How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  Recognizing his star's agitation on the set, Nichols suggested a vocal coach. Elizabeth had been struggling to find the right pitch for Martha, and the director thought that a coach might help bring her voice down an octave. But once again Elizabeth said no. She insisted that working with a coach would only make her self-conscious. How times had changed. Long gone was the contract player who had needed to manipulate her way into getting what she wanted. Now, as Elizabeth Taylor Burton, she just announced what she wanted and she got it. "So I am afraid," Lehman sighed into his tape recorder that night, "we are going to have a relatively high-voiced Martha."

  Despite her refusal, Elizabeth really did want to be good in the part. In fact, her desire to push herself as an actress was incredibly strong going into Virginia Woolf. Like Monty Clift had done a decade ago, Richard impressed and inspired her with his dedication to his craft. As one half of the team known as the Burtons, Elizabeth was aware that she was considered the lightweight in terms of talent. That rankled her. Some of the churlish comments after their poetry reading had no doubt gotten under her skin. So she threw herself into preparing for the film, paging through the script, underlining passages, circling scenes that she thought needed changing.

  At one point during rehearsals, she took issue with a line of George's, where he says, "Don't start in on the bit"—a reference to the imaginary son they'd talk about later in the script. She told Nichols that it didn't jibe with the ending, when George says that he has to "kill" the son because she'd mentioned him. The incident sounds, in fact, more like a gripe that had come from Richard, not Elizabeth; she may have volunteered, perhaps strategically, to wage the battle for him. But the line was not changed.

  Other quibbles were clearly her own concerns. She was passionately opposed to the scene in the roadhouse where she dances with George Segal. She called it phony, an example of "Hollywood vulgarity." It should not be a set piece, she argued, with the roadhouse looking as empty as an old-time musical soundstage. A "full-scale argument" flared up, with Burton, Nichols, and Lehman all having their say. "We went back and forth on it," Lehman said. Elizabeth's "eyes were really flashing." Lehman told her that he thought her argument was "intellectualized," to which she responded, "Why, thank you, Ernie, for calling me an intellectual." He wasn't sure if she was amused or angry. Though things got "pretty hot," eventually they all settled on a compromise, with Nichols promising as much realism as possible. "It was our first indication that [Elizabeth] is going to have things to say about the script," Lehman recorded.

  Of course she was going to have things to say. She knew the risks that she was taking with the part. "When I first read the script," she said, "I didn't think I was the right casting. I was too young and I hope—I trust—I'm unlike Martha myself. Richard read it and he said, 'You're not right for it, but I want you to do it because I don't want any other actress to do it. It's too good a part.'"

  It was clear that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was going to be a big, big movie. Anticipation was mounting, and Nichols was cutting no corners. The sets were decorated by George James Hopkins, an old studio veteran who dated back to Theda Bara and Mary Miles Minter. Nichols insisted that no detail be spared in creating the perfect ambience for the home of a New England academic. Strewn about were novels by Thomas Mann and old copies of the Kenyon Review. The glasses at the bar were old jelly jars and containers that had once held pimento cheese. Verisimilitude was the order of the day; Nichols wanted audiences to forget that they were watching a movie. "I want the audience drawn into the lives of these people," he said, "and not be aware of any director's technique, any camera or any cutting."

  The script was so carefully guarded that even George Segal hadn't seen the final draft until he sat down at the table for the read-through. Everything about the production was carefully shielded from the public in order not to give anything away. And with so much of the studio publicity apparatus gone, it was up to the filmmakers themselves to manage the press. Lehman's response to a request from Cosmopolitan to do a story about the picture shows that they knew how to play the game. "What we haven't decided yet, and hope to do in the next few days," he recorded in his journal, "is select the writer we feel would be right for the role of writing that kind of piece and also who would be acceptable to Cosmopolitan." They were casting their journalists just as they had cast their actors.

  In June there was "a full-scale publicity strategy meeting" in Lehman's office. Studio publicists like Max Bercutt and Carl Combs were there, along with John Springer, who worked exclusively for the Burtons. It was decided that the set would be completely closed to the press. Any interviews with the stars had to take place away from the set, and under no circumstances was Elizabeth ever to be seen in her makeup as Martha. That little shock would be reserved for the premiere.

