Special Episode – Cleopatra (1963) – Cleopatra and Antony

In this special episode, we tackle the second half of the 1963 epic, Cleopatra.

In the first part of this double-header, we tried to keep our focus on Cleopatra and Caesar and the initial challenges faced by #TeamCleo. However, today we get to delve into the second half of the movie when Cleopatra and Antony get it on. This means we finally get to discuss ‘Le Scandale’, aka the Taylor-Burton affair that developed on the set once these two clapped eyes on each other. Their passion would result in two broken hearts, a publicity sensation and not one, but TWO, marriages (and divorces).

Cleopatra (1963) is a classic example of how the context of a film can shape how the history was received. It’s hard not to see some weird parallels between Taylor & Burton and Cleopatra & Antony. We need to work on some couple names before this gets too confusing. Cleotony? Antra? Tayton? Burtay? We’ll keep workshopping these ideas.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in December 1963, just after the completion of Cleopatra. Courtesy of Tullio Saba on Flickr.

Things to listen out for:

• Unexpected feline births
• The casting couch makes an unwelcome appearance
• Studio coups
• Editing wars
• Broken hearts (#JusticeforSybil&Eddie)
• Odd similarities with the production of Spartacus
• MORE production problems than you can every imagine!

One thing we have concluded after three hours of discussion: don’t start shooting a movie without a finished script.

If you enjoyed this discussion, you might be interested in checking out The Plot Thickens, who are doing a whole season on Cleopatra (1963).

Our Sources

Drs G and Dr Rad discuss ancient sources such as Florus, Cicero, Appian, and of course, Plutarch’s Life of Antony.

Brodsky, Jack, and Nathan Weiss. The Cleopatra Papers : A Private Correspondence. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.

Geist, Kenneth L. Pictures Will Talk : The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. New York: Scribner, 1978.

Humphries, Patrick. Cleopatra and the Undoing of Hollywood : How One Film Almost Sunk the Studios. Cheltenham: The History Press Ltd., 2023.

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, and Daniel Ogden. “CELLULOID CLEOPATRAS or DID THE GREEKS EVER GET TO EGYPT?” In The Hellenistic World, 275-. United Kingdom: The Classical Press of Wales, 2002.

Royster, F. Becoming Cleopatra : The Shifting Image of an Icon. 1st ed. 2003. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07417-1.

Southern, P. Cleopatra. Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2007.

Taraborrelli, J. Randy. Elizabeth. London: Pan Macmillan, 2006.

Wanger, Wanger, and Joe Hyams. My Life with Cleopatra: The Making of a Hollywood Classic. New York: Vintage, 1963.

Wyke, Maria. Projecting the Past : Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Sound Credits

Our music is by the wonderful Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Automated Transcript

Dr Rad 0:15
Foreign Welcome to the partial historians.

Dr G 0:18
We explore all the details of ancient Rome,

Dr Rad 0:23
everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battles waged and when citizens turn against each other, I’m Dr rad,

Dr G 0:32
and I’m Dr G, we consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Dr Rad 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Dr G 0:54
Hello and welcome to this brand new special episode of the partial historians. I am Dr G

Dr Rad 1:03
and I am Dr rad, and we

Dr G 1:07
are going to discuss the second half of Cleopatra, the blockbuster film from 1963 starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. And this means that it’s a follow on from our part one looking at the same film, but it also means things are about to get far more complicated in terms of things to do with the production and things to do with Cleopatra and Mark Antony.

Dr Rad 1:35
Absolutely. We definitely recommend you go back and listen to our part one, but just to set the scene. Dr G to do a quick little recap in part one, where we were focusing a little bit more on the first half of the movie, where it was about Caesar and Cleopatra’s relationship. Mostly, we highlighted how this production was beset with problems from the get go. They had ongoing issues with weather being unusually temperamental, which meant that sometimes their sets were damaged, or sometimes they just couldn’t film. We also have the ongoing issues of Elizabeth Taylor’s health, in spite of the fact that she was one of the most beautiful movie stars of all time and commanded an insanely high fee to play Cleopatra, just goes to show you that money cannot buy you happiness or health. She was plagued with lots of health issues throughout this production, including a particular bout of, I believe, pneumonia, which almost killed her and meant she actually had to have an emergency tracheotomy and then plastic surgery to cover up the tracheotomy scar. On top of the fact that the film company that was producing this movie was in dire financial straits. Cleopatra was meant to be the movie that saved the studio spoilers. It did not.

Dr G 2:54
We’ve got to spend money to make money. That’s how it works in the film industry.

Dr Rad 2:59
All right, that’s how it works. So there’s all sorts of complications. And of course, all of these issues have a domino effect sometimes in that we’ve sort we seen how Elizabeth Taylor’s health problems meant that casting issues arose because the initial Caesar and Antony, they had had to be recast, etc, etc. So it has been complicated, and they’ve had to relocate from pine wood studios in England to Cinecitta in Rome, and this is where most of the actual filming takes place, because there was very little done in England, unfortunately,

Dr G 3:37
well, fair enough. And the weather is apparently nicer in Italy anyway, and more conducive for Taylor’s health, as we’ve discussed in the previous episode. So probably good news for her, really, it is.

