How to Be a Movie Star (51 page)

For Elizabeth, Nichols offered a connection to
Giant
that was more than just a return to the same studio. Not since George Stevens had she worked on a project with this kind of artistic fusion: director, material, cast, and chemistry. Not since Stevens had any director set out to kindle such prowess within her, to lure out talents heretofore unsuspected. Certainly Richard Brooks had shrewdly used the well of emotion that she'd felt over Todd's death in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
and Joe Mankiewicz had pushed her to striking extremes in
Suddenly, Last Summer.
But Albee's play—blasphemous, bitter, profane—was a very different kettle of fish. It required her to be shameless and sympathetic, despicable and delightful, abhorrent and alluring, all at the same time. And whereas her physical power was vital to the picture, it could not arise from her beauty, as it always had before. Instead, the audience must be made to forget Elizabeth Taylor while still finding Martha irresistible. Elizabeth would need to summon qualities from within herself that no director had ever asked her to bring forth before.

She'd risen to the occasion in the past, particularly on
A Place in the Sun.
But she'd been a child then, looking up at her director with hero worship in her eyes. Yet Nichols couldn't have been more different from Stevens. Slim, soft-spoken, boyish, he was nearly the same age as Elizabeth. He socialized with her, shared the same friends—hardly the case with Stevens. Indeed, the friendly synergy among the Burtons and their director was like nothing that they'd experienced before.

On those soundstages in Burbank, the three of them were helping to change Hollywood, and they knew it:
Virginia Woolf
was breaking down the last strictures of the old Production Code. After Jack Warner had gone through the script circling multiple
goddamn
s, a handful of
bastard
s, scattered
sons of bitches,
and the occasional
melons bobbling,
Nichols had agreed to soften Albee's dialogue. But then he suddenly reversed course and announced that the profanity would be retained. The "clean but suggestive phrases" he'd replaced it with had made the script read like "an old Gary Cooper movie when somebody said, 'He's so poor he hasn't got a pot to put flowers in.'"

Nichols insisted that the integrity of Albee's play would not be compromised. Aghast, the Production Code Administration threatened to deny the picture a seal of approval. Jack Warner pressed for "protection shots" in case the censors flat-out rejected certain scenes, but Nichols refused. "Mike's theory," Lehman said, was "that if we ever did shoot the protection stuff, somehow it would find its way into the picture." Nichols had come to the conclusion that a seal from the antiquated PCA wasn't necessary to sell their picture. They had the Burtons, after all.

And so, one more nail was hammered in the coffin of the old way of making movies. Just as she had when she broke the rules about star salaries, Elizabeth was using her enormous celebrity to break down one more vestige of a system that she had so despised as a girl.

Nichols relished being a young turk. Acting out scenes with his stars around the pool of his house, he knew that they were walking on hallowed ground. During the studio era, the house had belonged to Cole Porter and was a gathering place for many of the old greats: the Barrymores, George Cukor, Cary Grant, Bea Lillie, Elsa Maxwell, Clifton Webb. Now the nude marble statue in Porter's garden was adorned with sunglasses and a red-checked bikini, and a hi-fi system played loud music while Nichols's stars swore at the top of their lungs. "I don't know why you want to make a picture like this," sniffed the antediluvian Sydney Guilaroff as he designed Elizabeth's wigs. Nichols and company just laughed him off. Already the director was planning his next picture,
The Graduate,
in which a young college man is seduced by an older woman and then falls in love with her daughter. It was indeed a brave new world.

Elizabeth was not used to rehearsing like this, walking around an empty room as if they were putting on a play. The day was warm, and she kept fanning herself with the script in her hands. She wore a yellow linen dress with a matching yellow hat and yellow high heels. Off to the side sat Mike Nichols, who jumped up every now and then to act out a scene himself, showing his actors how it should be done. Elizabeth just shook her head, clearly ill at ease. To reassure her, Richard walked over to her several times and gave her a kiss. "Somehow she feels that she can't perform this way," Ernest Lehman observed, especially as all three of her costars were "experienced stage actors."

