Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  One morning, in the third year of her marriage to Wilding, Elizabeth had snatched the crossword puzzle from his hands and challenged him, “Go on, hit me! Why don’t you!” But he demurred, too much of a gentleman. Or too passive. A big part of the problem in that marriage had been not only the age difference but the fact that Wilding’s once-lively career in England as a light romantic lead had dried up in Hollywood, and Elizabeth was virtually supporting the family. But Elizabeth was an old-fashioned girl. She wanted to be the 1950s-era ideal of femininity that her lush beauty promised but her circumstances and commanding personality left no room for. She was born to rule, but she wanted a man’s man, and in Mike Todd, she finally got one.

  Tragically, her joy was snatched from her all too soon, on March 22, 1958, after thirteen months of marriage and eight months after the birth of her third child, Elizabeth Frances Todd, known as Liza. Todd had left for the East Coast on a publicity jaunt in the Liz, an eleven-seater, Lockheed Lodestar. Elizabeth planned to accompany her husband, but a 102-degree fever kept her at home. The Liz encountered a storm over the Nevada desert, ice formed on the wings, the engine failed, and the plane went down in a fiery explosion. Todd, the pilot, the copilot, and Art Cohn, who was writing Todd’s biography, all died in the crash. When the news was brought to Elizabeth, she was inconsolable. She became ill with grief, refusing to eat, and MGM was worried that she would be unable to complete filming her role as Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the Tennessee Williams drama costarring Paul Newman and Burl Ives. But she did return to work, and Richard Brooks, her director, coaxed her back to health. The camaraderie of the film set and the demands of finishing the shoot probably saved her sanity and her life.

  Soon after Todd’s death, Elizabeth turned for comfort to Todd’s closest friend and protégé: the crooner Eddie Fisher, who was, inconveniently, Debbie Reynolds’s husband at the time. The Fishers were considered America’s Sweethearts, and the bust-up of their marriage scandalized the country. Reynolds, whose kewpie-doll cuteness belied her tough-as-nails personality (“She’s as wistful as an iron foundry,” Oscar Levant once quipped), was now the poster girl for Jilted Wife, victim of the Other Woman, a role Taylor fit all too well, to the horror of her handlers. After a tremendous hue and cry from the press, Elizabeth and Eddie Fisher hastily married, on May 12, 1959, fourteen months after Todd’s death.

  Why such haste? It could have been that Elizabeth—who had been surrounded since childhood by a studio full of fawners—simply didn’t know how to be alone. And, as the biographer Richard Meryman, who collaborated with Taylor on her 1964 memoir, Elizabeth Taylor, once observed, marrying Fisher was her way of holding on to Mike Todd. As Todd’s best friend (he had named his son Todd, after his hero), Fisher was a bantam-weight substitute, but a substitute nonetheless, except in the bedroom. By several accounts (including Fisher’s own), he was a lusty and enthusiastic lover, often making love to his gorgeous bride three and four times a day. Unlike other movie stars, such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth really was a sex goddess—she adored sex, she loved inspiring lust and satisfying it, she loved the attention, she loved the excitement and the danger. (She had always been attracted to danger, ever since she’d learned to ride and to jump at the age of five.) As Fisher later wrote about their relationship, “She was a woman who loved men as much as they loved her, and she wasn’t shy about it.”

  Elizabeth was vilified for breaking up the Fisher-Reynolds marriage, even though it was clear to all three involved that the connubial fires had completely gone out (if indeed they ever existed). Fisher would later admit that his marriage to the effervescent blond actress, whose girl-next-door image clashed with her real-life toughness, was mostly studio-arranged and had never been a love match. She had been Elizabeth’s maid of honor at Elizabeth and Mike Todd’s wedding, and she had affectionately washed the bride’s hair the day before the nuptials. Now Reynolds, not surprisingly, went along with the studio publicity in portraying Elizabeth as a home-wrecker. She even appeared for newspaper reporters wearing diaper pins attached to her sweater, at the studio publicity department’s insistence (“What’s a diaper pin?” she’d allegedly asked). America definitely sided with the jilted blonde, not knowing, of course, that her marriage to Eddie Fisher had been stage-managed by Hollywood, just as Elizabeth’s marriage to Nicky Hilton—and possibly Michael Wilding—had been. At the height of the scandal, Eddie Fisher received seven thousand hate letters a week. Elizabeth was vilified as a harlot, a viper, a Jezebel. One headline announced “Blood Thirsty Widow Liz Vampires Eddie,” and she was denounced from pulpits across the country. When the moralizing gossip maven Hedda Hopper got into the act, Elizabeth fought back with the immortal words “Mike is dead and I’m alive!” (echoing the cri de coeur of her character, Maggie the Cat, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Hopper, in fact, led the charge against what she perceived as Elizabeth’s immoral behavior—an irony considering that the columnist had been crucial in touting Elizabeth as a child star.

