My Life with Cleopatra (25 page)

AFTERWORD
 

It was, and remains to this day, a film drenched in superlatives. It was called the most publicized movie of all time, the most expensive, the most reviled, even, at its 4 hour and 3 minute original theatrical cut, the longest film Hollywood ever released. Its star, Elizabeth Taylor, received the highest salary ever for an actress, a million dollars plus 10 per cent of the gross, and threw up the first time she saw it. Her celebrated costar, Richard Burton, claimed never to have seen it at all. It could only be
Cleopatra
.

It’s been fifty years since
Cleopatra
premiered on a June night in 1963 at New York’s Rivoli Theater, an event that both required the services of more than 100 policemen, the largest group ever assigned to a Broadway opening, and caused beleaguered writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz to feel like he was being carted to the guillotine in a tumbrel.

In that half a century, other films have caused a fuss and salaries and budgets have gone so sky high that
Cleopatra
’s once astronomical cost (estimates range from $32 million to $44 million) now seems almost quaint by comparison.

But
Cleopatra
still lingers in memory and legend, a cultural milestone whose significance is not exactly clear. It is not often revived these days and rarely reconsidered. While other epics once viewed as fiascos, like Michael Cimino’s
Heaven’s Gate
, have maneuvered their way from purgatory to critical respectability, time has so stood still for
Cleopatra
that seeing it again feels like a
trip back to the waning days of a formidable empire. Not the last days of Egypt’s greatness, but of Hollywood’s.

For the key thing that remains a constant about
Cleopatra
is that it’s still difficult to watch without the real world intruding. Even now the fuss and the film remain so fatally intertwined, like Holmes and Moriarty headed over Reichenbach Falls, that separating one from the other is challenging and perhaps not even necessary. Because the things that gave
Cleopatra
notoriety in its day remain the qualities that fascinate today.

Key among those aspects was the enormous, still-impressive physical scale of the film, the huge number of objects that in those pre-CGI days were actually built by hand. These included the construction of an authentic harbor, a twelve-acre Roman Forum set bigger than the actual Forum, and a royal barge built to Plutarch’s specifications that almost ended up as a restaurant at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

Not to mention (though everyone did) the 26,000 gallons of paint, 6,000 tons of cement, 150,000 arrows, 8,000 pairs of shoes, and 26,000 costumes. These clothes weren’t all for Cleopatra herself, though it sometimes seemed they were: the queen had only 58 costumes, including one of pure gold that cost $6,500 back in the day. All in all, the physical Cleopatra still impresses as the last gaudy gasp of a way of Hollywood life that rising costs and shrinking audiences were bringing to an end.

It was not just the physical backdrop, of course, that remains compelling about
Cleopatra
, it’s the legendary romantic liaison between Taylor, Hollywood’s biggest star, and Burton, called by actress Jean Simmons “an enviable cross between Groucho Marx and John Barrymore.” It was a stormy relationship that lasted more than a dozen years and included two marriages and two divorces. Its specifics never ceased to captivate the world because it both began during filming and echoed in uncanny ways the story the film itself was telling.

Moviegoers invested in what’s seen on the big screen like
nothing better than being told that the emotions they’re watching are duplicating reality. Audiences were enthralled when Greta Garbo and John Gilbert fell in love while making 1926’s
Flesh and the Devil
, and Burton-Taylor upped the ante in a way that remains potent today.

Cleopatra
is more than life imitating art, it’s life and art feeding on and changing each other. The lovers dallied as the world’s press salivated. Things got so intense that Vatican City’s weekly newspaper ran an open letter accusing Taylor of “erotic vagrancy” and Hedda Hopper reported that studio executives were rooting for astronaut John Glenn’s Project Mercury flight to make it into earth’s orbit and finally kick the potent, passionate liaison off newspaper front pages.

That this film exists at all is due to a passion of a different sort, a lifelong dream of Walter Wanger, a prolific producer whose Hollywood experience goes all the way back to purchasing the property that became 1921’s Rudolph Valentino-starring
The Sheik
. His idea, as related in the film’s substantial souvenir program, was a motion picture “that would interpret, more realistically than ever done before, Cleopatra’s life and the era in which she lived.”

Rather than ask what went wrong with that dream, it’s more instructive to say “What didn’t?” The film was bedeviled from the get-go by all manner of ills, from dreadful weather and a hairdressers’ strike in England (the production site before Rome) to several Taylor illnesses, including one that nearly killed her but led to a sympathy Oscar for
Butterfield 8
, as well as a director, Rouben Mamoulian, who was better at spending money than creating usable footage.

Partially at Taylor’s suggestion, Mankiewicz, whose credits included
All About Eve
and
The Barefoot Contessa
and had worked with the actress on
Suddenly, Last Summer
, took over to both write and direct. The trouble was the budget-driven necessity, aided by pills and injections, to do both almost simultaneously, shooting by day and writing by night.

The result, as the filmmaker sardonically related in Kenneth L. Geist’s
Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz
, was “the hardest three pictures I ever made … 
Cleopatra
was conceived in emergency, shot in hysteria, and wound up in blind panic.”

