How to Be a Movie Star (50 page)

And so Elizabeth appeared for the first time on stage in June, reciting poetry with her husband as a benefit for Philip Burton's drama school, the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. She was terrified, stumbling at first and feeling her armpits dampen her blue silk dress. Then she steeled herself, as she knew how to do so well, feeling "daring [and] audacious," proceeding from Dorothy Parker to D. H. Lawrence to Frost, Eliot, and Yeats. Even if poetry snobs insisted that she didn't understand what she was reading, she finished the night to a roar of applause. "Rarely has poetry drawn such a crowd," observed the
New York Times.
Once again, however, Elizabeth was realistic: "I knew that eighty-five percent of them had come and spent a great deal of money for me to fall flat on my face." But where she'd never been excessively proud of her films, she admitted, "I was proud of myself at that poetry reading."

In October it was once more back to MGM. The Burtons flew first to Big Sur, California, and then to Paris to make
The Sandpiper
for Vincente Minnelli, who'd directed Elizabeth fourteen years earlier in
Father of the Bride.
Elizabeth considered the film "a pile of crap," and insisted that she and Richard were making it only for the money. But it's hard not to see
The Sandpiper
as a kind of coda to Le Scandale. Richard plays a minister who, despite a deep respect for his virtuous wife, cannot resist falling in love with the beautiful, free-thinking artist played by Elizabeth. At one point, she says that society might consider their love to be wrong, but questions how it could be wrong when their feelings were so true and so pure. "I never knew it could be like this," she gushes during one of their secret trysts, and the audience is left feeling that Elizabeth might have said something similar during those early days in Rome. "Being with you is like having the whole world in my arms." If that didn't explain why Taylor and Burton had moved heaven and earth to be together, what could?

"The film was not written about her," said Martin Ransohoff, who both produced and wrote the story, "though people thought it was." How could they not? Observers on the set said that Minnelli, who was not fond of the original script, had wisely tweaked the material to reflect the offscreen love affair of Elizabeth and Richard.

There was also a deliberate attempt to appeal to the youth culture. Although
The Sandpiper
was shot predominantly in Paris, the location shooting in Big Sur made the most of the bohemian lifestyle of the California coast. The film features several earthy, sexy parties, and even includes a nude scene for Elizabeth, surely intended to evoke her spread in
Playboy.
Posing for a sculptor who is also her occasional lover, Elizabeth removes her smock, and though the camera is very discreet, the scene still caused audiences to gasp. The sculptor was originally to be played by Sammy Davis Jr.—which, in 1964, would have caused more gasps. "A wild idea," Minnelli thought, but ultimately Davis was vetoed by Ransohoff and replaced with Charles Bronson, much to Elizabeth's regret.

Her character was also styled to suggest a sixties flower child rather than a glamorous movie star. "Don't let Taylor wear much makeup," one studio technician advised. "This is not a standard of beauty anymore. The less she wears makeup-wise, the more the public will like her." Minnelli took this advice, and the result was that Elizabeth looked more beautiful than she had since
Butterfield 8,
her hair long and flowing, her unadorned eyes popping off the screen more brilliantly than ever in the Metrocolor film.

In the months after the film was completed, Springer and Frings spearheaded a campaign to ensure that the Burtons' names remained on the front pages. Elizabeth's reminiscences with Max Lerner were dusted off and expanded into a small memoir published by Harper & Row in 1964. Next it was Richard's turn, waxing poetic about his wife in the March 1965 issue of
Vogue.
The article was later expanded into a slim volume called
Meeting Mrs. Jenkins,
published by William Morrow in 1966 with full-color glossy pages featuring Elizabeth in all her violet-eyed glory.

The effect of both books was to lift the Taylor-Burton story out of its scandalous origins and transform it into a tale of eternal love and fate: "To have found, through trial and error, a tranquility in proud subordination, is so beautiful," Elizabeth wrote. By showing that she was just like any woman—indeed, like her character in
The Sandpiper
—she could hopefully bring any lingering doubters over to her side. Any person with even half a heart would understand that true love explains and conquers all. And while she might be a nonconformist in admitting her love of sex and four-letter words, Elizabeth also reminded the public of her romantic side, the part that was still the dreamy teenager from MGM. When she married Richard, she told her readers, she felt a "golden warmth," and instantly knew that the only way to make up for all the pain and struggle of the past was to "be good to each other and love each other." Only a hard-hearted cynic could fail to appreciate that.

