The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice (9 page)

Cukrowicz next interviews Catherine, who is lucid and composed, to the annoyance of the nun who torments her by withholding cigarettes. After Cukrowicz offers to move Catherine to Lion’s View, she adds to the picture he is forming of Sebastian: “ ‘Famished for blondes. Tired of the dark ones.’ That’s the way he talked about people. As if they were items on a menu.”

Catherine thrives at Lion’s View. Alarmed by her niece’s growing sanity, Violet offers Catherine’s family money—if they can force her to undergo the lobotomy. Catherine bolts from them, accidentally fleeing to a more harrowing place: a catwalk above the men’s section of the drum. When the male inmates see her, they lunge. Hooting, cawing, they clutch at her ankles. To me, this is the film’s scariest scene. It foreshadows the revelation of cannibalism; the men, drooling, hunger for Catherine.

But it is also a metaphor for celebrity. Watching the scene, I understood how it must have felt to be Elizabeth Taylor—above the mob but still not safe from it, unable to turn off her beauty when it attracted undesired strangers.

Tension mounts. Vexed by Cukrowicz’s dawdling, his boss threatens to replace him with a compliant lobotomist. In a last-ditch effort to unearth the truth, Cukrowicz gathers Violet, his boss, and Catherine’s family at Violet’s home. In front of them, he injects Catherine with Sodium Pentothal and interrogates her.

As Catherine, Taylor commands the screen. Her words are incantatory, hypnotic. Her ordeal did not begin in Europe with Sebastian; she had been raped the previous winter. We see fragments of her horror—a montage of images, including the skeleton in Violet’s garden and the final minutes of Sebastian’s life. Then she blurts what Violet never wanted anyone to hear: for years, Sebastian had used Violet to procure men for him. But last summer, when Violet became too old, he recruited Catherine. Aghast, Catherine recalls the see-through bathing suit Sebastian made her wear in Spain: a magnet for rough youths—youths for purchase—some of whom later turned on him, ending his life and gouging hunks from his body.

In the face of this truth, Violet succumbs to madness. Catherine survives. That is her triumph. She stood up to authority. She blocked a misuse of power. She forced the male doctors—including Cukrowicz’s boss—to think twice before lodging an ice pick in a sane woman’s head.

Catherine’s triumph is almost identical to that of the filmmakers: producer Sam Spiegel, director Joseph Mankiewicz, and screenwriter Gore Vidal. They stood up to authority. They blocked a misuse of power. They prevented the Production Code Administration and the Catholic Legion of Decency from completely eviscerating Williams’s play.

This was hard to do. Much of the credit goes to Spiegel, whose first smart move was securing Vidal to adapt the play. Not only was Vidal a friend of Williams, or “the Bird,” as he calls him; he was uniquely suited to address the concerns of the play’s Roman Catholic critics. After the censors office flat-out nixed a synopsis of
Suddenly, Last Summer
, Vidal agreed to meet biweekly with a Roman Catholic priest during the writing process and show him drafts of the script.

Vidal doesn’t recall which watchdog agency the priest represented: “They have so many of these torture groups—to try to keep literature and art out of commerce.” But he remembers that the priest was not impressive: “He was one of the dumb ones, a Christian brother or something,” which is to say: not a Jesuit or a canonical scholar. “And I knew so much more about the Catholic Church than he did.”

This was not an idle boast. Vidal had exhaustively researched the early Christian Church for his 1962 novel,
Julian
, which deals with Julian Augustus, the fourth century pagan emperor who tried to stop the advance of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Emperor Julian terms Christians “Galileans,” and he fears them. They will slaughter anyone who stands between them and political power.

In fairness to the intelligence of the priest, Vidal can be intimidating—even at age eighty-three and confined to a wheelchair, as he was when I interviewed him. When I arrived at his house, an assistant carried him downstairs. Regal in pajamas and a bathrobe, he greeted me by alluding to a line of Violet’s from
Suddenly, Last Summer
—a line that he, not Williams, had written: “Because this is a democracy … I don’t rise. I come down.”

Vidal refused to turn the play into a moral fable about the evils of homosexuality. He did, however, construct the story so that his Catholic critics could read it as such if they chose to.

