How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  "It was so intense," Elizabeth said later of falling in love with Richard. "There is something very mystic about all Welsh people. And that sense of poetry and wildness was where I had always wanted to be. I had wanted to be free, running in the rain on the grass, and just nothing to tether me. I just wanted to go."

  Like Mike Todd, what Richard offered was a sense of liberation—from the daily grind of moviemaking, from studio control, from the strictures that had dictated how she must behave in the public eye. With the money and notoriety that Cleopatra had brought them, Richard and Elizabeth were now rich enough and famous enough to chart their own course. And with Richard at her side, Elizabeth had achieved her holy grail: She was answerable to no one—except, as she enjoyed pointing out, to Richard himself.

  There was more about Burton that recalled Todd. His comfort with the many homosexuals in the world of theater and film made him extremely attractive to Elizabeth, whose entourage remained largely gay. And like Todd, Richard was her equal, even if their fame derived from different sources. He might not have yet made it big as a movie star, but he had enjoyed one megahit, The Robe, as well as the succès d'estime in 1958 with Look Back in Anger, one of the first pictures of the British New Wave. But it was the soon-to-be-released World War II epic, The Longest Day, filmed shortly before Cleopatra, that everyone expected would ratchet up Burton's box-office clout—just in time for his Marc Antony to stride across the world's screens.

  For Elizabeth, Richard's most appealing quality was no doubt his decided lack of awe. While Eddie Fisher had spent his days in constant solicitude, Richard, once more like Todd, enjoyed taking good-natured potshots at her in the press. "Elizabeth is a pretty girl," he told Kenneth Tynan, "but she has a double chin and an overdeveloped chest and she's rather short in the leg. So I can hardly describe her as the most beautiful creature I've ever seen." Elizabeth, as always, was ready with a comeback. Referring to her paramour's famous disinterest in attending the theater, she said: "Richard has enormous taste and discretion. He can't stand to watch any other actor but himself."

  They bickered, they bantered, they carried on. They snuck off to the Italian coast or partied at their respective homes in Switzerland. Burton proved to be a turning point in Elizabeth's life. For the first time, she was choosing a husband entirely for love, without any professional consideration. This was significant. The choice of every preceding husband, no matter how much passion was involved, had also made sound sense in terms of her career. And while the affair with Burton was looking more and more as if it might actually enhance her stardom—all those paparazzi had made her even more famous than Jackie Kennedy—certainly no one in the middle part of 1962 had any assurance that this would be the case. In fact, there was considerable fear that it might just do the opposite.

  Elizabeth, either too much in love or more trusting of the public's response than those around her, paid no attention to such grumblings. But Richard was torn. Despite the euphoria for his Dulcis Imperatrix, his "black moods," as his friends called his depressive episodes, had not disappeared. Some felt, in fact, that his drinking changed after Le Scandale, that it became an escape from the guilt over leaving his family, especially little Jessica, who had by now been diagnosed as autistic. "I generally shut Jess out of my mind," Richard wrote heartbreakingly in his diary, "but sometimes she enters with staggering agony." The only thing that he could do, he wrote, was to "make her rich." And so he did.

  But Richard Burton had always had his black moods, what he called his hiraeth, a Welsh word best translated as a longing for unnamable things. Elizabeth was all too aware of these moods. "He is a snakepit of ramifications," she admitted. "I tell him, if a frontal lobotomy were performed on his skull, out would fly snakes, frogs, worms, tadpoles, bats..." Asked by a reporter if there wasn't "anything better" in Burton's brain, she acknowledged: "Oh, perhaps a grasshopper would leap out at last, with a slim volume of Shakespeare—it would have to be the sonnets—tucked under his arm."

  For Richard, the conflict in his mind was essentially existential, the curse of a simple man plucked from humble origins and given to greatness. A deep river of insecurity ran within him. He would tell the producer Ernest Lehman that he believed "all great art comes from people who are either ugly or have a terrible inferiority complex." Lehman was left to wonder how Burton classified himself in that argument. His hiraeth could disturb his sleep. "I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat and I say to myself, 'What's going to happen to me?'" he admitted to Kenneth Tynan. "It's not the fear of death—it's the fear of dying and being forgotten, of being nothing, that keeps me awake."

