Cleopatra and the Undoing of Hollywood: How One Film Almost Sunk the Studios

Introduction

That weekday evening in 1964 was much like any other in suburban south-east London for a boy on the edge of his teenage years. Following my mum’s well intentioned, but calorically catastrophic high tea, homework had to be tackled: incomprehensible Latin, bewildering geography, baffling physics, hopeless French translation. Whole exercise books had to be filled, by hand, with the Christmas present Parker fountain pen regularly refilled. Impenetrable maths had to be tackled without the benefit of a calculator. The Repeal of the Corn Laws to be done by recall and research with no access to the yet-to-be-invented Internet.

On the whole, I would really rather have been watching one of the two television channels, even if they were scratchy black and white. Or listening to the pop music which had infused the British Isles with a ubiquitous passion. School exercise books which, the year before, had been covered with doodles of Second World War Tiger tanks and Spitfires, were now replaced with painstakingly drawn electric guitars and drum kits. Boys’ hair was tantalisingly creeping over the collar. Would Santa bring a pair of those fabulous Beatle boots? Or perhaps one of their 32s 6d long players? Or even – unimaginably – a ticket to see them perform in nearby Lewisham or Croydon?

I knew that somewhere out there, bobbing on the North Sea, the pirate radio station Radio Caroline was playing the pop music that the BBC Light Programme wouldn’t let you hear. At night in bed, with my homework at best half done, by pressing my ear to the crackle of my birthday transistor, I could pick up the coming-and-going tunes. They came from far, far away, on the white-wave, pirate-ship, static-bobbing distance. Listening to pirate radio was the nearest a public schoolboy got to danger during 1964.

I was an only child. It was just me and my mum and dad. So, it was a welcome distraction when my Uncle Leslie chose to drop in. He wasn’t really my uncle but actually a close family friend. Leslie often stopped at the pub, then came to us for a chat and a drink on his way home from work. That would be the drink he had before driving off and popping into the pub for a drink. The drink tended to make him absent-minded. But never enough to make him forget having a cigarette. He smoked a lot; everybody did then.

Leslie passed the time of day with us – the events at the office; the problems he was having with his racy, new sports car; the price of cigarettes, the foul perversion of the new Labour government. It’s funny to think that he was demonstrably younger than I am as I write this. Adults seemed so much more adult, more grown up then.

Mind you, my father and Leslie were old school friends. They had served their king and country in the RAF. They had seen friends and relatives killed and they lost their youth to that conflict. They had survived a world war; that entitled them, then in their mid-forties, to smoke. And to drink – a lot.

Then Leslie dropped his bombshell. He had just popped into the Grove Tavern for a quick drink, prior to his arrival to dropping in to us for a quick drink. (There was no breathalyser to interrupt this sort of social drinking then.) Anyway, that actress was there, Leslie informed us, in his absent-minded, cigarette-waving, ‘don’t-mind-if-I-do-old-boy, oh-one-for-the-road’ way.

‘Actress? What actress?’ asked my mother, moderately curious. This was long before the current obsession with celebrity. But it was a time when stars, real stars, held a vivid sway over the general public. Actors and actresses were personalities, larger-than-life figures who you never saw off screen and who rarely ventured from their Mayfair mansions or Hollywood villas. No camera phone interrupted their remote unattainability. They would never have come south of the river, and certainly never patronised pubs near us in Dulwich.

‘That actress,’ said Leslie. ‘You know …’

A top-up distracted him further. The usual ‘just a quick one then’ routine that owed more to the Drones Club than 1960s discotheques. My father poured his usual mahogany dark whisky for his old school friend, while chiding him gently about his meanness. Cigarettes were matched, held in fingers as mahogany-stained as the whisky they swigged like the water that rarely troubled it. As the fags flared, they both settled down for their usual strident denunciation of the latest perniciousness of Harold Wilson’s Labour administration.

