EIGHT

THE LAUNCH OF THE
$40 MILLION BOMB

WITH BUTTERFIELD 8 IN THE CAN, IT WAS TIME FOR THE Cleopatra fiasco to roll into action – a lengthy process that would be fraught with bust-ups of escalating virulence, threats of lawsuits and financial ruin, and for its star a maelstrom of tantrums, indispositions and more attention seeking than most people could sensibly handle. For starters, Elizabeth was not the only contender for the role that Spyros Skouras hoped would make the film Hollywood’s biggest smash since Gone with the Wind (1939) had saved Twentieth Century Fox from the receiver, although her personal and financial demands had been met and she had been told that Cleopatra was hers for the taking.

Skouras worked his way up the Hollywood ladder the hard way. The son of a Greek shepherd, he and his brothers Charles and George arrived penniless in the United States in 1910. Settling in St Louis, they bought up every cinema in the city by the mid-1920s. When these were later snapped up by Warner Brothers, Skouras was appointed head of distribution. In 1932, after a brief spell with Paramount, Skouras took over Fox’s movie theatres in New York. In 1942, he was appointed their president, investing in the CinemaScope widescreen process, which, for a while, successfully fought off competition from television, the ‘newfangled’ craze that had hammered the final nail into the coffin of the all-powerful studio system. Skouras’s debut film in this media, The Robe (1953), was a big hit worldwide.

Producer Walter Wanger had a no less illustrious pedigree. A graduate of Dartmouth College, he worked for Columbia, most notably on Greta Garbo’s Queen Christina (1933), before becoming an independent producer, releasing such gems as Stagecoach (1939) and The Reckless Moment (1949), with his wife, Joan Bennett. In the early 1950s, he spent time in prison for shooting her agent/lover but emerged from the scandal virtually unscathed to make Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Both Wanger and Skouras boasted at the time that Cleopatra would prove to be their greatest achievement, though it would actually turn out to be their biggest nightmare.

In recent years, Fox had endured some of the lowest returns of any of the major studios. Aside from The King and I and The Seven Year Itch (1955), there had been no massive box-office hits, and a series of turkeys had lost the company $100 million.

In June 1960, Elizabeth was yet to sign her contract. One of the reasons for this was that her films were banned in Egypt, where the film was set, and in the rest of the Arab world because of her conversion to Judaism and links with Israel. Still sitting in the wings, but no longer clear favourite, was Joan Collins – who, in retrospect, would have been just as good in the role – along with Susan Hayward, Gina Lollobrigida and, more ridiculously, Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, either of whom would have turned the production into a joke. Marilyn had just been assigned to The Misfits with Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable, and would cause them untold problems, turning up late every day, more often than not high on barbiturates and spreading the rumour that she and Monty were an item. Elizabeth detested her. During a confrontation at The Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills (quoted in Norman Mailer’s biography of Monroe), Elizabeth is reputed to have exclaimed, in front of witnesses, ‘Get that dyke away from me!’

All of the above-mentioned actresses were contract players and therefore cheaper to employ than Elizabeth. Aside from Monroe and Bardot, all were more talented. Elizabeth, however, was media manna from heaven – albeit an indiscriminate liability on account of health and personality issues – so much so that Wanger and Skouras were willing to stake their reputations in acquiring her, regardless of the cost. Any problems, they declared, would be ironed out along the way.

Like Rock Hudson and the Wagners, Elizabeth had founded her own company, the first of several – based in Switzerland for tax purposes, MCL was named after her children’s initials – and she was proving to be a surprisingly shrewd businesswoman. When the Fox executives decided that a $1-million salary was too steep, she and her agents negotiated a deal whereby she would be paid a flat rate of $125,000 to be followed by $50,000 for each additional week she was asked to work after a to-be-fixed shooting period. Fox were clearly expecting the production to run pretty much to schedule and could not have foreseen any of the dilemmas of the near future. Additionally, the studio would pick up her expenses tab. This included $3,000 per week in personal expenses, the salaries for her entourage, a suite at the Dorchester in London, first-class air and rail travel, and a Rolls-Royce to be laid on around the clock. It was as if Elizabeth had actually seen into the future or had even planned to take Fox for a ride. Though all of these terms combined came to less than the original $1 million she had demanded, by the time Cleopatra hit the screens the tally would be almost double this amount.

