My Life as a Mankiewicz (11 page)

The second thing one immediately noticed about Elizabeth was her sense of humor. It was earthy, even bawdy; she loved to have fun. When I told her the crew's nickname for Rex was Birdlegs, she roared with laughter, then asked, “And what's their nickname for me, ‘Cooseburger'?” She was a wonderful and inquisitive gossip. Wanted to know everything that was going on with everybody. One day she, Dad, and I were talking on the set. Dad told her that he'd always reminded me it was just as easy to marry a rich woman as it was a poor one. She laughed. Two days later I received a beautiful photograph of her taken by Roddy McDowall with the inscription, “Dear Tom. What happens if I'm broke? Love, Elizabeth.”

One afternoon she asked me if I'd like to have dinner with her and Eddie Fisher (her then husband) at their villa. Just the three of us. Would this twenty-year-old like to have dinner with Elizabeth Taylor? How about yes, devastated, thrilled, couldn't wait. Her driver picked me up. As I got out in front of the villa it was suddenly illuminated by dozens of flashbulbs. The paparazzi were up in the trees of the adjacent gardens, keeping track of whoever entered or left her house. I don't know if there's ever been a human in a fishbowl quite like that, before or since.

Once I was inside, Elizabeth and I had a drink and then went into the dining room for dinner. As we sat down I saw the table was only set for two. She told me that Eddie sent his regrets. He wasn't feeling well and was in bed upstairs. The affair with Richard had begun and must have been taking a terrible toll on Eddie. In spite of being a celebrity himself, a famous and popular singer, he seemed to be at loose ends all the time since he wasn't performing. He had vague aspirations of becoming a producer and would visit the studio too often, finally becoming something of a pest. I'm not sure, given the circumstances, what other options he had. He was a very nice man, but clearly unsure how to handle the situation he found himself in. Dad put it succinctly at the time: “Poor Eddie. Richard and Elizabeth are world-class killers, and he's basically a singing waiter from Grossinger's.” (I should add that Dad had great affection for both Elizabeth and Richard. He meant “world-class killers” as a compliment.) The affair took a terrible toll on all the participants. None of them was even remotely frivolous about it. Elizabeth was constantly ill on the picture and later even underwent what certainly looked like a suicide attempt. Richard's life with Sybil was torn apart. At one point, his half brother Ivor came down to Rome from Wales to support Sybil and punched Richard in the eye. Eddie eventually went back to New York where, ironically enough, as the “victim,” he became a more popular performer than ever.

Meanwhile, back at the villa: My dinner with Elizabeth was over. We retired to the living room for an after-dinner drink and coffee. Suddenly, the back door opened. Richard appeared: “Hello, luv,” he said to me. “Mind if I join you?” He and Elizabeth embraced. I realized that in some strange way I was meant to be a “beard” for them so that Richard wouldn't be alone with her in Eddie's house. The drinking started fast and furious as it always did when Richard appeared. Elizabeth did her best to keep up with him. Richard was in his devastatingly charming mode, telling stories and making us laugh. There was a noise from the staircase. We turned. There was Eddie, looking down into the living room, dressed in a bathrobe and slippers. It became very quiet.

Eddie said in a calm voice: “It's late, Richard. Elizabeth has to shoot in the morning.”

Richard answered cheerfully, “I just came by to see my girl.”

Eddie looked back evenly: “You already have a girl, Richard. You have Sybil.”

Another silence. Richard: “They're both my girls.”

Eddie paused, then walked back upstairs. I was so embarrassed, if I could have dug a hole, jumped in, and put the dirt back over my head, I would have. Instead I said, “Thanks for the lovely dinner, Elizabeth. I guess I've got to get back home.”

Egypt

The interminable shooting finally ended on location in Egypt. In the beginning, the Nasser government had refused entrance to Elizabeth on the grounds that she was Jewish. But faced with the potential loss of millions of American dollars, they finally relented, rationalizing that she'd “converted” and therefore wasn't really a Jew. Nevertheless, she remained in Italy while the rest of us made the trip.

Egypt was fascinating, two countries in one. If you stayed at the Nile Hilton and had a car and driver, Cairo was elegant, even European. If you looked behind the curtain, the poverty was blinding. We shot in the desert, outside a little town called Edku, near Alexandria. Most of the sequences involved the Roman army. Studios usually co-opted actual troops from the country they were shooting in, but Nasser was keeping a wary eye on Israel, so this was impossible. Many hundreds of extras were needed, extras who could march in step with one another. The people of Edku had rehearsed for weeks and promised they could do it. They were desperate for the dollar-a-day salary. A few weeks' employment could mean a year's pay for some of them. Unfortunately, they were hopeless at marching, and we started hiring young students from the University of Alexandria who were up to the task.

