As Liz and Dick found, drama can turn to farce in love and politics
“So, it ends in farce,” said Richard Burton, after realizing that the angry husband confronting him — in this case Eddie Fisher, the fourth husband of Elizabeth Taylor — had brought a gun.
I was at the Alley Theatre watching a rehearsal for a new play, “Cleo,” written by the Texas-based journalist Lawrence Wright, directed by Bob Balaban and starring Lisa Birnbaum and Richard Short as Taylor and Burton. The play, which had its world premiere on Friday, is about “the greatest sex scandal in film and ancient histo- ry,” according to the promotional materials about the play, which depicts the affair between Taylor and Burton during the making of the 1963 film “Cleopatra.”
That’s a bold claim to make in this year of our lord, 2018. Several days before the rehearsal, I had watched the adult film star Stormy Daniels, on “60 Minutes,” discuss her relationship with Donald Trump.
After the rehearsal, though, Wright gave me a rundown of the “Liz and Dick” saga, which unfolded when he was a teenager. At the time, Wright said, it was “incredibly titillating.” It’s legitimately pretty scandalous, even still.
Taylor was the bigger star of the two, having vaulted to international fame after starring in “National Velvet” at age 12. By the time she was cast as Cleopatra, she had become notorious, as well. In 1958, her third husband, Mike Todd, was killed in a plane crash. Shortly thereafter, Taylor began an affair with Fisher, who was then married to Debbie Reynolds, her best friend.
The sympathy the public had felt for the beautiful young widow turned to scorn. The studios, needless to say,
saw an opportunity.
20th Century Fox, for example, tried to cast Taylor as Cleopatra VII, the Queen of Egypt who got crossways with the Roman Empire in the first century BC.
Taylor wasn’t interested, Wright explained. Fisher, by then her husband, suggested that she respond by telling them she would accept, for $1 million. It was an unthinkable sum at the time, but the studio agreed.
The production was ill-fated from the start, apparently.
“Then Elizabeth Taylor got pneumonia and died,” Wright said at one point.
Antony role recast
Long story short, she revived after receiving an emergency tracheotomy, and was sent back to work. In the interim, producers had decided to recast the role of Marc Antony.
It was Fisher who recommended Burton, apparently. Taylor had met him years before and found him pretentious.
The tabloid scandal that ensued was the first of its kind, given Taylor’s staggering celebrity.
“It took Elizabeth a couple years to get divorced from Eddie,” Wright explained.
“Then she married Richard. And then they divorced. And then they married again, and then they divorced. And then they started marrying a number of other people,” he continued.
“But apparently they had very fond feelings all through their lives, even though they couldn’t seem to live together. Just a few days before he died, Burton sent his last letter to her. She kept it in her drawer.”
Sexual revolution
In Wright’s view, the drama in the early 1960s marked a turning point in American culture.
“I think that the Liz and Dick scandal was the opening of the sexual revolution,” Wright said.
“Things were pretty buttoned up, and then suddenly the buttons were ripped off.”
Wright began working on the script for “Cleo” some 20 years ago. The play has faced its its challenges too. As he explains in his new book, God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State, “Cleo” was supposed to open last fall.
The actors arrived in Houston shortly before Harvey did; when the storm came, they were marooned in the hotel.
Greg Boyd, who was then the Alley’s artistic director, concluded that the production would have to be canceled.
“Yes, well, we just want to keep rehearsing,” one of the actors said, after hearing the news. The others agreed, and the next day, Wright writes, Alley staff figured out how to fit “Cleo” into the spring schedule.
Insightful journalism
The play runs through April 29, and I’d encourage readers to see it. I’d also encourage Texans to check out Wright’s new book, which is actually what I was planning to write about before getting distracted by the story of Taylor and Burton.
In my defense, the Liz and Dick saga is interesting, even at a time when a porn star’s account of spanking the president is quickly filed away under “old news.” But Wright’s journalism is insightful, as usual, and he has some sound conclusions about how Texas should prepare for the future.
As he noted at the Alley, we should be investing much more in infrastructure and education than we currently do, given that our state is expected to experience tremendous population growth over the next 30 years, and that—as it stands—10 percent of all American schoolchildren are enrolled in Texas schools.
“We’ve got to prepare the state to be the size of New York and California combined, by 2050. And if we don’t educate them, it’s not just Texas that’s going to suffer,” Wright said.
“It’s so un-Texan to be so frightened of the future,” he added.
That’s good advice, which our leaders should heed—and would, if Texas politics wasn’t prone to farce too.