Dr Rad 3:48
But even in Rome, they did still have unusual weather problems. Like, I believe there was a particular day where it rained so hard their forums set flooded, like, really badly, they could film. And this is what keeps happening. Because I must admit, one of my big sources for preparing for this episode was Walter Wanger and Joe Hyams My Life with Cleopatra, which is essentially Walter Wanger’s kind of diaries from when he was the producer of his film, because this was he really his baby from the get go, he was the one that really drove a lot of this production. And when you’re looking at it in diary form, I actually feel quite sorry for him in many ways, because there are just so many times so he’ll be like Rex Harrison called in sick. Richard Burton too hung over to shoot. Elizabeth Taylor had more medical issues. It’s just endless. And then on top of that, you add in the diary entries where he says something, like, it was too cold, there wasn’t enough this, there wasn’t enough that it was too rainy. Like there’s just endless delays where they can’t film what they were intending to or There was even one instance where they shot a scene between. Antony and Cleopatra. And one of the issues they faced was that they were filming in this Todd ao cinematic style, one of these widescreen technologies. And this is partly because it benefits Elizabeth Taylor, because who invented Todd AO, why her third husband, Mike Todd, who died tragically in a plane crash, that wasn’t nice, but it did mean that she inherited his Todd AO filming method, but it’s an incredibly cumbersome way to film, and none of the Italians studios have a way of actually processing the film, viewing the film, et cetera. So what they would have to do is every time they shot something, they had to fly it back to America to get processed, et cetera, and then it would get back. And apparently there was a particular scene that they shot, and then on the flight, the film wasn’t packed properly, and it compromised the quality. They couldn’t process it. It came out all like foggy and weird, and so they had to re shoot it. And it’s just this kind of stuff that seems to keep on happening, just endless delays. In fact, one of my favorite delays, which I think you will also appreciate, there was even an incident where a cat managed to get into the set and give birth to kittens underneath Cleopatra’s bed, and they realized that they were there, because all of a sudden, these tiny, little newborn kittens screamed during a love scene between Cleopatra and Antony, so they had to pause filming. Incredible. They then had to, I think, actually dismantle the set, like to, I mean, probably dismantle the bed, because whilst they could get the mother cat out relatively easily, these kittens were so young, they were still blind and couldn’t see what on earth was going on, so they weren’t going to be coaxed out by food or anything like that, and it costs them in delays and labor and all of that kind of stuff, $17,000 just to get rid

Dr G 6:52
Wow. Okay, the fateful cats interrupting the filming. There is a really particular scene in this second half of the film where Cleopatra and Antony are having an argument of some kind, or a really intense conversation where they’re just agreeing about something, and it’s shot in so many different ways and in different costumes, almost to kind of suggest that this is an ongoing conflict that they have. But you get the feeling from the production side that this is actually because, for whatever reason, there was some complexities with shooting it, and they weren’t able to get everybody in the same place, in the same time, the same costumes. And so they were just like, we’ll just shoot it in pieces, and we’ll just piece it all together from whatever we’ve got, or it’s a mishmash to make sense of, something that was a lot bigger and more complicated, that did take place over a number of different scenes. And in the end, they were like, We don’t have time for this. We’re just gonna have to Franken scene. It into some sort of montage argument. And I was like, Wow, guys, wow.

Dr Rad 7:50
Yeah, I believe that’s when Antony comes back after having married Octavia. But yes, I agree. I would love to know if that was intended to show the passage of time, and the fact that they’re not resolving this argument quickly, or whether it was something more on the production side, I mean the fact that they were filming it in different costumes, but the same argument kind of suggests that maybe it was a deliberate choice that they did want to show the passing of time. But it’s hard to know, because, as again, we highlighted in the previous episode, but it bears mentioning here. Originally, this was meant to be two films, one called Caesar and Cleopatra, and one called Cleopatra and Antony. And what ended up happening with the production nightmare that ensued is that the people who worked on the movie were forced to combine it into one very long epic, and therefore a lot of stuff obviously got cut out, and we unfortunately don’t really know what that stuff was, because whilst at the end, I do have a statistic here for you, there was over 450,000 feet of film that was shot, which would have taken you 96 hours to watch

Dr G 9:03
Oh, my goodness. So

Dr Rad 9:06
there’s definitely some missing footage.

Dr G 9:08
I want the full release, please. The director’s cut only.

Dr Rad 9:12
That would be a hell of a Director’s Cut. Whilst there’s obviously there was extra footage that was shot. Not a lot of her has ever managed to be recovered. You know, it’s quite fashionable, particularly in like the nine particularly in like the 90s, there was a real spate of doing these restorations. Spartacus was one of those films that got restored in the 90s, but Cleopatra, there hasn’t been much footage that has showed up from those those cuts, which is a real shame, because we know that the original Director’s Cut was a lot longer than what we now have. I mean, there’s, there’s a few disputes about the exact number, but I believe that Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz was actually taken off the film and was told he wasn’t allowed to do the editing, but he eventually did get rehired. This is part of the production drama going on with studio heads changing at 20th Century Fox as. Were trying to grimly cling to life and try and keep the studio afloat, and there were real disputes between the new head of Fox, which who was Darryl Zanuck, and then Mankiewicz. Zanuck seems to have kind of switched his position from blaming the fact that this movie had been poorly managed by the film company, to blaming Mankiewicz personally for a lot of the failings of this film and the fact that it went so over budget, etc. So he’d removed him, but then he did bring him back, but we know that his cut was originally a lot longer than what ended up being the cinema release, because Zanuck was a bit more ruthless, probably because you didn’t have that personal attachment to it. And then even after the release of the film, there were so many audience complaints about the film being boring and too long that it was then cut down again, which I think is the version that we now tend to watch. Wow.

Dr G 10:58
Okay, so even watching it on the gloriously restored as much as possible, Cleopatra DVD set, which I possess, which itself is a relic at this stage. Maybe I’m not seeing the full flourishing glory that appeared in the cinema. Well, it just

Dr Rad 11:12
depends. I mean, if you if you’re watching something that’s about four hours long, that’s probably the original cinematic release, but if you’re watching anything that’s under four hours, then you are probably watching a truncated version that was cut down after people complained it was too boring and too much talking.

Dr G 11:28
I hate it when people are talking all the time. No, I definitely watch the four

Dr Rad 11:32
hours. There you go. So you’re probably watching the the original cinematic release and

Dr G 11:36
just too much talking. That’s That’s my review on that exactly.

Dr Rad 11:40
Now, of course, we are focusing on the second half of this film today, and I feel like it’s appropriate that we were talking about all these production issues, because what a number of people who worked on this film have said that the person who suffered most from all the cutting that went on in the editing room was Mark Antony slash Richard Burton followed closely, you’ll be pleased to know Dr G by Roddy McDowall slash, Octavian, yeah,

Dr G 12:09
well, I mean, Cleopatra is the star of the show, and Burton ends up his Antony is often a brooding Grumpy Pants who is not very good at expressing his feelings and tends to blame Cleopatra for everything. That’s how he comes across. Yeah.

Dr Rad 12:25
Well, this is exactly it. I think that a lot of people were very disappointed with the way that he came across in the final version, and they felt it was because you were missing a lot of the other side to him. They kind of just focused on one part of the storyline. However, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go into who is Richard Burton? Dr, G,

Dr G 12:45
I believe he’s an English actor. Is he not?