‘But which actress?’ my mother persisted. She would have had a smouldering Nelson on the go. I think she was knitting, the sort of activity which allowed her to keep busy in a wifely way but also keep a keen ear open.

‘That one they’re always writing about,’ Leslie conceded vaguely.

Was it someone from Coronation Street? she wondered.

Leslie didn’t know, he rarely watched the television.

Was she a film actress?

Leslie was pretty certain on this point that she was. But when pushed, could not bring to mind any of the films in which she had appeared. It had, after all, been some time since Leslie had actually been to the cinema. That Jean Kent, now she was a cracker … And didn’t Joan Greenwood have a marvellously sexy voice? And didn’t Ida Lupino come from Herne Hill?

This led to further they-don’t-make-’em-like-that-anymore ruminations on film stars; names I had never heard of. And films that had once been screened at the crumbling old flea pit down the road in Herne Hill, which is long gone now. Funny, stilted, jerky black-and-white silent films. Not like the glorious, strictly reserved for school holiday treats in Technicolor and Cinerama such as The Alamo, The Great Escape, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Zulu that I loved.

Mum resumed her knitting, helping herself to another gin from the Bentley-green Gordon’s bottle and probably treating herself to another Nelson while the men puffed at their Senior Service. Matches flared, glasses were topped. Then Leslie remembered. She had that chap with her. He was an actor as well. They were always writing about him too. While he naturally could not remember the chap’s name, Leslie’s confidence grew when he remembered that he was not only an actor, but that he was … Welsh!

‘Welsh?’ my mother’s interest was definitely piqued now.

‘Yes,’ Leslie confirmed. ‘They’re always together in the papers.’

Alarm bells were now ringing in our household.

‘Elizabeth Taylor!’ announced Leslie emphatically. That’s who she was. ‘Elizabeth Taylor!’

The ash was still on his cigarette by the time my mother had hauled my father out of the house and into his beloved blue Jaguar Mk 2. A terse instruction ordered him to drive to the Grove Tavern. In a time before trattoria, bistros or Harvesters, the Grove was where we dined as a family to commemorate big occasions: wedding anniversaries, birthdays, my getting into Dulwich College, my first report from Dulwich College at Christmas 1963 (bottom of the class, just out of academic interest).

Of course, by the time my parents got there, like the elusive myth she was, Elizabeth Taylor – and ‘the Welsh chap’ – had gone. My mother’s frustration was evident. They stayed for a drink but had missed the moment.

They had been there. Leslie had not been wrong. It was not a dream. The South London Press reported it prominently the next day. In its picture, Taylor is giving the photographer the snake eye, while Burton was plainly in high spirits (the paper reported they had already popped into Camberwell’s Fox On The Hill). This was south London news. The most famous woman in the world, on a local pub crawl.

I never did find out quite what drew Elizabeth Taylor to the Grove that evening for that drink. It was probably the fact that Richard Burton could barely pass a pub without popping in for a top-up. She did claim, ‘Even at the height of our notoriety, we could go into an ordinary pub in London and nobody looked around, except maybe to say, Hello luv – and that’s very precious to us.’

What I do remember is the galvanising effect the news had on my mother. For all of her life, Elizabeth Taylor had been front-page news, her every marriage, indiscretion and illness as well documented as the assassination in Dallas, not long before.

Like most of the Western world, my mum had been mesmerised by Elizabeth Taylor. The very thought that this unattainable screen goddess had been quaffing at the pub we used to go to as a family to commemorate big occasions was unimaginable – literally unimaginable – inconceivable – my mum simply could not conceive of the glamorous, glorious Elizabeth Taylor sitting perhaps where she had once sat.

Elizabeth Taylor was beyond famous. She had transcended mere film stardom; she glowed in her own inimitable firmament. Elizabeth Taylor was not simply a legend; she was the personification of fame, sexual allure, legend, myth. She had been famous since she was 12 years old. By 1964, then only 32, Elizabeth Taylor had gone stratospheric. And for all the scandal, illness and tragedy, that notoriety was all down to one film.

