How to Be a Movie Star (52 page)

After more than two decades of merchandising her looks, it's understandable that Elizabeth was anxious about appearing as Martha. While it was true that she didn't possess the overweening vanity of many stars, she was smart enough to realize that much of her success heretofore had been bolstered by her appearance. It had been that poster of her in a white bathing suit that had turned
Suddenly, Last Summer
into a box-office smash after all. So it's not surprising that, as she was made up as Martha for the first time, she was cranky and querulous, knocking back vodka after vodka. Striding out of her dressing room wearing the gray wig that Sydney Guilaroff had made for her, she awaited consensus. Lehman thought it made her look chic, "ravishingly beautiful" in fact—which of course pleased Elizabeth but horrified Nichols. The wig was sent back to Guilaroff to obtain the dowdier look that they wanted.

Elizabeth threw a fit. She was suddenly convinced that there was no reason to play Martha as an old harridan. "She felt that the role would work perfectly if she could play her own age, which is thirty-three," Lehman said. He and Nichols made no reply. They did not want to antagonize her. They allowed her to vent her rage and her fear. But they knew there was no way that Martha could be thirty-three. In Albee's play, she is described as a "large, boisterous woman, fifty-two." Uta Hagen had been in her midforties when she'd played the part on Broadway. And Martha was supposed to be older than George; the age difference helped to fuel the conflict between them. Nichols had already surrendered that bit of characterization; there was no way Elizabeth could convincingly look older than Richard, who would be forty in a few months. But the director was certainly not going to allow Martha to turn into a pretty thirty-three-year-old.

Makeup artist Gordon Bau had aged Elizabeth in
Giant.
But then she'd been in the springtime of her beauty. Now when he turned her around in her chair to look at herself as Martha, she nearly burst into tears. Lehman called her "awfully unhappy." It had been a long day; Elizabeth was swearing and demanding that they postpone the start of filming. Lehman felt she had been drinking too much and was far too tired. True enough; but she was also a woman on the edge of middle age, whose beauty had been celebrated around the world since she was an adolescent, and who was now forced to compete with fresh-faced twenty-somethings like Julie Christie and Jane Fonda for magazine covers. Bau's magic had only sped up the aging process. As she stared into the mirror, what likely troubled Elizabeth the most was that Martha's double chin and puffy eyes weren't all cosmetic. No wonder she was so insistent that Lehman spread the word that she had done all this for her art.

The drinking would continue throughout the shoot, sanctioned by the top brass and encouraged by the director; the film, after all, is one marathon binge. Elizabeth was conscious of depicting "the physical progression of drunkenness." Martha "starts out tippling," she explained, "and in the course of the play she has twenty-one or twenty-two straight gins." On the set, she and Burton nearly matched Martha and George shot for shot. There were pills, too, Lehman believed; at one point, when Elizabeth was "exceedingly cheerful" to everyone on the set, the producer had a realization: "For the first time it occurred to me that she might just possibly be taking some sort of medication to 'elevate her mood.'" Watching the dailies, he noted her "highly energetic performance" and became even more convinced that she was "taking something." He was hardly complaining. A happy Elizabeth meant a happy set. "Whatever the pill is," Lehman told his journal, "I am very much in favor of it."

Filming began on Monday, July 26. Standing beside Wexler and his camera, Nichols waited for Elizabeth to start her scene. When she didn't move for several seconds, he looked over at her as if to ask what was taking her so long.

"I can't
act
until you say
action,
" she told him.

Nichols laughed. There were some parts of filmmaking that he still hadn't gotten the hang of—and some parts of the old studio system that Elizabeth was never going to let go. He complied by stuttering, "Ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-action." Elizabeth grimaced, but it was good enough. She went into the scene.

Nichols was awed by her technical virtuosity. "Elizabeth can keep in her mind fourteen dialogue changes, twelve floor marks and ten pauses—so the cutter can get the shears in and still keep the reality," he said. All that MGM training was still paying dividends. Elizabeth was more than just a glamorous star; she was an old pro. In just one weekend she'd learned twenty-six pages of the script and had showed up to work "very well-prepared," Lehman said. The stress of preproduction was evaporating.

