Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 1
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‘If it be Love Indeed, Tell Me How Much’: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and White Pleasure After Empire / Gloria Shin
Abstract: In this paper, I use the iconicity of 1960s Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to theorize the visualization and formation of an ecstatic postcolonial whiteness.
To begin with, I adapt Edward Said’s formulation of orientalism to discuss Elizabeth Taylor’s exotic turn and emergence as a white oriental that buttresses the production of her film Cleopatra (1963). Through archival research, I map out Taylor’s orientalism, in this case the malleability of her image to exoticization evidenced by her enthusiastic conversion to Judaism in 1959, her influence as “Cleopatra” to set style trends in women’s makeup, hair and fashion in the 1960s, and her relentless globetrotting during that decade and how it is read through the visual register. I also posit that this Egyptomanic moment in women’s style is a naturalization of the linkage of consumerism to the symbolic ownership of colonial others that remakes the white feminine body onto a screen in which imperial desires are played out.
I affirm that Taylor’s exotic turn is initiated through her encounters with what Toni Morrison calls an “Africanist presence” on the set of her epic orientalist film. As her persona is re-forged and permanently melds with that of the mythic African queen, Taylor’s sense of freedom and the ecstasy of her release from an ironclad studio contract perhaps not surprising coincides with her participation in the production of images of black bondage, since Morrison has argued that philosophies of white freedom have often been realized through the white subject’s cognizance of the suppressed black body. Elizabeth Taylor’s very proximity to images of slavery illuminates her newfound liberation and her rebirth as a despotic and powerful international superstar occurs at the eve of the death of the Hollywood studio system and is contemporary with a historic cycle of African independence movements. This pivotal event in her career cites a tradition of the white artist’s transcendence into genius during moments of white uncertainty, in this case, Taylor’s rise as the greatest star in the world. Furthermore, her most iconic film interpolates the white melancholia that accompanies the loss of imperial power and presents whiteness as a cultural imperative rather than purely a visual category.
Finally, I theorize Elizabeth Taylor’s affair with Richard Burton as a performative act made up of a series of masquerades in which the lovers reveal the postcolonial white subject’s desire to claim both an imperial identity and the identity of the other. Burton not only falls madly in love with Taylor as the white oriental (his diaries are replete with imperial metaphors about her body as an exotic spectacle) but I also argue that Burton’s stardom hinges on his ability to replicate Homi Bhabha’s notion of “colonial mimicry,” about which he writes, “the menace of its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority.”
Richard Burton’s masterful elocution of English (he was not a native speaker of the language), his roles as imperial figures on screen (Alexander the Great, Henry VIII) his encyclopedic knowledge of the British literary canon and his simultaneous valorization of Welsh culture and masculinity foreground the various tensions of a postcolonial white subject coming into proper whiteness, a process that is spectacularized to the delight of viewers everywhere. Taylor’s white orientalism and Burton’s imperial ascendency are truly what make them the superstar couple of the subsequent postcolonial jet-setting decade.
Introduction
<1> This article uses Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry to examine the iconicity of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton the actors who reigned as perhaps the most famous movie stars in the world during the latter part of the era of decolonization in the 1960s. I argue that Taylor and Burton function as spectacularized amorous subjects, who emote imperial desire as they are forced to renegotiate their relationship to labor and leisure during the last days of the Hollywood studio system. These performers transfix anxious viewers fearing the loss of white power after the end of colonialism through the making of their off screen heterosexual romance, conspicuous consumption, and of course their film work in which they play a number of imperial characters in various colonial spectacles. For white subjects encountering the burgeoning postcolonial world, the image of the two stars as lovers on and off the set of Cleopatra (1963), the initial site of their legendary romance, allows for the modeling of a new white subjectivity produced through an imperative of unending pleasure and a distantiation from blackness.
<2> For Bhabha colonial mimicry exists as an “ambivalence” and must continuously produce its “slippage” to be successful [1]. It is an open contradiction that reveals the configuring of identities through the projection of difference that also operates as a disavowal. He writes in “Of Mimicry and Man,”
Mimicry is, thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power. It is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, poses an immanent threat to ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers [2].
Bhabha continues:
Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask... The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority [3].
Richard Burton’s acting is a postcolonial iteration of colonial mimicry as his stardom hinges on the exposure of the contradictions that undergird his identity without the burden of race. Viewers have him under surveillance in his imperial roles in films and his expressions of imperial desire off screen while he simultaneously promotes working-class Welsh masculinity. This is read as emblematic of masterful performance because it is predicated on the acceptance by the actor and the audience of the mutual avowal and disavowal of his identity. Because of and through the use of his white body, his acting as such is read as purely performative. He is rewarded handsomely for his brilliant articulation of the English language in his stage and screen parts as his offscreen persona conjoins the heart of the British literary canon to the oral culture at the crux of his Welsh identity to the delight of audiences and critics. His iconicity as the rags-to-riches Welshman temporally disrupts British colonial power while at its service as he circuitously claims and disavows white imperiality through the delivery of his dual consanguine performances, while his ascendance to film stardom initiates his personal narrative of coming to full-fledged whiteness. His repeated births into whiteness on screen and his close proximity to Elizabeth Taylor’s own racial instability of the 1960s make up the compelling and extended duet of racial masquerade that is contradictory but complementary to their respective performances. They ease apprehensive white subjects by providing a sense of white identity’s emerging mutability and adaptability during this crucial moment of global realignment and white authorial recalibration after the official death of empire. By doing so, they become arguably the biggest stars of the decade.
