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.

Flashback, November 1960: ‘BUtterfield 8,’ The Film Hated by Its Stars and Author, Opens

 A common adage holds that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Today’s case in point: BUtterfield 8, which MGM released 65 years ago this month.

It’s hard to find anyone today with much good to say about the film. When it came out, critics and even those most closely associated with the outcome of the movie felt just as strongly about the movie:

*Star Elizabeth Taylor took the role of promiscuous party girl Gloria Wandrous because she had to, in order to fulfill the last in a three-picture deal.

*Singer Eddie Fisher, who got his supporting role (his first movie acting credit) only at the insistence of his wife Taylor, never took another onscreen—perhaps out of embarrassment, perhaps because Hollywood regarded it as proof positive that he was best suited for his normal profession;

*Author John O'Hara could be forgiven for his usual cantankerous attitude this time, as he correctly believed that the Charles Schnee-John Michael Hayes screenplay had badly oversimplified his Depression-era novel.  Admirers like myself badly miss a cinematic equivalent of his panoramic view of class-ridden Manhattan in the Prohibition Era, as well as the bitter lament of his Irish-American alter ego, James Malloy, about being viewed as less than American by the WASP elite. (See my blog post from 14 years ago on the real-life scandal that O'Hara used as his springboard.)

With all the disgust these figures felt, American moviegoers reacted differently. BUtterfield 8 earned $10 million at the box office, which, on a budget of approximately $2 million, made it one of the biggest hits of 1960. And, in the new year, Hollywood gave Taylor her the first of two Oscars for a role in a motion picture that was little short of pornography.

The Production Code Administration, Hollywood’s censorship arm, had made it virtually impossible for more than two decades to bring O’Hara’s book to the screen. Although Hayes observed late in his life that in 1960 films didn’t encounter as many difficulties, that might have been in this case because the screenplay eliminated the novel’s references to abortion and lesbianism.

There was also the matter of how to describe Gloria’s occupation: was she a prostitute or not? Certainly in the case of the movie, many have assumed that she was, even though she ostensibly modeled dresses in restaurants and other upscale settings. 

But, particularly because of the opening scene, in which her married lover Weston Liggett left her money from the night before (to pay for the dress he tore in a drunken fit) and a joke by another lover that all the men she’s been with “meet once a year at Yankee Stadium,” the thought lingered among many that she was paid for her services.

(By the way, for the benefit of younger readers, the first two capital letters in “BUtterfield” are not a typo. They refer to how numbers were remembered in those days—thus, “BU” represents 28.)

Conventional wisdom holds that Taylor was awarded her Best Actress Oscar in sympathy for a life-threatening bout of pneumonia that resulted in an emergency tracheotomy. I won’t appraise the merits of the other nominees in the category. But it’s doubtful that they had to surmount as much as Taylor—a subpar screenplay and an extremely miscast co-star (Laurence Harvey).

The opening scene, unfolding with hardly a word for nearly 10 minutes, depends entirely on Taylor’s movements and expressions as she transitions from troubled sleep to anger at the departed Liggett. And her confession to her platonic male friend Steve of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child is searing.

Taylor reportedly did not get along well with director Daniel Mann. (One story goes that, when he handed her two eggs in their shells and told her to cook them in the next scene, Taylor—whose schooling on the MGM lot evidently did not include home economics—responded, “But what do I do with them?”)

Nevertheless, I like to think that, with her great sense of humor, Taylor would have guffawed at the notion that, even with a tawdry melodrama that brought such a sorry end to the studio she had called home for 17 years, she had achieved a career triumph in BUtterfield 8.

