How to Be a Movie Star Read Online Free Page B

"We can hardly wait," he said gleefully.
    But the Taylor show had been subdued so far. If spotted, Elizabeth was always with her husband. She'd chosen a villa far out on the old Appian Way with walls so high that photographers couldn't see over them, even when perched in trees and armed with telephoto lenses. On the day she reported to Cinecittà Studios for costume tests, she flicked a finger at the mob of paparazzi and Joe Mankiewicz promptly ordered twelve guards at every gate.
    Kroscenko's boasts led some people to suspect that he was planning to manipulate a shot with Taylor and a "lover," much as Secchiaroli and Sorci had done with Ava Gardner. If the star wouldn't give them an authentic love affair, the photographers might just hire some idle Italian nobleman to plant a kiss on her cheek. But on New Year's Day, Petrucci—Kroscenko's young protégé—brought news of what he'd spied inside Bricktop's. "And then it became the mission of all of us," Petrucci said, "to get the first photo of Burton and Taylor together."
     
     
    Six thousand miles away, Hedda Hopper, widely syndicated columnist and notorious maker or breaker of Hollywood careers, took a call from one of her "leg men."Just days into the new year, Hedda was on to a story, and she'd told her spies to bring her the dirt. In the biz, these leg men were usually gay and enjoyed a wide swath of worldwide connections. This particular foot soldier had just gotten back from Rome, and he repeated what Hedda had been hearing for weeks: that as far as Elizabeth Taylor was concerned, Eddie Fisher was almost history. But he added a bit more juice. Sources on the set of Cleopatra reported lots of giggling and whispering between Elizabeth and her costar, the handsome Welshman, Mr. Burton. Just like Tom Mankiewicz, Hedda's spies considered an affair inevitable—if, in fact, one hadn't already begun.
    Hedda seethed. She saw herself as more than a mere gossip columnist; she was the watchful mother and moral arbiter for an industry she loved deeply, even if she regarded it as often in need of chastisement. Long widowed, deeply lonely, approaching eighty, Hedda's whole world was her column and the vicarious view that it provided of other people's lives. Once she'd been more than just a fan of pretty little Elizabeth Taylor; she believed that she'd made the girl a star by promoting her in her column. But Taylor's marital adventures had always rankled Hedda, particularly the one that had brought Eddie Fisher into the picture. To Hedda's mind, Elizabeth had stolen Eddie away from sweet little Debbie Reynolds, and so she'd made it her job to instill that impression in the public's mind as well. Elizabeth's shameless actions had tarnished the industry's reputation, Hopper believed, damaging the movies as much as those horrible European directors and their damnable "realist" films. So she'd turned hard against her former protégé, and now that Elizabeth was at it again, she was about to turn harder. Like Fisher, Richard Burton was a married man with two children. In Hedda's view, "Hollywood's home wrecker" had to be stopped—as much for Sybil Burton as for the motion-picture business itself.
    But for all her moral indignation and concern about the industry, Hedda also wanted to break the story before anyone else. Within days she'd drafted a column on the affair that claimed inside knowledge despite a lack of actual firsthand information. This was not the first time such techniques had been used in journalism, and Hedda had certainly printed rumor as fact before. Yet when her lawyer, Martin Gang, read the draft, he ordered her to kill the story. "You couldn't print that," he told her. "It would be very embarrassing for me to sue you." Not only did Gang represent Hedda, he also counted Elizabeth and Richard among his clients.
    Hedda held back reluctantly, no doubt fretful that someone else might scoop her, but also livid that Elizabeth's bad behavior would proceed without censure.