The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice (13 page)

You and Burton, however, are bigger stars than Davis and Mason. So the project goes to you. So begins a charmed interlude in your very public life. An interlude in which—whether you are aware of it or not—you introduce millions of viewers to some core elements of feminist thought.

13

The Sandpiper
, 1965

The man is a husband and a father
and
something else, say a doctor. The woman is a wife and mother
and
… nothing. And it’s the nothing that kills her.

—Elizabeth Taylor as Laura Reynolds in
The Sandpiper

As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power.

—Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theologica
, 1265–1274

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon.

—Gloria Steinem,
New York Magazine
, December 20, 1971

THE SANDPIPER BEGINS IN THE SKY above Big Sur, California. From above, we see undulating hills—green and ripe—that suggest the curves of a pregnant woman’s body: Mother Nature, the Great Mother, the Mother Goddess. The hills abut the sea, another powerful female symbol. Its waters recall the most primal experience of a human’s life—nine months suspended in liquid saline. Then we see a bridge—a triumph of masculine engineering, intended to tame the landscape, which, of course, it can never fully do. The bridge is but a Tinkertoy, a pathetic effort to impose rectilinearity on the heaving, uncontainable earth.

Next we see Laura Reynolds, Taylor’s character, as fecund and womanly as the cliffs above her. She is painting at her easel on the beach, having escaped from the patriarchal world into nature, along with her out-of-wedlock, nine-year-old son Danny. Pregnant at age seventeen, she declined to marry her child’s father. Nor would she accept her parents’ offer of an abortion. She refuses to play by the cruel societal rules that destroyed nearly everybody in
A Place in the Sun
. “I was not abandoned by the father,” Reynolds proclaims. “The father was abandoned by me.”

Their little paradise, however, is soon despoiled. Her prepubescent son shoots a deer—to see what the “fun” is, or so he explains to the judge to whom the police have delivered him. “Man is the only animal who kills for fun,” his mother had told him, and he wanted to understand what she meant. This irritates the judge, who decides that Laura is a bad influence. Fatherless though he is, Danny is still an incipient man, and he must learn to act like one, which includes distancing himself from his mother’s antipatriarchal stance.

The judge hands over the boy to Richard Burton, aka Dr. Edward Hewitt, a married Episcopal minister who runs San Simeon, a fancy local prep school. Edward may once have lived by moral principles, but the first thing we see him do is assign a price to his “quality of mercy.” If the father of a flunking boy forks over a big gift for a new chapel, Edward won’t expel the boy. The deal is brokered by a pillar of the Church, Ward Hendricks, an oily car salesman. All the Church pillars, including the judge, spend their free time in the locker room of the Pebble Beach Golf Links. There, leering and drooling, they speculate on Laura’s sexual history, in which Hendricks once played a role. Later, Hendricks will attempt to rape Laura because he feels he is entitled to use her as he pleases.

Poor Laura. Men react to her beauty in the same way that they responded to Taylor’s: first with lust, then with snickers. But Edward, to Laura’s surprise, seems interested in her thoughts. In his office, he presses her on her religious beliefs.

“I’m a ‘Naturalist,’ ” she asserts. “We believe that man is doomed by his myths. There can be no peace on earth until man rids himself of all belief in the supernatural.” Then, realizing that she sounds as dogmatic as a fundamentalist, she adds jokingly, “It’s a small sect, with a membership of exactly one—and Danny as a novitiate.”

The light tone doesn’t drain Laura’s resolve to keep Danny out of Edward’s parochial school. Even after sheriffs pried him from her home and dragged him to San Simeon, she continues to fight. Finally, though, Edward offers a convincing argument: “We’ll give him a set of values that he can rebel against later. Otherwise he might rebel against yours.”

Laura and Edward forge a reluctant truce, which holds until Edward commissions her to design some stained-glass windows for his chapel. He doesn’t care that she is an atheist. Neither Diego Rivera nor José Clemente Orozco nor Marc Chagall believed in God, he says, but some of their greatest work is in houses of worship.

