The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (22 page)

Her marriage with Eddie had been “a mistake,” she told Joe Mankiewicz, her director. Years later, Mankiewicz’s sons speculated about a relationship between their father and Elizabeth Taylor. Trying to persuade her to lose weight, he said her upper arms resembled “a bag of dead mice.” After a crash diet, she was in peak physical form, looking more like seventeen instead of twenty-seven. She was late for shooting due to an impacted wisdom tooth, and Katharine Hepburn, a meticulous pro, was furious. Hepburn was even angrier when she realized that Mankiewicz was going to favor Elizabeth over her throughout the shoot.

Monty showed Elizabeth how to put over her long monologue about homosexuality and cannibalism. Full of Clift touches such as pointed hesitations for emphasis, violence held in check, and “Method” displacement of her grief over Todd, the monologue became one of her signature pieces. Monty’s health was rapidly deteriorating, and the entire production would have been canceled had Elizabeth not pulled rank on Mankiewicz, who wanted to shut it down after Monty fell ill as a result of washing down too many codeine pills with brandy in Tennessee’s Savoy suite one night. Having hitched his wagon to Elizabeth’s star, the director now meekly deferred to her—the first of many who would. As she took over, British laborers on the crew were rattled by her language. When she wanted a grip’s attention, she thought nothing of yelling across the set, “Hey, shmuck!” or “Hey, asshole!” Finally someone complained to Eddie, and thereafter she toned down her expletives.
¹³

When
Suddenly Last Summer
opened in December 1959 it was an immediate hit. For the third year in a row, Elizabeth was nominated for an Academy Award. For the annual ceremony at the Pantages, Helen Rose unpacked the white Grecian gown that Mike Todd had designed for her to wear the year she was nominated for
Raintree
. Unfortunately Elizabeth and Katharine Hepburn, both nominated for
Suddenly
, canceled each other out, and a dark horse, Simone Signoret, won by default for
Room at the Top
. Sitting in the audience, Elizabeth felt cheated but smiled into an explosion of flashbulbs and forced herself to applaud as Signoret, a middle-aged Frenchwoman, ran huffing up the aisle to the stage. Eddie gasped, “God, no! Oh, no!” Elizabeth blamed her loss on him. “I should’ve won for
Suddenly
,” she said, “but I was a bad girl then.”
¹⁴

At the studios, she found herself in greater demand than ever before. The film she chose to do was the highly touted 20th Century–Fox epic,
Cleopatra
. Metro insisted she owed them one more picture, despite a waiver Todd had secured but failed to get in writing. Metro threatened a lawsuit unless she agreed to star in John O’Hara’s
Butterfield 8
. She hated the role of Gloria Wandrous, a prostitute, but had no choice—she needed the money—and she agreed to shoot the film after Eddie’s two-week engagement at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas.

In his nightly act, Eddie shamelessly exploited Elizabeth. Her presence, or even the expectation of it, assured a capacity crowd. She usually arrived at 11:48 p.m., two minutes before curtain. He always sang to her, and she’d blow him a kiss, to the delight of the audience. One evening in Vegas, they went to the Sands Hotel to celebrate Kirk and Ann Douglas’s seventh wedding anniversary, sitting at a table with Dean and Jeanie Martin. Frank Sinatra was there with Marilyn Monroe, and Marilyn had mixed so many pills with liquor that she was drooling. Eddie sang a Sammy Cahn parody, and then Sinatra took the stage. Suddenly, Marilyn reached up and started pounding on the stage floor, disrupting the show. Sinatra made a barely perceptible gesture toward her, and goons appeared out of nowhere and dragged her from the room.
¹⁵

On October 19, 1959, the Fishers entrained on the Super Chief for New York, where Elizabeth was to film
Butterfield 8
. Still furious at Metro, she tried to sabotage the film, beginning with her insistence that Eddie replace David Janssen in the role of Steve Carpenter, Gloria’s platonic buddy. She wanted Eddie to be paid $100,000 for a single week’s work, though his acting could not have been more amateurish or embarrassing. The script was an excellent one, but the Fishers went to great lengths to beef up Eddie’s part. Elizabeth called in all her favorite writers—Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Paddy Chayefsky, Joe Mankiewicz, and Daniel Taradash—and had a sexy new scene crafted for her and Eddie. “We actually made love on the set,” Eddie recalled. “I didn’t have an orgasm, but we did everything else. Knowing the camera was filming was a tremendous turn-on.”

