My Life with Cleopatra (9 page)

J
ANUARY
5, 1961

Skouras offers the insurance company a deal. He suggests that they pay $3,750,000 in settlement of the present loss, with Fox to pay the underwriters 20 per cent of the profits on
Cleopatra
up to $2,000,000. Alternately, the company can pay $2,250,000 in settlement of the present loss with no share of the profits. In addition, the company has to agree to renew cast insurance to Elizabeth and the other principals.

To sweeten the pot he pointed out that if the insurance company accepts either of his offers they will avoid lots of bad publicity and the cost of legal action. If they accept his first offer and
Cleopatra
is a big box-office success, they will suffer only a relatively small loss.

J
ANUARY
6, 1961

Went to see Liz and Eddie at the Dorchester for a conference.

They live like royalty with children, dogs, cats, retainers, and supplicants for favor all over the place. Writers and famous people are always dropping in.

Liz and Eddie are constantly taking on projects, and the phone rings continually, with friends or agents calling in from Hollywood or Switzerland or Rome. The order of the day is—deals. Liz is enthusiastically interested in everything and anything, especially films and the theater. She has enough knowledge about show business to edit
Variety
with her left hand.

J
ANUARY
10, 1961

Script problems.

Liz and Peter Finch said the scene they were rehearsing was unplayable. Mamoulian, however, had approved it, even though I am sure he didn’t consider it perfect. But he did want to get on
with the picture and thought he would get something out of the scene on the set.

Liz said she wanted to see me later at the Dorchester for a script conference. She was in bed, not feeling well, when I arrived with Rogell. Liz said she was not happy with the script and insisted we call Skouras from her room. She managed to upset Skouras too.

Rogell suggested to me later that we move back to Hollywood as we are making no progress here. I wonder now whether the picture will ever be started, let alone finished.

J
ANUARY
14, 1961

A new bombshell—Skouras is considering another producer and director!

Charles Feldman, my agent, phoned at 11
A
.
M
. to impress on me that everything is my fault! I shouldn’t listen to Liz, Skouras, Mamoulian, or anybody. I should shoot the script I have, then get retakes later.

He said I am letting Liz run the show, and I must stop that at once. He told me that Skouras wants to change the producer and director on the film and is talking with Mark Robson, who doubles in brass.

J
ANUARY
16, 1961

Disastrous meeting with Rogell, Mamoulian, and myself.

Mamoulian arrived at Rogell’s office late—it was his wife Azadia’s birthday and he had been at lunch with her. When Rogell criticized him for being late the hostility which had been below the surface burst to the top.

Rogell blamed Mamoulian for the delays; Mamoulian in turn blamed the executives. I tried to take some of the blame to pacify things but the meeting ended with Mamoulian furious and sulking, and Rogell determined to start shooting, hot or cold, on Thursday—Liz willing.

Mamoulian agreed without enthusiasm.

J
ANUARY
17, 1961

Met with Liz, Eddie, and Mamoulian about the script. Liz said it was terrible. Mamoulian, who had approved the script, ended up by siding with her and letting me take the blame for it.

J
ANUARY
18, 1961

Mamoulian resigns.

Saw Rouben this morning in Rogell’s office. The meeting ended with Rouben and me having our first row. It started when I accused him of not standing up for the script the night before. He informed me he had cabled Skouras that he wants to resign.

I told him that he had made a mistake. If he had told me what he was going to do I never would have let him do it. I know the climate—they are considering his removal anyway and are talking to other directors.

“I didn’t tell you because I knew you would have tried to stop me,” Rouben said angrily. “I had made up my mind.”

I think he is maneuvering for complete autonomy, but I believe he made a bad tactical error.

J
ANUARY
19, 1961

Skouras accepted Mamoulian’s resignation. No shooting. Mamoulian’s resignation and negotiations with Joe Mankiewicz are in the papers already. They are hinting that the next to resign will be Liz.

J
ANUARY
20, 1961

Rouben held a press conference. Barry Norman of the
Daily Mail
gave the following account of it:

WHY I QUIT “CLEO”
I had a dream, says Director
.

J
ANUARY
23, 1961

Liz called. Wanted to know if she’s in or out of the picture. Am I in or out?

Mamoulian is looking for support from Liz, who likes to stand up for the underdog, but it is too late. Skouras knows she will quiet down if he brings in Mankiewicz, whom she trusts and believes in.

Meanwhile, I am at my wit’s end. There is still the problem of the script, and our overhead piles up—around $45,000 a day. We have only about ten minutes of film, some of it beautiful but none of it with Liz. And Liz refuses to do anything until the director hassle is settled.

J
ANUARY
25, 1961

Mankiewicz is hired as writer-director. Skouras wants JLM to run the show. There is already conflict between Skouras and JLM over JLM’s
insistence
that I continue to be producer of
Cleopatra
.

Where Rouben is slow moving and a chain cigar-smoker, Joe is mercurial and a pipe-smoker. JLM is intelligent with a wonderful sense of humor. Rouben is also intelligent, but has less sense of humor. The main difference between these two
men is their ability to adapt to situations. Mamoulian is unbending as is JLM, but JLM is much more adept in handling touchy matters.

F
EBRUARY
1, 1961

Mankiewicz begins to take over.

He has arrived in London with an entirely new, modern, psychiatrically rooted concept of the film. It is one with which I can agree entirely and I believe it can lead to a great picture. Mark Antony lived always in the shadow of Caesar—Caesar’s trusted lieutenant, Caesar’s loyal friend, Caesar’s right hand—but never a Caesar. JLM sees Antony as a bad replica of Caesar, following desperately in Caesar’s footsteps, but rattling loosely in them on the battlefield, in the Senate and in Caesar’s bed. He sees this inability to match Caesar as the cause of Antony’s excessive drinking and eccentric behavior. Antony’s conquest of Cleopatra is his only triumph over Caesar. Then he realizes he has not conquered but has been conquered—and this leads to his ultimate self-destruction.