To make money, Spyros Skouras avowed, money would have to be spent, and vast amounts were dispensed with in getting the project off the ground. In Italy, a rival company were about to begin shooting their version of Cleopatra, with a more sensible budget. Skouras bought them out to the tune of $500,000. He then gave the go-ahead for the sets to be constructed – recreations of Alexandria and Rome, spread across several acres at Pinewood Studios. By the time he had signed the supporting actors, the sets alone had cost Spyros $750,000. Stephen Boyd was hired to play Mark Antony, and Peter Finch was signed for the role of Caesar. Belfast-born Boyd, ethereally handsome and at the prime of his career, had recently triumphed as Massala in Ben-Hur (1959). Finch, a hell-raiser much admired by Elizabeth, had already worked with her in Elephant Walk. Welsh actor Stanley Baker was signed up to play Mark Antony’s favourite, Rufio. Shooting was scheduled to begin at the end of September, with director Rouben Mamoulian confident that a typical British autumn would provide an exact climate to the one enjoyed by ancient Egypt.

By then, Eddie Fisher had all but been relegated to the role of Mr Taylor – the press reported him as her factotum/secretary, on Fox’s payroll to the tune of $1,500 a week just to ensure that she got to work on time and sober each day. It was suggested that all they ever had in common was a mutual love for one man – Mike Todd – one passionately, the other platonically, and that neither had ever stopped mourning him.

The first major crisis occurred days into shooting when the studio coiffeurs staged a strike because Elizabeth had brought her personal stylist onto the set. When word got around that she must therefore consider British hairdressers to be useless, which was not the case, the technicians took a sympathy vote and downed tools, forcing the studio to shut for several days until the dispute was resolved. This apparently had an effect on Elizabeth’s health, and soon afterwards one of her ‘aides’ – almost certainly Eddie Fisher – informed Mamoulian that she would be unavailable for work because of a high fever. The director was concerned enough, having been forewarned of his star’s foibles, to cable Spyros Skouras in Hollywood – and for Skouras to be on the next plane to London. The press then learned that the production was costing the studio over $100,000 a day.

Eddie Fisher, by his own admission, found it necessary to get away from his wife from time to time. ‘I was caught in a magnificent trap, and even though I was madly in love with her, it was still a trap,’ he recalled, adding that his career had evaporated and that the only singing he was now doing was around the house. Taking a leaf out of Mike Todd’s book, Fisher had decided to produce Elizabeth’s films himself, which would mean jetting back and forth to Hollywood to strike up various deals and hopefully salvage their flagging marriage by putting some distance between them, thus applying the ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ technique used earlier by Louis B. Mayer to patch up the marriage of Elizabeth’s parents. She was reputedly interested in playing the outrageous American dancer Isadora Duncan (later immortalised on the screen by Vanessa Redgrave), mindless of the fact that she could not dance, and the great French tragic actress Sarah Bernhardt, mindless of the fact, some sniped, that she could not act. George Stevens, who had directed her in Giant, was also assembling the cast for The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and wanted Elizabeth to play Mary Magdalene, a move that would have seen her torn to shreds by the moralists. Other projects lined up by Fisher included Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers and L’affaire gouffre, a French drama co-starring Charlie Chaplin.

In what now appears to have been a trial separation, Fisher put his heart into these projects. ‘The truth was, I just wanted to breathe on my own,’ he observes in his memoirs, describing the tantrum Elizabeth had thrown when he had bid her au revoir. The nearest he came to signing a deal was when Warner Brothers wanted to team her up again with Paul Newman in Two for the Seesaw (1962). When the studio president learned that she would not work for less than her now statutory $1 million, the deal was off, and Fisher returned to London and inevitably more drama, for his wife was ill again.

Never one to do things by halves, Elizabeth had gained a valuable ally during Fisher’s absence: Lord Evans, the Queen’s personal physician. When she was suddenly declared seriously ill at the end of October, it was he who booked her into the London Clinic. She also flew in her personal doctor from Los Angeles, and despite the gravity of her condition, insisted on being stretchered out of the front entrance of the Dorchester – but not until the press had been informed.

