The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice by M. G. Lord Page B
Authors: M. G. Lord
Tags: United States, General, Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Biography, Performing Arts, Film & Video, Television, Motion Picture Actors and Actresses, Motion Picture Actors and Actresses - United States, Taylor; Elizabeth
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gown.” Burton was “handsome, arrogant, and vigorous” in his knee-length toga. And between the two of them, “you could almost feel the electricity.” By mid-February, the Burton-Taylor love affair had exploded, ripping their respective marriages asunder. The press called it Le Scandale. L’Osservatore della Domenica , the Vatican weekly, called it “erotic vagrancy.” Vatican Radio called it “the caprices of adult children.” And the publicity department at 20th Century Fox called it a godsend.
Typically, the Vatican did not comment on the private lives of movie stars. But Taylor had galled the papacy to its core. Not because of her extramarital affair; that was commonplace, slight. But because of something else—something truly extraordinary—something no undeserving erotic vagrant should have been permitted to accomplish. In London one year earlier, Taylor had died. But she had not stayed that way. She had—to the Vatican’s horror—been resurrected.
11
Cleopatra , 1963
Alexandria had its share of female mathematicians, doctors, painters, and poets. This did not mean such women were above suspicion. As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.
—Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life , 2010
First I shall want something to eat.
—Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra preparing for her suicide
CLEOPATRA IS NEITHER a great movie nor a feminist one. But it had the potential to be both. Two seeming sure-bets were going for it. The first was the historical Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt: a cunning politician and accomplished scholar who built a legendary library and spoke eight languages. She was not a fool for love. To obtain her throne, she murdered her brothers. To hold on to it, she conducted love affairs with her enemies—or, in any event, rulers of the empire that most threatened hers: Rome. Her first Roman lover was Julius Caesar; her second, Mark Antony. These were not romances. They were tactical alliances, sealed, in the case of Caesar, with a son, Caesarion.
The second attribute was Elizabeth Taylor. As Leslie Benedict in Giant , Taylor had projected brains, backbone, and a brilliance at behind-the-scenes manipulation—qualities no absolute ruler should be without. But this wasn’t why producer Walter Wanger agreed to pay her $1 million. He needed her to do something only she could do: override the audience’s prefrontal cortex, as she had in A Place in the Sun . He needed her to electrify viewers with primitive feeling. He needed her to whisper the Greek or Latin or Egyptian equivalent of “Tell Mama. Tell Mama all.”
Taylor was also a real-life star, determined to display the traits that pop culture demanded of its luminaries. Just as ancient Egyptians needed their rulers to be divine—Cleopatra declared herself an incarnation of the goddess Isis—so, too, midcentury fans required stars to be moody, unreliable, and petulant. During the making of Cleopatra , Taylor worked hard to satisfy them. Not all directors and producers, however, valued such dedication to the harsh dictates of stardom. Some grew cross when stars went AWOL, nursing hangovers or sniffles. When, for example, Marilyn Monroe was shooting Something’s Got to Give , a costly project that vied with Cleopatra for 20th Century Fox’s dwindling resources, director George Cukor fired Monroe … for behaving like a movie star.
Wanger, though, understood stardom and its crushing pressure to appear capricious. He deflected Taylor’s critics with a quote from director Billy Wilder: “I have a healthy aunt in Vienna who would come on set on time, know her lines, and always be ready. But no one would pay to see her at the box office.”
Wanger also grasped extreme emotions. He himself had served time for a crime of passion: shooting the purported lover of his then-wife, actress Joan Bennett. Wanger hoped to deliver both Cleopatra’s ice and Taylor’s fire—to make the Egyptian queen as vivid as Barbara Graham, the ex-junkie
Typically, the Vatican did not comment on the private lives of movie stars. But Taylor had galled the papacy to its core. Not because of her extramarital affair; that was commonplace, slight. But because of something else—something truly extraordinary—something no undeserving erotic vagrant should have been permitted to accomplish. In London one year earlier, Taylor had died. But she had not stayed that way. She had—to the Vatican’s horror—been resurrected.
11
Cleopatra , 1963
Alexandria had its share of female mathematicians, doctors, painters, and poets. This did not mean such women were above suspicion. As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.
—Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life , 2010
First I shall want something to eat.
—Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra preparing for her suicide
CLEOPATRA IS NEITHER a great movie nor a feminist one. But it had the potential to be both. Two seeming sure-bets were going for it. The first was the historical Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt: a cunning politician and accomplished scholar who built a legendary library and spoke eight languages. She was not a fool for love. To obtain her throne, she murdered her brothers. To hold on to it, she conducted love affairs with her enemies—or, in any event, rulers of the empire that most threatened hers: Rome. Her first Roman lover was Julius Caesar; her second, Mark Antony. These were not romances. They were tactical alliances, sealed, in the case of Caesar, with a son, Caesarion.
The second attribute was Elizabeth Taylor. As Leslie Benedict in Giant , Taylor had projected brains, backbone, and a brilliance at behind-the-scenes manipulation—qualities no absolute ruler should be without. But this wasn’t why producer Walter Wanger agreed to pay her $1 million. He needed her to do something only she could do: override the audience’s prefrontal cortex, as she had in A Place in the Sun . He needed her to electrify viewers with primitive feeling. He needed her to whisper the Greek or Latin or Egyptian equivalent of “Tell Mama. Tell Mama all.”
Taylor was also a real-life star, determined to display the traits that pop culture demanded of its luminaries. Just as ancient Egyptians needed their rulers to be divine—Cleopatra declared herself an incarnation of the goddess Isis—so, too, midcentury fans required stars to be moody, unreliable, and petulant. During the making of Cleopatra , Taylor worked hard to satisfy them. Not all directors and producers, however, valued such dedication to the harsh dictates of stardom. Some grew cross when stars went AWOL, nursing hangovers or sniffles. When, for example, Marilyn Monroe was shooting Something’s Got to Give , a costly project that vied with Cleopatra for 20th Century Fox’s dwindling resources, director George Cukor fired Monroe … for behaving like a movie star.
Wanger, though, understood stardom and its crushing pressure to appear capricious. He deflected Taylor’s critics with a quote from director Billy Wilder: “I have a healthy aunt in Vienna who would come on set on time, know her lines, and always be ready. But no one would pay to see her at the box office.”
Wanger also grasped extreme emotions. He himself had served time for a crime of passion: shooting the purported lover of his then-wife, actress Joan Bennett. Wanger hoped to deliver both Cleopatra’s ice and Taylor’s fire—to make the Egyptian queen as vivid as Barbara Graham, the ex-junkie
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