Cleopatra
Page 19
But DeMille’s was not the first film of the queen of Egypt. Georges Méliès produced the first known version as a ‘short’ in 1899, the same year that Shaw’s play was performed. Shortly after Beerbohm Tree played Antony on the stage in London and Maria Kuznetsova wowed them operatically in tsarist Russia, the Fox company launched Theda Bara down the Hollywood Nile in the silent version of 1917.
Early film-makers drew heavily on the Bible for their inspiration and in the days before the puritanical Hayes Commission began to introduce its rigid censorship, bacchanalian orgies and decadence were the stuff of ancient courts presided over by cruel tyrants. Theda Bara was a ‘natural’ for Cleopatra who fitted the licentious image perfectly. She was the vamp of the silent screen, a femme fatale with painted lips and large, hypnotic eyes. Her name, people said, was an apt anagram of ‘Arab Death’ and she hardly had to change her costume at all the following year for her role as Salome.
The sets of the 1917 film are astonishing, the painted columns of her chamber straight out of the Valley of the Kings while black American extras stand picturesquely as Nubian slaves fanning Cleopatra with ostrich feathers. She lounges casually on a chaise longue that Tutankhamun could have owned while an imperious-looking Caesar (Fritz Leiber) is attempting to control her by wearing plastic armour and a laurel wreath.
The 1934 version was more lavish and altogether on a different plane. Warren William played Caesar and heartthrob/hunk Henry Wilcoxon was Antony. The surprise came with Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra; she had previously only been known for her light comedy and romantic roles, but she was excellent as the Egyptian queen. In keeping with the world’s distorted view of Cleopatra, DeMille asked Colbert whether she wanted to play one of the wickedest women in history. The action spans the involvement of both Caesar and Antony in Egypt and some film experts regard this Cleopatra as DeMille’s best film. It was a ‘talkie’, of course, and filmed in black and white. Much of its set-piece brilliance owes a great deal to Busby Berkeley’s mass dance routines in which dozens of luscious female slaves move as one to a huge backdrop of ostrich feathers.
The seduction scene of Antony by Cleopatra is superbly handled. Antony is furious at being kept waiting by the queen (nobody glowered quite like Henry Wilcoxon!) and she blasts him when she finally arrives with her choreographed slaves, lifting virgins in nets from the sea and scooping up handfuls of jewels.
‘As Antony finally embraces her,’ wrote Baird Searles, ‘she looks across his shoulder, her face suddenly an icy mask and nods to her chamberlain. The camera pulls back from their feather-backed dais across the space of the hall. Gauzy drapes fall in front of the dais. Rose petals rain down. Dancing girls writhe...’ and the scene unfolds to reveal Cleopatra’s giant barge, which becomes the ‘scene of an aphrodisiac rite timed to the rhythm of the oarsmen’. White peacocks abound, harpists play and there is even a virgin straddling a sacrificial ox swathed in garlands of flowers. The Apis bull had made it to the big screen.
The next venture was Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, released in 1946 and the one in which the playwright was closely involved. It was then the most expensive British film ever made, produced in an atmosphere of escapism from the austerity of post-war Britain. The lighthouse of Pharos, one of the world’s seven wonders, was recreated and the cast was one to match DeMille’s. Claude Rains played Caesar like a kind old uncle and the impossibly handsome Stewart Granger was Apollodorus, Cleopatra’s faithful servant. So magnetic was Granger, said one critic, that it makes ‘one wonder about Cleopatra’s taste in men’. Flora Robson was the slave Ftatateeta and came dangerously close to stealing the film from Vivien Leigh. Even so, the star of Gone with the Wind put in a remarkable performance, maturing from impulsive girl to accomplished stateswoman.