For two weeks, all the public were told was that Elizabeth Taylor was very ill, possibly dying. Sara and Francis Taylor, declaring that her illness was ‘connected to the spirit’, breezed into town, accompanied by a Christian Scientist practitioner. The trio spent several nights at Elizabeth’s bedside, taking it in turn to read aloud passages from Mary Baker Eddy’s 1875 tome Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. The main thesis of this book is that ‘disease is of an illusory nature, curable without medication’. Whilst the cynics scoffed, Elizabeth accredited it with helping her towards her recovery, whilst her husband more realistically suspected that the true cause of her malady was her fondness for painkillers. Recalling how she popped pills prescribed by several different doctors, each with no knowledge of the other, he explained how one day he experimented by taking one of the more unfamiliar medications from Elizabeth’s nightstand – before then he had never knowingly taken anything addictive. ‘I couldn’t stand up until the next morning,’ he wrote, adding that he feared that she might overdose. ‘The most I could do was be there in case – just in case.’

Fisher claimed, just as others have, that Elizabeth knew more about these drugs than most doctors, that she was constantly passing out and that the situation became so bad that he had to be prescribed Librium to get a good night’s sleep. In fact, he had been addicted to drugs for years, something he might not have been consciously aware of. One of his mentors was alternative physician Max Jacobson, the infamous Dr Feelgood, whose celebrity clients included neurotics Margaret Leighton and Tennessee Williams. Both relied on his notorious ‘vitamin’ injections and, like Fisher, might not have known of their amphetamine content. Also, because these were not yet illegal in the United States, patients might have interpreted the unpleasant cold-turkey experience that followed once their effect wore off as merely being part of the condition for which the injections had been prescribed. Jacobson usually administered the shots himself, but once a client was hooked, he taught them to self-inject. According to Fisher, whoever was treating Elizabeth also allowed him to inject her with morphine. ‘She needed it more than she needed a husband,’ he recalled. ‘Ah, the things we do for love.’ Then it emerged that the cause of her mystery illness was nothing more than an abscessed tooth. This was removed and the patient given the all-clear, much to everyone’s relief.

During Elizabeth’s indisposition, Rouben Mamoulian had worked around her, shooting crowd scenes and scenes with Stephen Boyd that did not involve Cleopatra. No sooner had she returned to the set than she collapsed with severe headaches and had to be rushed back to the London Clinic. Lord Evans and his colleagues now diagnosed something much more serious: inflammation of the spinal cord and brain, possibly meningitis. On 18 November 1960, she was declared ‘unfit to work for the foreseeable future’.

For Twentieth Century Fox, this spelled disaster. Spyros Skouras had luckily, but with some difficulty, taken out a $3-million insurance policy in the event of such a catastrophe befalling the studio, and when it was decided that filming would have to be postponed, not just on account of Elizabeth but because of the fast-approaching winter – the cameras were getting steamed up due to the cold and there was steam coming from the actors’ nostrils and mouths, hardly appropriate for Egypt! – Lloyds of London suggested that Skouras find himself another Cleopatra and begin shooting elsewhere. Susan Hayward, Joan Collins and Joanne Woodward (a late contender) were no longer available, but Marilyn Monroe – a hopeless wreck after The Misfits – was still interested, and so too now were Kim Novak and Shirley MacLaine. Skouras would not hear of this. He announced that he was closing down the production until the new year, by which time he hoped Elizabeth would be fit.

The tabloids, meanwhile, were having a field day, fuelled by Elizabeth’s own passion for the dramatic. The Daily Mail suggested she had been faking it – keeping away from the set because she had put on weight. Insiders, who were effectively little more than idle speculators, leaked snippets to the American trash mags. One such rumour was that Elizabeth was cheating on Eddie Fisher with gay actor Stephen Boyd and that the Fishers’ marriage – founded solely on their joint grief for Mike Todd – was all but over. Boyd was enjoying a discreet relationship with the British boxer Freddie Mills, who later left him for singer Michael Holliday, but the press refused to believe that a man even reputed to be involved with Elizabeth Taylor could be anything but red-blooded and did not ‘out’ him.