Richard Burton Becomes a Star
<3> Richard Burton was born Richard Walter Jenkins, Jr. the twelfth child of a Welsh miner named Dic and Edith, a barmaid who dies of childbed fever, an infection that can be avoided through improved hygiene during delivery [4]. Born into acute poverty, he is raised by his sister Cecilia in Port Talbot, a steel town where English is spoken. A charismatic young man, his precociousness manifests itself in a love of poetic recitation and a voracious appetite for reading. He becomes the ward of Philip Burton, a Welsh schoolteacher who manages to avoid a life in the coal mines by matriculating at the University of Cardiff. Philip Burton also helps a desperate young Richard to avoid mining through an intensive tutelage that gives him the cultural/linguistic capital to escape the Welsh valleys. While in his care, he not only cultivates Richard’s passion for Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas but more importantly teaches him to speak English without a Welsh accent by guiding him through a series of breathing and projecting exercises.
<4> Philip Burton insists that his young ward give full attention to details such as diction, interpretation and delivery and coaches him through long passages of Shakespeare, particularly the monologues. He asserts, “Shakespeare is the best way to learn English… and the best way to learn all about acting [5].” With Burton’s support, Richard completes a brief stint as a cadet in the Port Talbot Squadron of the Air Training Corps in order to study at Exeter College in Oxford University for six months due to a special compensation for young men conscripted to later military service. After fulfilling his duties as a navigator for the Royal Air Force during the war, he quickly takes the name of his adoptive father out of gratitude and finds steady stage and film work in Britain.
<5> Reviewers take notice of Richard Burton’s acting talent early on. For his performance in The Last Days of Dolwyn (1949),
One critic notes that Burton has all of the qualifications of a leading man that the British film industry so badly needs at this juncture: youth, good looks, a photogenic face, obviously alert intelligence, and a trick of getting the maximum of attention with a minimum of fuss [6].
His critically acclaimed performance as Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I during the 1951 season at Stratford establishes his British stardom. Critic Kenneth Tynan exclaims,
His playing of Prince Hal turned interested speculation to awe almost as soon as he started to speak; in the first intermission, local critics stood agape in the lobbies [7].
At this time Burton is already famous for the off-stage persona most familiar to U.S. film audiences: he is the heavy drinking, garrulous Welshman, alive with story-telling and excessive sexual exploits. Eager for financial security, he signs a three- picture deal with 20th Century- Fox and stars in My Cousin Rachel (1952), The Robe (1953) and Desert Rats (1953) and is nominated for Academy Awards for his performances in his first two Hollywood films.
<6> Besides Richard Burton’s much celebrated tenure on Broadway in 1964 as Hamlet which ran for an unprecedented 136 performances, his famous roles include his Tony Award winning performance as King Arthur in Lerner and Loewe’s musical Camelot (1960), reportedly a favorite of John F. Kennedy’s that becomes a metonym for his administration and its projects to expand American Empire and rally against Cold War antagonisms through the containment of Vietnam and the conquest of the moon [8]. According to Mary L. Dudziak, while Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of Kennedy’s civil rights legacy after his assassination secures the foundation for the myth of America’s Camelot, U.S. racial discrimination is only a concern for the Kennedy White House when it is perceived as a threat to national security, possibly affecting U.S. relations with a newly emerging bloc of countries in Asia and Africa who may align with the Soviet Union against the United States because of American racism [9]. In fact, John F. Kennedy is considered by aides to be unconcerned with civil rights when he is elected in 1960. His priorities in office according to Harris Wofford, his chief advisor on civil rights matters during his presidential campaign, continued to be foreign policy, peace and relations with the Soviet Union [10]. The Kennedy Administration’s choosing to extend U.S. authority in the world over the pursuit of racial justice on domestic soil coincides with Richard Burton’s timely rise as a star of imperial dramas that celebrate the expansion of white power.
<7> Burton achieves international film fame for his portrayal of Roman general Mark Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) and his performances as Alexander the Great (1956) and King Henry VIII (1969) are well-known. All of these imperial figures exist at a junction between the consolidation of power and its unraveling and all are performed precisely at a historical moment when imperiality is being reconfigured in the postcolonial social world. Filmically, these flashpoints are represented as crises in masculinity that are resolved through the subordination of the unruly woman which then reestablishes imperial order.
<8> For example, Alexander, the young king of Macedonia conquers the Persians with the encouragement of his overbearing mother Queen Olympias and only through his triumphs as a colonizer and a transmitter of Hellenistic culture in Asia does he finally meet her expectations, assuage her disquieting temper and overshadow his father’s royal legacy. Henry VIII breaks from the Catholic Church to wed and bed the ambitious social-climbing Anne Boleyn. Hoping to guarantee the survival of his dynasty through the birthing of a male heir, he ultimately beheads her when she fails him and feels only a semblance of domestic tranquility during his short subsequent romance with Jane Seymour. In the case of Cleopatra, the Roman Republic girds itself against the dangerous queen, destroying her and forcibly subsuming Egypt, the site of her cultural transgressions, within the newly established greater Roman Empire.
<9> Richard Burton’s role as Mark Antony and his extra-marital affair with Elizabeth Taylor on set of Cleopatra are of particular interest because their pairing becomes a performative site that shows how imperial desire after empire does not dissipate, but rather claims the white imagination and body as it configures white postcolonial identity through a fetishization of personal power and pleasure. When co-star Martin Landau asks Burton about the origins of the affair he tells him that Taylor’s body is intoxicating. Their director Joseph Mankiewicz theorizes about the attraction saying
Richard Burton was overawed by her sheer power in Hollywood. Her power and her wealth. She was virtually brought up in Hollywood, and she knew how to get what she wanted, and people fell over themselves to give it to her. This is incredible power, and Richard loved that about her. She had a great contract because she had a great head for business, and he was mesmerized just by her contract. You put all that together as well as her staggering beauty and you have a very potent combination of sexual and economic power which Richard clearly found unable to resist [11].
