Elizabeth and Michael Read online

“You couldn’t have wished for a sweeter child,” said Hopper. “She would certainly have been happier leading that simple life close to woods and wild things to be tamed, maybe through all her years. But her mother had been bitten by the Broadway bug, and few women recover from that.”

  From the start, Sara devoted much of her attention to Elizabeth, all the more so when she saw the reaction of others to her daughter. People encountering the impeccably dressed child with the woman’s face could not forget her. Not only were there the girl’s angelic looks but also her charm and charisma. Howard’s handsome looks were also commented on. But although both children were trained to be well mannered and well spoken with the tones and inflections of the English aristocracy, Elizabeth accepted the growing attention in a way that apparently Howard did not. Even as a boy, Howard was his own person. No one would ever tell him what to do or be. Elizabeth was then more malleable. As soon as she could walk, Sara enrolled her in classes at the prestigious Vacani School of Dance. Told that the daughters of the royal family, the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, studied there, Sara wasted no time. Never did the princesses come to the school itself. Instead, instructors from the school gave them private lessons at their home. Regardless, Sara loved the connection that she boasted of then and in the years to come.

  With the other young dancers, Elizabeth performed at a benefit for the school that was attended by the princesses and their mother, the Duchess of York (the future Queen Mother). “I peeked up through the curtain of my hair and began casing the joint,” recalled Taylor. “I loved it. I wouldn’t leave the stage,” she remembered. “It was a marvelous feeling on that stage—the isolation, the hugeness, the feeling of space and no end to space, the lights, the music—and then the applause bringing you back into focus . . .” Because she wouldn’t leave the stage, she recalled that the curtain was finally lowered on her. Elizabeth never forgot the experience. Nor did Sara. Much was later made of this benefit by MGM. It became a part of the studio’s official biography of her. Already both Elizabeth and her mother had stars in their eyes about the future.

  But behind the idyllic facade of life in the Taylor household, a marriage was in trouble. With vastly different perspectives and interests, Sara and Francis often clashed and quarreled. Some believed the marriage became sexless. Francis drank heavily, a fact about which the two apparently argued. Mild-mannered and considered weak, Francis appeared overpowered by Sara’s demanding and domineering personality. For a man who, although social, preferred spending some quiet nights reading, he was learning to live with an unending round of social activities—the dinner parties and the nights on the town that Sara seemed to thrive on.

  Francis also believed—even then—that he didn’t have enough private time with Elizabeth, time when the two of them could do things together and come to know each other better. He must have felt he was being kept away from his own child. With his son, Howard, he appeared to have a good relationship, but Sara seemed unwilling to share Elizabeth.

  At the same time, Francis could have a short temper. When the children misbehaved, he struck both Howard and Elizabeth, to the point where, years later, Elizabeth referred to her father as having been abusive.

  The arguments and the recriminations between Sara and Francis continued. “Sara and Francis’s marriage didn’t strike me as a particularly happy one,” recalled an art dealer who knew the Taylors in the 1930s. “The couple argued a great deal. Francis had a drinking problem. He drank too much, and his alcoholism became a major source of contention between husband and wife.” Their fractious relationship may even have been similar to that of Martha and George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the film that would come to mean so much to Elizabeth. The domestic discord was not lost on Elizabeth. She would always be attracted to strong, independent, tough-minded men who represented what she may have always wanted her father to be. Still, she loved Francis deeply, and in the years to come she understood him better and sympathized with him. She would also always have an affinity for seemingly softer, more sensitive, talented men in need of a special kind of nurturing.

  Aside from Sara, Francis had to contend with another demanding personality, his uncle, Howard. Because he and his family had become financially dependent on Howard, Francis had to live by Howard’s rules. Rumors also circulated about conflict in the Taylor household because of the close friendships of both Sara and Francis with Victor Cazalet. Not only did Victor influence Sara’s dedication to Christian Science, but he was an important engineer of her social world. This shrewd politician brought the likes of Winston Churchill and Sir Anthony Eden into the Taylors’ lives, as well as some of England’s aristocracy and power brokers. Other than the fact that it was good for the art business, Francis may not have cared that much about the high and mighty. But Sara certainly did. With the witty, clever, and stylish Victor, Sara could laugh, relax, and kick up her heels. Some gossiped that she and Victor had an affair, so much did she appear to relish her time with him.

