Abstract
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film Cleopatra (1963) appears at a historical point when the film celebrity emerges from the constraints of studio production and control. As the film’s chief visual referent and marketing focus, Elizabeth Taylor changes what it means to play Cleopatra for all of those who follow and also the ways that the “Cleopatra” code could be attached to a particular star—the blurring of star and role already associated with Cleopatra from Shakespeare’s characterization onward. This blurring of star and role, in the context of the market dynamics of mass media in the mid-twentieth century, provides the necessary conditions for the formation of the celebrity. Taylor’s body, treated as grotesque in the press, becomes the stand-in for Cleopatra’s financial woes and for Twentieth Century Fox’s increasing structural weaknesses. In turn, Taylor’s Cleopatra becomes synonymous with the increasingly outdated excesses of the Hollywood epic, the death of the studio-made “star” and the resurrection of the celebrity. Cleopatra’s iconographic meanings become harnessed with Taylor, the famous-for -being- famous and famous -for -being -overexposed icon, tapping into the glamour and insouciance of Claudette Colbert’s earlier version, but taking glamour further into the realm of excess and indulgence.
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Notes
Marvin Carlson, “The Haunted Stage: Recycling and Reception in the Theatre,” Theater Survey, 35.1 (May 1994): 2.
For further discussion of the skin as a site of surveillance in the genre of horror in particular, see Judith Halbersram, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
Kitty Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 223.
Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3.
On Warhol’s use of the celebrity portrait as a form of mourning, see Jonathan Flatley, “Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopoeia” in Pop Out: Queer Warhol eds. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, José Muños (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 101–133.
Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 2nd ed. (London: Murray, 1831).
Geoffrey Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 17.
For a discussion of this public friendship between the Davises and the Burtons, see Gerald Early The Sammy Davis Jr. Reader (New York: Far-rar, Straus and Giroux. 2001), 285.
Norman Mailer first coined the term “white negro” in his highly influential 1959 essay, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” in Advertisements for Myself (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959). In the essay, Mailer espouses an escape from the deadliness of American Cold War conformity through “hipsterism,” which includes an identification with jazz and other “transgressive” aspects of black culture. Mailer’s characterization of black culture here includes sexual openness, living in the present and giving in to physical pleasure. As Thomas Frank points out in The Conquest of Cool, Mailer’s fetishlzation of black culture reproduced many of the mainstream prejudices that he sought to escape: “although expressed in terms of admiration rather than fear or hatred, his identification of black Americans with bodily pleasure, lack of inhibition, and sexual prowess conforms rather neatly to standard stereotypes and racial myths.” Thomas Frank, The Conauest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 246, n18.
Ronald L. Davis, Celluloid Mirrors: Hollywood and American Society Since 1945 (Fortworth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1997), 379.
Walter Wanger and Joe Hyams, My Life with Cleopatra (New York: Bantam Books, 1963), 12.
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloom ington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 23.
Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss, The Cleopatra Papers: A Private Corre-spondence (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), vi–vii.
In the week of March 8, 1998, for example, six books tied in rath James Cameron’s film Titanic and its stars topped the New York Times Book Review’s best-sellers charts: Douglas Kirkland and W. Marsh, James Cameron’s Titanic (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); Susan Wels, Titanic: Legacy of the World’s Greatest Ocean Liner (New York: Time-Life, 1997)
Walter Lord, A Night to Remember (New York: Bantam, 1997)
Grace Catalano, Leonardo DiCaprio: Modern Day Romeo (New York: Laurel-Leaf/Dell, 1997)
Brian J. Robb, The Leonardo DiCaprio Album (New York: Plexus/Publishers Group West, 1997)
Wyn Craig Wade, Titanic: End of a Dream (New York: Penguin, 1992).
Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 60.
P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 106.
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. by Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 6, n51.
Richard DeCorodova, Picture Personalities: the Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 21.
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© 2003 Francesca T. Royster
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Royster, F.T. (2003). Egyptian Scandals: Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra and the White Grotesque. In: Becoming Cleopatra. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07417-1_4
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