The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice

by M. G. Lord

  A few months after the film came out, when Vidal was stopped for speeding on New York’s Taconic State Parkway, he learned just how baffling some viewers had found the ending. “The policeman recognized me and said, ‘I just saw that movie you wrote. Was that guy a faggot?’ ” Vidal recalls. “I said, ‘I think he was, yeah.’ ” And the policeman was exultant—because he had figured this out and his wife hadn’t.

  Some of the film’s murkiness, however, was not in the script but in the direction. Under the spell of Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman (one of whose characters famously plays chess with Death), Joseph L. Mankiewicz peppered Suddenly, Last Summer with enigmatic symbols. After viewing the climactic montage, Spiegel began calling him “Ingmar Mankiewicz.”

  In the fall of 1959, Spiegel submitted a finished version of the film to the Production Code Administration Appeals Board. “The story admittedly deals with an [sic] homosexual, but one who pays for his sin with his life,” Spiegel argued. And “there should be no offense on religious grounds because the mother and son are obviously psychopaths.”

  Things had changed at the Production Code Administration since Stevens’s scuffle over A Place in the Sun. In 1954, Joseph Breen retired as chief enforcer. He was replaced by Geoffrey Shurlock, his former assistant. Unlike Breen, who had kept apart from Hollywood, Shurlock seemed to enjoy Spiegel’s company. On November 16, 1959, Shurlock wrote to Spiegel: “I don’t need to tell you what a treat it is for us to meet you under all circumstances, and even in the melee of an appeals hearing.” Shurlock also enjoyed what appears to have been a bribe: “I must thank you again for getting me in to that magnificent performance of ‘Figaro’ at the Metropolitan.”

  Whether by dint of persuasion or payoff, Spiegel prevailed at the hearing. Both the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency approved the film. Unfortunately, the critics did not. In an emblematic review, Variety called it “the most bizarre film ever made by any major American company.”

  At first, Vidal recalls, Spiegel was “furious about how terrible the reviews were and he blamed me. He said, ‘You ruined it, you ruined it.’ I said, ‘I have not. Those reviews will make it the most successful movie of your career, even more than the dreadful Bridge on the River Kwai.’ ” And as is so often the case, Vidal was right.

  Columbia’s cunning publicity campaign also helped. Its ads managed to be both smug and titillating. They showed Taylor in that notorious see-through swimsuit with the caption: “Cathy knew she was being used for evil.” In this context, of course, “evil” meant “procuring.” When you view the film today, however, only one true evil leaps out: the willingness of some male doctors to maim a healthy woman for money.

  When Suddenly, Last Summer wrapped, Taylor still owed MGM one last movie. She fought to be released from her contract, but the studio fought harder. She had to accept the film it imposed: BUtterfield 8. Seething with resentment—and determined to slow the production—Taylor struggled against the role of Gloria Wandrous. At some point, however, she stopped resisting. She embraced Gloria, making her bigger and more memorable than the small-minded plot in which both Gloria—and Taylor—were stuck. She made Gloria what in the 1980s would be termed a “sex-positive” feminist.

  9

  BUtterfield 8, 1960

  Now I get it—you pick the man. He doesn’t pick you.

  —Laurence Harvey as Weston Liggett to Elizabeth Taylor as Gloria Wandrous in BUtterfield 8. (Liggett made this observation after Wandrous plunged her stiletto heel into his instep.)

  There should be developed in this story an attitude of compassion for Gloria, not one of glorification. The story should seem to indicate that she might have been a great woman if it were not for the fact that she was a sick one.

  —E. G. Dougherty, Production Code Administration memo, October 16, 1959

  POOR GLORIA WANDROUS. She was born—or invented—before society was ready for her. Gloria is the central character in BUtterfield 8, John O’Hara’s 1935 novel, as well as Daniel Mann’s 1960 movie of the same name.