Laura’s problem, however, is that she doesn’t believe in Man. There are no people in the sketches she presents to Edward. She identifies entirely with Nature—pagan, lush, innocent. But “man is essential to any concept of the universe,” Edward sputters. For him, “the awe and terror of the infinite universe” is meaningless without a person battling not to fear it. In that moment, I could not help but think of the film’s opening panorama, its love note to the immensity of nature. When Laura shows her sketches to Hewitt, she has almost become the landscape. And Edward is the Tinkertoy bridge attempting to contain it.

Well, of course, they have an affair—but it is an affair with conceptual underpinnings. Accused by some critics of having written a shallow sex romp, Dalton Trumbo exploded in a letter to producer Martin Ransohoff: Had Laura “been dull and devoid of ideas, no amount of beauty could have aroused that interest in her as a person which, for a man of Edward’s quality, is the only basis from which love can develop. His interest in her as a person—his interest in her ideas and values and way of life—becomes the bait without which he could never have been trapped into a love affair.”

Taylor and Burton brought in Trumbo and Michael Wilson, who wrote
A Place in the Sun
, to rethink the script, after Ransohoff, who had come up with the story, showed them a crude early treatment that resembled, Burton said, “a lady’s magazine melodrama.” Trumbo met with the Burtons in London and received his marching orders. The couple would bring their luster to the project if it portrayed the complexity of betrayal. Edward should not flee a troubled marriage; he must love his wife but fall in love with Laura.
For her mind.

This assignment might have daunted a lesser screenwriter, but not Trumbo. From 1950 to 1960, he survived blacklisting and a prison term for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. When he was again permitted to work, his acclaimed script for
Spartacus
allowed Kirk Douglas, a muscle-bound scenery chewer, to portray with plausibility the dynamic leader of a Roman slave rebellion. To get inside Laura’s head, Trumbo pondered the problems of extreme beauty. He grasped what lustful men and envious women often miss: beauty isolates its possessor and can cause real pain.

In a letter to Ransohoff, he described Laura’s retreat to Big Sur: “There came a time when she realized that she must escape from the pressures of that constantly encroaching sea of masculinity, or be drowned in it. Out of this experience came a feeling that she had become no more than a sexual object which attracted the desires and passions of all kinds and classes and ages of men; that no man had ever loved her in the sense that other women are loved, and never would or could; that men, confronted with her, were not capable of loving the woman—only of possessing the object of beauty she represented to them.”

Trumbo’s meditation made me think of Edith Wharton and her characterization of Lily Bart, the comely, troubled heroine in
The House of Mirth
. “Beauty,” Wharton wrote, “needs more tact than the possessor of an average set of features.” She will have to manage the desire of men and the envy of other women.

Paganism does not triumph in
The Sandpiper
, but neither does Christianity—which itself is a victory, given the zeal with which monotheists throughout history have struggled to extirpate the Goddess. Edward senses the dryness of his faith; he is a “sloganeer” and fund-raiser. But he is not yet prepared to abandon either Church or wife. So he strikes out alone (as we all are at birth and in death) to find himself. Laura, too, has been awakened by the affair—to the possibility of male tenderness. Still skeptical, but with less reluctance, she lets her son stay in boarding school, hopeful that he can learn the ways of men without becoming a brute.

I am not proud of this, but I loved watching Claire, Edward’s wife, disintegrate. As her upscale, patriarchal universe imploded, I felt happy and alive. As she lurched, ashen, from the family station wagon—shattered by Edward’s betrayal—I sensed a weight lift off my heart. I couldn’t help it. In the majority of post–World War II Hollywood movies, the Claires of the world—conformist, antiseptic helpmates—always win. They get the man, the money, the prize. In contrast, the Lauras—brazen, sexual freethinkers—get their comeuppance: either commitment to an insane asylum or, if they’re lucky, death.