Now that the cameras were rolling, Elizabeth was having a ball. She found playing Martha a cinch. "I had a character to grab ahold of and sink my nails into," she said, and the script provided "wonderful words to wrap your lips around." She'd insist that she had needed no specific preparation for the part. "It's a matter of concentration," she told an interviewer. "I read the script over several times. I think about it all the time. I very rarely discuss it. It's an inward process that works itself on me probably even when I'm asleep."

All of her husband's initial doubts about her were banished. "You cannot believe it is her," Burton said in awe. "When I first saw the rushes, I was absolutely astounded. The voice, the accent, the walk. It's so vulgar and oddly poignant." He pointed out that it would have been easy for her just to play an old woman, as she had in
Giant.
"But for a thirty-year-old woman to play a forty-year-old is very difficult."

"I have totally divorced myself from Martha so when I'm doing Martha I completely forget anything else I've ever done, or ever was, or ever will be," Elizabeth explained. "It's almost like a split personality kind of thing. It was difficult in the beginning because I didn't know if I was going overboard or underboard. All the things I had to find for myself, like the voice, and the walk, and the slouch, and the laughter, and the vulnerability. I can turn Martha on now. It's the easiest role I've ever played. It's difficult playing yourself. And Martha is so remote from me."

That would be a continuing refrain in her interviews. She stressed often that she was not like Martha. It didn't matter that those words she found so wonderful to wrap her lips around were the same sort of obscenities that she used so casually in real life, or that she and Richard could snarl and bicker in ways that were not completely dissimilar to Martha and George. It didn't matter that Elizabeth often scuffed around in slippers and a housecoat at home, eating cold fried chicken with her hands—an image not out of character for Martha. Maybe that was why Elizabeth subconsciously took Martha home with her on occasion, keeping the voice and the walk. She and Richard would have people over for dinner, and the next morning Richard would look at her and ask, "Do you know how you spoke to so-and-so last night?" Elizabeth found it quite amusing. In tape-recorded interviews that she made at the time, it's uncanny to hear how easily she could move from her well-modulated speech, containing traces of her childhood English accent, to the shrill, coarse voice of Martha: "What the hell do you want?"

As filming progressed, Nichols and Lehman realized that there were certain things they could do to keep their star happy and cooperative. Little gifts were left for her to find in her dressing room, over which she'd titter and giggle like a child. Of course, giving gifts to Elizabeth Taylor was a tradition that dated back to Stanley Donen, and perhaps even earlier, to the day when Louis B. Mayer presented her with the stallion from
National Velvet.
But in recent years, the tradition had reached extraordinary heights. Throughout the filming of
Virginia Woolf,
Elizabeth constantly compared (unfavorably) the gift giving of Lehman to his predecessor, Martin Ransohoff. "Ernie," she trilled one day, "I thought you'd be interested to know that Marty has just given me another present." Playing along, Lehman asked what could anyone possibly give to the woman who had everything. "Another husband," Nichols dead-panned. "Hey, now, wait a minute," Burton said, glancing up suddenly from his newspaper.

Elizabeth paid them no mind, slinking over to Lehman to tell him that she'd seen a "fabulous" piece of jewelry designed by David Webb, whose pieces adorned the throats, ears, and wrists of the Duchess of Windsor, Diana Vreeland, and Gloria Vanderbilt. Lehman professed ignorance of the man. "David Webb," Elizabeth repeated forcefully. "Take out your pen and write down that name." Lehman told her that he'd forgotten his pen. But he added that he
had
considered buying her a baby wolf to commemorate the picture. Elizabeth squealed with delight. She'd
love
to have a baby wolf.

A few weeks later, after Ransohoff had dropped off a double rope of nine-and-a-half-millimeter pearls in gratitude for the continued outstanding box office of
The Sandpiper,
Elizabeth reminded Lehman that all
he'd
given her so far were flowers and bottles of champagne. Even Mike Nichols had splurged on some sapphire earrings. Lehman took it in with a noncommittal nod. Watching from the sidelines, Richard found it all very funny. Elizabeth, he said, reminded him of his aunt Tessie, who was "a bit on the greedy side." Dropping his arm around Lehman's shoulders, Richard said, "The wonderful thing about Elizabeth is that she loves jewels so much that she makes even a stingy man like me want to give her jewelry just to see the thrill she gets when she sees it."