Eddie was alone in his enthusiasm. The scene ended up on the cutting-room floor, and all the new rewrites were thrown out. Elizabeth advised Eddie to go to Monty for acting lessons. Eddie arrived at the session wired on speed, and Monty was drunk. Eddie gave him the script and went into the bathroom. When he came out, Monty was asleep with a lighted cigarette in his hand, the script in flames. The acting lessons were abandoned, and Eddie went back to doing what he liked best. “Eddie’s favorite time to fuck is the morning,” Elizabeth told their hotel manager, alerting him to keep the maids out of their suite until afternoon.
¹⁶
At the Park Lane Hotel, they spent three consecutive days in bed. Complaining of back pains and headaches, she took three to four baths a day. “She also liked to make love in the tub,” Eddie recalled. “It alleviated her aches and pains.” Eddie also had other distractions, among them drinking with his cronies and gambling away sizable amounts of cash. Alone at the hotel, Elizabeth had time to reflect that Eddie was Mike Todd’s “ghost [and] boy, did I realize how sick it was.”

She was often three hours late getting to the set. Fighting all the way, she denounced the film to the press, chastising Metro for paying her $375,000 less than she’d received for
Suddenly Last Summer
and $875,000 less than she was demanding for
Cleopatra
. “I was very self-destructive,” she admitted. According to some reports, she came down with a case of double pneumonia, but according to others she took too many pills. Eddie’s Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson, sent her to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. She did not appear sick to Eddie, who noted that she applied lip gloss and powder in the ambulance just before arriving at the hospital. He questioned the accuracy of her diagnosis and decided “she enjoyed playing the invalid. It was a way of testing the devotion of those around her.”
¹⁷

Ironically, though Elizabeth despised
Butterfield 8
, she played the hooker to perfection, sultry without being cheap, powerful in a sinewy understated way, and finally touching and vulnerable without being maudlin. When nominated for an Oscar for the fourth time, she held out no hope of winning, still feeling the vehicle unworthy and telling the press: “It’s the most pornographic script I’ve ever read, and . . . I don’t think the studio is treating me fairly.”
¹⁸
She reserved all her enthusiasm for her next picture,
Cleopatra
, though it would represent the artistic nadir of her career.

The
Cleopatra
saga had begun in September 1958 when dapper, sixty-nine-year-old Walter Wanger—Joan Bennett’s ex and Jennings Lang’s would-be assassin—conferred with Fox president Spyros P. Skouras about remaking the 1917 Theda Bara silent
Cleopatra
for Elizabeth. Wanger’s fascination with the subject harked back to his beginnings in the movie business. In the 1920s, as Paramount’s general manager of production, he’d presided over an era of exotic mideastern orientalist spectacles, providing post-Victorian audiences with titillating visions of freedom and ravishment. This lurid genre, epitomized by Valentino’s
The Sheik
, would culminate in 1963 with Elizabeth’s
Cleopatra
.
¹⁹

Though Wanger had his heart set on casting her, Skouras feared Elizabeth, warning Wanger that she was trouble.
²⁰
Skouras preferred almost any other pretty actress for the role and suggested everyone from Susan Hayward to Millie Perkins. Wanger never gave up hope of getting Elizabeth. A brave, bright, semi-independent producer who’d worked both in and outside the studio system, putting together memorable films such as Garbo’s
Queen Christina
and John Wayne’s
Stagecoach
, Wanger served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1945. Physically resembling matinee idol Paul Muni, he was a “smiling Casanova,” in Selznick’s description. He’d romanced both Louise Brooks and Tallulah Bankhead. “Wanger had a good cock,” Tallulah said, but added, “he didn’t know how to use it.”
²¹
As a producer he was noted for giving his artists maximum freedom, an asset that would work against him in
Cleopatra
, because his principal artists—Elizabeth, Richard Burton, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Rex Harrison—were all undergoing varying degrees of nervous collapse. So was 20th Century–Fox, which was having the corporate equivalent of an epileptic seizure after the departure of Darryl F. Zanuck and a succession of inept production chiefs, including Buddy Adler and Skouras.

