My Life as a Mankiewicz (10 page)

Elizabeth and Dad had stayed in touch since
Suddenly, Last Summer.
He adored her. She felt she'd given her finest performance in that film. Somehow, a deal had to be made.
Cleopatra
was the antithesis of a Joseph L. Mankiewicz film. A sprawling historical epic with no biting social commentary exchanged in small, sophisticated living rooms. He asked Fox if they would shut down until someone (at first, not him) revised the screenplay. No, they wanted to shoot right away. They were cast, huge sets had been built in England—all systems were go. Dad was tempted. He wanted to work with Elizabeth again and realized that her right of director approval might result in his getting a huge deal. Still, it was the wrong kind of film for him to make. He'd always trusted Mother's opinion on career matters. I'm convinced if she'd still been alive, he wouldn't have done it.

Fox finally made Dad an offer he couldn't refuse. They'd buy his independent company (Figaro) from him. This would pay for his services and give them ownership of
The Barefoot Contessa
and
I Want to Live
, a successful film starring Susan Hayward (she won an Oscar) that Robert Wise had directed for the company. Dad and NBC were fifty-fifty partners in Figaro. The offer was for $2.5 million. Dad would get half. After paying capital gains taxes, he would net over $1 million, which actually meant he'd be getting more than Elizabeth. No director had ever been paid that much before. The idea of taking on
Cleopatra
was getting more irresistible every day.

I remember seeing the twenty minutes or so of film Mamoulian shot with Dad in a New York screening room. He was a big fan of Peter Finch and intended to keep him. A close-up of Stephen Boyd flashed onto the screen. “Who's that?” Dad asked.

“That's Stephen Boyd. He's playing Mark Antony.”

“No he's not,” came Dad's reply.

Before shooting could begin, Elizabeth became desperately ill. A tracheotomy was performed on her neck to assist in her breathing. It would take her months to recover. There was no getting around it: now they had to shut down. The entire cast (except Elizabeth) was suspended or let go. Dad told Peter Finch that if he were available, he'd love to have him play Caesar when they started up again. Stephen Boyd was history. Brando was Dad's first choice for Antony. Marlon had just started shooting
Mutiny on the Bounty
in the South Pacific, another film that had replaced its director and looked as if it would never end. Richard Burton was bought out of the Broadway musical
Camelot
, in which he was playing King Arthur. Peter Finch was just about to shoot the title role in
The Trials of Oscar Wilde
and was unavailable. Rex Harrison came aboard to do his third film for Dad, playing Julius Caesar.

It was nonsensical to shoot in England. Dad was astounded that huge Roman and Egyptian exterior sets had been constructed in a country where it could rain for months before even colder and wetter winters. He moved the production to Rome, to Cinecittà, where he'd shot
The Barefoot Contessa. Cleopatra
took over virtually all the space the large studio had to offer. Dad had tried to avoid taking over the screenplay, but after several false starts, he finally did so. Whether or not he was kidding himself, he'd become convinced that if George Bernard Shaw could write
Caesar and Cleopatra
and Shakespeare could write
Antony and Cleopatra
, there was real buried treasure in the project waiting to be unearthed. He planned on making two separate films, one to be released directly after the other. It was a laudable ambition he could never achieve. When Elizabeth was ready to shoot again, he'd barely scratched the surface of the films he wanted to make. But they had to shoot, and shoot they did, endlessly. Dad stayed up nights writing, trying to keep far enough ahead of what he was directing during the day. There wasn't anything like a final completed draft until the film had been in production for many months.

Dad wanted the family with him. Chris had just graduated from Columbia. Dad gave him a job as a second assistant director on the film. I was still at Yale and could come over only on vacations. Fortunately for me, the film shot so interminably this meant two summer breaks and the intervening Christmas and Easter holidays. There have been countless documentaries and accounts of
Cleopatra
aired and published over the years. I have my own private memories.

