Bio - 199 - Elizabeth Taylor: There Is Nothing Like a Dame

by Darwin Porter

Imitating Mike Todd, Fisher forged ahead to set up independent film companies such as Pisces Productions and MCL films as a means of starring Elizabeth in such features as Pearl Buck’s Imperial Woman or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Neither of these projects was ever filmed.

  “What really turned her against Fisher was what he was doing to use her as a future bread ticket,” Dick said. “In addition to other film companies, he set up the Fisher Corporation and announced that it would produce all Elizabeth Taylor films in the future. But he was getting nothing off the ground. He was a total failure as a producer. At least Mike Todd had launched 80 Days. Perhaps the coup de grâce occurred when she found out that all those diamonds he was giving her were actually being charged to their joint account.”

  When Max Lerner came to London, Elizabeth resumed her affair with him. The columnist later admitted, “We got so serious there for a while, we talked of marriage. When my fellow journalists learned of our affair, they called it ‘The Beauty and The Brain.’A similar reference had been used to describe the marriage of Marilyn Monroe to Arthur Miller. Elizabeth must have been attracted to my brain. It sure wasn’t my body.”

  Dick wasn’t surprised that Elizabeth took up with other men after having been married to Fisher for such a brief time “She was terribly attracted to Eddie in the beginning. They couldn’t get enough of each other. But she soon tired of him. She lost respect for him when he lost his career, though she may have been responsible for that. He’d gone out and spent all his money and now he was forced into the position of being her kept boy. She didn’t like that. So she started treating him like a slave, demanding he obey her every wish.”

  She was not only bossing Fisher around, but increasingly, she was using her new found clout with producers and directors. Consequently, Elizabeth insisted that Monty Clift be included in the cast of Suddenly, Last Summer.

  Unfortunately, in his previous film, Lonelyhearts (1958), Monty had virtually ruined his reputation among the power elite of Hollywood during his portrayal as an “agony uncle” [an “Advice to the Lovelorn” columnist]. Because of his drinking and drug abuse, he’d had a rough time getting through the production. Word spread from studio to studio, and, as a result, he became an uninsurable risk. Elizabeth was nonetheless adamant that he be cast in Suddenly, Last Summer. Otherwise, she threatened to bolt from the picture herself.

  Since no company would insure Monty, Joseph Mankiewicz was placed in the frightening position of having to direct the film with one of its three principal players uninsured.

  Mankiewicz had good reason to be worried: In London, Monty came to visit Elizabeth and Fisher in their respective suites at “The Dorch.” At one point during the evening, he went out and balanced himself precariously on the iron balustrade of their terrace, “wobbling a few inches from his death,” in Fisher’s words.

  When Fisher lured a drunken and drugged Monty back into the suite, Elizabeth told Monty that many friends, including Janet Leigh, had told her not to accept the role in Suddenly, Last Summer. According to Elizabeth, as transmitted by Fisher, “Janet said, ‘It will ruin what’s left of your reputation.’ She said ‘The gay stuff is barely acceptable to the general public, but the cannibalism is just too damn much.’”

  For the first day of shooting, Elizabeth and Fisher were driven outside London to Skepperton Studios. In her hand, she clutched a hastily marked-up copy of the script of Suddenly, Last Summer, which was based on a one-act play by Tennessee Williams. The screenplay had been written by Tennessee’s friend, rival, and fellow gay author, Gore Vidal. Since she’d had such success with Williams’ material in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she was hoping to score another win with Suddenly.

  She was being paid half a million dollars for her participation in Suddenly, which made her the highest paid salaried actress in the world.

  Showing up for work, she had the hint of a double chin. As Sam Kashner wrote in Furious Love, “It seems hard to believe that someone whose reputation and livelihood depended on flawless beauty would risk it all by sheer overindulgence. Yet it’s possible that Elizabeth had a love-hate relationship with her beauty. It was her beauty that had stolen her childhood and imprisoned her in an unreal life. She was a freak of nature, constantly being gawked at, lusted after, envied, and subjected to extreme scrutiny. It’s not surprising that a part of her would want to destroy it. So she would eat and eat and eat.”