Cleopatra remains, quite simply, one of the most fabled films of all time. While others have won more Oscars, attracted better reviews and taken more money at the box office, the 1963 Elizabeth Taylor film stands alone in cinema legend.

It began life in 1958 as a vehicle for studio contract player Joan Collins. In his search for a guaranteed box office hit, following a suggestion from producer Walter Wanger, Twentieth Century Fox president Spyros Skouras found a script in their vaults of a 1917 silent version of Cleopatra and remarked, ‘All this needs is a little rewriting.’ The film was awarded a modest $2 million budget, and a sixty-four-day shoot was scheduled. When Cleopatra eventually opened in 1963 – nearly three years after the project was green-lighted – it ended up costing more than twenty times the amount originally envisaged.

This is a story of superlatives. Taylor was the first star to demand – and get – a million-dollar fee. The lavish extravagance of Cleopatra, spread over its turbulent five-year history, has entered movie history legend. That single production saw venomous boardrooms battles rage; it all but bankrupted Twentieth Century Fox, and in doing so, Cleopatra almost singlehandedly set in motion the decline of the Hollywood studio system. The film drew a line in the sand – before Cleopatra, the Hollywood studios, by and large, pulled the strings. Post-Cleo, the independent mavericks inveigled their way into the studio system. They proved that films could turn a profit on what one scene of Cleopatra had cost. They could produce successful films for what Twentieth Century Fox spent on Elizabeth Taylor’s hairstyles.

It was during the making of Cleopatra that Taylor fell in love with her co-star, Richard Burton, and the ensuing romance on location in Italy virtually invented the concept of celebrity journalism as the world’s best-known lovers fled from the paparazzi. There had been infamous liaisons beforehand, but Taylor’s reputation as a proven husband rustler was at its height. The media portrayed her as a siren, who had only recently snatched husband number four – crooner Eddie Fisher – from the arms of his wife, the saintly Debbie Reynolds.

Burton, meanwhile, had blitzkrieged the London theatre scene during the 1950s, then took the thirty pieces of silver Hollywood offered and became a film actor. Running parallel was his reputation as a hellraiser. However, it was the white-hot fusion with Taylor in Cleopatra which turned Burton into a film star.

The rumours percolated, the denials flourished, the great game of illicit romance was played out in Rome, by then already notorious as the city that represented la dolce vita, ‘the good life’. The moment that first photograph of them kissing was published, Taylor and Burton became the most famous and in-demand couple in the world.

With Joan Collins dumped and a new cast and director in place, after a desultory spell shooting in rainswept England, filming on Cleopatra finally began on 28 September 1960, nearly two years after the film was first slated. From the beginning, Twentieth Century Fox were convinced they could exceed the ‘sword and sandal’ success of MGM’s 1959 Ben-Hur. Sure, they had a chariot race, but Cleopatra had a big barge, and onboard was the voluptuous Taylor, surely a bigger enticement than even the muscular Charlton Heston?

The ancient Egyptian capital of Alexandria had been reconstructed on a 20-acre site at Pinewood Studios, but from early on, Cleopatra was doomed. Even the weather was against the production, and eventually the Pinewood sets were torn down as the rain continued to pour. The costly decision was made and filming switched to Italy. After the sets had been expensively rebuilt in Rome, the beleaguered production recommenced in 1961, with a new director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, now at the helm. The original male leads (Stephen Boyd and Peter Finch) were also replaced by Richard Burton and Rex Harrison.

Once in Rome, the newly christened paparazzi clustered like bees around the honeypot of the besotted Burton and Taylor. Respective wives and husbands seethed from the side-lines, while thousands of miles away, as the Telexes buzzed, each with tales of greater extravagance, Hollywood executives were tearing their hair out at the spiralling budget.

