Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  Hume Cronyn on the beach at Children’s Bay Cay, with two friends

  Josie was just beginning—her life, her career, her married life and building a family. But for Joe, watching and squinting into the sun as she took the vows, he had no way of knowing that at the age of fifty his own final act was about to begin. The seeds had been planted years earlier, but he would soon be embarked on the project that, if it didn’t exactly kill him, so drained him of energy and life force that he never contested the fact that he was a very different man at the end than at the beginning. The saddest aspect of the whole sorry affair was that it took him so long to realize that he might well have been on his way to being a better one.

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  —

  Joe had never liked the sun, the beach, vacations of any kind—but he was starting to understand why people loved the Bahamas so much. He had been down at Children’s Bay Cay, the Bahamian retreat of actor Hume Cronyn for several weeks—Joe had first worked with the intelligent actor on People Will Talk—and he really did see the appeal. The rhythm of beach, work, pool, work, lunch, nap, work, had been successful—and he was enormously pleased that he was getting on so well with Jeanne Vanderbilt, the woman he’d brought along for the stay. Since Rosa’s death, there had been a series of women, none all that serious, and he didn’t think Jeanne, heiress to an enormous fortune, would last either (he was right). Still, Joe appreciated the ease they had around each other, and he was quietly excited about his new project: an ambitious adaptation of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. With four novels in all to adapt, Joe had written the equivalent of four screenplays, six hundred pages, and shown them to Durrell, who, according to Joe, had looked at him in amazement and said, “I really never thought anybody could do this.” Joe felt the work was maybe the best of his career; the script demonstrated Joe’s ability to look at things from several different points of view; as with many of his films, it would be structured around several narrators’ different accounts, and would in all tell a complete tale set during World War II with heavy mediations on memory and time, two things Joe loved to think and talk about.

  Taylor insisted Joe was the one man for the job.

  Joe on Cleopatra, 1961–62

  Spending afternoons sipping drinks by the pool with Hume, with Jeanne and Hume’s wife, Jessica Tandy, languidly swimming laps, Joe was content with the work, and eager to move on to preproduction and casting. One of the challenges, though, was that his producer on the picture, Walter Wanger, was beset by headaches on another film, the almost comically catastrophic Cleopatra, which Fox had started a few months back and which was generating stories of tremendous cost overruns and egos run amok. Joe was grateful that it wasn’t his problem. He remembered one of his favorite lines of Herman’s, that some of the films he’d worked on were so bad that “one should stay at least four city blocks away from where they are playing in case a sudden rain should drive you into the theater.”

  Joe’s inimitable directing style, on Cleopatra

  That’s when the phone rang.

  The story of the making of Cleopatra, like the stories of the Edsel, New Coke, or Apple’s Newton computer, is a rich and complicated parable for American ambition and folly in the twentieth century. But for Joe Mankiewicz, the decision to take on the doomed project, into which Fox had already poured more than $5 million by the time he was asked to salvage the movie in January 1961, was a simple one which came down, in the end, to money. Joe was offered more than he’d ever earned in his life—“fuck-you” money, Chris called it. Throughout his entire career, he’d earned a weekly salary, even when he ran his own production company. But the production of Cleopatra, which Fox had begun two years earlier and by the time of Josie’s wedding to Peter Davis was well under way, with Elizabeth Taylor announced as the queen of the Nile amid a fanfare of publicity, was so important to Twentieth Century–Fox and its mercurial head Spyros Skouras, that Joe’s agent Charlie Feldman was able to negotiate an almost unheard-of payment for Joe when he was offered to take over the directing duties from Rouben Mamoulian. Eager to get going on the Alexandria Quartet, Joe initially turned the project down. (“Why would I want to make Cleopatra? I wouldn’t even go see Cleopatra.”) But Liz Taylor, who had been impressed with Joe on Suddenly, Last Summer and was the world’s biggest movie star, insisted that Joe was the only man who could bring shape to the material, and so Joe was summoned to New York from the Bahamas, and over lunch at the Colony, Skouras made his plea—and opened his checkbook: “Joe, I know you like the Riviera. Is there a house in particular you want? I hear you like yachts…” Persistence paid off, and Fox gave in to Feldman’s demands. First, Fox bought his production company Figaro for the almost unheard of price of $3 million, equivalent to more than $25 million today. Joe would be so flabbergasted and exhilarated by the windfall that when his nephew Don’s eight-year-old son John visited him in New York, Joe, after touring the young boy around the town house and thrilling him with a ride in its elevator, opened his desk drawer and showed the boy an actual check for a million dollars.