Her husband wasn't always so benevolent, however. Mike Todd Jr. stopped by the set on day, and Elizabeth gushed over him, making hay out of the fact that, in her Martha makeup, she finally looked as if she could truly be his stepmother. Later, during a break in a scene, Richard, who'd been drinking, called her a "sourpuss," and said she "was giving a lousy performance." Lehman thought that the two incidents were connected, that the "reminder of one man she really loved so much might have led Richard to say what he said." To assuage any hurt feelings, Nichols encouraged the crew to say kind things to Elizabeth and, indeed, to part with some cash to buy her gifts.

But, in her own way, Elizabeth could be quite generous herself. For Nichols, one anecdote summed up her "very essence." They were getting ready to shoot a particularly long monologue of Martha's. In the course of it, she was supposed to cry. Elizabeth was terrified that she might not be able to bring forth the tears when she needed to. Nichols insisted that she not worry, that he was confident that she could pull it off. But his star wasn't so sure. Nichols called "Action"—he was getting better at that—and the cameras began to turn. With a deep breath, Elizabeth started in on the scene. Her director watched as she summoned all the emotion she could. Her eyes began to glisten. And then, with a groan, Nichols had to call "Cut." There was a technical problem with the camera. Elizabeth deflated like a balloon.

"Okay, so now it's the second take," Nichols described, "and she has to get herself going again. She's really going and she's amazing and the tears suddenly start flowing on cue and she's
great.
" But then disaster. Right in the middle of the scene came a very loud snoring sound from overhead. A crew member had fallen asleep. "And he was snoring so loud," Nichols said, "that there was absolutely no way to go on filming." Once again he had to cut the scene. "And the first thing out of Elizabeth's mouth," Nichols said, "right on top of the word 'Cut,' was 'Don't fire him! Please don't fire him!' That was her very first response—her reflex—even after all her worries, even after this guy had ruined her very difficult scene. She said, 'Don't fire him!' There are not a lot of people like that."

Granting his leading lady's wish, Nichols let the errant crew member keep his job. And Elizabeth redid the scene. Brilliantly.

The Burtons were furious. For all their jet-setting, they insisted that they hated flying, especially takeoffs and landings. Why Ernie Lehman had chartered a plane that had to refuel in Chicago was beyond them. As they settled into their seats, they ordered a couple of double vodkas with tonic. Lehman knocked on the cockpit door and pleaded with the crew to change the flight route. Once in the air, the captain announced that due to favorable weather conditions, they could fly straight through to Hartford. Everybody cheered, especially the Burtons, which meant that the whole company could now relax and have a good time. Little Liza Todd, accompanying her parents on the New England location shoot, scrambled out of her seat to play with George Segal's little daughter. The liquor flowed freely. "The spirit in the cabin was marvelous," Lehman said. Nichols mused, "If only we could stay in the plane and never land."

But land they did, touching down at Bradley Field outside Hartford, Connecticut, a little after 5:30
P.M.
It was Saturday, August 21. Elizabeth had made it plain that she wanted none of the shenanigans that had greeted their arrival in Boston a year earlier. Bowing to her wishes, John Springer had cleverly informed the press that the flight wasn't due in until seven. In those days before the Internet, it was an easy ruse to pull. All the
Virginia Woolf
company found waiting for them as they debarked from the plane were three buses for the crew and four air-conditioned Cadillacs for the stars, director, and producer. The next day the local press would report that "advance publicity was not calculated to please the many avid fans" who had arrived a half hour after the caravan pulled away.

Well tanned, in a white dress, and with her hair worn in a stylish upsweep, Elizabeth watched from the window of the Cadillac as they headed north on Interstate 91. Their destination was Northampton, Massachusetts, home of Smith College, where exteriors for the film would be shot. Northampton was an old town on the banks of the Connecticut River, with a wide main street lined with brownstone buildings and a cemetery that dated back to the seventeenth century. Smith was founded in 1871 as a college for women and counted among its former students Margaret Mitchell, Julia Child, Sylvia Plath, Nancy Reagan, and Gloria Steinem. Its hillside campus, ringed with pine and oak trees, included a botanical garden and an arboretum designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Warner Bros. had settled on Smith to serve as the backdrop for the film after a long search for a suitable campus location in California had proven fruitless. "We finally decided that we could not find New England in the far West," Lehman said. The studio offered to pay the college $5,000. Smith asked for, and got, five times that.