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

by M. G. Lord

  Had Shurlock stopped there, his letter would have exposed him as a bully and a prig. But he continued, revealing himself as an ignoramus.

  “In the last century, issues between good and evil were much more clearly drawn,” he wrote, citing Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as examples of moral tales. “In both these novels, the adulteresses died horribly,” he noted, pleased that they met an appropriate fate. He then suggested that Flaubert and Tolstoy “would have been scandalized at the treatment of prostitution in Never on Sunday.”

  Shurlock’s interpretation is, of course, exactly the opposite of what the authors intended. Both Flaubert and Tolstoy were sympathetic to their women characters. Their goal was to criticize the bourgeois social conventions that destroyed two healthy, lively, women. Nor would either author have been “scandalized” by Never on Sunday. Though they might have gagged at the ending of BUtterfield 8. “I love prostitution,” Flaubert famously said, “and for itself, too, quite apart from what is beneath.” (This line is also often translated “quite apart from its carnal aspects.”) Tolstoy was also a lifelong fan, despite the venereal disease he contracted in his youth.

  After watching BUtterfield 8 many times, I can barely recall its final scenes. “The ending,” New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote, “is absurd.” But I will never forget “No Sale!” scribbled in lipstick or the spike heel grinding into Liggett’s shoe. Taylor breathed life into the defiant Gloria, burning her into our collective memory. Then she sleepwalked through the moralistic mishegoss imposed by the Production Code.

  Taylor couldn’t rescue Gloria from the censors. But at least she minimized their damage.

  10

  1960–1962

  IN SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER, Elizabeth Taylor gave form and believability to Catherine Holly, a brave trauma victim who stands up to the male medical establishment. In real life, however, actors can be different from the characters they play. Taylor suffered from health problems going back to her adolescence. And perhaps because her mother was a Christian Scientist, for whom medical treatment is anathema, Taylor herself became an ardent consumer of the healing arts.

  On the set of Giant, she often spent her off-camera time in a wheelchair, tormented by sciatica and numbness in her legs. Her chronic back problems had begun in childhood. While learning to jump horses for National Velvet, she took a variety of spills that caused injuries. But her shooting schedule didn’t permit adequate leisure for them to heal. In 1957, after accidentally tumbling down some stairs, she underwent a four-hour surgery at New York’s Harkness Pavilion to fuse the crushed disks in her spine. Her then-consort Mike Todd did his best to make her stay pleasurable. He installed himself in the room next door and purchased a Renoir, a Pissarro, a Monet, and a Frans Hals to liven up her joyless hospital walls. So blissful, in fact, was her doctor-ordered sojourn that within the year—and not long after delivering her daughter, Liza, by cesarean section—Taylor arranged for an unnecessary appendectomy. This time she booked Todd into the adjoining suite and forbade him to leave until she had recovered.

  In his memoir, Eddie Fisher writes with odd wistfulness of his time with Taylor and its glamorous backdrops: a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a suite at the Park Lane in Manhattan, quarters designed by Oliver Messel at the Dorchester in London—as well as emergency rooms on two continents. As I read his descriptions, I began to understand. When I needed a break from this manuscript, I stayed at a hotel. But when you live in a hotel, where do you go to escape? To the hospital.

  This is only half-facetious. As a child, Taylor supported her parents financially. After Todd’s death, she supported her children—by herself. To survive, her family depended on her; and to support them, Taylor depended on her appearance. She couldn’t look puffy or haggard on screen. She had to look fantastic—or in any event, thin. If her director told her to smile, she had to radiate sunshine. She had to dredge within herself to play a scene with feeling. She was always going, going, going. But if she became really sick—sick enough to die—the carousel stopped. A dead star could derail a film and cost a studio money. In sickness, she could escape her burdens. In sickness, she could rest.

  Fisher recounts one harrowing near-death experience after another. While shooting BUtterfield 8, Taylor fell prey to pneumonia and could barely breathe. Passed out from cold medication, she was whisked on a stretcher from the Park Lane to Harkness Pavilion. As the ambulance approached the emergency room, however, Fisher recalls, Taylor sat up, rummaged for a compact, and handed Fisher her purse. “Get me my lip gloss,” she ordered.

