This Day in Film History (‘Virginia Woolf’ Erodes Censorship Barriers)

June 21, 1966—Mike Nichols was so worried about the reaction to his film directing debut, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that he left the Pantages Theater early with the movie’s editor, Sam O'Steen.

Nichols need not have been concerned about the popular or critical reception to his adaptation of one of the most acclaimed yet controversial plays of the postwar period. 

With the draw of real-life couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, this scalding marital drama may have been, at $7.5 million, the most expensive black-and-white movie ever produced, but its $10.3 million box-office take ensured profits for Warner Bros.

Over the winter, Hollywood poured more honors on the film, with 13 Academy Award nominations, including for every category in which it was eligible—the first time this had occurred since Cimarron in 1931. Subsequently, wins went to Taylor (her second Best Actress win), Sandy Dennis for Best Supporting Actress, and Haskell Wexler for Best Cinematography.

From the moment Edward Albee’s play opened on Broadway in 1962, it was considered a hot property—but also, in some quarters, too hot to handle. Its frequently profane language and sexual explicitness unnerved the trustees of Columbia University enough that they overruled the recommendation of its Pulitzer Prize panel that the award go to the playwright.

Acquiring the property was unusual for Jack L. Warner, an aging mogul with conservative tastes that increasingly veered towards prestige musical blockbusters like My Fair Lady and Camelot.

At least sone among the studio hierarchy felt qualms about the finished product, which retained much of Albee’s incendiary dialogue. At one early screening, Life Magazine reported, one Warner executive groaned when the lights came up, "My God! We have a $7 million dirty movie on our hands!"

They were right to be concerned. Though the Production Code that had restricted profanity and sex onscreen for the prior three decades was coming under increasing fire from filmmakers and critics, it still presented roadblocks.

The Catholic Legion of Decency, which aimed to identify and boycott any movie it deemed morally objectionable, represented an especially significant roadblock to widespread distribution and popular acceptance of the film. Archbishops and priests promoted pledges by the faithful to avoid any cinema that the organization condemned.

Nichols had fought constantly with screenwriter Ernest Lehman to stick as closely as possible to Albee’s original dialogue and plot. He had survived being removed when generous starting hours for Taylor and Burton left the production 30 days behind schedule and with double the budget. He was not about to let the picture sink before it had a good chance of being seen by the public.

When the 80 judges for the Catholic Legion panel met, Nichols promised Warner execs, he would have his good friend Jacqueline Kennedy—practically a venerated figure after her husband’s assassination—sit behind prominent clerics like “Monsignor What’s-His-Face” and pronounce at the picture’s conclusion, “How Jack would have loved it."

The plot worked, as the Legion assigned Virginia Woolf a new rating—A-IV (“morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations")—which took into account the work’s moral seriousness while signifying that its often scabrous language and subject matter were not for the squeamish.

After haggling with Warner Bros. over its content, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) used a similar strategy as the Legion, designating the film as the first to bear the notice, "No one under 18 will be admitted unless accompanied by his parent." Its first attempt at a rating system followed two years later.

While the censorship walls crumbled rapidly on the nation’s cinemas in the late 1960s, it took a bit longer for the old restrictions to fade on television. I well remember the first time the film aired on CBS in February 1973.

Then 13 years old, I wondered exactly what was being signaled when the “Tiffany Network” issued its pre-viewing disclaimer urging parents and “sensitive viewers” to use “judgment and discretion.” I soon received what The New York Times’ Howard Thompson termed “an adult earful.”

Nowadays, in whatever medium it appears, it is seldom that such editorial handwringing occurs. Although CBS aired the show starting at 9 pm, when many kiddies would be fast asleep, Turner Classic Movies, for instance, has been known to show it during daytime. 

(A waggish filmmaking friend of mine once noted that TCM never had to worry about children watching their movies, as the cable channel’s average viewing age was 65!)

Viewers who couldn’t get beyond the blistering language that caused so much sturm und drang were likely to miss the symbolism of the names given the feuding, sadistic middle-aged academic couple at the heart of the play and film: George and Martha.

Like the first American President and his wife, Albee’s couple were unable to conceive—certainly not a baby, perhaps only drink-induced disorder and destruction among fellow academics ostensibly oriented towards reason.