But Nichols laid down the law. They would rehearse in this manner from July 6 to 19. For those two weeks, the Burtons had agreed to take no pay, which may have contributed to Elizabeth's disquiet. After that, of course, it was back to business, with Elizabeth pulling down $100,000 per week for ten weeks, and Richard $75,000 for the same terms. By then they would move out of the stark bare room that made Elizabeth so uncomfortable and commence shooting on Stage 8, where the interior sets of George and Martha's house were being built. Then Elizabeth would feel more at home, as if she were really making a movie. But until that time, she'd be fretful and uneasy.

Arms akimbo, she confronted Nichols during a break. She insisted that her contract stipulated that she was not to be called to the set earlier than 10 in the morning. Nichols replied softly that it most definitely did
not
say that. Well, if it
didn't,
Elizabeth huffed, she'd have to fire her agent, Hugh French. Indeed, for a couple of days after that, she made "very large sounds" about firing French. Burton confided to Lehman that she was feeling "very guilty" about leaving Kurt Frings and was "probably looking unconsciously for some excuse" to dump French and go back to the man Mike Todd had anointed to represent her. Frings had, after all, done so much for her, and now, Burton said, he was rather "hard up." The messy divorce from Ketti had taken its toll.

But Elizabeth didn't fire French. With Lehman's help, her new agent got Jack Warner to agree to the 10
A.M.
starting time. Reluctantly Nichols acquiesced. He said they might as well grant her request because otherwise "she'd be impossible to work with." But the "gentleman's agreement" proposed by Warner was completely unacceptable to Elizabeth. "If they agree to it," she told Lehman, "they must put it in writing. I'll be damned if I'll ever expose myself to the possibility of a suit." She'd been making movies far too long to take anyone in Hollywood at his word. "She is not only rich and beautiful," Lehman recorded in his journal, "she is also very shrewd."

Recognizing his star's agitation on the set, Nichols suggested a vocal coach. Elizabeth had been struggling to find the right pitch for Martha, and the director thought that a coach might help bring her voice down an octave. But once again Elizabeth said no. She insisted that working with a coach would only make her self-conscious. How times had changed. Long gone was the contract player who had needed to manipulate her way into getting what she wanted. Now, as Elizabeth Taylor Burton, she just announced what she wanted and she got it. "So I am afraid," Lehman sighed into his tape recorder that night, "we are going to have a relatively high-voiced Martha."

Despite her refusal, Elizabeth really
did
want to be good in the part. In fact, her desire to push herself as an actress was incredibly strong going into
Virginia Woolf.
Like Monty Clift had done a decade ago, Richard impressed and inspired her with his dedication to his craft. As one half of the team known as the Burtons, Elizabeth was aware that she was considered the lightweight in terms of talent. That rankled her. Some of the churlish comments after their poetry reading had no doubt gotten under her skin. So she threw herself into preparing for the film, paging through the script, underlining passages, circling scenes that she thought needed changing.

At one point during rehearsals, she took issue with a line of George's, where he says, "Don't start in on the bit"—a reference to the imaginary son they'd talk about later in the script. She told Nichols that it didn't jibe with the ending, when George says that he has to "kill" the son because she'd mentioned him. The incident sounds, in fact, more like a gripe that had come from Richard, not Elizabeth; she may have volunteered, perhaps strategically, to wage the battle for him. But the line was not changed.

Other quibbles were clearly her own concerns. She was passionately opposed to the scene in the roadhouse where she dances with George Segal. She called it phony, an example of "Hollywood vulgarity." It should not be a set piece, she argued, with the roadhouse looking as empty as an old-time musical soundstage. A "full-scale argument" flared up, with Burton, Nichols, and Lehman all having their say. "We went back and forth on it," Lehman said. Elizabeth's "eyes were really flashing." Lehman told her that he thought her argument was "intellectualized," to which she responded, "Why, thank you, Ernie, for calling me an intellectual." He wasn't sure if she was amused or angry. Though things got "pretty hot," eventually they all settled on a compromise, with Nichols promising as much realism as possible. "It was our first indication that [Elizabeth] is going to have things to say about the script," Lehman recorded.

Of course she was going to have things to say. She knew the risks that she was taking with the part. "When I first read the script," she said, "I didn't think I was the right casting. I was too young and I hope—I trust—I'm unlike Martha myself. Richard read it and he said, 'You're not right for it, but I want you to do it because I don't want any other actress to do it. It's too good a part.'"

