Dreamsâ calendar photo, featuring her fully nude and stretched out on red velvet, had long decorated the walls of barbershops and college dorms across the country. She already had divorced Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, allegedly seduced President Kennedy, and pressed her hands into the wet cement in front of Graumanâs Chinese Theatre. People knew about her troublesâthe fractured childhood spent in orphanages and foster homes, the failed marriages, the miscarriages, the nervous breakdowns, the trips to psychiatric clinicsâbutthey didnât know her. David didnât really know her, either, though he felt he occasionally caught glimpses of the scared little girl who lived just under her skin. âShe used to come into my office and sit on my lap, sometimes tickling me,â he later wrote in his memoir, Let Me Entertain You . âWeâd talk a bit. Joke a bit. Yes, I got paid for that job.â
Unfortunately, it didnât last, partly due to the meddling of Monroeâs psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, who supported the appointment of another producer whom he knew socially, Henry Weinstein. David was pushed out, and Monroe, who was working for a small fraction of her worth because of an old contract with Fox, derailed the production after she failed too many times to show up to the set, claiming that she was ill. Fox dismissed her, filed a $500,000 lawsuit against her (it was later upped to $750,000), and ultimately halted the production. In the meantime,David had committed to producing a historic drama about the Battle of Leyte Gulf, set to film in Hawaii and Hollywood.
There were many other films on Foxâs list of upcoming movies, including an ambitious adaptation of James Joyceâs Ulysses , as well as a project about World War II general George S. Patton that David had been working on for years. But the movie that everyone was talking about that summer was Cleopatra , which Foxâspresident, Spyros Skouras, prematurely had declared would be âthe greatest grossing film of all timesâ as well as the greatest movie in the history of the motion picture.
It certainly was shaping up to be one of the most expensive.Costs for Cleopatra , originally budgeted at around $2 million, skyrocketed thanks to a bungled production that began in London and later moved to Rome, where sets and costumes had to be recreated a second time. It was while in Rome that the filmâs two stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (cast as the Egyptian queen and her Roman lover Mark Antony)âmarried to other peopleâcarried out an increasingly public and tumultuous affair that made Helen Gurley Brownâs office romances seem junior league in comparison. Even before the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper broke the news of their tryst in her column in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner , everybody knew about the couple, including Taylorâs husband, the singer Eddie Fisher; and Burtonâs wife, the young actress Sybil Williams. Paparazzi stalked them, and publications around the world wrote about them. In Italy, the newspaper Il Tempo described Taylor as an âintemperate vamp who destroys families and devours husbands.â Even the pope chimed in, denouncing her as immoral.
No one could have predicted the colossal mess that Cleopatra would becomeânot even David Brown, who had pitched the idea for a remake in the first place. Five years earlier, in 1957, Skouras had asked David to come up with âa big pictureâ on âa big subject.â It was while digging through some studio records that David learned Cleopatra was actually a Fox property. In 1917, Fox Film Corporation had made a film about the Egyptian queen starring the silent-screen star Theda Bara. Working for Paramount, the director Cecil B. DeMille later remade Cleopatra with Claudette Colbert in 1934.
More than twenty years later, this was the film David watched in a small screening room with Skouras and
Unfortunately, it didnât last, partly due to the meddling of Monroeâs psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, who supported the appointment of another producer whom he knew socially, Henry Weinstein. David was pushed out, and Monroe, who was working for a small fraction of her worth because of an old contract with Fox, derailed the production after she failed too many times to show up to the set, claiming that she was ill. Fox dismissed her, filed a $500,000 lawsuit against her (it was later upped to $750,000), and ultimately halted the production. In the meantime,David had committed to producing a historic drama about the Battle of Leyte Gulf, set to film in Hawaii and Hollywood.
There were many other films on Foxâs list of upcoming movies, including an ambitious adaptation of James Joyceâs Ulysses , as well as a project about World War II general George S. Patton that David had been working on for years. But the movie that everyone was talking about that summer was Cleopatra , which Foxâspresident, Spyros Skouras, prematurely had declared would be âthe greatest grossing film of all timesâ as well as the greatest movie in the history of the motion picture.
It certainly was shaping up to be one of the most expensive.Costs for Cleopatra , originally budgeted at around $2 million, skyrocketed thanks to a bungled production that began in London and later moved to Rome, where sets and costumes had to be recreated a second time. It was while in Rome that the filmâs two stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (cast as the Egyptian queen and her Roman lover Mark Antony)âmarried to other peopleâcarried out an increasingly public and tumultuous affair that made Helen Gurley Brownâs office romances seem junior league in comparison. Even before the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper broke the news of their tryst in her column in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner , everybody knew about the couple, including Taylorâs husband, the singer Eddie Fisher; and Burtonâs wife, the young actress Sybil Williams. Paparazzi stalked them, and publications around the world wrote about them. In Italy, the newspaper Il Tempo described Taylor as an âintemperate vamp who destroys families and devours husbands.â Even the pope chimed in, denouncing her as immoral.
No one could have predicted the colossal mess that Cleopatra would becomeânot even David Brown, who had pitched the idea for a remake in the first place. Five years earlier, in 1957, Skouras had asked David to come up with âa big pictureâ on âa big subject.â It was while digging through some studio records that David learned Cleopatra was actually a Fox property. In 1917, Fox Film Corporation had made a film about the Egyptian queen starring the silent-screen star Theda Bara. Working for Paramount, the director Cecil B. DeMille later remade Cleopatra with Claudette Colbert in 1934.
More than twenty years later, this was the film David watched in a small screening room with Skouras and
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