  Joe with producer Walter Wanger (left) and Art Buchwald (right) during the filming of Cleopatra

  Joe had proved with the adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that he knew his way around antiquity, and the more he considered the material, with its psychologically complex heroine and its central male relationship between the proud and brilliant leader Julius Caesar and his ambitious successor Marc Antony (Herman, Joe; Margo, Eve; would it never end?), the more it appealed to his sensibilities. Even though the production was troubled, there was no script, the existing footage Mamoulian had shot (which would have accounted for about twelve minutes of screen time) struck Joe as wooden and unusable, two of the three central roles had to be recast (Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd, the original Caesar and Antony, were no longer available), the sets looked garish and cheap, and there would not be nearly enough time to rewrite the script to his satisfaction, Joe said yes. As his agent said, “Hold your nose for fifteen weeks and get it over with.”

  Joe with the double-headed hydra: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

  In the end, Cleopatra took more than two years of Joe’s life. It taxed his energy in a way that no film ever had, drastically affected his confidence, and effectively finished him off as a major director. The reaction to the film among critics was perversely, delightedly antagonistic. In my household, as I was growing up, Cleopatra was considered an almost gleefully epic disaster, and it was almost gospel that just as Citizen Kane was the best movie ever, Cleopatra was likely the worst. But an actual accounting of what went on from that fateful day in January 1961 when Joe agreed to do the film to the feeling he had going to the premiere in June of 1963 of “being carted to the guillotine in a tumbrel” (a feeling of course that does not come through in footage and photos of the event, where Joe is his customary grinning self), reveals that in some ways Joe Mankiewicz never did better work in his life. Given that the film was, as Joe later said, “conceived in a state of emergency, shot in confusion, and wound up in a blind panic,” he had nothing to be ashamed of.

  To begin with, that Joe came to a movie that was already under way proved far more complicated than if he’d taken on a new assignment, no matter how huge. The list of challenges that Joe would face was long, many of them due to Fox head Spyros Skouras’s bizarre management style, where some decisions would be agonized over for months, and others made so hastily, as if the world depended on a yes-or-no answer by noon, that the end result was almost invariably penny-wise, pound-foolish. Elizabeth Taylor was getting a notoriously high salary of $50,000 a week,*3 and Spyros insisted that Joe start shooting before the revised script had even been completed, a decision that in the end cost the studio far more money than if they had just taken three months off and allowed Joe the time he needed to finish the complicated script, which was a nearly complete overhaul of the original.*4 In
addition, Spyros had decided to take advantage of tax incentives and shoot the entire movie in England, which made no sense, given that the notoriously wet and un-Rome-like British weather made shooting outside, where the set designers had spent more than $1 million building a replica of the Roman Forum and Colosseum, virtually impossible. As a result, when Joe took over, the entire production had to be moved to Rome—the sets rebuilt from scratch, another cost overrun, this one in the millions, that would ultimately be used to tar Joe’s reputation, but which was not his doing.

  Tom Mankiewicz celebrates his twentieth birthday on the set of Cleopatra with his father.