  As soon as Taylor recovered from pneumonia, she again went to a hospital—this time as a visitor to Fisher’s ailing mother in Philadelphia. But the pull of the ER proved irresistible. Before returning to New York, Taylor slipped on some ice, sprained her ankle, and received emergency treatment. She left Philadelphia on crutches.

  After many illness-related delays, BUtterfield 8 finally wrapped. In September 1960, Taylor and Fisher settled in London, where Cleopatra was to be filmed. England was good for Taylor’s financial health. For tax reasons, she had demanded that the movie be shot there. But the damp air was bad for her lungs. Almost as soon as she moved into the Dorchester she got sick.

  Taylor was not popular in London. Tabloids continued to blame her for Fisher’s divorce. Worse, she offended the British hairdresser’s union, which staged a strike on the set of Cleopatra. She had demanded that Sidney Guilaroff, her MGM stylist, be permitted to arrange her hair for the movie. The Brits were furious. What was so special about her hair that they couldn’t comb it?

  Nor, as Rouben Mamoulian, Cleopatra’s director, discovered, was London in winter a plausible substitute for Alexandria, Egypt, at any time of the year. Wanger had palm trees flown in from Hollywood to make Pinewood Studios resemble Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, but he could do nothing about the bitter cold and fog. Peter Finch, who had been cast as Julius Caesar, and Stephen Boyd, who had been cast as Mark Antony, shivered beneath their metal breastplates. Taylor coughed and wheezed in her hotel room. In January 1961, after a row with 20th Century Fox over the script, Mamoulian resigned. In February, Joseph Mankiewicz took over as director. He tried to interest Laurence Durrell and Lillian Hellman in working on the screenplay. When they declined, Mankiewicz began writing it himself.

  Taylor’s health worsened. The problems, Fisher explained, had as much to do with her back as with her lungs. She needed shots of Demerol, which he administered, to ease the chronic pain. By late February, fighting staphylococcus pneumonia, she burned constantly with fever. At night she slept beneath an oxygen tent in her hotel room. On March 3, 1961, the infection and painkillers became too much. She slipped into a coma.

  Fisher noticed nothing unusual. But Taylor’s private nurse flew into action, summoning a doctor, who began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Lashed to a stretcher, Taylor was rushed to the London Clinic, where Fisher, in shock, gave permission for doctors to plunge a knife into his wife’s throat. The incision created a “tracheotomy,” a passage through which air could again reach Taylor’s congested lungs.

  With a tube poking through a hole in her neck, Taylor was alive but just barely. She still couldn’t kick the infection. The crowds that had railed against her—for stealing Reynolds’s husband, for snubbing the British hairdressers—suddenly rallied in support. “Hundreds of people kept vigil day and night while Elizabeth fought for her life,” Fisher wrote. “People everywhere loved her and were praying for her recovery.”

  Visitors like Tennessee Williams, John Wayne, and Truman Capote struggled to cheer her. Cards and letters poured in—so many that the hospital collected them in laundry baskets. Wanger recalls a telegram sent from the United States: SIX THOUSAND OF US ARE PRAYING FOR YOU AT THE BOEING PLANT. WE KNOW YOU’LL PULL THROUGH. But the stubborn infection would not capitulate. As Fisher tells it, a week after the tracheotomy, a British doctor injected Taylor with gamma globulin. And the infection finally gave
up.

  Discharged from the hospital, Taylor identified with Lazarus. She flew to Los Angeles, where she described her ordeal at a fund-raiser for Cedars of Lebanon and Mount Sinai hospitals. “Dying, as I remember it, is many things,” she said. Mostly, it was lonely, and she was glad to be back. But she remained in touch with the angel of death, whom she met on the other side, and who often told her—psychically—when other people would die.

  Nominated for Best Actress in BUtterfield 8, Taylor planned to attend the Academy Awards ceremony. Her main competitor was Shirley MacLaine, nominated for The Apartment. Today MacLaine is as well known for her psychic experiences as for her acting. A believer in reincarnation, she has written ten books that detail her past lives. In 1961, however, MacLaine was the rationalist and Taylor the mystic. And one wonders whether Taylor’s win—the triumph of the mystic—might have inspired MacLaine’s spiritual journey. Before Taylor returned from the grave, MacLaine was the odds-on favorite. Without rancor, MacLaine said, “I lost to a tracheotomy.”