By 1965 the world had once again, almost unanimously, fallen in love with Elizabeth Taylor. In July
The Sandpiper
opened to mixed reviews but frenzied box office, setting the record for the biggest opening day up to that point at Radio City Music Hall in New York. The picture ended up raking in $6.4 million, the seventh highest grossing film of the year. Once again Elizabeth was among the top ten moneymaking stars, having been absent from the list the year before due to the long lapse between
The V.I.P.s
and
The Sandpiper.
And right beside her on the list was Richard, finally a star as big as she was. They could have coasted for a while, flitting between their homes in Switzerland and Mexico, causing uproar wherever they went—but as ever there was that sense of responsibility. What to do next?

That's when they finally had their chance to make a picture with Mike Nichols.

Nine

Rewriting the Rules

July 1965–February 1968

S
TUCK IN TRAFFIC
as he headed toward the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, Ernest Lehman gripped his steering wheel with one hand and wiped his brow with the other. Normally calm and cool, the urbane producer of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—
and acclaimed screenwriter of
North by Northwest, West Side Story,
and
The Sound of Music
—was feeling a bit anxious this morning. The night before, he'd been too excited to sleep, his mind consumed with all the little details that came with the start of a picture. "On a day that I would like to be in top shape," he lamented into the tape recorder on the seat next to him, "I'm weary, and the day hasn't even started yet."

There was a reason for his weariness. Lehman, who got his start working as a legman for Walter Winchell and then served as a Broadway publicist, had a pretty good idea of what he'd face with the stars of his latest picture. "No one," he said, "is bigger than Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton." That was why, as both producer and screenwriter for
Virginia Woolf,
he'd been convinced that the only way he could turn Edward Albee's profanity-laden tragicomedy into a box-office smash was to cast the most notorious husband-and-wife team in cinema history. Of course, studio chief Jack Warner had needed some persuading. The Burtons didn't come cheap. But they'd be worth every penny, Lehman promised. He'd do everything to keep them happy.

When he finally made it to Warner Bros., he dashed across the lot to make sure that his stars' dressing rooms were all set. He'd taken tips from Dick Hanley on what sorts of goodies might put the Burtons in a good humor. For Richard, Lehman had ordered a bottle of Rémy Martin cognac, a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch whisky, and a huge bowl of fruit. Not to be outdone, Jack Warner had sent over six bottles of champagne, a case of Scotch, and a case of gin. Lehman quipped that if anyone got loaded during the production, at least they'd know whom to blame.

For Elizabeth, there were white roses and lilies of the valley that complemented the dressing room's yellow and white decor. Hanley had cautioned Lehman against overdoing the flowers. "Keep it moderate in size and in good taste," he advised. He also suggested a bottle of Dom Pérignon. Lehman made it three bottles. Hanley hadn't cautioned about overdoing the champagne.

A few days before, Hanley, along with the rest of the Burtons' entourage, had come by the studio to inspect their employers' dressing rooms. The designation was hardly apt: They were suites instead of rooms, each with its own kitchen and piano. Elizabeth's suite was airy and feminine; Richard's was wood-paneled and "Old English," which Lehman found "rather fitting." Hanley and John Lee nosed through the kitchens, ensuring that everything was in place, while Michael Wilding and Hugh French, as the Burtons' agents, went down a checklist to make sure that all contractual specifications had been met. Everything was in order. "Elizabeth's dressing room was so beautiful," Lehman recorded, "that they said they would like to stay there and live in it themselves."

A delivery boy arrived with a pound of caviar from Mike Nichols. Hugh French doubled that, just to make sure that his clients had enough.

The "confusion and last-minute running around" at the studio ended when Lehman spotted the Burtons getting out of a car. Everyone tensed for their entrance. Richard sauntered in first, dressed in a white cardigan sweater and a pair of tan slacks. Elizabeth followed in a silk dress and straw hat. Burton was "surprisingly warm," hugging the producer instead of shaking his hand. Elizabeth bestowed a polite kiss.