One morning, hundreds of townspeople showed up at our location, led by the mayor of Edku. They demanded employment and were clearly ready to riot if they weren't going to be hired. Everyone on the crew was terrified. We were in the middle of nowhere. Our only protection was four uniformed members of the Egyptian Camel Corps, each one riding a camel and carrying an automatic weapon. Nasser's son-in-law, also in uniform, had been visiting our location for several days. He heard the ruckus, exited a tent, faced the multitude, and screamed at them, ordering them to line up in rows. This was my first and only personal lesson in seeing just how effectively Fascism could work at times. I couldn't believe it. The mass of belligerent villagers suddenly started to tremble as Nasser's son-in-law identified himself and continued yelling. The four Camel Corpsmen fanned out behind him, weapons cocked and ready. Nasser's son-in-law demanded that the mayor step forward. He did so. The young man pulled out a leather quirt and whacked the mayor in the side of the face, opening up his cheek. The villagers turned and headed back for Edku. I was stunned. I'd never seen anything like it. The fear of the state was so powerful it trumped everything.

Dad was literally on his last legs by then. For months he'd been taking injections to keep going during the day, then sedatives at night to get some sleep. He'd developed a drug dependency that took him years to get rid of. A nurse, looking for a new injection site, had accidentally hit his sciatic nerve with a needle. He could walk properly on only one leg. They put his chair right next to the camera so he didn't have to get up, but when it came to Richard Burton's last shot, he insisted on it. He limped in front of the lens and changed the scene number on the slate while Richard held him steady. The slate now read: “This prick is through.” They both grinned as the camera rolled. For all I know, the scene is still listed that way in the editor's log.

Cleopatra
Shuts Down Fox

The $42 million
Cleopatra
had bankrupted Fox. The California studio was shut down for the first time in its history. Normally, when you make a film for a major studio, the budget of your picture contains an “overhead” fee, usually 10 or 15 percent. Spread out across the multiple yearly productions, this overhead cost plus the distribution fees pays for the actual operations of the studio. Since Fox was shooting only
Cleopatra
and nothing else, the entire worldwide expense of running the company was added to the film's budget. If two Fox employees went out to lunch in, say, Paris, the cost of that meal was charged to
Cleopatra.
This meant that the announced budget was perceived as not only unforgivably profligate, but obscene.

Darryl Zanuck had taken the studio back from its former head, the dotty, incompetent Spyro Skouras. He began his own Night of the Long Knives. In a totally meaningless gesture, he fired Walter Wanger. Dad ran the rough cut of the film in Paris. It lasted more than seven hours. When the lights came up there was a silence, following which Zanuck said, “That Antony's a weak man.”

“Yes, he is, Darryl,” came Dad's reply.

“If any woman did that to me, I'd kick her right in the balls.”

“The picture's not about you, Darryl.”

Even though they'd made Oscar-winning films together in the past, the irresistible force was now meeting the immovable object. Zanuck insisted on one film, and at less than four hours. Dad refused. He wasn't about to leave all that hard work and sweat on the cutting room floor, especially since he knew it contained all of the best character scenes that truly fleshed out the principal roles. What Zanuck wanted would now be an exercise in simply stringing together an abbreviated story so it made sense to the audience. Dad would have none of it. Zanuck fired him. Dad was stunned. There were a few additional scenes that had to be shot for the shortened film to make narrative sense. Zanuck would get another director. When news of the situation leaked out, the Fox Board of Directors, led by William Wyler, threatened to resign unless Dad was allowed to finish his film. The principal actors suddenly “weren't sure” they'd be available to return. Dad was rehired. He'd decided that if someone was going to mutilate his film, it might as well be him.

From his point of view, Zanuck had a logical point to make by insisting on one film instead of two. The real potential box office gold lay in the Taylor-Burton relationship. The whole world was waiting to see them on the screen together. Richard appeared for only approximately ten minutes in the first half. If they released a
Caesar and Cleopatra
first, what would happen if Richard and Elizabeth broke up before
Antony and Cleopatra
came out? What if they went back to their respective spouses? Who'd want to see them then? Fox would suffer a tremendous financial loss from which it might never recover. What was that line from
The Barefoot Contessa
again? “Gentlemen, it's a wonderful art we're doing business in.”

