Ava Gardner and Ganga

A new book, Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, reveals that the sultry star tried marijuana with co-star Robert Mitchum around 1951, when the two were filming My Forbidden Past.

"I adored him. He was outrageous," Gardner told Peter Evans about Mitchum. "On the set, in front of reporters, he'd call to his makeup man: 'Hey, bring me some of that good shit, man.' He didn't give a fuck.

"Out in the Valley working on location one day, he said, 'Sugar, have you ever tried this stuff?' He was smoking a joint. I said no, I never have. There was plenty around when I was with Artie [Shaw] but he wouldn't let me touch it. He said I got high enough on booze. Anyway, Bob said, 'I've got some really great shit, really great. I want you to try it.' So we went to this old van where they carried all the equipment. I smoked a couple of sticks. Bob taught me how. You take a little air with the hit, deep, deep down and you hold it and hold it and hold it....

"Anyhow, I didn't feel a goddamn thing, nothing whatsoever. Bob was flying. He was fine and dandy. On the way home we stopped at a bar—dry martinis were the thing in those days—and once I'd had a martini, I felt as if I was sitting two feet above the stool. Everything I reached for was a little off, a little to one side. It took the martini to bring on the feeling of the pot. Bob did his best to convert me to marijuana. I tried, but I never got into it." (Perhaps, like me, she thought she was supposed to feel tipsy after she first smoked, instead of being attuned to the subtle effect of an expanded consciousness.)

Happy Women of Weed Day

Since I wrote a round-up of Famous Female Cannabis Connoisseurs in 2010, I’ve added a few notables to the list. Here they are, in honor of International Women's Day and Women's History Month.

After Elizabeth Taylor died, I googled and found a biography of her that said she smoked pot with Christopher Lawford. It’s interesting now because Lawford has joined with Kennedy cousin Patrick to start an organization aimed at forcing marijuana users into treatment. That the Kennedys would be considered expert on such a topic is, of course, laughable and lamentable. Watch a video of Liz smoking. 

For my Black Herstory posting last month, I decided to google Josephine Baker and sure enough, found evidence that she too had imbibed. (Baker is one of the women featured on the US government's Women's History Month website.)

Sadly, I added Teresa McGovern, daughter of the late Senator George McGovern, whose pot bust at the age of 18 helped turn her short life into a tragic one. Also, I found evidence that Lucille Armstrong, wife of trumpeter and mj enthusiast Louis Armstrong, was busted for carrying pot in 1954.

  

Lady Gaga smoked an enormous joint onstage, and she and Rhianna, who puffed pot in Hawaii and Tweets about it often, both dressed as “marijuana” on Halloween 2012. But it's Fiona Apple who's facing hashish charges in Texas. 

Lisa-Marie Presley expressed a desire to one day go off the grid and “become a big pothead.” VIP Laura Nyro was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, introduced by Bette Midler. Madonna smoked the SuperBowl halftime show and Amy Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning, causing many of her fans to wish she’d stuck to pot instead.

Lily Tomlin “outed” herself as a pot smoker on the cover of Culture magazine. Joan Rivers toked up on her reality show saying, back in the day she smoked it with Betty White, George Carlin, Woody Allen and Bill Cosby. Roseanne Barr appeared at Oaksterdam University while campaigning for President on the Peace & Freedom Party ticket.

Jane Fonda was caught puffing at a post-Oscar party in 2012. Heather Donahue of The Blair Witch Project released a book about growing medical marijuana in Northern California. Miss USA 2011 Alyssa Campanella said she supports medical marijuana; so does the reigning Miss Universe (although both say they're against recreational use). 

In fiction, secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olson puffed pot on Mad Men. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris depicted Alice B. Toklas and (possibly) Beatrice Hastings. Patti Smith’s award winning book Just Kids describes how she saw pot more as an aid to her work than a social drug. 

A video of Whoopi Goldberg surfaced in which she admits she was high when she picket up her Oscar for “Ghost.” Capping it off is Jennifer Lawrence, this year’s Oscar-winning Best Actress who, days later, was photographed smoking pot in Hawaii.

