Furious Love (2 page)

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 contrib
uted 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 intellectual, 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 re
ported 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.