Burton’s inability to resist Taylor and his delirium in her presence is partly a discourse of addiction, a subjectivity that is first socially constructed through British colonialism. According to Eve Sedgwick in her reading of Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards’s work on opium eating, drug use is a phenomenon that shifts from being a set of acts to a practice that is tied to an identity which emerges from the changing of class and imperial relations and the pervasiveness of medical authority in 19th Century Britain [12]. Sedgwick writes that the taxonomic reframing of the drug user to the addict changes the basic terms about him from a subject who operates in relative stability and control to one who is propelled into a narrative of decline and fatality. Burton of course is an actual addict whose excessive drinking ravages his health. While undergoing surgery in February 1981, doctors discover that his entire spinal column is coated with crystallized alcohol [13]. Taylor also seeks treatment for alcohol abuse in 1983 at the Betty Ford Center where the former First Lady becomes her first sponsor [14].
<10> Richard Burton’s love for and unwavering fascination with Elizabeth Taylor constitute a discursive body reliant on imperial metaphors to become a narrative of boundless colonizing desire. The couple is an embodiment of a narcotic postcolonial whiteness that reorganizes their labor and leisure under the rubric of the constant pursuit of pleasure that rivets audiences. They perform whiteness as a renewing and continuous site of personal power, erotic adventure, and seemingly infinite mobility through the glamourization of sex, outrageous consumption, and globe-trotting. When Richard Burton marries Elizabeth Taylor (the first time) in 1964, he presents her with a suite of emeralds from Rome’s famed Bulgari jewelry store and continues to shower her with diamonds throughout their tempestuous eleven years of marriage. These sumptuous gems, including his most famous acquisitions, the Taylor-Burton and the Krupp Diamonds, are her trophies of romantic conquest. But more importantly they are forms of commodity fetishism which, according to anthropologist Michael T. Taussig, are the almost magical objects that separate and alienate the worker from his labor and mark Richard Burton’s bypassing of the coal mines of Wales to his path of real and imagined imperiality [15].
<11> An avid diarist, Burton recalls his first encounter with his twice and future wife, Elizabeth Taylor in 1952 at his first Hollywood pool party, years before seeing her again on set in Rome. Burton has her under surveillance and his description is replete with imperial metaphors:
It was my first time in California and my first visit to a swank house.
Wet brown arms reached out of the pool and shook my hand.
I affected to become social with the others but out of the corner of my mind
—while I played for the others the part of a poor miner’s son who was puzzled,
but delighted by the attention these lovely people paid to him—
I had her under close observation... She was unquestionable gorgeous... She was lavish.
She was a dark unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much, and not only that,
she was totally ignoring me...I became frustrated almost to screaming.
He continues to write about Taylor on another occasion exclaiming,
She was famine, fire, destruction, plague, the only true begetter. Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires before they withered… her body was a miracle of construction [16].
Richard Burton writes the quoted entry twelve years after this foundational encounter with Taylor. Even with hindsight or because of it, he is enthralled by her beauty, and exhilarated as an outsider by his entrance into this exotic and forbidden Hollywood world of “brown arms” and suntanned bodies. His hyperbolic description is akin to the words of the other Richard Burton, the prolific European translator of The Kama Sutra (1883) and A Thousand and One Nights (1885).
<12> A soldier, explorer and ethnographer, Captain Richard Francis Burton is a noted British orientalist during the era of high imperialism and his most famous exploit is his hajj to Mecca in 1853 for which he disguises himself as a Muslim to record the rites prohibited to non-converts. His observations fuel British imperial fantasies of the racial other as he and his contemporaries actively participate in the production of discourses that categorize notions of eastern difference on the basis of linguistics, biology, and culture that captivates the Victorian imaginary [17]. He enters Mecca on September 11 and he finds himself before the huge square catafalque, the Ka’aba, the most sacred site of Islam and exclaims,
There at last it lay...realizing the plans and hopes of many and many a year... Few Moslems contemplate for the first time the Ka’abah without fear and awe [18].
Captain Burton tries to observe all rites including drinking from the sacred well of Zamzam and the ceremony of Tawaf, the circumambulation of the Ka’aba in imitation of the triumphant Prophet Muhammad when he returned to Mecca as a conqueror after his exile in Medina. The next day following midday prayers, while trying to take notes, Burton writes that he becomes distracted by
A tall girl, about eighteen years old, with regular features, a skin somewhat citrine-coloured, but soft and clear, symmetrical eyebrows, the most beautiful eyes, and a figure all grace... The shape was what the Arabs love, soft, bending, and relaxed, as a woman’s ought to be [19].
He flirts with the girl and claims, “She smiled imperceptibly, and turned away. The pilgrim was in ecstasy.” Arguably she is not the only pilgrim in ecstasy.
<13> Historian James Clifford defines travel as a “range of practices, for situating a self in a space or spaces grown too large, a form of both exploration and discipline [20].” I use these two episodes separated in space and time to illustrate the tangibility of masculine imperial desire through the eroticization of the racialized feminine body. Furthermore both Burtons highlight the role of performance as a form of discipline in the imperial endeavor. The Victorian Burton is a polyglot, purportedly with the ability to speak a dozen languages including Hindustani and Arabic and is taken into imperial service because of his aptitude for languages, his desire for fortune and renown and his eagerness to assimilate amongst nonwhites to gather forbidden (often sexual) knowledge. After all he has himself circumcised in order to pass as a Muslim in preparation for the hajj and to be able to visit Muslim prostitutes while in the Middle East [21].
Elizabeth Taylor as an Oriental in Whiteface
<14> As he foreshadows in his diaries, the postcolonial Richard Burton falls in love with Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra when her staggering beauty is framed by her exotic turn. I posit that this gesture is initiated through her encounters with what Toni Morrison calls an “Africanist presence” on the set of Cleopatra (1963) itself. She describes Africanism
as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people [22].
It is most often a trope mobilized to help white Americans define modernity, individualism and freedom. Morrison in agreement with sociologist Orlando Patterson asserts that
the concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—than slavery [23].
