How to Be a Movie Star (48 page)

But Hedda dug in her heels, refusing to settle. "She stood by what she had written," said Shaw. "She believed Wilding was a homosexual and figured it would be easy to prove it." She had plenty of connections in the gay world; that's how she'd heard the story in the first place. But despite dispatching an army of assistants to comb for "evidence" in both Hollywood and London, she discovered to her mounting dismay that the first loyalty of her gay friends was not to her but to one another. "No one was willing to testify that Wilding was gay and therefore ruin his career," Shaw said. "If they did that, who's to say somebody else might not do it to them someday?"

In desperation Hedda turned to an unlikely ally: Eddie Fisher. The man whose career she'd played a large part in destroying answered his telephone one day to hear her shrill voice on the other end of the line. "I wanted to hang up," Eddie said. But Hedda invited him over to her house, where she gushed all over him, telling him what a great singer he was and hinting that she could help him make a comeback. But Eddie was wary; he was in the midst of his own legal problems, haggling with Elizabeth over custody of Maria and the financial terms of their upcoming divorce. Hedda hoped that this might make him eager to come over to her side, but Eddie just stared at her blankly when she revealed the real reason she'd called. "I have no idea whether Michael Wilding is a homosexual," he said. Coldly, Hedda told him he could leave. There was no more talk of comebacks.

But Wilding was taking no chances. As his roles dwindled to a couple of television episodes on
Burke's Law
and
The Alfred
Hitchcock Hour,
he announced that he was giving up acting to become a talent agent with the Hugh French Agency. (Among the clients he'd pick up was Richard Burton—evidence of a continuing close association with his ex-wife during the legal battle with Hedda.) Bracing himself for a trial, which he no doubt dreaded, Wilding married the actress Margaret Leighton. His lawyer, Ben F. Goldman Jr., continued pressing Hedda to settle. They were asking for a monetary figure as well as a public apology. But Hedda wasn't ready to surrender.

"She was at the end of her career, and she knew it," said Shaw. "Hollywood had sort of passed her by at this point. So it was her reputation she was fighting for now. She kept hoping she'd find someone who'd give her the evidence that she needed, to prove she hadn't made it all up. If that happened, she could show she was still relevant. But fewer people seemed to think of her that way anymore."

There was one person who hadn't completely written Hedda off yet. As the trial date approached, a memo in her papers reveals that a call came in from Sara Taylor. "All very chatty and friendly," Hedda's secretary wrote. Sara insisted that it had been Elizabeth's idea to call, just as a courtesy to update the columnist about the wonderful family holiday they'd all celebrated. Elizabeth and Richard had brought Elizabeth's four children, and Howard Taylor came with his wife and five children. Sara said Elizabeth had prodded her: "Don't forget, you promised to call Hedda."

It seems extremely unlikely that Elizabeth gave a whit about Hedda at this point, except perhaps to curse her for the troubles she'd caused Wilding. A far more likely scenario is that Sara was still trying to facilitate her daughter's career, hoping to assuage Hedda's wounded feelings by sharing a story of happy family togetherness. Her daughter's embrace of a new, poststudio world order wasn't for Sara; Mrs. Taylor proceeded as if Hedda still wielded the kind of power she had back in the days of Louis B. Mayer. Her efforts paid off; Hedda wrote a glowing account of the family's holiday celebrations and described Elizabeth as feeling sentimental about their old friendship. "I wish we could be friends again as we used to be," she quoted Elizabeth as saying about her. No doubt that was a lot of malarkey given to her by Sara. But Hedda, pathetically aware of her increasing irrelevancy, wanted very much to believe that it was true.

Currying favor with the Taylors did no good. Three weeks before the trial was to start, a dispirited Hedda finally agreed to settle with Wilding. None of her sources had agreed to back her up. Wilding would receive $100,000. But Hedda steadfastly refused to apologize. Attorney Goldman put the best face on the situation by saying that "the settlement in itself is an apology" and a "complete vindication" of Wilding.