All these versions were swept away by Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1963 offering, made infamous by the on- and off-set romance between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and a colossal overspend that threatened at one point to bankrupt the Fox organization. The cost was $44 million (about $308 million in today’s figures). Mankiewicz was a highly literate director and his screenplay acknowledged the services of men we have met before – Plutarch, Suetonius and Appian. Some critics believed that it was the attempt to stick to history as opposed to spectacle that caused Cleopatra to flop. Mankiewicz based the screenplay on The Life and Times of Cleopatra by Carlo Maria Franzero, which, while it followed the conventional (Romanized) facts, could not help seeing Cleopatra as a siren, ‘deflowered, in the old custom’, on the altar of Amun-Ra.79 The film ran for nearly four hours and became, in a sense, the story of a domestic triangle – Caesar, Antony, Cleopatra – albeit on a colossal scale. The epics of the 1960s, no less than the SFX blockbusters of today, received huge hype ahead of the premiere and, as today, it was usually woefully over the top.
The epic scenes, like Cleopatra’s entry into Rome on a huge, slave-carried Sphinx, are dazzling in their glitter, but there is something predictable and laboured about them. Taylor’s make-up was straight out of the wall-paintings at Luxor, but critics even complained about that, preferring the chic 1930s fashions of designer Travis Banton in the DeMille version. The battle of Actium was surprisingly well done in an age before computer graphics.
What of the actors? As George MacDonald Fraser says in his Hollywood History of the World, the arrival of the cult of celebrity adds to the problem of authenticity. ‘They are not Antony and Caesar, they are Burton and Harrison.’80 And even more so, they are Taylor. Rex Harrison is surely too urbane and ‘modern’ for one of the greatest generals in history and although we know that Burton could probably have held his own drink for drink with Antony, he is too petulant and too intelligent at least for Plutarch’s thug. On the other hand, he handles the ennui after the Parthian campaign and after Actium very well. He does nothing and it is precisely that that infuriates us. We want to shake him and shout, ‘You are Mark Antony, for God’s sake! Pull yourself together!’ Roddy McDowall is chillingly creepy as the single-minded Octavian, but could the real man who would become the Emperor Augustus have been such a psychopath? Elizabeth Taylor had more costume-changes than anyone in the cast, to accentuate Cleopatra’s legendary wealth, but she was not merely a clotheshorse. She is endearing in the soft interchanges with both Caesar and Antony, imperious in command and genuinely, it seems, in love. She dies as nobly as Antony, proving that the Romans did not have a monopoly on courage.
The truth is that Cleopatra is a very difficult role to recreate, be it on stage or screen. Her sheer diversity defies belief and it all comes back to a question we have posed earlier – how could a woman cope against the male-dominated powers of the world, especially when that power was the greatest military machine in history?
As I write, a new Cleopatra is in the offing. Chat rooms have been abuzz since the summer of 2010 with Hollywood-generated gossip that Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Shiff’s Cleopatra: A Life has been bought up by producer Scott Rudin with a view to present yet another celluloid version. Plans for a 3D rock ’n’ roll musical based on Cleopatra by Steven Soderbergh appear to have died and in October, James ‘LA Confidential’ Cameron was in discussions to direct. By November that was ruled out but controversy has arisen because of the potential casting of the queen. The likely choice is Angelina Jolie, whom Sony’s production head Amy Pascal says was ‘born to play this role’.
But there is a problem. Essence magazine wrote in June, ‘Why does Hollywood think it’s even slightly plausible to cast white women in roles that would be more sensible to cast a black actress for? Especially when that role is an African queen.’ Essence has missed the point spectacularly. We shall discuss this more fully in the next chapter, but basically, Cleopatra was Greek. Being queen of Egypt does not remotely make her African in the accepted sense and the whole thing is a storm in a teacup. If we follow this thing logically, Spartacus would be played by a Bulgarian, Jesus by an Israeli and, of course, every Roman would be Italian. Caucasian American actors could not
start to compete for roles before the sixteenth century!
Stacy Schiff herself has produced an element of sanity by giving an interview to the Wall Street Journal in November: ‘If you need someone to project raw charisma and immense authority, I think [Angelina Jolie] is terrific. The interesting thing about Cleopatra is that she is such a shape-shifter ... throughout history we’ve moulded her to our times and our places.’
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FATALE MONSTRUM?
‘Moulded her to our times and our places.’ This is the fate of any great figure from history. However much we try, through scholarship and careful research, we can never truly get under the skin of Cleopatra because she is not of our time. Intellectual as she was, she could not read the words you are reading now because in her day there was no such language. The last 2,000 years with all its experiences, especially for women, have changed irrevocably anything Cleopatra knew.