Dr Rad 12:49
Bite your tongue. He’s a proud Welshman. Thank you very much.

Dr G 12:53
Whoops. My My apologies to all Welsh listeners out there. He is obviously an excellent Welsh actor,

Dr Rad 13:01
Richard Burton is well known to us now because he became obviously a big star. And it’s not that he was an unknown when Cleopatra was being made. And I don’t know about you, Dr, G, but I could listen to his voice all day

Dr G 13:15
long. Look, I do think he has a lovely vocal tone to him, and he does a good Shakespeare. That’s what I’ll say for

Dr Rad 13:23
him. He does. He does so. Richard Burton is an interesting person. He didn’t come from like a massively wealthy background. He was kind of a self educated man. Apparently could speak multiple languages, very well, versed in Shakespeare and poetry and all that kind of thing. He was doing fairly well for himself. And Cleopatra came along, but probably more on the stage than the screen. Most of the movies that he’d been in before Cleopatra had not been gigantic hits, so much so that when they found they needed a new person to play Antony, and his name came up the director slash writer at this point was Joe mankowitz. He was a big fan of Burton. He thought he embodied the kind of qualities that they wanted for their Antony. However, the guy who was at that time the head of Fox wasn’t interested. Okay, so this is Spyros Skouras. Ah, yes, I recall this name. Yeah, not interested. Did not think that Burton was enough of a box office draw for an epic like this. Everyone else tried to really fight hard for him, like Wanger and Mankiewicz say, look, we’ve got Elizabeth Taylor. We don’t really need any more of a box office draw than that. Let’s give him a go. And so eventually, in May of 1961 they managed to talk Skouras into hiring Burton, and in order to do that, they actually had to spend about $50,000 to get him out of a pre existing contract he had for a musical on Broadway called Camelot mm.

Dr G 14:59
Oh, he sings as well. Look,

Dr Rad 15:03
the reason why it’s so interesting that Richard Burton, I think, ends up playing Mark Antony, is that Mark Antony is represented a particular way in our source material, and that has an awful lot to do with your main man, dr, G, Octavian slash, Augustus slash the young Caesar, whatever you want to call him.

Dr G 15:22
Yes, Augustus is the ultimate winner of the civil war that we’re going to see unfold to a high degree in this part of the film. And so it is his perspective on Antony that really resonates in the subsequent source material. And boy, is Antony portrayed as the villain. And part of this is because of the nature of the rivalry that Octavian slash Augustus and Mark Antony share, which is their they’re basically competing for, who is the best man left in Rome. This is the very tail end of what historians will talk about as the late Republic, and after this civil war, we move away from the idea of the republic in really particular ways and but up until this point, it’s always been about like personal competition in the public arena between men at a political level Who has the best claim to be persuasive. And unfortunately, in this period, Mark Antony is not in Rome as much as Octavian is. So Octavian has a greater share of the listeners ears of the persuasive folk, and he also does some things which are pretty terrible in order to sully Antony’s reputation. And I’ll get into some of that as we get further into like the action of the story of this film, but suffice it to say that he comes across poorly in our ancient source material, and this is then perhaps reflected in the portrayal we see on screen as well, because we know that for this movie, as you noted in the previous episode, some ancient sources are cited as inspirational writers. They are,

Dr Rad 17:12
and one of the one of the big influences, is definitely Plutarch. And Plutarch is one of those writers who near and dear to my heart. Dr, G, because I feel like he has often inspired cinematic adaptations. I think his writing is at the heart of most popular versions of Spartacus story. Not that he writes about Spartacus personally, but he writes about Crassus, and Spartacus comes up whilst he’s doing that. And I think very much we see the moralistic way that Plutarch writes about Antony in his life, of Antony coming through a lot of the time in popular understandings of Mark Antony. And this is, I think, because of what Plutarch is doing, right? He writes biographies. Biography in the ancient world is about presenting exemplar. You want to live like this person. You don’t want to live like this person. These are the qualities we value. These are the qualities we despise. And that is very clear in the life of Mark Antony. It’s not that he is dehumanized by Plutarch and there’s probably a reason for that that I could even say is political. Let’s face it, Mark Antony’s bloodline is in that of the Julio claudians, thanks to his relationship with Octavian sister, brief though it was, but also, I don’t think anyone would want to completely trash his reputation, nor is it entirely in octavians interest to completely trash his reputation, just like they don’t want to wholly undermine Cleopatra. You want to beat a worthy opponent, and also can’t, like flat out lie about someone either. It’s like what we often talk about. There’s a lot of spin put on source material that we deal with. There are lots of gaps. People get a bit creative sometimes, but at the end of the day, it seems unlikely that our sources are trying to flat out lie a lot of the time.

Dr G 18:58
Definitely and certainly, Octavian is skirting a pretty fine line during his lifetime in terms of what he says about Antony and when he says

Dr Rad 19:07
it, yes, absolutely, but definitely, in Plutarch, we get this idea that Antony is a charismatic, convivial, well liked person who unfortunately has particular weaknesses which become more of a problem as he ages, and particularly in this period here where he’s in his rivalry with Octavian and one of those will end up being His love for women, particularly domineering women like Fulvia, who was one of his earlier wives, and, well, actually shouldn’t even say earlier wives. There’s a bit of overlap between Cleopatra and and then obviously Cleopatra as well. So we get material coming through talking about him as being kind of enslaved in. By his love for Cleopatra. I’ve even actually got a little excerpt here, which I thought kind of summed it up. So plutak says such then was the nature of Antony we’re now as a crowning evil. His love for Cleopatra’s supervened roused and drove to frenzy many of the passions that were still hidden and quiescent in him and dissipated and destroyed whatever good and saving qualities still offered resistance, and he was taken captive in this manner,

Dr G 20:31
goodness me, so we get something comparable from Appian, actually, in his civil wars, where he says Antony was amazed at Cleopatra’s wit, as well as her good looks, and became her captive as though he were a young man, although he was 40 years of age, it is said he was always very susceptible in this way, and that he had fallen in love with her at first sight, long ago when she was still a Girl, awkward grace, and he was serving as master of the horse under gabinius at Alexandria,

