Read My Life with Cleopatra Online
Authors: Walter Wanger
My Life with Cleopatra (20 page)
Burton left for Paris to do another day’s work in
The Longest Day
.
A
PRIL
8, 1962
Lunched alone at Borghese Park and saw Liz with Mike Nichols. She seemed cool and collected and was enjoying the sunshine, the day off, and our company, though she must have been irritated at the beating she was taking in the press.
Late in the day I discovered that Rex Harrison had gone to London without getting permission or notifying anyone, despite the fact that he was told he would be needed on Monday.
A
PRIL
9, 1962
Talked to Elizabeth, trying to get her to issue a statement to deflate the campaign against her, which is mounting rapidly. She was evasive. Said she would think it over.
A
PRIL
10, 1962
A very good day.
Shot Caesar’s entrance into Rome—a beautiful segment which came off just as well as we hoped it would. Rex, who is back from London full of apologies, was wonderful. The only sour note came from Burton, who doesn’t like riding a horse. There were three takes. Richard Burton was angry because of the yelling crowd and the skittish horse.
Another blast today. The American papers have said that we are employing “call girls” as extras. This news brought Skouras on the telephone in great agitation. We had thousands of extras, and of course, it is conceivable that a “call girl” made it into the extra line.
Tried again to get Elizabeth to make some kind of statement to counteract the bad press she has been receiving.
Paris Match
,
Life
,
News of the World
,
France Soir
, and many other European papers are violently attacking her.
I finally called Louis Nizer in New York. He said that, with the exception of the
Life
article, no serious attacks have appeared in America, and he feels the press situation is getting better, not worse.
A
PRIL
11, 1962
This was to be our first day at Torre Astura, but we were unable to get Caesar’s galley into the water because of rough seas.
Unlike most “big” Hollywood pictures, there were no miniatures used in
Cleopatra
. We had an Italian admiral and six Italian naval captains commanding our fleet.
A
PRIL
12, 1962
The Vatican City weekly
Osservatore Della Domenica
published an open letter which was a cruel and unmistakable attack on Elizabeth.
Dear Madam:
When a short time ago you said that your marriage (the fourth, to be exact) would last a lifetime there were those who shook their heads in a rather skeptical way. We, always willing to believe the best, kept a steady head and didn’t say a word. When afterwards you even went so far as to adopt a baby girl, almost as if to make more stable a bond which had no natural children, we really believed for a moment that things could have changed. But children, they say, count little, whether they are natural or legal children, and for illustrious ladies like you there is no child that counts.
“My marriage is dead and buried,” you apparently had the bad taste to say. And how about that for a lifetime which you declared three years ago? Does a lifetime mean only three years? And if your marriage is dead, then we have to say, as they say in Rome, it was killed dead. The trouble, my dear lady, is that you are killing too many of them. Even considering the one that was finished by a natural solution, there remain three husbands buried, with no other motive than a greater love that killed the one before.
But, if we start using these standards and this sort of competition between the first, second, third, and the 100th love, where are we all going to end up? Right where you will finish—in an erotic vagrancy (we don’t even want to use the word sentimental because that would seem a little bit too optimistic) without end or without a safe port, in which three years means “for a lifetime.” It may well be that the next “for a lifetime” will get shorter and shorter to a year or maybe a year and a half, if everything goes well.
The new “for a lifetime” appears to have almost officially started. Here and there remain coquettish displays of a modesty which does not exist.
And your poor children, both your own and the one you took away from an honest institution?
If nature does not allow you any more children, you at least should not go around asking for them, turning them into half orphans, orphans of live fathers and of mothers remarried for the second, third, and fourth time.
But don’t these institutions think before handing out children to somebody? Don’t they ask for any moral references? In Italy such institutions are very demanding and they do very well.
They do not let themselves be seduced by money or fame, but get down to hard facts and investigate the seriousness of the people.