The Production

The production was massive, on a scale never seen before. At times there were as many as five separate units either prepping or shooting simultaneously. The port of Alexandria was constructed near Anzio on the Mediterranean coast. While clearing the land, bulldozers struck buried, still-active land mines left over from the famous World War II landing. One worker was killed and several others wounded. The sheer size of the film alone would have been enough to generate worldwide publicity, but suddenly the ultimate wild card fell out of the deck: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had fallen in love. It was, at the time, the most internationally celebrated romance since Edward VIII abdicated the British throne for Mrs. Simpson. Both Elizabeth and Richard were already married to other people. Their affair was publicly condemned by the Vatican. In Washington, D.C., a member of Congress took the floor to demand that Elizabeth (born in England) relinquish her American passport. There was virtually no publication of any kind anywhere that didn't feature the story on its cover, and more than once. Flocks of the press descended on Rome from all over the world. Art Buchwald announced in the
Washington Post
and
Paris Tribune:
“It used to be that one couldn't leave Rome without having seen the Colosseum and the Roman forum. Now you can add having been on the set of
Cleopatra.”
Foreign dignitaries, even heads of state, were not uncommon. I remember President Sukarno of Indonesia, among others.

Walter Wanger was the nominal producer on the film. I say “nominal” because he had no real power and found it easier to ignore the mounting production problems, preferring to socialize with Italian society on the Via Veneto. Dad liked Walter. He'd produced
I Want to Live
for Figaro and was a warm, gutsy man. During World War I he'd volunteered for the brand new American Air Force, but after crashing five training planes was asked politely to find employment elsewhere in the military. He was given an enemy air medal and dubbed “the Italian Ace.” In the 1950s his wife, the actress Joan Bennett, was having an affair with her agent, Jennings Lang, later the executive vice president of Universal Pictures. Walter shot him in the balls. He did a short stint in prison, then resumed his marital life and career.

The original production manager on the film was Johnny Johnston, someone who'd worked with Dad before and in whom he had absolute confidence. Johnny had been working in Spain for Samuel Bronston. His right-hand assistant was Rosemary Matthews (remember
The Barefoot Contessa?).
She'd also just worked for Dad on
The Quiet American
, which he'd shot in Vietnam and Rome. They'd grown closer over the years, to say the very least. Shortly after arriving on
Cleopatra
, Johnny tragically died of a heart attack. His talented and experienced replacement was C. O. “Doc” Erickson, who later continued to work with Dad on several more films. Needless to say, Rosemary stayed in place. Her presence was essential to Dad's maintaining his health and sanity. The roots of their future marriage were starting to take hold.

Freddy Simpson was the first assistant director. Gruff, funny, no-nonsense, he'd started as a prop man for Dad many years earlier. The myriad of production problems soon began to overwhelm him. Among them: Elizabeth's unprecedented contract allowed her two days off for every menstrual period. One day she notified the production that she was having it and wouldn't be available to shoot. The only problem was she'd claimed the same thing just two weeks earlier. Freddy was beside himself: “Two periods in less than three weeks? When this broad dies they should send her body to the Harvard Medical School.” He was going to have a doctor go over to her villa to verify her condition, but Dad called it off: “The problem, Freddy, is that she's smarter than you are. This time it is her period. I know her too well. You're going to have egg all over your face.”

Rex Harrison wore leather leggings as Julius Caesar, principally because his own legs were so skinny they didn't seem to belong to the then conqueror of the known world. His nickname among the crew was “Birdlegs.” One day Freddy was barking out orders on the set and yelled to someone, “We're ready. Get Birdlegs in here!” He turned and suddenly found himself face to face with Rex. Freddy managed a weak smile. “Should I just take a cab to the airport now, or…?” Rex shook his head in disgust and walked past him.

Richard Burton

Richard Burton was that rare and enviable male who is the consummate ladies' man and man's man. He could be a boisterous drunkard as well as a thoughtful intellectual. His capacity for booze was enormous. I once saw him consume more than a bottle of vodka before lunch while working. In makeup at five thirty or six in the morning he could toss back a triple brandy followed by a cheery “Good morning, all!” One day when a rainstorm interrupted filming on the island of Ischia, the cast and crew ducked into a bar. I remember Richard had at least five vodkas in the half-hour period before the rain stopped.

