to come her way. Louella refused to attend Elizabeth’s next audition, claiming that she had better things to do. As for Hopper, there appears to have been some sort of link with Francis Taylor’s benefactor/lover Victor Cazalet. Some sources suggest that Cazalet’s sister Thelma had befriended Hopper during her trips to London – others that Cazalet had once had an affair with the columnist’s ex-husband, stage actor William DeWolf Hopper. Sara maintained that one of the Cazalets had furnished her with a letter of introduction to Hedda Hopper. However, the likeliest theory is that Sara approached her, taking advantage of the fact that she was a friend of a friend who ironically might just prove an invaluable ally. Hopper was kind enough to invite mother and daughter to her home, but she was not impressed. She observed in her autobiography The Whole Truth and Nothing But (Doubleday, 1963) of the pre-teen Taylor vocals, ‘Sara had never gotten over Broadway, and she wanted to have a glamorous life again through her child . . . It was one of the most painful ordeals I have ever witnessed.’

Luck appears to have been on Elizabeth’s side – largely because Hopper did not refer to this ‘ordeal’ in her syndicated column – during the summer of 1942 when Louis B. Mayer was having problems finding a little girl with an ‘English rose’ accent for his debut exercise in Technicolor, Lassie Come Home (1943), which was about to go into production. Mayer’s first choice had been Marie Flynn, the soon-to-be-forgotten child prodigy who had appeared with Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo (1939). During her screen test, however, she was deemed ‘mousy-looking and unphotogenic for color’. Mayer, or more likely one of his assistants, remembered Elizabeth and dispatched one of his lackeys to sweet-talk her mother into letting him have her. Elizabeth was offered the part without making a screen test (the four other unnamed child actresses who did tests failed because they could not do English accents) but was compelled to take a drop in salary. This, she later said, had been worth it for the opportunity making the film gave her to form what would be a lifelong friendship with its star Roddy McDowall.

London-born fellow evacuee Roddy McDowall had made his name as a child star in John Halifax, Gentleman (1938) three years before taking Hollywood by storm in How Green was My Valley (1941). He would be the first in a long line of closeted gay actors who would regard Elizabeth Taylor as some sort of protectress/surrogate-mother figure. Cynics have ignobly dubbed her a ‘fag hag’, but this title is unfair. Despite her selfishness towards many, her flighty reputation, her neurasthenia and her inability to hold herself together at times, for these men she proved nothing less than a rock and a loyal and discreet tower of strength, and as such commanded untold respect from the world’s gay community. Even the small section of this community who disliked her could not help but admire her for the unselfish qualities she displayed in her tireless rallying to raise funds for AIDS research. Also, one must not lose sight of the fact that in the days of the intensely homophobic studio system, she too ran the risk of being ostracised by the film community by befriending gay actors and sharing in their ‘secret’ lives. That this sort of thing was still prevalent was brought to the public’s attention, along with her loathing of hypocrisy, in September 1992 when Elizabeth pronounced on Whoopi Goldberg’s television show, ‘The creativity of homosexuals has made so much possible in this town. Take out the homosexuals, and there’s no Hollywood.’ The next month, she would go one step further and attack the US government on account of the biggest health crisis to hit the country since the flu epidemic during the early part of that century. ‘I don’t think President Bush is doing anything at all about AIDS,’ she told an International AIDS summit in Amsterdam. ‘In fact, I’m not sure he even knows how to spell AIDS!’

Lassie Come Home, directed by Fred Wilcox, was a smash at the US box office, and even more so with British audiences who welcomed the heartrending boy-and-dog scenario as an antidote to the horrors of war. Elizabeth played Priscilla, the granddaughter of the Duke of Rudling (Nigel Bruce, aka Dr Watson in the Sherlock Holmes films), to whom Lassie is sold, the story centring around her flight back to her rightful owner Joe Carraclough (McDowall). It spawned the first in a long line of Lassie movies. (The lead was played by a male dog called Pal, who earned more than the rest of the cast added together, Hollywood’s biggest canine star since Rin Tin Tin.) In no way can this film be attributed to making Elizabeth a name – she appeared in four scenes only, was on screen for ten minutes, and was not seen in trailers and on playbills – but, as part of a hugely successful package comprising the cream of the British thespian crop (Donald Crisp, Elsa Lanchester, Nigel Bruce, Dame May Whitty, Edmund Gwenn), Elizabeth was assured of being retained on the Metro roster, albeit in minuscule letters.

Elizabeth was not yet a star, as she and her mother liked to think when recalling the period, just one of any number of disposable kiddie actresses at a time when there was a surfeit of these. Because she was closer to the bottom of the MGM list than the top, and because they had nothing for her to do after Lassie Come Home, she was loaned out to Twentieth Century Fox – the studio that, two decades hence, her foibles would come close to bankrupting.

Fox had begun shooting Jane Eyre (1944) with Joan Fontaine as the adult Jane and Orson Welles as Rochester. Though her name does not figure in the credits, she acquitted herself extremely well as Helen Burns, the girl who befriends Jane. For once, Sara was justified in complaining that such a stellar performance was not recompensed by her daughter’s name being added to the credits (though today Elizabeth’s name frequently appears above that of Peggy Ann Garner), but her protestations backfired on her. The director Robert Stevenson complained to Louis B. Mayer, who issued Sara with the first of several verbal warnings when Elizabeth returned to MGM.

