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

• Book claims Taylor, a star at 12, lost her virginity to actor Peter Lawford at 15
• Met Mickey Rooney at 12 and was later caught performing a sex act on him
• Errol Flynn bedded her at just 15 after getting her drunk on pink champagne
• Slept with Reagan in his Hollywood home while trying to get a starring role
• Had threesome with John F. Kennedy and co-star Robert Stack in his pool 

By Tom Leonard

Published: 18:21 EST, 16 October 2015 | Updated: 10:16 EST, 17 October 2015

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.

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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

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 their 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.

Taylor 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

She was only 11 when she auditioned for the role of Velvet Brown in National Velvet. When the producers told her she was too flat-chested to play an adolescent, Taylor defiantly replied: ‘Don’t worry. You’ll have your breasts’

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-like grip on publicity have stopped scandals about their most valuable child star from leaking out?

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

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 pint-sized Mickey Rooney at 14, then surely anything might be possible.

What has never been denied is that the young Taylor, though small for her age, was mature beyond her years, deeply ambitious and sexually precocious.

She was only 11 when she auditioned for the role of Velvet Brown in National Velvet. When the producers told her she was too flat-chested 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 from 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’.

The MGM star of Lassie films grew up fast. A few years after they first met, Rooney’s pregnant second wife, Betty Jane, was shocked when she opened the door to his dressing room in June 1946. A close friend of Mrs Rooney said Taylor was on her knees engaging in a sex act with her former co-star

By the time she was 14, Taylor was painting her nails scarlet and wearing peasant blouses with plunging necklines. She would squeeze in her already tiny waistline and thrust out her breasts.

Taylor admitted she ‘wanted to be a woman … I flaunted an hourglass figure at a stage when most young girls were still developing’. At night, she would lie awake practising her French kissing on her satin pillows.

When she discovered how much attention she got by wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse in the MGM commissary — the in-house dining room — she became ‘impossible’.

Far from discouraging her young daughter from being treated as a sex object, her hugely ambitious mother, Sara, right, appeared to encourage it

That was the verdict of Ann Strauss, a studio executive who advised MGM actors what to wear and enforced its strict ban on starlets showing cleavage.

Although forced to sit at the commissary’s ‘children’s table’, Taylor would ‘have herself paged during lunch and then she would pull her shoulders down and walk through the commissary — the entire length — so everyone could see her’, Miss Strauss recalled.

And far from discouraging her young daughter from being treated as a sex object, her hugely ambitious mother, Sara, appeared to encourage it.

A witness remembers Sara Taylor 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.

The studio did ‘approve’ of two mildly romantic relationships she had as a teenager — one with actor named Marshall Thompson, pictured

She had just turned 15 when Orson Welles saw her in the 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.

Taylor dancing with Mickey Rooney, another star a new book claims was a notch on her bedpost 

That wasn’t the verdict of authors Prince and Porter in their recent book — titled Elizabeth Taylor: There Is Nothing Like A Dame — which claimed Welles was among a string of famous men who had their way with the teenage Taylor.

The book claimed Taylor was 15 when she lost her virginity to the aristocratic British actor Peter Lawford, the future brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy and a man on whom she had a huge crush.

It reportedly happened as Lawford and Taylor shared a large limo on the way to the grand California home of the media mogul William Randolph Hearst. The age of consent in the state was — and remains — 18, meaning Lawford would have been technically guilty of rape.

It is claimed Taylor met Ronald Reagan when she was trying to get a starring role (which eventually went to Shirley Temple) in a 1947 film called That Hagen Girl.

The actor and future U.S. president, then 36 and estranged from wife Jane Wyman, reportedly seduced her on his sofa after inviting her over for a candlelit dinner he had cooked at his Hollywood home.

Reagan was hardly one of Hollywood’s notorious skirt-chasers, so can this possibly be true? Taylor apparently didn’t tell friends the story until the Eighties, prompting sceptics to conclude she invented it in anger over Reagan’s failure as president to do more to fight the Aids epidemic, her cherished cause.

But Reagan was between marriages at the time. And the actress Piper Laurie claimed in her memoirs that Ronnie seduced her as a teenager — she was 18 and still a virgin — while they were making the 1950 film Louisa together.

As for Orson Welles, Taylor reportedly told friends that he forced himself on her in his dressing room after luring her there with the promise of a film role.

Errol Flynn, Hollywood’s consummate philanderer, was also an early notch in Taylor bedpost, the book claims. Taylor joined the director Michael Curtiz at a film screening at Flynn’s Hollywood home, only to find — when the lights went on at the end — Curtiz had disappeared and she was alone with the actor.

The book claims she had a threesome with JFK, left, and slept with womaniser Errol Flynn, right

Also among her conquests, it's claimed, were Ronald Reagan, who later became president, and Orson Welles, who was allegedly obsessed with the young actress

She was still 15 and they allegedly ended up in bed after he got her tipsy on pink champagne, which would hardly have been surprising given Flynn’s scandalous reputation.

He famously 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 co-stars, allegedly became another lover and re-introduced Taylor to a friend, 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.

Taylor later married Conrad ‘Nicky’ Hilton Jr, an alcoholic, and a heroin and gambling addict

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 well-connected family stopped it, appalled he could marry someone who wore such low-cut dresses and seemed to have such 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.

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