Cleopatra at 60: new book reveals ‘stunning profligacy’ of infamous Hollywood epic
Sixty years ago, the Hollywood studio system crumbled under the weight of a failed blockbuster – and the Observer’s coverage did not help.
On this weekend in 1963, the newspaper ran the second of three special features on the most expensive flop ever made – Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Called “The Ordeal in Rome”, the article even had its own logo, featuring mirror images of Cleopatra’s profile.
Now a new book, Cleopatra and the Undoing of Hollywood: How One Film Almost Sunk the Studios, explains why the world was so gripped by a doomed attempt to put the story of the Egyptian queen and her Roman lover on the silver screen.
Author Patrick Humphries reveals that many of the shocking facts about extravagant expenditure on the set that emerged at the time were only the tip of an iceberg.
“Despite knowing a lot about the problems surrounding Cleopatra, writing the book I was stunned by the profligacy of the production,” he said this weekend. “For example, items glimpsed for a few seconds on Cleopatra’s dressing table were designed by Bulgari. And for the key scene, the queen’s entry into Rome, it struck me that the 20,000 Italian extras used all had to be costumed, fed, accommodated and transported to the set. If anything went wrong, such as an elephant misbehaving, they had to all start over again.”
The production was news from the start because Taylor was the first star to demand a million dollar fee for a role. But Cleopatra was also to mark the end of the dominance of the major Hollywood studios. When it was seen that independent film-makers could produce hits on a fraction of its $40m budget [about $400m today], the Tinseltown economy changed for ever.
The Observer writer Roy Perrott, dispatched to Los Angeles and New York to uncover the story behind the film shortly after its release, did not hold back: “Twentieth Century Fox needed four years, $40m, and shooting in five countries to make its epic, Cleopatra... Never before has a major film company looked so overwhelmed by its own creation.”
Back on 11 August 1963 the Observer was still guessing at the scale of what had gone wrong. Perrott picked up the plot at a point when a new director had been hired to turn things around on the set in Italy: “Fox had now spent 16 months and $6m, enough to produce a routine picture, with nothing worth showing to any serious-minded stockholder. After six successive years of loss on movie-making, the company was hardly making sense as a business, and the president who had supervised the decline, Spyros Skouras, badly needed a success to steady his chair.”
Such a comprehensive, blow-byblow report of entertainment news is an indication of just how infamous the production had become. Not only was it judged an astonishing waste of money, it was also the film on which Taylor and Burton, both married to other people, had scandalously fallen in love with each other. In April 1962, the Los Angeles Times announced that “probably no news event in modern times has affected so many people personally”.
“It was front page news,” said Humphries. “At times it trumped the trial of [the Nazi Adolf] Eichmann, as well as the first American to go into space and the Cuban missile crisis.”
At the time Burton, a theatrical star in London, was still married to his first wife, Sybil Williams, while Taylor was married to Eddie Fisher, her fourth husband, who had left Debbie Reynolds to marry her. Taylor had been dogged by ill health as soon as she was cast and was even pronounced dead at one point, and in 1961 Lloyds of London were contacted by Fox to see if it would continue to underwrite the film.
Perrott’s third article tackled the next shock for the film’s backers: “Yet it was not the star’s health exactly that, in January 1962, raised the apprehension of the board and management to a new peak. It came out that Antony and Cleopatra had been continuing their attachment off-screen. Life had begun to imitate art, and the management was deeply stricken by the unfairness of it.”
A worldwide appetite for pictures of the illicit couple prompted a frenzy among the paparazzi, photographers the Observer described as “the fanatically aggressive cameramen from the Via Veneto”.
Humphries’ book reproduces Taylor’s own memories of press interest in her new love: “They used to dress up like priests and come to the door, or they would get inside as workmen or plumbers. Sometimes, inside the garden we were besieged by the paparazzi. They were on the wall, climbing up stepladders from the outside. The servants would come in with brooms and rakes and the kids turned the hose on them. And yet we were accused of airing our ‘little affair’ in public.”
The idea of making Cleopatra dated back to 1958 when it was planned as a vehicle for Joan Collins, another contracted starlet. Skouros had found a script for a 1917 silent version and hoped to emulate the success of the 1959 hit Ben-Hur. With an initial budget of $2m, Cleopatra was expected to take just 64 days to shoot.
When it opened in cinemas six years later it had cost 20 times that. Paper cups used on set alone accounted for $100,000, according to Humphries, while the British actor George Cole, later known for Minder, spent 18 months on the film. His role as a mute slave had been scheduled to take 14 weeks to complete. “More cement was used for the film’s Roman forum set than for the 1960 Olympic stadium in Rome,” said Humphries, adding that Taylor not only wanted her own hairdresser, but food flown in from her favourite New York deli.
Initial filming took place in England on a 20-acre set at Pinewood, but bad weather meant that only eight minutes of this footage would be used on screen, at a cost of £6.45m. A new Alexandria was constructed later on the Anzio peninsula in Italy.
Lead actors Stephen Boyd and Peter Finch were replaced by Burton and Rex Harrison, while director Joseph L Mankiewicz, the brother of “Mank”, the Citizen Kane screenwriter, replaced Rouben Mamoulian. “I’m not biting my fingernails, I’m biting my knuckles,” the new director said. “I finished the fingernails months ago.”
When Taylor saw the film for the first time her verdict was clear. She was sick. On 4 August 1963 the Observer’s critic, Penelope Gilliatt, was not much more impressed: “There is a point where the story seems to be being told entirely in terms of Elizabeth Taylor’s clothes, which run into scores and include two peculiar hats like petalled bathing caps that make the queen of Egypt look curiously like Mandy RiceDavies.”
Cleopatra eventually earned nine Oscar nominations, winning four, and even became the highest grossing of film of 1963, but not nearly enough to repair the damage to Fox’s finances. It took 1965’s The Sound of Music to do that.