Quote of the Day (Richard Burton, on Seeing Elizabeth Taylor for the First Time)

“There were quite a lot of people in and around the pool, all suntanned and all drinking the Sunday morning liveners – Bloody Marys, boilermakers, highballs, iced beer….I was enjoying this small social triumph, but then a girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me. She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud…. She was unquestionably gorgeous. I can think of no other word to describe a combination of plentitude, frugality, abundance, tightness. She was lavish. She was a dark unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much, and not only that, she was totally ignoring me.”—Actor Richard Burton (1925-1984), in a diary entry recalling his first sight, at a 1952 California party, of future wife Elizabeth Taylor, quoted by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, “A Love Too Big To Last,” Vanity Fair, June 2010

Richard Burton—who died 40 years ago today at his home in Geneva, Switzerland—fascinates me as much as any actor. He was a hell-raiser, to be sure—and, in coupling with the object of desire mentioned in the above paragraph a decade later, in Cleopatra, a cyclone of scandal.

Since his death at age 58, many have wondered how much more he might have accomplished had he not become addicted to both fame and alcohol. He himself thought he had squandered his talent on work that was essentially inconsequential: “All my life I think I have been secretly ashamed of being an actor and the older I get the more ashamed I get.”

I think of Burton as suffering from Mickey Mantle Disease, named after another prodigiously talented celebrity who overcame the humblest of origins—but still rued that he never became more.

But think of it this way in both cases: How many other gifted people have yielded to their demons without accomplishing anything at all?

Oscar nominated seven times (though he never won), Burton, for all his difficulties in staying sober, still showed at the end of his life that he could be superb in a supporting role, as in his unsettling appearance as the mysterious, cruel Party leader “O’Brien” in his last film, 1984.

At his best, in earlier films like Look Back in Anger, Becket, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Equus—not to mention stage work such as his legendary 1964 Broadway appearance in Hamlet— few could match his erudition, intensity, or magnificent baritone voice.

Burton showed talent in another capacity besides acting. (Surprisingly, it wasn’t in directing—his single foray behind the camera, a 1967 adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, was critically panned.)

No, his talent turned out to be writing. It didn’t involve screenplays, as so many other actors have turned their hands to, nor film analysis (Louise Brooks), novels (Dirk Bogarde), or memoirs (too many to list here), but diaries, 400,000 words scrawled in pocketbooks, desk diaries and loose paper.

Burton’s observational powers were acute, as was his sense of the rhythm of words. Thinking to himself, he could summon passion for material he admired such as Shakespeare’s plays:

“Last night I was lying on the bed doing a double crostic and looked up a quotation in the paperbacked Quotation Dictionary that I carry around with me specifically for that purpose. I immediately became lost in the book and read all the Shakespeare ones right through very slowly. There was hardly a line there that I didn't immediately know but seeing the miraculous words in print again doomed me to a long trance of nostalgia, a stupor of melancholy, like listening to really massive music, music that moans and thunders and plumbs fathomless depths.”

Unfortunately, just as often he expressed anger and disenchantment that all his attempts at self-medication could do nothing to assuage:

“I loathe, loathe, loathe acting. in studios. In England. I shudder at the thought of going to work with the same horror as a bank clerk must loathe that stinking tube journey every morning and the rush hour madness at night.”

In Elizabeth Taylor, he found his muse (they would star in 11 films together) and his downfall, as surely as Zelda Fitzgerald served the same functions for her novelist husband Scott. And, like the Jazz Age duo, their marriage was as much train wreck as love story, with the volatility and drinking of each only worsening the same instincts in the other.

Flashback, June 1963: Budget-Busting ‘Cleopatra’ Barges Into Theaters

 

Cleopatra, conceived as a cheap, quick-and-dirty remake of a silent feature, premiered in June 1963 at New York City’s Rivoli Theater with 10,000 spectators. 

It’s hard to resist the conclusion, after the movie went from an originally projected $2 million budget and 64-day shoot to one coming in at $44 million (or nearly a half billion dollars in today's money) and taking three years, that many of these “fans” had turned out for the same reason that others have for centuries: to witness a catastrophe.

During its troubled shooting, the movie shed a director, producer, three screenwriters, two leading men, a cinematographer, and an on-location film set—and, most notoriously, the latest husband of the actress playing the title character, Elizabeth Taylor.

Midway through creating this post, I thought of headlining it “Anatomy of a Disaster.” That wasn’t the case when I first became of the film as a teen in the Seventies. Like many film fans, I initially became fascinated by the scandal that made the movie notorious: Ms. Taylor’s affair with her Marc Antony.

As I noted in this prior post about her eventual marriage to Richard Burton, photos had flashed around the world showing the couple in intimate off-set moments, producing palpable shock and swift condemnation. (The Vatican accused Taylor, already infamous for stealing Debbie Reynolds’ husband Eddie Fisher, of “erotic vagrancy.”)

