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

by M. G. Lord

  When Warner Brothers submitted Lehman’s script to Shurlock’s office, it got back a five-page list of words and phrases that needed to be cut. They included “goddam,” “screw you,” “bugger,” “plowing pertinent wives,” “hump the hostess,” and “mount her like a goddam dog.” Most of this language has remained in the finished picture. Warner Brothers appealed Shurlock’s decision to the Motion Picture Association of America Production Code Review Board—the same group that Sam Spiegel had petitioned in 1959 with Suddenly, Last Summer. This time, however, the review board didn’t just rubber stamp the film. It concocted a new way of handling “mature” subject matter: refusing theater admission to people under eighteen years of age.

  Meanwhile, the Legion of Decency—which by 1966 had rechristened itself the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures—recoiled from imposing an unpopular directive on the Church’s increasingly rebellious flock. Instead, it recruited eighty-one volunteers—college-educated Catholics who liked movies—to determine what it should do about the film. Most thought Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had redeeming artistic value, though a minority could not get beyond its language. “The only possible favorable comment I can make is that the actors ably depict the varying moods of drunken persons,” a dissenter observed.

  Having discerned which way the wind was blowing, the Church signed off on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Mature adults, it felt, could handle the material—as long as such adults first asked the Church permission to be allowed to handle it.

  The verdict came as a relief to Nichols. “Disguising profanity with clean but suggestive phrases is really dirtier,” he told an interviewer. “It reminds me of an old Gary Cooper movie when somebody said, ‘He’s so poor he hasn’t got a pot to put flowers in.’ Everybody in the audience got what was intended: echoes of wild talk, it seems to me, are deliberately titillating.”

  Lehman, too, was relieved. His experience adapting Virginia Woolf was a far cry from the one he had had with the previous play he brought from Broadway to the screen: The Sound of Music.

  Many people have favorite scenes in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Mine embodies what I like most about the movie—its dark comedy, its zany yet resonant non sequiturs. The scene occurs near the end of the film, after Martha consummated her attraction to Nick. She sits alone on the front porch. George has momentarily vanished. Nick returns from a successful search for his missing wife, Honey. When he last saw her, hours earlier, she had been retching in the bathroom. He wishes his search had failed.

  “My wife’s in the can with a liquor bottle and she winks at me,” Nick, stunned, tells Martha. “She’s lying down on the floor on the tiles all curled up. And she starts peeling the label on the liquor bottle, the brandy bottle—”

  With a look of genuine concern, Martha cuts him off. Even on a night like this, she has not forgotten how to be a hostess: “Maybe she’d be more comfortable in the tub,” she suggests.

  At first I thought this line was the funniest in the film, because Taylor plays it sweetly, rather than for laughs. But it may, in fact, be the saddest—far more wrenching than Martha’s later breakdown, her frank admission of her fears.

  Being a good hostess is all that Martha has in her life—all she has ever allowed herself to have. She is the daughter of an educated man. A handmaiden to educated men. A woman who has never questioned the primacy of educated men or their arid left-brain values.

  In this instant, though, something stirs in the withered right hemisphere of Martha’s brain. Something empathetic. Something that may one day deliver her from the self-imposed combat zone where she and George currently reside.

  15

  1967–1973

  IF I LOVE LUCY had been written in iambic pentameter—and lit without shadows, as if it were an Italian Renaissance painting—it would resemble the Burtons’ 1967 version of The Taming of the Shrew. The film is packed with physical comedy—pratfalls—and domestic skirmishes worthy of professional wrestling. Its most essential element, of course, is its feminist spin, which is in large part conveyed visually. Franco Zeffirelli, the film’s director, achieves this by having his actors behave in a way that contradicts what they are saying.

  Most people know Shakespeare’s play; it’s a staple of high school English classes. They may not recall pretty Bianca or her schoolmaster beau, but they remember Katerina, the so-called shrew (aka “bonny Kate” and “Kate the curst”), and Petruchio, the blustering fortune hunter who allegedly tames her. They also remember Kate’s capitulation speech near the end of the play. This speech—and whether it is delivered with irony or in earnest—determines the meaning of the entire play.