Elizabeth Taylor’s persona is re-forged and permanently melds with that of the mythic Oriental queen and captivates the public imagination because of her expressions of ecstasy in her newfound freedoms. Her release from an ironclad MGM studio contract and her engrossing affair with Burton are contrasted against her participation in the production of images of black bondage, discursively and visually rearticulating white power through scenarios of black enslavement as commercial entertainment. Her rebirth as a despotic and powerful international superstar follows the representations of her death in various media: on film, in tabloids and in the set of memento mori portraits of her by Andy Warhol, the Liz series (1963), which he produces because he fears for her death [24].
<15> Elizabeth Taylor’s emergence as a white oriental in multiple media whose hypersexuality and explicitly nonwestern glamour on and off screen beguiles the public occurs at the eve of the death of the Hollywood studio system and coincides with a historic cycle of African independence movements that initiates statehood for seventeen nations on the continent in 1960 alone [25]. This pivotal shift in Taylor’s image cites a tradition of the white artist’s transcendence into genius during moments of white uncertainty. Here it takes the form of melancholia that follows the loss of imperial power. Its primary affect of grief forms a new imperative of white pleasure and is then expressed within systems of visual representation through narratives of death and rebirth.
<16> These expressions reset the limits of white liberation, best expressed by the celebration of the unhindered pursuit of white revelry most often through and against the presence of black subjects struggling for freedom. And so often they become “breakthroughs” for white artists and seminal moments in western art. During this film, Elizabeth Taylor becomes more than just the world’s most famous movie star but turns into an extrafilmic iconic figure who orchestrates her break from the archaic modes of labor and image circulation tied to the dead studio system and paves her way to do different cultural work after her tenure as a film actor is over, primarily her AIDS activism, which she begins in the 1980s. This separation between star and studio echoes the nostalgic impulses of Cleopatra production discourse that mourns the end of the studios’ former imperial dominance through a celebration of its production values that have then been revised as both highly artistic and artisanal.
<17> The photos and the ancillary gossip that follow the onset Taylor-Burton affair as specters during production become objects of commercial exchange within a media landscape that is shifting in correspondence to both the changes in Taylor’s image as a sexualized and racialized body—the spectacular racially—liminal seductress unmoored, unencumbered by the bonds of marriage and outside the control of the studio—and the new trajectories of stardom and vectors of star power that Taylor’s particular rise and divorce from the contract system of the studios make possible. The majority of the photos of the two stars together are glimpses into their life off- set, as lovers in and of leisure, often with Elizabeth Taylor still in full Cleopatra makeup.
<18> The most famous photo of the pair which ushers a seminal shift in the production of candid celebrity photography and its rabid consumption features a beaming Taylor in a frilly bikini with her face and considerable cleavage to Burton. He is wearing swim trunks with his back turned to the camera as the couple sun themselves on a yacht off the Italian coast of Ischia. Taken with a telefoto lens by noted photographer Bert Stern most famous for his gallery portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor shows audiences that is she always Cleopatra—her face ornately decorated with exotic cosmetics and seducing men on her barge in the Mediterranean even when not filming. Her performance as the unapologetic white oriental globally markets a fantasy of sexual liberation, at the core of the personal freedom desired by white subjects who do not find the pleasures that are supposedly guaranteed through marriage and work to be enough.
<19> Elizabeth Taylor takes the image of the oriental woman that has been an object of fantasy in the white western imagination for centuries to adapt for her own use fully transforming into the exotic figure that Richard Burton fantasizes about in 1952, a formation the preceding Burton marvels about in Mecca in 1853. While the oriental woman and her perceived uncontrollable licentiousness are tied to foreign spaces of lawless paradise that justifies their control, the star becomes the oriental who can not be controlled [26]. Taylor’s inversion of the colonial fantasy of oriental sexuality functions in ways to give her inordinate amounts of pleasure while tapping into her newfound power to experience the gains tied to her free-lancing as a film actor including the astounding fee for Cleopatra which she negotiates herself. Through the spectacularization of her transnational unstoppable sexuality she expands the purviews of white pleasure to be borderless for postcolonial whites fearing the loss of power after decolonization.
<20> While in this form, Elizabeth Taylor shoots Cleopatra’s most magnificent scene. Richard Burton becomes so hypnotized by her power to enthrall her audience that he speaks for weeks on end about her entrance into Rome sitting atop a fifty-foot tall onyx Sphinx. She is adorned in a gold gown and wears an impressive golden headdress as a throng of slaves pulls her through the Arch of Titus. As she passes through this monument of western architectural achievement she signifies to viewers everywhere her cinematic rebirth as an oriental in whiteface, ending her outmoded tenure as an American movie princess by crowning herself as a global superstar whose persona eclipses the power of Hollywood largely because of her engrossing extra-cinematic racial masquerade [27].
<21> Theorist Edward Said describes orientalism in several ways, including as “a western style of dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient,” and as “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western Experience [28].” As is the case of Cleopatra and Elizabeth Taylor’s remade image concurrent to the film’s production, “authority over the Orient” does not only pertain to territorial and administrative jurisdiction but also to representative and discursive powers that reset the Occidental understanding of the Oriental, often as a site of western pleasure. After Taylor is lifted onto a royal sedan and is carried by a group of Nubian slaves she carefully walks down a set of stairs to first bow to Julius Caesar played by Rex Harrison and then to wink at him, showing viewers that she and Cleopatra are both masters of this exotic spectacle. Not only is her physical elevation made possible by the labor of black bodies as she sits raised in foreground, the scene’s visual economy puts the primary focus on her, orienting the viewer away from the black Sphinx statue, which is placed at a distance behind her.
<22> While the blackened sphinx implicitly suggests that Egypt is a cradle of black African culture, this sequence utilizes a spectacle of black slavery as both an object of white pleasure and to assert that blackness only signifies subservience and is purely ephemeral, as the slaves are mobilized mostly for show to highlight Cleopatra’s and Elizabeth Taylor’s surplus of power to her Roman rivals and quickly disappear from screen. Even with the sequence’s outrageous visual excess, what enraptures the viewer is Taylor dressed in gold in the guise of the Egyptian goddess Isis. In fact during shooting, the director tells the throng of Italian extras to rush to the Sphinx and yell out, “Cleopatra!” When the scene is finally shot, the Italians run to Taylor as ordered, but instead of screaming, “Cleopatra!” they shout, “Leez! Leez! Leez!” Afterwards, a thrilled Taylor thanks them in Italian.
