Read Online The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice by M. G. Lord - Free Book Online

, producer Mike Todd’s latest movie.
    McClory, however, made a very big mistake. He introduced Taylor to Todd. Within hours of their meeting, Todd, the cigar-chomping Broadway impresario turned Hollywood macher , had fallen in love. Never mind that she was still married to Wilding, Todd courted her lavishly. He courted her on location in Kentucky, where Raintree County was shooting. He courted her with presents—sparkling, eye-catching objects—a Cartier emerald bracelet, a $30,000 black pearl ring, and, eventually, a 24.9-carat diamond engagement ring.
    In November 1956, Taylor filed for divorce from Wilding. She became Mrs. Michael Todd in February 1957 in Acapulco, Mexico. Having become pregnant by Todd in late 1956, Taylor needed a speedy Mexican divorce—and Wilding, for $200,000 and proceeds from the sale of the Benedict Canyon house, was willing to accommodate. He left Mexico when the divorce was final—two days before the wedding.
    Wilding retreated to London to avoid journalists, who nevertheless tracked him down. Beleaguered yet classy, he wished the couple well, hoping Taylor would find with Todd what she had been unable to find with him. “They are,” he observed, “two of a kind.”
    Wilding may have meant the remark disparagingly, as a comment on their emotional rapaciousness. But the fact was, Todd and Taylor had much in common professionally. They approached their movie work in a similar way. Each aspired to the same goal: overriding a viewer’s logical left brain by engaging his or her intuitive right—or better yet, striking the mother lode of emotion: the reptile brain.
    Taylor moved toward this instinctively. As directed by Stevens in A Place in the Sun , she enflamed the screen with unambiguously grown-up desire—using words that the left brain would dismiss as baby talk: “Tell Mama. Tell Mama all.” Because he worked behind the scenes and not in front of an audience, Todd approached this goal more deliberately and methodically—by investing in technologies to expand the sensory limits of film. At the 1939 World’s Fair, Todd, then a Broadway producer, met Fred Waller, inventor of a three-camera, wraparound screening system that plunged viewers into a projected world. Captivated, Todd invested in the system, christened it Cinerama, and in 1952, brought out This Is Cinerama —a movie to show what the technology could do. Highlighted by a harrowing ride on the Coney Island roller coaster, the movie anticipated the immersiveness of virtual reality.
    Buoyed by this success, Todd pushed harder, funding what he hoped would be another breakthrough, Smell-O-Vision, which recognized the emotional power of scent. Taylor, too, understood this power; and perhaps Todd’s dream—the dream of Smell-O-Vision—inspired her in later years to found a perfume empire, one of whose cornerstone fragrances is named Passion.
    This is not a glib connection. An appreciation of smell sets its possessors apart; it suggests a heightened receptivity to sensual information. The base of most perfumes is musk, a secretion from abdominal glands in the male musk deer. This substance contains a potent sexual allure—a chemical magnet, whose very molecules must enter our bodies for us to sense them. Smell often triggers a violent response. Bad smells repel us, protecting us from, for example, spoiled food. Beguiling smells seduce us. They tickle the primitive brain. Often they override judgment. “The nose really is a sex organ,” playwright Tony Kushner wrote in Angels in America , winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Smelling “is desiring.”
    The olfactory sense does not work like vision, hearing, or touch. To perceive an aroma, receptors in the nose must come in contact with actual bits of the aroma’s source. Smell is a comingling of substances, as is sex. “We have five senses,” Kushner continued. “But only two that go beyond the boundaries … of ourselves. When you look at someone, it’s just