  The scandal of the Fisher marriage would have a long shelf life, invoked in 1965 when Jacqueline Kennedy was fighting her own public relations war over the publication of William Manchester’s The Death of a President, commissioned by the Kennedys after the assassination but which Jacqueline, in the end, found too personally revealing. In a publicity battle against the writer and his publisher, Mrs. Kennedy appeared on the cover of Esquire with the pull quote: “Anyone who is against me will look like a rat—unless I run off with Eddie Fisher…”

  It didn’t matter that Fisher’s marriage to Debbie Reynolds had never been an affair of the heart. His marriage to Elizabeth brought the actress her first bad publicity. Some even speculated that it had cost her the Academy Award for her work in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a performance she had painfully—and affectingly—delivered from the depths of her grief.

  Fisher had begun his career as a popular singer at Grossinger’s, a resort in the Catskills, and had an early Billboard hit with “Oh My Pa-Pa.” A popular recording star, he reached the pinnacle of his success with a weekly NBC variety show, Coke Time (named after its sponsor). Besides the bad publicity of his ruined marriage, the era of crooners was giving way to rock-and-roll stars like Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. His career never recovered, but it didn’t seem to matter—he was wildly, madly, dangerously in love with the grieving beauty. It was thrilling for him to try to follow in Todd’s footsteps, as Todd was everything Fisher longed to be—authoritative, expansive, macho. A waiter at Chasen’s in Beverly Hills recalled that when the Todds and the Fishers would dine together, Eddie always ordered exactly what Mike Todd ordered. “If Todd said steak medium rare, Eddie wanted steak medium rare. If Todd ordered sole slightly underdone, Eddie wanted the same thing…Fisher even ate the same way Todd did—fast.” Alas, though Todd and Fisher shared similar backgrounds (both came from urban Jewish working-class families) and ambitions (Fisher hoped to be a producer, like his hero), Fisher would prove to be no Mike Todd. But then nobody could fill those shoes—the short, bulldoggish impresario was louder, more lavish, more passionate, more of a con man, more challenging than anyone Elizabeth had ever known.

  By the time Elizabeth was ensconced in a fourteen-room villa on the Appian Way in Rome with an entourage of three children, a huge staff, and several pets, preparing for a role she had demanded and for which she had been paid a record $1 million (plus substantial overages and a percentage of profits), it was probably apparent to her that Eddie was not the kind of husband she needed. Having already stared down Louis B. Mayer and having learned how to handle alpha males like Todd, the last thing she wanted was someone she could boss around. His career as a pop singer in trouble, Fisher was kept on salary by 20th Century-Fox as a producer, really just another factotum hired to make sure Elizabeth showed up on time. His own plans to produce films starring his wife were not catching fire. So he hung on, picking up after Elizabeth’s several dogs and sliding into the role of “Mr. Elizabeth Taylor.”

>   Having learned always to get her way and to indulge her enormous appetite for life, in all its forms—food, love, sex, jewels, booze, attention, drama, joy—what Elizabeth needed was someone who could say no to her. Or at least stand up to her. Or at least knock her down a peg or two. Or match her in her Rabelaisian joie de vivre. Fisher just couldn’t do it.

  But, she would soon discover, Richard Burton could.

  The dapper, newly appointed 20th Century-Fox producer Walter Wanger was chosen to produce Cleopatra by then-studio boss Spyros Skouras, who believed that a remake of the successful 1917 silent film starring Theda Bara would bring in much needed income to the studio, which had fallen on hard times. Wanger was a successful producer of over sixty pictures, most notably Joan of Arc in 1948 and Susan Hayward’s tearjerker I Want to Live! in 1958. Though his private life had been a tad shaky (he had served time for shooting talent agent Jennings Lang in the groin when he’d discovered that the agent was having an affair with his wife, Joan Bennett), Wanger was up to the task. How hard could it be to add some dialogue to the silent-movie script, hire some attention-getting names, and bring the movie in for $2 million?

