How to Be a Movie Star (53 page)

Known for its liberalism, the college nonetheless triggered some dissension among its alumnae by allowing the campus to be used for a movie starring Elizabeth Taylor. "Why should we help support a college that entertains such an unsavory female?" one graduate of the class of 1922 asked in a letter to president Thomas C. Mendenhall. The president's reply was succinct. "The play is about hypocrisy," he wrote, referencing Albee's original. "Personally I find hypocrisy unattractive but considerably less so than jealousy, for instance, which is the central theme of
Othello,
a play doubtless studied in many schools in Northampton and elsewhere. As you well know, it is dangerous for an individual or college to play censor." Still, the college decreed that it not be credited in the film and insisted that the company be off the grounds by the time classes resumed.

Trailed as usual by controversy, the Burtons and company descended upon the campus, just as the skies opened up and poured down torrential sheets of rain. The storm was a surprise; the forecast had only called for clouds. With temperatures hanging in the low seventies, the green woods of western Massachusetts took on an almost tropical glow. As the last bit of daylight disappeared behind the wet trees, everybody hurried off to their various lodgings. Lehman and Nichols were thrilled with the Victorian houses with the large yards that the studio had found for them. But, perhaps not surprisingly, the Burtons were not quite as satisfied with theirs.

Word had leaked out. When Elizabeth and Richard arrived at their lakeside house, they found hundreds of people standing all over the yard and "bothering them with banners and requests for autographs." It was clear that there would be no way to efficiently cordon off the house. Thus began, in the midst of all that rain, what Lehman called a game of "musical houses." Graciously, the producer offered to switch houses with his stars. Back in their limousine, Elizabeth and Richard zipped over to Lehman's and sloshed through puddles to check out the place. Elizabeth declared that it was no better. So they headed off to another house, which was also unsuitable. Finally they found themselves at Mike Nichols's house. After much champagne, Elizabeth decreed that this one would do just fine. Her director very kindly agreed to make the switch.

Walking barefoot with Lehman on the wet grass, Elizabeth blamed no one but herself for all the confusion. She had been the one to select the first house based on its descriptions and photos. "But [she] had never dreamt," Lehman recorded in his journal, "that the residents of Northampton would think that the presence of the Burtons would be worthy of crowds gathering to see them." As she said this, the producer no doubt looked at her closely to see if she was being ironic. She wasn't—or at least she gave no indication that she was. Lehman replied that he thought she underestimated their fame.

Shooting began on August 23 and was frequently interrupted by rain and thunderstorms, fog and humidity. On rainy days the Burtons occasionally slipped away to the Academy of Music downtown, where they watched movies from the balcony. Elizabeth once snuck off with some of the crew to catch
What's New, Pussycat?
at a cinema in nearby West Springfield. Their days were largely free because the entire location shoot was conducted after dark. The action in the film unfolds in the course of one long night, ending with sunrise. Accordingly, the call was for 6:30 every evening, two hours before darkness. "If you want to turn a crew into a tribe of zombies, try having them work at night and sleep during the day," said second-unit director Michael Daves.

But Nichols defended his methods. "It's easy to say you're tired, and you've been drinking a lot, and it's 5:30 in the morning," he explained, "but how do you really feel? We wanted to do it, and we found some things we hadn't thought about."

Their nights would end when everyone stumbled home as the sun rose over the Berkshire mountains. Area farmers eventually would sue Warner Bros., contending that the harsh movie lights shining through the trees had confused their cows and decreased the production of milk.

The first scene shot was the opening scene of the picture, where George and Martha stroll across the campus after a party at the house of the dean, who also happens to be Martha's father. To simulate late fall instead of high summer, dried leaves were blown around by wind machines. Various Smith faculty members served as extras, sauntering out of the house and dispersing across the lawn. Lehman fell in among them, a bit player in his own picture. It was decided that George and Martha knew him, so they exchanged a wave. But Lehman cringed when he heard Elizabeth call over to him, "Good night, Ernie! Up yours!" He hoped that the microphone hadn't picked that up.

