by Donald Bogle
Every day seemed to bring some new medical complication. Because she had taken antibiotics for past pneumonia bouts, those antibiotics were now of no use. Because the veins in her arms had broken down from so much medication from so many injections, they injected the veins in her legs. But phlebitis set in one of her legs. Then a doctor flew in from the States with a different, much needed antibiotic. Alerts and bulletins were issued as international publications and wire services covered her condition. Outside the London Clinic, hundreds prayed for her. At one point, there were stories that she had died. Her parents flew to London. Eddie Fisher looked near half out of his mind. Fox considered replacing her with another actress.
Somehow, she pulled through and recovered. “Out of every hundred who have Miss Taylor’s type of pneumonia, rarely do two survive,” said one of her physicians, Dr. Carl Goldman. “She lived. She lived because she simply would not die,” said Ruth Waterbury.
“What made her become ill again, then?” Waterbury asked. “Was it nerves? Was it her need for drama, and if it was, why did she need drama? Was she actually bored, without being aware of it?”
Nonetheless, her survival was a kind of miracle that transformed her in the eyes of the public. Not only had the scarlet woman been forgiven for her wicked sins, but now the Taylor legend took on mythic proportions. Here was a star who had confronted death and conquered it.
Photographers, reporters, and camera crews recorded her return to the States for rest, recuperation, and sunshine. Carried from her plane in a wheelchair, wearing mink and mascara, she was gorgeous Liz.
In the meantime, she had won her fourth Academy Award nomination, this time for the film she hated, BUtterfield 8. On the bleachers outside the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on April 17, 1961, some twenty-five hundred fans had waited for the arrival of the stars, primarily Elizabeth, for the Oscar ceremony. Rarely in Oscar history had an audience sat so breathlessly waiting to hear the Best Actress winner. Inside when Yul Brynner called out her name, the applause was thunderous as Elizabeth Taylor slowly—by then she was recovering from a blood clot that had developed in her leg and healed—walked onstage to accept. “I really don’t know how to express my gratitude for this and everything. All I can say is thank you. Thank you with all my heart.” Afterward, she went to the ladies’ room—where she fainted. But she soon appeared in the pressroom with fellow Oscar winners, where she almost fainted again—until actor Burt Lancaster caught her. Yet true to her determination to ignore health issues, she attended the post-Oscar party, where Oscar host Bob Hope observed: “Everybody wondered whether she’d be able to make it up the aisle. But . . . she was still at the party dancing and drinking. That Oscar must have gotten the old adrenaline flowing.” She didn’t seem to think twice about the effect alcohol might have on her recovery or her health down the road. Following the party, she and Fisher returned to the Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow where they were staying—for a nightcap with her friends Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer, and Yul Brynner. The next week a photo of Elizabeth, holding her statuette, graced the cover of Life with the banner that read: “An Oscar at Last.” Many, including Elizabeth herself, would say her illness had won her the award. Early on, Shirley MacLaine had been a favorite for her performance in The Apartment. But in all truthfulness, her performance in BUtterfield 8 had been tough, biting, and vulnerable. Fisher’s former wife Debbie Reynolds said: “Hell, even I voted for her.”
• • •
During Taylor’s recuperation, Spyros Skouras and other executives at Twentieth Century Fox decided to dump London and instead shoot Cleopatra at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. There were new principal players: Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar and Richard Burton as Marc Antony. Elizabeth’s childhood friend Roddy McDowall was set to play Octavian. Its cinematographer would be Leon Shamroy, one of the industry’s finest. Oscar-winning costume designer Irene Sharaff would create Taylor’s costumes. With his own list of complaints about the production, director Rouben Mamoulian had also made the mistake of giving an ultimatum: unless his demands were met, he threatened to leave the picture. In her contract, Elizabeth had director approval, and she reportedly informed the studio: to let him go. Few stars in Hollywood history, especially women, had the kind of power that Taylor now exerted. Having finally freed herself from studio control, she basically never again would let anyone tell her what to do professionally.