  Worst of all, there was the double-headed hydra Liz-and-Dick, which became the most notorious love affair in the world and completely overshadowed the production. Taylor was more than merely a huge star by the time the film began shooting—she was a public personality and a massive celebrity. She was also such a notorious home wrecker, having “stolen” current husband Eddie Fisher away from her dear friend Debbie Reynolds (America’s sweetheart, who had helped Liz through her own unhappy time after the death of her third husband Mike Todd in a plane crash), that even the official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore della Domenica, had denounced her “erotic vagrancy.” Now, with the international press swarming, ElizabethTaylor seemed to be wrecking Richard Burton’s marriage as well, and if not for a series of bizarre illnesses that would tilt public sympathy in her favor (and may well have been botched suicide attempts), she would have been even more reviled than before. But Burton, who initially saw Taylor as no more than another notch in his happy Welshman’s belt of sexual conquests (“Gentlemen,” Burton announced one day as he bounded into the men’s makeup trailer, “I’ve just fucked Elizabeth Taylor in the back of my Cadillac!”), was stunned by his costar’s notoriety. He found the mountain of press scrutiny so enormous that he was heard to remark, “It’s like fucking Khrushchev! How did I know the woman was so famous!”

  Through it all, Joe kept his equilibrium, though his health began to break down. Stress caused his psoriasis to flare into such a serious dermatological disorder that the skin on his hands cracked open, forcing him to wear the thin white film cutter’s gloves both on the set and at night, as he struggled to write the script in longhand and stay ahead of the work he was doing each day. His humor never wavered, though. When one Italian newspaper reported that the Taylor-Burton affair was a sham Joe had concocted to cover up the real romance, which was between Taylor and himself, Joe responded with a press release of his own: “The real story is that I’m in love with Richard Burton, and Elizabeth Taylor is the cover-up for us.”

  In time, as Tom, who took a year off from Yale to work on the film, told me, “the picture nearly killed Dad.” The almost impossibly taxing task of directing by day and writing by night, a regimen Joe was forced into adhering to for months, was so draining that by the end he required daily vitamin B12 shots to keep going. When one shot missed its mark and hit his sciatic nerve, Joe was barely able to walk. For thirteen months, he got only two or three hours of sleep a night, and Hume Cronyn remembers thinking, “One day, he will die.” But he didn’t, and the production rolled along, costing nearly $60 million in the end, equivalent to more than half a billion dollars in 2021, more money than any movie before or since.*5 The waste, though, was hardly Joe’s fault; the decision to shoot in Italy had opened the door for the kind of graft for which the nation was famous.*6 It became impossible to stay on top of the numbers. “If you wanted to buy some new dinnerware or a set of glasses for your house,” Tom said later, “it was the easiest thing to put it on the budget of Cleopatra.” Years later, Elizabeth Taylor, who was herself responsible for further waste in insisting that chili be shipped to Rome from Chasen’s in Hollywood, was horrified when she saw the official studio accounting, which indicated that $100,000 had been spent on paper cups.

  Other expenses were equally questionable. A massive replica of Alexandria had been built on the beach at Torre Astura, sixty miles from Rome and just ten minutes south of Anzio, where the Allies had made their successful amphibious landing in January 1944 in World War II. It wasn’t till after the set had been built that anyone realized the harbor, where the film’s Roman ships would be seen in the film, was still laced with live mines left over from the war. A costly “mine-dredging” expenditure was soon added to Cleopatra’s ledger. Making matters worse, the Alexandria set was not far from a NATO firing range, so filming would have to be confined to times, as producer Walter Wanger wrote in his diary, “when the big guns are not blasting.”

  Further delays were strictly the cause of Elizabeth Taylor, who was routinely late to the set and often kept everyone waiting for hours. What’s more, as she felt she was playing the most beautiful woman in history, she wanted to look her best, so her contract stipulated that she was unable to shoot during her menstrual period. (Still, as Joe joked to Tom, no one knew when the contract was drawn up that the woman would wind up having three or four periods a month.)

  Nor was the end of production even remotely the end of Joe’s headaches. In June 1962, the Fox board of directors, more than a little alarmed by Cleopatra’s skyrocketing costs, forced Spyros Skouras out as head of the studio. In his place, they brought back Darryl Zanuck.