Whilst Boyd breathed a sigh of relief, the Fishers sued various tabloids for a collective $8 million. Not that this did much good. A few years earlier, the Daily Mirror had been taken to the cleaners by the flamboyantly homosexual Liberace for suggesting that he was effeminate, since which time the press had been meticulous in checking their sources. No doubt the newspapers would have supplied proof of where their stories had come from had the matter gone to the high court – and no doubt released more details of the Fishers’ troubled marriage. The couple were therefore compelled to settle out of court for smaller amounts than they had anticipated, amounts which have never been disclosed.

Shooting on Cleopatra resumed on 3 January 1961, but ground to a halt days later when Rouben Mamoulian denounced the script rewrites as ‘tosh’. Acting on a whim, he flew in writer-cum-producer-cum-director Nunnally Johnson from Hollywood, an exercise which did not come cheap. Johnson had worked on Tobacco Road (1941), The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and, more recently, Elvis Presley’s Flaming Star (1960). His fee for Cleopatra was a non-negotiable $100,000, and his on-set presence only added to the general mayhem, forcing Mamoulian to confess that he had made an almighty mistake and throw in the towel. Through no fault of his own, he had ended up with just 15 minutes of usable film, which, he told reporters, had cost Twentieth Century Fox around $500,000 a minute!

It was Elizabeth who suggested that Mamoulian’s replacement should be Joe Mankiewicz, much as she loathed him for his treatment of Montgomery Clift during Suddenly, Last Summer. Riding high on the crest of a wave of popularity following the success of the film, Mankiewicz upped his fee in a deal that very nearly catapulted the studio irretrievably into the red. Mankiewicz joint-owned a production company with NBC that Spyros Skouras had been after for some time. Part of the deal was that Fox should buy him out for $3 million – and pay him a salary way above the norm, as well as ‘executives’ expenses. As such, he became the highest-paid director in Hollywood history up to that point.

Mankiewicz hit Pinewood like a tidal wave. To pacify the film’s backers, who were threatening to pull out, he dismissed Nunnally Johnson and the lesser scriptwriters, sacked most of the bit-parts and extras, and gave instructions for the sets to be trashed and rebuilt. Within a month of taking the helm, he had sent the Cleopatra budget soaring to over $12 million. Then he announced a target date: 3 April 1961. By then, he vowed, he would have come up with a script that would not have cinemagoers cringing and a movie with actors worth watching. Until this date, production would be suspended.

Elizabeth, now on the $50,000-a-week part of her deal with Fox – currently being paid just to hang around waiting for the studio call – accompanied Eddie Fisher to Munich’s pre-Lenten carnival. No sooner had they arrived than Fisher was taken ill with suspected appendicitis. Elizabeth insisted upon him being flown back to London – again suggesting that the condition cannot have been serious. Fisher subsequently confessed that he had invented the illness in order to draw attention to himself for once and thus prevent Elizabeth from self-destructing completely. Some people might think it incredible that he should actually undergo surgery in order to assuage his wife’s acute selfishness rather than ‘kick her into touch’ as some husbands might have done. Such was her power over him.

Fisher had barely recovered from his ordeal when Elizabeth’s lungs became congested and she almost choked to death during the night of 3 March 1961. Her life was ostensibly saved by one J. Middleton Price, an anaesthetist attending a party at a nearby suite at the Dorchester who performed an emergency tracheotomy. Rushed into the London Clinic, she was diagnosed with pneumonia and placed on the critical list, with a 40 per cent chance of survival. The headline in the next day’s Evening Standard read, ‘Liz Fights for Her Life’.

Outside the London Clinic, hundreds of fans kept a round-the-clock vigil, mingling with the curious and reporters eager to relay news of her death to their editors who would vie for the best exclusives on her busy love life once she was deceased and incapable of suing. Some of those religious organisation that had previously denounced her held prayer meetings for her recovery – they were unashamed to admit that they wanted her well so that they would not feel guilty about attacking her. Some even delivered bottles of Lourdes water to the hospital.

London had not witnessed such an emotional scene since June 1939, when Gracie Fields had been placed on the danger list after being admitted to the Chelsea Hospital with ovarian cancer. Photographers were offered huge amounts of cash to infiltrate the tight security for an exclusive of Elizabeth’s corpse should the worst befall her. Just over a year earlier, the same incentive had been put forward when French heart-throb actor Gérard Philipe had died in Paris. Elizabeth’s parents flew in to be with her, this time without their Christian Science miracle worker. Montgomery Clift called every day; John Wayne and Tennessee Williams, working in the capital, dropped in to see her. Every hour on the hour there was a bulletin: these either declared her to be slightly on the mend or sinking fast.