It was clear that
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
was going to be a big, big movie. Anticipation was mounting, and Nichols was cutting no corners. The sets were decorated by George James Hopkins, an old studio veteran who dated back to Theda Bara and Mary Miles Minter. Nichols insisted that no detail be spared in creating the perfect ambience for the home of a New England academic. Strewn about were novels by Thomas Mann and old copies of the
Kenyon Review.
The glasses at the bar were old jelly jars and containers that had once held pimento cheese. Verisimilitude was the order of the day; Nichols wanted audiences to forget that they were watching a movie. "I want the audience drawn into the lives of these people," he said, "and not be aware of any director's technique, any camera or any cutting."

The script was so carefully guarded that even George Segal hadn't seen the final draft until he sat down at the table for the read-through. Everything about the production was carefully shielded from the public in order not to give anything away. And with so much of the studio publicity apparatus gone, it was up to the filmmakers themselves to manage the press. Lehman's response to a request from
Cosmopolitan
to do a story about the picture shows that they knew how to play the game. "What we haven't decided yet, and hope to do in the next few days," he recorded in his journal, "is select the writer we feel would be right for the role of writing that kind of piece and also who would be acceptable to
Cosmopolitan.
" They were casting their journalists just as they had cast their actors.

In June there was "a full-scale publicity strategy meeting" in Lehman's office. Studio publicists like Max Bercutt and Carl Combs were there, along with John Springer, who worked exclusively for the Burtons. It was decided that the set would be completely closed to the press. Any interviews with the stars had to take place away from the set, and under no circumstances was Elizabeth ever to be seen in her makeup as Martha. That little shock would be reserved for the premiere.

There was a reason for such secrecy. For the first time in her career, Elizabeth Taylor would not be glamorized. Her beauty, for once, would not be a selling point for the picture. Instead, it was the concealment of her beauty that was generating interest: How would Elizabeth look as Martha?

That was what everyone was asking in the summer of 1965. Cameraman Harry Stradling, like George James Hopkins, had a career stretching back to the silent days; he'd photographed leading ladies from Betty Blythe and Norma Shearer to Carole Lombard and Judy Garland. He knew all the tricks to make stars look as beautiful as possible—but here was Mike Nichols telling him to shoot Elizabeth as pitilessly as he could. It was another clash of old Hollywood values versus the new. "What are those ravishing shadows on Elizabeth's throat?" Nichols asked upon seeing the tests Stradling had made. The cameraman insisted that he was covering her double chin. When Nichols replied that he
wanted
to see her double chin and the circles under her eyes, Stradling grumbled, "Yes, but are you worried at all about what the public might want?"

Stradling would soon depart the film, although Warners insisted that it had nothing to do with how he was shooting Elizabeth. Nichols, however, stated plainly, "He wanted her beautiful. We wanted a certain harshness." Haskell Wexler, younger and more in tune with the times, was hired to replace him. Wexler had just made a documentary about the civil rights movement and had photographed Tony Richardson's avant-garde
The Loved One,
so he had the right sensibility for this more modern assignment. Yet he too had to overcome some ingrained presumptions. "My job is traditionally to make women look good," he explained. "Mike Nichols said, 'I don't want her to look good.'" So Wexler did as he was instructed, letting Elizabeth's double chin waddle freely and the bags under her eyes retain all their unflattering shadows. But he'd admit to a friendly covert agreement with the star not to "uglify her too much."

Indeed, for all of her celebrated courage in deglamorizing herself for the sake of the part, Elizabeth was not at all comfortable with the idea, at least not at first. The publicists quoted her as saying, "If Mike wants me to have a double chin, we'll emphasize it," but in fact she was terribly self-conscious about what it would do to her image. She complained about being forced to consume "a lot of cream and butter and sweets"—though one suspects that she didn't find such gourmandizing as odious as she made out. But it made her nervous. One day, just before shooting was scheduled to begin, Elizabeth buttonholed Lehman and turned on all her power and charm. "Listen, Ernie," she said, eyelashes batting, "you must be sure to tell the press from here on in that you and Mike have
ordered
me to get fat for this picture. I don't want them to get the idea that I'm overweight and sloppy simply because I don't know any better." Lehman was impressed with her skill for public relations. Once again he called her shrewd.