Studio Blamed Taylor for $44M Disaster — She Called Journalists & Shocked Hollywood
Studio Blamed Taylor for $44M Disaster — She Called Journalists & Shocked Hollywood
How one image on a Roman yacht rewrote the rules of fame, scandal, and power. In February 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. He circled the planet three times, traveling at 17,000 mph through the blackness of space. And when he landed, the world erupted in celebration. 3 days later, a photograph appeared in the international press.
Two people on a yacht off the coast of Italy. And within a week, that photograph was generating more column inches than Glenn’s orbit. No astronaut, no spacecraft, no achievement of any kind. Just Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton sitting together in the Roman sun. The editors who chose to run that photograph instead of coverage of the space program were not making a frivolous decision.
They were responding to something real. A story so charged, so combustible, so deeply embedded in the anxieties of the age that it made even the conquest of space feel secondary. This is the story of how that happened and why it still matters. If you have not subscribed yet, this is the moment.
Stories like this one live on this channel. Subscribe now and make sure you never miss what comes next. To understand why the world reacted the way it did, you have to understand what Elizabeth Taylor represented before that photograph ever existed. She was not simply a movie star by 1962. She was something the studio system had spent 30 years constructing with extraordinary care.
An idea, a symbol, a living proof that Hollywood’s version of beauty and virtue and femininity was real and attainable and worth believing in. She had been a child star at 10, the kind of child whose face made adults stop walking. By 20, she was in National Velvet. By 26, she was in Giant, and somewhere in between, she had been married three times, lost a husband to a plane crash, nursed another through addiction, and still managed to show up on set every morning looking like exactly what the studio needed her to look like. The public had forgiven her
these complications because she seemed, despite everything, to be trying. She was a widow. She was a survivor. She was, in the language of the era, a good woman who had suffered. Then came Eddie Fiser. Fischer was the most popular recording artist in America at the time. Cleancut, bright smiled, the kind of performer that embodied everything postwar America wanted to believe about itself.
He was also married to Debbie Reynolds, who was arguably the most beloved actress in Hollywood. When Taylor and Fiser began their relationship in 1958 following the death of Taylor’s husband, Mike Todd, in a plane crash, the press response was volcanic. Columnists who had spent years celebrating Taylor’s resilience, now reached for their most unforgiving vocabulary.
Ha Hopper, the most powerful gossip columnist of the era, declared Taylor a moral catastrophe, and America by and large agreed. By the time Taylor arrived in Rome in 1961 to begin filming Cleopatra, she was already a convicted woman in the court of public opinion. What the public did not know was that the production surrounding her was already unraveling in ways that had nothing to do with her personal life, and the men responsible for that unraveling were quietly preparing to make her the explanation for all of it.
The making of Cleopatra is one of the great production disasters in the history of motion pictures, and it began long before Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton ever looked at each other across a rehearsal room. The film had originally been budgeted at $2 million. By the time it was released in 1963, it had cost $44 million, a number so staggering that it nearly destroyed the production company as a functioning enterprise.
The original director was fired. The original cast was replaced. Sets built in England were dismantled and rebuilt in Rome at enormous expense. There were 6,000 costumes, 26,000 extras, and a replica of the Alexandria Harbor that had to be rebuilt because the engineers had miscalculated the tide. None of this had anything to do with Elizabeth Taylor.
All of it would eventually be blamed on her. Taylor arrived in Rome in September 1961, and the production was already 6 months behind schedule before she had spoken a single line of dialogue. She had herself been seriously ill. A respiratory infection the previous year had nearly killed her and left her physically depleted.
She sat for 12-hour costume fittings wearing gold headdresses that weighed nearly as much as she did in conditions that would today be considered medically irresponsible. And in the first weeks of January 1962, Richard Burton arrived on set to play Mark Anthony. Burton had a reputation that preceded him like weather. brilliant, self-destructive, magnetic in a way that actors half his age could not replicate.
What no one had anticipated was what would happen when that particular force met Elizabeth Taylor at that particular moment in her life. By the end of January, the makeup department had started noticing things. The camera operators, the lighting technicians, the continuity supervisors, everyone on the Cleopatra set who watched human beings professionally for a living was noticing the same thing.