Two Tokes for Sister Sara

I just viewed the 1970 film Two Mules for Sister Sara with Shirley MacLaine in the title role. I'm not the first who wonders if it was pot she was puffing in a scene where she steps away to have a smoke. After deeply inhaling, she gets a beatific look on her face and has another toke. She wears a wonderful smile when she walks back to co-star Clint Eastwood.

MacLaine admits to trying pot brownies provided by VIP Robert Mitchum (with whom she had an affair) in one of her books, where she also says she tried smoking pot in a London hotel room.

Two Mules was filmed in Mexico and written by director Budd Boetticher, who lived there. According to Wikipedia, Boetticher had planned on using Mitchum as the male star of the film, and the part of Sister Sara was originally offered to Tokin' Woman Elizabeth Taylor.

Directing the movie was Don Siegel, who directed the 1949 movie The Big Steal, the first film Mitchum made after his bust for marijuana. It was also filmed in Mexico, where co-star Jane Greer reported locals were always trying to foist joints on Mitchum.

The Two Mules film score was composed by Ennio Morricone, who's named as a pot smoker on the web, although I have not found confirmation. Since he's the brilliant composer of "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" as well as "The Mission" and other masterpieces, it would be nice to know!

In 1960, Boetticher departed from Westerns to make The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, a film loosely based on the lives of Jack Diamond and Arnold Rothstein, the US's first major drug dealer (who appears in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as well as Damon Runyan stories). Boetticher had a role in the 1988 Robert Towne movie Tequila Sunrise, starring Mel Gibson as a man who has a connection with a Mexican dealer (Raul Julia).

MacLaine played an Indian widow rescued from death on a funeral pyre by the heroes of the 1956 film version of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days (pictured). In the book, the woman is stupefied to her sorry fate with fumee d'opium et de chanvre  (smoked opium and hemp). 

Shirley is now playing the American grandmother going toe-to-toe in Downton Abbey with matriarch Maggie Smith (who starred in Travels with My Aunt, based on Graham Greene's story about an eccentric woman with a marijuana connection).

Also recently seen: Bunny O'Hare (1971), starring Bette Davis as a widow who heads to Mexico on the back of a motorcycle driven by Ernest Borgnine as the two pose as hippies to pull off a string of bank robberies. Ernest puffs in the movie and Bette refuses when offered, but asks some intelligent questions about it. She gets the last word, and it's a doozy.

Farewell To the Exceptional Elizabeth Taylor

UPDATE 12/15: It's been revealed that Taylor ran a "buyer's club" for AIDS patients.

10/15: Taylor is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory 

Ten-year-old Taylor in Jane Eyre (1943)

Elizabeth Taylor, who graced the screen as a child in Jane Eyre and National Velvet, and as an adult in films like Giant, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, and Cleopatra, has died.

Taylor won several humanitarian awards for her work raising over $10 million and much awareness for AIDS at a time when no one wanted to acknowledge the disease. She is remembered for her addictions to alcohol and painkillers, and according to one biographer, smoked pot.

Taylor with Christopher Lawford

According to Ellis Amburn's 2000 book, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World: The Obsessions, Passions, and Courage of Elizabeth Taylor, Liz's experimentation with marijuana began in mid-1973, when she partied with Peter Lawford and his son Christopher, hitting hot spots like Candy Store in Beverly Hills. Peter's friend Arthur Natoli recalled, "[Lawford] and Elizabeth used to turn on together. They were high on pot a lot. I don't know if he supplied her." (Christopher has since gone onto a career as an addiction recovery advocate.)

Taylor's fourth husband Eddie Fisher was revealed to be a pot smoker by his daughter Carrie in her 2008 book Wishful Drinking. In his 2008 autobiography, Tony Curtis says marijuana was very popular in Hollywood around the time of his 1971 bust for carrying pot through Heathrow airport.