In an atmosphere like this, everything that could become a crisis did. When the filmmakers changed their minds about using a group of elephants, their owner insisted the animals had been “slandered” and decided to sue. And when eleven U.S. Congressmen found a reason to visit the set in Rome and Taylor didn’t find time to meet with them, the resulting story (“Film Set Snub Irks Visiting Congressmen”) became an international incident.

It is a shock after all of this silliness to discover how serious the intentions for
Cleopatra
were. Mankiewicz was nothing if not a thoughtful, adult filmmaker, and his aim here, which fit nicely with Wanger’s, was to create what the producer described as a “modern, psychiatrically rooted concept” that dealt with the complex personal relationships between mentor Julius Caesar, protégé Mark Antony, and the woman that intoxicated them both. It was a worthy goal but one that the film, beset on all sides as it was, could no more than partially realize.

Part of the difficulty stems from the reality that
Cleopatra
is not one long narrative interrupted by an intermission but rather two quite different films. 20th Century-Fox, realizing this, gave serious consideration to releasing
Cleopatra
as two separate entities, but, bowing to the reality that the audience for the first part alone was close to non-existent, went the one big film route.

With the dignified, capable Rex Harrison cast as Caesar, it’s inevitable that the first part of
Cleopatra
, detailing the measured realpolitik relationship between older Roman ruler and younger Egyptian queen, is more serious than what happens when the age-appropriate tabloid-fodder romance between her and Mark Antony takes center stage.

Here are some of Mankiewicz’s better lines, zingers like “you stand here dribbling virtue out of the corner of your mouth” and Caesar’s noting of Egypt’s chief eunuch that his is “an exalted rank not obtained without certain sacrifices.” But even during this part the stab at seriousness is both self-conscious and undercut by more boisterous scenes like Cleopatra arriving in Caesar’s presence rolled in a rug, or her Greatest Show on Earth arrival in Rome on an enormous Sphinx-headed chariot pulled by hundreds of men. When Mark Antony says, “nothing like this has come into Rome since Romulus and Remus,” he is not being hyperbolic.

Once Caesar is gone, conveniently assassinated by a group of Roman Senators led by, of all people,
All in the Family
’s Carrol O’Connor as Casca, the way is clear for Burton and Taylor, his football captain to her homecoming queen, to take center stage and give the audience, both then and now, what they’ve come to the movies for.

Whatever else is said about
Cleopatra
, the first kiss between these two remains a classic and the couple’s scenes together are alive in the way the rest of this at times stodgy production (not to mention, with the notable exception of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
, their ten other theatrical features) manage to be.

Though not the bigger star, Burton is the more commanding performer. He holds the screen without effort, energizes Mark Antony with his great open smile and cocky charm, and masters lines like “everything I shall ever want to hold or look upon or have is here now with you.” Of the aspects of
Cleopatra
that merit reconsideration, Burton’s performance tops the list.

Taylor did not have her costar’s acting credentials, but she was not the icon of her generation for nothing. Detractors could and did mock—Stanley Kauffman remarked that “she needs do no more than walk across the throne room to turn Alexandria into Beverly Hills”—but her energy and passion are unmistakable.

This is especially true in the scene where Cleopatra discovers that Mark Antony has married the pale Octavia (Jean Marsh, millennia away from her
Upstairs, Downstairs
career) and takes her revenge on their abandoned bed. According to David Kamp’s encyclopedic article in
Vanity Fair
, Taylor shot the scene on the day Burton announced (prematurely as it turned out) that he would not leave his wife. In a tantrum that electrifies even today, “Taylor went at it with such gusto that she banged her hand and needed to go to the hospital for X rays. She was unable to work the next day.”

Though it remains easy to laugh at this flawed film’s expense,
Cleopatra
was hardly the fiasco its place in public memory would indicate. It was nominated for nine Oscars, including best actor for Harrison, and won in four categories (cinematography, art direction, costume design, and special effects).

And while everyone remembers the reviews that savagely attacked
Cleopatra
(Brendan Gill waspishly commented that the film “would have made a marvelous silent picture” and Judith Crist memorably skewered it as “at best a major disappointment, at worst an extravagant exercise in tedium”), the film got its share of positive notices, including a rave from
The New York Times
’ powerful Bosley Crowther, who called it “one of the great epic films of our day.”

Even in the all-important area of box office,
Cleopatra
eventually turned a profit despite its great cost, which is more than many of today’s epics can say. With the public completely consumed by the Burton–Taylor liaison,
Cleopatra
became one of the highest grossing films of 1963, ended up playing in New York for sixty-three weeks, and went into profit in 1966 after ABC paid $5 million for television rights.

On one level the limited success
Cleopatra
achieved in the face of ungodly obstacles can be seen as a triumph of the system, the victory of industry worker bees over snarky gossipistas. But from another point of view the lesson of this film fifty years down the
road is how little remembered that triumph is and the recognition of how often perception becomes reality in this town. It is the oldest of Hollywood lessons, and one we have to learn over and over again.

—Kenneth Turan

KENNETH TURAN
is a film critic for the
Los Angeles Times
and National Public Radio’s
Morning Edition
, as well as the director of the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prizes. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he teaches film reviewing and nonfiction writing at USC. His most recent books are
Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told
and
Never Coming to a Theater Near You
.