  There was a reason for such secrecy. For the first time in her career, Elizabeth Taylor would not be glamorized. Her beauty, for once, would not be a selling point for the picture. Instead, it was the concealment of her beauty that was generating interest: How would Elizabeth look as Martha?

  That was what everyone was asking in the summer of 1965. Cameraman Harry Stradling, like George James Hopkins, had a career stretching back to the silent days; he'd photographed leading ladies from Betty Blythe and Norma Shearer to Carole Lombard and Judy Garland. He knew all the tricks to make stars look as beautiful as possible—but here was Mike Nichols telling him to shoot Elizabeth as pitilessly as he could. It was another clash of old Hollywood values versus the new. "What are those ravishing shadows on Elizabeth's throat?" Nichols asked upon seeing the tests Stradling had made. The cameraman insisted that he was covering her double chin. When Nichols replied that he wanted to see her double chin and the circles under her eyes, Stradling grumbled, "Yes, but are you worried at all about what the public might want?"

  Stradling would soon depart the film, although Warners insisted that it had nothing to do with how he was shooting Elizabeth. Nichols, however, stated plainly, "He wanted her beautiful. We wanted a certain harshness." Haskell Wexler, younger and more in tune with the times, was hired to replace him. Wexler had just made a documentary about the civil rights movement and had photographed Tony Richardson's avant-garde The Loved One, so he had the right sensibility for this more modern assignment. Yet he too had to overcome some ingrained presumptions. "My job is traditionally to make women look good," he explained. "Mike Nichols said, 'I don't want her to look good.'" So Wexler did as he was instructed, letting Elizabeth's double chin waddle freely and the bags under her eyes retain all their unflattering shadows. But he'd admit to a friendly covert agreement with the star not to "uglify her too much."

  Indeed, for all of her celebrated courage in deglamorizing herself for the sake of the part, Elizabeth was not at all comfortable with the idea, at least not at first. The publicists quoted her as saying, "If Mike wants me to have a double chin, we'll emphasize it," but in fact she was terribly self-conscious about what it would do to her image. She complained about being forced to consume "a lot of cream and butter and sweets"—though one suspects that she didn't find such gourmandizing as odious as she made out. But it made her nervous. One day, just before shooting was scheduled to begin, Elizabeth buttonholed Lehman and turned on all her power and charm. "Listen, Ernie," she said, eyelashes batting, "you must be sure to tell the press from here on in that you and Mike have ordered me to get fat for this picture. I don't want them to get the idea that I'm overweight and sloppy simply because I don't know any better." Lehman was impressed with her skill for public relations. Once again he called her shrewd.

  After more than two decades of merchandising her looks, it's understandable that Elizabeth was anxious about appearing as Martha. While it was true that she didn't possess the overweening vanity of many stars, she was smart enough to realize that much of her success heretofore had been bolstered by her appearance. It had been that poster of her in a white bathing suit that had turned Suddenly, Last Summer into a box-office smash
after all. So it's not surprising that, as she was made up as Martha for the first time, she was cranky and querulous, knocking back vodka after vodka. Striding out of her dressing room wearing the gray wig that Sydney Guilaroff had made for her, she awaited consensus. Lehman thought it made her look chic, "ravishingly beautiful" in fact—which of course pleased Elizabeth but horrified Nichols. The wig was sent back to Guilaroff to obtain the dowdier look that they wanted.

  Elizabeth threw a fit. She was suddenly convinced that there was no reason to play Martha as an old harridan. "She felt that the role would work perfectly if she could play her own age, which is thirty-three," Lehman said. He and Nichols made no reply. They did not want to antagonize her. They allowed her to vent her rage and her fear. But they knew there was no way that Martha could be thirty-three. In Albee's play, she is described as a "large, boisterous woman, fifty-two." Uta Hagen had been in her midforties when she'd played the part on Broadway. And Martha was supposed to be older than George; the age difference helped to fuel the conflict between them. Nichols had already surrendered that bit of characterization; there was no way Elizabeth could convincingly look older than Richard, who would be forty in a few months. But the director was certainly not going to allow Martha to turn into a pretty thirty-three-year-old.

