London Slog

British Gas have this thing. We call it home care. We'll fix all sorts and its unlimited repairs. Expert engineers will solve the upset of boilers not boilering or taps that won't wet. Electric's playing tricks or a pipe that's broke. We're there for everyone. Even blue furry folk. Your home won't feel booby trapped. It'll feel just like new. British Gas taking care of things and looking after you. T-Sensee supply excess options available per repair. Please note this podcast series contains mentions of suicide and domestic violence. My great-uncle, my grandfather's brother, lived in a farmhouse in upstate New York. About an hour from the city, Joe made movies, wrote, and directed them. I was young when he was still alive, but I do remember one thing clearly. His four Oscars sitting out on his fireplace mantle. Joe was a seriously big deal in Hollywood during the 1940s and 50s. Hello, uh, hello cousin. Hello cousin. Alex Bankewitz is Joe's daughter. Good to see you. You as well. Where are you? Alex is my age. She grew up in that farmhouse with the Oscars and with other reminders of Joe's movies. Upstairs in the house, there was a corridor lined with posters of all of the movies that he directed. And he directed 20 films and there were 19 posters. Right. Yeah. The one poster Joe did not hang was for a movie he directed called Cleopatra. Cleopatra was the Voldemort of my childhood. I mean, it was him truly, you know, the thing that shall not be named. Cleopatra took three years to make. It starred Elizabeth Taylor, the most famous actress in the world. It paid my uncle a staggering amount of money. Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. In 1963, when the movie came out, it set a record for the biggest budget in Hollywood history. But in the house of Joe Mankewitz, Cleopatra was a ghost. It did not exist. Outside of Joe's house, everyone knew about Cleopatra. It was Hollywood's most famous disaster. Everything that could go wrong on a movie set did go wrong on Cleopatra. It destroyed careers and marriages, even by the most outrageous Hollywood standards. Frankly, they were all mad. They were mad. They spent thousands and thousands of dollars on wigs for the Rebels and the Unions, but you couldn't say the weights because they're all wearing helmets. They're betting the studio on Cleopatra. Cleopatra became known as the nail in the coffin of old Hollywood, the movie that bankrupted 20th Century Fox, the movie that made paparazzi a household word, the movie that launched a torrid love affair. Richard and I fell in love on the set of Cleopatra. The conduct of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton is a public outrage and highly detrimental to the public morals of the youth of our nation. On their best days, Madonna or Tom Cruise has never seen the kind of attention that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton got. The Cuban Missile Crisis was knocked off the front page by Berton Taylor. Cleopatra was also a big deal in my family. My grandfather, Herman Mankiewicz, Joe's older brother, wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane. In my family, the saying went like this. Herman wrote the greatest movie of all time, and Joe made the worst movie of all time. But is that really true? Is Cleopatra the worst movie of all time? And even if it is, why did it impact Joe the way it did? So many people say my uncle was never the same after Cleopatra. I think the film ruined him. I think it destroyed something crucial in Joe Mankiewicz. Joe was pretty much a broken guy after Cleopatra. I began to see that Joe was, even then, a slightly changed man from the Joe's I'd known. And of all the films I think he made in his whole long distinguished career, this film I think he regarded as the greatest tragedy of them all. He was mortified by the final product. And to the day he died was really upset about it. Here's Joe back in 1972 talking to a biographer. No one will ever believe the conditions under which this film is made. I've never given any interview about it. He then refused to say anything more about the movie. I don't want to recall any of Cleopatra, but it just sent me into a tremendous depression. What the hell for? And now here I am, dredging it up years after Joe's death. I'm not sure he'd be pleased about this podcast. But I have questions I'd like answers to. And there are a lot of myths I'm not sure are true. Fact is, I didn't really know my uncle Joe. He died when I was 25, but most of my interactions with him had been on the phone when he called my dad. I remember playing in his yard with Alex. He had a dog and piped tobacco. He always smelled like piped tobacco. I also knew he was really important