They can refuse a child to a capricious princess and entrust it instead to a farmer’s wife with a clear conscience. These children need an honored name more than a famous name, a serious mother more than a beautiful mother, a stable father rather than a newcomer who can be dismissed at any time.
A few hours after the article appeared Liz, wearing a tightbodiced, black silk ballerina dress and looking radiant as always, met Richard for dinner in the dining room of the Grand Hotel. She seemed gay and brave. But later in the evening they joined Mike Nichols, and her mood suddenly disintegrated into sobs. She fled from the night club they were visiting only to be hounded outside by the jackal pack of paparazzi.
The pressures on Liz are enormous, and I am amazed by her stamina. The only place where she has any security is on the sound stage, where the crew which adores her can form a buffer between her personal problems and the outside world. She is our star. They resent this invasion of her private life.
A
PRIL
13, 1962
Filmed one of the most dramatic scenes in the movie and one of the most dramatic real-life scenes I have ever witnessed. Again the parallel between the life of Cleopatra and the life of Elizabeth Taylor is incredible.
The scene filmed in the Forum calls for Cleopatra to make her entrance into Rome sitting with Caesarion on top of a huge (more than thirty feet high) black Sphinx drawn by 300 gold-covered slaves. The entrance into Rome was Cleopatra’s big gamble. If the Romans accepted her with an ovation, she had won Caesar. If they refused to accept her, she had lost him, and very possibly her life.
There were almost 7,000 Roman extras milling about in front of the Forum. All of them presumably had read the Vatican criticism of Liz. Not only would these Roman extras be accepting Cleopatra, but they would also be expressing their personal acceptance of the woman who plays Cleopatra.
Liz was nervous and tense before the scene. Irene Sharaff told me later that she had never seen her so nervous before.
Then, JLM called, “Action.” Liz, riding high on top of the Sphinx, appeared. The crowd shouted as one, “Bacci, Bacci!” (Kisses, kisses).
I saw the sense of relief flood through Liz’s body as the slave girls, handmaidens, senators, guards, and thousands of others applauded her—personally.
Earlier in the day Eddie Fisher telephoned from New York, very upset about the Vatican statement. “What can we do?” he asked me.
I said I thought there was very little we could do, and that it had been overplayed by the American press. Just forget it.
A
PRIL
13, 1962
Received a six page letter from Skouras today, who was extremely upset about the unfavorable publicity Liz and Burton
are getting. He urged me to keep them out of the headlines and quoted at length from attacks in the national newspaper columns and editorials. Skouras noted that practically all the newspapers in New York had headlines to the effect that “Vatican Paper Lashes Liz” and carried the open letter that appeared in the “Domenica.”
He was not aware that the letter was from a reader; it was not an official pronouncement. And it was blown up out of all proportion by the press.
Despite all the hysteria from New York and the newspaper criticism of Liz I was not disturbed. As a man who has made a profession of studying the public, I know that newspapers and editorials do not necessarily reflect the public taste.
The American public pretends to be puritanical. But the immense popularity of magazines such as
Confidential
, the peephole publications, and fan magazines belies the public puritanism.
The same studios which require a “morals clause” in the contracts of all employees from stars to executives make motion pictures which glamorize the same immorality their contracts forbid.
These are hypocritical times, when men are permitted to have more than one love at a time and women are castigated for the same kind of behavior. I believe that Elizabeth loves two men. And who is to say that a woman can’t love two men at the same time, any more than that a man can’t love two women at the same time?
I have lived in several of the great cities of the world during my lifetime, and I have known many women considered to be paragons of virtue. I doubt, however, that many of these moral women have as strong a code of personal ethics as Elizabeth. Further, I doubt that many of them would have been able to resist Burton’s charm.
I believe that Elizabeth is envied by most of the women in the world because she follow’s woman’s true nature—she goes where
her heart leads her. Most people don’t dare to follow their heart and, in envy, attack those who do.
