The Happiest Time—Elizabeth Taylor

The steward of the giant BOAC flying ship moved up to the crew’s cabin. Lightly, he tapped the pilot on the shoulder. The skipper looked back.

“Elizabeth Taylor and her baby,” the steward shouted.

The skipper relinquished control of the ship to his co-pilot.

“What about it?”

“The little fellow is crying his head off,” the steward said. “Miss Taylor thinks maybe he’s sick.”

The -pilot got up and walked back to the tail of the ship. Liz and her son had spent the night in a berth flying across the Atlantic, and according to her, “He was just wonderful, not a peep out of him, until about an hour ago. Now, he just won’t keep quiet.”

“l can’t call him Michael,” Mike complains: “I feel as if I’m talking to myself!” So he called his son ‘Boy” (because the hospital identification bracelet worn by the new baby read “Boy Wilding”). Then Liz came up with “Britches” for a pet name. Now a confident father, Mike once feared hospital would give them the wrong baby.

“I feel sorry for the rest of the passengers,” said Michael Wilding, the baby’s father. “I think he’s tired.”

The pilot nodded and returned to the nose of the ship. He motioned to his radio officer. “Send a message to London Airport. Tell them to have a nurse standing by.”

Three hours later, when Mr. and Mrs. Michael Wilding set foot on English soil, the nurse was waiting. But first the three Wildings had to pass through Customs and Immigration.

A reporter asked an official whether Liz was traveling on an American or British passport. There had been some question of her citizenship before she had left Hollywood. On previous trips she had used dual passports, having been born in England of American parents.

Liz and Nurse Mary share care of eight-month-old Britches. Ordinarily cheerful and easy to, handle, Britches is given to crying only when tired. He found the flight across the Atlantic wearing, alarmed Liz and the plane’s crew with his wails until England and a nurse comforted him. Imperturbable Mike, Sr., only felt sorry for the other passengers!

“She is an American citizen using an American passport,” the official explained. “Her husband is a British citizen using a British passport.”

Liz carried her crying eight-month-old son as she went through Passport Control. The minute the Immigration men were finished, she handed the baby over to the waiting nurse. Instantly, the child stopped crying.

Liz, wearing a dumpy little bowl of a hat, a wide, flourishing skirt, with a fabric stole to match, turned to her husband. “How do you like that?” she asked.

The imperturbable Michael Wilding smiled. “Probably thinks she’s Mary.” Mary is the-baby’s nurse in Hollywood.

They drove to the flat in Grosvenor Square West which Michael Rennie’s wife had rented for them. Here Liz undressed her son, changed him, and gave him his bottle.

Without a murmur, baby Wilding, whose blue eyes are beginning to turn his mother’s shade of violet, fell off to sleep.

“I’m glad there’s nothing wrong with him,” Liz said.

“He’s just tired,” Mike said. “After all, we’ve been flying since Wednesday.”

“So am I,” Liz said.

Wilding kissed her on the cheek. “Lie down. Have a bit of a rest.”

A few moments later, the phone began to ring. Friends knew of the Wildings’ arrival from the radio and the afternoon newspapers. Now, they were phoning to welcome them to England.

Mike couldn’t resist adding his own family snapshots to MODERN SCREEN’S collection. Liz shares motherhood with one of her menagerie—Gigi, her French poodle, who had a Caesarean birth at the same time Liz did, produced almost as cute offspring. Britches shares his parents’ love of animals, plays happily with the family’s many pets.

Wilding, pretty well knocked out himself, bore the brunt of this assault by telephone with his usual calm and aplomb.

The only thing that disturbed him was a phone call from his parents, Henry and Ethel Wilding. “It was supposed te be a surprise,” he explained later. “Liz and I brought the baby to England to show to my parents who are really getting on in years. We were going to ring them and say, ‘Well, here we are, the three of us.’ But they’d heard about our plan before we ever left California.”

After talking to friends and relatives, Wilding spoke to the London newspapermen. One of the reasons the actor is so well-liked by the press is that he has always been cooperative and thoughtful.

Unlike many American film stars who use studio press agents to run interference for them, Mike Wilding has never been stand-offish. To him, newspapermen have always been friends, and he’s always glad to talk to them.

Liz often plunks Britches on her huge bed for romp with 4 cats!

This time he was no different. When they rang to ask if they could drop by for a fast minute or two, he said, “We’d be delighted.”

Liz, of course, loves to sleep—“I’m naturally lazy,” she claims—and when the reporters got to the Wilding flat, the young wife was off somewhere in dreamland. But not Wilding.

“How long are you going to stay in London?” he was asked.

“We’re over here for six weeks,” Mike said. “Strictly a holiday. No pictures.”

“How is Mrs. Wilding?”

Mike grinned. “Exhausted. Out cold. Fast asleep.”

“Was it a rough trip?”

“Not particularly. Michael is usually so good. Hardly ever cries, but when he gets tired you can’t stop him. He was very tired. I’m sure the other passengers will testify to that.”

Still new to motherhood, Liz admits, “When he cries, I cry.”

Wilding went on to explain that Liz hadn’t had a vacation in six months, that after the birth of the baby she had gone directly into Elephant Walk as a replacement for Vivien Leigh and then she had done Rhapsody for MGM with Vittorio ‘Gassman.

As for him—well, he’d just finished Torch Song with Joan Crawford.

“As soon as we find a nurse,” Wilding ‘said, “Elizabeth and I will probably take off for the Continent.”

A few days later, Liz hired an Australian nurse for Junior, and the Wildings were ready to embark on their European holiday.

“We tried very hard,” Mike says, “to get on the jet to Rome, but all the reservations were filled, so we caught an ordinary aircraft.