  The Burtons originated the project and brought on Zeffirelli, primarily an opera director, to create its look. He built the town of Padua, where the play is set, inside the Dino De Laurentiis studios, about twenty miles south of Rome. To achieve the absence of shadows, the production team had to “skirt every pan”—which is to say, hang a cloth around each overhead light, to diffuse the illumination and thus eliminate patches of shade. (Burton enlisted Richard McWhorter, who had produced The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, as production manager; McWhorter himself saw to the labor-intensive details.)

  Depending upon how it’s acted, the play can tell different stories. It can be about two harsh people who soften because they fall in love. Or it can be about a thug who brutalizes a woman into submission.

  In the Burtons’ version, Kate and Petruchio fall in love. Taylor delivers Kate’s famous capitulation speech without irony. This was her decision, Zeffirelli says in his memoir. But what happens after the speech (in which she tells wives to “serve, love and obey”) belies her words. Kate’s seeming submission permitted Petruchio to win a bet. And when he should have been lingering with his friends to gloat over his triumph, he instead appears stricken. He realizes: Kate left the room. He dashes after her. Without Kate, he is confused and bereft. Visually, the message is clear: Kate is utterly in control; wherever she goes, Petruchio will slavishly follow.

  Viewed in this context, Kate’s speech is not an exhortation to surrender, but a strategy for converting an antagonist to one’s point of view—the same strategy that Leslie Benedict used to gain control of the Benedict household and ensure that her ideas lived on in the Benedict children. “I am ashamed that women are so simple,” Kate says. “To offer war where they should kneel for peace.” In other words, diplomacy works. Open antagonism doesn’t, making it both foolish and useless: “Our lances are but straws.”

  Like The Taming of the Shrew, Taylor’s next film, Reflections in a Golden Eye, has an impressive pedigree. It was based on a novel by Carson McCullers, adapted by Chapman Mortimer and Gladys Hill, and directed by John Huston. McCullers loved the script: “You have made my original book a new and powerful creation,” she wrote to Huston, Mortimer, and Hill. The film explores the stifling effect of rigid gender roles in an epicenter of male supremacy: a U.S. Army post in the South, where, we learn at the opening of the film, a murder will be committed. The puzzle: who will kill whom?

  On this army base, all the gentle, artsy, right-brain types either go mad, kill themselves, run away, or receive unexpected military discharges. The dim and brutal ones thrive. Taylor’s character, Leonora, is so dim that she can barely write a letter. She is, however, beautiful and voraciously heterosexual. When her gruff, hypermasculine husband, Major Penderton, portrayed by Marlo Brando, rejects her, we have no doubt that he is homosexual. Penderton is also a voyeur—besotted with a handsome enlisted man whom he spies upon, and who, in turn, is besotted with and spies upon Leonora. Robert Forster, a twenty-three-year old newcomer, played Private Williams.

  In 1967, Gloria Steinem was not yet a feminist icon. She was a journalist and a friend of the film’s producer, Ray Stark. In a note to Stark, Steinem expressed amazement at Taylor’s willingness to subsume herself in the project: “What other movie queen would have—or does now—take such un-Hollywood-like chances with her glamou
r? She probably knows less about Stanislavsky than Natalie Wood does, yet she became old and fat for Virginia Woolf and now tops it off with being simple-minded as Leonora.”

  Huston shot most of the film outside Rome in the De Laurentiis studios. He demanded a closed set for intense scenes, such as the one where Leonora strips for Penderton, then mocks him for his unresponsiveness. When Huston began filming this scene, all nonessential crew had apparently been banished. But when Taylor’s naked body-double climbed a flight of stairs, the crew reappeared. “More guys than you can imagine,” Forster recalls with amusement, “popping out from under trucks and behind tires—all the places they had hidden.”

  The press, however, was effectively excluded, creating a protected atmosphere that encouraged actors to take risks. As Williams, Forster had to ride naked on Leonora’s horse, while Penderton, hiding, gapes at him. In response to the safe atmosphere, Forster sent away his body double: “My pride took over, and I said, ‘I’m not gonna let that guy be me,’ ” he said. “The next thing I know, the wardrobe department hands me a flesh jock strap without the straps and a roll of flesh covered tape”—which Forster tried to wear—until the objects fell off, and he boldly completed the scene without them.