Whether it was or not, Hedda was wiped out. "The suit is settled, but at what a cost!" she wrote to a friend. She'd been counting on her memoir to cushion her retirement, but now, she said bitterly, the roughly $110,000 she'd made (minus $26,500 to her coauthor) would go to "Wilding and his Jew lawyer." Although it seems unbelievable for someone who made her living as a gossip columnist, she didn't have any libel insurance. And despite Doubleday's agreeing to pay half of the settlement, their lawyer had charged Hedda $12,800 on top of her own legal fees of $23,000. "So, you see," she wrote, "I get nothing." She was particularly aggrieved by those Hollywood gays who hadn't come forward to help her out and who, in fact, seemed to take delight in her fall from grace. She singled out
Hollywood Reporter
columnist Mike Connolly—"one of the boys," she wrote sarcastically. "It is sort of precious, isn't it? I don't believe [Connolly] cared much about Wilding, but Mr. Wilding has the last laugh. I hope he will enjoy it."

As Hedda declined, Elizabeth triumphed. She and Richard flitted around Europe, defying traditional values as the most famous unmarried, cohabitating couple in the world. Producer Anatole de Grunwald eagerly snatched them up to be part of his all-star film
The V.I.P.s,
shot in London in December 1962. It was an original Terence Rattigan script about a group of stranded airline passengers whose lives are changed by the unexpected delay. Directed by Anthony Asquith, the picture was rushed out to theaters to capitalize on the still-bubbling interest in the Taylor-Burton affair. Elizabeth was particularly pleased that
The V.I.P.s
was an MGM picture. No longer a contract player forced to accept the studio's terms, she was now a freelancer who commanded $1 million plus 10 percent of the gross. It was "good revenge," she said, for the paltry salary they'd paid her on
Butterfield 8.
"Even I wouldn't have the audacity to ask for more," she said.

Early in 1963 word came that Fox needed her back for a couple of linking shots on
Cleopatra.
For $50,000, she once again donned Egyptian eye makeup and emoted for half a minute, reacting to the Battle of Actium. Later, sitting at the "most conspicuous table" in the cocktail lounge of London's fashionable Dorchester Hotel, she laughed about it with a reporter. "Do you think it will ever be finished?" she asked, referring to
Cleopatra.
"Are the stockholders going to scream and haul it back for a happy ending when they finally see it?"

Looking more curvy than ever—busybodies called her "plump"—and wearing a lavender sweater and slacks, Elizabeth was gesturing dramatically and speaking in a loud voice. Anyone who came in through the swinging doors that led out onto Park Lane would have spotted her immediately—and Burton, too, sitting there in his Marc Antony makeup, having just finished his own last few shots. They were drinking and laughing and carrying on, lighthearted and carefree. The world was theirs. Richard had finally asked Sybil for a divorce. Elizabeth couldn't have been happier.

The same couldn't be said of Joe Mankiewicz. Those stockholders
were
screaming. The previous year Fox had posted a $40 mill ion loss, with
Cleopatra
's astronomical expenses much of the reason. Skouras, forced to resign as president, had been replaced at the top by former Fox chief Darryl Zanuck, who'd immediately clashed with Mankiewicz. With so much footage, the director had decided to make two two-and-a-half-hour movies, the first one focusing on Cleopatra and Caesar (Rex Harrison), the second on Cleopatra and Antony. Zanuck, however, would have none of it. "The studio didn't have enough money to make a cartoon at this point," Tom Mankiewicz said. "Zanuck's rationale was: What if these two people [Taylor and Burton] fell out of love between now and the second half? Who'd come to see the picture then?"

Zanuck's goal, understandably, was to get the picture out as soon as possible, while the affair between its two principals was still hot. He was determined that
Cleopatra
not be tagged as a four-hour history lesson, which would have consigned it to the art houses. It had to be a big, sexy, romantic spectacle—the only way it might possibly pay for itself and lift the studio out of the red. And so began what Mankiewicz called the "butchery" of the picture, but what Zanuck would have described as a studio-saving venture. Everything was reshaped and reorganized to centralize the love story between Antony and Cleopatra. When Mankiewicz protested the cuts, he was fired.

Elizabeth was outraged. "Mr. Mankiewicz took
Cleopatra
over when it was nothing—when it was rubbish—and he made something out of it," she told the press. But the director's vision was obliterated in this new version, sliced down from five hours to four. On Zanuck's express order, the whole package, including publicity, was geared to capitalize on Le Scandale. Many of the ads didn't even bother to use the film's title or the stars' names. They simply featured Taylor and Burton in a sexy clinch. But the studio wasn't finished tinkering. After the New York premiere in June 1963, another twenty-one minutes were cut from the film. Elizabeth refused to see the truncated picture, turning her back on an enterprise that had consumed two long years of her life.