In fairness, Edward’s wife, portrayed by Eva Marie Saint, is not as bad as most Claires. She’s stunted, of course, from all those years of chirpy servitude, and she wears her pastel knits as if the hangers were still inside them. But she isn’t vengeful or frigid. Trumbo gave the Burtons what they had requested: Edward isn’t escaping a gorgon; he’s running
toward
Laura.

My exhilaration at Claire’s defeat, I suspect, had less to do with Saint in
The Sandpiper
, and more to do with other, smugger Claires that she portrayed. One of the worst was in
Raintree County
, the ghastly movie that Taylor made after her fantastic turn as Leslie Benedict in
Giant
. Saint’s character, named Nell, is in love with Montgomery Clift’s character, John, an abolitionist. As you can imagine, Taylor’s character, a bombshell named Susanna, quickly steals John away from Nell. But Susanna doesn’t get to keep him. She’s bad and must therefore suffer a Hollywood reprimand. Like clockwork, Susanna first goes eye-rolling, gibberish-spouting nuts. Then, realizing her chronic Mrs. Rochester impersonation might impede her husband’s political career, she does what any noble wife would do: she drowns herself in a swamp. Nell, who has been circling, vulture-like, since the opening credits, can now take her “rightful” place beside John.

The Sandpiper
, with all its flaws, seemed a feminist
Citizen Kane
. Not everyone, however, felt this way. Men who liked seeing strong women punished were annoyed. The film “uses the formidable Miss Taylor to rationalize values and views that are immature, specious, meretricious and often ridiculous,” Bosley Crowther huffed in the
New York Times.

Mad
magazine, the cultural barometer I myself favored as a kid, mocked the movie’s gaps in logic. If Laura is a starving artist, how can she afford to live on some of the most expensive beachfront property in California?
Mad
suggests that perhaps because Laura models nude and favors scanty beachwear, she has saved a lot of money on clothes.

I expected this fixation on Taylor’s looks from
Mad
, but not from my friend Jeffrey, a scholar of mathematics, computer science, and religion, whose opinion I frequently seek on all manner of subjects. After urging him to watch the movie, I asked whether he thought Laura had weakened Edward’s faith. No question, he said, then described a scene where she poses naked for a sculptor: “When I saw her,
I
forgot about God.”

Even Pauline Kael fixed on the nudity—likely threatened by Taylor’s beauty: “Taylor demurely cups her breasts with her hands, though they seem inadequate to the task.” In fairness, the scene really was a little strange. The Production Code Administration forbade Taylor to conceal her breasts with her bare hands; instead she covered them with what look like black cocktail napkins.

With decades of distance from the real-life Burtons and their infamy as a couple, it’s easier to see Laura and Edward as fictive characters. Viewed in this way, the film dramatizes a phenomenon that Leonard Shlain would detail three decades later in his groundbreaking book,
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image.

Shlain drew on brain anatomy, anthropology, and history to make a startling suggestion: that literacy may have a dark side. The very act of reading, Shlain says, prioritizes the left hemisphere of the brain, which processes linear, abstract, and masculine thought. It deemphasizes the right side, which is visual, holistic, and feminine. Over time, the ascendancy of the left brain has led to many bad things: the denigration of women, the banning of imagery from churches, and patriarchal domination.

As Shlain tells it, the values that typify the right brain are “empathy with the plight of one’s companions, generosity toward strangers, tolerance of dissent, love of nature, nurturance of children, laughter, playfulness, mysticism, forgiveness of enemies, and nonviolence.” In contrast, the left brain valorizes “work, goals, focus, power, and money.” These are of course good things; the left brain is not evil. But it does tend to frown on obstacles to its ambitions. Hence its other attributes: “cruelty, argument, a disregard for nature, and a lack of concern for the lame and the halt”—all the things that make one “a successful hunter/killer.”