  Fortified by her Oscar win, as well as a summer in Los Angeles, Taylor and Fisher flew to Rome where she began the final version of Cleopatra. While Taylor had languished in the hospital, version one had officially bitten the dust. In the new iteration, Rex Harrison was Julius Caesar, and Richard Burton was Mark Antony,

  Taylor and Burton were not immediately drawn to each other. Acclaimed as a Shakespearean actor, Burton dismissed Taylor as “MGM’s Little Miss Mammary.” As he watched her work, however, he came to admire her craft. From the get-go, he had coveted Taylor’s earning power. Soon he would come to covet Taylor herself.

  Walter Wanger recalls their first scene together—in Cleopatra’s Roman villa—on January 22, 1962. Taylor was “elegant in a simple yellow silk gown.” Burton was “handsome, arrogant, and vigorous” in his knee-length toga. And between the two of them, “you could almost feel the electricity.” By mid-February, the Burton-Taylor love affair had exploded, ripping their respective marriages asunder. The press called it Le Scandale. L’Osservatore della Domenica, the Vatican weekly, called it “erotic vagrancy.” Vatican Radio called it “the caprices of adult children.” And the publicity department at 20th Century Fox called it a godsend.

  Typically, the Vatican did not comment on the private lives of movie stars. But Taylor had galled the papacy to its core. Not because of her extramarital affair; that was commonplace, slight. But because of something else—something truly extraordinary—something no undeserving erotic vagrant should have been permitted to accomplish. In London one year earlier, Taylor had died. But she had not stayed that way. She had—to the Vatican’s horror—been resurrected.

  11

  Cleopatra, 1963

  Alexandria had its share of female mathematicians, doctors, painters, and poets. This did not mean such women were above suspicion. As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

  —Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life, 2010

  First I shall want something to eat.

  —Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra preparing for her suicide

  CLEOPATRA IS NEITHER a great movie nor a feminist one. But it had the potential to be both. Two seeming sure-bets were going for it. The first was the historical Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt: a cunning politician and accomplished scholar who built a legendary library and spoke eight languages. She was not a fool for love. To obtain her throne, she murdered her brothers. To hold on to it, she conducted love affairs with her enemies—or, in any event, rulers of the empire that most threatened hers: Rome. Her first Roman lover was Julius Caesar; her second, Mark Antony. These were not romances. They were tactical alliances, sealed, in the case of Caesar, with a son, Caesarion.

  The second attribute was Elizabeth Taylor. As Leslie Benedict in Giant, Taylor had projected brains, backbone, and a brilliance at behind-the-scenes manipulation—qualities no absolute ruler should be without. But this wasn’t why producer Walter Wanger agreed to pay her $1 million. He needed her to do something only she could do: override the audience’s prefrontal cortex, as she had in A Place in the Sun. He needed her to electrify viewers with primitive feeling. He needed her to whisper the Greek or Latin or Egyptian equivalent of “Tell Mama. Tell Mama all.”

  Taylor was also a real-life star, determined to display the traits that pop culture demanded of its luminaries. Just as ancient Egyptians needed their rulers to be divine—Cleopatra declared herself an incarnation of the goddess Isis—so, too, midcentury fans required stars to be moody, unreliable, and petulant. During the making of Cleopatra, Taylor worked hard to satisfy them. Not all directors and producers, however, valued such dedication to the harsh dictates of stardom. Some grew cross when stars went AWOL, nursing hangovers or sniffles. When, for example, Marilyn Monroe was shooting Something’s Got to Give, a costly project that vied with Cleopatra for 20th Century Fox’s dwindling resources, director George Cukor fired Monroe … for behaving like a movie star.

  Wanger, though, understood stardom and its crushing pressure to appear capricious. He deflected Taylor’s critics with a quote from director Billy Wilder: “I have a healthy aunt in Vienna who would come on set on time, know her lines, and always be ready. But no one would pay to see her at the box office.”