  The director wanted Elizabeth to take publicity stills of herself in a white swimsuit, which would be flashed across the world. When she first tried on the suit in her dressing room, with Mankiewicz present, he instructed her to “tighten those muscles. It looks like you’ve got bags of dead mice under your arms.”

  On hearing this, Elizabeth lunged at him, threatening to “tear out your fucking eyeballs.” Dick pulled her off the director.

  Just prior to and during the filming, she would go on a crash diet, which restored her youthful beauty. By the end of filming, she claimed, “Hell, I look like I’m seventeen again—and a virgin.”

  Even though they fought each other, there was an obvious physical attraction between Elizabeth and her director, and this was all too obvious to the cast and crew.

  While professing undying love for Fisher, Elizabeth launched a summer (1959) affair with Mankiewicz, who had recently suffered through the ordeal of his wife committing suicide. Elizabeth told Monty, “Joe is my kind of man, like Mike Todd in many ways—bombastic, strong, determined, powerful. He combines strength with vulnerability, a combination I have always found irresistible.”

  “Dad had a habit of bedding his leading ladies, such as Joan Crawford and Gene Tierney,” claimed his son, Chris Mankiewicz. His other son, Tom Mankiewicz, agreed with his brother, “In All About Eve, Dad passed on Bette Davis, but not on Eve herself [a reference to Anne Baxter].”

  Fisher heard that Elizabeth was having an affair. Perhaps to save his pride, he denied it. When pressed, he said, “Joe is in love with Jean Simmons one day, Judy Garland the next day, and now Elizabeth. There is no affair.”

  Mankiewicz more or less admitted to the affair in 1962 when he was directing Elizabeth in Rome during the filming of Cleopatra. A reporter from a Roman newspaper asked him if he were “having an affair with Cleopatra.”

  “Fuck, no!” the director shouted at him. “That was during our last picture together!” a reference, of course, to Suddenly, Last Summer.

  The film was promoted with Elizabeth in that swimsuit, with the caption: “Suddenly, Last Summer, Cathy (the character played by Elizabeth) was being used for evil.”

  The “evil” referred to her being used to attract men that her cousin, Sebastian, would then seduce. Previously, Sebastian had used his mother, Violet Venable (as played by Katharine Hepburn) for procuring, but she had grown too old. The assumption, of course, was farfetched.

  Sebastian had been killed in a traumatic episode of cannibalism, and Violet orders Dr. John Cukrowiz (as played by Clift) to perform a lobotomy on the episode’s only witness, Cathy (Taylor).

  In the film, the details of Sebastian’s grisly death are not clearly depicted, but the plot calls for Sebastian to be chased, bludgeoned, and stripped by a group of angry, vengeful young men and pieces of his flesh eaten. After seeing the filmed version of the scene, Tennessee Williams said, “That is the ultimate parody of a blow-job.”

  Mankiewicz at first had been courteous and respectful of Monty. But when he invited him to dinner, he was appalled. Monty reached for food on the plates of others, and even tossed pieces of meat into the faces of his fellow guests. He ate with his hands and made outrageous remarks. “Let’s go around the table,” he said. “I want to know the size of every man’s penis. As for the women, I want to know the largest object you’ve ever inserted into your vagina.”

  Joseph Mankiewicz

  Facing Monty before the camera, Elizabeth realized just how much his mental and physical condition had deteriorated. Monty simply could not remember his lines, which incited almost violent att
acks from Mankiewicz. At one point, the director wanted to shut down the picture and cast another actor in the role.

  Zombie like, Monty walked through the film, giving a strangulated and neurasthenic performance. He spends a great deal of time on screen repeating the words of others, reformulating them in the form of a question.

  Elizabeth exploded and denounced Sam Spiegel when she learned that he was negotiating with Peter O’Toole to take over Monty’s role. She threatened to walk off the picture.

  The character of Violet Venable (Hepburn) was based on Tennessee’s mother, Edwina, who permitted (some say encouraged) doctors to perform a lobotomy on his sexually frustrated sister, Rose Isabel Williams.

  Several biographies have suggested that until she made Suddenly, Last Summer, Hepburn was not aware of what homosexual men did in bed together and that Gore Vidal had to explain it to her. That, of course, is a laughable assertion about a woman who had spent decades in Hollywood among homosexuals. As a lesbian herself, she was deeply involved in a platonic relationship with another closeted homosexual actor, Spencer Tracy. Her best friend was George Cukor, the gay director, and her best female friend and lover was Laura Harding, the American Express heiress.