The need for secrecy was even greater now that they were shooting out in the open. Northampton residents, with their long history and New England common sense, were not easily impressed. And yet there they were, night after night, gathering in the streets, their cameras popping. The studio had arranged for one hundred guards to encircle the campus, but the police could only keep crowds back, not disperse them, because the house that served as George and Martha's was on a main thoroughfare. People stood three and four deep staring at the house all night waiting for Liz or Dick to come outside. One reporter snuck into the operation by getting hired as a chauffeur, but he was quickly fired.

Such tight controls meant that the filmmakers eventually would butt heads with the Burtons' press agents, whose job, after all, was to maintain public interest in their clients. It was difficult to do that if reporters were banned from location. John Springer caused a stir one night when he tried to sneak in a couple of magazine writers. Lehman blew up. He had no intention of allowing Springer to "start fouling things up in the interests of publicity." Eventually, however, Springer was persuasive. A few writers, like Roy Newquist from
McCallS,
were allowed to visit and interview Elizabeth and Richard, but only if they promised not to reveal anything about Elizabeth's appearance as Martha.

The nights were long. When she wasn't in front of the cameras, Elizabeth was usually drinking a glass of Lancers wine. For much of the shoot, Liza was on the set, falling asleep on the grass or in the waiting room where the actors passed the time between shots. Elizabeth was unhappy about keeping Liza up so late, but Richard enjoyed having her around; he'd bonded tightly with the little girl. ("She has the larceny of her father and seductiveness of her mother," he'd tell friends.) He insisted that Liza stay, causing a row with his wife in front of the crew. Finally Elizabeth was convinced to let her daughter stay because it was too risky to hire a babysitter. Sitters might "turn out to be unofficial newspaper people or unreliable personnel," Lehman said, who'd sell their stories to the magazines. It had happened before in Rome. So eight-year-old Liza remained on the set, staying up until dawn, watching her mother in that crazy gray wig shout obscenities at her beloved stepfather.

Richard had become close with all of Elizabeth's children, something Eddie Fisher had failed to do. Michael and Christopher were now twelve and ten, respectively, and were attending school in England, though they, too, spent some time in Northampton that summer. Little Maria was now almost four. After doctors discovered that she'd been born with a malformed hip, her mother, painfully aware of the difficulties of living with an untreated congenital condition, had paid for all the necessary surgeries needed to correct it. Now Maria could walk and run freely. That summer she was living with Sara and Francis, but like her sister, Maria had formed a fast attachment to the charismatic Richard, who officially adopted her and gave her his last name.

The charisma that emanated from both the Burtons was apparent every morning when the rushes were screened. Nichols and Lehman were unqualified in their praise for their stars. "Both Elizabeth and Richard seem to have a quality of sadness as well as funniness which I think is just right for their roles," Lehman recorded in his journal. Knocking on Elizabeth's door, he peered inside to say that he hoped he wouldn't embarrass her, but he thought that she was simply wonderful in the morning's rushes. "Don't be silly," Elizabeth said, beaming. "There's nothing embarrassing about hearing that."

She had brought something to Martha that only she could bring. "Yes, it would have been very interesting with Bette Davis," Nichols reflected. "But with Elizabeth somehow—even though her light was dimmed with the age makeup—she shone as herself anyway. I think that's one of the things that worked for the film. Instead of just two academics—and one hopes you can accept them as academics as well—you see these two were once very hot people who were now buried in this place." What had originally attracted George to Martha was very clear. "Underneath it all, you could see how sexy Martha had been," Nichols said. "She still had that allure." When George Segal sneaks off to have sex with her, it's not so difficult to fathom, the way it probably would have been with Bette Davis playing the part.

Burton, too, was shining. "It's the most enjoyable—in a funny, perverse way—of any [modern] role I've ever done," he said. With the exception of Jimmy Porter in
Look Back in Anger,
George was "the most brilliantly written" role he'd ever played.