On 10 March 1961, Elizabeth was taken off the critical list, though she would remain hospitalised until the end of the month. There was absolutely no hope of her returning to the Cleopatra set for the time being, but the showbiz wheel had to keep turning, even if the star was out of action. Upon her discharge, Elizabeth was driven to Heathrow, looking pale under her make-up but still every inch the movie legend in her furs and jewels. On a specially equipped plane, she was flown back to Los Angeles to pick up a Best Actress Oscar for Butterfield 8. Many critics believed that the award was given to her not on account of her acting abilities, but out of pity – others suggested that this was the Academy’s way of apologising for their harsh treatment of her during the Fisher-Reynolds split, though she had, of course, brought this upon herself. ‘They always gave you an Academy Award when they thought you were going to die,’ Marlene Dietrich told me. ‘It was their way of salving their conscience – “The Deathbed Oscar” – and many believe that Elizabeth Taylor died a death every time she stepped in front of a camera.’ Elizabeth was presented with the award by Yul Brynner. Her chief rival had been Shirley MacLaine, nominated for The Apartment (1960), who later observed, ‘I lost to a tracheotomy.’

Elizabeth embarked on a strange and most mysterious relationship during this period with Max Lerner, the 59-year-old ex-Harvard and Brandeis University professor and columnist with the New York Post who had penned a glowing review of her performance in Suddenly, Last Summer. Lerner had also defended her against some of the vitriolic comments that had appeared in the press following her marriage to Eddie Fisher, particularly those made by Robert Ruark, who had denounced her as ‘a monument to busting up other people’s homes’. Praising Elizabeth and Eddie for their frank expression of their feelings for one another, despite the hurt this had caused, Lerner observed, ‘This is a case where joyous candour is far better than a hysterical show of virtue. Where so many people have been desensitised in our world, I welcome this forthright celebration of the life of the senses.’

Biographer Kitty Kelley later compared Elizabeth and Max Lerner with Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller: ‘The perfect complement of “The Brain” and “The Body”, a melding of the cerebral and sexual.’ It is unlikely Lerner would have bothered watching a film such as Suddenly, Last Summer had it not been for an impromptu meeting with Elizabeth in June 1959, when he had been covering the summit talks between Prime Minister Macmillan and President Eisenhower. It was obviously love – or lust – at first sight on his part, and now that her fourth marriage was crumbling, Elizabeth welcomed the attention of a worldly wise, super-intelligent man as an antidote to the inarticulate braggarts she had been involved with in the past.

Speaking to McCall’s magazine in September 1974, Lerner retrospectively confirmed their relationship: ‘It strengthened Elizabeth’s self-respect, her index of self-worth.’ Certainly, her confidence needed a boost after one violent husband, one who was pathologically docile and two more who believed that true love was expressed by way of the wallet, not the heart. According to Lerner, their affair was sufficiently serious for them to contemplate marriage, though with a 32-year age gap, and with both parties still married, this would have created an even bigger scandal than the one involving Eddie Fisher. Elizabeth also trusted Lerner enough to confide her innermost secrets, which she now wanted to share with the world, no doubt wishing to set the record straight should she fall ill again and not survive. She announced that this project would be called Elizabeth Taylor: Between Life and Death, and an undisclosed publisher paid her $250,000 for the privilege of opening her heart. The exercise produced some 200 pages of transcripts from the taped interviews given when she was feeling up to it. Her friend Roddy McDowall compiled a collection 50 never-before-seen photographs for use in the book, an exercise he would later repeat for his famous Double Exposure (William Morrow and Company, 1993) tome. Though the project was subsequently abandoned, some of these confidences are believed to have been incorporated into An Informal Memoir by Elizabeth Taylor (Harper & Row, 1965). Elizabeth’s relationship with Lerner, like all the others, quickly fizzled out, though the journalist would remain a close friend until his death, aged 89, in 1992.