There was a quality to the way Taylor and Burton looked at each other that had nothing to do with the script. Taylor’s then husband Eddie Fischer was on set regularly, as was Burton’s wife, Syibil Williams, who had followed him from Wales with their two daughters. The production continued, the cameras rolled, and somewhere in the gap between the official version of events and what was actually happening in those hotel corridors and on those Roman streets, a story was forming that would consume everything around it. The paparazzi
culture that now feels like a permanent feature of modern celebrity was not yet fully industrialized in Rome in 1962. But something was crystallizing. Photographers who had previously worked with access managed by studio publicists were beginning to work differently. They were hiding outside restaurant terraces, pursuing cast and crew for information, and by some accounts going to extraordinary lengths to gain access to the Chinichi lot.
In early April 1962, a group of photographers hired a boat and positioned themselves offshore near Port Stofano, where Taylor and Burton had traveled for a weekend away from the set. The photographs they took of the two of them close together, intimate in a way that no press management could explain away, were sold within 48 hours to outlets in 14 countries.
By the time the photographs ran, both Fischer and Cibil Williams had been informed of their existence by journalists seeking comment. The public era of the Taylor Burton affair had begun. What happened next shocked even the journalists who had spent months speculating about precisely this outcome. The response was not simply large.
It came from directions that no one in Hollywood had anticipated and it would change the meaning of everything that followed. The Vatican’s involvement in the Taylor Burton affair is the element of this story that most contemporary audiences find hardest to fully absorb. In late April 1962, the Vatican’s semiofficial weekly newspaper published an open letter addressed to Elizabeth Taylor.
The letter accused her of what it called erotic vagrancy, a phrase so specific that it was quoted verbatim in newspapers from Buenos Aries to Tokyo. It characterized her relationship with Burden as an offense against the sanctity of the family and suggested that her influence on young women was actively dangerous.
This was not a private correspondence. It was a public document published in a newspaper associated with the most powerful religious institution on earth addressed to a woman who was simultaneously trying to film a motion picture while managing the collapse of her marriage under the constant observation of several dozen camera operators.
The American political response was equally extraordinary. Iris Faircloth Blitch, a congresswoman from Georgia, rose on the floor of the House of Representatives and delivered a formal address calling on the Department of Justice to declare Taylor and Burton undesirable aliens and bar them from re-entering the United States. The motion had no serious legal basis.
Moral turpitude provisions in immigration law applied to criminal conduct, not adultery. But Blitch pressed the case with genuine conviction and remarkable constituent support. Her office was flooded with constituent mail in the weeks that followed, the overwhelming majority of it in agreement. Letters also arrived at the White House, at the Justice Department, and at the production company’s corporate headquarters in New York, where executives who had already spent $40 million on the film were calculating whether the scandal would help or
destroy their investment. The answer to that question was already being shaped by something that no studio executive had planned for and no press agent had orchestrated. Elizabeth Taylor had decided to stop being managed. There is a moment in the management of every major scandal when the subject makes a choice about whether to apologize, to disappear, or to speak.
Most people in Taylor’s position would have chosen one of the first two. The studio system was built on the third option never being available. Stars did not speak for themselves, not about anything that mattered. publicists spoke for them, and if a statement had to be issued under the stars name, it was drafted by six people and approved by two lawyers before it reached anyone who might publish it.
Taylor understood this system because she had been incited since she was 10 years old. And by the spring of 1962, she had arrived at a conclusion that would define the remainder of her public life. She called the journalists herself. She spoke without a prepared statement. When asked by a reporter whether she regretted what had happened, she said without hesitation that she did not regret a single minute of it.
This statement in the context of 1962 was not simply unusual. It was a rupture with everything the studio era expected of its female stars. Male stars had occasionally spoken out of turn and been forgiven. But a woman in Taylor’s position was expected to perform contrition because the alternative, a woman who had broken the rules and refused to apologize for it, threatened something much larger than her own career.
It threatened the entire narrative structure through which Hollywood had been selling femininity to its audiences for three decades. The institutions that depended on that story responded with the fury of people whose authority had been directly challenged. What none of them had anticipated was that Taylor’s refusal would not destroy her.