  For the moment, he found distraction from such fears in the embrace of Elizabeth, the most voracious lover he had ever known. As the world watched, fascinated and scandalized, the couple took up residence together in Rex Harrison's villa in Portofino. Sybil Burton, in her only recorded remarks about the affair, said, "This was so that Richard, who was still married to me at the time, should have some place to shelter from the pursuit of Elizabeth and him by the press." According to Sybil, Harrison's wife, Rachel Roberts, always felt "very bad" that her house was "lent to 'that man and his woman' who had broken up my marriage." But while Sybil may have been touched by her friend's loyalty, fewer and fewer people seemed to share Roberts's reservations about the romance. As the spring of 1962 rolled on, no two people in the world were more watched, more envied, or more idolized than "Liz and Dick." Even if no one could predict how their story was going to end, all agreed that it would be one for the ages.

  Under the Porta San Sebastiano Mike Nichols whizzed in his little rental car, heading out of the city and into the rolling green of the Roman countryside. He drove along the dusty route of the Appian Way unpursued and unnoticed. He might be the current toast of Broadway, having exploded onto the scene a couple of years earlier with his brilliant comedy improv act with his partner, Elaine May, but his face was not internationally known. No paparazzi chased him the way they did his pal Rich Burton, whom Nichols had met when they were on Broadway at the same time: Camelot had played just a block away from An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May. After their final curtains, Nichols and Burton had often met for a few drinks, sometimes for more than a few. They became chums. And now, learning that Mike was in Rome, Rich had rung him to ask a favor. He was away and couldn't see him, but would Nichols be so kind as to take Elizabeth out for an excursion? She was trapped in the house by the paparazzi, Burton said, and was going a bit stir-crazy.

  "Take Elizabeth Taylor out for a day?" Nichols recalled. "I jumped at the chance!"

  Nichols was a trendsetter. He and May were in the process of rewriting the rules of acting and performance. The pair had helped found an improvisational theater group at the University of Chicago that eventually became the famed Second City company. Then they moved on to television and Broadway, leaving audiences and critics alike in stitches with their fast-paced, largely ad-libbed routines. But what Nichols really hankered to do was direct, both for the stage and the screen. "I want to direct in motion pictures most of all," he told a reporter, "but I figure that I must learn a whole [new] technique or the whole machine can roll over you."

  Certainly few people knew those techniques or that machine better than Elizabeth Taylor. And while that's not why Nichols took her out that day in the spring of 1962, the business of moviemaking and the idiosyncrasies of fame would inform the conversation they had. Telling Elizabeth to put on a kerchief and sneak out the back door, Nichols met her in his car, unrecognized by the paparazzi, and spirited her off to Villa d'Este in Tivoli. There, strolling anonymously among the terraced gardens and famous fountains of the sixteenth-century villa built for the son of Lucrezia Borgia, Elizabeth opened up to Nichols about her life. She talked about the scandal, about her fears of hurting Sybil and drawing the wrath of the world once again. She talked about falling in love with Richard, and the long, long journey that had taken her from child star to this place of exalted worldwide fame. Nichols was awest
ruck by her candor. "She never had a life of her own," he said. "Every movement had always been public. But where most people would have developed a shell, for some reason she didn't. She was extraordinary.

  "She said a startling thing to me one time during those days in Rome," Nichols continued, "when we were at some horse show in the middle of the city and everyone was walking past her to stare at her. I asked her if it was ever a pain in the ass being so beautiful. And she looked at me and said, 'I can't wait for it to go.'"

  Their visits ended with Nichols determined that one day he would work with this remarkable woman. On her part, Elizabeth was resigned to further hassles from the press and public—at least until that blessed day when she could finally put Cleopatra in the can. After nearly two years, it looked as if her long ordeal might soon be coming to an end. But several big scenes were still to be shot, including the one where Cleopatra enters Rome on top of a thirty-foot-high Sphinx drawn by three hundred slaves. In the film, it is the moment of Cleopatra's big gamble. If the Romans accept her, she has won. If they do not, she might lose Caesar, and her life. Elizabeth felt that the stakes were just as high for her.