<23> Having remade Elizabeth Taylor into a figuration of Isis, the deity who stands in for the Egyptian tributary state, the film which uses Cleopatra as a metonym for Egypt throughout, also therefore, conflates Taylor’s image with that of a fictive Egypt not once but twice. Borrowing a method from simple reductive mathematics, since Cleopatra is Isis, and Isis is Egypt, and Elizabeth Taylor is Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor is Egypt through a specific visual register that obscures an extensive history of contradictory and imbricated African American identifications with the ancient land as both its bonded slaves and as the proud descendants of the great black emperors who oversee the building of the pyramids. Scott Trafton asserts that African American intellectual and spiritual connections to this space as well as black American transcontinental migrations to and from it, including Frederick Douglas’s trek to Egypt in 1887, have spurred American Afrocentrism and helped shore up black American masculinity as an enabling formation. Members of the mobile black diaspora of the nineteenth century were ennobled in Egypt and returned from their eastern sojourns crowned as African American men [29].
<24> Off screen, Africa once again becomes a site that enables African Americans and the black diaspora to access their political power through their work for African anticolonialism from the late 1930s to the late 1950s as they believe their struggles for U.S. civil rights are inextricably linked to liberation struggles on the continent. According to Penny von Eschen, the efforts of global black Americans including Ralph Bunche and W.E.B. Du Bois and others during the inception of the United Nations in the 1940s and the ensuing work for the liberation of Ghana in 1957 particularly shape and contextualize the fight for U.S. civil rights and help reformulate models of global and American democracy [30]. But by the early 1960s, Hollywood’s Cleopatra appropriates Africa to initiate a narrative of proper whiteness and white domination.
<25> To this effect, Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra embodies the visual signs of the decadent, dark non-western other by adapting the iconography of ancient Egyptian art and tropes of African American women’s style, particularly the copious use of wigs. Taylor as Cleopatra continues her reign as a ‘60s beauty ideal through her projection of hyperfeminine indulgences that makes over her face and body with intensely commodified vibrant cosmetics and resplendent jewelry. She was the American Dream Girl in the 1950s, the dark beautiful woman whose looks were commensurate with the highest echelon of capitalist success, a feminine trophy worth killing and dying over in A Place in the Sun (1951). Here she is an Oriental queen in whiteface who graphically blots out the possibilities of expressing the decade’s most powerful axiom of “black is beautiful” that helps inspire and sustain the fight for U.S. black liberation and equality in the social world outside the screen.
<26> Still, in this particular iteration of the mythic queen, Cleopatra’s body is also a split white form. While composed of a partially Hellenistic subjectivity and a white phenotype it is also self-constructed to represent difference. The film represents Egyptian culture as strange, decadent and hyperfeminine purposefully setting itself apart from the stable white masculinity of the Roman Republic. The Republic wary of the dangers of Cleopatra’s unruly, liminal body must make itself into the Empire precisely because it fears being vulnerable to or compromised by this notion of “Egypt” and its “associations with chaos, uncertainty and the uncanny [31].” This Cleopatra, a self-described “almost all-Greek thing” and Elizabeth Taylor are both “white,” but even as this Egypt conclusively splits from blackness through the deployment of her body, I assert that the Egyptian queen and the star who portrays her are still “not as white” as scholars have previously assumed. She is more than simply the “white grotesque” that characterizes Francesca T. Royster’s reading of Taylor’s Cleopatra who argues that the star’s bodily excesses are analogous with Hollywood decay. Nor is she just the white Cleopatra to be read oppositionally against Tamara Dobson’s black Cleopatra Jones as Ella Shohat has done.
<27> Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra insists on political, economic and cultural reciprocity with the masculine sphere of the Roman republic, a new world order with Rome and Egypt as dual centers of the ancient geopolitical universe and more significantly, a melding of eastern and western culture, characterized by the intermarriage of the western Roman man (Antony) and the eastern Egyptian woman (Cleopatra). Identity, including race, is represented as anchored through cultural practices rather than visual phenotypes since Cleopatra and the Romans look white, but to the Roman imagination Cleopatra signifies insoluble differences through her gender and culture that re-racializes her whiteness and her aggressiveness as improper. The space which Taylor inhabits on screen is a speculative site that refuses to suture the rupture between east and west and becomes a metaphor for the forced split between black and white subjects in the social world contemporary to the film’s production. In fact, Cleopatra reenacts a race war using white bodies, with the victors calibrating the meaning and strictures of proper whiteness.
<28> In this endeavor, the film makes continuous strategic emphases on Cleopatra’s/Elizabeth Taylor’s violet eyes to argue that her visual whiteness even as a marker of her Hellenistic origins cannot override her hyperfemininity and racial instability. Cleopatra is seen applying expressive makeup, often blue or green eyeshadow contrasted against extended black eyeliner encircling her eyes that put focus on their color. The color is referenced again in a scene in which she spies on Caesar through a peephole cut through an artistic rendering of her violet eyes on a palace wall. This doubly cites Cleopatra’s visual whiteness as well as Taylor’s off screen chromatic iconicity precisely when she peers through an enormous graphic depiction of her eye in a closeup. She watches intently as Caesar and his men strategize ways to maneuver Egypt for further Roman use and discuss its queen’s numerous aberrations including her intellectualism and rampant sexuality.