in the family. But honestly, Joe scared me a bit. I talked with Alex about this. I don't know if whether I ever would have been close to your dad if I'd had the opportunity. I mean, I knew there was something appealing about him, mostly because my dad liked him so much. I was intimidated by him. And I was trying to, for the purposes of this, figure out what it was, because it's not like he scolded me. And I think it was this sense that, like it was his manner of speaking. I felt as if I'd stumbled into a meeting of classics professors at Cambridge, and I hadn't done any of the summer reading. But that's simply not true, Ben. I mean, if you listen to the way he speaks, the content of what he was saying, perhaps, but actually the way he spoke was surprisingly accessible. I mean, surprisingly, kind of non-eridite. I think that there's a myth that has sprung up around dad that wasn't really the reality of who he was. To help me better understand my uncle Joe and what happened to him, Alex gave me Joe's diaries from the Cleopatra years. I'm looking at them right now. There's four of them, one for each year, 1961 through 64. They're appointment books. They're Hermes. They're very nice. He pretty much logged what he did every day and wrote down a lot about how he felt about things too. They were private diaries. They were not written with sort of like an angle that would make him seem more perceptive or better than, you know, the event. His writing is hard to read, though after 10 or 15 minutes you start to be able to decipher Joe Mankiewicz's ease. Here on February 4th, he writes, smoked the pipe of peace with E. Taylor, obviously, Elizabeth Taylor. And she blew smoke over the telephone to Fox producers. Then he writes, dinner among the dog turds with Elizabeth and Eddie. Elizabeth Taylor had her dogs with her at her hotel. I like how he writes, smoked the pipe of peace. They were almost like sort of, I think they were for sanity on some reason too, because I mean, there was so much madness going on with the production. And it was more like, you almost want a candid camera. They're going, did anyone just see that? He was almost running it down going, you know, if you find my body cold in the morning, because I've just, I've collapsed. She was bearing witness. Here's an entry from Sunday, October 29th of 61. Harrison, incapable of remembering his lines, I used every psychiatric approach this side of shock treatment. He documents when he eats dinner alone, which was often it seems in part because he's been talking and making decisions all day. Through these diaries, as well as old interviews with actors and crew members who were on set with Joe and then my own conversations with historians and people in my family, I'm going to try to figure out what happened on this famous film set. I want to understand what my uncle was thinking along the way to see if he really did change. And if so, how Joe might not have been ready to talk about Cleopatra, but I am. From Turner Classic Movies, I'm your host, Ben Mankiewicz. This is season six of the Plot Thickens, a podcast about the movies and the people who make them. This season, Cleopatra, how an epic production pushed my uncle Joe Mankiewicz to his breaking point. This is episode one, London's Slog. One night in the summer of 1959, Elizabeth Taylor decided to take a bath. She was staying in her regular room at her favorite London hotel, the Dorchester. The bathroom was covered in custom pink marble that she picked out for a hotel room and they put it in for her. Liz was exhausted. She was filming a movie called Suddenly Last Summer. She'd spent a long day on set. A bath was just what she needed. She'd barely started to soak when the phone rang in the other room. Her husband answered it. On the line was Walter Wanger. Wanger was a big time Hollywood producer. He was making a new movie for 20th Century Fox called Cleopatra. He'd been hounding Elizabeth to play the lead, calling her again and again. I was getting so sick of it, I really didn't want to do it. Wanger had sent her a rough draft of the script. He really wanted her to like it. The first script was terrible. In an A&E documentary, Liz remembers wanting Wanger to stop calling. So she came up with a ridiculous offer. And I said, yeah, tell them I'll do it for a million dollars and 10% of the absolute gross, which was absurd and I meant it to be absurd. Elizabeth Taylor told this story many times. Details would occasionally change. I was in the bathtub and I yelled the figure out through the door to my assistant. But two details stayed consistent. First, she's always in the bath. And second, her offer is always the same. Tell them I'll do it for a million dollars and 