  Makeup artist Gordon Bau had aged Elizabeth in Giant. But then she'd been in the springtime of her beauty. Now when he turned her around in her chair to look at herself as Martha, she nearly burst into tears. Lehman called her "awfully unhappy." It had been a long day; Elizabeth was swearing and demanding that they postpone the start of filming. Lehman felt she had been drinking too much and was far too tired. True enough; but she was also a woman on the edge of middle age, whose beauty had been celebrated around the world since she was an adolescent, and who was now forced to compete with fresh-faced twenty-somethings like Julie Christie and Jane Fonda for magazine covers. Bau's magic had only sped up the aging process. As she stared into the mirror, what likely troubled Elizabeth the most was that Martha's double chin and puffy eyes weren't all cosmetic. No wonder she was so insistent that Lehman spread the word that she had done all this for her art.

  The drinking would continue throughout the shoot, sanctioned by the top brass and encouraged by the director; the film, after all, is one marathon binge. Elizabeth was conscious of depicting "the physical progression of drunkenness." Martha "starts out tippling," she explained, "and in the course of the play she has twenty-one or twenty-two straight gins." On the set, she and Burton nearly matched Martha and George shot for shot. There were pills, too, Lehman believed; at one point, when Elizabeth was "exceedingly cheerful" to everyone on the set, the producer had a realization: "For the first time it occurred to me that she might just possibly be taking some sort of medication to 'elevate her mood.'" Watching the dailies, he noted her "highly energetic performance" and became even more convinced that she was "taking something." He was hardly complaining. A happy Elizabeth meant a happy set. "Whatever the pill is," Lehman told his journal, "I am very much in favor of it."

  Filming began on Monday, July 26. Standing beside Wexler and his camera, Nichols waited for Elizabeth to start her scene. When she didn't move for several seconds, he looked over at her as if to ask what was taking her so long.

  "I can't act until you say action," she told him.

  Nichols laughed. There were some parts of filmmaking that he still hadn't gotten the hang of—and some parts of the old studio system that Elizabeth was never going to let go. He complied by stuttering, "Ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-action." Elizabeth grimaced, but it was good enough. She went into the scene.

  Nichols was awed by her technical virtuosity. "Elizabeth can keep in her mind fourteen dialogue changes, twelve floor marks and ten pauses—so the cutter can get the shears in and still keep the reality," he said. All that MGM training was still paying dividends. Elizabeth was more than just a glamorous star; she was an old pro. In just one weekend she'd learned twenty-six pages of the script and had showed up to work "very well-prepared," Lehman said. The stress of preproduction was evaporating.

  Now that the cameras were rolling, Elizabeth was having a ball. She found playing Martha a cinch. "I had a character to grab ahold of and sink my nails into," she said, and the script provided "wonderful words to wrap your lips around." She'd insist that she had needed no specific preparation for the part. "It's a matter of concentration," she told an interviewer. "I read the script over several times. I think about it all the time. I very rarely discuss it. It's an inward process that works itself on me probably even when I'm asleep."

  All of her husband's initial doubts about her were banished. "You cannot believe it is her," Burton said in awe. "When I first saw the rushes, I was absolutely astounded. The voice, the accent, the walk. It's so vulgar and oddly poignant." He pointed out that it would have been easy for her just to play an old woman, as she had in Giant. "But for a thirty-year-old woman to play a forty-year-old is very difficult."

  "I have totally divorced myself from Martha so when I'm doing Martha I completely forget anything else I've ever done, or ever was, or ever will be," Elizabeth explained. "It's almost like a split personality kind of thing. It was difficult in the beginning because I didn't know if I was going overboard or underboard. All the things I had to find for myself, like the voice, and the walk, and the slouch, and the laughter, and the vulnerability. I can turn Martha on now. It's the easiest role I've ever played. It's difficult playing yourself. And Martha is so remote from me."