Richard possessed a wonderful intellect and the curiosity to go with it. He had a deep background in classical theater, having been the resident leading man at the Old Vic, where he was once described as “the first Hamlet with balls.” Over dinner he would love to make a statement like “No German has ever had an original thought” and then defend his proposition against all comers. I always suspected that some of these intellectual exercises were setups to show off his knowledge, but in the German example I remember he could successfully show you that the thoughts of Hegel, Marx, Goethe, and so on, were far from original.

Richard could be moody. He had quick flashes of anger, especially when drunk. He turned his magnetism on and off like a stereo. When he decided to charm you, he enthralled you. I never saw it fail with anyone. And when he misbehaved, he got forgiveness from everyone as if they were excusing a brilliantly talented “bad boy.”

The timber of his voice was legendary. A deep Welsh baritone heavily seasoned by years of incessant smoking and drinking. He had an almost unbelievable ability to project his voice, which he said came from his stepfather, Phillip Burton. When Richard was young, the two of them would stand on opposite sides of a chasm between two cliffs in Wales. The wind noisily whipped through the gap, and Phillip made Richard project his voice over the racket until he could be heard clearly. It seemed a fanciful story, but Richard insisted it was true. He played his voice like a virtuoso plays a musical instrument. When I saw him on Broadway in
Camelot
, he received a standing ovation not only at the end, but at the close of the first act as well. And that was at a time when standing ovations actually meant something. An actor's ability to “take stage” in a role can completely distort your perception of the play. I remember seeing
Equus
in London when it opened at the National Theatre. It starred Colin Blakely as the psychiatrist and Peter Firth as the troubled young boy. It was clearly a two-handed piece, and the balance between both roles made the play. Later, in New York, Anthony Perkins played it with Peter Firth. I went to see it and was surprised to discover that the play now belonged to Peter Firth. It wasn't that Tony was bad. He simply didn't “take stage” to the degree that Firth did. The balance of the piece had changed. Even later, when Richard agreed to do
Equus
on Broadway for a limited run, I went to see him. The play had changed once again. This time it belonged to Richard, and it was more than simply because of the star power he carried with him. It was the force of his performance. Peter Firth had been reduced to playing a wonderful supporting role.

Coming onto
Cleopatra
, Richard was famous for supposedly having slept with every leading lady he ever worked with. This time it would be with a very much married Elizabeth Taylor, but from the moment the picture began there seemed to be an inevitability about it. Everyone watched the two of them circling each other, these two volatile, ignitable personalities. The day they consummated their relationship, everyone seemed to know it. Richard had apparently intended to do a hit-and-run, to make a conquest and then go back to his wife, Sybil, as he'd done countless times before. Elizabeth was having none of it. You didn't hit-and-run with Elizabeth Taylor. The affair continued, grew deeper, and the rest, as they say, was history. I remember Dad telling me at the time: “You know, when you see one of these marriages, the kind Richard and Sybil have, it's taken for granted that every time he misbehaves he'll come home and be forgiven because that's where the real love is. The only problem with a relationship like that is the near inevitability that one day he'll find his real love somewhere else.”

Elizabeth Taylor

The first thing you noticed when you met Elizabeth Taylor was that she was small in stature, almost tiny compared with the way she photographed onscreen. She had a full, almost lush body and was so beautiful it made my hair hurt. She was also the biggest celebrity of her day, even before the affair with Richard. When she arrived in Rome, she briefly stayed at the Grand Hotel until moving to her villa on the Appia Antica outside the city. While she was at the Grand, hundreds of people congregated in front of the hotel day and night behind police barricades, hoping for just a glimpse of her. On her thirtieth birthday there was a small party upstairs at Bricktop's, a famous nightclub on the Via Veneto. When word got out that she was there, the boulevard outside suddenly became packed wall to wall with people waiting to see her leave. The police had to escort us down a back staircase into an alley, where cars whisked everyone away. Even Richard was astonished. “I'd no idea she was that famous,” I remember him saying.