  Wanger also grasped extreme emotions. He himself had served time for a crime of passion: shooting the purported lover of his then-wife, actress Joan Bennett. Wanger hoped to deliver both Cleopatra’s ice and Taylor’s fire—to make the Egyptian queen as vivid as Barbara Graham, the ex-junkie death-row inmate in Wanger’s searing 1958 movie, I Want to Live! Critics had loved that movie, even critics who supported capital punishment, which the film condemned. Portraying Graham, actress Susan Hayward won an Oscar.

  But Wanger’s dreams for Cleopatra never panned out. Perhaps they were too big for his time, the 1950s, when conformity, McCarthyism, and disbelief in the full humanity of women kept people and ideas small. But you can’t say Wanger didn’t try. Taylor tried, too. As did Joseph Mankiewicz, Cleopatra’s director, and 20th Century Fox, the studio that it pushed toward bankruptcy. Even the studio heads tried: Spyros Skouras, who initiated the project, and his successor, Darryl Zanuck, who ripped the movie away from Mankiewicz and hacked out scenes essential to its exposition. (After completing a cut that ran about six hours, Mankiewicz begged Zanuck to release the film in two parts; Zanuck refused.)

  Cleopatra differs from most movies in this book—films whose nimble passages outnumber those that fall flat. The movie occasionally catches fire, but it quickly dies out. Mark Antony’s stark assessment of himself could also apply to many people who worked on the film: “Meaning to do the best, I suppose I could not have done worse.”

  Imperfection, however, is why one must study Cleopatra. It teaches us not about 48 to 31 B.C. but about A.D. 1958 to 1963. Historical dramas often say more about the times in which they were made than the era in which they are set. Likewise, the characters in such dramas reflect the world of their writers. For example, in both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare imagined an Egyptian woman who was tougher and wiser than both of her Roman consorts. He saw Cleopatra thorough the lens of the sixteenth century, when a formidable woman, Queen Elizabeth I, occupied the English throne.

  Dramatists in the 1950s, however, had no Queen Bess to inspire them. Before 1969, when Golda Meir became prime minister of Israel, and 1979, when Margaret Thatcher assumed the same post in the United Kingdom, women did not hold visible power in the West. During the years when Cleopatra moved from page to screen, feminist thinker Betty Friedan, then a suburban New York housewife, struggled to discern why so few women rose to the top of governments, corporations, or, for that matter, their professions. She detailed her findings in The Feminine Mystique, an angry book that came out the same year as Cleopatra and became an instant bestseller.

  After World War II, Friedan noticed, more “women than ever before were going to college—but fewer of them were going on from college to become physicians, philosophers, poets,
doctors, lawyers, stateswomen, social pioneers, even college professors.” Women would strive to reach a certain level, then—seemingly of their own volition—withdraw from the ascent. They had bought into a curious postwar ethos: because of their gender, they existed not to fulfill their potential but to fulfill the potential of others. Their role was not to live, but to live through—gaining satisfaction exclusively by way of their husbands and children.

  Friedan called this pattern “the forfeited self.” She blamed it on “the feminine mystique,” a cult of female self-abnegation that maintained its grip through fear. The mystique impelled women to cower before the bogeyman of unfemininity—a scourge alleged to render them repulsive to men. Although Cleopatra was supposed to have been about the most powerful woman in the ancient world—an autocrat who seduced men with her wit and not her looks—the film fell prey to its time. Taylor could not do that much to project Cleopatra’s independence and strength. The part had been written to show her clinginess and frailty.

  The film cites Plutarch, Suetonius, and Appian as its sources—the same Roman historians whom Shakespeare likely read. But it also credits Carlo Maria Franzero’s The Life and Times of Cleopatra, a 1950s middle-brow biography that was also a paean to the feminine mystique. In his book, Franzero recognizes Cleopatra’s intelligence: “How soon, how soon Cleopatra must have seen through the bombast of Mark Antony, who could not conquer Persia with all the treasure of Egypt she had put at his disposal, and who abandoned the decision at Actium to chase after her in a mad fit of passion.”