<29> The foregrounding of Cleopatra’s eyes also evoke the blue eyes of Faruq I (1920-1965), the extravagant penultimate king of Egypt who is deposed in the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 led in part by Egypt’s future president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The king is infamous for his ostentatious life style, including his vast collections of cars, rare coins, and pornography. While in power, his enormous appetite for food, womanizing, and political incompetence mortifies the Egyptian public [32]. The extrafilmic oriental as played by Taylor aligns quite well with Faruq’s iconic image of relentless indulgence. Her casting in the role while still speaking to the body of Cleopatra as a site of struggle for both Eurocentrists and Afrocentrists in their projects of racializing Egypt to suit their political needs also links it to an actual historical figure who intrigues the western European imagination, not so much because he is partly European himself, with an Albanian ancestor as the founder of his dynasty, but because he is an oriental unfit to rule his land. His conjuring through Elizabeth Taylor further allows the film’s representation of Egypt as suitable for white colonization [33].
<30> For Ella Shohat, the film’s use of blue eyes, whether they are a direct reference to Cleopatra’s, Faruq’s or Elizabeth Taylor’s actual eyes, unequivocally signal white authority, signified through Cleopatra’s ability to see without being seen and best expressed through the film’s power to erase the blackness of Egypt itself [34]. Even so, for Shohat, the black Cleopatra Jones (Tamara Dobson) while operating “through a subversion of Hollywood’s racialized dream factory” that mythologizes whiteness as a signifier of beauty and goodness, and bearing the signs of the Black Power Movement with her “Afro hairstyle, clenched fist and dashiki clothing,” still works within the film’s overdetermined U.S. nationalism that functions to maintain the existing social order, symbolized by the CIA headed by her white male boss [35].
<31> Elizabeth Taylor herself at this time is a public figure who embodies a notion of whiteness as a set of gradations, presenting it as an identity that must be secured through the performance of cultural acts exactly at a historical moment when white power and the subjectivities it anchors must be redefined after the official end of colonialism. Her precarious whiteness off screen is routed through the pursuit of pleasures that exist outside the strictures of normative whiteness, notably self-control. She becomes the flesh for fantasy of whites who yearn for the gratification and bliss that they imagine non-white bodies must experience, including the oriental and the liberated black subject, possibly at their expense. While proper whiteness must be ensured through the following of cultural codes, both Taylor and Cleopatra refuse to do so. In fact, Taylor’s off screen life invites readings of her various adventures at this juncture as those of a race traitor.
<32> Elizabeth Taylor’s well-publicized conversion to Judaism in 1959 during her marriage to singer Eddie Fisher, much to the dismay of her disapproving mother spurs the writing of anti-Semitic hate mail and posters for her hit film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) which bear her image are emblazoned with the word “Jewess [36].” Taylor herself is frequently quoted as saying, “As a kid I had a Walter Mitty dream about being Jewish and wished I was,” an aspiration that precedes her actual conversion and unequivocally sets the affective values of the claiming of her new, historically minoritarian identity through a subjectivity now comprised partially through the notion of bell hooks’s theory of “eating the other [37].” For dominant white subjects seeking pleasure, eating the other often functions to color the blanched landscape of dull whiteness through encounters with fantasies of the primitive and a return to innocence [38]. Perhaps more unsettling and (titillating) for some American audiences is Elizabeth Taylor’s friendship with fellow star Sammy Davis, Jr. another famous Jewish convert whose romantic relationships with white women and adopted religion means that his image like Taylor’s is formed in part through his racial and sexual transgressions, including what can be read as his distantiations from blackness.
<33> According to Francesca T. Royster and her astute reading of an October 1964 article of Photoplay Magazine which features a cover story detailing Taylor’s friendship with Davis and his white wife May Britt, “The Friendship that EVERYONE [is] Talking About,” the story and photos which accompany the article imply both miscegenation and wife-swapping. But while Taylor’s relationship with Burton is under great media scrutiny, it is not fraught with the dangers the highly visible Davis and Britt face since interracial marriage is legally forbidden in a majority of states at the time the article is published. The socializing foursome who frequent each other’s parties and appear in benefits together are linked through what Royster calls a “guilt by association.” They in her estimation, are “phenotypic misfits,” and Taylor in particular is a “white Negro [39].”
<34> The actual racial identity of the historical Cleopatra not withstanding, the reimagining of Cleopatra’s race through Taylor’s racial and sexual transgressions assuage white fears of blackness through a displacement onto her explicitly non black, but racialized body. As an oriental in whiteface rather than a white Negro, her performance of identity is an amalgamated whiteness contoured through discourses of the exotic and aberrant that sanctions her ebullient pursuit of pleasure. In fact it is the ocularity of Elizabeth Taylor’s image as Cleopatra tied to her extra-cinematic persona as a sexual libertine that makes the film engrossing for audiences, a top box-office earner in 1963. White women in particular who wish to look like Taylor as Cleopatra trigger a major phase of Egyptomania in the United States and other western nations that interpolates her racial transgressions by commodifying her sexuality as an enticing site of previously unknown personal freedoms. Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra inspires trends in fashion and cosmetics that commodify not only Cleopatra as a signifier of an oriental seducer of men, but Elizabeth Taylor’s status as 1960s sexual icon, an unstoppable woman who intoxicates men and turns them into her successive husbands during the decade in which women first begin to experience the new sexual agencies tied to the commercialization of the birth control pill [40].
<35> Many of the objects inspired by Cleopatra evoke Taylor’s image as a beautiful woman to argue that these products, which vary from the luxurious to the banal are endowed with the same seductive powers of Cleopatra and Taylor to bend men to a woman’s will. The film becomes the source of inspiration for evening gowns designed by Oleg Cassini, Virginia Wallace and Samuel Robert. Modernist day dresses with graphic abstract prints and the geometric haircuts by Vidal Sassoon also reference the looks from the film. Alexandre of Paris, a celebrity hair stylist and personal friend of Taylor’s invents a Mini Cleo half up do. Millstein, a New York clothing manufacturer makes faux leopard and cheetah skin coats and Whiting & Davis puts out a collection inspired by the jewels of Cleopatra that of course includes a coil snake cuff.
