From Tom Leonard

ElIzABETh TAYloR was just 14 at the time, a child star with the MGM studio who had melted hearts playing sweet little girls in films such as lassie Come home and The White Cliffs of Dover. Two years earlier, she had been propelled to stardom at 12 when she played the plucky young heroine of National Velvet, riding her beloved horse to win the Grand National.

The oscar-winning film classic had co-starred 24-year-old Mickey Rooney as an ex-jockey who helps her.

It was not unnatural that the two actors would remain friends but, even so, Rooney’s pregnant second wife, Betty Jane, was somewhat taken aback when she opened the door to his dressing room at a hollywood film studio in June 1946.

According to a close friend of Mrs Rooney, Taylor was on her knees engaging in a sex act with her former co-star.

‘After that, all hell broke loose,’ says Pam McClenathan, an old friend and confidante of Mrs Rooney who revealed the affair to the authors of a new biography of Rooney. ‘Betty Jane was pregnant with t heir second son. She got a top attorney and a big settlement, but she was not happy. She wanted a faithful husband.’

She went to the wrong man, then, as the diminutive Rooney was one of hollywood’s most notorious, if unlikely, womanisers. he married eight times, as did Taylor.

But the revelation is far more shocking about her. The British-born star was, of course, to carve out one of the most tempestuous love lives in showbusiness history but the idea that she started her sexual conquest of hollywood in her early teens will jolt many fans.

A recent biography of Taylor claims that as a teenager she lost her virginity at 15 to British actor Peter lawford, had flings with Ronald Reagan and Errol Flynn, was roughly seduced by orson Welles and even enjoyed a threesome involving John F. Kennedy.

The authors — Danforth Prince and Darwin Porter — also allege Taylor was just 11 when she was taught by her close friend, the gay British actor Roddy McDowall, the star of lassie Come home, how to satisfy men without sleeping with them.

These jaw-dropping claims were unsourced, involved only people who were dead, and were frankly too outrageous for many to credit. Taylor spent nearly 20 years contracted to MGM, describing herself as the studio’s ‘chattel’: it controlled what she wore, where she went and even picked her dates.

But insiders agreed she always had a strong rebellious streak. Could the studio system’s vice- l i ke grip on publicity have stopped scandals about their most valuable child star from leaking out?

In the absence of racier alternatives, biographers have generally chosen to accept the ‘official’ version of Taylor’s early life — that, watched over by her fiercely protective if pushy mother, she was still a virgin when she married her first husband, socialite Conrad hilton Jr, when she was 18.

In interviews, the teenage sexpot gave little indication that she was even interested in boys, claiming that those her own age were too scared to approach her anyway.

But if she had an affair with pintsized Mickey Rooney at 14, then surely anything might be possible.

What has never been denied is t hat t he young Taylor, t hough small f or her age, was mature beyond her years, deeply ambitious and sexually precocious.

She was only 1 1 when s he auditioned for the role of Velvet Brown in National Velvet. When the producers told her she was too flatchested to play an adolescent, Taylor defiantly replied: ‘Don’t worry. You’ll have your breasts.’

Three months later she returned and, lifting up her jumper, showed off a newly acquired B-cup bust which she believed she had achieved by using ‘fast-grow’ creams, a special high-fat diet and rigorous chest development exercises.

It did the trick and she got the part. Time magazine commented on Taylor’s ‘pre-adolescent sexuality’ on the screen. They weren’t the only ones to notice. Those who had worked with her in previous films said the sudden stardom f rom National Velvet robbed Taylor of her childish sweetness and shyness.

Even as other girls her age were still playing with dolls, Taylor suddenly became very aware of her effect on men. As Mary Astor, an actress who worked with the young Taylor, put it, ‘ there was a look in those violet eyes that was somewhat calculating, as though she knew exactly what she wanted and was quite sure of getting it’.

By the time she was 14, Taylor was painting her nails scarlet and wear- dressing the 13-year-old like a ‘Joan Crawford hussy’ — black velvet dress, white fur coat and nylon stockings — for a publicity trip to the White house.

Men were left gasping in her wake. ‘She is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen in my life,’ said the writer J.D. Salinger after meeting her. Even on film sets, men had difficulty controlling their feelings — Robert Taylor, who gave a 16- year- old Elizabeth her first on-screen romantic kiss while making the British thriller Conspirator, became so excited filming one scene he urged the cameraman to shoot him only from the waist up.

Taylor enjoyed the attention of older men, or at least some of them. When she was 15, she told a radio interviewer that boys her own age ‘bored’ her but admitted she ‘wanted to do crazy, silly things’ with ‘ men’ who were a little older.

She had just turned 15 when orson Welles s aw her in t he MGM commissary. She was ‘unbelievable’, he said in an interview many years later. ‘Unlike other figures in hollywood, I have never found myself attracted to young girls,’ said the Citizen Kane director.

‘ But Elizabeth Taylor had something which transcended age. I will never forget how she moved down the commissary aisle, holding her food tray. I lusted for that young girl and felt, for the first time in my life, like a dirty old man.’

he denied, however, ever following up on his lustful thoughts.

That wasn’t the verdict of authors Prince and Porter in their recent book — titled Elizabeth Taylor: There Is Nothing like A Dame — which