Dr Rad 21:06
which is referenced in this movie, by the way, it

Dr G 21:09
is. I do like this little tidbit, because the situation gets reversed. What we hear from Cleopatra in a scene when she’s with Antony is that she had noticed him when he’d been in Alexandria under gabinius. So the detail comes from Appian, but the credit in the film is given to Cleopatra, probably to smooth over the fact that it’s a bit awkward for an adult man to be crushing on a young girl to avoid that. Yeah, to avoid that

Dr Rad 21:43
exactly, and yeah. And then I’ve also got a little quote from Florus, which I thought I would go to, because you can always rely on Florus for saying things incredibly brutally. I think he kind of takes original source material and then amps up just how dramatic it is. So he explicitly says that Antony was a slave to his love for Cleopatra, the Egyptian woman demanded the Roman Empire from the drunken general as the price of her favors, and this Antonius promised her as though the Romans were more easily conquered than the Parthians. Dot, dot, dot, forgetful of his country, his name, his toga, and the emblems of his office, he soon completely degenerated into the monster, which he became in feeling, as well as in garb and dress.

Dr G 22:28
Ooh, yes. And I see that the film definitely picks up on some of this stuff. So we rarely see Mark Antony wearing things that are particularly Roman in style, and he transitions very quickly to often appearing in clothing that we would interpret on screen as being more Greek in nature, which is in keeping with the Ptolemaic rule of Egypt at this time. And well, these kinds of ideas coming through in florus, in Plutarch, in Appian, they’re all drawing upon the sorts of things that were said about Antony in the political invective of his day, Octavian is out there making those sorts of criticisms. Likewise, Cicero not a fan of Mark Antony lays in pretty hard and so we do get a lot of historically preserved criticism of Antony. And from a Roman perspective, it makes a lot of sense. This is a guy who has left Rome essentially to the land that has been divvied up to him to look after. There’s been an agreement between Octavian and Antony about which sections of the Roman Empire they’ll look after. Respectively. On a strategic level, the lion’s share has been given to Antony, but none of it includes Italy, and therein lies his problem, because he’s sitting on the outskirts. He’s supposed to be looking after a lot of territory, and I think, from Antony’s perspective, he’s trying to make the best of it. It makes sense to get Cleopatra on side. She is in charge of Egypt, which is famously known as like the grain store of Rome. You need to have Egypt on side. How do you do that? Well, you take Cleopatra as a lover,

Dr Rad 24:15
and you knock her up a few times. Just for good measure,

Dr G 24:18
those children are always going to sell the grain to Rome at a good price? Well,

Dr Rad 24:22
this is exactly it. So this is the picture we have of Antony coming through in the ancient sources. And obviously it’s partly because of exactly the issue that you highlighted during his lifetime, and then the fact that he loses the civil war with Octavian, although Octavian wouldn’t paint it as a civil war, but let’s be real. And then on top of that, Octavian slash Augustus happens to live completely unexpectedly for many, many decades after this victory, which means that he really gets to solidify his version of exactly what happened, what Antony was like, why he failed. Yeah, and it’s part of, I think, the strategy of the way that Octavian is trying to spin this particular conflict. He doesn’t want it to appear like a civil war. He wants it to be a war against Cleopatra, against Egypt, which we all know in effect, is also a war against Antony. But that’s what I think he really wants to emphasize with what he is doing. It’s really about Cleopatra, it’s her fault. She’s this foreign devil woman, witch who has enslaved Antony with her Eastern charms. And that way, it kind of softens the blow, I think, a little bit to Antony’s reputation, to paint him in this way that it’s it’s Cleopatra using her charms and exploiting his vulnerabilities and weaknesses that have led to this situation, and this, I think, is what we see coming through in the film a little bit. But also, I think it comes down to what Mankiewicz, who was the main screenwriter and the director on this movie, he was very much drawing from Shaw and Shakespeare for his vision of things. And that makes sense, because Shakespeare obviously used a lot of Plutarch as well, so that’s probably partly where it came from, but also he had a vision that Antony’s main motivation was often this perceived sense of being less than Caesar, of having a bit of a chip on his shoulder after Caesar is assassinated, that he’ll never be as good as Caesar, which is an interesting take, because I must admit, that’s something I don’t think you get in the source material.

Dr G 26:36
I think we have too much source material coming from Octavian side to see that one coming through. Yeah, particular. And I think you’ve made a good point about Augustus legacy of being able to cement his own version of the story. Because as we go through the histories, it doesn’t seem like there’s that much in it between these two. Yeah, in terms of the troops that they’re able to bring to the table in terms of who is supporting, who like, even at the height just before the Battle of Actium, where Octavian does some things that I’ll get into later, some people in Rome leave. They walk out in support of Antony because they see part of what Octavian is doing as a violation of Roman values, and they walk out in defense of Antony over it. So it’s not the case that Antony is lacking support in Rome, but it is the case that because he loses his version of events, doesn’t get to have the same traction over time, and all of this is playing into how Antony gets portrayed in this film from a Roman perspective, positioning Cleopatra as the main enemy is a huge insult to Antony. This This means his masculinity has been completely undermined. No Roman worth their salt in their patriarchal system would allow themselves to be held under the sway of a woman like this. Antony seems up for it, though, and in the same way that they criticize Fulvia for the way she behaves in a very active way, going out, doing things in support of her husband, Cleopatra is like puvia writ large on a much grander scale. This is a woman who is in charge of a whole nation. The Romans aren’t happy about that, but it does mean that Mark Antony can’t be much of a man,

Dr Rad 28:32
no. And this comes down to, as you say, that inherently Roman understanding of how power works, that in order to exercise Imperium, in order to be a politician in Rome and make decisions for others, you need to be able to show that you can control yourself and your own household. You need to prove that you have the self control, the discipline, the wisdom, all of those things that come together and Antony the way that he is painted with his tendency to be a drunkard, party a little bit too much and sleep around is seen as dangerous. It’s seen as undermining that sense of Roman morality, because it shows he has weakness, like it’s fine to have sex with whoever you want within the you know the rules of the Roman world for most people, but it has to be within those bounds. It’s about that self control. And Antony is seen as going beyond and that scene with his relationship with Fulvia, with Cleopatra, Plutarch has that famous quote which I wish I had in front of me right now, where he talks about how Fulvia broke Antony in for Cleopatra because she was such a dominating wife. I think it’s something along the lines of Fulvia wished to rule a ruler and command a commander, and that it’s thanks to Fulvia that Cleopatra. Was able to just take over because Antony was used to following a woman’s orders. That is exactly the kind of stuff where not being in control of yourself and having someone who’s not supposed to exercise power, in a Roman system, having power over you, this is all like, red flags. Red flags. Antony should not be holding power. It’s got to be Octavian guys. He’s the only logical choice