Wanger had been hired as a line producer at $2,000 a week with fifteen percent of his films’ profits, but Fox had turned down most of his ideas, finally accepting his proposal to film Carlo Franzero’s book,
The Life and Times of Cleopatra
. Despite Franzero’s anachronistic dialogue—the seed of all the problems that would plague
Cleopatra
—Wanger was convinced that with Elizabeth as its star, he could score a hit. Director Rouben Mamoulian also wanted Elizabeth, and finally her agent, Kurt Frings, was contacted. Everyone from Guilaroff to Eddie Fisher has tried to take credit for suggesting Elizabeth’s historic fee for
Cleopatra
, but it was Elizabeth herself who, as a kind of joke, told Frings, “I’ll do it for $1 million against ten percent of the gross.” She was astonished when Wanger took her proposal seriously. As they dined at the Colony in Manhattan, she added that Eddie was to receive $150,000 as “some kind of production assistant.”

Securing Elizabeth was Wanger’s decisive move in making Fox see
Cleopatra
as a big-budget film, but unfortunately the fusty Franzero material did not justify “A” treatment. Elizabeth’s
Cleopatra
was a “B” movie from the start, despite its $3 million budget. She signed a somewhat hokey $1 million contract, becoming, at least according to Fox, the highest paid movie star in history. The actual document wouldn’t be ready for months—as Hedy Lamarr once pointed out, “It is not unusual for an actress to finish a picture before receiving her contracts.” At the much-photographed signing ceremony, Elizabeth wore a black dress, long black gloves, and seven strands of pearls. Unwittingly, she ushered in a new era of filmmaking, in which actors would call more of the shots and be paid upward of $20 million a picture. Since Elizabeth provided reporters with good copy, they ignored the fact that William Holden and Susan Hayward had preceded her as million-dollar stars.

When Elizabeth arrived in London to begin filming
Cleopatra
on September 15 at Pinewood Studios, she looked up her old flame, Peter Finch. Leaving Eddie and the children behind at the Dorchester, she went to his flat in Sydney Street. Over dinner that night, Finch was torn between Elizabeth, who sat on one side of the table imploring him to play Julius Caesar to her Cleopatra, and poet Christopher Logue, who sat on the other, pressing him to play King Creon in his new verse play
Antigone
. George Devine, who was producing the Logue play at the Royal Court Theatre, was also present. Though outnumbered, Elizabeth won, and Finch signed for $150,000, hoping she’d turn him into an international star. Stephen Boyd was cast as her Marc Antony.

Unfortunately the production was in complete disarray at Pinewood. No one at Fox knew how to produce an epic film. Unlike the superb professionals at Metro, who solved all of
Ben-Hur
’s problems in preproduction before going to Rome on location, Fox assembled a cast and crew in London without even having a shootable script, which is essential not only for the actors but for planning operations, budgets, and controls. Moreover, nervous Fox executives shut Walter Wanger out of their deliberations, urging the producer to remain in Hollywood to develop Elaine Dundy’s novel
The Dud Avocado
. Dundy herself was in London, where she and her husband Kenneth Tynan ran an influential leftist political and literary salon in their Mount Street flat. Shelley Winters was also in London, filming
Lolita
with Stanley Kubrick. At a dinner one night with the Fishers, Finch, and Albert Finney, Shelley noticed that Eddie was miserable over Elizabeth’s obvious intimacy with Finch. Elaine Dundy later wrote Finch’s biography, and when quizzed in 1997 about the actor’s relationship with Elizabeth, she commented, “Does lovemaking on location count as adultery?”

Despite costly sets of ancient Alexandria covering twenty acres at Pinewood, there was still no finished scenario. Elizabeth somehow convinced herself that Paddy Chayefsky, author of
Marty
, a modern Bronx love story, could solve their script problems. Fox disagreed, trying out several writers, including Lawrence Durrell, Dale Wasserman, and Nunnally Johnson, none of whom produced an acceptable script. When Wanger finally arrived in London, he was little help; he’d always been a hands-off producer, and his behavior on the
Cleopatra
set, following a second heart attack, was almost aloof. He wasn’t doing any better with
Avocado
. Though he took Elaine Dundy and Blake Edwards to lunch at the Caprice, Edwards later decided to direct
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
instead.