10% of the absolute gross. No actress had ever been paid a million dollars for one movie before. Patrick Humphries wrote a book about Cleopatra, the movie. He says back in 1959, a million dollars was an outrageous salary. Liz was only paid half of that for suddenly last summer. And she figured that they said there's no way on God's earth we're gonna pay one million dollars. He'd help great, fantastic. Liz Taylor had grown up on film sets. She started making movies when she was nine. She was popular as a child actor, as a teen star and as an adult. She starred in Hollywood blockbusters, National Velvet, Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I'm alive. Eventually, she'd win two Oscars for Best Actress. When Walter Wanger interrupted her bath, Liz was only 27, but already the biggest movie star in the world. And she knew her value. She understood that once you start imagining Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, nobody else would do. She was stunning. You know, she had that combination of bone structure and luminescent skin and beautiful coloring, dark hair, pale skin. This is film historian Nancy Schoenberger. She was famous for her quote, unquote, double row of eyelashes. Her violet eyes, they weren't really violet. They were probably blue-gray, but they reflected whatever she was wearing. So her beauty was genuine and much was made of it throughout her whole life. What most people probably remember her for at that time was as a wanton, fuzzy. She seemed to go through husbands like most people went through pairs of socks. Elizabeth married for the first time at 18 years old. Less than a decade later, she'd been divorced twice and widowed once. Her latest husband, Eddie Fisher, her fourth, left his wife to be with Elizabeth, and his wife was nearly as famous as Liz. Eddie was married to America's sweetheart, actress Debbie Reynolds. They had two kids, one of them named Carrie Fisher. The press painted Liz as a home record. It was a worldwide scandal. Years later, Eddie Fisher recorded a memoir titled, Been There, Done That. Everywhere Elizabeth went, photographers followed, and everything we did was reported. As Debbie and I once had been the poster couple for Wholesome Family Values, Elizabeth and I might have been on a wanted poster as moral outlaws. The husband who picked up the phone while Liz was soaking in the bathtub, that was Eddie. Through the bathroom door, Liz told Eddie what to say to Walter Wanger. Tell him I'll do it for a million dollars and 10% of the absolute gross. Eddie relayed the figure to Wanger. After a brief pause to let that sink in, he said, I'll get back to you. Truth is, Walter Wanger didn't need Elizabeth Taylor. He had other options, cheaper options too. Actresses who were under contract at 20th Century Fox, Joan Collins, Sophia Loren, Rajit Bardot. But Wanger couldn't get Elizabeth Taylor out of his head. Everything about her screamed Cleopatra. Her love life, her queen bee behavior, even her scandals. Wanger knew moviegoers still loved Liz, even if newspapers vilified her. There's a great difference between the public's point of view and the point of view of the man who writes their headline on the big speculation job. There's something you need to understand about Walter Wanger. He and Liz could have shared tips on how to survive a public scandal. Matthew Bernstein wrote a book about Wanger. He says Wanger came to Hollywood in the 1920s as a production executive at Paramount. Unlike a lot of producers at the time, Wanger was a college graduate, erudite, well-read, handsome too. Walter Wanger was this really snappy dresser, savel rose suits. He always had the handkerchief in his pocket. He wore spats. He wore derbies. He had the striped trousers. Wanger had a long successful run in Hollywood, a run that ended abruptly in December 1951. That's when he found out his wife, the actress Joan Bennett, was having an affair with her agent. He tracked the two of them to an open-air parking lot in downtown Los Angeles. Then Wanger shot the agent, a guy named Jennings Lang, shot him in the groin. Lang recovered. Wanger went to jail for a few months. Later on, he joked. He said, everyone complains about agents. I'm the only one who did something about them. When Wanger got out, his career was in ruins. Eventually, though, he started making movies again, building back his reputation. He had long wanted to make a movie about Cleopatra. By the late 50s, Wanger realized the time was right. Epics were all the rage in Hollywood. The industry called them sword and sandal pictures. Movies like Ben Hur and Spartacus. Wanger believed a movie about Cleopatra could put him back on top, so he took the idea to 20th Century Fox. The