"Somebody knows what I like," she cooed after spotting the flowers and the champagne in her dressing room.

The studio was a hubbub of activity that morning. It wasn't every day that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton made a picture on the lot. The last time Elizabeth had been at Warners had been for
Giant,
a decade before. Back then she'd been a twenty-three-year-old girl, a popular star but hardly the worldwide phenomenon that she had become. Now secretaries and technicians pushed their way to the windows, trying to catch a glimpse of her, but the attendants that constantly swarmed around her prevented a good look. Arriving with the Burtons were Bob and Sally Wilson, their personal dressers; Irene Sharaff, who was doing Elizabeth's costumes; Hugh French and his son, Robin; and press agent John Springer. Finally Mike Nichols shooed them all away. It was time he, Lehman, and their actors—who also included George Segal and Sandy Dennis—sat around a table in a closed room and read through the script for the first time together.

For Nichols, there was some trepidation. The day before, lounging with Lehman by his pool at his rented house in Brent-wood, he'd mused about Elizabeth's ability to play the role of Martha, a woman a decade older than she was, a woman who was out of shape, in decline, trapped by rage and frustration and grief. "It's like asking a chocolate milkshake to do the work of a double martini," he'd lamented to Lehman.

Elizabeth had already been cast when Nichols was hired to direct. She had been chosen despite Edward Albee's expressed desire that Bette Davis and James Mason play Martha and George, the two bitter spouses waging war against each other on a New England college campus. Davis was the right age and fit the character's blowsy, caustic image, but Lehman had gone for "star power first," Nichols said, "and correctness for the part maybe second or third." To prepare for their task, Nichols and Lehman had watched Hitchcock's
Rope,
another film set in real time. The whole time, Nichols had complained "bitterly" that he wasn't directing Davis in the part of Martha.

But the director wasn't entirely opposed to Elizabeth. He'd been wanting to work with her for years, and he'd seen her in
Suddenly, Last Summer
and
A Place in the Sun.
He knew she could deliver powerful performances. He was just worried that this beautiful creature seated across the table from him could never convince audiences that she was a middle-aged, washed-up shrew.

But yet as the four actors began reading the script—beginning with Martha's splenetic "Jesus H. Christ!"—something magical occurred. "Almost immediately," Lehman said, "Mike and I exchanged very pleased glances at Elizabeth's performance." It was the first time they'd actually heard how she might express the character, and they were thrilled. She possessed the right fire and wasn't the least bit hammy. If anything, it was Richard who was "a bit uneven" in the beginning, though he got "very good indeed" by the end of the day. Bloody Marys were served all around during the reading, keeping everybody's spirits free-flowing. At four thirty, the reading concluded with a line from Elizabeth: Martha's heartbreaking reply to George, who'd been singing the play's catchphrase, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf ?" Looking up from her script with just the right amount of fear and sadness and grief on her face, Elizabeth said softly, "I am, George. I am." Nichols sat back in his chair, pleased.

Elizabeth let out a whoop. It was the first time in her entire career, she announced, that she'd ever acted out a complete screenplay in one day while seated around a table.

She'd find much that was new and different making a picture with Mike Nichols. There would be two weeks of rehearsals, and his actors could expect no advance direction from him. "I don't like to go into rehearsals with a set plan," Nichols explained. "I would rather that it come from the cast. In that way they have an investment in the outcome."

By now, Nichols's directorial skills were unquestioned, even if
Virginia Woolf
was his first movie. On Broadway, the Nichols-helmed
Barefoot in the Park
had been the biggest comedy hit two seasons ago;
Luv
quickly followed, and this year it was
The Odd Couple
that had everyone talking. Nichols had won the Tony for Best Direction for all three. Just thirty-three, he brought a fresh, innovative style to his projects that made old-timers think twice about what they thought they knew. "His invention is as resourceful as his author's flair for humorous twists in rapid-fire dialogue," the
New York Times
said. Even the way he introduced his characters on stage was novel: "Those entrances could become classics of a kind as exercises for students of advanced acting."