Elizabeth’s near-death battle had changed her. “I think it was my subconscious which let me become so seriously ill. I just let the disease take me. I had been hoping to be happy, pretending to be happy. But there was something deeply desperate inside me and I was consumed by self-pity. I had stopped thinking. I had stopped reading. I had stopped discussing anything—just numbly agreed with everything Eddie said,” she said. “I really believe that whole lives can have turning points. Mine came with that pneumonia.”
Mamoulian exited from Cleopatra and never made another film. Now Taylor gave Fox her two choices for director: George Stevens or Joseph Mankiewicz. Having filmed the biblical epic, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Stevens didn’t want to become involved with another spectacle. After much pressure and cajoling, Mankiewicz accepted.
• • •
A Hollywood veteran whose career stretched back to the 1930s when he was a producer at MGM, Joseph L. Mankiewicz was a highly sophisticated, well-educated, exceptionally literate writer/director who was a member of a celebrated family. His brother Herman J. Mankiewicz had cowritten with Orson Welles the Oscar-winning screenplay for Citizen Kane. Joseph himself had won back-to-back director/writer Oscars for his classic films A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. Having worked with such stars as Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, Linda Darnell, Rex Harrison, Gene Tierney, and a young Marilyn Monroe, he understood star temperament and proved himself especially adept at creating fascinating and multidimensional female characters—and drawing complex performances from actresses, as he had done with Elizabeth on Suddenly, Last Summer.
Doing all it could to make its star happy, Fox provided a luxurious villa for Elizabeth, Fisher, and her children, who she kept with her as much as possible, for the duration of filming. She also adopted a little German girl named Maria. Suffering from a terrible hip deformity, the child would successfully endure several operations. Elizabeth’s every command or whim was tended to. Stories spread that because she loved the chili at Chasen’s in Los Angeles, such chili would be specially prepared for her, carefully packed, then taken to the airport and flown to Rome, where, upon arrival, someone would be there to pick it up and carry it to Liz.
• • •
Filming on Cleopatra the second time around proved even more difficult than the first with new delays, new production hassles, and new health crises for Taylor, all reported on by an international press corps. A major problem was that there was really no complete script once production began. Director/writer Mankiewicz was literally writing the movie as he went along. After long workdays, he wrote during the night.
Producer Walter Wanger constantly struggled to stay on top of everything and also to deal with the Fox executives in the States. The day before the first scene was to be shot, on September 24, 1961—with Elizabeth praying to the Egyptian goddess Isis—Wanger discovered that the statue of Isis looked “comic rather than imposing.” A crew was assigned to work through the night to alter the statue. A planned procession sequence hit a snag when the elephants could not be controlled. Wanger had to contact England in order to have a new crew of animals sent over. In his notes, Wanger commented that on the night before filming began, “We are waiting for the costumes to be completed and fitted. Of the sixty sets needed only one is ready. Every day that we are not before the cameras costs us $67,000 in overhead.”
During production, an endless stream of politicians and dignitaries visited the set, just about all of whom wanted to meet Taylor. For the high and mighty in Rome, an audience with the pope wasn’t as high on their list as was a j
aunt to the Cleopatra set, said Wanger.
In December, Taylor developed phlebitis in one of her legs again. Doctors feared a blood clot might set in, but she pulled through it.
However, the production reached a new level of coverage with new headaches for everyone concerned when rumors sprang up that Mrs. Eddie Fisher was falling in love with her costar Mr. Richard Burton—a “happily” married man.
