The Affair (53 page)

Authors: Gill Paul

BOOK: The Affair

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The movie lurched from crisis to crisis, the budget escalating every day, and by June when they decamped to Ischia to shoot the sea battle of Actium (staged with real boats, some 200 feet long), Walter Wanger had been sacked as producer – but told to stay on and finish the film anyway. The president of Twentieth Century Fox, Spyros Skouras, was forced to resign and Darryl F. Zanuck was appointed in his place. He in turn sacked Joe Mankiewicz then realised he needed him to make sense of the hours and hours of footage, so bribed him to come back and help with the edit.

The New York première

Mankiewicz had always seen it as two films –
Caesar and Cleopatra
, followed by a sequel,
Anthony and Cleopatra
– but Zanuck wanted it cut down to one. It scraped in at just over four hours long, but a huge number of scenes were left on the cutting room floor, including many of Burton’s best ones. Taylor and Burton declined to come to the New York première in June 1963 citing ‘other commitments’, but she claimed when she saw the film in London she was physically sick. The critics were generally scathing, and particularly cruel to Elizabeth – ‘Miss Taylor is monotony in a slit skirt’ – while Richard was described as ‘looking like a drunken sot on a campus’.

Joe Mankiewicz married Rosemary Matthews, his assistant, so that at least brought him a happy conclusion on the domestic front, but his career never recovered. Walter Wanger never made another film. Richard Burton slowly, painfully extricated himself from his marriage to Sybil and married Elizabeth on 15 March 1964. They divorced ten years later and remarried in 1975 but only for nine months.

Despite a final cost of forty-four million dollars, Cleopatra went into profit in 1966 and it won four Oscars (although none were for acting or direction). It’s worth watching, but it’s very,
very
long.

Did Walter Wanger ever reflect on Spyros Skouras’s advice when he first suggested casting Elizabeth Taylor?

‘
Don’t do it,
’ the studio president urged. ‘
She’ll be too much trouble.
’

But for those cast and crew who didn’t have to shoulder the financial blame, the consensus was that their ten months in Italy was the holiday of a lifetime.

Acknowledgments

I couldn’t have written this book without the help of John Gayford, an actor who played a centurion in the 1963
Cleopatra
and is frequently seen standing behind Richard Burton in the finished movie. He has been unbelievably generous with his time, answering my questions by telephone and email and going through the text in minute detail. His knowledge of the making of the film and life in Rome in the early 1960s have been invaluable, while his witty emails brought colour to the working day! I’m incredibly grateful.

Thanks also to Francesca Annis, who played one of Elizabeth Taylor’s handmaidens in the film, and who answered my questions about life on the set. And my gratitude to Aurelio Cappozzo and Laura Ronchetti for information on legal processes in Rome at the time.

For those interested in learning more about the making of the film, I recommend Walter Wanger’s book
My Life with Cleopatra
and Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss’s
The Cleopatra Papers
, both published in 1963, as well as the documentary
Cleopatra: The Film that Changed Hollywood
. And do watch the film: it’s enjoyable, and certainly much better than the critics said at the time.

Huge thanks as always to Karen Sullivan, my number one reader, who has extraordinarily good instincts for story and character. Anne Nicholson also had some very wise advice. Thanks to Karel Bata for his wisdom on technical aspects of filming and to Luke Sullivan for help with Italian dialogue. And grateful thanks to all the team at Avon: Caroline Ridding, Sammia Rafique, Helen Bolton, Lydia Newhouse, Becke Parker, Claire Power, Cleo Little, Tom Dunstand and Cicely Aspinall, as well as the amazing Claire Bord, whose editing is always spot-on.

Finally, special thanks to Vivien Green, the best agent anyone could wish for. She is wise, fun, fiercely protective of her authors, and a canny deal-maker. Having her on my side has made all the difference, and I’ll always owe her a huge debt of gratitude.

About the Author

Gill Paul lives in London, where she runs her own company producing books for publishers and has worked as an editor and researcher for some eminent historians. Her previous novels include
Women and Children First
(2012). She has written several non-fiction books, including
Titanic Love Stories
(2011), about the honeymoon couples on board the doomed ship, and
Civil War Love Stories
(2013), based on letters couples wrote to each other during the war. As a long-time Elizabeth Taylor fan, it was wonderful to go to Rome while researching
The Affair
and visit all the places she used to frequent. Gill also interviewed people who worked on the
Cleopatra
film set and heard from them first-hand about that extraordinary, life-changing time.

To find out more about Gill Paul please visit
www.gillpaul.com

By the same author:

Women and Children First

Titanic Love Stories
(Ivy Press)

Copyright

Published by Avon,

an imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers Ltd

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins
Publishers
Ltd 2013

Cover [photograph © Getty Images; Arcangel Images.

Cover design © HarperCollins
Publishers
Ltd 2013

Gill Paul asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

Source ISBN: 9781847563262

Ebook Edition © May 2013 ISBN: 9780007494118

Version 1

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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