This is Liz Taylor at 16. Had she ALREADY been seduced by half of Hollywood?
Mickey Rooney. Ronald Reagan. Errol Flynn. And a threesome with JFK. A new book raises extraordinary questions
hardly have been surprising given Flynn’s scandalous reputation.
He f amously had a bedroom where the bed sat on an elevated platform like a throne while the walls and ceiling were covered in mirrors. Their affair lasted just two weeks — despite Flynn claiming he wanted to marry her.
Taylor was nearly 16 when she made the film musical A Date With Judy. Robert Stack, one of her costars, allegedly became another lover and re-introduced Taylor to a f riend, a young congressman named John F. Kennedy.
According to authors Porter and Prince, Taylor had first briefly met JFK as a little girl when her parents were invited to the U. S. ambassador’s residence in London where his father was then ambassador.
They say Taylor told friends that on their second encounter — when she would still have been only a teenager — she ended up in a threesome in Stack’s swimming pool with him and JFK.
Reagan , Flynn, Lawford , Kennedy — the claims mount up. It’s quite a stretch to believe none of this would have come out before, but then again it’s also quite hard to accept that a teenage beauty as highly sexualised and dead set on stardom as Taylor would have remained a virgin — in Hollywood of all places — until her wedding night.
The studio did ‘ approve’ of two mildly romantic relationships she had as a teenager — with an actor named Marshall Thompson and an American football star called Glenn Davis — but those involved insisted neither ever progressed beyond kissing.
At 16, Taylor was pursued by the eccentric tycoon Howard Hughes who offered to pay a $1 million dowry and set up her own film studio if she would marry him. He even spilled an attaché case of jewels over her bare tummy as she lounged by a swimming pool, but she couldn’t bear him.
A year later, she became engaged to a handsome and immensely rich oil heir, Bill Pawley, but his wellconnected f amily stopped i t, appalled he could marry someone who wore such low- cut dresses and seemed to have s uch avaricious parents.
One famous actor who did admit to friends that he had taken a teenage Liz Taylor to bed was the gay icon Montgomery Clift. She fell in love with the handsome star while they were making the film A Place In The Sun.
Taylor was then 18 and friends say that — as with Rock Hudson and James Dean — she may have been attracted to Clift because her father was also a homosexual. Clift told a confidant they attempted but failed to have sex, only to try again years later and succeed.
That same year, Taylor married Conrad ‘Nicky’ Hilton Jr, an alcoholic, and a heroin and gambling addict.
The marriage lasted all of eight months before Taylor left him, blaming his ‘gambling, drinking and abusive behaviour’. It was the beginning of decades of marriages and affairs to some of the world’s richest and most famous men.
‘I stopped being a child the minute I started working in pictures,’ Taylor once solemnly told the writer Paul Theroux.
If the story about the shock that awaited Mickey Rooney’s poor wife in his dressing room is even half true, how honest Liz Taylor was.