  Yet Victor also relished his time with the sensitive Francis. Over the years, there were whispers and rumblings that Francis Taylor had homosexual leanings, and that Victor, a lifelong bachelor, was one of his lovers. Victor once presented Francis with a sparkling red Buick. The two men were reported to have traveled together and were seen laughing, talking, exchanging private glances, and also drinking together. It was the alcohol that seemed to open Francis up. Sara herself may have wondered about the relationship, but apparently she did not dwell on such thoughts. Nor did she care. Victor was too important to her. Yet Francis also grew close to a young man, Marshall Baldrige, who worked at the gallery. In later years, Marshall would say that he and Francis were merely close friends, like a father and son. But that never stopped the gossip about Francis and Marshall. Or about Francis’s friendship with another young man, the Viennese artist Stefan Verkaufen. Another friendship was with the German author Kurt Stempler, who said that he and Francis had a short-lived affair.

  The Taylors’ lives and their complicated domestic situation changed dramatically as war swept through Europe. In 1936, Italy invaded Ethiopia, Japan threatened China, and a Civil War began in Spain. In 1938, Hitler’s troops occupied and annexed Austria into Nazi Germany. That same year, Germany also annexed Czechoslovakia’s northern and western border regions, known as the Sudetenland. In March 1939, Germany occupied the rest of a weakened Czechoslovakia, then Hitler invaded Poland. At any time, England feared an invasion by Germany. Francis and Sara remained at Heathwood as long as they could. Then, according to Sara, a call came from the office of the American ambassador to the Court of Saint James, Joseph Kennedy. Like other Americans in England, Francis was urged to get his family out of the country and back to the States as soon as possible. When asked about the ambassador himself calling the Taylor home, Francis told a friend he never received such a call, that it was simply Sara embellishing on the details of their ultimate departure from England. Regardless, he knew the time had come to return to the States. Plans were immediately made for the departure of Sara and the children. Francis would have to remain behind to close the gallery and tie up other loose ends, then join them later. Francis also urged his young friend Marshall to come to America with him. But Marshall remained in England.

  • • •

  On April 3, 1939, Sara and the children and their nanny boarded the ocean liner SS Manhattan and sailed home to the States. For seven-year-old Elizabeth, the trip across the Atlantic seemed a glorious adventure. Part of the Taylor legend has it that while on the SS Manhattan, the girl saw Shirley Temple as a Victorian lass in the movie The Little Princess. Mesmerized by the action on-screen and by the power of the film’s leading lady, pint-size Shirley, Elizabeth was reported to have said: “Mummy! I think I want to be an actress.”

  Prophetic as the story sounds, Sara later said—once Elizabeth was living in California—that up to that time her seven-year-old daughter “had seen only Snow White and one or two Disney films . . . and wasn’t the l
east scrap interested [in making movies]. Neither was I.” It’s doubtful, however, that Sara herself was not interested.