pitch was that this would be a big budget, spectacular film. This is a movie where he'll mesmerize the viewer through its elaborate sets and costumes, and Elizabeth Taylor in the lead. Fox gave Wanger a $3 million budget. So when Elizabeth Taylor told him she wanted $1 million for the movie, Wanger realized that was a third of his budget. He immediately went to work convincing the studio he needed more money. The Fox executives are outraged by this $1 million salary idea, but they were desperate for films. They want films that'll make money, so they want this film. Fox quickly bulked up the budget to $4 million and agreed to Elizabeth Taylor's $1 million payday. Walter Wanger called his new leading lady. According to Elizabeth, when she heard the news, she was still in the bathtub. And Eddie came back and said through the door, he said, okay, it's a deal. I just screamed a dove under the water, inhaling more water because I was laughing so hard. She did it. Elizabeth Taylor became the first actress to land a guaranteed $1 million for a single movie. The motion picture casting achievement of the year is about to become a recorded fact. The Hollywood signing of the exotic Elizabeth for the most exotic role in her career. And the role Cleopatra, the most fascinating woman of history who exclaimed, there's beggary in the love that can be reckoned. Once they've got Taylor signed up, they actually stage a fake contract signing. They wanted the publicity if they're going to spend a million on a star. Let's get some photos. So they actually staged a false contract signing on the Fox lot. What a role and Liz is the gal to do with justice. The publicity stunt worked. Newspapers ate it up. The Hollywood reporter wrote, Liz Taylor's asping price is one million smackers. What Fox didn't see coming was Elizabeth Taylor's business savvy. Liz signed her fake contract, then spent the next nine months negotiating, adding more perks and stipulations to her deal. She knew at this point she had real leverage. The studio had already announced her as Cleopatra. So she milked Fox for all she could get. Among her perks, two penthouses on location, a Rolls Royce with show for first class airfare for her entire family and her agent, and $3,000 a week just for living expenses. That's all on top of her million dollar salary. Walter Wanger had found his Cleopatra. Now he needed a director. Matthew Bernstein says Wanger had one in mind, someone he'd worked with before. Are you ready for this? Alfred Hitchcock. Oh, let's have Hitchcock make an elaborate spectacle film. That would be new. That would be innovative. Then Hitchcock said no, which is a very, very good call on Hitchcock's part. The main problem with finding a director, no screenplay or at least not a good one. None of the staff writers at Fox had delivered the action-packed epic Wanger had in mind. And it is hard to land a director without a story. But Wanger didn't consider the script a priority, a decision that would haunt him and the production. Instead, Wanger focused on the Egyptian sets. He wanted stunning scenery built at the Fox lot in Los Angeles, massive replicas of ancient Rome and Egypt, white stone columns 40 feet tall, marble floored palaces. Wanger hired John DeCure, a legendary production designer. DeCure was known as Hollywood's Da Vinci, nominated for 11 Oscars. He won three. He designed sets for four decades, everything from the King and I in 1956 to Ghost Busters in 1984. Problem was, John DeCure was flying blind. Without a finished script, he had no blueprint for what to build. He was interviewed about Cleopatra years later in a restaurant. We tried to build a city of Alexandria five times. And that's a story in itself, five times that enormous set. Meanwhile, 20th Century Fox was growing impatient. There were all these sets going up and no director. Author Patrick Humphries said they stopped waiting for Wanger and hired a director who'd worked at the studio before, Ruben Memulian. Ruben Memulian was a successful old school Hollywood director. He'd made some very good films. Films were spectacular in, so it was felt to be a safe pair of hands for Cleopatra. I don't think his heart was ever in it reading interviews with him. I think he saw it as a job, a bit of a chore. John DeCure was on the Fox lot attempting to build one of his epic Egyptian sets when he met Ruben Memulian for the first time. One day, that big black car came out there with Walter and a beautiful little but near and out stepped Ruben Memulian. And Ruben came over and he said, what are you doing here? And I said, we're building the city of Alexandria. And he said, you're building it in the wrong place. And that was the beginning. The next day we were on a plane going to Egypt. Memulian wanted to shoot on location in Egypt. 