  On the set one sultry afternoon, when London was experiencing a rare heat wave, a jittery Hepburn confronted Vidal and Elizabeth, who were sitting in directors’ chairs, discussing the next scene.

  “Mr. Vidal, I talked it over with Spence last night, and he and I decided I can’t go on with this film. Your script is just too vile. Give the role to that poor, wretched Mildred Dunnock. She’ll play any part, no matter how demented. With all its flesh-eaters, lesbian nurses, sadistic nuns, it’s all so Grand Guignol,” Hepburn said. “No movie-goer will sit through this muck. The characters you and Mr. Williams have created are perverted. I do not understand perversion— never have, never will. I’m far too mentally healthy to be appearing in such demented trash.”

  Discussing the nuances of perversion Katharine Hepburn (left) as Violet Venable and Gore Vidal (right)

  “Miss Hepburn,” Vidal said with gravitas. “You understand perversion to your toenails. You’ll give one of the most electrifying performances of your life. Forget Dunnock. Do you want us to give the role to Bette Davis? You’ll probably get nominated for an Oscar.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Hepburn said before walking away.

  She went ahead and finished the film as Vidal had written it. In fact, she worked even harder to improve the demented and perverted quality of Violet Venable’s character.

  Vidal’s prediction about Hepburn being nominated for an Oscar turned out to be accurate.

  That same day, a reporter encountered Elizabeth and asked her what she thought about appearing in such a controversial film. “I’ve always wanted to appear on screen with Venus’s-flytraps,” she said. That was a reference to the recreation of a carnivorous garden as a set within the movie.

  SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER

  “A world of degenerates obsessed with rape, incest, homosexuality, and cannibalism.”

  As a kind of gag, Fisher appeared uncredited as a street urchin begging Elizabeth for food. Frank Merlo, the lover of Tennessee Williams, also made an uncredited appearance, as did Gore Vidal. He and Merlo can be seen among the audience in a wraparound balcony observing Monty in his role as a surgeon performing an operation in a “surgical theater” below.

  Mercedes McCambridge, cast as Elizabeth’s greedy mother, recalled what an unhappy time filming Suddenly was for everybody: “Monty was coming apart right on the set, but Elizabeth could not provide her usual help because of her own misery. I read constantly in the papers about how much she loved Eddie Fisher. London was an inferno that summer. She and I walked off the sound stage to get some fresh air. Outside, she was in tears. ‘My life is a shambles,’ she admitted. ‘I made a horrible mistake. I married Eddie and I don’t love him. At times, I can’t even stand him.’ I could not believe my ears. Once we went inside, Eddie was there. She made a spectacle of showing her affection for him.”

  “Whereas working with Joan Crawford is a nightmare, working with Elizabeth Taylor is merely a disturbing experience. On the set she sounded like a fishwife, calling people ‘assholes’ or ‘schmuck.’ I thought she was completely outrageous. She was tender to Monty, but by the end of the shoot, she wasn’t speaking to Hepburn. Elizabeth told me that Hepburn came on to her in her dressing room one afternoon—and she was rejected. That’s why Hepburn was so bitter. A lot of those old dragon stars of the 1930s were dykes—not just Hepburn, but Garbo and Dietrich, too. Might I have the honor of adding Joan Crawford to that list—I should know!”

  Tennessee arrived on the set and spent time with Elizabeth. He told her, “I was with Monty last night. He’s washing down his codeine pills with brandy. But who am I to cast stones? He told me that after the accident, he has become impotent and the only way he can achieve sexual satisfaction is to peform fellatio on a man or else be penetrated by one.”

  “Thank you, Tennessee, you’re a darling, but I really don’t know what I can do with this personal data about Monty,” Elizabeth said.

  When Truman Capote saw the movie, he claimed that Elizabeth’s final dramatic monologue was “the best scene she’d ever performed before or likely ever again. She should win the Oscar.”

  Mankiewicz defined her long, concluding monologue as “an aria from a tragic opera of madness and death.”

  After she shot that scene, Elizabeth became hysterical and couldn’t stop crying for hours.