“I don’t care where I work,” says the new Liz, “or if I ever work. I just want to be with two guys named Mike.”

“We’d both been to Rome before. In fact, Liz knew the city much better than I. We checked into the Grand Hotel, saw the sights for a few days, and then flew out to Madrid.”

Elizabeth Taylor is a well-traveled girl, jut she’d never been to Spain before. She and Mike were looking forward to seeing their first bullfight.

“I thought I was going to like it,” Liz says, “but I got sick.”

“She just couldn’t take it,” Mike adds. “Too much blood, too much gore. After the first corrida, she left the arena. I stayed and watched. I’d read so much about bullfights. I wanted to see one.”

The next morning, after a week away from little Michael, Liz said she wanted to fly back to London. She was homesick for her baby.

Mike enjoys fatherhood, counters Liz’ worries with calm efficiency. He reassured her before trip, (“Typhoid injections don’t bother babies”) promised that son would like mew nurse in England, (“This baby likes everyone”) and agrees that a big family will be just fine.

The birth of a son has wrought a marked change in the personality and outlook of Hollywood’s most beautiful actress.

She is no longer the flighty, unpredictable girl of yesteryear. She has matured into a steady, easy-going, young woman. Much credit, of course, must go to Michael Wilding for this. In Madrid, for example, when Liz began to worry about Junior, Mike said, “Darling, we’ll simply catch the plane to London tomorrow morning.”

Reassured by her husband’s promise and attitude, Liz stopped worrying and enjoyed a wonderful night. The following afternoon, she was back in Grosvenor Square, and little Michael lay cuddled in her arms.

Wilding is a sensitive man who understands the moods and meanderings of his wife. He never pressures her, never disturbs her with problems or crises. He takes everything in stride. At the bullfight in Madrid when Liz got upset, Wilding merely said, “You go ahead back to the hotel, dear. You’ll be all right.” No fuss.

Wilding never reports his working problems to Liz. He has well-balanced values and having been married to an actress once before for ten years, he knows what upsets the female histrionic temperament.

He has seen to it, for example, that Liz takes baby Wilding in her stride. There is always the tendency for a young wife to grow irritable and nervous after the birth of her first child. Unsure of herself, she worries and frets at the baby’s every sniffle.

Mike has seen to it that Liz enjoys her baby. When she grew anxious about the little boy’s typhoid inoculations—Junior was “shot” before he went overseas—Wilding said, “Those things don’t bother babies.” Apparently he was right.

When Liz expressed some fear that the child might not take to his new nurse in London, again her husband stepped in with a word of assurance. “This baby,” he announced, “likes everyone.”

In London when Liz expressed some doubt about leaving the child while she and her husband toured the Continent, Mike said, “The baby’s much too young to miss us now.”

There is never anything patronizing in Wilding’s tone or manner. Although he’s twenty years older than Liz, he treats her as an equal. He makes all the major decisions but that’s only because he doesn’t want to trouble his young bride. He was raised in the European tradition wherein the man of the house rules the roost.

When Liz and Mike were married two years ago, the consensus opinion was that the marriage would not last long. One writer in Stockholm, for example, told his readers: “Miss Taylor is young, spoiled and unsophisticated. Mr. Wilding is middle-aged, jaded, and continental. This combination rarely works.”

Now, read what this same writer had to say after Liz and Mike visited Stockholm on their recent holiday. “Mr. and Mrs. Michael Wilding—she is Elizabeth Taylor, the American film star—arrived in Stockholm today. They are very much in love, and Mrs. Wilding looks more beautiful than ever. The couple do not behave like newlyweds. They seem very well adjusted to each other. In the past two years, Mrs. Wilding seems to have developed both mentally and physically. She is a little heavier than when I last saw her—not only in the body but also in the brain.”

In Copenhagen where Liz came down with a supposed heart attack, a formerly critical journalist wrote, “The American film star, Elizabeth Taylor, is a most sensible young woman. When wild newspaper reports insisted that she had collapsed here because of heartstrain, she said, “That’s ridiculous. My back just hurt me a bit and some massages took care of it very nicely.’

“Miss Taylor is not at all the zany, irresponsible Hollywood actress the American journalists would have us believe. She knows every minute what she is doing.

“Miss Taylor and Mr. Wilding went to Kastrup Airport to meet their son and his nurse.”

Liz has come to a very sensible conclusion about the relative worth of her marriage and her career. To her the most important thing is the security of her marriage—which is why you will never hear about her fighting or scheming for any coveted role. Whatever the studio wants her to do is all right just so long as it presents no threat to her family life.

In London, for example, after she and Michael had visited Stockholm and Brussels, she learned that Larry Weingarten, a Metro producer was in town. Supposedly, Weingarten was bearing news about the production of Beau Brummel, a film in which Liz is scheduled to star opposite Stewart Granger.

“I don’t know as of this minute,” Liz told me, “whether the picture will be made here in London or back in Hollywood. And frankly, I don’t care just so long as Michael and I aren’t separated.” Then she hummed four bars of an old tune, paraphrasing the lyrics into “Michael and me and baby makes three.”

As of this writing MGM says that Beau Brummel will be shot entirely in! England which means that the three Wildings will probably remain abroad until Christmas or little Mike’s first birthday.

“I don’t care where I work,” Liz repeats, “or if I ever work. I just want to be wit two guys named Mike.”

Liz Taylor has come a long way since her first marriage to Nicky Hilton. Now she has the satisfaction of a mature husband and a baby, and she is contented.

“Let her have two more children,” one of Wilding’s London friends says, “and the chances are she’ll never make another picture. This girl is beautiful but she also has brains. Compared to her family, her career means precious little to her.”

THE END

BY SUSAN TREUT

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE DECEMBER 1953