  Elizabeth would later believe she had left her childhood the moment she departed from Heathwood. Though she would be thought of as a quintessentially American star, she never left Great Britain behind. Her very manner of speaking—the sound of a young British aristocrat—would lead to her first important movie role. In the future, whether for films or vacations, she would return frequently to England. Two of her future husbands would hail from the United Kingdom. After her marriage to Richard Burton, she lived there again. In 1963, she would star in the hour-long CBS documentary Elizabeth Taylor in London, one of her rare television appearances at the time, in which she provided viewers with a personal tour of the sights and sounds of the London she held so dear. In her later years, she sometimes even had the style of a British matron, which may have led fashion writer Cathy Horyn to observe “that despite the jet-set life, the jewels and the husbands, she retained an Englishness, a hominess, a love of children and animals that was recognizably real.” Perhaps most surprisingly, when Taylor turned fifty, she suddenly showed up at her family’s old home Heathwood—where she startled the current residents, especially when she asked if their house might be for sale. Obviously, she had thoughts of buying the house back. In Los Angeles during her later years, she told her landscape designer Nicholas Walker: “I’ve been looking all my life to duplicate an authentic English border.” Walker said: “Well, Southern California doesn’t have 360 days of rain a year, as England does, but I could create the feeling that she wanted using plants from all over the world.” He told her: “If you want delphiniums year-round, I can’t do that. But you can have them in short, truncated moments.” He recalled: “Dame Elizabeth arched an eyebrow and said, ‘That sounds interesting.’ ” Photographer Bruce Weber remembered: “She took pride in her garden, like most English people.” And one of the proudest days in her life would occur in 2000—when she was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire. Somewhere, deep inside, Elizabeth Taylor was profoundly affected by those formative years and the country of her birth. “The happiest days of my childhood were in England,” she said years later. But onward Elizabeth went in 1939.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  MICHAEL JACKSON’S LIFE—LIKE Elizabeth’s—also had a fairy-tale quality. His was the tale of the rise of a boy prince who overcame adversities to assume his throne but who would forever be haunted by the early years—a childhood he felt he had missed—and who would always be tied to a complicated family he loved greatly yet which he sometimes found himself in conflict with. The complicated feelings would be a part of his identity—and all went back to the time that Joseph Jackson met pert and pretty Katherine Scruse.

  • • •

  Brash, tough-minded, and confident, Joseph Walter Jackson, born in 1928 in Fountain Hill, Arkansas, was the oldest of six children—four boys, two girls—of a strict, emotionally remote, religious schoolteacher named Samuel and his young wife, Crystal, who had once been his student. The marriage of Samuel and Crystal was a troubled one, and by the time Joe was a teenager, his parents had split up. “Joseph’s mother, Crystal, had had an affair with a soldier,” said Joe’s son Jermaine Jackson. Afterward, Samuel moved to Oakland and was later joined by thirteen-year-old Joe. Crystal stayed behind with the other children. There was a brief reconciliation, but the marriage collapsed again and was over for good. As affected as he was by his parents’ divorce, Joe had suffered another emotional blow that earlier had left him devastated when his favorite sister Verna Mae took ill. “Joseph watched his sister’s deterioration from the bedroom door as the adults surrounded her bed,” Jermaine recalled his father saying. Following Verna Mae’s death, “Joseph sobbed for days.” Jermaine believed “that was the last time he shed a tear.” Joseph might have been around nine. Hers was the last funeral he attended until Michael’s in 2009, recalled Jermaine. “One loss in life sealed our father’s emotions.”

  Perhaps always brooding, and, like his father, Samuel, not someone who could easily show his feelings, Joseph dropped out of high school, became a Golden Gloves boxer, and had big dreams for himself, the kind his other family members didn’t. He first met pretty, young Katherine Scruse at a dance in East Chicago, a city in northern Indiana. But intrigued as he may have been, nothing happened between the two. Then, after Joe had a short-lived marriage—one rarely discussed in later years—Joe saw Katherine Scruse again. This time around, his world changed.

  A southerner and also a child of a broken home, Katherine had been born in Alabama in 1930, the daughter of Prince Albert Scruse and Martha Upshaw. Her younger sister, Hattie, was born a year later, and in 1934, Prince moved his family to East Chicago. But theirs was another troubled marriage that ended in divorce. Becoming a Pullman porter, Prince often traveled on the road. As a Pullman porter, he was one of a corps of mostly black railroad porters who, from the late 1860s into the twentieth century, were immaculately groomed and uniformed as they tended to passengers in sleeping cars. Such a position attained a certain status because such jobs were not easy to come by. In turn, the Pullman porters, which under the leadership of African American A. Philip Randolph formed the first all-black union in 1925—known as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—helped lead to the emergence of a black middle class and was an early sign of a civil rights movement in the black community. Katherine’s family was clearly upwardly mobile. Katherine and her sister, Hattie, lived with their mother. Quiet and shy with a sweet temperament, Katherine suffered from polio before she turned two years old. Wearing braces or using crutches until she was sixteen, often teased at school, and walking with a limp for the rest of her life, Katherine’s refuge from the taunts of other kids was her love of music, especially the country music that she and Hattie heard over the radio. Katherine also played the piano and the clarinet. When she met Joe, she discovered that he played the guitar and his dream was to be an entertainer.