  That would be a continuing refrain in her interviews. She stressed often that she was not like Martha. It didn't matter that those words she found so wonderful to wrap her lips around were the same sort of obscenities that she used so casually in real life, or that she and Richard could snarl and bicker in ways that were not completely dissimilar to Martha and George. It didn't matter that Elizabeth often scuffed around in slippers and a housecoat at home, eating cold fried chicken with her hands—an image not out of character for Martha. Maybe that was why Elizabeth subconsciously took Martha home with her on occasion, keeping the voice and the walk. She and Richard would have people over for dinner, and the next morning Richard would look at her and ask, "Do you know how you spoke to so-and-so last night?" Elizabeth found it quite amusing. In tape-recorded interviews that she made at the time, it's uncanny to hear how easily she could move from her well-modulated speech, containing traces of her childhood English accent, to the shrill, coarse voice of Martha: "What the hell do you want?"

  As filming progressed, Nichols and Lehman realized that there were certain things they could do to keep their star happy and cooperative. Little gifts were left for her to find in her dressing room, over which she'd titter and giggle like a child. Of course, giving gifts to Elizabeth Taylor was a tradition that dated back to Stanley Donen, and perhaps even earlier, to the day when Louis B. Mayer presented her with the stallion from National Velvet. But in recent years, the tradition had reached extraordinary heights. Throughout the filming of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth constantly compared (unfavorably) the gift giving of Lehman to his predecessor, Martin Ransohoff. "Ernie," she trilled one day, "I thought you'd be interested to know that Marty has just given me another present." Playing along, Lehman asked what could anyone possibly give to the woman who had everything. "Another husband," Nichols dead-panned. "Hey, now, wait a minute," Burton said, glancing up suddenly from his newspaper.

  Elizabeth paid them no mind, slinking over to Lehman to tell him that she'd seen a "fabulous" piece of jewelry designed by David Webb, whose pieces adorned the throats, ears, and wrists of the Duchess of Windsor, Diana Vreeland, and Gloria Vanderbilt. Lehman professed ignorance of the man. "David Webb," Elizabeth repeated forcefully. "Take out your pen and write down that name." Lehman told her that he'd forgotten his pen. But he added that he had considered buying her a baby wolf to commemorate the picture. Elizabeth squealed with delight. She'd love to have a baby wolf.

  A few weeks later, after Ransohoff had dropped off
a double rope of nine-and-a-half-millimeter pearls in gratitude for the continued outstanding box office of The Sandpiper, Elizabeth reminded Lehman that all he'd given her so far were flowers and bottles of champagne. Even Mike Nichols had splurged on some sapphire earrings. Lehman took it in with a noncommittal nod. Watching from the sidelines, Richard found it all very funny. Elizabeth, he said, reminded him of his aunt Tessie, who was "a bit on the greedy side." Dropping his arm around Lehman's shoulders, Richard said, "The wonderful thing about Elizabeth is that she loves jewels so much that she makes even a stingy man like me want to give her jewelry just to see the thrill she gets when she sees it."

  Her husband wasn't always so benevolent, however. Mike Todd Jr. stopped by the set on day, and Elizabeth gushed over him, making hay out of the fact that, in her Martha makeup, she finally looked as if she could truly be his stepmother. Later, during a break in a scene, Richard, who'd been drinking, called her a "sourpuss," and said she "was giving a lousy performance." Lehman thought that the two incidents were connected, that the "reminder of one man she really loved so much might have led Richard to say what he said." To assuage any hurt feelings, Nichols encouraged the crew to say kind things to Elizabeth and, indeed, to part with some cash to buy her gifts.

  But, in her own way, Elizabeth could be quite generous herself. For Nichols, one anecdote summed up her "very essence." They were getting ready to shoot a particularly long monologue of Martha's. In the course of it, she was supposed to cry. Elizabeth was terrified that she might not be able to bring forth the tears when she needed to. Nichols insisted that she not worry, that he was confident that she could pull it off. But his star wasn't so sure. Nichols called "Action"—he was getting better at that—and the cameras began to turn. With a deep breath, Elizabeth started in on the scene. Her director watched as she summoned all the emotion she could. Her eyes began to glisten. And then, with a groan, Nichols had to call "Cut." There was a technical problem with the camera. Elizabeth deflated like a balloon.