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

by M. G. Lord

  But Franzero never lets Cleopatra’s intelligence prevail. He always eclipses it with “that touch of frailty that is part of the enchantment of femininity that stirs the emotions and imaginations of great men.”

  Franzero’s viewpoint informs the movie. Like the coeds in Friedan’s book, the adolescent Cleopatra strives to become educated. As a young woman, she doesn’t live through her male relatives; she murders them. But also like the women in Friedan’s book, she is transformed by marriage and motherhood. Not tamed, exactly. Franzero’s Cleopatra still itches to control the world. But only so that she can give it to her Roman lover and her eldest son.

  The real-life Cleopatra was not Egyptian but Greek, descended from Ptolemy, a general under Alexander the Great who founded the dynasty that controlled Egypt from 323 to 30 B.C. Because she was a Ptolemy, transferring power to her son would not be an act of a doting mother or one of self-annihilation. It was the same tactical necessity that compelled every monarch before and after her to produce an heir: riding on her son’s future was the future of the royal line.

  But no historical reason exists to portray her as a slave to her emotions. “I will not have love as my master!” Taylor’s Cleopatra hisses at Antony, whom she bedded with seeming cold-bloodedness to solidify a strategic alliance. Yet when Antony, also for tactical reasons, marries the sister of his Roman archrival, Octavian, she carries on like a jilted teenager, rather than the shrewd politician that she is.

  Near the end of the movie, when she must choose between her man and her empire, she abandons all pretense of reason: “Without you, Antony, this is not a world I want to live in, much less conquer.”

  Cleopatra’s problems with narration and structure, however, stem from more than the feminine mystique. The film was made during a painful upheaval in the movie business. By 1960, the studio system was on its last legs. Yet it had to marshal its remaining strength to contend with an unforeseen competitor: television.

  In the 1950s, television blindsided the movie industry—stealing its audience and threatening its primacy. Television was free and easily consumed. And shows like Playhouse 90 established it as a medium for intimate, idea-driven drama. To pry viewers out of their homes, movies had to offer what the small screen couldn’t: spectacle—splashy, Technicolor pageants.

  Typically, telling a story and creating a spectacle are antithetical challenges. Story gains power from nuance, from getting deep inside the characters’ heads. Spectacle gains power from eye-popping effects, from actions that swirl around the characters.

  Mankiewicz was a first-rate storyteller. In such classics as All About Eve, he created complex women characters whose clashes riveted audiences. In Suddenly, Last Summer, he coaxed a strong performance from Taylor. But for Cleopatra, this was not enough.

  Life magazine’s 1961 feature on the making of Cleopatra reveals the lengths to which movies would go to upstage television. The piece fixates on color and spectacle: the “army of 4,000 being drilled to fight mighty land battles,” the 1,500 ships “for naval engagements,” the insane vibrancy of Cleopatra’s costumes. (Taylor sports a brassy funereal headdress on the magazine’s cover.) The article doesn’t mention television, but it doesn’t have to. Ads for the rival medium filled the magazine: Philco’s “Cool-Chassis,” Admiral’s “Automatic Picture Contrast Restoration,” Motorola’s “Golden Tube Sentry Unit.”

  In principle, story and spectacle should be able to coexist in a film. But few directors balance them successfully. In Gone with the Wind, director Victor Fleming mixed the two, moving back and forth between an intimate love story and a sweeping mural. The contrast captured the magnitude of war: its vast fields of devastation; its tiny shattered lives.

  Under different circumstances, Mankiewicz might have realized similar results with Cleopatra. But when he replaced Rouben Mamoulian as its director, the film was already over budget and behind schedule. Plus it had no script. Many people had been paid to write one—Sidney Buchman, Ranald MacDougall, Ben Hecht, among them. But no one could make it work. Mankiewicz had to write the script himself—on an insane deadline—while he directed the movie.

  To do this, he filmed by day and wrote by night, battling exhaustion with amphetamine shots. If fatigue dulled his eye for nuance, this served him well. He couldn’t afford to fuss over subtleties. He had to command a navy. He had to bark orders via an interpreter at four thousand Italian extras pretending to be Roman soldiers. He couldn’t even be Cecil B. DeMille; he had to be General George S. Patton.

