How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  Her nonchalance was refreshing—yet how would it all play at the box office? That was still the unanswered question. In June the New York Times reported that Fox had launched a "quiet study" to test Elizabeth's "box-office status" in the wake of Le Scandale. Apparently in cooperation with the studios that had produced them, a number of Elizabeth's old pictures were rereleased, with Fox reportedly keeping a close eye on how well they performed. (Suddenly, Last Summer, for example, played at New York's Murray Hill Theatre from May 23 to 28.) Fox, however, denied that the pictures had been reissued as any kind of test, but instead as a straightforward means "to garner extra dollars at a time when Miss Taylor's name is before the public via daily headlines."

  For once a studio denial seems more believable than the story being denied. Surely Fox knew the advantages of those daily headlines; Elizabeth and Richard had become what Melvyn Bragg called "a self-contained media event," providing the studio with "unpurchasable publicity." Even Hedda Hopper expected the headlines were only going to help Cleopatra in the end: "The public wonders if the latest scandal will hurt the picture. Well, the day headlines popped about the Fisher separation, people lined up at the corner of Hollywood and Vine to buy papers. Scandal is not always a drawback."

  And yet the lore of Cleopatra has always held that Fox officials were opposed to the Taylor-Burton affair. Previously unreleased court depositions do provide some evidence of that view, with Elizabeth admitting that Wanger had told her that Skouras was concerned about "a wave of public opinion ... being developed by reason of [her] conduct." Yet, significantly, the depositions also make clear that no one ever requested that she and Burton end the affair. In fact, Wanger's expressed opinion on the relationship was apparently so innocuous that Elizabeth "forgot about it two minutes after he had given it." Later, it would be in Fox's interest to claim that the studio had opposed the affair; but most of the execs were probably in agreement with Darryl Zanuck, soon to replace Skouras at the helm, who candidly admitted: "I think the TaylorBurton association is quite constructive for our organization."

  On July 14, 1962, after two tumultuous years, Elizabeth finally completed her work in Cleopatra. "I told you we would make it, darling," she said to Richard, squeezing his hand. Mankiewicz and his camera crew headed off to Egypt for a few final location shots, then hunkered down in the editing room with thousands of feet of raw footage. Meanwhile, eager fans besieged Fox with requests for advance tickets, offering to pay up to twenty dollars a pop. And Elizabeth and Richard were bombarded with dozens of offers for new film roles, sometimes apart but more often together. There were no more worries about Elizabeth Taylor's bankability.

  Life magazine put her on the cover naked (cropped at the shoulders) and immediately sold out at newsstands. Inside, Elizabeth was quoted dramatically: "I have paid and Richard has paid through both of our hearts and our guts. Our brains have bled." But there was no bitterness in her voice, only triumph. "I have learned," she said, "that there's no deodorant like success."

  Seventy-seven-year-old Hedda Hopper, stiff with arthritis as she made her way down the airplane steps, was not giving up without one last fight.

  On tour to promote her memoir, The Whole Truth and Nothing But, Hedda was frequently asked to comment about "Liz and Dick." On this day she paused as she stepped onto the tarmac, turning her sharp features in the direction of the questioner and saying, "They are destroying themselves utterly." Then she adjusted her crazy Eiffel Tower hat and walked with a slightly shaky gait to her waiting limousine.

  Her book had quite a bit more to say about the pair. Le Scandale had broken just as the memoir was going to press so Double-day had asked for some quick updates. Only too glad to comply, Hedda added considerable material about Elizabeth to the front of the book. She seems to have had a rather specific editorial motive. Since she'd been unable to rally the masses this time, Hedda had settled on another tack. She went after the entire Elizabeth Taylor mystique, suggesting that it wasn't worth the newsprint it had been printed on—even though she herself had done much of the printing.

  In the first fifteen pages of her book, Hedda willfully exposed Sara's relentless ambition, portrayed Mike Todd as conniving, rehashed the wrongs done to poor little Debbie, and finally divulged what Elizabeth had said to her after Todd's death ("What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?"). Most incendiary of all, however, was her revelation of the scoop she'd sat on back in 1952: that she believed Michael Wilding to be gay and that she had warned Elizabeth against the marriage. The Whole Truth and Nothing But amounted to an all-out broadside against Elizabeth. If one thing didn't stick, Hedda seemed to be hoping, then maybe something else would.