20th Century Fox came around to the idea because Hollywood was about to shut down. The writer's guild and the screen actors guild were headed for a strike, led by that noted union leader, SAG President Ronald Reagan. But let me say that a contract covering all of the working conditions and the rates of pay in an industry such as ours, you give a little and you get a little. Nobody knew how long the strike would last. To Fox executives, planning an overseas shoot seemed like a smart move. The sets on the Fox lot were scrapped. Ruben Memulian and John DeCure spent the spring visiting locations in Europe and the Middle East. Wanger started to get antsy. He wrote in his diary, Ruben, who was supposed to be gone a week, stayed six. And after surveying all the great antiquities, Ruben decided that it should be made in Egypt and in Rome. And we started to build the city the second time in Rome. And that went on for some months. We had the plans and the great temples were going up and we were extending the lakes for the galley's novel. And we would talk about the story. Bear in mind, there was still no screenplay. Memulian flew back to Los Angeles to work on the script. DeCure stayed in Rome, overseeing construction and, I imagine, enjoying wine and cacio pepe. That suddenly came to a halt. Fox sent an urgent wire to DeCure. It said, stop building in Rome. Cleopatra will now be shot in a new location. Not Hollywood. Not Egypt. Not Rome. There's an old saying. I've said it. You've said it. Hindsight is 2020. Looking back at this moment with 2020 Hindsight, it's possible to say this was the beginning. The beginning of the series of mishaps that would turn Cleopatra into, at the time, the most expensive movie ever made. The lack of a script. Building sets in Hollywood, then scrapping them. Building in Rome. Tossing those sets too. Now, build again. This time, in a city with the wrong landscape, the wrong history, even the wrong climate. Fox decided it was a good idea to film Cleopatra in London. It's Alexandria at Pinewood. Specifically at a London studio called Pinewood. It was, in fact, all for Cleopatra. As splendid and realistic a background as such an epic film demanded and still demands. This fortune, however, overtook the making of Cleopatra. Misfortune hardly describes what happened. That's next after the break. Indeed presents. Highers, you can't afford to get wrong. Like a warehouse operations manager. Uh, where are the forklifts? I sold them. They were too expensive. I got a great deal on these scooters though. You expect us to move a two-ton pallet on a scooter. It'll be fun. Just think of the core strength you'll build. This is a job for sponsored jobs. This is what happens when you don't sponsor your job on Indeed. So the next time you need someone to get the job done right, get matched with quality candidates with an Indeed sponsored job. Visit indeed.com slash next hire and sponsor your job today. Elizabeth Taylor hated working in London. The movie she was in called Suddenly Last Summer was shot there and she was sick much of the time. Chills, fever, headaches. But from Fox's perspective, London had much to offer. Pinewood Studios was just outside London and Buckinghamshire. There was a huge water tank they could use to film ocean scenes. Pinewood also had large sound stages. And perhaps most importantly for the studio, it had a financial incentive to film in London. Matthew Bernstein says Fox banked a lot of money in England from films they'd produced there. If they shot the film in London, they had access to those funds. So it was an economic decision, obviously, to shoot a movie about Alexandria, Egypt in London. John DeCure abandoned the sets in Rome and started all over again for the third time at Pinewood. He was clearly a man of infinite patience. On a spring day in 1960, DeCure was asked to pick up director Ruben Mammoullian from the London airport. And Ruben, of course, was very surprised to see me in London because he'd left me in Rome, building Alexandria. And as we rode back to London, I said, you'll have to come out and see what we're doing in the set. He said, he said, you mean when we get to Rome, he said, I said, no, here in London, Alexandria is going up. But he said, did the driver stop the car? He said, John, did I hear you? I said, you're building Alexandria here in London? And I said, that's right. And he leaned over the fence. He stood by that speedway and he was sick for over 15 minutes. I took him by the hospital. Instead of taking him to the hotel, he just turned absolutely green. Mammoullian was horrified for two reasons. First, nobody from the