  Gloria may be Elizabeth Taylor’s most magnificent character, as well as her most feminist. But to appreciate Gloria, one must view her through the lens of today. On a contemporary university campus, Gloria would be an archetypal coed. But in 1935—and even in 1960—she was an object of scorn. Gloria is in touch with her sexual feelings and chooses to satisfy them, as do “nice” girls in today’s culture of “hookups,” liaisons that don’t necessarily lead to marriage. Young women who “hook up” don’t view this as an alternative to marriage; most still seek that institution’s prestige and tax advantages. But they wisely realize that not all attractions last forever. In the twenty-first century, Gloria’s behavior seems both prudent and clear-eyed. But in 1959, the Production Code Administration called it “nymphomaniac.”

  In her essay “Lusting for Freedom,” feminist Rebecca Walker emphasizes the value of sexual experimentation to the emotional health of young women—as a stepping stone to forging enduring relationships. Almost more important than the sex itself is the permission to engage in it. Walker disparages “sex where our agency is denied”—sex divorced from female desire—and the institutions that condemn women for pursuing pleasure. “For giving bodies what they want and crave, for exploring ourselves and others, we are punished like Eve reaching for more knowledge,” she writes. “We are called sluts and whores. We are considered impure and psychotic.”

  The term “pro-sex feminist” arose during the early 1980s, when some feminists aligned with social conservatives to fight pornography. In this debate, the feminists who championed the First Amendment—and dared to consider pleasure a woman’s right—were called “pro-sex” or “sex-positive.” Writer Ellen Willis explains: “Confronted with a right-wing backlash bent on reversing social acceptance of non-marital, non-procreative sex, feminists like me, who saw sexual liberalism as deeply flawed by sexism but nonetheless a source of crucial gains for women, found themselves at odds with feminists who dismissed the sexual revolution as monolithically sexist and shared many of the attitudes of conservative moralists.” Gloria would likely have shared Willis’s views.

  At the beginning of BUtterfield 8, Gloria wakes up alone, in the rumpled bed of Weston Liggett, portrayed by Laurence Harvey, a man she met mere hours earlier. The camera zooms in on her left hand, conspicuously unencumbered by a wedding ring. Gloria is a tiny bit hungover, which is also something young women today are permitted to be. The Production Code Administration, however, referred to occasional overindulgences by women as “alcoholic.” (Spencer Tracy’s character in Father of the Bride routinely drank until he passed out, but the Production Code folk never branded him with the A-word.)

  The movie version of BUtterfield 8 divides into two clear sections: an opening movement based on O’Hara’s book, and a closing movement shaped by the Production Code Administration. In section one, Gloria is a beacon of female sexuality and power. She boldly defies marital convention and rejects men who repel her, no matter how much money they offer. She will not be rented like a prostitute or owned like a chattel—or like a wife, for that matter. In the fancy Manhattan apartment of Liggett, who is married to another woman, Gloria finds a note that says, “$250.00. Enough?” And assuming that the money is for her, not for the dress that he ripped, she declares her independence, scrawling “No Sale” in lipstick on an ornate mirror.

  Equally memorable, in a later scene, Gloria makes clear to Liggett that she desires him, not his wallet. “Put your assets away,” she scoffs. “You couldn’t match what I’ve already turned down.” When he interprets this as a negotiating ploy, she impales his foot with her spike heel—an image of such startling female strength that I gasped when I first saw it. The scene was recorded in one long shot. Harvey’s fluid face captures Liggett’s confusion. He is at first aroused, then aghast. If Gloria picks partners based on her own desire, he wonders, does she then drop them when she pleases? “Without a parachute,” she smirks.

 
; Gloria is quick-witted and verbal. After swimming to consciousness in Liggett’s bedroom—then borrowing his wife’s mink coat because Liggett had destroyed her dress—she heads to the Greenwich Village apartment of her childhood buddy, Steve, lamely portrayed by Eddie Fisher. “Sunday morning and Scotch on your breath?” Steve says. “Well, it’s good Scotch,” Gloria rejoins.

  Out of respect for her mother, with whom she lives, Gloria refuses to return home naked under an expensive fur. Her mother works hard to ignore Gloria’s idiosyncrasies, but this might be too much to overlook. She asks Steve for help. “I’m all she has,” Gloria tells him, referring to her mother. “So we have to lie to each other.”