JLM sees Cleopatra as one of the very first women to rule in a man’s world—a woman who wanted it all and picked off the Number One and Number Two ranking men of that world in succession. Cleopatra is not a wide-eyed child in his concept. She is an artist of consummate femininity, a genius in the art of attracting men. His overall approach is through the story of the woman who nearly made it.

It is his plan to stay very close to history. The lives of our chief protagonists, as chronicled in Plutarch, Suetonius, Appian and other ancient sources, are crammed with dramatic event and structure. He is going to start the script with the battle of Pharsalia.

JLM comes in the midst of a crisis: the cast is in open rebellion against being required to play the original script, which
conceives of Cleopatra as a virgin who could be deflowered only by a god. JLM says he cannot salvage anything from the original, and he plans to disregard it completely in favor of his own concept. In this case he has my enthusiastic OK, as well as Skouras’. But more will have to be discarded than the script and the 10½ minutes of film already shot—all the footage made during these disastrous ten weeks.

We must also pay off all the contract people like Peter Finch, who will receive $150,000 for the role he was not able to complete. We are recasting the entire production as well as replanning and rebuilding. And we need enough screenplay ready to enable us to start shooting here again as close to March 15 as possible.

A hurried call has gone out to writers to help organize and set down a story line which can be translated into a screenplay as quickly as possible.

F
EBRUARY
5, 1961

Sidney Buchman and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom like the Mankiewicz concept, made themselves available for enough time to get us started at any rate. Durrell is to be paid $2,500 a week.

The modus operandi is to hold conferences plotting the story line section by section. Buchman and Durrell then prepare separate “story-step outlines” which Mankiewicz adapts and expands into his screenplay outline. The outline has to be detailed and as close to the eventual screenplay as possible because of the pressure of time.

F
EBRUARY
9, 1961

Received a copy of budget report from Rogell. Total cost to date: $4,998,000. Estimated further cost to complete the picture: $4,866,000. The grand total is almost ten million dollars. What we have spent so far is, I am sure, wasted, and I doubt that we will ever finish the picture within this estimate.

F
EBRUARY
14, 1961

The London
Evening Standard
reported that Fox is claiming almost twelve million dollars from the forty insurance companies and ninety syndicates of Lloyd’s underwriters that insured us on the picture.

The paper also reported that Liz had won her libel suit against the
Daily Mail
for claiming
Cleopatra
had been held up because she was overweight.

F
EBRUARY
16, 1961

I have seen the first pages of Mankiewicz’s screenplay outline. Excellent!

JLM has begun dictating his screenplay outline to Elaine Schreyeck, who was his script girl on
Suddenly Last Summer
. She transcribes her shorthand notes in rough form. He corrects and edits them in longhand. Then the material is mimeographed. Luckily for us, JLM is including long passages of dialogue in his outline, but I have no idea when he is going to find time to write the actual screenplay.

Sidney Buchman has another assignment and can give us only a limited amount of time. Lawrence Durrell, who I consider a brilliant writer, seems a little baffled by the technique of screen-writing and dramaturgy, but he is whipping along on a shooting script based on the early pages of the JLM outline.

F
EBRUARY
19, 1961

Visited Eddie at the London Clinic. While he and Liz were on holiday in Zurich he had an attack of appendicitis. In the rush of coming back for his operation here Liz caught Asian flu.

F
EBRUARY
27, 1961

JLM told me about Liz’s birthday. Liz was in bed at the Dorchester, still suffering from Asian flu, but she had a party for the children.
JLM, who dropped in to see her, said she put on a brave show for the children though she seemed ill.

M
ARCH
1, 1961

At last everything is going along beautifully. The plan is to start shooting in London April 4, then to Egypt for the exteriors.

M
ARCH
3, 1961

9:30
A
.
M
. JLM called me about Liz. He is beginning to worry. He has talked with Dr. Goldman, who said she is “quite ill.”

M
ARCH
4, 1961

Eddie called this morning, distraught over Liz, who he said is seriously ill. She is being attended by eleven doctors, including the Queen’s physician. She has staphylococcus pneumonia.

Eddie called back to ask if I could possibly find a portable toilet! I rushed to Harrod’s, got one, and hurried back to their hotel. There I learned that Lord Evans had been able to supply one—reportedly the same one used by her Majesty the Queen on tours to the more primitive corners of the Empire.

At the hotel I heard that doctors have given Liz only one hour to live unless surgery is performed to open her windpipe and ease congestion. Eddie called Hollywood for Dr. Kennamer.

In the evening Liz was rushed in an ambulance with Eddie by her side from the Dorchester to the London Clinic. A tracheotomy was performed. I hurried to the clinic and fought my way through the crowds of press people but was unable to see Eddie. A reporter told me Liz was in an automatic respirator, something like an iron lung, to make breathing easier.

M
ARCH
5, 1961

A sleepless night with the telephone. My own doctor came to my home at 9
A
.
M
. He gave me a sedative because he doesn’t think
Liz in her condition has a chance to survive the operation and he wants me prepared for the worst.

The excitement and tension is incredible. The hospital issues health bulletins every fifteen minutes, so I am staying near my radio.

M
ARCH
6, 1961

There was a news report today in America that Liz had died. Skouras called: “My God, how did it happen?” He sounded beside himself. I told him it was not true and the news report had been denied.