How to Be a Movie Star (3 page)

One

When in Rome

December 1961–April 1962

N
EW
Y
EAR'S
E
VE
, 1961. People, ordinary and otherwise, were gathering along Rome's famed Via Veneto, a boulevard of blasphemy in the shadow of Vatican City. The atmosphere outside Bricktop's, the nightclub for the chic and the daring run by the cigar-smoking chanteuse who'd inspired Cole Porter's "Miss Otis Regrets," was feverish. The air was a blend of cigarette smoke and perfume. The holiday wasn't the only reason for the energy. Much of it came from rumors that somewhere inside Bricktop's the world's most famous woman was ringing out the old—not to mention the fairly recent—in her own lively fashion.

"Leez," the mob began to chant. "Leez!"

Within the smoky club, Elizabeth Taylor threw her head back in laughter, her cheeks rosy with champagne and revelry. The diamonds around her neck sparkled, and for a second her plunging neckline revealed even more soft cleavage than usual. Across from her, nearly as starstruck as the crowd outside, was Tom Mankiewicz, the nineteen-year-old son of the director who had brought Elizabeth to the Eternal City.

"It's impossible to exaggerate how beautiful Elizabeth Taylor was back then," Mankiewicz said. "She was so beautiful that my teeth hurt."

At twenty-nine, Elizabeth, the mother of three, still had the figure of a goddess—or at least the attitude and experience to convince just about everyone that her attributes were divine. Her beauty was real, but it was maximized by her performance: Her walk, her talk, her clothes, her jewels all announced, "I'm here. Aren't I grand?"—which would be followed by another eruption of ebullient laughter and a sip of something, then a flash of those magnificent eyes. Elizabeth Taylor made beauty warm and approachable—if expensive.

As just about everyone on the planet knew, she was in Italy to play Cleopatra, queen of the Nile. "It is important for Liz to know that Cleopatra was considered a goddess, directly divine, by herself as well as by the Egyptians," writer Paddy Chayefsky had advised the film's producers. The Egyptian queen, he said, was sensual, aristocratic, clever, and impulsive. Call it a match or a revision of history or just pure invention, but Cleopatra was becoming the latest incarnation of Elizabeth Taylor.

Now into its second year of production, having started and stopped any number of times in London and now in Rome,
Cleopatra
was on its way to becoming the most expensive production of its era. Part of the enormous budget—$20 million at that point, and it would later double—was because of its especially grand scale. The Alexandrian set was the largest ever built, spreading over thirty acres. And that was just the real estate. Wags joked, not without cause, that
Cleopatra
had the third largest navy in the world. But the real grandeur was Elizabeth; the hurricane of sex and glamour she stirred up didn't come cheap. Her $1 million salary was a landmark in 1961, and then there was her share of the profits. She stood to make a killing. But then—as this evening illustrated—she worked overtime.

In 1961 Elizabeth was the biggest star in the world. The annual exhibitors' poll had just confirmed her number one box-office status, largely due to her smash hit,
Butterfield 8.
She'd nabbed an Oscar for that one—though some people said that she'd really won for best performance in a real-life tragedy: her near-fatal (or fatalish) bout with pneumonia earlier that year. Six months later she was out of bed and causing a riot in Rome soon after she arrived with a neckline that plunged to her waist. Two thousand screaming fans broke through a ring of police when they spied her at the Sistina Theater, and she was lost among them for a moment. Scrambling into a parked car and locking the door behind her, Elizabeth waited until the police arrived to escort her to safety. Who said a million was so generous? And she played it all to the hilt.

Every day was more of the same: more outfits, more screams, more drama. Her life seemed concocted to create havoc and dispel boredom. Outside her hotel the street became a circus every time Elizabeth raised the blinds in her room. But what she was really doing was raising the curtain on the Era of Celebrity. Hundreds gathered daily, "thinking there might be a chance they'd see her walk in or out," Mankiewicz said. Her hold over the public and their dreams was like the caress of a steel vise. She had been trained in the all-American art of public living since girlhood, and she had elevated it to an almost Shakespearean level—with diamonds and disposable husbands.

Her training came courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio that, more than any other, created the business of Hollywood and the cultivation of these things called stars. Trained by experts, Elizabeth had taken it all up a notch or two when given the opportunity. "No one—and I mean
no one
—has ever had that kind of fame quotient," Tom Mankiewicz said. "And no one has ever handled it quite so well."