  Their dream of a modestly budgeted movie was dashed when their top choice to play Cleopatra—Elizabeth—asked for $1 million, a fee she came up with because she really didn’t want to make the picture. Her typical salary at the time was $125,000 (close to $900,000 today, adjusted for inflation). Skouras was outraged and told Wanger to jettison Elizabeth for Susan Hayward. But by then, Elizabeth had warmed to the idea, and when Wanger called to tell her the studio wouldn’t pay her asking price, Elizabeth went into negotiation mode. First she cried. Then she got tough. She ended up with an even better deal—the $1 million originally offered, a $3,000 a week living allowance, $50,000 for every week over the production schedule, and 10 percent of the movie’s gross profits. In addition, she insisted the movie be shot in Todd-AO, a cinemascopic process invented by Mike Todd, which would further enrich her, because, as Todd’s widow, she had inherited the rights to the process. She had learned a lot from her third husband—how to ask for the moon and how to get it. The studio agreed. She also demanded director approval. Again, the studio agreed. Peter Finch was cast as Caesar; he had costarred with her in Elephant Walk, a jungle drama in which Elizabeth had replaced an ailing Vivien Leigh as the female lead. Stephen Boyd, fresh from his success in Ben-Hur, would, for the time being, be her Marc Antony. Wanger then made the odd choice of Rouben Mamoulian to direct the epic—odd, because, though he’d had many successes and was known as “a woman’s director”—he had never brought in an epic before. And epic this was going to be.

  Elizabeth then insisted on shooting the film overseas, for tax purposes. The studio had hoped to film in Rome, but the 1960 Summer Olympics were to be held in the Eternal City when production was slated to begin, so there would be no hotel rooms available for cast and crew. (It was the 1960 Olympic Games, incidentally, that bestowed the gold medal in light-heavyweight boxing to a young American boxer with a Roman-sounding name: Cassius Marcellus Clay. He would change his name a few years later to Muhammad Ali.) Skouras, however, discovered that he could film in Pinewood Studios outside of London—not only did they have excellent soundstages, they contributed funding to the production in exchange for employing British extras, costumers, hairdressers, and crew and construction workers. So entire sets depicting Rome and Alexandria were built on the Pinewood Studios lot, in a doomed attempt to transform England into Rome.

  Massive set construction began, extravagant costumes and props were created, and an enormous cast of extras was assembled. Skouras, Wanger, and Mamoulian, however, didn’t anticipate two things: the lousy English weather and Elizabeth Taylor’s persistent health problems. The nearly constant rain, wind, and gloom delayed shooting and eroded the sets, which had to be constantly repainted. Living in London’s luxurious Dorchester Hotel with Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth contracted bronchitis and missed weeks of shooting, virtually grinding the production to a halt, while extras, actors, and crew all had to be paid. While Wanger was still trying to turn a cold and rainy landscape into sun-baked Rome, Elizabeth’s bronchitis turned into pneumonia, which was so intractable that the actress fell into a coma and had to be rushed to the London Clinic, where she famously underwent a tracheotomy to save her life. It left her with a scar visible in close-ups as Queen of the Nile, but it was the luckiest scar imaginable: she credited it with winning her the sympathy vote for Best Actress for her 1961 portrayal of good-time girl Gloria Wandrous in BUtterfield 8, a picture she’d completed the year before and had loathed. (“I lost to a tracheotomy,” her rival for the award, Shirley MacLaine, bemoaned.) The world waited anxiously as she recovered from her near-fatal illness—one wire service even reported that she had died—and the international headlines finally turned around the bad publicity that had dogged her after her breakup of the Fishers’ marriage. Elizabeth learned early how to make the most of her frequently dramatic illnesses and accidents. Sometimes it was the only way she could find respite from MGM’s relentless demands on her; other times it was a surefire way to win sympathy in the face of criticism.

  By the time she recovered, the entire set for Cleopatra had been disassembled and moved to Rome, where it should have been all along. At last, Rome would stand in for Rome, and the warm sun would hasten Elizabeth’s return to health.