studio told him they were moving production to London. And second, I don't know if you know Buckinghamshire, but it's a long way from the Mediterranean. London turned out to be a terrible choice. What goes wrong in England? It'd be shorter to say what goes right in England. There are so many problems. The script isn't set. The weather was a huge problem. September can be nice, but it's the beginning of autumn and it started raining. There was a tank was built with a million gallons of water to represent the harbor of Alexandria. That started overflowing because of the heavy torrential rain. The set for the palace in Alexandria was just enormous. It was too too big for the sound stages. It really needed to be built outdoors on a lot, but the weather didn't work for that. Whenever a word was spoken, you could see the vapor coming out of the actors' mouths. One of the executive producers said we'd called 500 extras and could hardly find them on the set in the fog. Rain button slush on a good day, which again didn't suggest a Mediterranean climate. Eddie Fisher said it wasn't just the climate. London obviously did not look like Egypt. Palm trees had been flown in from Hollywood, but the fresh palm leaves had to be shipped from Egypt. And then there were the seagulls. They had a problem with seagulls getting in the frame and making too much noise. So someone decided to buy thousands of rotting fish and lay the trail of them to lure the seagulls away from the set. Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher landed in London to start work on Cleopatra on September 8, 1960. Photographers were waiting at the airport yelling, Liz, Liz. Elizabeth smiled at the cameras and walked calmly to her Rolls-Royce. She wore white gloves, a paisley scarf, and a long wool coat. Eddie said Liz was always sensitive to cold. Almost from the day we arrived in London, Elizabeth was sick. She ran the slight fever and none of the doctors we consulted could figure out what was causing it. At first, everyone assumed it was merely a cold, but it wouldn't go away. England's top doctors paid house calls, including the Queen's personal physician. None of them could figure out what was wrong with her. Production on Cleopatra had been gearing up for Liz's arrival. They hadn't been able to shoot much without her, but Liz remained in bed at the hotel. Ruben Memoulian had to improvise. Memoulian, talking to journalist in 1960. And you're now basically waiting on her? Yes, basically waiting on her, however. We have not stopped shooting. There's quite a few scenes without her. Well, you know, the French series, you see on the pass bar, I refuse to believe that because I'm so excited about this film and so is everybody that's working on it. To me, there will be a solution. My hunch is that there will be one and we'll finish it. But supposing your hunch isn't correct and there isn't a solution, what will happen to the set? Well, then Alexandria, which has come to existence after 2000 years, will go into oblivion again. Memoulian shot what he could, mostly wide shots, crowd scenes, wardrobe tests. He tried to stay calm, but he wasn't the one dealing directly with Elizabeth Taylor. That fell to the producer, Walter Wanger. How does this sound? I haven't used this in so long. I'm not certain that it's going to work or not. Wanger recorded the notes he kept during the making of Cleopatra. Here's an example of the kind of calls he was getting from Liz's entourage. At 8 o'clock Eddie calls. Liz can't work on account of her legs, which have been troubling her. They've swollen up in terrible shape. I was very much worried about the leg injury because I was afraid it might affect her heart. During her lifetime, Elizabeth was hospitalized more than 70 times. She had leg problems, heart problems, spinal problems, eye problems, lung problems. One time she even punctured her esophagus. In London, she had a cold, a fever, and a sore throat. And it wouldn't go away. She was sick for weeks. Couldn't work. The newspapers printed all the rumors. She'd put herself on a crash diet, or she was pregnant again with child number four, or she didn't like the script for Cleopatra and was faking the whole thing. Even Eddie wasn't sure what was happening. I was beginning to wonder if the real cause of her illness was her desire for pain-killing pills. She'd be popping pills and drinking most of the day. I discovered she was getting prescriptions for sedatives and painkillers from several different doctors. None of the doctors knew about what her other doctors were prescribing. Her headaches got worse and she needed large doses of demoral to fight the pain. She was eating demoral like candy. The most I could do was be there