Seated at Bricktop's on that New Year's Eve, Elizabeth glanced up to see a young United States marine in full-dress uniform approaching the table. "I'd like to ask you to dance," the young man said. Taylor's husband (number four), the singer Eddie Fisher, tried to shoo him away, but Elizabeth, her extraordinary blue eyes (the press routinely called them violet) filling with mischief, followed the kid onto the dance floor.

While Fisher brooded, the rest of the table admired how charming and ladylike Elizabeth was with the marine—even after just knocking back an Ivan the Terrible, a potent mix of vodka, grappa, and ouzo, on a dare from her costar, Richard Burton, who was there with his gracious, soft-spoken wife, Sybil. The Burtons were the official hosts of the party; Taylor and Fisher were the guests of honor. Among the entourage was Elizabeth's longtime pal Roddy McDowall, accompanied by his boyfriend, John Valva; the film's producer, Walter Wanger, in from Los Angeles; and director Joe Mankiewicz with his two sons, Tom and Chris, who were assisting on the film.

Once the marine had returned Elizabeth to the table, Eddie announced that they were calling it a night. "There isn't anything more important than the sleep and rest of Elizabeth Taylor," he often said. But someone had other plans. It wasn't even midnight yet, Elizabeth argued, arms akimbo, eyes flashing.

Burton egged her on. "You see here?" he asked, tapping Elizabeth's glass. "She hasn't even finished her champagne."

Several observers witnessed Burton switching his own glass with her empty one. His ruse continued for the next hour as he slid refills on the table and she drank them down eagerly. Fisher didn't catch on, but he knew something was happening. The increasing proximity of Elizabeth and Richard unnerved him. The others noticed it as well. "It was just a matter of time before they began an affair, if they hadn't already," Tom Mankiewicz said. "We were all just waiting for it to happen."

So be it. Movie people have affairs. It's part of the way business is done. Two years before, when he'd directed her in
Suddenly, Last Summer,
Joe Mankiewicz himself had taken up with Elizabeth. The
Cleopatra
publicists probably expected—perhaps even welcomed—a bit of behind-the-scenes with Taylor and Burton. But they had no idea of the earthquake that was about to hit.

The crowd outside was growing bolder, pushing against the red velvet ropes that cordoned off Bricktop's entrance. Photographers zipped up on their little Vespa motorbikes. One jumped off and shimmied up a streetlamp. Another crawled under the legs of the crowd to the nightclub's front door. But one man took the award for most enterprising performance.

Gilberto Petrucci, twenty-two and handsome enough to blend in with the big names, dropped a few hundred lire into the palm of a doorman. Just as the clock struck twelve, he slipped inside the club, his camera discreetly covered by his coat. Smiling at his
buona fortuna,
he knew he'd have to act fast. Bricktop's bouncers would be on him at any moment to toss him out on his
natiche.
Unnoticed among all the noisemakers, Petrucci managed to get off a round of pictures, then dropped to his knees to change film.

"And I looked over," he said, "and I could see that under the table, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were holding hands."

Then he felt a hand on his shoulder—Bricktop's majordomo was putting an end to the impromptu photo session. As Petrucci left, he noticed Burton glance his way.

It was only then, apparently, that the
Cleopatra
company understood the commotion they were causing streetside. "We were told that we couldn't leave through the front door," Tom Mankiewicz said. "The Via Veneto was packed solid. Thousands of people were waiting out there for Elizabeth to come outside."

So they exited out the back under heavy escort, detouring through the warm kitchen smelling of garlic and oregano. On a side street they piled into two waiting cars. Someone caught sight of Elizabeth's black hair and sparkling dress, and shrieked, "There she is!" As the mob roared down the street, the cars sped off into the night. Elizabeth, undoubtedly, loved it; she liked a good chase scene. And one wonders if Burton might have acquired a taste for the thrill of it all himself that night.

Petrucci didn't pursue them. He had his photos and was developing them even as he wove his motorbike in and out of the snarl of traffic. "I invented a photo-processing lab right inside my Vespa, the only one in the world," Petrucci said. "This way I could process the pictures and get them in ahead of my rivals."

Magazines like
Oggi Illustrato, L'Europeo, Lo Specchio
and
Settimo Giorno
paid hefty sums for photos of celebrities. Petrucci was part of a roving band of freelance imagemakers who catered to this clientele. The term
paparazzi,
lifted from the Fellini film
La Dolce Vita,
had not yet become widespread, although it was along the glittery Via Veneto that photographers, stalking their subjects like prey, created what would become one of the celebrity circus's most controversial sideshows. It was here that Tony Franciosa, husband of Shelley Winters, went berserk after being snapped entering Bricktop's with Ava Gardner. It was also here that former King Farouk of Egypt hurled his considerable girth at a photographer after being caught with his mistress at the Café de Paris.