Yet there are some constants. The rampant xenophobia and sexism of the Romans has not disappeared, however much the Politically Correct brigade might wish it otherwise and it is still possible to accept the Roman propaganda view of Cleopatra as fatale monstrum, an unnatural and deadly harpy whose claws drew the blood of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and the thousands of ordinary men who marched under her banner. As I write, the people of Alexandria are rioting in the streets, complaining about their government rather as their forebears snapped at the rule of the Ptolemies. Images on the television news of the mob clambering over the statue of Alexander the Great strikes a chord. The statue is relatively new, but the man and his age and his royal descendants take us back into the mists of time.
Cleopatra is rarely out of the news. She is the stock-in-trade of television documentary-makers, either in her own right or as part of a programme/series on Rome. High-profile archaeology has thrown its spotlight on her too. Serious underwater research has been going on since 1994 in the harbour of Alexandria, which Octavian’s Romans called Portus Magnus, the great port. A series of earthquakes since Cleopatra’s time, which may or may not have been accompanied by at least one tsunami in AD 365, have drowned the palaces of the Ptolemies. Land erosion and the rising of sea levels have added to the problem. Over the last fifteen years two parallel underwater projects have been going on led by Dr Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the supreme council of antiquities of Egypt, and Franck Goddio, a specialist undersea archaeologist. Their finds are extraordinary – huge blocks of sculpted stone that may have come from the Pharos lighthouse, life-size statues of pharaohs and gods, in Greek and Egyptian style, from the royal palaces, sheets of gold with Greek texts written on them. Isis and Osiris have been found lying in the silt, along with the bearded Serapis.
In May 2008, Zahi Hawass announced that he had found Cleopatra’s tomb. Land-based archaeology is being carried out in Alexandria and at Heraclion and Canopus along the coast, but Hawass’ Cleopatra site is at Taposiris Magna, 28 miles west of the queen’s capital. The underground chambers there have yielded many Cleopatra coins and busts which have her likeness. One 400-foot-long tunnel also has coins of Mark Antony. The only problem is that no bodies have come to light and without them the whole claim can be no more than conjecture. John Baines, Professor of Egyptology at Oxford University, warned that looking for royal tombs is a hopeless task and doubted very much that Octavian would have allowed the queen to be buried with Antony.81
The problem arises because we do not know exactly where the pair were buried or indeed if they were buried together. Cassius Dio says they were and from his texts and those of Plutarch it is clear that Cleopatra’s mausoleum, where she died, was in the palace area, presumably in Alexandria’s Beta district. We know that Octavian allowed their burial with full funeral rites, but this does not give us a site. Taposiris Magna is a full day’s ride (and two days on foot) from those palaces and the place, unlike Alexandria, has no particular resonance as a burial site of the Ptolemies.
Adrian Goldsworthy wrote in his recent book that he secretly hoped the tombs would never be found. ‘Neither Cleopatra nor Antony enjoyed much peace in their lives,’ he says, and ‘it would seem a shame if their remains ended up on display to crowds of tourists, or even examined, stored and catalogued in a museum basement.’82 Three lines earlier, however, the historian in him admits that any new discoveries would be of interest.
Enter another piece of speculation hyped by the media into spectacular fact. Two years ago, the BBC produced a documentary with the lurid (and woefully incorrect) title Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer and it focused on the archaeology of a tomb in Ephesus that was claimed to be that of Arsinoe, Cleopatra’s younger sister. The find itself was old hat (the tomb having been opened by archaeologists in 1926) but state-of-the-art research was only carried out in the three years prior to the programme. The Ephesus body was found in an octagonal-shaped tomb, which was very unusual, and the skeleton lay in a sarcophagus. The skull was measured and examined, but ended up in Nazi Germany during the Second World War and subsequently disappeared. In the early 1990s, Hike Thür of the Austrian Academy of Sciences re-entered the tomb and carried out extensive work on the remaining bones. Fabian Kranz worked on the body from 2007 and came to the following conclusions. The carbon dating process gave a date range of 200–220 BC, which fits Arsinoe, and the woman in question would have been between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. There was no sign of disease or that the girl had ever done hard manual work. That this could be the body of Arsinoe cannot be doubted, but there are more cons than pros in the evidence.