in case, just in case. The other possibility? That Elizabeth was really quite sick. In mid-November, more than two months after her arrival in London, Elizabeth complained of a toothache. They called in a dentist who pulled an infected tooth. After that, she improved. Her fever went away and the headaches cleared up. That lasted only a few days. On November 13, 1960, Elizabeth Taylor's fever spiked. She was burning up and was rushed to the hospital. The doctors decided she was suffering from something called meningism. Meningism is an old diagnosis. You don't hear about it anymore. It's similar to meningitis. It causes fever, headaches, and stiffness. The doctors suspected she got it from the infected tooth. Liz was treated and released and reporters made sure everyone knew it. Good news from the London Clinic and here's evidence of it. Eddie Fisher arriving to escort his beautiful wife as she left the hospital. There has been widespread sympathy for Liz Taylor over her illness. Now interest in her recovery reached a climax. The media had been camped out at her hotel. Now they waited outside the hospital. Not exactly the moment to pose for pictures, but the cameras were there by the score to record the scene. And we got a glimpse of Liz as she drove happily away with Eddie. Liz and Eddie may have been happy, but executives at Fox were anxious. Before she left, the doctors told Elizabeth she couldn't work for several more months. The picture was now completely shut down. The studio was frantic. And frantic studio executives rarely make smart decisions. That's coming up after the break. Inspired by jet engine silences, the Dyson Hushjet Purify powerfully purifies the entire room, quietly, capturing pollen, allergens, and pet dander, removing odours and harmful gases such as NO2, day and night. Hushjet, powerful compact purification, that's quiet. Isn't life grander and making it better just got easier with Starbucks' new protein cold foam? A little something, something to take your favourite drinks up a notch with 15 grams of extra protein. Turn your usual iced caramel latte into a smooth iced caramel protein latte. Add a delicious swirl on top of your drink, just like that. Protein never tasted so good with Starbucks' new protein cold foam. Subject to availability while stocks last. By the end of November, production on Cleopatra had sputtered and stopped. So after eight weeks filming in England through Fogg and Reign, they had eight minutes of exposed film that they could use, none of which featured Elizabeth Taylor. Writer Patrick Humphries again. There's another big reason Fox didn't shut down the production, Elizabeth Taylor. As far as the press was concerned, Liz was Cleopatra. She was the whole movie. And now that she was sick, the public suddenly felt bad for her. All the press coverage made Cleopatra one of the most talked about movies in years. The studio had to give Liz the time she needed to recover or face a backlash. But the director, Ruben Mamoulian, was done waiting. He offered his resignation. It was a bit of a bluff, a power play to get more creative control. But it backfired. Fox accepted Mamoulian's resignation. They stuck with Liz and dumped the director. Here's John DeCure. It was a great shock to Ruben. It was a great shock to all of us because we were so deep into this thing. We had a train that was going, a tremendous expensive thing that at this point already cost more than the entire production should have cost. And we hadn't started yet. Walter Wanger gathered a small group, including John DeCure. Their job was to find Mamoulian's replacement. Not easy. The script Mamoulian had been using was a mess. It had been written and rewritten several times and still nobody liked it. Collectively, they decided Cleopatra needed a writer slash director, someone who could craft a story and had experience behind the camera. 65 years ago, that combination was rare. When you go down the list and you take all the great directors in 1960, and you can do the same thing yourself right at this moment, and you'll see that you have to scratch all the names on because they can't sit down and write a script. One name fit the bill. Joseph L. Mankewitz, my great uncle, arguably the hottest writer-director in Hollywood at the time. Wanger had worked with Joe before. He thought if anyone could wrestle Cleopatra under control, it was Joe. He's a past master and a super psychiatrist. A super psychiatrist. I think that's a compliment. And extremely clever, although he himself is disturbed and quite unhappy. Disturbed and quite unhappy. And they couldn't have been a more complicated situation. Yeah, it was clearly a complicated production. But Wanger was convinced that