Dr G 30:21
well, but I would like to put it out there that it’s perfectly fine for a woman to be the DOM and a man to be the sub. And realistically, Romans just need to get on board with that kind of stuff. And it’s clear that they’ve got a long way to go. I’m really interested in talking about things to do with the scene where Mark Antony is kind of really early on in this part of the film, is struggling in the east, and he doesn’t want to go to Egypt. He’s resisting going to Egypt and asking Cleopatra for help. And he’s having some struggles with that, because he he thinks it’s inappropriate for him to go to her. He wants her to come to Him. And He sends His faithful companion, Rufio, to go and get Cleopatra,

Dr Rad 31:04
who, by the way, I have to say, I think, is the actual star of this movie. I love Rufio. He’s

Dr G 31:09
great Rufio. I mean, he, yeah, he’ll, he has his moments, that’s for sure. And so he does the bidding of Antony in this Cleopatra refuses. She says she isn’t going to step outside Egypt. Why would she do that? Egypt is her place. He’ll have to come to her. So they’re having a tussle of the wills, which I quite like. And then is what happens next, which I think is one surprising given what has just been said, but also fascinating. So I’m interested in your take on what is happening next with these

Dr Rad 31:38
two. Well, this is their famous meet cute, isn’t it, even though we know, because we’ve just talked about it, that they probably crossed paths when Cleopatra was very young and Mark Antony was younger, their meet cute, in the source material, is usually seen as them coming together on the barge at Tarsus. Now this makes no sense, because not only did they meet when Cleopatra was very young, potentially, but obviously, they probably hung out all the freaking time when she was ceases partner. There’s no way that when she was in Rome, for example, she and Antony weren’t bumping into each other all the time. And we see this in the movie, right? Antony is there at meetings where Cleopatra is also present and Caesar is also present, but this is the moment where their relationship

Dr G 32:26
begins. Something has changed, somebody’s dead, someone’s available, exactly. And what happens in Silesia stays in Silesia. But this is,

Dr Rad 32:36
this is actually one of those things, though, where I feel like it’s made such a big deal of in the source material, and then it becomes kind of a staple. I think, of movies that go this far into Cleopatra’s life, if they don’t stop with the death of Caesar for example, there are certain moments you just gotta have, and the meeting at Tarsus is one of those. And you see that even in painting. So even if we’re going into visual forms of telling this story before film is even invented. We see the meeting at Tarsus as being a moment that painters often go back to as well. And one of the things that also highlights the production problems with this film, because they were filming where they were in Italy, they actually had to build these boats, all of the battles and stuff. Everything you see, they’re not little miniature models that have then been made to look like real ships. These are actual ships that they had to build because they were filming in Italy.

Dr G 33:27
I love that. I hope they kept those ships, but I’m guessing they didn’t. I actually don’t

Dr Rad 33:32
know what happened to them, but I actually think that this barge scene, I feel like it actually wasn’t a particularly early shot. I feel like when I was looking at the dates, I should have written this part down, but I feel like when I was looking at the dates of when they shot what I feel like this was towards the end of the production that they shot it. And obviously it was huge deal, because it’s a big set, having like a barge, they had to have the purple sails. They do explicitly note that they had to make them out of polyester rather than silk or cotton, because they would have faded in the sun if they were made from natural fabric. So they were like, we can’t be historically accurate. Sorry, guys, we tried our best.

Dr G 34:10
It’s amazing. But I do like this idea that the way they explain it and allow Cleopatra to keep her power and dignity in this moment is that she classifies the gigantic barge that she’s brought all the way to Tarsus as Egypt. She’s like, as long as I’m on this boat, I’m Egypt. And even then Mark Antony’s like, I’m getting on that boat. And it’s like, Dude, she’s actually come so close. All you have to do is take a step. She’s making it so easy for you now, and he’s still, like, Grumpy Pants about it, and then he gets really drunk at the dinner that she holds for him. The guy is just a bit of a loser. You have to I mean, at this point, it seems like, well, we can see why he’d be into her. She’s gorgeous, but like, why would she be into him right now?

Dr Rad 34:57
And this is exactly the thing, right? This, again, comes. Down to the way that the Antony comes across in this particular movie. The guy who ends up in charge of what we now know as 20th Century Fox, who took over after the boardroom coup, which takes place towards the end of the filming of this movie, is Darryl F Zanuck. He takes the place of Skouras, and he ends up being the one to call the shots. Darryl F Zanuck had a real issue with the way that Antony was portrayed in this movie as well. He actually thought that one of the big failings of the movie was the fact that Antony came across as weak, and he hated the way that their relationship came across. I believe his famous quote is that if he ever encountered a woman who treated him the way that Cleopatra treated Antony, he cut her balls off.

Dr G 35:49
Okay? So this is somebody from the the Roman mold who also needs to learn that it is okay for a lady to be in charge.

Dr Rad 35:57
Yeah, look. Darryl F Zanuck is someone who contributes a lot to cinema. He was a great filmmaker, but he was certainly a man of his time. It’s pretty well documented. I believe that he made extensive use of the casting couch system. I believe from four to five every day he would interview, and I’m using my flesh rabbits here, new acquisitions when he was in charge of CEO. So he’s a very man’s man of this time, which we would now look at and say, bit of a sexist pig, I would imagine.