  Reluctantly, Steve’s girlfriend, Norma, lends Gloria a suit, snidely remarking that it “shocks easily.” Norma is a tedious, self-righteous blonde—Debbie Reynolds without the talent. Of course Gloria gets the better of Norma in their exchange. But the problem is, Gloria permits Norma to frame the conversation with her bourgeois notions of morality. Had Gloria come of age in the 1990s, she might have critiqued those notions, as well as the lack of self-consciousness with which Norma embraces them.

  In part one of BUtterfield 8, Gloria is so out-of-step with society that she seems like a time traveler from the future—a visitor from the 1980s or early ’90s, when academic theories of gender explored the social construction of heterosexuality. During these years, a new discipline—queer studies—emerged at universities. This discipline looked at groups that had been marginalized by their sexuality: gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people. It embraced prostitutes as “sex workers,” who exposed the tacit economic transactions of heterosexuality. Before this line of thinking, even a suffragist like Rebecca West (1882–1983), who defined “feminist” as an antonym of “doormat” and defiantly bore an out-of-wedlock child, was dismissive of female sex workers. West resisted looking at the ways in which their transactions with straight men might be more honest than the identical but veiled transactions within a heterosexual marriage.

  I can imagine a latter-day Gloria contributing to an anthology such as Jill Nagle’s Whores and Other Feminists, a groundbreaking 1994 collection of scholarship from the intersection of queer studies and feminism. I envision Gloria defiant, explaining to Norma that what Norma calls “moral” is simply the oppressive “norm of white procreative heterosexuality.”

  I picture Gloria using words like those of contributor Eva Pendleton, a professional prostitute who at the time of publication was earning a Ph.D. in American studies at New York University: “Heterosexuality as a social system depends upon the specter of unchastity in order to constitute itself. The ‘good wife’ as a social category cannot exist without the ‘whore’… Each of these othered positions exists to reinforce the norm of white procreative heterosexuality.”

  Norma’s priggishness, Gloria might also have added, probably has less to do with principles than with paranoia about social class. As filmmaker and pornography scholar Laura Kipnis wrote, notions of “propriety” and “bad taste” arose during the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, which codified rigid rules as a way to “separate themselves from the noisy lower orders.” Because their social positions are inherited, aristocrats can be indifferent to such rules. And Bohemians define themselves in contrast to the rules, pour épater la bourgeoisie, as the saying goes.

  In BUtterfield 8, although Steve means well, he is too dim and conformist to be a useful friend to Gloria. He clings to a galling 1950s misconception: parents who deviate from traditional gender roles will inevitably warp their kids. Steve explains this to Norma: when Gloria was a little girl, her father died and her mother went to work—so of course Gloria turned out badly. Such propaganda dominated mid-twentieth-century pop culture, reaching its apotheosis in Rebel Without a Cause, when James Dean’s character has no choice but to fall in with a delinquent crowd. He once saw his dad wearing an apron.

  Gloria did, in fact, suffer as a teenager, but not because her mother worked. When Mrs. Wandrous tried to return to a traditional housewife role, the man to whom she was engaged molested Gloria. Gloria enjoyed the sensations but felt sullied by them—a conflict common to abuse victims and one that psychotherapists often successfully treat. Gloria’s Freudian analyst, however, never addressed Gloria’s problems, but this wasn’t entirely his fault. The Production Code forbade him from improving her mental health. For BUtterfield 8 to obtain its seal of approval, Gloria had to be portrayed as “sick,” E. G. Dougherty, a Code official, told Pandro S. Berman, the film’s producer.

  The revelation of abuse opens the film’s unfortunate second section. Abruptly, Gloria becomes infected by patriarchy—or, in the vernacular of the 1950s, “respectability.” She begins second-guessing everything that is clean and noble and strong inside her. She starts saying things like, “By some miracle, I’m like everybody else. I’m in love.” Mann must have found this line as comical as I did. When she says it, he frames her head with a plate on the wall, so that she appears to have a halo.

  “I was the slut of all time,” she blurts to her mother, who slaps her—which I myself would have done, though for a different reason: words like “whore” and “slut” are merely the flip side of “good wife.” They imply that a woman cannot own her own body. She exists only in relationship to men.