  But problems persisted. Peter Finch and Elizabeth disliked the script, which had been rewritten by Sidney Buchman, Ben Hecht, and Ranald MacDougall. Mamoulian agreed, and he demanded a new script or else he’d walk off the picture. But the production was already behind schedule and horribly over budget. Elizabeth’s pneumonia and tracheotomy had brought the production to a halt, costing the studio $100,000 a day. A year of production had produced only ten minutes of film and had increased the budget to $35 million. To Mamoulian’s surprise, Wanger and Skouras accepted his resignation. Elizabeth—exercising her director-approval clause—asked that either George Stevens, who had directed her so magnificently in A Place in the Sun (and had driven her to tears in Giant) or Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who had directed her in Suddenly, Last Summer two years earlier, be hired to replace Mamoulian. Elizabeth knew how important the right director was, how good she had been in the hands of Stevens and Mankiewicz. Stevens wasn’t available, so Mankiewicz got the call while he was vacationing on the island retreat owned by his friend, actor Hume Cronyn. Like Mamoulian, Mankiewicz was an esteemed director, but, also like Mamoulian, he had never before brought in an epic.

  Cronyn’s advice to his friend? “Don’t do it.”

  A brilliant writer-director, Mankiewicz had won four Academy Awards, back to back, for writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve; like Mamoulian, he had a reputation as a “woman’s director,” so the studio thought he would help keep Elizabeth in line. Besides being prone to sickness and accidents, she contractually demanded time off from filming during her menstrual periods. She was chronically, famously late, and she suffered flus, infections, bronchitis, and injuries the way other people caught colds. She once stepped on a wire while dancing at a wrap party, injuring herself and starting a fire. Mankiewicz had already wrestled into submission divas such as Bette Davis in All About Eve and Katharine Hepburn in Suddenly, Last Summer. He was fascinated by “actresses,” whom he regarded (perhaps a tad jealously) as neurotic, fabulous creatures, and he was writing a never-finished tome on the subject. The studio tempted him with a $3 million payout (over $21 million in today’s dollars) for his services and an offer to buy him out of existing commitments—more money than he had ever received in his long, distinguished career—so he agreed to shoulder the burden, casting his friend Hume Cronyn as Cleopatra’s tutor, Sosigenes.

  Mankiewicz would prove to have a strong influence on Elizabeth, who would one day describe him as her favorite director. His own view of women reiterated Elizabeth’s feeling that a certain femininity was lacking in her life. Mankiewicz, a stocky, pipe-smoking intellectua
l, was proud of his understanding of the human psyche and was known to have his screenplays psychoanalyzed before shooting. The lines he wrote for Bette Davis in All About Eve would later be appropriated by Elizabeth: “I can be an actress or a woman, but I can’t be both.” Happy, fulfilled women served their men (and were supported by them). With almost every new marriage, Elizabeth publicly announced that her main role in life was to be “Mrs. Michael Wilding” or “Mrs. Mike Todd” or “Mrs. Eddie Fisher.” It was good press in the Eisenhower era, but it was also her genuine longing for a “normal” life. On one rare occasion, she railed against her own movie-star status: “Why couldn’t they let me grow up like Suzy Smith with a house in the suburbs, a husband who takes the 8:10, and three fat, saucy kids?” Of course, she would have hated that. Too safe.

  In some ways, their fates were intertwined. Mankiewicz had been scheduled to accompany Mike Todd on his last, fatal flight on the Liz, but his sister-in-law, Sarah Mankiewicz, had had a premonition and warned him not to go. He took a different flight, but he had the frisson of seeing his own death notice when he was mistakenly reported as having been aboard the doomed plane. Mankiewicz lived, he accepted the offer of directing Cleopatra, and his choice to replace Stephen Boyd as Marc Antony would change the course of Elizabeth’s life. The movie would also change the course of his own: his brilliant career lost all momentum and limped to its conclusion five years later; in the last twenty years of his long life Joe Mankiewicz never directed another film. He would blame Elizabeth and Richard for that.

  Mankiewicz replaced Peter Finch (now committed to another film) with Rex Harrison, whom he’d loved directing in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. To replace Stephen Boyd, the studio had to buy Richard Burton out of his successful Broadway run as King Arthur in Camelot, paying Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe a lump sum of $50,000. In addition to that payment, Burton was offered a contract guaranteeing him $250,000 ($1.7 million today), plus overages, plus extras, such as transportation for himself and his family, and $1,000 a week for what 20th Century-Fox’s ledgers referred to as “small expenses.” He and Sybil and their two girls were also given the use of a villa and household staff, which they shared with Roddy McDowall, Burton’s Camelot costar and Elizabeth’s childhood friend from their Lassie days. All of these perks, of course, further bloated the production budget.