<36> U.S. cosmetics giant Revlon produces Sphinx Pink lipstick claiming that “any other pink is positively pallid” along with Sphinx eye shadows and directions to ensure the proper application of the elaborate designs that Taylor wears in Cleopatra. The reference to “pallid” is striking here, since even as the film insists on deploying a phenotypically white Cleopatra, the notion of pale/pallid lips or a pallid oriental seductress is framed as undesirable. There are Cleopatra inspired tunics and swimsuits for the Mexican market, undoubtedly to insure great tans, another safeguard against pallid Cleopatras. While an absolutely white Cleopatra remains unacceptable, as Taylor’s casting in the role and the Revlon ad both assert, a black Cleopatra is still impossible. In this moment of global black liberation, the black Cleopatra remains invisible and unrealized as Rouben Mamoulian’s proposal of casting Dorothy Dandridge instead of Elizabeth Taylor is ignored [41]. And advertisements tied to this Cleopatra trend feature only white models, marking its designated demographic as white women [42].
<37> This early 1960s phase of selling Cleopatra is a postcolonial form of what Melani McAlister calls commodity orientalism [43]. It is a phenomenon that was once associated with post-Victorian norms present in the early twentieth century that produced discourses linking the emancipated New Woman, companionate marriage, modernity and consumerism. Orientalism in the previous form was a cultural logic that helped Americans symbolically break from the bleakness of nineteenth-century piety and come into modernity. The East spoke to what was missing within the American work ethic and what Americans longed for, elements the Orient with its sexual iconography provided. The purchasing power of consumerism provided opportunities for reverie and pleasure that were not produced through working hard.
<38> Scott Trafton in his survey of American Egyptomania in the nineteenth century argues that images of ancient Egypt that proliferate through American culture were explicitly linked to the nation’s anxieties about race and slavery, even as ancient Egypt was used as a signifier for American Empire and U.S. aspirations. In fact, the making of an American identity was being actively manufactured in the nineteenth century through white and black visions of ancient Egypt. Even while white Americans fiercely admired the power of the ancient land since it was a great empire built through the labor of slaves, both white and black Americans closely identified with its captive victims [44]. Discourses about the end of ancient Egypt also narrate a grand scenario of the death of empire that results from race-mixing which annihilates Egyptian subjectivity, a cautionary tale for both Antebellum white Americans of the 1860s and postcolonial white subjects of the 1960s so fearful of race and newly liberated black subjects [45].
<39> The Egyptomanic commodity fetishism initiated by Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra signals desires for greater white pleasure devoid of the anxieties tied to race—primarily that black freedoms impede on white power—particularly for white women through a revaluation of their sexuality that mobilizes racial masquerade as a form of women’s style cast through a 1960s frame. But through the ensuing joys of sex and consumption, the process of Oriental commodification with its promises of feminine indulgences actually attempts to structure the further disciplining of the female body to enable or sustain white heterosexual marriage as one French magazine layout claims that “Cleopatra makeup will create eyes that captivate husbands.” Still for white women seeking opportunities to openly express their sexuality with the men they desire to be with, items such as clothing, jewelry and cosmetics and the advertising magic that is attached to them promise success and a reliable source of hope and pleasure. The image of Cleopatra as a rabid consumer, as a collector of beautiful objects on screen as well as Elizabeth Taylor’s public life of outrageous accumulation are counterpoints to the staid discourse of anti-communist ideology at the time and alleviate some of the anxieties surrounding proper consumption produced during the Cold War. This must have been particularly true for a majority of women who are forced to have intimate relationships with responsible consumerism as the careful managers of household budgets. This new white orientalism allows them a powerful space of fantasy, a way to escape the strictures of domesticity and gender and to imagine an exotic and luxurious life elsewhere.
<40> Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s open pursuit of pleasure is best signified through spectacular sexualized consumption and organizes the public lives and codifies the personas of the duo as not only erotic legends but exemplars of postcolonial whiteness. They demonstrate that whiteness after the end of colonization can remain as a sanctuary against the imagined loss of white power and pleasure through the active restructuring of work and play through a symbolic marriage of the two. Many speculate that the Taylor-Burton affair began in part because the shooting of Cleopatra was so mismanaged and overextended that the two actors became idle and bored enough to fall in love. Reportedly, the cost of bottled water for the cast and crew exceeded $100,000 a week [46]. Their relationship is in part a reaction to their dissatisfactions with their work, as they must find gratification elsewhere when their labor fails to provide them with satisfaction. Their life of conspicuous consumption is a rejoinder in a sense as well, a method of producing contentment for themselves and for their audience when filmmaking, the process through which they must deliver their official performances becomes less interesting, less rewarding, less challenging, and less exciting.
<41> Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s consumption is glaring, even within the surplus logic of exchange-value, which dictates that capitalism always manages to naturalize the notion of continuous work not through necessity but for the purpose of always producing capital [47]. This visibility of rabid consumption reifies capitalism as a system whose rate of escalation is unrelenting. Rather than being subsumed under capitalism’s insistence on exploiting the worker, Taylor and Burton spend money and manage to make more, never escaping the system but staying it seems, one step ahead, which for spectators is exhilarating. Their combined film grosses in 1967 was $200 million, which one industry advisor estimates was half of the U.S. film industry’s income at the time. With some of their earnings they buy a ten-passenger twin-engine de Havilland jet for $ 1 million named Elizabeth, his and hers Rolls-Royces, 685 acres on Tenerife in the Canary Islands where they grow bananas, 10 acres in County Wicklow, Ireland where they breed horses, an estate in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico dubbed Casa Kimberley, homes in Hampstead, England, and Céligny and Gstaad, Switzerland and paintings by Utrillo, Monet, Picasso, van Gogh, Renoir, Rembrandt, Pissarro, Augustus John, Rouault, Degas and Rembrandt. Burton also reportedly supported forty- two people at one time, including his brothers and sisters [48].