  The book came out in November 1962 and spent several months on the bestseller lists in early 1963. Elizabeth had no comment about any of it. But Wilding was furious. Hedda could never understand why; what she'd written about him was "just a little stinking bit," she believed. But, in fact, until the tabloids made "outing" a common tactic two decades later, Hedda's strike against Wilding was the most explicit example of gay baiting in Hollywood history. It was also utterly mean-spirited and thoroughly extraneous. Hedda had no beef with Wilding. He was simply a means to "get" Elizabeth. Wilding decided to get Hedda instead. On April 4, 1963, he blindsided her and her publisher with an unexpected libel suit for $3 million.

  Why the suit was unexpected is difficult to comprehend. Hopper's editor at Doubleday, the usually astute Kenneth McCormick, had never asked a lawyer to sign off on the material. Another editor, Margaret Cousins, told Hedda, "I would never have let that pass." But pass it had—into several thousand copies that were now causing cash registers to jingle all across the country. Quite understandably, Wilding feared the effect the book might have on the meager career that he still maintained. In his suit, he charged that Hedda had made her statements in "a reckless and wanton disregard of his rights and feelings with intent to injure his feelings." Of course, Wilding's feelings were the furthest thing from Hedda's mind; he was merely collateral damage in her campaign to punish his ex-wife. Still, the book had subjected him to "hatred, contempt, ridicule and humiliation, and was injurious to his reputation as an actor and entertainer." Wilding vowed to friends: "I'm going to fight this battle and I'm going to win."

  He may have had some encouragement in that fight. "Hedda always believed that Liz Taylor was behind Wilding, urging him along," said Hopper legman Robert Shaw. After all, the former spouses had remained friendly, and Wilding enjoyed a good, if often distant, relationship with his two sons. Friends agreed that Elizabeth was infuriated by Hedda's revelations. "She was very protective in some ways of [Wilding]," said one person close to her. "She would have seen this incident for what it was, as an attack on her, and her loyalty to [ Wilding] would have rushed to the forefront."

  But Hedda dug in her heels, refusing to settle. "She stood by what she had written," said Shaw. "She believed Wilding was a homosexual and figured it would be easy to prove it." She had plenty of connections in the gay world; that's how she'd heard the story in the first place. But despite dispatching an army of assistants to comb for "evidence" in both Hollywood and London, she discovered to her mounting dismay that the first loyalty of her gay friends was not to her but to one another. "No one was willing to testify that Wilding was gay and therefore ruin his career," Shaw said. "If they did that, who's to say somebody else might not do it to them someday?"

  In desperation Hedda turned to an unlikely ally: Eddie Fisher. The man whose career she'd played a large part in destroying answered his telephone one day to hear her shrill voice on the other end of the line. "I wanted to hang up," Eddie said. But Hedda invited him over to her house, where she gushed all over him, telling him what a great singer he was and hinting that she could help him make a comeback. But Eddie was wary; he was in the midst of his own legal problems, haggling with Elizabeth over custody of Maria and the financial terms of their upcoming divorce. Hedda hoped that this might make him eager to come over to her side, but Eddie
just stared at her blankly when she revealed the real reason she'd called. "I have no idea whether Michael Wilding is a homosexual," he said. Coldly, Hedda told him he could leave. There was no more talk of comebacks.

  But Wilding was taking no chances. As his roles dwindled to a couple of television episodes on Burke's Law and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, he announced that he was giving up acting to become a talent agent with the Hugh French Agency. (Among the clients he'd pick up was Richard Burton—evidence of a continuing close association with his ex-wife during the legal battle with Hedda.) Bracing himself for a trial, which he no doubt dreaded, Wilding married the actress Margaret Leighton. His lawyer, Ben F. Goldman Jr., continued pressing Hedda to settle. They were asking for a monetary figure as well as a public apology. But Hedda wasn't ready to surrender.

  "She was at the end of her career, and she knew it," said Shaw. "Hollywood had sort of passed her by at this point. So it was her reputation she was fighting for now. She kept hoping she'd find someone who'd give her the evidence that she needed, to prove she hadn't made it all up. If that happened, she could show she was still relevant. But fewer people seemed to think of her that way anymore."