  Walter Wanger described her as "nervous and tense" when she was preparing for the scene. For the first time since the scandal had broken, she would be facing seven thousand extras—Roman citizens who had surely heard the Vatican condemnations. Would they jeer her? Would they make obscene gestures? Holding her chin high, Elizabeth strode out in front of the crowd. And to everyone's great surprise, the applause that greeted her was far more than anything Mankiewicz had called for as the director. "Leez, Leez!" the extras chanted. "Baci, baci!" ("Kisses, kisses!") Walter Wanger witnessed the "sense of relief" that flooded through Elizabeth's body as a sea of "slave girls, handmaidens, senators, guards, and thousands of others applauded her—personally."

  It was a very different public response this time to a very similar scandal. The groundswell of outrage that had occurred in 1958 did not happen again. Fewer letters of indignation flowed in to Hedda Hopper, despite the columnist's best attempts to whip up public sentiment against the lovers, and hardly anyone wrote irate letters to the newspapers.

  Of course, the religious conservative base—the same one that had rallied against Elizabeth playing Mary Magdalene—was just as offended as ever. Congresswoman Blitch's mail ran fifty-to-one against Elizabeth, encouraging her to call for a "Congressional investigation of the most serious kind" into the "motion picture industry's lack of sensitivity of good taste and high moral values." But no one was listening. Blitch retired that fall, and the Congress that was elected in November was among the most liberal delegations ever sent to Washington, with little interest in policing the lives of entertainers. When one member, Rep. Michael Feighan (D-Ohio), did attempt to pick up the baton from Blitch by calling for the revocation of Burton's visa, he was quickly slapped down by the U.S. State Department, which concluded that there was nothing that made Burton ineligible to enter the United States. Editorials chided Feighan for reaching "new heights of ridiculosity." In a stark break from the past, much of the press now believed that "people are not concerned with Hollywood morals" when so many other, more pressing issues existed.

  The world was changing rapidly. In June 1962 Stanley Kubrick's film of Vladimir Nabokov's sexually charged novel Lolita debuted to strong box office. how did they ever make a movie of lolita? read the film's posters, a coy wink at the evolution in cultural mores. On Broadway, Edward Albee's profanity-laden Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened to ecstatic reviews. The long-banned Henry Miller novel Tropic of Cancer was finally published in the United States, prompting legal reconsiderations of the definition of obscenity. When photographs of a topless Jayne Mansfield from the film Promises! Promises! were published in Playboy, publisher Hugh Hefner was arrested, only to be acquitted at his trial, proving just how in flux public sentiment really was.

  Elizabeth herself pushed the envelope when she allowed Hefner to publish nude photographs that Roddy McDowall had taken of her on the set of Cleopatra. No matter that the photos were tastefully discreet—no nipples or genitals—the very inclusion of a star of Elizabeth's magnitude in a periodical like Playboy enflamed moralists across the country. Yet the average fan-magazine reader seemed more titillated than affronted. "Is she modern or immoral?"> Photoplay asked. The answer, given the way Elizabeth was increasingly being portrayed, seemed to be the former.

  Indeed, nowhere was the change in the public mood better illustrated than in the way the fan magazines covered the TaylorBurton affair. To be sure, sensationalism still ruled, but censure and condemnation not so much. the final act that shook the world was showcased in Modern Screen with a two-page telephoto spread of Elizabeth and Richard stretched out kissing in bathing suits. In the accompanying story, Elizabeth comes across not as the black-hearted home wrecker of four years earlier but as a fascinating inamorata determined to marry the man she loves.