At this point in his career, Richard Burton was a celebrated stage actor. Born Richard Walter Jenkins in 1925, in Pontrhydyfen, Wales, the son of a coal miner, and the twelfth of thirteen children, he showed dramatic promise as a teenager and was taken under the wing of his schoolmaster and Shakespearean scholar Philip Burton, whose last name the young Richard ultimately took. Athletic and handsome with a rich baritone voice, he studied briefly at Oxford and later served in the Royal Air Force as a navigator. Working in British theater in the late 1940s and 1950s, he scored with critics and audiences in such classical productions as Hamlet, Coriolanus, and Othello. Many believed him to be the heir to Laurence Olivier’s theatrical throne. Though Burton had worked in such Hollywood films as My Cousin Rachel, Alexander the Great, and the hit epic The Robe, movie stardom had eluded him. But when seen by Joseph Mankiewicz on Broadway in the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot about King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, Burton was hired for the film. Interestingly, President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, were reported to have loved the music from Camelot—and Burton’s rendition of the song “Camelot.” (Of course, following her husband’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy dubbed the short period of Kennedy’s presidency Camelot.)
Married to his early love Sybil, with whom he had two children, Kate and Jessica, Burton had a reputation as a raconteur, as a heavy drinker, and as a notorious womanizer with a legion of affairs, often with leading ladies: among them, Claire Bloom, Jean Simmons, Susan Strasberg, and others. Yet it was always said he would never leave his wife. When the stories first broke that he and Elizabeth were having an affair, show biz insiders probably didn’t take it seriously. Nor probably did Burton himself. It was just Richard Burton being Richard Burton. He was both casual and crude about his exploits. After the first occasion that he and Taylor made love, he boasted ungraciously to a few actors and crew members on the set of Cleopatra that he had “nailed” her in the back seat of his Cadillac the previous night.
• • •
Elizabeth Taylor was possibly the most famous woman alive, more so than even Jacqueline Kennedy. Her marriages, her divorces, her widowhood, her scandalous affair with Eddie Fisher, her health crises, and her career milestones had been chronicled for two decades. Now, just when the public had “forgiven” her scandalous, adulterous affair with Eddie Fisher, here she was again involved with a married man. She didn’t seem to care that she might be “wrecking” another home. That was how she was perceived by the worldwide public, which now looked on, both outraged and fascinated by her affair with Burton.
Photographers and reporters trailed Taylor, Burton, and Fisher. Pictures of Taylor and Burton out on the town. Pictures of Taylor and Burton sunbathing on the deck of a yacht. Pictures of Elizabeth—on the boulevards of Rome still wearing her Cleo makeup—with Francis and Sara Taylor, who flew to Italy at their daughter’s request. Pictures of a distressed Fisher in Rome, then when he flew home to the States, aware that his marriage to the love of his life was effectively over. The wire services couldn’t get enough pictures and stories. A new term, drawn from a pesky reporter named Paparazzo in Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita, now came into the international lexicon: the paparazzi. Hordes of photographers followed her day and night. “Every time I run around there are grinning, leering, shouting photographers,” said Wanger. “They are everything and everywhere. They are like the cats of Rome, hiding on rafters, hiding under beds, always screaming for a morsel. They were like birds, too, with nests in the most unlikely places. The lovely trees surrounding Elizabeth’s swimming pool were alive with photographers with long-lens cameras fighting to get pictures.”
In the States, a Congresswoman from Georgia censured Taylor, saying the actress “had lowered the prestige of American women abroad and damaged goodwill in foreign countries, particularly in Italy. It is my hope that the attorney general in the name of American womanhood will take the measures necessary to determine whether or not Miss Taylor and Mr. Burton are ineligible for re-entry into the United States on the grounds of undesirability.” Perhaps most shocking was the Vatican’s weekly newspaper L’Osservatore della Domenica, which criticized Taylor for “erotic vagrancy.” Even Sara and Francis Taylor, while in Rome, had become upset by their daughter’s behavior. “I heard that Elizabeth had an argument with her parents,” Wanger recalled. “Her father apparently spoke harshly to her, and Liz, who adores her mother and father, was so upset she spent the night crying.”
Though Burton handled all the fanfare well—he seemed to relish it—he was, in a sense, in way over his head. Fisher had been, too. The casual affair did, indeed, become the great love of Burton’s life, and he couldn’t break away from her.