  Liggett does not love his wife. But thanks to the Production Code Office, he has sanctimonious friends who try to make him feel bad about this. “You married a lovely woman and you blame her for the life you lead,” one tells him. On the other hand, because Liggett’s wife, Emily, refuses to live in the same city with him, even the censors realized that she might have had a hand in their estrangement. In August 1959, before filming began, E. G. Dougherty demanded that Emily be “re-written so as to eliminate what now appears to be a social, if not moral, justification for Liggett to look elsewhere for his love life.”

  No amount of revision could make Geoffrey Shurlock like the script. “Liggett appears to have no recognition whatever of the immorality of his adultery, and its relationship to his marriage,” he grumbled. In the novel, this is, of course, the point. Liggett has not enjoyed sex with his wife since before they were married. Soon after the wedding, Emily’s closest childhood friend seduced him. “From that moment on,” O’Hara writes, “he never loved Emily again.” This occurred long before he met Gloria.

  O’Hara’s novel is less a character study than a mural—a seamy, sprawling portrait of New York City during the Great Depression. None of his characters represents good or evil; they are just flawed people muddling through an imperfect world. The Gloria that he created was not an avatar of sex-positive feminism; she was a victim of her economic circumstances. Taylor brought a modern sensibility to Gloria, making her more compelling—and seemingly self-aware—than she was originally drawn.

  Once Gloria succumbs to conventionality, the vital, animated woman in part one ceases to exist. She might as well be dead; and soon she actually is. In the novel, while fleeing from Liggett, she falls (or jumps) from a steamer bound for Boston. In the film, she crashes her convertible.

  Taylor did not want to play Gloria—because of Gloria’s bad-girl behavior, she told the press. And at least one person believed her. “MGM must have thought the image was perfect—Elizabeth Taylor as a whore and homewrecker,” Fisher wrote in his memoir “They wouldn’t let her work on Cleopatra or anything else until she made the picture.”

  Therein, of course, lies her real motivation. Taylor’s standard fee from MGM was $125,000 per movie. Producer Walter Wanger offered her $1 million to portray Cleopatra. “The trouble had nothing to do with the fact that Gloria was a call girl,” Pandro S. Berman told Brenda Maddox. Taylor simply wanted more money.

  Unable to break the contract, Taylor lobbied without success for a stronger script. The screenplay’s flaws, however, were not literary but ideological. O’Hara’s novel had critiqued the society that destroyed Gloria. But Dougherty and Shurlock, who had final say over the movie, viewed Gl
oria’s rebellion as the problem and punishment as the solution.

  After viewing the finished picture, Fisher called it “trash,” which was certainly true of his part in it. In a charitable appraisal, the Saturday Review called Fisher “a non-actor, much as certain successful books have been called non-books.” The Harvard Lampoon named him Worst Actor of the Year.

  Taylor never forgave MGM for delaying her work on Cleopatra. She expressed her anger at the studio after seeing a rough cut of BUtterfield 8. Before arriving at MGM to watch it, she and Fisher dined at Trader Vic’s, a Beverly Hills restaurant known for its potent cocktails. The couple brought two big cups of Scorpions—a blend of rum, brandy, and citrus juices—to sip during the screening. When the lights came up afterward, Taylor hurled her drink at the screen. Then she lurched to the office of Sol Siegel, MGM’s head of production, and scrawled “No Sale!” in lipstick on his door. Moviegoers, however, did not share her opinion. BUtterfield 8 became a sensation, earning Taylor both $15 million and her first Academy Award.

  For no reason besides coincidence, 1960 was a big year for prostitutes in the movies. Never on Sunday (a Greek film set in Piraeus) and The World of Suzie Wong (an English film set in Hong Kong) also explored the theme. The Production Code Administration had no authority over foreign films, which was fortunate because Shurlock hated these two. In a letter defending BUtterfield 8 as a “moral story,” he railed against the idea of prostitution being treated “sentimentally,” as in Suzie Wong or, worse, “gaily,” as in Never on Sunday.

  In BUtterfield 8, thanks to the hard work of his office, “sin” looks “exactly the way it should, repulsive and degrading.” And Gloria gets what a sinner deserves: “The girl is conscious of her wrongdoing, bemoans her weakness, berates herself to her mother and to her young musician boy friend; and, at the end, in an attempt to flee from falling back into evil, she has an accident and is killed.”