Dr G 36:32
Yeah, sounds like it a sex pest, and probably somebody who’s sexually assaulting people, by the sounds of it,

Dr Rad 36:38
great. Yeah. Certainly, definitely sexually exploiting people at the very least. But yeah, he is a typical man in position of power at this point in time, I think. But he is a great filmmaker. People marvel at the way that he was actually able to pinpoint issues when looking at films. So there’s something to be said, I suppose, for his particular interpretation of the second half of the film as being the particular problem, and Mankiewicz and the people who defend him would say, Well, that’s because you cut out so much and it was meant to be two movies. Thank you very much. But we don’t really know, obviously, because we don’t see, we don’t see exactly what they were seeing. We don’t have all the footage. But I think this is where we need to acknowledge Dr G, the thing that makes this movie particularly famous, which of course, is the real life affair that develops between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. And this is where, this is the favorite part of always talking about this movie, because you can’t make this stuff up. It is so bizarre how much Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton seem to kind of embody the people that they are playing. Because, of course, Richard Burton is known as a fantastic acting talent, particularly as you noted with his Shakespearean abilities, definitely acknowledges a man with prodigious acting talent. Unfortunately, it was somewhat undermined by his drinking. He was a terrible alcoholic, and it came, it’s seems, from a defensiveness and an insecurity within him, perhaps feeling uncomfortable about the idea of kind of selling out and, you know, going to Hollywood, and this is the movie that made him a big star. It’s not just because he was playing Mark Antony in this movie. It’s because of the affair that developed between him and Elizabeth Taylor whilst this movie was filming, he went from being somewhat known to being a household name. His salary, I think it’s probably was times by about 50, like it was insane, he could command like $500,000 a picture after this. Can’t really emphasize just how much this particular affair boosted him, and yet, at the same time, kind of was his undoing in that it set his career on a particular path that it seems he wasn’t entirely comfortable with and accepting of within himself. And I’m not sure that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were the best couple for each other. It’s not that they didn’t have a fiery, passionate romance. They obviously loved each other very much, but it seems to have been in a somewhat destructive mode, and you can kind of see that obviously, in one of their most famous films together once they were actually an established couple Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, if you’ve never seen that, it’s a masterpiece, but again, almost because it seems like they’re channeling a little bit how they actually were at certain points in their relationship. But I digress. Let’s get into this. Dr G so Elizabeth Taylor, at the time of Cleopatra filming in 1962 is about 30 years old. Richard Burton is about 36 when they pulled Richard Burton out of his contract again, this is speaking to the production issues. He actually didn’t have a lot to do most of the time. They didn’t budget their time very well because it was constant changes in shooting, etc, etc. So he was often just cooling his heels for a few months without much to do, because of the fact that the scheduling was all over. Place, and I, once again, must say that the biggest issue with this film, it does come down to the studio. Just like with Spartacus, you should never start filming a big budget picture if you don’t have a complete script. And that’s what it comes down to all the time. It makes it very interesting for people like me, who love to see how how history gets thrown together, but it means that the history a lot of time is actually, quite frankly, completely chaotic and random, because it’s purely born of a lack of time.

Dr G 40:30
Yeah, you just got to get through it as best you can. Throw it in there, do something. I’m not sure this is the sort of thing that would ever fly today in terms of making a film if you didn’t have a robust

Dr Rad 40:41
script, if you

Dr G 40:46
hadn’t planned it all out correctly in terms of your storyboarding and things like that, there’s no way you’d get to a point where you’d get funded. So the idea that studios are just sort of kind of like we’ve got an idea and we’ve got half a script. Let’s start is, I feel like this is very mid 20th century approaches to filming.

Dr Rad 41:06
Well, look, I disagree. Actually. I think that kind of stuff does still happen. I think it just depends how it comes together. If you’ve got, like, a big name, big director and an idea that seems to work. Sometimes, I think these things can still happen. But part of the reason why it happens, obviously, with this production, is that they they need to get filming because the studio is hemorrhaging money, and it’s such an expensive shoot. I mean, the sums are a little bit different depending on what point in the production you’re talking about. But even if they don’t film anything, it’s costing like $65,000 in like 1960s money, just to keep the production itself going. So it’s a huge amount of money. Elizabeth Taylor alone is getting $3,000 a week in expenses. So just the amount of money that this kind of film is hemorrhaging. And so they’re pushing to just get started with the actual filming. And it just, it’s just such a bad idea. Everyone tries to point it out to them. Mankiewicz is like, look, what if we just had a finished script, and then I know exactly where I was going. And it means this is why we have so much footage, because Mankiewicz is writing after he’s finished filming for the day and on weekends for a lot of this production, which means that you’re not getting his best work. You’re getting what he’s pumping out while popped up on drugs and then coming down from things, and whilst he’s exhausted and tired, and his method, because of what the pressure the studio is putting on them to film is to film everything and then cut it out later, which is so expensive to do, it’s not at all cost effective, and it means that they’re probably creating sets and costumes and stuff that were unnecessary because they end up on the cutting room floor. But nonetheless, I’m digressing once again. Let’s talk about Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, so much like Cleopatra and Antony, they had met before. They were not strangers to each other. Yes, they hadn’t exactly hit it off. They didn’t hate each other, but wasn’t really much chemistry when they met the first time, and they didn’t know each other super well. However, on January 22 1962 the first scene was shot that involved both Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and it was apparently the scene where all Caesar’s friends who were Senators in Rome are meeting at Cleopatra’s Villa while she’s hanging out, and they’re all milling around and discussing things. Now, if we are to believe what was written later, everyone sensed electricity between Taylor and Burton immediately. However, you know, they’re good looking. People could be nothing. But it’s on January 26 1962 that Walter Wanger in his diaries, his published diaries, records that Joseph Mankiewicz, Director, such screenwriter, called him in to tell him that he’s pretty sure there’s an affair going on between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, because he’s quite friendly with them, and he doesn’t really want to keep it a secret that there is something going on to backtrack a little bit to what we talked about last episode. Keep in mind that Elizabeth Taylor already had just copped a lot of flack for breaking up somebody else’s marriage with Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, and she’s only just recently married. Eddie Fisher herself, Richard Burton is in a slightly different boat in that he has been married to one person for a little bit of time and has children with that person, Sybil, his wife. Now, Richard Burton had a reputation, and this is where, again, kind of weird. So not only is he a bit boozy, like Mark Antony supposedly was, Although

Dr G 44:40
who knows who better to cast in the role,

Dr Rad 44:44
but like Mark Antony, supposedly was Richard Burton, was a womanizer. He kind of prided himself, I think, on betting every leading lady he acted across. And his wife kind of knew about that, but always looked. Other way, I guess, and saw it as just something to tolerate, and that it wasn’t anything serious, and that their relationship was solid, because he was that classic case of, oh, he always comes home after playing around, you know, he’ll always come home to his wife. He’ll never leave her, Oh,

Dr G 45:16
the 20th century, just, I’m unhappy already. This is going badly. First, you’re telling me about this film, guy. Now you’re telling me about Burton boo, yes. I don’t know

Dr Rad 45:29
if this makes it any better or worse, but I know that Darryl senek wasn’t the only one doing that.