  To the editors' surprise, this new persona delighted readers instead of driving them away. At the height of Le Scandale, Photoplay crowned Elizabeth, along with Jackie Kennedy, as one of "America's 2 Queens." Burton benefited, too. Eddie Fisher had been turned into a cad in the public's mind, but Burton was hailed as a sex god. In Modern Screen, Radie Harris revealed why women can't resist richard burton: a "knock 'em between the eyes kind of animal magnetism that makes little girls sigh, 'Thank heaven for little boys who grow up to be big little boys like Richard Burton.'"

  Editorial attacks still occurred, but with Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl dominating the bestseller lists, they seemed relics of a different era. A new relationship between celebrities, the press, and the public was developing. Tabloids like the New York Daily News, which depended on front-page sensationalism, grasped the change quicker and better than most others. While the editorial page might still regurgitate the standard line that the affair in Rome was doing "no good" for the movie industry, the paper also acknowledged the "interesting newspaper copy" the story of "Liz and Dick" had yielded, including the "intriguing telescopic-lens photographs which The News has been pleased to present to its fascinated (we hope) readers."

  This was the point. Those up-close pictures and stories offered a more uncensored glimpse of celebrity lives than ever before, which in turn allowed the public to form its own opinions about its heroes and heroines without the mediating intervention of publicists or press agents. Such a formula had been unthinkable in the old days; such transparency had been considered fatal to careers. Conventional wisdom had held that such reporting could never work to a star's benefit. Elizabeth Taylor turned that thinking upside down. The more the public was let in on her life, the more it worshipped her.

  With celebrity coverage no longer consigned only to fan magazines and gossip columns and now spilling across newspapers, radio, and television, Elizabeth's fans were able to track her every movement, her every nightclub date, her every purchase of Dior furs and diamond wristwatches. Consequently, she became less the shadowy black widow that Photoplay had fabricated in 1958 and more like an old familiar—albeit flashy and fabulous—friend. By now people expected Elizabeth Taylor to live like the sexy nymphs of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8. No one but the most rigidly puritanical took offense at her affair with Burton. No one but the most rigidly puritanical would ever turn on Elizabeth Taylor again.

  And yet this new paradigm was due as much to the woman herself as it was to any shift in public sentiment or standards of press coverage. Elizabeth's decision not to hide, not to eat humble pie, had paid off. This time there was no skulking around in the back of Roddy's car to avoid the press. Instead, gambling that the world had moved on, she had stepped out unapologetically with Burton on her arm. "If part of the world, unfortunately, has some kind of nasty opinion, maybe it's only to be expected," she said candidly. "But, to me, being honest is all a part of being what one is. I don't try to give any illusion, or delusion, at all. It isn't that I don't care. But what I am is my own busin
ess."

  Her gamble proved on the money. The public did not turn on her. In fact, her honesty and her sheer likability ensured her continued success. The press, so long accustomed to charades and half-truths, found fresh respect for her. After all, this was a new generation of the fourth estate. Conservative mavens like Hedda and Louella and Walter Winchell were no longer calling the shots. The most influential entertainment writers were increasingly younger and more liberal, people like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris and Liz Smith and Rex Reed—the same generation who were chronicling the revolutionary impact of the burgeoning youth culture. Writers like these were far more apt to extol an independent-thinking woman like Elizabeth Taylor than they were to chastise her, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the old guard. "The press has seemed determined to make a heroine out of Elizabeth Taylor," complained one woman in a letter to Iris Blitch, citing a recent issue of Look magazine that had praised "her to the skies." But to a new way of thinking, a celebrity who eschewed spin and studio trickery was worth the veneration. She was a heroine indeed.

  This was a radically new dynamic. For a star to speak so plainly was unprecedented. "To tell you the truth," Elizabeth told one reporter at the height of the affair with Burton, "I haven't kept track of my so-called 'public image.' I know that, in the American press, I must get shticklech, which is a good Jewish word for needles right below the heart...[But] why get a heart attack over [such press]? I suppose [the public] rather regards me as a scarlet woman. I guess I seem so scarlet I'm almost purple." She seemed to truly enjoy flouting convention. One magazine showed her sprawled out on a couch drinking champagne with Richard, asking in the caption below: "So what do the papers say about us now?"