Most critics shared her low opinion of the film, and they weren't too impressed with her performance either. "To look at, she is every inch 'a morsel for a monarch,'" observed
Time
magazine, quoting Shakespeare. "But ... when she plays Cleopatra as a political animal she screeches like a ward heeler's wife at a block party." Indeed, while she's quite good in the passionate scenes—Maggie the Cat in ancient Egypt—when she starts spouting dialogue about the politics of the classical world, she sounds absolutely absurd. Critics derided her reading of such lines as "Did you know that Apollodorus would kill Pothinus?" There was a sense that she'd memorized the names phonetically with no clear idea of what she was talking about. She gave the appearance of a pretty 1960s teenager, complete with flip hairdo, playing dress up as an ancient queen.

Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
was one of the few voices of praise, calling Elizabeth's Cleopatra "a woman of force and dignity" and the picture itself "brilliant, moving and satisfying." But far more reviewers seemed to agree with Peter Baker in
Films and Filming,
who, despite how much the picture had cost, thought
Cleopatra
never rose above the level of a low-budget "Italian Hercules spectacular."

And yet it was an enormous hit. That, too, is a fact that's been obscured by the legend around the film that has seeped into the public consciousness: that
Cleopatra
was a box-office disaster. But, in truth, with full domestic earnings of $15.7 million,
Cleopatra
was the top-grossing film of 1963; after all those headlines and magazine covers of "Liz and Dick," how could it have been otherwise?
Cleopatra
outgrossed the top film of 1960,
Spartacus,
by $2 million, and beat the second top-grossing picture of the current year (Burton's other starring vehicle,
The Longest Day
) by $3 million. Only a handful of pictures (including
Around the World in Eighty Days)
had ever made more money;
Cleopatra
was by far the biggest grossing picture Elizabeth had ever made. The problem, of course, was that it had cost somewhere around $40 million to produce, so $15.7 million was nowhere near what was needed to turn a profit. Fox was banking on an extraordinarily long run over several years, in which the film might gross, at least according to their estimates, over $200 million.

No matter the studio's problems, Elizabeth was a clear winner. With ten cents of every dollar earmarked for her, that meant an additional million and a half by the end of the year. And no matter what the critics thought, the public loved the picture. One opinion poll asked those who had seen
Cleopatra
to rate it: 53 percent called the film "excellent," 29 percent called it "good," and only 18 percent considered it "fair" or "poor." Once again, public hostility—or the presumption of it—hadn't taken a dime. Elizabeth Taylor was at the height of her fame and power. No star had ever been as big.

An orange fingernail moon hung low over Banderas Bay, one of the deepest, widest, and bluest bays in the world. From the sprawling white-brick-and-stucco house perched amid the vine-hung foothills rising up from the bay, gas lamps cast a soft golden light onto the papaya trees and the creeping red bougainvillea. The cliff-hanging house with its six bedrooms, six baths, and gleaming white-tiled floors was named Casa Kimberley after a previous owner, but from October 1963 forward, it would be known as the place where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton lived when they were the most notorious unmarried lovers in the world.

"Here on the lazy west coast of Mexico," one reporter wrote, "the couple who fell in love on the Rome set of
Cleopatra
—despite prior commitments—are finding a measure of tropical solitude some nineteen months (and no divorces) later." Their notoriety would put the obscure little fishing village of Puerto Vallarta on the map.

Watching from a chaise lounge as Richard ran lines with John Huston—rehearsing for the film
The Night of the Iguana
—Elizabeth was aglow. She adored the peace and lush exotic beauty of Puerto Vallarta. "I can live here," she had told Burton soon after they'd arrived, and so Casa Kimberley had become a little love gift. From their terrace, Elizabeth could look down onto the village where men in wide sombreros rode burros over the cobblestone streets. Just past the house she could see the belfry of the village church, modeled after the crown of the Empress Carlota, and beyond that the moonlit bay, which was close enough that the fierce surf could be heard all through the night. Colorful moths fluttered in through the glassless windows while spirited little geckos ran across the beams overhead. Elizabeth was awakened in the morning by bright green macaws announcing the first rays of the sun reflecting against the red tiles of the roof. She was in heaven.