It would make her The production company filed suit against Elizabeth Taylor in the summer of 1962, seeking $50 million in damages on the grounds that her conduct had caused the production’s catastrophic budget overruns. The lawsuit required ignoring the six months of chaos that had preceded her relationship with Burden, the incompetent management of the original production, the unusable English sets, and the systematic failure of the studios own planning processes.
None of these factors appeared in the legal complaint. Taylor did. Her lawyers filed a counter suit. The case ran through the courts for months and in the end the production company withdrew its claims and settled privately. The film opened in June 1963. It was the highest grossing film of the year.
The box office success of Cleopatra is the fact most commonly omitted from the standard account of the scandal because it complicates the story many people prefer. The scandal had not damaged the film. It had marketed it. The studio understood this eventually, which is why subsequent promotional materials leaned heavily on the real life romance between the two leads.
The editors who had run the yacht photographs instead of coverage of John Glenn had understood something the studio executives had been slower to grasp. That the Taylor Burton story was not a distraction from the film. It was the film. And beneath that commercial reality lays something that would not become fully visible until decades later when internal documents changed the interpretation of almost everything that had come before.
Among the documents preserved in the production company’s archive is a series of internal memoranda from the spring of 1962 that did not become publicly available until long after the people who wrote them had died. These memoranda exchanged between the studios executives and their legal team show that by March 1962, two months before the yacht photographs appeared and four months before the lawsuit was filed, the studios senior leadership had already decided that Taylor would be made the public face of the production’s financial catastrophe.
Regardless of the evidence, the language used in these internal communications is clinical. There are discussions of timing, of when to release which information to which outlets to maximize the effect on public perception. There are discussions of which columnists to approach and with what material. There are discussions of how to use Taylor’s personal life to redirect attention from the studio’s own management failures.
This was not spontaneous outrage. It was a campaign planned in advance by the institution that was simultaneously seeking to profit from her performance. Taylor was aware of aspects of this, though not its full scope, and the experience of fighting it in public with the cameras watching without a publicist to manage the narrative, taught her something about power that no film role could have.
It is that lesson, more than any other, that connects the Cleopatra scandal to everything she did afterward. The connection between the Cleopatra scandal and Elizabeth Taylor’s later activism is not one that most accounts of her life draw explicitly, but it is the one that makes the most sense of her as a public figure.
The experience of being targeted by institutions, the Vatican, the United States Congress, a major Hollywood studio, the entire machinery of mid-century gossip journalism, and surviving that targeting without apology had taught her something irreplaceable about the mechanics of stigma. She understood from direct personal experience what it felt like to be publicly designated as a moral failure to have institutions that claimed authority over social norms use that authority to punish behavior they found threatening. She understood what
it felt like to be abandoned by people who had previously claimed to support her and to find that the abandonment said more about the people doing the abandoning than about whatever transgression had supposedly warranted it. When the AIDS crisis emerged in the early 1980s and her close friend Rock Hudson became publicly ill with the disease in 1985, Taylor recognized the shape of what was happening with a clarity that most of her contemporaries did not share.
The disease was being processed through exactly the same vocabulary of moral failure and deserved punishment that had been applied to her in 1962. The people suffering from it were being abandoned by institutions that were supposed to protect them. Taylor had seen this before. She had been inside this before.
Her response, the founding of Afar, the raising of millions of dollars for AIDS research, the willingness to appear publicly with patients at a time when most public figures were terrified of the association, was not simply a philanthropic decision. It was a reckoning with everything she had learned about the cost of stigma and the damage done by institutional cowardice masquerading as principal.
The congresswoman who had called for her deportation in 1962 later saw the film praised Taylor’s performance and quietly let the matter drop, which in the political language of the era was as close to a retraction as anyone was likely to get. The lawsuit was settled in private. The photographs from the yacht off Santo Stfano are now housed in archives studied by media historians as founding documents of the modern paparazzi era.
and Elizabeth Taylor, who had refused to apologize for any of it, received the Gene Hershel Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1993. The photograph that silenced the coverage of John Glenn’s orbit is not, in the end, a story about scandal. It is a story about what happens when a culture decides that a woman has stepped outside the boundaries it drew for her and the woman decides that the boundaries were wrong.
Elizabeth Taylor did not set out to change Hollywood’s relationship to female autonomy. She set out to finish a movie. Everything else followed from her refusal to pretend that she was something she was not, and from a world that, faced with that refusal, found it could not look away.