Taylor was 19 in 1951 when she was cast in A Place in the Sun opposite Montgomery Clift. She had a lifelong devotion to Clift, who smoked marijuana (as did James Dean). According to Patricia Bosworth's biography of Clift, Libby Holman, the 16-years-older actress with whom Clift was involved, "got into the so-called exotic states of consciousness in the twenties with Tallulah Bankhead...Paul Bowles recalled discovering a supply of 'very good grass' in a humidor in Libby's brownstone the day Allen Ginsburg and Peter Orlovsky came to call." Bosworth wrote of Holman's home during the time she and Clift were involved, "Marijuana, cocaine and mescaline were available at the Treetops."

Twenty-year-old Taylor in Ivanhoe

Taylor next appeared in Ivanhoe, based on the Sir Walter Scott novel. She played Rebecca, a Jewess and the daughter of a money lender who supports Ivanhoe's quest to unseat King John in favor of King Richard. When Ivanhoe is wounded in battle, Rebecca heals him, since she "knowest the craft of herbs, and the force of elixirs." She is then brought up on charges of witchcraft, in order to smear Richard. 

"I was taught healing by Miriam of Manassas. But I have always sought to use that skill in the service of man to relieve his pain," Taylor as Rebecca says in her defense at trial. "If this convicts me of witchcraft and with me my people, then may God have pity on every man who seeks mercy and justice from his fellow man. For the only merciful power in this world is death, and the only justice is beyond the grave." She is nonetheless sentenced to be burned at the stake, until Ivanhoe saves her as her champion. 

While in England filming Ivanhoe, Taylor began dating her second husband Michael Wilding. According to Amburn, "Elizabeth sometimes ditched Wilding to slip off to Oscar Levant's Beverly Hills house with Monty, where the pianist serenaded them with Gershwin tunes as they whiled away afternoons and early evenings." Sounds like a pothead's dream date to me.

Thirty-year-old Taylor as Cleopatra 

In 1963 the epic film Cleopatra was released with Taylor resplendently formidable in the title role. It's quite likely that Cleo used cannabis, as depicted in the more modern HBO series Rome (but not in Taylor's portrayal, though much incense was burned at altars therein).

Taylor was also a powerhouse as a bohemian Big Sur artist in The Sandpiper (1965), by once-blacklisted screenwriter (and Very Important Pothead) Dalton Trumbo. According to Kirk Douglas, when sniping columnist Hedda Hopper complained about Trumbo's screen credit at the film's premiere, Taylor turned around in her seat and said, "Hedda, why don't you just shut the fuck up?"

According to How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor and Hollywood by William J. Mann, Taylor suffered from a painful congenital anomaly of the spine, and was shot up with drugs like novocaine and hydrocortisone, and given prescriptions for the painkillers Meticorten and Demoral, in order to keep her films like Giant shooting on schedule.

As a newlywed in Mexico, Taylor's husband Mike Todd had to carry her up to the roof to watch the fireworks tribute to the couple because she was recovering from a spinal fusion to treat a herniated disc. After Todd died in an airplane crash, his crony Fisher sent the despondent widow to Dr. Max "Feelgood" Jacobson, whose "vitamin injections" to the stars were filled with at least 30 mg of amphetamines combined with steroids, hormones, placenta and bone marrow. 

Sweet Bird of Youth (1989)

It's a shame Taylor didn't live in a time when marijuana was more acceptable than the more harmful substances she seems to have used more frequently. On the set of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) she was encouraged to drink as much as her character did, and writer Ernest Lehman also suspected she was "taking something" to elevate her mood. Happy with her high-energy performance (which won her a second Oscar), Lehman wrote in his journal, "Whatever the pill is, I am very much in favor of it."

In 1989 Taylor appeared in a TV version of Tennessee Williams' play "Sweet Bird of Youth" (pictured), as the aging actress Alexandra Del Lago whom a young hustler (Mark Harmon) tries to blackmail over her hashish habit. 

Her last film appearance opens Elton John's 2001 video, "Original Sin":

 

Oh, it's carnival night
And they're stringing the lights around you
Hanging paper angels
Painting little devils on the roof

Oh the furnace wind
Is a flickering of wings about your face
In a cloud of incense
Yea, it smells like Heaven in this place

 

I hope that's the Heaven Elizabeth is in today.