But in more recent years, perhaps because of a lifetime spent in the business world, I have become more intrigued by how management lost control of the movie, leading to the near-bankruptcy of studio 20^th Century Fox.

I wanted to know: How did this whole project get out of hand? What steps, if any, were taken to keep the situation from worsening, and why didn’t they work? And how did this affect the many people caught in its wake?

Maybe it was appropriate that the scandal-marred Cleopatra was the brainchild of Walter Wanger, a producer trying to live down his own past brush with notoriety: his shooting, in the most precious part of the male anatomy, an agent he believed was carrying on with his actress wife. Wanger hoped his peers would forget about the whole unfortunate business and his subsequent jail time for the same reason Hollywood usually did: a box-office winner.

Since 20^th Century Fox already had starlet Joan Collins under contract, it only made sense to use her, argued company president Spyros Skouras. And they had a ready-made property whose intellectual rights it already owned: the 1917 silent film Cleopatra, starring Theda Bara. Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 film starring Claudette Colbert as the legendary queen likewise confirmed that the public would be interested in this, he believed.

Ms. Collins even tested for the role. But a consensus quickly formed in 1959 that, rather than cast the English actress who was something of a poor-man’s Elizabeth Taylor, it was better to pursue the real thing.

Unconvinced that the role was meant for her, Taylor at first demurred. When Wanger relayed the offer again over the phone to Fisher, Taylor joked to her latest husband that she’d only accept it for $1 million, convinced that this would put Wanger off once and for all. Instead, the producer accepted her demand.

A 1962 report by a C.P.A. (cited in David Kamp's excellent "When Liz Met Dick," in the April 1998 issue of Vanity Fair) attributed the skyrocketing expenses till then to four factors: Taylor, lack of planning, corruption on the part of employees, and friction between American and Italian executives. In all its dryness, the following sentence still speaks volumes: "No effort was made at this time to review the first category, due to the danger involved.”

That may seem unfair to the actress, particularly given a number of circumstances beyond her control, but considering all that happened, much of what subsequently transpired did revolve around Taylor.

Ms. Taylor’s basic salary condition was 10 percent of the gross (with no break-even point). The take of the gross followed the precedent set by James Stewart with the 1950 western Broken Arrow, and the $1 million mirrored what Marlon Brando was receiving at the same time for another deeply troubled production, the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty.

At the start, Ms. Taylor’s expected windfall might not have seemed like such a gamble. The actress had retained her popularity with moviegoers from adolescence to adulthood, and her Oscar three years before for Butterfield 8 demonstrated the increasing respect she was receiving within Hollywood.

Moreover, the commercial and critical success of other recent epics set in ancient times (e.g., Ben-Hur, Spartacus) seemed to prove that, no matter how much money was spent or how much turmoil occurred on a set, audiences would still turn out in droves for spectacles they couldn’t find on their boxy black-and-white TV sets.

But Ms. Taylor’s final windfall ended up costing 20^th Century Fox far more than expected. Here’s why:

* Her contract guaranteed her $50,000 for every week filming ran over the 16-week schedule—and it did three years for the movie to wrap up;

* She insisted the movie be filmed on 70mm Todd-AO, which her late husband Mike Todd created to compete with CinemaScope, and which she owned now;

*She (along with Burton and Fisher) sued Fox for their share of the gross.

When all was said and done, Taylor was believed to have walked away with $7 million—and that didn’t account for other expenses associated with her, including:

* $194,800 just for her costumes—the highest amount ever shelled out for an actress in a single role;

* $150,000 paid to Fisher for “junior-producer” duties that really amounted to taking care of his wife;

* $25,000 for Taylor’s personal physician, Rex Kennamer of Beverly Hills, to be flown in to Rome;

* an untold amount went for her American hair stylist to be flown to England—sparking a strike by the British hairdressers on the first day of shooting in that country.

Another Taylor demand--shooting outside the U.S., to make this a truly international epic--introduced cascading complications during production. Initially, lured by tax breaks offered by the British government, Fox decided that the on-site location should be not Rome, but Pinewood Studios, just outside London.

Nobody seems to have anticipated that the damp autumn weather in the UK--bad enough that the multitudes of shivering extras on the 20-acre lot would emit cold vapor into the air--would exacerbate long-standing health problems of Taylor, to such an extent that a cold would worsen into pneumonia and eventually require an emergency tracheostomy.

For the sake of their fragile star, Fox relocated the production to Italy, whose Mediterranean climate would be more salubrious for her now-impaired bronchial condition. Director Rouben Mamoulian, chafing at all the turmoil already surrounding the movie, threw up his hands and cabled his resignation.