Dr G 45:35
That does not make it okay.

Dr Rad 45:36
Yeah. Anyway, so very quickly, rumors get out. And this is, again, partly to do with not just the magnitude of this production. I mean, it’s taking up so much space and everything in China, you know, Rome, but it’s also the fact that this is Elizabeth Taylor we’re talking about. She’s just kind of got a bit more sympathy back after all her health problems and the fact that she almost died, and she was everyone kind of acknowledges that she won an Oscar for Butterfield eight, kind of because they were like, Oh, you almost died. We forgive you. Have an Oscar, not really because it was her best role, or anything like that, but she’s just getting that sympathy back. Nonetheless, she’s glamorous. People are interested, and the paparazzi are a feature of life in Rome at this time, like really intrusive press photographers. We are familiar with that in our world, but it actually wasn’t something that you would necessarily encounter everywhere. And it’s not that there isn’t like a media industry surrounding the film industry in America. Obviously there is, but this is, I think, much more chaotic, much less control. They’re much more intrusive. There are all sorts of things that they try in order to get the inside wear on the production. It seems that people who are working for Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher in their home are probably on the payroll of the paparazzi. We’re talking about a film production which has 1000s of people employed as laborers and extras and that sort of thing. So it’s super easy to get people involved somehow, if you promise them a bit of cash and they can get you some inside photos. One of the more notorious incidents, which was documented by the producer Walter Wanger, was that they found out that there was a woman who had been hired to work in the publicity department who was wearing a very big bouffant 1960s style on her head as like her hairdo, and it’s because she was actually hiding a camera in there. What amazing. There was even an incident when two priests presented themselves asking for donations at the Burton residence. And luckily, the housekeeper was like, Who exactly did you say you were collecting for? It turns out these guys were paparazzi just trying to get inside the Burton household and get a bit of a scoop, because by February, the rumors are everywhere about a love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and what this potentially means.

Dr G 47:53
Wow. The timeline is very short. It seems to

Dr Rad 47:57
it seems to develop remarkably quickly,

Dr G 48:02
they see each other, and they’re like, You know what? Let’s do it.

Dr Rad 48:05
It’s all, yes. Richard Burton’s not exactly discreet about it. Chris Mankiewicz, who was the son of Joe Mankiewicz, and was working on the film as a younger man, reported that Richard Burton walked into his makeup trailer one day and announced that he had screwed Miss Taylor the night before. So

Dr G 48:21
you know, well, that man’s not keeping secrets, is

Dr Rad 48:25
he? No, no, not exactly. Now you might imagine that the studio would be thrilled about this, right? Because any publicity is good. Publicity. Sex sells.

Dr G 48:33
It adds to the drama. That’s like, what? What are they going to be like on screen together? I’ve heard that they’re doing it. It’s like now I need to see it for myself. There is

Dr Rad 48:43
some awareness of this. There’s a very famous quote from one of the publicists on the film saying Everyone’s going to want to see this film, to try and see on screen what they know is happening off screen. But there is actually also a lot of fear about a romance like this, between two people who are married to other people, and they actually referred to it at one point as a cancer that will destroy us all. Oh, yeah. And this is this kind of highlights the hypocrisy, which actually Walter Wanger was somewhat aware of and sort of wrote about, even though this is the early 1960s we’re talking about the swinging 60s attitude has not fully kicked in, we’ve still got some real 1950s hangovers for a public affair like this between two married people. You know, adultery writ large, this is not okay, and it’s particularly not okay on Elizabeth Taylor’s part, obviously it makes her seem very much like the Octavian version of Cleopatra.

Dr G 49:40
Ah, yes, all right, well, so Octavia does portray Cleopatra very poorly in his dealings, and obviously it’s to his benefit to do so, because he needs to manufacture consent for his war against Egypt, slash Antony. And one of the great ways to do that is. Is through denigrating Cleopatra. And I think this leads really nicely to the issue that crops up in 32 BCE, which is jumping ahead in terms of the action of the film, but is very illustrative of what Octavian is up to, because we do get this scene where he reveals the contents of Mark Antony’s will in Rome. And it is this that is seen as the impetus that turns any doubters that are left in the city to Octavian side, because the contents of that will is explosive Mark Antony is giving everything to Cleopatra and his children with her, and basically setting up for himself to be buried in Egypt as well. Now was that will? A real will? So these are all sorts of problems that historians have because apparently Mark Antony had deposited HIS WILL with the Vestal virgins. This is where I become interested in this.

Dr Rad 51:09
This is where you’re in our interests collide. Yes,

Dr G 51:13
all of a sudden, you’ve mentioned my favorite people, Vestal virgins. So one of the roles that the Vestal virgins had during the late Republic is to hold important documents. They were seen as a bit of a repository, a safety deposit box, if you like, of Rome, which makes sense, because, you know, lock it in that safe one of the things that the Vestal Virgins hold on to and keep inside the temple are the signals of imperial power, so they represent the safety of the state. So the idea is, if you put a document with the Vestals, it’ll be as safe as it possibly could be. Oh Antony, you could not be more. That is not how it works. Octavian manages to demand that the vessels release the will to him to the point where they can no longer resist his demands for it. He then also seems to have managed to persuade the two individuals who had placed their witnessing seals on Mark Antony’s will to change sides. And there’s a whole bunch of illegality with this, because the role of those two as witnesses to the will itself is to verify it when it’s opened upon the death of the person whose will it is. And Mark Antony is not dead in 32 BCE when that will is opened, but they do, nevertheless stand up and publicly verify that those are their seals, and they endorse the contents that are about to be revealed. All of this is part of a bigger play by Octavian to produce the required emotional response. So there’s good reason to question whether this will is real, but we don’t know, and we’ll likely never know, and we’ll likely never know, and the film navigates this as well, because it is part of octavians limited screen time to reveal these details to the Romans in a way that allows them to be like, yes, we need to go into battle. We will turn up to Actium. Let’s do the business.