  The closed set, however, put a damper on prerelease publicity. To promote the film, Steinem encouraged Stark to play up the surprising way in which Taylor had evolved as an actress: “She is expert at what she does, professional on the set, un-catty in her work relationships with other actresses, and pretty much willing to try whatever the director asks. All of this runs contrary to the public image of a spoiled and difficult La Taylor. And so does the fact that she took a salary cut in order to get Brando on the film.”

  Reflections in a Golden Eye did poorly at the box office. Viewers didn’t warm to its southern Gothic sensibility or its implication that beneath the exterior of a fearsome army officer, a hurt gay man might lurk. “Hell hath no fury like a homosexual scorned,” Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times. Although Brando’s character is far from heroic, viewers today would be hard-pressed not to recognize his pathos. He is so brainwashed by society’s expectations of manliness that he cannot accept who he is.

  I think the film is among Taylor’s best from this period. Her collaborations with Burton were not so great. During the golden age of European avant-garde cinema—when the art houses burst with smart, visually enticing work—the Burtons had a knack for finding bad art films and starring in them. Burton’s low-budget version of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus adapted by his Cambridge buddy, Nevill Coghill, may have been the worst. Taylor appears in it as Helen of Troy, but she has no lines—because a speaking part would have cost too much.

  After The Taming of the Shrew, Burton retained McWhorter, a Hollywood veteran, to produce his films. McWhorter soldiered through Doctor Faustus, but when Burton brought him the script for Boom!—an adaptation of a Tennessee Williams flop—he resigned. “Until you get ready to make a picture where I can be of some service,” he told Burton. “I’m wasting your money and my time.”

  Boom! moved forward anyway, with Joseph Losey directing. The film has fans (including director John Waters), but it strains credibility. Burton is supposed to be a young hustler—despite the fact that he looks old enough to be Taylor’s father. And Taylor is supposed to be a woman—despite her Kabuki drag and a name usually applied to effeminate men: “Sissy.”

  In real life, Taylor doesn’t project ambiguous sexuality; she clearly likes men. But two of her next projects—Secret Ceremony for Losey, and X, Y and Zee for director Brian G. Hutton—required her to flirt with bisexuality. This was not a success. X, Y and Zee, however, written by Irish novelist Edna O’Brien and set in 1960s London, at least had a clever premise: a scheming wife (Taylor) connives to wrest her husband (Michael Caine) away from his mistress (Susannah York) by seducing the mistress herself. Taylor gamely—and plausibly—goes to bed with York, who is supposed to convey enthusiasm. But York looks like rigor mortis has set in, undermining the premise.

  In 1968, Taylor ceased to be among the top-ten box-office stars. This was a very big deal for Taylor. Biographers agree: it shook her confidence. Her plunge continued in 1970 with The Only Game in Town, a painful coda to the luminous career of director George Stevens. Promoted with the tag line “Dice was his vice. Men hers,” the movie promised a camp fest to rival Boom! But I felt sad when I watched it. In A Place in the Sun and Giant, Stevens had taken on big themes and created rich worlds. In The Only Game in Town, his epic style merely accentuated the pettiness of the characters and the tedium of their story.

  As a couple, the Burtons retained their luster. In 1968, when Burton gave Taylor the 33.19-carat Krupp diamond, the story was front-page news. But their projects became increasingly dull. Their 1973 venture, Divorce His Divorce Hers, “holds all the joy of standing by at an autopsy,” Variety wrote.

  Ash Wednesday, Taylor’s next film, broke this pattern—for her alone, not Burton. It did not lift her significantly higher, but it slowed her fall.

  16

  Ash Wednesday, 1973

  HARD TO BELIEVE, but in 1973, the brows of most middle-aged women furrowed when they frowned. Neither Botox nor dermal filler nor facelifts were commonplace. In the opening scenes of Ash Wednesday, Elizabeth Taylor, made up to look dowdy, portrays Barbara Sawyer, the fifty-something wife of a rich midwestern lawyer, who enters a Swiss clinic to undergo extensive cosmetic surgery.