According to Patrick Humphries' 2023 account of the multi-year fiasco, only a little less than eight minutes of all Mamoulian shot made it into the nearly four-hour Cleopatra initially released to theaters (nearly another hour would be cut to improve chances for profitability in general release), and the cost had already reached $7 million.

The studio gulped when it learned that it had to replace its original Caesar and Antony, actors Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd, because of prior filming commitments. At least they found two highly regarded substitutes in Rex Harrison and Burton.

But those sets made in England? Made of papier-mache, much of that "marble" had peeled away in the UK fog, rendering it unusable. The sets would have to be reconstructed from scratch in Italy.

The filmmakers were still intent on offering audiences every penny's worth. The triumphant procession of Cleopatra and her son into Rome, for instance, required dozens of scantily clad female dancers, along with a black, 30-ft. high marble sphinx, pulled by over 300 Numina slaves. 

Some (including the creators of the documentary “The Making of ‘Cleopatra’”) regarded it as one of filmdom’s most impressive sequences; but I see it as a slow-moving monstrosity—wretched excess, to be sure.

The presence of all those "slaves" gave rise to a scandal that attracted nowhere near the same amount of notice as the Taylor-Burton affair, but which in retrospect oddly foreshadows the #MeToo movement: the “Revolt of the Slave Girls.” 

After the production moved to Italy, multiple female extras who played Cleopatra’s servants and slave girls resorted to a strike to secure protection against the roaming hands of the local technical crew. Nobody had a phrase for it at the time, but it was a textbook case of sexual harassment.

Twentieth-Century Fox hired a special guard to protect the women and its own reputation—which, as it turned out, was probably one of the more justifiable expenditures in the production. 

Corruption was rampant in Italy. The studio found itself billed $100,000 for paper clips and $3 million for the vaguely termed "miscellaneous" expenses. Taylor remembered more than 30 years later, "They said I ate 12 chickens and 40 pounds of bacon every day for breakfast. What?”

Even after this move to a healthier climate, illness kept Taylor off the set at points—except that this time it wasn't because of pneumonia because of an overdose of Seconal after Burton made a belated, guilt-ridden, but brief attempt to break off the affair and return to his wife Sybil.

But production was also delayed because through much of the shoot, there wasn’t a settled script. Mamoulian, dissatisfied with both the first script and a rewrite commissioned by Wanger, ended up getting a third. 

Taylor did not like any of the three, and shortly thereafter Mamoulian was out and Joe Mankiewicz—who, like Taylor, found his initial lack of enthusiasm for the project oozing away in the face of an enormous salary offer—came on board.

At the heart of Mankiewicz’s acclaimed work as a director were his scripts, especially the Oscar-winning original screenplays he wrote for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. He had also earned Taylor’s trust through his work with her a couple of years before on Suddenly Last Summer. 

But Mankiewicz had never helmed a movie of such complexity with so many moving parts, and he had never taken over a film so far behind schedule and so far over budget.

Most of all, for all the interference he may have encountered as an old studio hand, he had never experienced a situation till now where the studio believed that its very life rode on the success of the film. The meant their “supervision” was more incessant, more emotional, more desperate—and, because shooting was so far away from Hollywood, more fruitless.

Twentieth Century Fox had seen several films crash and burn over the last few years, leaving it in a big financial hole. It was rushing movies into production, whether the scripts were ready or not. If the film started to have problems, it might terminate it unexpectedly to maximize the cash needed for Cleopatra and another Fox film having cost overruns, the D-Day epic The Longest Day.

That was the case with the Marilyn Monroe film Something’s Got to Give. The star was constantly absent, it was true, but she was convinced that her termination represented the studio’s scapegoating of her for similar or worse problems stemming from Taylor on Cleopatra.

Firing Monroe wasn’t the only extreme measure Fox took to deal with its Cleopatra-induced cash-flow crisis. 

As the production delays for the movie reached an apogee, Skouras engineered the sale of Fox’s 260-acre Los Angeles backlot to the Aluminum Company of America for $43 million. That property was then developed into Century City, a sprawling office-building-and-shopping-center complex, in a deal regarded as a financial fiasco for Fox.

Insurance was also playing a role in what was transpiring. The 1958 fatal heart attack of star Tyrone Power while shooting a prior sword-and-sandals epic, Solomon and Sheba (a crisis I discussed in this prior post) lingered in the minds of Fox and other studios about securing the health of their leading actors. 

Wanger acknowledged afterward that preserving the health of Taylor (integral to the overwhelming majority of the film's scenes) guided much of the studio's decision-making. And both English and overseas insurers needed to be involved.