Spyros Skouras, meanwhile, announced that Cleopatra would resume shooting in Hollywood in June, and the hardly used Pinewood sets were dismantled and crated up. They were halfway across the Atlantic when a Twentieth Century Fox executive reminded Spyros of the clause in Elizabeth’s contract stipulating that MCL had insisted upon the film being made outside the United States for tax purposes. Skouras spent $400,000 creating a huge artificial lake for the film’s battle scenes but now had to have this filled in, selling the land at a loss to a real-estate company. Then he began searching for what he considered would be the next best thing to ancient Egypt and Rome: a location in Italy.

To acquire his director, Skouras had been compelled to buy some of Joe Mankiewicz’s holdings. Now, to raise additional funds for what was already being labelled ‘Hollywood’s costliest turkey’, he found himself selling 250 acres of Twentieth Century Fox’s studio lots in Beverly Hills. Instructions were given to reconstruct Rome’s Forum on a 12-acre back-lot, whilst the Alexandria site sprung up across 19 more, with the studio conveniently forgetting the stipulation in Elizabeth’s contract that filming should be done outside the USA for tax purposes. Skouras then commissioned an exact replica of Cleopatra’s barge – at a cost of $100,000. Replicas were made of 200 statues, 30,000 ancient weapons and 25,000 costumes. This done, he summoned his leading lady to work – only to be informed by her doctors that she would require another three months to recuperate. She was, however, apparently well enough for socialising and attending official functions. On 8 July 1961, Elizabeth and Attorney General Robert Kennedy spearheaded a fund-raising event for the Cedars-Sinai Hospital, with guests paying up to $3,000 to hear her open her heart about her near-death experiences in an ‘off the cuff’ speech, actually scripted by Joe Mankiewicz:

Dying is many things, but most of all it is wanting to live. Throughout many critical hours in the operating theatre it was as if every nerve, every muscle were being strained to the last ounce of my strength. Gradually and inevitably, that last ounce was drawn, and there was no more breath. I remember I had focused desperately on the hospital light hanging directly above me. It had become something I needed almost fanatically to continue to see, the vision of light itself. Slowly it faded and dimmed like a well-done theatrical effect to blackness. I died. Shall I tell you what it was like? Being down a long, dark tunnel, and there was a small light at the end. I had to keep looking at that light. It was painful, but beautiful too. It was like childbirth: painful but so beautiful.

Cynics were not slow in pointing out that Elizabeth had never experienced childbirth, having undergone three Caesarean sections. The full speech, syndicated to newspaper columns around the world and frequently dipped into by Elizabeth for future interviews and press conferences, might have been contrived, but the sentiment, linked to her need to reach out and help others, was heartfelt and genuine. When she and Eddie Fisher chipped in with $100,000 for the cause, the well-heeled guests reached for their chequebooks, and the evening raised over $8 million! The world’s press had spent years detailing every last moment of her complicated private life; now they were witnessing the birth of Elizabeth Taylor the great humanitarian. What a tremendous pity, then, that over the next decade this quality would be overshadowed by her mania for spending vast amounts of cash on what some people considered to be trivialities.

Three days later, the Fishers flew to Russia for the Moscow Film Festival. This time, everyone knew who she was. The couple and their entourage, which included Rex Kennamer, stayed at the Sovietskaya Hotel. Again, the subject of Anna Karenina was brought up. Elizabeth now wanted the film to be shot on location in Leningrad, but, again, nothing came of it. There was also a minor incident of sorts when Eddie Fisher was invited to sing at the Kremlin – the first American to do so since Paul Robeson. Elizabeth and Gina Lollobrigida turned up wearing identical Yves St Laurent dresses.

By early September, Elizabeth and her court had temporarily relocated to Rome: an assortment of servants and animals that decamped, at Fox’s expense, to the 20-room Villa Papa near the Cinecittà studios, where the Cleopatra sets had been reconstructed to the tune of $1 million. Stephen Boyd, Peter Finch and Stanley Baker had moved on to new projects by this time. Because they had had no part in the delays, they retained their combined salaries of over $350,000, and Elizabeth had a new Caesar and Mark Antony – Rex Harrison and Welsh actor Richard Burton. Playing Rufio was Martin Landau. And the so-called ‘Roman Scandal’ was set to begin.