  There was one person who hadn't completely written Hedda off yet. As the trial date approached, a memo in her papers reveals that a call came in from Sara Taylor. "All very chatty and friendly," Hedda's secretary wrote. Sara insisted that it had been Elizabeth's idea to call, just as a courtesy to update the columnist about the wonderful family holiday they'd all celebrated. Elizabeth and Richard had brought Elizabeth's four children, and Howard Taylor came with his wife and five children. Sara said Elizabeth had prodded her: "Don't forget, you promised to call Hedda."

  It seems extremely unlikely that Elizabeth gave a whit about Hedda at this point, except perhaps to curse her for the troubles she'd caused Wilding. A far more likely scenario is that Sara was still trying to facilitate her daughter's career, hoping to assuage Hedda's wounded feelings by sharing a story of happy family togetherness. Her daughter's embrace of a new, poststudio world order wasn't for Sara; Mrs. Taylor proceeded as if Hedda still wielded the kind of power she had back in the days of Louis B. Mayer. Her efforts paid off; Hedda wrote a glowing account of the family's holiday celebrations and described Elizabeth as feeling sentimental about their old friendship. "I wish we could be friends again as we used to be," she quoted Elizabeth as saying about her. No doubt that was a lot of malarkey given to her by Sara. But Hedda, pathetically aware of her increasing irrelevancy, wanted very much to believe that it was true.

  Currying favor with the Taylors did no good. Three weeks before the trial was to start, a dispirited Hedda finally agreed to settle with Wilding. None of her sources had agreed to back her up. Wilding would receive $100,000. But Hedda steadfastly refused to apologize. Attorney Goldman put the best face on the situation by saying that "the settlement in itself is an apology" and a "complete vindication" of Wilding.

  Whether it was or not, Hedda was wiped out. "The suit is settled, but at what a cost!" she wrote to a friend. She'd been counting on her memoir to cushion her retirement, but now, she said bitterly, the roughly $110,000 she'd made (minus $26,500 to her coauthor) would go to "Wilding and his Jew lawyer." Although it seems unbelievable for someone who made her living as a gossip columnist, she didn't have any libel insurance. And despite Doubleday's agreeing to pay half of the settlement, their lawyer had charged Hedda $12,800 on top of her own legal fees of $23,000. "So, you see," she wrote, "I get nothing." She was particularly aggrieved by those Hollywood gays who hadn't come forward to help her out and who, in fact, seemed to take delight in her fall from grace. She singled out Hollywood Reporter columnist Mike Connolly—"one of the boys," she wrote sarcastically. "It is sort of precious, isn't it? I don't believe [Connolly] cared much about Wilding, but Mr. Wilding has the last laugh. I hope he will enjoy it."

  As Hedda declined, Elizabeth triumphed. She and Richard flitted around Europe, defying traditional values as the most famous unmarried, cohabitating couple in the world. Producer Anatole de Grunwald eagerly snatched them up to be part of his all-star film The V.I.P.s, shot in London in December 1962. It was an original Terence Rattigan script about a group of stranded airline passengers whose lives are changed by the unexpected delay. Directed by Anthony Asquith, the picture was rushed out to theaters to capitalize on the still-bubbling interest in the Taylor-Burton affair. Elizabeth was particularly pleased that The V.I.P.s was an MGM picture. No longer a contract player forced to accept the studio's terms, she was now a freelancer who commanded $1 million plus 10 percent of the gross. It was "good revenge," she said, for the paltry salary they'd paid her on Butterfield 8. "Even I wouldn't have the audacity to ask for more," she said.

  Early in 1963 word came that Fox needed her back for a couple of linking shots on Cleopatra. For $50,000, she once again donned Egyptian eye makeup and emoted for half a minute, reacting to the Battle of Actium. Later, sitting at the "most conspicuous table" in the cocktail lounge of London's fashionable Dorchester Hotel, she laughed about it with a reporter. "Do you think it will ever be finished?" she asked, referring to Cleopatra. "Are the stockholders going to scream and haul it back for a happy ending when they finally see it?"