All this was happening thousands of miles away from Taylor, Burton, Harrison, and their colleagues. But the emotional environment was inevitably something Mankiewicz had to consider as he tried to remake the movie on the fly.

Moreover, Mankiewicz was, by day, directing a movie with more than the normal share of technical challenges and heightened emotional stakes among its principals, then returning to his room at night to write more scenes for the next day. If Taylor and Burton had had lovers’ quarrels the night before, one or both might be in no condition to come on set when they were supposed to.

As a result, Mankiewicz could not shoot scenes economically based on set availability, weather and similar conditions, the way on-location shooting has traditionally taken place. This left cast and crew members lingering for extended periods with nothing to do, for far longer than originally intended. (Actor Hugh Cronyn, for example, signed for 10 weeks, ended up in production for 10 1/2 months, using his spare time to tour the Italian coasts and Tuscany.)

His postmortem on the film—one of the only times he cared to comment on it at all in the remaining two decades of his life—was concise, hilarious, and true: Cleopatra was “conceived in a state of emergency, shot in confusion, and wound up in a blind panic.”

The disorder revolving around Cleopatra (and, to a lesser extent, The Longest Day) led Darryl Zanuck to stage a successful coup among the Fox board of directors against Skouras, who ended up out of Fox after two decades leading the company.

Skouras wasn’t the last person connected to Cleopatra to experience a termination:

*Despite an entreaty to Skouras’ successor Zanuck to let him continue to work on Cleopatra, Wanger was out as producer during the 1962 post-production period.

*Mankiewicz’ quarrels with the home office were pointed enough that Fox fired him at one point. Then the studio recalled that it needed him onboard because, after all this time, a final screenplay still had to be written—and, as the guiding light of the project, Mankiewicz was in the best position to do so. So he was rehired.

Even so, Zanuck disregarded the director's desire that the movie be released in two three-hour parts, focusing first on Cleopatra's relationship with Caesar, then with Antony. Back-to-back filming was an intriguing idea that would foreshadow how the Back to the Future, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises would handle their releases. 

But Zanuck rejected the proposal--and, considering how much energy Cleopatra loses after Harrison's Caesar exits the movie, I'm not sure it would have worked, anyway. By the time the film was cut and re-cut for general release, several of those associated with it (such as Taylor) felt the final product was rushed and incoherent at points.

Cleopatra is not without its defenders, who correctly point to its excellent performances by Harrison and Roddy McDowall as Octavian, as well as to a box-office take that made it among the highest grossers of the Sixties.

But it took a decade--after all those audiences in cinemas and its sizable sale to network TV--before Fox made back its investment. Even then, the studio kept all future profits secrets so it wouldn't have to pay investors promised a percentage of its profits.

That was better than what Joe Mankiewicz experienced. “Cleopatra affected him the rest of his life,” remembered his widow, Rosemary. “It made him more sensitive to the other blows that would come along.” 

For this film professional he regarded his writing as essential to his directing assignments, he would never have another screenwriting credit. After three films made over the next decade, he spent his last 21 years “finding reasons not to work,” according to his son Tom--a devastating ending for a once-prolific and honored filmmaker.

Quote of the Day (T.H. White, As Merlin Warns Arthur About ‘Popular Agitators’ in His Kingdom)

“You have become the king of a domain in which the popular agitators hate each other for racial reasons, while the nobility fight each other for fun, and neither the racial maniac nor the overlord stops to consider the lot of the common soldier, who is the one person that gets hurt.” —English novelist T.H. White (1906-1964), The Once and Future King (1958)

Written like another epic with mythical overtones, The Lord of the Rings, during WWII, The Once and Future King became the basis of the musical Camelot. 

The image accompanying this post comes from the original 1960 Broadway production, with Richard Burton as reason-guided King Arthur and Roddy McDowall as Mordred, the conniving son who will become a stand-in for the “popular agitators” who put the realm at risk.