That didn't mean he didn't have his insecurities. With Richard Burton, there were always insecurities. One night in early September, Richard casually asked Lehman if he could cut out early, which meant that he wouldn't finish all of his scheduled scenes. He explained that Elizabeth's sons were leaving for school the next day, and he wanted to spend some time with them. Lehman said that he was sorry, but he couldn't allow it: They needed to finish the crucial scene between George and Sandy Dennis's character. The scene was an emotional one, the moment where George's bravado cracks and he cries, forcing Dennis to look up at the window where her husband is having sex with Martha. Burton seemed resigned to Lehman's refusal for an early dismissal. But a short time later he was making the same request of Nichols.

Eventually the director discovered what was really going on. "We're in trouble," he told Lehman. "The man is in tears. The story about having to get home because Elizabeth's sons are leaving was just a cover-up. He's tired and feels he cannot go on with the scene. He's always been afraid of this scene ... He gave so much during the early evening that he feels that he just cannot go through with it." There was nothing they could do. They couldn't force him to act. With great reluctance, Nichols called it a night. Burton was extremely apologetic. He promised he would do the scene first thing the following evening. And he did. Masterfully.

Burton's George is the calm in the storm of Elizabeth's Martha. Hers was the showier part; his was, in many ways, the more difficult. He admitted that his "natural ego" wanted to make the character more aggressive and powerful, but that he'd learned to accept being dominated and led around by Elizabeth. His respect for Nichols helped. "I listened absolutely to what he said," Burton revealed. "First time in my life I've ever done so with a director. Whatever he says, I do."

At the Red Basket diner in nearby Southampton, he followed Nichols's directions impeccably. The night was chilly but clear, the moonlight suffusing the gravel parking lot and surrounding trees. Over and over, Nichols instructed Richard and Elizabeth to walk out of the diner, which was serving as the roadhouse in the picture. It was a long trucking shot, and the director wanted to make sure he got them from every angle, not knowing which would look best in the editing room.

Then came the fight between George and Martha in the parking lot. "Elizabeth and Richard were absolutely blood-curdling in their performance," Lehman recorded the following morning. Their struggle was so realistic that the crew winced every time Elizabeth was thrown back and hit her head against the station wagon. At one point tears sprang to her eyes and she had to lie down for a bit, the company doctor looking in on her. Still, she came back again and redid the scene "many times," Lehman said. Even when Nichols finally said that he had what he wanted, Elizabeth requested they do it once more, because she felt she could do it better. "And indeed she did," Lehman said.

"I've never had a better time in my life," Elizabeth would say, looking back on the filming of
Virginia Woolf.
Perhaps to counterweight the sturm und drang of the script, there was considerable laughter and lightheartedness on the set. Elizabeth and Sandy Dennis engaged in belching contests, and for the first time in her life, Elizabeth didn't win. Burton and Nichols played word games, betting each other that they wouldn't know the definitions of odd words like
porbeagle, roup,
or
pleach.
The quarrels that had arisen early in the shooting had been largely replaced by harmony.

Part of the reason Elizabeth would always have such rosy nostalgic memories of
Virginia Woolf
was because, in many ways, this was the pinnacle of her time with Richard. They were truly, deeply, happily in love for these five months. Not long before shooting wrapped, Richard showed Lehman a short poem he'd written about Elizabeth that, in the producer's opinion, was "decidedly erotic." Lehman later asked Elizabeth, "How does your husband do things like that?" She replied simply, "I inspire him."

Passionate for each other and their movie, they took lusty delight in shouting and cursing at each other in front of the cameras and then falling into each other's arms after Nichols called "Cut." It was rather like foreplay. "We both had to pull out all the stops, and throw all the scenery around," Elizabeth said. "That was fun. It was very cathartic, too, because we would get all our shouting and bawling out on the set and go home and cuddle." And probably more than cuddling, too.

As the film neared completion, Burton grew reflective. He told Lehman that the two fears he'd had at the outset had been dispelled. The first was that Elizabeth wouldn't be capable of doing Martha. The second was that the shoot would undermine their relationship. It hadn't, he said. On the contrary, they'd not had one major quarrel the whole time—unusual for them, he said. For one halcyon moment, there was reason to think that maybe all of the drama of their coming together might actually pay off, that despite all the naysayers they might truly have found soul mates in each other, that they might really be together forever.