  Not surprisingly, his characters sometimes took a backseat to their lavish world. Cleopatra’s grand entrance into Rome, for example, should have exposed her firestorm of conflicting emotions. She had reasons to feel triumphant: she controlled Egypt’s bounty and was the mother of Julius Caesar’s only son. But she also had grounds for fear: Ceasar was legally married to someone else, and the Roman senate was already plotting against him.

  Instead of illuminating Cleopatra’s feelings, Mankiewicz distracts viewers with a parade—endless rows of marching bands, Vegas showgirls caked with Nefertiti eyeliner, muscular Nubian slaves. When Taylor finally appears—riding atop Cleopatra’s gaudy float—she looks like a stupefied Rose Bowl queen. Her son stands by her with an equally vacant expression, as if he were a prop.

  Both alone and in crowds, Taylor’s talent for intimacy is wasted. The camera rarely lingers on her face. And if she can’t show us her face, how can she engage our reptilian brains?

  Moving from Egypt to Rome and back again to Egypt, Taylor stumbles helplessly through one huge historically inaccurate set after another. Nearly every set could double as an airplane hanger. The wall frescoes often resemble museum restorations—chipped, broken, faded. Not vibrant and intact, as they would have been in Cleopatra’s day.

  The queen’s final hours oscillate between bathos and parody. Parody prevails. According to legend, Cleopatra died from the bite of an asp, which was smuggled to her in a basket of figs. Many good ways exist to work this exposition into a scene. Among them, however, is not the approach Mankiewicz took—making an actress renowned for her weight problems grandly proclaim, “First I shall want something to eat.”

  Critics lambasted the film, but viewers paid no attention. It became the highest grossing film of 1963, earning $22 million. (Unfortunately, it cost $44 million.) Reviewers noted all the film’s problems: its overblown scenery, its inadvertently funny script, its over-the-top costumes, its confusing direction. But the New Statesman may have come closest to pinpointing its greatest weakness: “Miss Taylor is monotony in a slit skirt, a pre-Christian Elizabeth Arden with sequined eyelids and occasions constantly too large for her.”

  In fact, the occasions were just right. Taylor had risen to grander, more demanding ones since she was twelve years old. But the sets were too large. No human actress could have filled them.

  Recently, National Geographic detailed a new quest for the “real” Cleopatra, whom the magazine expects to find in the historical Cleopatra’s tomb. In 2004, Kathleen Martinez, an archaeologist from the Dominican Republic, evolved a fresh theory: Cleopatra planned her death as carefully as her life, arranging to be buried in a secret spot outside Alexandria, where her remains and those of Mark Antony were not likely to be disturbed. Octavian, the Roman leader who vanquished Cleopatra, purportedly buried the couple inside the city. But a conspirator could later have moved their remains.

  Martinez’s hunch has not yet yielded any mummies. Nor have archaeologists unearthed new images of the queen, whose appearance to this day is a puzzle. (Her only confirmed portrait is a murky profile on a coin.) If Martinez is right, the queen’s DNA could resolve many controversies, including whether Cleopatra was of mixed race.

  Interesting though the remains could be, they are only part of the “real” Cleopatra, who has lived long past 31 B.C. in myth, music, literature, and art. Between 1540 and 1905, five ballets, forty-five operas, and seventy-seven plays were written about her. She has been portrayed in seven
films, including a 1934 effort by Cecil B. DeMille that had even more spectacle and less history than the Burton-Taylor extravaganza. In 2010, producer Scott Rudin announced plans for a new biopic, based on Stacy Schiff’s critically acclaimed Cleopatra: A Life. Schiff’s feminist portrait bodes well for a twenty-first-century Cleopatra. But she may still be overwhelmed by spectacle. Between 3-D, IMAX, and computer-generated imagery, directors today have many more tools with which to distract from story.