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 (Charlotte Bronte, on Not Holding Grudges)

"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs…. No; I cannot believe that: I hold another creed: which no one ever taught me, and which I seldom mention; but in which I delight, and to which I cling: for it extends hope to all: it makes Eternity a rest—a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss. Besides, with this creed, I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last: with this creed revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low: I live in calm, looking to the end." — English novelist Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Jane Eyre (1847)

These words are spoken in the novel by Jane Eyre’s doomed but serene childhood friend, Helen Burns—played, in the 1943 screen adaptation, by 11-year-old Elizabeth Taylor (on the right in the attached image, with Peggy Ann Garner as the young Jane Eyre).

Quote of the Day (S.J. Perelman, on a Macho Husband of Liz Taylor’s)

“[Film and stage producer Mike] Todd’s machismo was that common form that afflicts all undersized men—megalomania. He freely identified himself with Napoleon, P.T. Barnum, and Carl Laemmle, Junior, not to mention the Roman emperors of the decline. Whereas the latter, however, believed in giving the populace bread and circuses, Todd gave them circuses and kept the bread. Rarely if ever has there been anyone more unwilling to fork over what he owed to those actors, writers, and technicians who aided him in his grandiloquent projects of stage and screen. The little corpuscle, in short, believed in flaunting money where it made the most impression—at Deauville, Monaco, and the gambling tables of Las Vegas. In this respect, he was a true macho. My sole souvenir of our frenetic association [the film Around the World in 8o Days] is a replica of the carpetbag Phileas Fogg carried on his celebrated journey, a thousand of which Todd distributed to Broadway companions, investors, accountants, dentists, and other sycophants. But surely, his admirers have since queried me, I must have been awed by his tremendous vitality. Only in part, I respond; Moi meme, I prefer the anthropoid apes.”—American humorist and screenwriter S.J. Perelman (1904-1979), “The Machismo Mystique,” from Vinegar Puss (1975)

There were two exemplars of machismo among his acquaintances, S.J. Perelman noted in the essay from which I’ve just quoted. One, Ernest Hemingway, remains so famous that there seems little point in my belaboring the obvious. But the other, Mike Todd, is surely less familiar to my readers, and his antics—along with Perelman’s hilarious description of him—are worth recalling. 

Perelman was used to show-business lunatics--he did, after all, help write some of the best screenplays (Monkey Business, Horse Feathers) for the Marx Brothers. But I think you can see here that, nearly 20 years after working with Todd, just the memory of Todd was enough to bring him to heights of wonderful invective.

“Flamboyant,” used most by journalists to summarize this showman’s life, is a pallid word for this would-be entertainment Napoleon. Undaunted by losing his shirt in the Depression when his construction business crashed, Todd was bitten by the show-business bug.

Notice that I didn’t say he was particularly wise—or good—at his work. By 1950, the profligate spending that Perelman hinted at engulfed Todd in a second bankruptcy. It didn’t help that four years before, a musical version of Around the World in 8o Days, starring Orson Welles, cratered after he had pulled out, losing virtually all of its investors’ (including Todd's) money.

Then, something astonishing happened. Shrugging off his horrifying involvement in staging the 19^th-century Jules Verne novel, Todd rolled the dice on the property a second time, except now as an all-star Hollywood vehicle. He not only made his investment back over and over again, but won the Best Picture Oscar for 1956. (Perelman shared a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar with John Farrow and  James Poe). 

Oh, yes, another sign of Todd’s machismo, perhaps the major reason why he is remembered at all today: the last of his wives, Elizabeth Taylor: the equivalent of today’s trophy wife, a woman at the height of her glamor—and less than half his age, as you might be able to tell in the picture accompanying this post. (He would be the third of her eight husbands.)

When he died at age 50, in a crash of his private plane, Todd nearly took down with him the one man in Hollywood who could credibly exceed him in machismo: Kirk Douglas, who, with great initial reluctance—at the behest of his wife—turned down the producer's invitation to join him on the fatal flight.

So, let’s see: A builder thirsting for the bright lights of the entertainment world, glorying in the eye-candy on his arm, spending like there’s no tomorrow, and stiffing creditors and employees—Todd was nearly 60 years ahead of his time as Oval Office material.

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