Cleverly, Vidal opens the film after Sebastian, the gay character, is dead—having expired in a horrific way that could be interpreted as “punishment” for his wickedness. In an uncensored movie, a handsome actor portraying Sebastian might have appeared in flashback scenes sipping daiquiris while Catherine flirted with attractive locals. In this film, Sebastian is a cipher, a faceless figure, who, in a flickering montage, meets a bad, if not entirely comprehensible, demise.

A few months after the film came out, when Vidal was stopped for speeding on New York’s Taconic State Parkway, he learned just how baffling some viewers had found the ending. “The policeman recognized me and said, ‘I just saw that movie you wrote. Was that guy a faggot?’ ” Vidal recalls. “I said, ‘I think he was, yeah.’ ” And the policeman was exultant—because he had figured this out and his wife hadn’t.

Some of the film’s murkiness, however, was not in the script but in the direction. Under the spell of Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman (one of whose characters famously plays chess with Death), Joseph L. Mankiewicz peppered
Suddenly, Last Summer
with enigmatic symbols. After viewing the climactic montage, Spiegel began calling him “Ingmar Mankiewicz.”

In the fall of 1959, Spiegel submitted a finished version of the film to the Production Code Administration Appeals Board. “The story admittedly deals with an [
sic
] homosexual, but one who pays for his sin with his life,” Spiegel argued. And “there should be no offense on religious grounds because the mother and son are obviously psychopaths.”

Things had changed at the Production Code Administration since Stevens’s scuffle over
A Place in the Sun
. In 1954, Joseph Breen retired as chief enforcer. He was replaced by Geoffrey Shurlock, his former assistant. Unlike Breen, who had kept apart from Hollywood, Shurlock seemed to enjoy Spiegel’s company. On November 16, 1959, Shurlock wrote to Spiegel: “I don’t need to tell you what a treat it is for us to meet you under all circumstances, and even in the melee of an appeals hearing.” Shurlock also enjoyed what appears to have been a bribe: “I must thank you again for getting me in to that magnificent performance of ‘Figaro’ at the Metropolitan.”

Whether by dint of persuasion or payoff, Spiegel prevailed at the hearing. Both the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency approved the film. Unfortunately, the critics did not. In an emblematic review,
Variety
called it “the most bizarre film ever made by any major American company.”

At first, Vidal recalls, Spiegel was “furious about how terrible the reviews were and he blamed me. He said, ‘You ruined it, you ruined it.’ I said, ‘I have not. Those reviews will make it the most successful movie of your career, even more than the dreadful
Bridge on the River Kwai.
’ ” And as is so often the case, Vidal was right.

Columbia’s cunning publicity campaign also helped. Its ads managed to be both smug and titillating. They showed Taylor in that notorious see-through swimsuit with the caption: “Cathy knew she was being used for evil.” In this context, of course, “evil” meant “procuring.” When you view the film today, however, only one true evil leaps out: the willingness of some male doctors to maim a healthy woman for money.

When
Suddenly, Last Summer
wrapped, Taylor still owed MGM one last movie. She fought to be released from her contract, but the studio fought harder. She had to accept the film it imposed:
BUtterfield 8
. Seething with resentment—and determined to slow the production—Taylor struggled against the role of Gloria Wandrous. At some point, however, she stopped resisting. She embraced Gloria, making her bigger and more memorable than the small-minded plot in which both Gloria—and Taylor—were stuck. She made Gloria what in the 1980s would be termed a “sex-positive” feminist.

9

BUtterfield 8
, 1960

Now I get it—you pick the man. He doesn’t pick you.

—Laurence Harvey as Weston Liggett to Elizabeth Taylor as Gloria Wandrous in
BUtterfield 8.
(Liggett made this observation after Wandrous plunged her stiletto heel into his instep.)

There should be developed in this story an attitude of compassion for Gloria, not one of glorification. The story should seem to indicate that she might have been a great woman if it were not for the fact that she was a sick one.

—E. G. Dougherty, Production Code Administration memo, October 16, 1959

POOR GLORIA WANDROUS. She was born—or invented—before society was ready for her. Gloria is the central character in
BUtterfield 8
, John O’Hara’s 1935 novel, as well as Daniel Mann’s 1960 movie of the same name.