Quote of the Day (Richard Burton, on Alcohol and ‘The Age of the Abyss’)

“I stuck to my diet and had a whisky and soda before lunch, followed by a half dozen belons, a steak au poivre, a salad with French dressing, and a hefty lump of cheese. I drank Lafite ‘60, about two glasses, and two or three brandies after the cheese with sugarless and creamless coffee. Later that night I had a couple more whiskies and soda. Apart from water that is all I took in that day…. E[lizabeth Taylor] was astonishingly drunk even as I got to lunch. I don't recollect her before ever being incoherent from drink. I expect it from the drugs she's forced to take, but not from the booze. Christ I hope she's alright. It would be frightful to live the rest of our lives in an alcoholic haze, seeing the world through fumes of spirits and cigarette smoke. Never quite sure what you did or said the day before, or what you read, whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon. Good I'm going to have a whisky and soda right now. There are few pleasures to match tipsiness in this murderous world especially if, like me, you believe in your bones that it, the world as we know it, is not going to last much longer. This is the age of the abyss and any minute now or dark day we could tumble over the edge into primal chaos. Some frigging foreigner will press a button and gone it will all be. Even the Miners Arms in Pontrhydyfen. Our little lives will be shattered with a cosmic bang. ‘These millions of white faces,’ as Archie MacLeish says, and then ‘nothing, nothing, nothing at all.‘ But don't let's be stoned all the time. Let's have days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical….”—Actor Richard Burton (1925-1984), diary entry for January 10, 1969, The Richard Burton Diaries, edited by Chris Williams (2012)

I have always wanted to read the diaries of Richard Burton, and this past weekend I finally got my hands on a copy at a library near me. Since then, I’ve been consuming entries the way I once might have gone after a Crackerjack box, sampling one here, one there, finding myself unable to stop. 

The entry here hardly contains the most news—it doesn’t describe his purchases, for wife Elizabeth Taylor, diamonds and a plane, each costing at least $900,000, nor his high-profile friends and films of the time. 

But these lines may evoke something more revelatory and fascinating than any more seemingly momentous incident. Such was the consequence of a self-loathing genius—a talented writer who (perhaps correctly) believed he was miscast as a gifted, well-compensated actor—pursuing “the drinking man’s diet.”

There are several astonishing elements of this entry:

*That phrase, “that is all I took in that day.” The amount of alcohol involved is not inconsiderable.

*Burton largely passes over his own drinking, but not his wife’s.

*Shortly after conjuring up the very real consequences of alcohol abuse, the actor indulges in his thirst for another whisky and soda.

*Burton wishes for liquid oblivion to wipe out “the age of the abyss” he sees in the hands of nuclear powers around the world—but somehow also wishes for “days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical”—an outcome that feels ever more elusive by the end of this paragraph.

Clear-eyed enough to see the disappointing finish to his life and his wife’s (who, though successfully drying out in the Betty Ford Clinic in the 1980s, lived out the rest of her days more by taking advantage of her celebrity than by strengthening her real muscles as an actor), Burton is also seemingly powerless to stop it. 

It is quite sad to behold the evolution—or, rather, the devolution—of these entries. Initial ones, from the early 1940s, are short, befitting a youth still struggling to find his place and his voice.  The decade or so from the 1960s to early 1970s featured the longest ruminations, when the actor would take out his typewriter and type right in front of Ms. Taylor. He was trying to harness his creativity by imposing self-discipline. But, from the mid-Seventies and continuing for several years, there were no entries. 

Burton had slipped into an extended lost weekend of substance abuse. The voice on stage had, despite heavy cigarette use, lost little of its mellifluous richness. But the “voice” on the printed page, in the last entries from early 1983, over a year before his death, is exhausted, confessing that his last wife, Sally, is “still depressed and fed up….Being with me is not as glamorous as people think.”

Perhaps it was no accident that some of his best, Oscar-nominated performances--in Becket, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and his late-career triumph of stage and screen, Equus--center around disillusioned, burnt-out cases

Quote of the Day (Richard Burton, on Reputation--With Application to the Political Scandal Du Jour)

"I rather like my reputation, actually, that of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drunk, a womanizer; it's rather an attractive image."--Richard Burton, quoted in Gene Shalit, Great Hollywood Wit: A Glorious Cavalcade of Hollywood Wisecracks, Zingers, Japes, Quips, Slings, Jests, Snappers and Sass From the Stars (2003)

With reputations, it’s all about where you make them and how long the impression lasts. Burton, of course, had wide latitude in Hollywood, where four is probably the median number of marriages and the number of affairs is exponentially larger. There, a reputation as a sexual swordsman gives you a certain cachet.

But in politics, better known, in James Carville’s formulation, as “show business for ugly people”--well, that’s another story. There, depending on the stage of the career, a reputation is made and re-made repeatedly. You might think you can simply move on and upward, without anyone remembering what you did along the way. Not so.

Or, as Robert Penn Warren’s political boss Willie Stark says in All the King’s Men: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”

Herman Cain is encountering this great truth right now. Did he commit sexual harassment, or engage in some similar louche behavior? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we’ll never know.