The next film was The White Cliffs of Dover (1944), a tribute to British wartime heroism headed by Irene Dunne and Alan Marshall – a non-event so far as Elizabeth’s contribution was concerned. She appeared briefly in just two scenes, and, as if to punish her further for her mother’s interference, Mayer ensured that, once more, her name did not appear in the credits.

Based on the novel by Enid Bagnold, the script for National Velvet had been commissioned by Paramount for 30-year-old Katharine Hepburn back in 1935, but it was, not surprisingly, rejected by her (Velvet Brown is only 12 years old) and subsequently sold to MGM, who had kept it on ice since. The story is far-fetched, though the film itself provided an entertaining touch of whimsy for post-war audiences eager to embrace a world hopefully cleansed of oppression. It is marred only by the occasional ‘British’ accents of some of the leads: Anne Revere is not too bad and Mickey Rooney kept his American accent, because he was in the middle of his Andy Hardy period and MGM did not want his fans to be confused, but the Bronx twang of child star Jackie ‘Butch’ Jenkins is dreadful.

The unprecedented success of National Velvet led to Louis B. Mayer upping Elizabeth’s salary to $200 a week – and, bizarrely for a man whose stinginess was legendary, this was not her only reward. Mayer brought in an interior designer who fashioned her a National Velvet bedroom, complete with the most expensive riding equipment money could buy and a wooden horse. Naturally, this came in handy for photo shoots. And, finally, Mayer paid her an unprecedented $15,000 bonus, adding to the speculation that, as had happened with Judy Garland after The Wizard of Oz (1939), this acknowledged connoisseur of underaged girls might have had an ulterior motive.

Mayer was certainly acting with shrewdness, because one of the terms for her receiving the bonus was that her current contract would be extended by another year, binding her to him for what was anticipated would be the remainder of her childhood before puberty set in. As for Elizabeth, she had a condition of her own before permitting Sara to sign on the dotted line: she wanted to keep the horse King, with whom she had bonded on the picture. Mayer acquiesced, and photographs of her being presented with the horse – no longer of use to the studio because he was lame – flooded the press.

This love of four-legged creatures would be further documented in a Life magazine feature of February 1945 – who could resist a cute little girl cuddling up to one of her many pets, at that time a kitten, three dogs and a chipmunk? The chipmunk, the first in a series all baptised Nibbles, became a minor celebrity: first, with a cameo appearance in Courage of Lassie (1946); then when a New York publisher brought out Nibbles and Me, a 77-page tome recounting the story of Elizabeth’s friendship with the little fellow(s). Her name appeared on the title page, although it is unlikely that she contributed to it other than to pose sweetly with her cherished pet. The book was essentially a gimmick cooked up by Sara and MGM’s publicity department to promote the child star and her latest movies – location shots from Courage of Lassie and National Velvet were included.

Nibbles and Me was serialised in Photoplay, and much was made of the fact that Elizabeth had it drilled into her by her mother that tears were useless when one of the chipmunks died. Sara explained that death did not exist so long as the departed loved one was retained in the memory, according to the edicts of Christian Science. Elizabeth would recall her mother’s words many times over the years – only to go to pieces each time she lost someone dear, frequently, it has to be said, for the benefit of the media.

One syndicated column, whose contributor perhaps wisely opted to remain anonymous, labelled Elizabeth ‘a modern-day St Francis of Assisi’, having been alerted by Sara that her daughter was what would today be called a horse-whisperer. ‘She whinnies like a horse,’ observed the Los Angeles Times’s Louis Berg. ‘And she also chirps like a squirrel and makes bird noises.’ MGM attempted to capitalise on this by purchasing the screen rights to William Henry Hudson’s 1904 novel Green Mansions, offering her the central role of Rima. Accepting this would have been a terrible mistake. Though she genuinely possessed the innocent appeal required to play the timid forest girl who converses with the fauna and falls in love with a handsome stranger, she was already too voluptuous and, through no fault of her own, would have turned the part into a joke. Sara realised this. The project was shelved until 1954, when Vincente Minnelli tried to foist it upon the equally unsuitable Italian siren Pier Angeli. It was eventually filmed in 1959 when Mel Ferrer directed his then wife Audrey Hepburn in the definitive portrayal opposite Anthony Perkins.

To make up for Elizabeth losing out on Rima, and for the benefit of those unfamiliar with America’s latest pre-pubescent sensation, an ‘official’ biography was syndicated in columns across America in the hope of someone coming forward with a role as close to ‘real life’ as possible. In much the same way as Tasmanian scallywag Errol Flynn had been reinvented as an all-round sporting jock from Ireland, so Elizabeth became a wunderkind talent plucked from the London Blitz – one who had danced before the king of England and who had also been amazed to learn of her ability to communicate with animals. It was pure hogwash, of course, but peacetime readers lapped up ever syrupy sentence – although the hoped-for role never came.