Said Wanger: “I have been told by responsible journalists that there was more world interest in Cleopatra, which I produced, and in its stars—Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Rex Harrison—than in any event of 1962.” Wanger was diplomatic in including Harrison, who was merely an afterthought during the production, though his performance would later be lauded. The real interest was in Taylor and Burton.
Amid all of this, the budget for Cleopatra soared to the then astronomical sum of $40 million, making it the most expensive movie ever made at that time. Today its cost would come to more than $300 million. A re-creation of a twelve-acre Roman Forum—actually larger than the real Forum—had been built. A harbor had been created. A royal barge was constructed. One Taylor costume was made of pure gold at the cost of $6,500. All in all, as has been documented, the film used “26,000 gallons of paint, 6,000 tons of cement, 150,000 arrows, 8,000 pairs of shoes, and 26,000 costumes.”
Though Cleopatra’s production problems and delays were blamed on Taylor, who still suffered blinding migraines and back ailments, Wanger knew to target her was unfair. “She takes her responsibility seriously, and being a perfectionist, she will be under tremendous strain,” he said. She was in pain “some of the days we have worked, but she has said nothing about it and refused to have the doctor.” Then her emotions—and her distress about her relationship with Burton and the international scrutiny—took a toll no one could have anticipated. As quiet as the studio tried to keep it, she took an overdose of Seconal and was rushed to the hospital. Wanger said it had been a case of food poisoning. But no one was buying that. “It wasn’t a suicide attempt,” Elizabeth said at another time. “I’m not that kind of person, and Richard despised weakness. It was more hysteria. I needed the rest. I was hysterical, and I needed to get away.” She recovered. But the film was further behind in its schedule.
Ultimately, heads started to roll. At Twentieth Century Fox, Spyros Skouras had to answer to his stockholders and the moneymen. Eventually, he was out of a job, replaced by Darryl F. Zanuck, who, having left Fox, returned once again as its head of production. Fox also had another troubled production, Something’s Got to Give, starring another troubled leading lady, Marilyn Monroe, whose absences caused delays and an escalating budget. “No company can afford Monroe and Taylor,” a Fox spokesman said. In too deep to replace Taylor, the studio did fire Monroe from what would be her last film. She would die not long afterward from an overdose of pills. Wanger was also unceremoniously fired. Taylor “was so angry she wanted to quit,” said Wanger. But both Wanger and Mankiewicz persuaded her to stay on the picture.
Darryl F. Zanuck assumed control of the film—and its editing. Mankiewicz’s conception was a literate drama with lots of spectacle but also a telling examination of love and politics for a woman who understood power and was determined to use it—in a man’s world. In many respects, his Cleopatra was also a telling
examination of the star power of Elizabeth Taylor. Because of its length and also its characters’ definitions, Mankiewicz considered dividing Cleopatra into two movies, but Fox rejected the idea.
Supervising the editing of Cleopatra, Zanuck saw it as an old-style epic. The second half of the film would have far too many uninspiring battle scenes. Everything Mankiewicz had built—the psychology of his characters—would fall apart. Having had high hopes for the film, Taylor would ultimately be despairing of the finished product. Cleopatra also became a bitter disappointment. Still, Cleopatra would have dazzling sequences. Her entrance into Rome—with its elephants, dancers, and giant Sphinx that carried the queen and her son—was brilliantly conceived and shot by Leon Shamroy. So was the sequence of Cleopatra’s barge coming to Rome. In the first half of the film, Taylor would be vibrant, shrewd, ironic, commanding, and spellbindingly gorgeous.
• • •
Burton had not anticipated it, but he had fallen so deeply under Taylor’s spell that his marriage to Sybil ended, amid much emotional torment for everyone concerned. Once Sybil left Rome, she reportedly never saw Burton again, which surely caused him pain. Both he and Taylor went to England, where he socialized with his old theater group, some of whom were loyal to Sybil and unaccepting of Elizabeth. But in time, most found her hard to resist. Philip Burton recalled that he didn’t know what to do. He loved Sybil. But then he came to love Elizabeth. Burton’s siblings felt the same way.