But it was a major, major mistake for him to embark upon this campaign without thinking that settlements with two women while he was president of the National Restaurant Association would not come to light. A recent summary from The Huffington Post on his most recent accounts of the matter include an inordinate number of “I do not recall” or its variants.

His campaign’s response to the revelation bears all the marks of a disarray he surely would not have tolerated as a business executive, but I’m afraid he has only himself to blame. If he was indeed innocent, he should have told his inner circle from the start so they could immediately launch an effective defense. (The beginning of the campaign would have been best to reveal this, but it seems as if his handlers knew 10 days ago that members of the media had this story, and the responses are still changing.) If he was guilty as claimed, his decision to begin an epic, cross-country campaign will come to be seen as an act of hubris on the order of John Edwards’ similar one before the 2008 campaign, when he already knew that Rielle Hunter loomed in the background.

There is also the matter of audience. Burton’s reputation as a “spoiled genius” only enhanced his credibility in his best roles in Becket, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Equus--world-weary men haunted by their pasts. If the current claims are true, the conservative voters in the Republican primaries will not be anywhere near as understanding with Cain as Burton’s audience was.

Whether or not the accusations turn out to be accurate, the press have not covered themselves in glory. The initial accounts came from two anonymous sources, which, unlike a courtroom, does not allow the quarry to confront his accusers. Unlike Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton, we don’t even know the substance of what is claimed, never mind the truth of the matter.

What we do know is this: risking a hard-won reputation built up over a lifetime on a campaign for President requires a level of ego unknown to the average voter, though perfectly normal in show business and its ugly sister, politics.

Movie Quote of the Day (“Becket,” on the “Supreme Irony” of His Life)

“It is a supreme irony that the worldly Becket, a profligate and libertine, could find himself standing here at this moment. But here he is, in spite of himself. The king, for good or ill, chose to pass the burden of the church on to me, and now I must carry it. I’ve rolled up my sleeves and taken the church on my back. Nothing will ever make me set it down again.”—Archbishop Thomas a Becket (played by Richard Burton), on his unexpected appointment to his post by friend (later enemy) King Henry II, in Becket (1964), directed by Peter Glanville, screenplay by Edward Anhalt, based on the play by Jean Anouilh

This Day in Classical Music History (‘Tristan & Isolde’ Reflects Real-Life Wagner Drama)

June 10, 1865—The Munich premiere of Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Isolde) should have placed Richard Wagner on the high, comfortable plateau he had needed so desperately throughout his career.

His creative acolyte, conductor Hans von Bulow, had battled recalcitrant musicians in the orchestra throughout rehearsals, but had now brought off the composer’s vision in brilliant fashion; after several postponements, the public had nevertheless greeted his three-act music drama with storms of applause; and, most of all, he now had a patron—King Ludwig II of Bavaria—who not only had taken care of his debts but had financed this really expensive opera.

But Wagner, being Wagner, had already incurred the proverbial wrath of the gods. It wasn’t only that he continued to spend other people’s money recklessly, that he told any and all about “the incomparable magic of my works,” or even that he tried to influence Ludwig’s politics.

No. Like the Arthurian tale he’d adapted, Wagner had embarked on a heedless love affair with von Bulow’s wife Cosima—not the first time he’d taken advantage of the wife of an admirer. Only this time the relationship produced a baby, as well as such a scandal that, by year’s end, he’d be forced into exile again.

I was first exposed to the work of Wagner for a music humanities course in college. As the various tenors and sopranos battled each other in ear-shattering duets, I came to agree with the assessment of Mark Twain in his Autobiography (or, rather, the assessment he passed along by humorist Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye): “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.”

Wagner’s personality, most assuredly, was not better than his music. Harold C. Schonberg’s The Lives of the Great Composers, after the obligatory noises about the composer’s genius, offered this devastating conclusion:

“As a human being he was frightening. Amoral, hedonistic, selfish, virulently racist, arrogant, filled with gospels of the superman (the superman naturally being Wagner) and the superiority of the German race, he stands for all that is unpleasant in human character.”

In creating Tristan from 1857 to 1859, Wagner proposed to change the rules of the musical drama with an opera that used the orchestra, in startling new ways, to suggest unresolved chords and recurrent leitmotifs. He was already changing the rules of civilized social order by having an affair with poet-writer Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of Otto Wesendonck, a wealthy silk trader. The relationship broke up his marriage and alienated Wesendonck, a benefactor.

As bad as that was, the scandal involving Cosima, the daughter of Wagner’s great friend Franz Liszt, was worse. It was so blatant that even Ludwig told the composer he needed to leave for awhile, until everything blew over. (Ludwig being Ludwig, he subsidized the exile of Wanger and Cosima in Switzerland for the next few years.)