  Even with the limitations of a 1950s mind-set, Taylor’s Cleopatra may contain more of the “real” queen than a North African dig. When Taylor’s character sneaks into Ceasar’s quarters to demand that he make her pharaoh, the “real” Cleopatra emerges. In her ironic counsel to a platoon of ferocious Roman soldiers—“Be not afraid, I am with you”—the real Cleopatra comes through. And when she sails her barge to Tarsus so that Antony can meet her on “Egyptian soil,” the real Cleopatra appears—cleverly saving face for both herself and the general who would become her lover.

  The real Cleopatra doesn’t hang around for the full 192 minutes. But she blows in. She flickers. She burns.

  “I am fire and air,” Shakespeare’s Cleopatra says as she prepares for death. And as such she has lived on, not withered by age, in her “infinite variety.”

  12

  1963–1965

  IMAGINE BEING ELIZABETH TAYLOR after the release of Cleopatra. You and Richard Burton have become the most infamous lovers in the world. Billboards for Cleopatra have no writing on them—just a giant image of the two of you in costume. You will never again have privacy. If you ever itch to move among the people, you must move with bodyguards, hidden behind a wig and sunglasses.

  You follow Burton to London, where he is set to film The V.I.P.s, an updated version of Grand Hotel, about a bunch of jet-setters detained in Heathrow Airport by a stubborn fog, which, unlike most obstacles in their lives, they cannot bribe to go away. In real life, Burton is still married to his wife, whom he professes to love, even though he is “in love” with you. You settle into a rooftop suite at the Dorchester Hotel, temporarily shelving your own career.

  It is not shelved for long. Anatole de Grunwald, producer of The V.I.P.s, offers you $1 million to star opposite Burton—twice what Burton will be paid. You accept.

  Burton’s $500,000, however, is not nothing. Before Cleopatra, the most he ever got for a movie was $125,000. On April 26, 1963, Time runs a color painting of Burton on its cover. Inside is an oddly backhanded profile, praising Burton as an actor but suggesting he made a Faustian bargain. His own agent says, “This is a man who sold out.” Less hyperbolic, actor Paul Scofield is thus more damning: “Richard professionally is the most interesting actor to have emerged since the war. I think his qualities of heroic presence are not seen to their full advantage in movies. He appears not to be attracted by the best there is in the cinema.”

  Perhaps in response to such remarks, Burton accepts two classy roles. In Becket, he plays Thomas à Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury from 1163 to 1170, who was assassinated after a power struggle with Henry II. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a first-rate adaptation of a John Le Carré novel, he portrays Alec Leamas, the anti–James Bond, a burned-out spy, disgusted with his profession’s amorality and deceit.

  Both you and Burton struggle to be good parents. You adopt a German baby whom you name Maria. You had begun the adoption process when you were married to Fisher. It was one of the things that whipped the Vatican into a froth. Maria has significant congenital health problems, which you spare no expense to correct. “She was spread-eagled in a cast for about two years and we really didn’t know whether she would walk ever,” you explain. “Finally, a man at Oxford, a great doctor, advised an operation to put in a metal plate. Now she can even run, and she has begun to speak. Her first word was ‘Mama.’ I guess that’s universal, isn’t it? But when it happens, you just die.”

  Through all this—the filming and the parenting and the constant dodging of paparazzi—you search for a project worthy of you and Burton. A project on which you can work together.

  In London, you and Burton meet with screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who has come to discuss The Sandpiper, a project sent to you by producer Martin Ransohoff. You don’t love the treatment, which was written by Irene and Louis Kamp. But you like Trumbo—and you suggest ways he could enrich the story. You also like your prospective character, Laura Reynolds, a pantheistic rebel with a deep link to nature. The setting, too, appeals to you: Big Sur, California—twenty-six miles south of Pebble Beach. It recalls an innocent time, when you were a twelve-year-old warrior against gender discrimination in National Velvet.

  As The Sandpiper begins to jell, another project also comes together. You are not yet involved, but you will be soon. Warner Brothers pays $500,000 to Edward Albee for the film rights to his Broadway smash, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Jack Warner had intended the movie for Bette Davis and James Mason. The opening line in Albee’s play—“What a dump!”—was spoken by Bette Davis in her 1949 movie Beyond the Forest. Albee is amused by the thought of Davis doing a deliberate parody of herself, instead of all the inadvertent ones she would later come to do.

