Free love at its tackiest in ’65 Taylor-Burton film
I’m not one of those hard-core lefties who think all life must be suspended until President Trump is defenestrated from the Oval Office. Yes, barricades must be mounted, distress flags flown. But the battle for America’s soul is never-ending. So in the meantime, martinis must still be served, weddings and funerals attended, and guilty pleasures indulged. One of mine is watching gloriously tacky old Hollywood movies in the privacy of my home on the TCM channel. Somehow I had missed one of the most glorious and tacky of all, “The Sandpiper,” the steamy 1965 melodrama starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, until the film rolled around this month during TCM’s tribute to Burton.
Set along the sands and cliffs of Big Sur, “The Sandpiper” tells the tale of a tortured and breast-heaving affair between a free-spirited artist (that would be Taylor, in flowing caftans and eye-popping halter tops) and an uptight, self-righteous headmaster of an Episcopalian boys school (Burton in a priest’s collar so tight it made his eyes pop). Though Taylor and Burton married before shooting began on the film along the Central California coast, they remained the most scandalous couple in the world, with paparazzi swarming them wherever they went.
Taylor — portrayed as a home-wrecking vamp ever since she broke up America’s sweethearts, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher — took her femme fatale act to a sensational new level when she dumped Fisher and stole Burton from his wife and kids on the stormy set of “Cleopatra,” the 1963 epic that nearly sank 20th Century Fox. (The notoriously rakish Burton did not require much seduction — all Taylor had to do was fix her bewitching violet eyes on him.)
Even at the time, the film’s depiction of the Big Sur art scene, caught somewhere between the beat and hippie eras, was hilariously bogus. Let’s start with the squareheaded Charles Bronson, who somehow got himself cast as a beach-bum sculptor and former bedmate of Taylor. Bronson enjoys baiting the pompous Burton (“Hey, padre, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” — or language to that effect). But he comes across more as a North Beach bouncer than a Benny Bufano. To her credit, Taylor wanted Sammy Davis Jr. for the role, which would have given the movie a genuinely bohemian interracial frisson, but the studio nixed it.
The stiff Burton just can’t fit into Taylor’s scene at the wild and dissolute Nepenthe restaurant, where young lotus-eaters loll about and dance to music that sounds vaguely Middle Eastern and unlike any songs that my California generation was listening to at the time. “The Shadow of Your Smile” — the annoyingly unforgettable, Oscar-winning theme song from “The Sandpiper” — was more Burt Bacharach than Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead or the Doors (all of whom started playing together as bands in 1965). Even Dave Brubeck would’ve been a more appropriate soundtrack.
At the cliffside restaurant, the minister lectures Taylor and her tribe that nepenthe was a drug used by ancient Greeks to obliterate sorrow and trouble. They look blankly at him. Um, cool. Yes, the Nepenthe is still there, hanging in the mists above the roaring surf, but oblivion is harder to find these days among the tourists.
The critics were savage to “The Sandpiper” when it was released, and for good reason. But there was something especially vicious and vindictive in the way that movie reviewers like Bosley Crowther of the New York Times (talk about uptight squares!) scolded Taylor and Burton for their loose morals. The movie, harrumphed Crowther, is “a slick and sympathetic sanction of the practice of free love — or, at least, of an illicit union that is supposedly justified by naturalness. And because it has Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the leading roles, the indelicacy of its implications is just that much more intrusive and cheap.”
Burton, too, thought he was slumming it on the film, for which he was paid a half million dollars while Taylor got a cool million (a lot of Hollywood green at the time). But there is something genuinely hot about the charged scenes between these two actors who had overturned their lives because of their need for each other. Burton’s married minister is guilt-stricken after their first night of lovemaking. But Taylor roars that she “feels clean and content with myself ” — as if she’s telling off the whole world.
“We never thought it would be an artistic masterpiece,” Taylor later wrote in her autobiography. “We were playing two people in love, so it was not particularly difficult. I must say, when we looked at each other, it was like our eyes had fingers and they grabbed hold, and perhaps something special did happen.”
“The Sandpiper” was written by left-wing screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson, who only recently had been freed from the Hollywood blacklist. Even within its kitschy formula, there are bursts of dialogue that reflect the banned writers’ rebellious spirits, including some early feminist lines given to Taylor. “Men have been staring at me, rubbing up against me ever since I was 12 years old,” she tells Burton. “They’ve always been sort of waiting for me to stumble so they can close in. Sometimes I get the suffocating feeling that they will. I see myself as being handed from man to man as if I were an amusement. Men have always had me — they’ve never really loved me.”
It’s no surprise why “The Sandpiper” has acquired an ardent cult following over the years. Yes, it’s a laughably fictitious version of California bohemia in the mid’60s. But it still channels Taylor’s feisty spirit and the heartfelt bond she felt for the outcasts of the world. She might have been a Hollywood goddess, but she knew that her almost absurd beauty made her into some kind of freak.
In its cracked way, “The Sandpiper” reflects a looser, freer time — when Taylor and Burton were still in their sensual prime and didn’t give a damn about the world’s finger-wagging opinion. There was love in the air at Big Sur, and two summers later it would wash all over San Francisco.