Joe, this unhappy, disturbed super psychiatrist, could handle it. There was another big reason to hire Joe. Congratulations to those five talented ladies nominated for best performance by an actress. A few months before she started work on Cleopatra, Liz Taylor was at the Oscars, nominated for best actress. And Elizabeth Taylor for suddenly last summer. She didn't win, but she considered it her best performance. And she gave credit to suddenly last summer's director, Joe Mankiewicz. After that, Liz thought the world of Joe, which is important because her contract contained a stipulation. She had director approval, meaning it was Liz who got to decide who would directly at Patra. She heard the studio was considering Joe Mankiewicz and she approved. At the start of 1961, my uncle Joe was in the Bahamas on a private island owned by the actor Hume Cronin and his wife Jessica Tandy. I looked in Joe's diary. This is what he wrote on January 6, 1961. After lunch, my first try at goggles, snorkels and fins, both liked and disliked it. In general, I find myself in a cord with Will Nixon, Hume's native foreman. I got no agreement with anything under the water. Enjoyed most watching the beauty of the water and enjoying the touch of the breeze on my body. Then Joe adds this, Bugs, bugs, bugs. Other than the bugs, sounds pretty nice and Joe seems relaxed. He was also writing, working on a screenplay for his next movie. While he was lounging about the island, Joe got a call from one of his agents, Charlie Feldman. Charlie wanted to talk about Cleopatra. Here's my uncle Joe. Joe was more than hesitant. This did not sound like a Joe Mankiewicz movie. He never made an epic. He even said, why would I want to make Cleopatra? I wouldn't even go see Cleopatra. Plus, Joe knew it was a troubled production. Hell, everyone in Hollywood knew it. Still, Joe flew to New York to meet his agent. Charlie said, look, here's a chance to make the only capital gains you'll make in your whole life. And Charlie's phrase was, hold your nose for 10 weeks and get it over with. And I said to myself, why shouldn't I do that once? It's just take something that is deliberately going to make me a lot of money. But you're only going to take 10 weeks. It's only going to take 10 weeks? This, I find hard to believe. I doubt any of them believed Cleopatra could be shot and wrapped in 10 weeks. Fox made Joe a tantalizing offer. If Joe would write and direct Cleopatra, they'd buy his production company for $3 million. Joe would get half of that, $1.5 million. That was more money than my uncle had ever seen. An act of whoredom, Joe said. You're the second director that's been on this film. When Joe gave his first press conference about Cleopatra, a reporter asked him if he was superstitious about taking over the movie. Joe said he wasn't worried. Of course, I may be wrong in not being superstitious. This may be the sequel to the toot and calm and curse, but anyway, if I'm around in a month or two, you can always know whether it is, in fact, cursed or not. Maybe Joe should have been a little more superstitious because 10 days later, March 4th, 1961, Elizabeth Taylor collapsed in her hotel. I was blue and I wasn't breathing and they carried me out on a stretcher through the Oliver Meso Banquet room. Just as she seemed to be on the mend, Elizabeth Taylor was suddenly fighting for her life. That's next week on The Plot Thickens. Angela Carone is our director of podcasts, story editors Rob Rosenthal. Yako Friedman is our senior producer. Script writing by Yako Friedman, Natalia Winkleman and Angela Carone. Research and fact checking by the indispensable James Sheridan. Audio editing and sound design by Mike Volgaris. Mixing by Glenn Mutulo. Production support from Liz Winter, Allison Fire, Matthew Oenby, Julie Bitton, Emma Morris, Jordan Chips, Nicole Hill and David Corwin at Patches. Thanks to our legal team, John Renau and Kristen Hassel. The following TCM staffers help us get the word out about our podcast. So thank you to Alina Novick, Katie Daniels, David Byrne, Diana Bosch, Caroline Wigmore, Michelle Height and Stephanie Tames. Our executive producer is Charlie Tabish. And a special thank you to the Archivists at the American Film Institute, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and Boston University. We could not make these podcasts without the work of Archivists around the country. Special thanks to my family, especially my cousins Alex Mancoitz and Nick Davis. I regret that I never got to interview my cousins Tom and Chris Mancoitz. They died before we started production. Thomas Avery of Toon Welders composed our theme music. I'm your host Ben Mancoitz. Thanks for listening. See you next time.