  In 1949, the two married and wasted no time in starting a family that grew almost year by year. In 1950, they had a daughter named Maureen, called Rebbie. The next year Katherine gave birth to a son named Sigmund Esco, called Jackie. Tariano Adaryll, called Tito, arrived in 1953. Then came Jermaine LaJuane, in 1954; La Toya Yvonne, in 1956; twin sons Marlon and Brandon (the latter died in childbirth), in 1957; Michael Joseph, in 1958; Steven Randall, called Randy, in 1961; and a baby girl, Janet Damita Jo, in 1966.

  By the early 1950s, Joseph took a job as a crane operator at Inland Steel in East Chicago, earning about sixty-five dollars a week. Joe also worked as a welder to make extra money. No matter what the criticism of Joseph Jackson in later years, the care and welfare of his family came first. “I think it takes a certain type of man to do that kind of job—someone hardened and emotionally strong—and he worked his fingers to the bone to ‘earn a life,’ as he put it. I think this is where his insistence on ‘respect’ comes from,” Jermaine recalled. Also a hard worker, Katherine, to make ends meet, took a part-time job at Sears, and she learned to stretch a dollar. Family meals could consist of chitterlings and lots of potatoes. Without much money for games and toys, the kids learned how to keep themselves entertained with such television shows as Maverick, reruns of The Three Stooges, and old movies with stars like Randolph Scott, and, for Michael, Fred Astaire. In time, Michael developed an intense interest in past child stars, whether it be the kids from the Our Gang series or Shirley Temple. During these years, he was aware of Elizabeth as a child star. But his fascination with her had not yet occurred. Early on, Michael also loved animated programs.

  The family moved into a small house in Gary, Indiana, their address later becoming almost iconic: 2300 Jackson Street. It was a historical irony—perhaps a fortuitous one—that the family would settle in a home on an otherwise “unknown” block with the same name as its own. In time, they would make Jackson Street famous. The street reportedly had been named after the nation’s seventh
president, Andrew Jackson. Known for decades as a factory town, Gary, Indiana, had been founded in 1906 by the United States Steel Corporation and named after a founding chairman of the company, Elbert Henry Gary. Its new plant, Gary Works, had opened that year. In 1919, labor unrest resulted in a massive strike that turned violent when striking steel workers had bloody clashes with outsider strikebreakers. At one point, Indiana’s governor James P. Goodrich declared martial law. Some four thousand federal troops were called in. Otherwise, life in Gary was fairly uneventful. Continuing to grow, the city reached a population of one hundred thousand in the 1930s, attracting foreign-born immigrants eager for employment in the steel mills and a chance at a better life. People of color also flocked to the city, African Americans composing 17 percent of its population and Mexicans composing more than 3 percent. For decades, as the steel mills prospered, so did the city’s fortunes. But after the Second World War, with competition from abroad, Gary’s economic growth slowed, then declined in the 1960s. Unemployment rose. So did the crime rate. So did racial divisions. Later Gary would have one of the nation’s earliest black mayors, Richard G. Hatcher. But even before that occurred, Joe must have seen the writing on the wall. For a better life, he’d have to do more than labor in the steel mills. In the meantime, he struggled to stay afloat.

  Every single foot of the house in Gary was taken up. “Nine children, two parents, two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room were packed tight into a space about thirty feet wide and no more than forty feet deep,” Jermaine recalled. “Our home was built in the 1940s, wood-framed, with a tiled pyramid lid that seemed so thin for a roof that we swore it would blow off during the first tornado.” Katherine and Joe had one bedroom. The four eldest sons shared the other bedroom with a triple bunk bed: Tito and Jermaine on the top; Marlon and Michael in the middle; Jackie on the bottom. On a pullout sofa bed in the living room, the three girls slept. Randy slept on another sofa. There wasn’t much breathing room, and certainly there wasn’t much privacy.