  Zanuck, Zanuck, Zanuck! What are you two—lovers?

  —All About Eve

  Like most of his intense relationships, Joe’s connection to Zanuck had been filled with both love and hate. In fact, his greatest success had come when he was working with Zanuck. It was Zanuck who had fixed “A Letter to Four Wives” by eliminating one of the wives, and Zanuck who had ridden herd over Joe as he edited All About Eve.*7 (It was also Zanuck, Joe later liked to remind interviewers, who had urged Joe to cast Tallulah Bankhead as Margo Channing and Jeanne Crain as Eve, and who was dead set against casting Marilyn Monroe.) When Zanuck took over Fox from Skouras, Joe was relieved. At least now someone with a firm hand would be at the tiller, who knew how movies were made and what would make this one work. Gone would be the guesswork that had dominated the first part of the production.

  But on one point Joe and Zanuck would never agree. In Joe’s mind, the best way to salvage the film would be to do it as two separate movies, the first to focus on Caesar and Cleopatra, the second on Antony and Cleopatra. Joe had modeled his vision to some extent on Shaw’s and Shakespeare’s plays*8—and in his view, two three-hour movies would have been perfect. But Zanuck was as adamant as Skouras had been on this point: he would hear none of it. First of all, he felt that no one would pay to see the film twice, and more than that, given the worldwide publicity over Taylor and Burton’s affair, it made no sense to do Caesar and Cleopatra first, since Mark Antony was barely in it—and, as Spyros had asked, who wanted to see Elizabeth Taylor make love to Rex Harrison for a whole movie?

  Finally, on October 13, 1962, Joe screened his first cut for Zanuck in Paris, where Zanuck had his base of operations: a five-hour-and-twenty-minute version that Joe hoped would convince Zanuck of the wisdom of dividing the film in half and charging separate admissions for each. Instead, Zanuck’s only response to the screening was to tell Joe at the end, “If any woman behaved toward me the way Cleopatra treated Antony, I’d cut her balls off.” Joe fired back, “The picture isn’t about you, Darryl,” and the two men parted. The next day, Joe and Zanuck were scheduled to meet to discuss the cut. Zanuck cancelled the meeting. Less than two weeks later, Joe read in the trades that “after spending two years and $35 million of Twentieth Century–Fox shareholders’ money,” Joe Mankiewicz had earned a “well-deserved rest.” Zanuck had fired him.

  “One of Tom’s cherished possessions”

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  One of Tom Mankiewicz’s cherished possessions as a young man was a gift he’d received after working on his father’s epic: a gold coin, mocked up on one side to look like an ancient Roman artifact, with bas relief profiles of the rea
l Marc Antony and Cleopatra staring imperiously to the left—Antony is characteristically behind Cleopatra, whose visage dominates, complete with royal crown and proud nose. On the other side was a simple engraving curved around the outside rim: FROM ELIZABETH AND RICHARD—1962—“CLEOPATRA”—and best of all, in the center, one word: TOM. In the years after the film, Tom would bring out the coin and marvel at it, not merely for the craftsmanship with which an actual Roman coin had been replicated, but for what it meant about Hollywood. Tom felt that Burton and Taylor had liked him, but he was under no illusions—they had given out more than two hundred of these coins to members of the crew and cast. And yes, it was certainly a generous act, and he couldn’t help feeling warmed by the gesture. The cast and crew of that monumental film had been through a lot because of the notoriety of the stars, and it was fitting and right, almost by way of apology, that the two had given such a thoughtful token to all involved. But what struck Tom when he thought of it later was just how much power the coin seemed to have. When he would show it to college friends, even the jaded Yalies would marvel at the almost religious nature of the artifact. Movie stars were like emperors and queens and kings themselves now (“All the religions in the world rolled into one,” Margo Channing had said, “and we’re Gods and Goddesses…”); their mere replications on a coin carried with it tremendous significance.