The making of Cleopatra was a titanic struggle from the very beginning: original director Rouben Mamoulian was replaced after four months of filming and a finished script proved as elusive as a sunny day in Buckinghamshire. All the while, Taylor’s recurring illnesses saw production grind to a halt again and again – at one point the star was officially pronounced dead.

In desperation, in February 1961, Lloyd’s of London were contacted and the venerable London insurance firm agreed to carry on insuring the troubled production. Incredible as it seems, the one name that would guarantee the production of Cleopatra to proceed was Marilyn Monroe. So successful was the blanket of secrecy over Marilyn that, had Lloyd’s known of her paranoia, insecurities and reliance on prescribed medication, they would never have suggested her. It surely would have added innumerable zeroes to the ballooning Cleopatra budget had Marilyn acceded.

Following the turbulence of 1960’s The Misfits, even the lightweight comedy, the unfinished Something’s Got to Give, caused Fox executives further headaches. Marilyn was eventually sacked by the studio. It beggars belief to even imagine the troubled Monroe at the centre of the turmoil that swathed Cleopatra.

If not Marilyn, Lloyd’s intriguingly revealed they would accept three other actresses for the title role: Kim Novak, Shirley MacLaine and Rossanna Podesta. Novak was an established star in the Monroe mould; MacLaine was on the way up, following an Oscar-nominated performance in The Apartment, while Podesta was an unknown quantity to audiences outside Italy. In the end, it was a given. The film’s producer Walter Wanger emphasised in telegramese, ‘No Liz, no Cleo’.

While filming was underway at Pinewood, there was even a trade union battle over the star’s choice of hairdresser. The British unions wanted their members to fashion the star’s hair; she insisted on her own personal hairdresser. By the time the production ground to a soggy halt in England, only a meagre eight minutes of film would ever make it to the finished film. Those precious 480 seconds came at a cost of $6.45 million. Even by Hollywood standards, such extravagance was unheralded and unacceptable.

This was crunch time: would Twentieth Century Fox persevere with the already troubled production in the UK and pray that Taylor’s health would hold? Or would the studio bite the bullet and pull the plug, thereby saving what would no doubt prove to be further prohibitive costs?

Who would put their head above the parapet and take responsibility for the catastrophe? Somewhere along the line the decision was taken. Nobody could sanction the loss of nearly $7 million with nothing to show for it. So, in its wisdom, the studio crossed its collective fingers and decided to proceed with the production.

Rather eerily, while writing this, I read of a similar predicament. In August 2022, David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros decided, following ‘disastrous test screenings’, to pull the plug on Batgirl. It was felt that the $90 million already spent would have been doubled if the film were released globally, so the decision was taken to write it off completely and bin the finished film.

For Twentieth Century Fox, over half a century before, writing off a seven-figure sum was chastening, but eventually approved. A move from rainy Buckinghamshire would help the beleaguered production, so the location switched to Rome. With Taylor returned to good health and relocated to the sunnier climes of Italy, what else could possibly go wrong?

It was when Burton arrived on set that further fuel was added to the fire. The actor had first set foot in Rome in September 1961 – and then, typically, had to wait for four solid months before he delivered a single line.

However, on 22 January 1962, when the first scene between Marc Antony and Cleopatra was filmed, the electricity was unmistakable. Ironically, Elizabeth Taylor’s last day of filming was 23 June 1962 – and her final scene? The day Cleopatra first met Marc Antony!

For all the health issues, vanity and ego, as she approached 30, Elizabeth Taylor had never looked more glamorous. As Cleopatra, she was at her most seductive, ideally placed to play history’s most desirable woman. As Marc Antony, Burton exuded rugged charisma. That first day when he arrived on set, an onlooker found him ‘handsome, arrogant and vigorous’. Almost immediately, it became apparent that the love scenes between Burton and Taylor were more than simply well acted.