<42> The management of their newly realized freedoms as non-contract actors means the re-navigation of their labor and leisure through the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism that signals the end of the assembly-line mode of industrial filmmaking after the divestiture of Hollywood studios. Arguably, as a nine-year old with a film contract, Elizabeth Taylor is an archetypal film studio professional who, while firmly entrenched within the system, feels the acute alienation from the end of that mode of labor even as she felt hostility towards its methods of labor management and discipline [49]. Just as daunting is the alienation that Richard Burton feels through his very singularity. His status as the first man in his family in multiple generations to escape the mines through his meteoric rise as an actor is both thrilling and isolating [50]. He counters his separation from the traditional trajectory of men’s work through the repetitive valorization of his father’s mining as the idealized formulation of Welsh masculinity, comparing his father’s skill to that of a surgeon [51]. But Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton manage to band together, as least for an extended period of time. Through the adventures provided by transnational white mobility they travel to numerous national spaces across the globe to participate in the various international co-productions that are made possible through the final voiding of their studio contracts. As they co-star in eleven films together during their union, they mostly relish in their experiences as members of the globetrotting jet-set for the decade that follows.
<43> Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are white postcolonial superstars because they spectacularly highlight the pursuit of pleasure as an organizing principle for white subjects through the deft management of their labor and leisure. By the melding of the two they raise their commercial value as performers and guarantee their fiscal freedom. For anxious white subjects concerned for the loss power with the liberation of people of color, particularly black subjects, Taylor and Burton during the 1960s through the spurring of capitalism perform postcolonial whiteness as site of continuous possibility. As their fantasies of imperiality and consumption seem to exist without the burden of race and function outside the struggle for civil rights, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton model a new mode of subjectivity for nervous white subjects that manifest new forms of labor, leisure, and mobility through the performative, as their images reflect the pleasurable processes tied to the disavowal of blackness and new kinds of white self-racialization.
Notes
[1] Melvyn Bragg, Richard Burton: A Life, p. 194.
[2] Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 127.
[3] Dana Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victoria World, p. 1-4.
[4] Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Burton, A Biography, p. 267.
[5] James Clifford, “Notes on Travel and Theory” from Inscriptions 5 (1989) http://www2.ucsc.edu/.
[6] Captain Burton’s biographer Edward Rice speculates that he had himself circumcised in order to visit Muslim prostitutes as he journeyed to Medina and Mecca. See p. 119.
[7] Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” p. 126.
[8] Melvyn Bragg, Richard Burton, A Life, p. 7.
[9] Michael Munn, Richard Burton Prince of Players, p. 27.
[10] Ibid., p. 56.
[11] Ibid., p. 58.
[12] Elizabeth Taylor made $7 million dollars for Cleopatra. Ibid., p. 117.
[13] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Tendencies, p. 131.
[14] Michael Munn, Richard Burton Prince of Players, p. 232.
[15] Ellis Amburn, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, p. 248-249.
[16] Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, p. 17-18.
[17] Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, p. 6-7.
[18] Ibid., p. 38.
[19] Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol” in Andy Warhol, p. 54-55.
[20] There were three hundred extras present dressed as slaves. See J. Randy Taraborrelli, Elizabeth, p. 277-280 and his discussion of the shooting of Cleopatra’s arrival and Burton’s excitement. Upon viewing, not all of the extras visually code as Nubian slaves, particularly the ones in long shots pulling the Sphinx. But sedan carriers who have more camera time and are photographed in tighter medium shots are black performers playing Nubian slaves.
[21] Edward W. Said, Orientalism, p. 1-3.
[22] Scott Trafton, Egypt Land, p. 24-27.
[23] See Francesca T. Royster, Becoming Cleopatra, p. 63 and her readings of early silent film representations of Egypt that are situated in those terms, especially the film The Haunted Curiosity Shop (1896).
[24] See Royster’s reading of Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, “Egyptian Scandals: Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra and the White Grotesque,” p. 93-120 from Becoming Cleopatra.
[25] See Shohat’s readings of the two Cleopatras in her essay, “Disorienting Cleopatra: A Modern Trope of Identity” from her Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, p. 166-200.
[26] See Becoming Cleopatra, p. 103.
[27] See William J. Mann, How to be a Movie Star, p. 263.
[28] Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century, p. 173.
[29] See bell hooks, “Eating the Other Desire and Resistance” from her Black Looks Race and Representation. Eating the other functions as form of imperialist nostalgia in dominant subjects long to encounter the primitive to “enhance the black landscape of whiteness.” p. 29.
[30] Becoming Cleopatra, p. 102-103.
[31] Ibid., p. 19.
[32] See Deborah L. Spar and Briana Huntsburger, “The Business of Birth Control.” Harvard Health Policy Review, Spring 2005. p. 6. When the birth control pill was first introduced in 1960 it set off a major boom in the pharmaceutical industry.
[33] Donald Bogle, Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography, p. 457.
[34] See the website Trivette’s Tribute to Taylor under “The Cleo Craze” http://www.taylortribute.com/. Retrieved 6.1.11.
[35] Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters Culture, Media and US Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000,. p. 22-23.
[36] Scott Trafton, Egypt Land, p. 19-20.
[37] Ibid., p. 36-37.
[38] DVD commentary of the film Cleopatra (2006), quoted from assistant on set, Christopher Mankiewicz, son of the director.
[39] Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, p. 25-29.
[40] Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, Furious Love, p. 194-195.
[41] William J. Mann, How to be a Movie Star, p. 4. Taylor once astonished a director by knowing how far away in yards the film camera was set from her be the intensity of the surrounding lights hitting her cheeks.
[42] Burton was a guest on The Dick Cavett Show in 1981 when he spoke of mining in Wales. Not only did he elevate his father’s mining skills, he spoke of how his oldest brother who had gone down into the mines at age 13 and retired at 65 loved mining even though he died of black lung disease, Coalworker’s Pneumoconiosis at age 79. He finally spoke of the Great Atlantic Fault which produced a coal face that ran from northern Spain, to Wales and Pennsylvania that he hinted symbolically united coal miners transnationally before the age of mechanization.
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