The opening of
Cleopatra
in New York was broadcast on
The Tonight Show.
Johnny Carson was in his studio. Bert Parks interviewed the celebrities as they poured in. Dad arrived, suffering in silence. He knew that because of the notoriety of everything that had gone on, most critics had already written their reviews. Bert Parks intercepted him: “And here's Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the multiple Oscar-winning director. Mr. Mankiewicz, I hear we're in for a truly magnificent film tonight.”

Dad stared, then said, “You must know something I don't.”

Parks blinked. “Ah…exactly how long did it take you to make this film?”

Dad: “I can't remember ever having been on anything else.”

He walked past a totally nonplussed Parks. Carson and the studio audience exploded with laughter. Johnny told me later it was one of his favorite moments ever in the decades he did
The Tonight Show.
He always included it on his anniversary broadcasts.

The film received mixed reviews, though oddly enough, a total rave from Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times.
Years later, it finally broke even on the books as a result of television sales. In the nineties, Roddy McDowall, Martin Landau, and I went to see Bill Mechanic, then president of the studio, in a vain attempt to have the remaining footage reassembled and released in the form Dad intended. Mechanic was in favor of it, but the missing footage was spread out all over the world, some of it without sound. The largest batch was in the possession of two projectionists in London who'd stolen it from the lab at the time it had been processed. They were willing to sell it but wouldn't show it first, and Mechanic was adamant about Fox not paying a ransom for stolen material. For the rest of his life, Dad had a framed
New Yorker
cartoon hanging in his bathroom. It depicts two suburban women commuters at a train station, staring at a
Cleopatra
billboard featuring Elizabeth and Richard in a sexy pose. One woman is saying to the other, “What really annoys me is I know I'm going to see it.”

There were important consequences to the film in terms of our family. Dad would soon marry Rosemary and move to a beautiful, peaceful Pound Ridge estate in Westchester County. My brother Chris fell in love with one of Cleopatra's handmaidens on the film. Her name was Bruna Caruso. They went back to New York, where they were married and she became a top model. Before their divorce, they had a son, my nephew, Jason. As for me, Yale was over. Now it was time to go to work.

The Best Man

After graduating from Yale, I headed to Los Angeles. I suppose if Dad were still living there I'd have probably gone to New York. I needed the space to try to do things on my own. I'd met two young producers, Stuart Millar and Larry Turman, through my aunt Sara, who knew Stuart's family. They were about to make a film of Gore Vidal's hit play
The Best Man
and were looking for an assistant who could help out in multiple areas. My previous work on film crews and experience in summer stock sufficed to qualify me, and I was hired. I got $125 a week. I took a room at the Montecito Hotel on Franklin Avenue—at the time, the poor man's Chateau Marmont. So poor, in fact, that they didn't have the money to fill the hotel pool, which remained empty all year. Sometimes the residents held improvised cocktail parties on the dry cement after climbing down the ladder. The hotel was filled with up-and-coming (they hoped) actors from New York who were playing one- or two-day parts in television shows. No room service, but there was a kitchenette area and a Hughes market on the corner. I spent a lot of time defrosting frozen meals. A housekeeper went over your carpet with a vacuum cleaner on a daily basis.

The Best Man
shot at Columbia Studios, which was then on nearby Gower Street. What a heady experience it was, and what talented people to work with. The cast included Henry Fonda, Cliff Robertson, Margaret Leighton, Kevin McCarthy, Shelley Berman, Edie Adams, and Lee Tracy, who received an Oscar nomination for playing Vidal's version of Harry Truman. Larry Turman would go on to produce many successful films, including
The Graduate.
The director was Franklin Schaffner, an Emmy winner from television, making his second film
(The Stripper
was his first). He went on to make
Patton, The Planet of the Apes, Nicholas and Alexandra
, and more. The cameraman was a young Haskell Wexler, later to photograph
The Loved One
and
In the Heat of the Night
and win an Oscar for
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The assistant editor to Bob Swink was Hal Ashby. Endlessly cheerful, he was determined to direct one day. I sympathized, but wasn't sure he had much of a chance. Later on, after seeing
Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Coming Home
, and
Being There
, I decided I was wrong. In 1976 Hal directed
Bound for Glory
and Haskell Wexler won yet another Oscar for photographing it. What a talented group to start a creative learning curve with.