Within days of their first scene together, the director was informing the producer that ‘Liz and Burton are not just playing Antony and Cleopatra’. Before long, the whole world knew of ‘le scandale’. From backstreet gossip in Warrington to presidential mansions in Washington, the world was intrigued. For example, on arrival at the White House as the story broke, PR executive Warren Cowan was buttonholed by the wife of the president, Jacqueline Kennedy, the second best-known woman in the Western world, who breathlessly inquired, ‘Warren, do you think Elizabeth Taylor will marry Richard Burton?’

By April 1962, the Los Angeles Times confirmed, ‘Probably no news event in modern times has affected so many people personally. Nuclear testing, disarmament, Berlin, Vietnam and the struggle between Russia and China are nothing comparable to the Elizabeth Taylor story.’

Burton and Taylor were front-page news everywhere – the world was spellbound, their affair trumping the Eichmann trial, America’s first man in space, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Telstar satellite linking the US and UK. Such was the scandal that the couple were publicly denounced by the Vatican. Neither cared, they plunged headlong into the affair. Burton was spellbound by the intoxicating Taylor and left his wife, Sybil. Taylor was captivated and lost little time in ditching her husband.

It was not the sexual shenanigans for which the film is remembered today, however. Even by Hollywood’s lavish standards, the scale of extravagance on Cleopatra was mind-boggling. It was not just Taylor’s record-breaking million-dollar salary. She travelled to Italy accompanied by personal secretaries, doctors, cooks, hairdressers and her very own maître d’, and later, when she moved her base in Rome, she took 156 suitcases with her. Food was flown in from her favourite deli – in New York.

The supporting cast were equally coddled in their Roman exile. Richard O’Sullivan, playing the boy king Ptolemy, was scheduled for a six-week shoot; he waited twelve weeks on full salary (flying back to London every weekend to watch Chelsea FC play) until he appeared in his first scene.

George Cole’s role as the deaf-mute slave Flavius was originally scheduled for fourteen weeks but he ended up staying in Rome for eighteen months. Years later, Cole remained awestruck by the scale and spectacle of the production, but felt confined, ‘We were already barred from leaving the [set] and now we called it house arrest. I had no lines to learn, which was hardly surprising as I was a deaf mute, and no matter how beautiful Rome undoubtedly is, you can get bored very quickly there.’

Actor Carroll O’Connor estimated that his original fifteen-week contract stretched to ten months – during which time he actually worked on just seventeen days. Veteran Hume Cronyn recalled in a Vanity Fair feature that he arrived on set the same day as Burton, 19 September 1961, yet neither one of us worked until after Christmas’.

The truly epic scale of Cleopatra’s profligacy can be seen if you compare the production with that of Ben-Hur, the Charlton Heston Oscar winner which, four years earlier, had been filmed in Rome at the same studio as Cleopatra. Ben-Hur went on to become the most lauded film in Academy Award history, garnering a record eleven Oscars in 1959. But, despite the film’s unforgettable chariot race, costly naval battles and spectacular sets, director William Wyler still managed to bring Ben-Hur in at a manageable $15 million – barely a third of the final cost of Cleopatra.

Poor Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who replaced the original director, found himself directing during the day then attempting to fashion a screenplay by night. He was buoyed by drugs to fuel him during daylight hours, then more drugs to make him sleep. No wonder he had been heard bemoaning on the Italian set, ‘I’m not biting my fingernails, I’m biting my knuckles. I finished the fingernails months ago.’ Immediately prior to the film’s opening, journalists watched as the director donned white cotton gloves to stop him ‘clawing at his cuticles’.

When Cleopatra finally did open in the summer of 1963, everything was resting on the film’s success. Not just Twentieth Century Fox, the studio which financed the film, but the whole of Hollywood held its breath to see if the off-screen magic could be transferred into box office receipts.

Cleopatra received nine Oscar nominations, but the on-screen talent and screenplay were ignored. Due to a technical error, Roddy McDowall was denied a Best Supporting Actor nomination, for which the studio had to publicly apologise. The film triumphed only in the less glamorous technical categories: Art Direction, Costume Design, Special