Though a tough breed, these "assault photographers" were far less aggressive than the paparazzi of today. Young men mostly, they dressed fashionably in coats and ties or cardigan sweaters that were sometimes complemented by colorful sashes. They traveled in packs, the heavy batteries of their Rolleiflexes slung over their shoulders. The best shots came when they worked together. One night while pursuing Ava Gardner, the photographers Tazio Secchiaroli and Elio Sorci came up with a plan. Secchiaroli would insinuate himself as close to Gardner as possible, then set off his flash directly in her face. When the time came, the actress's escort, actor Walter Chiari, took off after Secchiaroli just as they had hoped. Sorci, meanwhile, was snapping away. The resulting photos, published in
Settimo Giorno,
turned both young men into hotshots along the Via Veneto. "We discovered that by creating little incidents we could produce great features that earned us a lot of money," Secchiaroli said. Creating "little incidents" to produce dramatic reactions would become one of the signature arts of these photographers.

By 1961 the self-proclaimed king of the camera troops was a Russian expatriate, Ivan Kroscenko, who had declared that Elizabeth Taylor was the biggest "get" of all. Before Elizabeth's arrival in Rome, Kroscenko predicted that she would become a veritable cottage industry in Italy: "You'll see photographs of her—intimate ones—with some handsome actor, fascinating director, or patrician playboy." He spoke with such confidence because he'd heard murmurs that Fisher was fading out of the picture. And Kroscenko knew that stars in troubled marriages loved to let loose in Rome. "We can hardly wait," he said gleefully.

But the Taylor show had been subdued so far. If spotted, Elizabeth was always with her husband. She'd chosen a villa far out on the old Appian Way with walls so high that photographers couldn't see over them, even when perched in trees and armed with telephoto lenses. On the day she reported to Cinecittà Studios for costume tests, she flicked a finger at the mob of paparazzi and Joe Mankiewicz promptly ordered twelve guards at every gate.

Kroscenko's boasts led some people to suspect that he was planning to manipulate a shot with Taylor and a "lover," much as Secchiaroli and Sorci had done with Ava Gardner. If the star wouldn't give them an authentic love affair, the photographers might just hire some idle Italian nobleman to plant a kiss on her cheek. But on New Year's Day, Petrucci—Kroscenko's young protégé—brought news of what he'd spied inside Bricktop's. "And then it became the mission of all of us," Petrucci said, "to get the first photo of Burton and Taylor together."

Six thousand miles away, Hedda Hopper, widely syndicated columnist and notorious maker or breaker of Hollywood careers, took a call from one of her "leg men."Just days into the new year, Hedda was on to a story, and she'd told her spies to bring her the dirt. In the biz, these leg men were usually gay and enjoyed a wide swath of worldwide connections. This particular foot soldier had just gotten back from Rome, and he repeated what Hedda had been hearing for weeks: that as far as Elizabeth Taylor was concerned, Eddie Fisher was almost history. But he added a bit more juice. Sources on the set of
Cleopatra
reported lots of giggling and whispering between Elizabeth and her costar, the handsome Welshman, Mr. Burton. Just like Tom Mankiewicz, Hedda's spies considered an affair inevitable—if, in fact, one hadn't already begun.

Hedda seethed. She saw herself as more than a mere gossip columnist; she was the watchful mother and moral arbiter for an industry she loved deeply, even if she regarded it as often in need of chastisement. Long widowed, deeply lonely, approaching eighty, Hedda's whole world was her column and the vicarious view that it provided of other people's lives. Once she'd been more than just a fan of pretty little Elizabeth Taylor; she believed that she'd made the girl a star by promoting her in her column. But Taylor's marital adventures had always rankled Hedda, particularly the one that had brought Eddie Fisher into the picture. To Hedda's mind, Elizabeth had stolen Eddie away from sweet little Debbie Reynolds, and so she'd made it her job to instill that impression in the public's mind as well. Elizabeth's shameless actions had tarnished the industry's reputation, Hopper believed, damaging the movies as much as those horrible European directors and their damnable "realist" films. So she'd turned hard against her former protégé, and now that Elizabeth was at it again, she was about to turn harder. Like Fisher, Richard Burton was a married man with two children. In Hedda's view, "Hollywood's home wrecker" had to be stopped—as much for Sybil Burton as for the motion-picture business itself.