First, it was asserted that the octagonal tomb shape bears reference to the Pharos lighthouse with which Arsinoe was associated. The octagon was, in fact, the shape of only one tier of the lighthouse – the others were rectangular and circular – and there is no written reference linking Arsinoe with the Pharos at all. Secondly, all accounts agree that she was executed in or near the temple of Artemis, probably by Antony’s guards. We obviously do not know how this was done, but it seems unlikely that soldiers/hitmen would waste time with poison when they were carrying swords. There is no sign of violent trauma on the Ephesus body; sword thrusts or hacks could leave telltale cuts on the bones – there were none. Ages are notoriously difficult in body identification and we do not have any exact date of birth for Arsinoe, but all written records imply that she was four or five years younger than Cleopatra. That means that at the time of her death in 41, Arsinoe was twenty-three or twenty-four, not the teenager the skeletal remains suggest. Then there is the vexed question of the state of the body. Ephesus had been under Greek control for 200 years by 41 and the Greeks practised cremation of their dead. The Ptolemaic Egyptians, as we know, practised mummification. Why, then, has the body of Arsinoe undergone neither of these processes?
The most contentious theory, however, comes with the skull. It has gone, so we are relying on measurements taken in the 1920s, a time when archaeology was notoriously lacking in intellectual rigour, and the conclusion reached in the 2009 programme was that the skull was peculiarly elongated, which was an African practice. This means that Arsinoe was of mixed race. We know that her father was Ptolemy Auletes, a Greek, so her mother had to be African. Because she was Cleopatra’s sister, the theory runs, Cleopatra was black too. It is difficult to know where to start to unravel these leaps in logic. Elongated skulls are found in many cultures, including that of the Huns of Eastern Europe, the Slavs and Russians, the Incas and in Greece itself. Allowing that this is not a peculiarity of this particular body – perhaps hydrocephaly which distorts the skull was responsible – but a genetic trait, then it could well mean that ‘Arsinoe’s’ mother as well as her father was Greek. Then we have the further leap that Arsinoe and Cleopatra had the same mother. We do not know that. It is entirely possible that all Auletes’ children were by different women. All we can say is that the Ephesus body is that of a high-status young female, cause of death unknown, who was buried in the Octagon in the 200 years before the birth of Christ. Infuriatingly, it is as vague as that.
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In 2009 Egyptologist Dr Sally Ashton of Cambridge University compiled a computerized face of Cleopatra to help us understand what Chaucer’s ‘rose’ and Shakespeare’s ‘ribaudred nag’ actually looked like. The result is typical of all computer-generated images – it could be anybody. Factored into the computer program for this was every known image of Cleopatra, including Greek busts, Alexandrian coins and Egyptian bas-reliefs. Most contentious of all is the skin pigmentation. None of the artefacts mentioned can help us with that and no contemporary comments on it. Deep down, we want Cleopatra to be dark-skinned and sultry, because it fits with all our prejudices and preconceptions. An auburn-haired, poppy-eyed Greek woman with a hooked nose and hard mouth does not equate with the siren who challenged an empire and destroyed her own.
It has taken a long time for the world to escape the cultural shackles of the Roman historians. Shakespeare didn’t even try. Not until 1838 was there a book about Cleopatra written by a woman. Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns was written in that year by Anna Brownell Jameson. The purpose of the book was to ‘present in a small compass ... an idea of the influence which a female government has had generally on men and nations and of the influence which the possession of power has had individually on the female character’,83 but the author admits that she sometimes breaks the rules of biography by going for the moral or picturesque. In the case of morality, of course, she was doing no more than Plutarch in his Parallel Lives but the moral high ground had changed somewhat in 1,800 years. For example, she finds it absurd that victories are always called ‘glorious’ and is appalled that the sheer brutality of history is far more horrific than ‘any of the banished superstitions and goblins of the nursery’.