  You and Burton, however, are bigger stars than Davis and Mason. So the project goes to you. So begins a charmed interlude in your very public life. An interlude in which—whether you are aware of it or not—you introduce millions of viewers to some core elements of feminist thought.

  13

  The Sandpiper, 1965

  The man is a husband and a father and something else, say a doctor. The woman is a wife and mother and … nothing. And it’s the nothing that kills her.

  —Elizabeth Taylor as Laura Reynolds in The Sandpiper

  As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power.

  —Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1265–1274

  Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon.

  —Gloria Steinem, New York Magazine, December 20, 1971

  THE SANDPIPER BEGINS IN THE SKY above Big Sur, California. From above, we see undulating hills—green and ripe—that suggest the curves of a pregnant woman’s body: Mother Nature, the Great Mother, the Mother Goddess. The hills abut the sea, another powerful female symbol. Its waters recall the most primal experience of a human’s life—nine months suspended in liquid saline. Then we see a bridge—a triumph of masculine engineering, intended to tame the landscape, which, of course, it can never fully do. The bridge is but a Tinkertoy, a pathetic effort to impose rectilinearity on the heaving, uncontainable earth.

  Next we see Laura Reynolds, Taylor’s character, as fecund and womanly as the cliffs above her. She is painting at her easel on the beach, having escaped from the patriarchal world into nature, along with her out-of-wedlock, nine-year-old son Danny. Pregnant at age seventeen, she declined to marry her child’s father. Nor would she accept her parents’ offer of an abortion. She refuses to play by the cruel societal rules that destroyed nearly everybody in A Place in the Sun. “I was not abandoned by the father,” Reynolds proclaims. “The father was abandoned by me.”

  Their little paradise, however, is soon despoiled. Her prepubescent son shoots a deer—to see what the “fun” is, or so he explains to the judge to whom the police have delivered him. “Man is the only animal who kills for fun,” his mother had told him, and he wanted to understand what she meant. This irritates the judge, who decides that Laura is a bad influence. Fatherless though he is, Danny is still an incipient man, and he must learn to act like one, which includes distancing himself from his mother’s antipatriarchal stance.

  The judge hands over the boy to Richard Burton, aka Dr. Edward Hewitt, a married Episcopal minister who r
uns San Simeon, a fancy local prep school. Edward may once have lived by moral principles, but the first thing we see him do is assign a price to his “quality of mercy.” If the father of a flunking boy forks over a big gift for a new chapel, Edward won’t expel the boy. The deal is brokered by a pillar of the Church, Ward Hendricks, an oily car salesman. All the Church pillars, including the judge, spend their free time in the locker room of the Pebble Beach Golf Links. There, leering and drooling, they speculate on Laura’s sexual history, in which Hendricks once played a role. Later, Hendricks will attempt to rape Laura because he feels he is entitled to use her as he pleases.

  Poor Laura. Men react to her beauty in the same way that they responded to Taylor’s: first with lust, then with snickers. But Edward, to Laura’s surprise, seems interested in her thoughts. In his office, he presses her on her religious beliefs.

  “I’m a ‘Naturalist,’ ” she asserts. “We believe that man is doomed by his myths. There can be no peace on earth until man rids himself of all belief in the supernatural.” Then, realizing that she sounds as dogmatic as a fundamentalist, she adds jokingly, “It’s a small sect, with a membership of exactly one—and Danny as a novitiate.”

  The light tone doesn’t drain Laura’s resolve to keep Danny out of Edward’s parochial school. Even after sheriffs pried him from her home and dragged him to San Simeon, she continues to fight. Finally, though, Edward offers a convincing argument: “We’ll give him a set of values that he can rebel against later. Otherwise he might rebel against yours.”

  Laura and Edward forge a reluctant truce, which holds until Edward commissions her to design some stained-glass windows for his chapel. He doesn’t care that she is an atheist. Neither Diego Rivera nor José Clemente Orozco nor Marc Chagall believed in God, he says, but some of their greatest work is in houses of worship.