  Looking more curvy than ever—busybodies called her "plump"—and wearing a lavender sweater and slacks, Elizabeth was gesturing dramatically and speaking in a loud voice. Anyone who came in through the swinging doors that led out onto Park Lane would have spotted her immediately—and Burton, too, sitting there in his Marc Antony makeup, having just finished his own last few shots. They were drinking and laughing and carrying on, lighthearted and carefree. The world was theirs. Richard had finally asked Sybil for a divorce. Elizabeth couldn't have been happier.

  The same couldn't be said of Joe Mankiewicz. Those stockholders were screaming. The previous year Fox had posted a $40 mill ion loss, with Cleopatra's astronomical expenses much of the reason. Skouras, forced to resign as president, had been replaced at the top by former Fox chief Darryl Zanuck, who'd immediately clashed with Mankiewicz. With so much footage, the director had decided to make two two-and-a-half-hour movies, the first one focusing on Cleopatra and Caesar (Rex Harrison), the second on Cleopatra and Antony. Zanuck, however, would have none of it. "The studio didn't have enough money to make a cartoon at this point," Tom Mankiewicz said. "Zanuck's rationale was: What if these two people [Taylor and Burton] fell out of love between now and the second half? Who'd come to see the picture then?"

  Zanuck's goal, understandably, was to get the picture out as soon as possible, while the affair between its two principals was still hot. He was determined that Cleopatra not be tagged as a four-hour history lesson, which would have consigned it to the art houses. It had to be a big, sexy, romantic spectacle—the only way it might possibly pay for itself and lift the studio out of the red. And so began what Mankiewicz called the "butchery" of the picture, but what Zanuck would have described as a studio-saving venture. Everything was reshaped and reorganized to centralize the love story between Antony and Cleopatra. When Mankiewicz protested the cuts, he was fired.

  Elizabeth was outraged. "Mr. Mankiewicz took Cleopatra over when it was nothing—when it was rubbish—and he made something out of it," she told the press. But the director's vision was obliterated in this new version, sliced down from five hours to four. On Zanuck's express order, the whole package, including publicity, was geared to capitalize on Le Scandale. Many of the ads didn't even bother to use the film's title or the stars' names. They simply featured Taylor and Burton in a sexy clinch. But the studio wasn't finished tinkering. After the New York premiere in June 1963, another twenty-one minutes were cut from the film. Elizabeth refused to see the truncated picture, turning her back on an enterprise that had consumed two long years of her life.

  Most critics shared her low opinion of the film, and they weren't too impressed with her performance either. "To look at, she is every inch 'a morsel for a monarch,'" observed Time magazine, quo
ting Shakespeare. "But ... when she plays Cleopatra as a political animal she screeches like a ward heeler's wife at a block party." Indeed, while she's quite good in the passionate scenes—Maggie the Cat in ancient Egypt—when she starts spouting dialogue about the politics of the classical world, she sounds absolutely absurd. Critics derided her reading of such lines as "Did you know that Apollodorus would kill Pothinus?" There was a sense that she'd memorized the names phonetically with no clear idea of what she was talking about. She gave the appearance of a pretty 1960s teenager, complete with flip hairdo, playing dress up as an ancient queen.

  Bosley Crowther in the New York Times was one of the few voices of praise, calling Elizabeth's Cleopatra "a woman of force and dignity" and the picture itself "brilliant, moving and satisfying." But far more reviewers seemed to agree with Peter Baker in Films and Filming, who, despite how much the picture had cost, thought Cleopatra never rose above the level of a low-budget "Italian Hercules spectacular."

  And yet it was an enormous hit. That, too, is a fact that's been obscured by the legend around the film that has seeped into the public consciousness: that Cleopatra was a box-office disaster. But, in truth, with full domestic earnings of $15.7 million, Cleopatra was the top-grossing film of 1963; after all those headlines and magazine covers of "Liz and Dick," how could it have been otherwise? Cleopatra outgrossed the top film of 1960, Spartacus, by $2 million, and beat the second top-grossing picture of the current year (Burton's other starring vehicle, The Longest Day) by $3 million. Only a handful of pictures (including Around the World in Eighty Days) had ever made more money; Cleopatra was by far the biggest grossing picture Elizabeth had ever made. The problem, of course, was that it had cost somewhere around $40 million to produce, so $15.7 million was nowhere near what was needed to turn a profit. Fox was banking on an extraordinarily long run over several years, in which the film might gross, at least according to their estimates, over $200 million.