The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice Read Online Free PDF Page A

Dachau concentration camp—footage he later edited to prosecute war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials. After he returned to Hollywood, his films examined aspects of American society that, unchecked, might permit a dangerous slide from liberty to fascism. He explored class prejudice, racial bigotry, and the injustices of capitalism.
    On its surface, the part that Stevens proposed—Angela Vickers in A Place in the Sun —was one at which Taylor had excelled: a rich girl. But he needed her to be something more: the “dream girl,” every man’s ideal, a woman so poised, wealthy, and desirable that a wrong-side-of-the-tracks fellow like George Eastman had to view her as unattainable. In a memo to William Meiklejohn, head of casting at Paramount, Stevens explained why Angela’s perfection was essential to the plot. When George Eastman grasps that Angela Vickers is not beyond his reach, that he can, in fact, “have her, he is willing to commit murder and does to bring this about.”
    Angela’s character, Stevens continued, is “the fundamental part of the machinery that goes to make the whole story work in relationship to its audience, and to keep the audience in a frame of mind that is sympathetic to all that it portrays.”
    For the role of Alice Tripp—the factory girl whom George impregnates—Stevens made a list of thirty actresses to consider. For Angela, he could think of only one: Taylor.
    “Angela is not bound by the need to follow her father’s grave conventions, because her own qualities would fit her for any world she chose to enter—be it rich or poor, bohemian or snobbish, pleasure-loving or serious,” Stevens and screenwriters Michael Wilson and Harry Brown elaborated in a later memo. She rebels against the conformity and self-importance of her social circle. Not because she is a budding communist, but because such rules and rigidity “spoil and limit the world in which she alone is able to move with complete ease.”
    Did Taylor know what she was getting into? Kitty Kelley thinks not. MGM’s Little Red School House did not serve its child actors well. In 1949, Kelley says, Taylor was barely educated and understood little beyond the price of a cashmere sweater. Taylor mostly took the part, Kelley suspects, to interrupt her servitude at MGM. But whatever propelled Taylor—instinct, intuition, maternal prodding, or escape—hardly matters. When the reviews came out, the Taylor brand soared. “Elizabeth Taylor is a joy to watch,” Hollis Alpert wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature . “One had somehow never conceived of the glamorized creature as an actress.”
    Time magazine applauded Taylor’s “tenderness,” and the motivation her portrayal of Angela provided for George’s behavior. But its reviewer was not blind to the film’s underlying message, which involved reproductive rights. In its “boldest scene,” Time writes, Shelley Winters, as Alice Tripp, “gropes, on the choked-up brink of tears, for a tactful way to ask a doctor for an abortion.”

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    A Place in the Sun , 1951
    Your problem is this: You have no money, no husband, and you don’t dare tell your parents—perhaps—the truth. In relation to these difficulties, Miss Hamilton, I have but one duty—to see that you give birth to a healthy child.
—Doctor Wyland addressing Alice Hamilton (precursor to Alice Tripp) in A Place in the Sun. (This draft by Michael Wilson is dated November 23, 1949.)
    You understand that the foregoing suggestions are made merely in the hope that we can be helpful to you in salvaging what we realize is a very tense and dramatic scene. We must again say, however, that we cannot accept any suggestion of the subject of abortion.
—Joseph I. Breen, Vice President and Director, Production Code Administration, in a letter to Luigi Luraschi, Director of Censorship, Paramount Pictures
    BEFORE WE EXTEND our thumb and hitchhike with Montgomery Clift into the opening scene of A Place in the Sun , we need to