In 1983, public television aired a miniseries on Wagner, starring Richard Burton (in one of his last roles) as the composer and Vanessa Redgrave as Cosima von Bulow Wagner. I have not yet had a chance to watch this, but I can’t imagine better casting than these two stars. Only they could begin to comprehend the scandal and controversy that followed in the wake of the composer and his wife.

(Incidentally, the image accompanying this post shows one of the original Munich performances of Tristan, with Ludwig Schnorr von Carelsfeld and wife Malvina in the title roles. Good thing the photographer took this shot, because, in another instance of the turbulence surrounding this production, the gifted Ludwig died after only the fourth performance, at age 29, of rheumatic fever.)

This Day in Film History (Liz and Dick Wed)

March 15, 1964—Starting a whole new act in their turbulent life together, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor—the screen stars whose illicit romance on the set of Cleopatra made that film the talk of the world even before it opened—married in Montreal.

"For some reason the world has always been amused by us two maniacs," Burton observed not long before his death 20 years later.

The “amusement,” if one could call it that, was certainly in evidence upon their return to the United States after their wedding. In Boston, by the time they had gotten to an elevator, crazed fans had torn the sleeve off Burton’s jacket and chunks of hair and an earring from Taylor.

As a teenager, whenever I heard the media refer to James Taylor and Carly Simon as “the Burton and Taylor of rock ‘n’ roll,” I knew instantly what was meant: an impossibly rich and glamorous couple famed almost as much for their romances and substance abuse as for their wealth and the high (if often uneven) quality of their work.

Some years ago, I read excerpts in Vanity Fair Magazine from Burton’s diary, which he began a year after his marriage to Taylor. Seldom have I read more intelligent and better-written diary entries, and certainly not from someone in a profession more given to saying someone else’s words than creating one’s own.

At the same time, I don’t know, outside of the journals of John Cheever, if I’ve ever read a more self-loathing diarist. Much of the problem derived simply from Burton’s belief that his magnificent gifts were given to a profession that, on the scale of things, was simply useless. "I loathe loathe loathe acting. I loathe it, hate it, despise, despise – for Christ's sake – it," he wrote.

Extramarital affairs in the film world are hardly shocking anymore. But, when Cleopatra was being filmed in the early 1960s, it was still a big deal. Movie stars had only recently emerged from a studio system that cosseted its stars with all sorts of insulation, including publicists who knew how to spike a story with newspapers.

When photos of married stars Burton and Taylor "canoodling" flashed around the world, then, the surprise was palpable and the condemnation (the Vatican accused her, already infamous for stealing Debbie Reynolds’ husband Eddie Fisher, of “erotic vagrancy”) swift.

Over the years, the press and public came to associate the lives they portrayed onscreen together with the couple’s offscreen turbulent relationship—not just the infamous historical Antony-Cleopatra relationship at the heart of their hugely disastrous film (originally budgeted for $3 million, it ended up costing $42 million, or $300 million in today’s money), but also Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Taming of the Shrew, and—in a sorry indication of their eroding relationship and taste in roles—the TV film Divorce His/Divorce Hers.

After a dozen years, countless public shouting matches and private infidelities, the marriage was no more. But the two actors still cared for each other. Why?

In his case, it was that voice—not just the famous speaking one that, at its best, made audience members the world over want to go out and buy Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas, but also, as I’ve just suggested, that voice on the page—rueful, remorseful and passionate about her.

What about her? Garry Trudeau, in a title inspired by one “Doonesbury” character’s description of her at a low point in her life ("A Tad Overweight, But Violet Eyes to Die For") caught one obvious physical aspect of her appeal. But there was also her humor and, above all, her fierce loyalty.

Norman Mailer once termed Norman Podhoretz a “foul-weather friend”—i.e., someone who provided help invariably only when things were worst. As such male friends as Montgomery Clift, Peter Lawford, Rock Hudson, Roddy McDowell, and Michael Jackson learned over the years, Taylor was very much this type. There are far worse things to be in Hollywood, a place where, if you want to be sure of a friend, you'd better get a dog.

Debbie Reynolds and the Vatican were right—if you were a wife, you would definitely want to hide your husband if Taylor were within the vicinity. But in my book, humor and loyalty redeem an awful lot about a life.

Shortly before he died, explaining his ex’s appeal, Burton remarked to fellow actor John Hurt: “She still fascinates.” All her other surviving husbands and lovers would undoubtedly agree, as does the world, even as she struggles with illness (congestive heart failure) and the old age that beauty-besotted actors--like tempestuous lovers Liz and Dick--dread.