Dr Rad 53:23
I think this is very interesting, because it the fact that they chose to include that part, I think, is trying to, once again, show how subservient Antony has become to his Cleopatra. And I would have liked to almost have seen some more of these difficult scenes be tackled, but it would have been hard, because one of the things that they don’t do in this movie is they don’t show the fact that Cleopatra and Antony also have children with each other. It’s just Caesarion. It’s Caearion, and that’s it. Cleopatra’s a one and done kind of mum in this particular story, which means you don’t get to see the donations of Alexandria. You get this reference to the idea that Antony is tossing the empire in Cleopatra’s no doubt very well deserving lap, as Octavian says, but you don’t get to see the full moment of the donations of Alexandria. And that’s always an episode in the Antony and Cleopatra story that I find particularly intriguing. We I think we only get it in Plutarch’s account, but we get this description of Antony staging this very elaborate pageant where he’s all dressed up. Cleopatra’s all dressed up. Their children are all dressed up. Caesarion’s there as well. They are given these crazy titles. And he divvies up all this land between them, some of which is definitely not his to give away. It’s obviously just a title thing. And some of their children are like toddlers. They’re like, four years old, so the idea that they were going to command it anyway is weird. And he definitely, I think, highlights in this. The donations of Alexandria, that Caesarian is Caesar’s actual son. I think it’s the first time he sort of comes out publicly says it that Caesarian is definitely Caesar’s son, and that he’s kind of his rightful heir. Is, I think, the implication of that. So this would seem to be, I think, almost a moment where Antony is perhaps trying to do his own version of like a propaganda war against Octavian but the way that it’s been documented in our surviving material, I think again, is trying to show that Antony isn’t thinking

Dr G 55:29
straight. Well, how could he be he’s under the sway of that woman?

Dr Rad 55:33
Yes, exactly. And the funny thing is, I had not actually realized how quickly Taylor and Burton’s romance also exploded. I mean, I knew it happened during filming, but the pace of it is really crazy. So essentially, they start filming together in January. They start sleeping together. It would seem by the end of January, February, everyone kind of knows about it and wants to know more about it, but they’re trying to minimize word getting out. Deny. Deny. Deny is the attitude and the studio obviously have a love hate relationship with this particular affair. Because on one hand, it’s getting a lot of attention for the film, which they need, because they need this expensive film to work, but it’s also a negative thing because of the moral judgments involved. And it’s in April that we start to get Taylor and Burton sort of giving up, kind of shrugging their shoulders and deciding that they’re going to give the paparazzi what they want, which is photos of the two of them together. Nothing overly sexual, but definitely out and about, like a couple, you know, holding hands well dressed and that kind of thing. And after they do that, and seemingly, kind of give the paparazzi this information, we get a very big denunciation of Elizabeth Taylor by the Vatican in April of 1962

Dr G 56:57
Oh, well, there’s a shock. I’m more thinking about Sybil and Eddie, the respective spouses of the two, maybe calling each other up and being like, What the hell is going on?

Dr Rad 57:11
Yeah. Well, there’s this very public denunciation of Elizabeth Taylor by the Vatican. There’s also a very nasty open letter, which is published in a Vatican newspaper, not by the Vatican themselves, but by a reader. And obviously, it’s one of their newspapers. I’ll read you some of the famous quotes from this letter. So they basically rip into her for having short and frequent marriages, they say, even considering the one that was finished by a natural solution, as in the marriage that resulted in her husband’s death in a plane crash. There remain three husbands buried with no other motive than a greater love killed the one before. And they go on to say, essentially, think of the children. Elizabeth Taylor, for God’s sakes, think of the children. These children need an honored name, more than a famous name, a serious mother, more than a beautiful mother, a stable father, rather than a newcomer who can be dismissed at any time. Wow.

Dr G 58:06
Okay, well, I hope somebody’s written an equally shocking letter about Burton and his ridiculous antics, because that would make it fair.

Dr Rad 58:16
They did not. And the US papers obviously pick up on this, and it gets published all over the United States as well. So Elizabeth Taylor and Burton are told to sort of lay low, but they end up sneaking off without telling anybody, and going on a little weekend away this gets reported on, and I think it’s around this time, in sort of late April, that the news of the affair spreads from just sort of tabloid, trashy, kind of newspapers into more serious newspapers, like the Sunday Times. And this is when Sybil Burton starts paying attention, because she’s learned to look the other way. And even though her house is surrounded by reporters and her children are being followed, she’s actually just ignoring it as she always has, apparently, and not giving in to the emotions of the situation. But when she sees it being reported in what she views as a serious newspaper, this is when she starts to get upset and think, oh my god, maybe this isn’t just, you know, an onset affair like all the others.

Dr G 59:21
Wow. Sybil, I’m so sorry.

Dr Rad 59:23
I know it’s, it’s really horrible. And there’s, look, there’s all sorts of things which obviously got misreported. Like there are stories about Elizabeth Taylor having, like, a suicide attempt, which everyone is fairly certain was just food poisoning that got misreported. So there is a certain amount of misreporting going on here. Richard Burton ended up dubbing it les gandal, but it is Elizabeth Taylor that cops most of the negativity, because most Italians, obviously Catholics at this point in time. So a lot of them, if she’s out in the street, abuse her as like a whore and a home wrecker, whereas Richard Burton doesn’t cop that kind of abuse, which. Again, is a little bit like it was in ancient Rome. I was

Dr G 1:00:02
gonna say this was a real mirror to the way Ancient Rome treated these sorts of things as well, because it’s definitely Cleopatra who is receiving the brunt of the criticism and throwing Mark Antony under the bus is just part of the cherry on top, as it were,

Dr Rad 1:00:21
absolutely So, whilst there was definitely a lot of fear about this affair, it seems that after about four or five months, everyone realized that, okay, this is not just an affair. This is becoming a relationship. And we start to, I think, see that the other marriages with Eddie Fisher and Sybil Burton are over essentially, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are kind of making a go of it for real. Now this is i