  ***

  Throughout the filming, Katharine Hepburn had been consistently furious with Mankiewicz for his brutal treatment of the tormented Monty. She was also furious at him for his treatment of herself as well, interpreting his behavior as condescending.

  On the last day of Hepburn’s appearance before the camera, the tension between Mankiewicz and Hepburn was obvious to the entire crew. By ten o’clock, she and the director were screaming at each other. But once the camera was turned on her, the star became her carefully controlled, professional self, giving an awesome interpretation of her particular manifestation of evil.

  By five o’clock that afternoon, Mankiewicz defined the experience as a wrap. Then Hepburn walked over to him. “Are you absolutely sure that that is all you’ll need from me on this film?”

  “I am absolutely sure,” he told her. “You’re free to go.”

  “Fine, she said. Then in front of everybody, including Elizabeth, she spat in his face, turned her back to him, and stormed off the set.

  Wiping the spit off his face, Mankiewicz, in front of Elizabeth said, “Miss Hepburn is the most experienced amateur actress in the world. Her performances, though remarkably effective, are fake.”

  In contrast, Capote found that “Hepburn is the Queen of High Camp as she stands in that fantasy New Orleans garden filled with insectivorous growths. Monty looks as if he is going to expire at any minute. Although I detest the film’s scriptwriter, Gore Vidal, I have to admit Suddenly, Last Summer marks the end of the 1950s. The public is obviously eager for a more candid expression of sex.”

  The Catholic Legion of Decency forced the studio to edit much of the dialogue so that the homosexual theme is only implied, and that the actual gay character has neither a face nor a voice in the film.

  “Homosexuality is truly the love that dare not speak its name—or show its face,” Tennessee said. When he was presented with a screening of the film’s final cut, he sat silently through it. At the end, he rose from his chair. “It made me want to throw up. Elizabeth Taylor was totally miscast.”

  In spite of their difficulties during the shoot, Mankiewicz later said, “Her role as Cathy was the best performance Elizabeth ever gave on the screen.”

  Time claimed that watching Suddenly was like being crushed in the “clammy coils of a giant snake.” The critic for Variety made the claim that, “It’s the most bizarre film ever made by a major studio.”

  Inadvertently, film
critic Bosley Crowther increased attendance in droves when he wrote that the movie was about “the world of degenerates obsessed with rape, incest, homosexuality, and cannibalism.” By “degenerates,” he was referring, of course, to Vidal and Williams.

  “We could not have asked for better advertising,” Vidal said, in response.

  “It stretched my credulity to believe such a ‘hip’ doll as our Liz wouldn’t know at once in the film that she was ‘being used for something evil,’” Tennessee said.

  In contrast to Tennessee’s objections to Elizabeth and her performance, he referred to Hepburn as “a playwright’s dream. She makes my dialogue sound better than it is. She invests every scene with the intuition of an artist born to act.”

  The New York Times shrieked that Suddenly, Last Summer “was a celebration of sodomy, incest, cannibalism, and Elizabeth Taylor at her most voluptuous.”

  Ultimately, she came to prefer Suddenly as her favorite film—“emotionally draining, but also emotionally stimulating.”

  In spite of the critics, and in spite of the doom-predicting Hedda Hopper, Suddenly became the fourth highest grossing movie of 1960, earning nearly $6 million in domestic ticket sales alone.

  Far from emerging as a flop, as some in Hollywood had predicted, Suddenly catapulted Elizabeth into the ranks of Hollywood’s Top Ten box office stars, a list that was dominated at the time by Rock Hudson and Doris Day in the wake of their highly successful Pillow Talk (1959).

  She went to that year’s Academy Award ceremony assured that “I will win. They’re sure to give it to me for Maggie the Cat.”

  Dick Hanley warned her, “Don’t get your hopes up. Katharine Hepburn is nominated for the same movie. Academy members who like Suddenly, Last Summer will split their vote. Hepburn should have run for Best Supporting Actress, but the old dyke wouldn’t listen to reason.”

  As the Oscar winner was announced at the Academy Awards, Elizabeth had her hopes crushed. She and Hepburn came in at second and third place, respectively. The Oscar winner for the year’s Best Actress was Simone Signoret for her role in Room at the Top.