A
PRIL
14, 1962
Saturday. Although she had the day off, Liz agreed to work today in the big Forum scene. Doc Merman arranged for 7,000 extras to be on hand so we could finish the scene and move on to another stage.
Soon after Liz appeared on set there was a brisk wind. Caesar’s toga began to flap around his legs like wings. Then a sandstorm came up. The shooting was canceled. JLM told Brooks Roberts, a visiting editor from
This Week
, “That wind cost us $200,000.”
As a result of the Skouras memo, I arranged to see Richard after lunch. I told him it was none of our business what his private life is as long as he keeps it private. “And stop going to the Via Veneto and those cheap joints,” I said.
Burton was furious. “Those places are not cheap, they are very expensive,” he roared.
A
PRIL
16, 1962
Walter Lippmann came out on set today to see JLM. “All that to-do about Liz and Burton is a good thing,” he said. “It gets the newspaper readers’ minds off the daily world crises.”
A
PRIL
17, 1962
Shooting delayed during the morning for one hour because of cats under the stage.
Italian workmen hurriedly tore the set apart to discover the source of loud mewings. They found a cat and five-day-old kittens tucked cozily up against the framework just out of reach. The mother cat was finally lured out with liver bits, but the blind kittens remained howling under the set. It took another half-hour to get them. At our normal hourly cost the cat and her five kittens added $17,000 to the already straining Cleopatra budget.
An earlier scene between Cleopatra and Mark Antony was held up 45 minutes while the entire crew chased a cat up a wall. The cat disappeared, only to be replaced by two low-flying bats who put on a spectacular aerial display.
Tally: $12,000 for cats; $5,000 for acrobatics.
A
PRIL
21, 1962
Elizabeth and Burton, who had promised to stay out of the public eye for a few days, took off without telling us where they were going and ended up at Porto Santo Stefano for an Easter holiday.
Since we didn’t know anything about the trip, we were unable to provide them with any protection against the press. Result: they were in the papers today sitting on the rocks overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea sharing kisses and a bag of oranges.
A
PRIL
23, 1962
Sybil Burton is in town.
She called me at the hotel, quite upset, and said she wanted to reach Richard. She said that, although the London tabloid press has been outside her house constantly, following the children and the nurse everywhere and causing great embarrassment, she has never paid much attention to them because she does not read the popular papers.
But she does read the
Sunday Times
. She saw the story of the Santo Stefano weekend in “her paper,” and if it was important enough for the
Sunday Times
she felt it was time to take notice.
So she is here in Rome. She is upset, which means anything can happen. Rather than have her waiting outside Elizabeth’s villa and perhaps causing a scene which would delight the press, I felt it better to have her with me.
I sent my car for Sybil and had her brought to the Grand Hotel for dinner. At the same time I notified our press department to try and find Elizabeth and Burton and advise them that Sybil was in Rome.
Sybil was very upset all during dinner. When we were through talking, she went to her villa, leaving me to reflect on what a remarkable woman she is. Sybil is a very worldly, poised woman—and Richard and family came first with her. She was balanced and calm and usually not a woman to be concerned with gossip and columnists. But the
Sunday Times
was a respected Sunday paper in London and could not go unheeded, although she was not unmindful of the publicity that is part of show business.
Midnight. “Liz is in the hospital and will be unable to work tomorrow.” The caller was Dick Hanley, who explained that Liz came home by car from San Stefano alone, with a black eye and badly bruised nose. Hanley and Bianca, the housekeeper, brought her to the hospital at 11:30.
A
PRIL
24, 1962
Dr. Pennington says Elizabeth’s bruises won’t disappear for three weeks.
Elizabeth told me her chauffeur stopped the car suddenly and she fell forward and hit her nose.
A
PRIL
25, 1962
The Rome police are investigating her hospitalization as a suicide attempt from sleeping pills. Dr. Pennington gave a statement to the press: “Liz did not take an overdose of pills.”
