Furious Love by Sam Kashner

for paintings—had moved to England to buy Old Masters for his wealthy uncle, an art dealer named Howard Young. It was Young who had launched Francis in the business, setting him up in one of his galleries in New York before sending him abroad. Francis Taylor opened his own gallery in London’s Old Bond Street. Francis and Sara’s two children, Howard and Elizabeth, were thus Americans born in England.
    For a while, the Taylors lived well—some would say well beyond their means—partly on the generosity of others. Howard Young kept an eye out for his nephew (and his own vested interests), and Sara and Francis were invited to make use of a spacious, sixteenth-centurycottage on an estate in Kent belonging to Victor Cazalet, a wealthy art collector and well-liked Conservative Member of Parliament, who had bought paintings from Francis Taylor. Cazalet and Sara were both keen believers in Christian Science.
    Elizabeth lived a fairy-tale life, given her own horse at the age of five, sent to the same ballet school as Princess Elizabeth and her sister Princess Margaret. She was fussed over not only by her mother but by Cazalet himself. It was rumored that his generosity to the Taylors stemmed from an affair he was having with Sara, and it was also rumored that the bachelor MP was having an affair with Francis; either scenario would have added to the unreality of Elizabeth’s storybook childhood.
    Elizabeth later wrote about her early years, “The happiest days of my childhood were in England, because I rode—that’s where I learned to ride bareback…” But once the family decamped to Los Angeles before the outbreak of World War II, leaving her beloved horse behind, the sweet unreality of her English life would take on another kind of unreality—one full of triumphs, but not so sweet. “I never cared whether or not I was an actress, especially when I was a very little girl,” she recalled. “When I was first acting, I just liked playing with the dogs and the horses. Riding a horse gave me a sense of freedom and abandon , because I was so controlled by my parents and the studio when I was a child that when I was on a horse we could do whatever we wanted. Riding a horse was my way of getting away from people telling me what to do and when to do it and how to do it.”
    In a way, it was a horse that changed the direction of Elizabeth’s extraordinary life. Sara Taylor knew that the role of Velvet Brown in MGM’s National Velvet would be a star vehicle for her beautiful little eleven-year-old. She was born for the role of an English girl who loved horses and who trained her horse, “Pi,” to win the Grand National Sweepstakes, while she rode him to victory disguised as a boy jockey. Abetted by her mother, Elizabeth came to feel that “National Velvet was really me,” and she began decorating her bedroom with statuesof horses and to dream of playing Velvet Brown. The only problem was that Elizabeth was too small for the role, looking more like a first-grader than an eleven-year-old. Elizabeth reportedly told the producer, Pandro S. Berman, “I will grow—I will grow in the part.” Again, with her mother’s encouragement and her intense belief in Christian Science, the two prayed together that Elizabeth would shoot up in time to be cast as Velvet. Sara also plied her with farmer’s breakfasts—heapings of pancakes, fried eggs, bacon, all washed down with jugs of fresh milk—in an effort to add three inches to Elizabeth’s height. Amazingly, it did the trick (without adding three inches to her waist), but it may also have unleashed a hedonistic love of food that would wreak havoc with Elizabeth’s tiny frame in later years. Sara Taylor credited the remarkable growth spurt to two things—their prayers and Elizabeth’s amazing willpower. They both believed that Elizabeth had actually willed herself to grow three