  Documentary-style, with no underscore, Ash Wednesday lays out what such surgery involves—to a public not yet accustomed to reading in fashion magazines about eyelifts, nose jobs, and chemical peels. Barbara’s “aged” face occupies the entire screen, as a real-life plastic surgeon (not an actor) draws lines where he will make incisions. The camera lingers on her crepey eyelids and the folds of her upper neck. Shouting “cut” and “sponge” in French to his assistants, the surgeon slices into her flesh, rearranges it, and sews it back up. In the 1970s, TV medical shows didn’t depict the gore of surgery. Ash Wednesday, in contrast, shocked viewers with footage of an actual facelift—not Taylor’s but that of a woman who looked similar to her.

  We next see Barbara—and the clinic’s other patients—with mummylike bandages around their heads. Her face is a patchwork of eggplant bruises; her upper lip is black. When the bandages come off, however, we understand why she took the trouble: She now looks like Elizabeth Taylor. Barbara hopes her rejuvenated appearance will win back her husband, who has fallen for a younger woman. But after the surgery, while vacationing at Cortina d’Ampezzo, a posh Alpine ski resort where she had expected to meet her husband, she remains miserable, indifferent to the scenery and bonhomie around her. Her husband refuses to join her—dashing her hope of rekindling their romance. Nor can even she appreciate her own beauty if he doesn’t value it.

  By the end of the movie, however, with the encouragement of her independent, feminist daughter (who is defiantly oblivious to fashion) and a worldly gay photographer whom she met at the clinic, Barbara begins to discover … herself. She doesn’t need the pathetic husband whose terror of aging propels him into the arms of younger women. She has her looks and (unless she really bungles the divorce) his money.

  The movie shows both what plastic surgery can repair (the grosser ravages of age) and what it can’t (a bad marriage). The movie’s message is feminist, but not in a simpleminded way. It doesn’t condemn surgery per se; it cautions against doing it for the wrong reasons. Barbara underwent pain and risk to please someone other than herself; this made her a doormat. She also internalized society’s objectification of women; she saw herself only as a withered old thing.

  For the right reasons, however, cosmetic surgery can be empowering. It won’t mend a broken marriage or stave off death. But it will rescue a healthy person—aware that he or she is more than just an object—from having to endure the shock of a liver-spotted stranger in the mirror.

  Burton hated the movie, and in a 1973 letter to his assistants (
sold at auction in 2004), he called it “a fucking lousy nothing bloody film.” This seems extreme. At worst it is harmless melodrama. What got to him, I suspect, was the portrait of Barbara’s husband, played by Henry Fonda—a clownish old goat chasing the fountain of youth in a woman less than half his age.

  During the filming of Ash Wednesday, “Lumpy” and “Pockface”—as Taylor and Burton referred to each other—grew apart. They divorced on June 26, 1974, only to remarry on October 10, 1975. This reconciliation, however, did not prevent Burton from taking up with Suzy Hunt, a model more than twenty years his junior. So on July 29, 1976, Taylor and Burton again divorced. This time they meant it.

  In 1974, Taylor made another flawed but engaging movie, The Driver’s Seat, based on a novella by Muriel Spark. Campy and erratic, the film flirts with a macabre sort of female power: Taylor plays a woman searching for a man she can induce to murder her. But her next project, a film version of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, directed by Harold Prince, was cringeworthy. Much of the film’s funding came from Austria, so the producers set the story there instead of in Sweden, where the Broadway musical and the Ingmar Bergman movie on which it was based took place. The plot climaxes on a summer night when the sun seemingly never sets—a phenomenon that occurs strikingly at Sweden’s northern latitude (and not so much in Austria).

  The film tanked. And by 1976, Taylor had become as tired of movies as Cousin Sebastian (in Suddenly, Last Summer) had once been of blondes. She needed a new role to display her talents: political wife. I will not dwell on Taylor in the 1970s, because her life was in transition. She should have had a chrysalis in which to change—from which she could have dramatically emerged. According to 12-step literature, a person must “hit bottom” before he or she can recover. Taylor began a swift slide toward that destination on December 24, 1976, when she married John Warner, an authoritarian, antifeminist Republican who would use her celebrity to advance his political career. (In fairness, the future U.S. senator had at least one thing going for him: he was very handsome.)