Gloria may be Elizabeth Taylor’s most magnificent character, as well as her most feminist. But to appreciate Gloria, one must view her through the lens of today. On a contemporary university campus, Gloria would be an archetypal coed. But in 1935—and even in 1960—she was an object of scorn. Gloria is in touch with her sexual feelings and chooses to satisfy them, as do “nice” girls in today’s culture of “hookups,” liaisons that don’t necessarily lead to marriage. Young women who “hook up” don’t view this as an alternative to marriage; most still seek that institution’s prestige and tax advantages. But they wisely realize that not all attractions last forever. In the twenty-first century, Gloria’s behavior seems both prudent and clear-eyed. But in 1959, the Production Code Administration called it “nymphomaniac.”

In her essay “Lusting for Freedom,” feminist Rebecca Walker emphasizes the value of sexual experimentation to the emotional health of young women—as a stepping stone to forging enduring relationships. Almost more important than the sex itself is the permission to engage in it. Walker disparages “sex where our agency is denied”—sex divorced from female desire—and the institutions that condemn women for pursuing pleasure. “For giving bodies what they want and crave, for exploring ourselves and others, we are punished like Eve reaching for more knowledge,” she writes. “We are called sluts and whores. We are considered impure and psychotic.”

The term “pro-sex feminist” arose during the early 1980s, when some feminists aligned with social conservatives to fight pornography. In this debate, the feminists who championed the First Amendment—and dared to consider pleasure a woman’s right—were called “pro-sex” or “sex-positive.” Writer Ellen Willis explains: “Confronted with a right-wing backlash bent on reversing social acceptance of non-marital, non-procreative sex, feminists like me, who saw sexual liberalism as deeply flawed by sexism but nonetheless a source of crucial gains for women, found themselves at odds with feminists who dismissed the sexual revolution as monolithically sexist and shared many of the attitudes of conservative moralists.” Gloria would likely have shared Willis’s views.

At the beginning of
BUtterfield 8
, Gloria wakes up alone, in the rumpled bed of Weston Liggett, portrayed by Laurence Harvey, a man she met mere hours earlier. The camera zooms in on her left hand, conspicuously unencumbered by a wedding ring. Gloria is a tiny bit hungover, which is also something young women today are permitted to be. The Production Code Administration, however, referred to occasional overindulgences by women as “alcoholic.” (Spencer Tracy’s character in
Father of the Bride
routinely drank until he passed out, but the Production Code folk never branded him with the A-word.)

The movie version of
BUtterfield 8
divides into two clear sections: an opening movement based on O’Hara’s book, and a closing movement shaped by the Production Code Administration. In section one, Gloria is a beacon of female sexuality and power. She boldly defies marital convention and rejects men who repel her, no matter how much money they offer. She will not be rented like a prostitute or owned like a chattel—or like a wife, for that matter. In the fancy Manhattan apartment of Liggett, who is married to another woman, Gloria finds a note that says, “$250.00. Enough?” And assuming that the money is for her, not for the dress that he ripped, she declares her independence, scrawling “No Sale” in lipstick on an ornate mirror.

Equally memorable, in a later scene, Gloria makes clear to Liggett that she desires
him
, not his wallet. “Put your assets away,” she scoffs. “You couldn’t match what I’ve already turned down.” When he interprets this as a negotiating ploy, she impales his foot with her spike heel—an image of such startling female strength that I gasped when I first saw it. The scene was recorded in one long shot. Harvey’s fluid face captures Liggett’s confusion. He is at first aroused, then aghast. If Gloria picks partners based on her own desire, he wonders, does she then drop them when she pleases? “Without a parachute,” she smirks.

Gloria is quick-witted and verbal. After swimming to consciousness in Liggett’s bedroom—then borrowing his wife’s mink coat because Liggett had destroyed her dress—she heads to the Greenwich Village apartment of her childhood buddy, Steve, lamely portrayed by Eddie Fisher. “Sunday morning and Scotch on your breath?” Steve says. “Well, it’s good Scotch,” Gloria rejoins.