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The 1960s 61 Somehow, a deal had to be made. Cleopatra was the antithesis of a Joseph L. Mankiewicz film. A sprawling historical epic with no biting social commentary exchanged in small, sophisticated living rooms. He asked Fox if they would shut down until someone (at first, not him) revised the screenplay . No, they wanted to shoot right away. They were cast, huge sets had been built in England—all systems were go. Dad was tempted. He wanted to work with Elizabeth again and realized that her right of director approval might result in his getting a huge deal. Still, it was the wrong kind of film for him to make. He’d always trusted Mother’s opinion on career matters. I’m convinced if she’d still been alive, he wouldn’t have done it. Fox finally made Dad an offer he couldn’t refuse. They’d buy his independent company (Figaro) from him. This would pay for his services and give them ownership of The Barefoot Contessa and I Want to Live, a successful film starring Susan Hayward (she won an Oscar) that Robert Wise had directed for the company. Dad and NBC were fifty-fifty partners in Figaro. The offer was for $2.5 million. Dad would get half. After paying capital gains taxes, he would net over $1 million, which actually meant he’d be getting more than Elizabeth. No director had ever been paid that much before. The idea of taking on Cleopatra was getting more irresistible every day. I remember seeing the twenty minutes or so of film Mamoulian shot with Dad in a New York screening room. He was a big fan of Peter Finch and intended to keep him. A close-up of Stephen Boyd flashed onto the screen. “Who’s that?” Dad asked. “That’s Stephen Boyd. He’s playing Mark Antony.” “No he’s not,” came Dad’s reply. Before shooting could begin, Elizabeth became desperately ill. A tracheotomy was performed on her neck to assist in her breathing. It would take her months to recover. There was no getting around it: now they had to shut down. The entire cast (except Elizabeth) was suspended or let go. Dad told Peter Finch that if he were available, he’d love to have him play Caesar when they started up again. Stephen Boyd was history. Brando was Dad’s first choice for Antony. Marlon had just started shooting Mutiny on the Bounty in the South Pacific, another film that had replaced its director and looked as if it would never end. Richard Burton was bought out of the Broadway musical Camelot, in which he was playing King Arthur. Peter Finch was just about to shoot the title role in The Trials of Oscar Wilde and was unavailable. Rex Harrison came aboard to do his third film for Dad, playing Julius Caesar. It was nonsensical to shoot in England. Dad was astounded that huge Roman and Egyptian exterior sets had been constructed in a country where My Life as a Mankiewicz 62 it could rain for months before even colder and wetter winters. He moved the production to Rome, to Cinecittà, where he’d shot The Barefoot Contessa. Cleopatra took over virtually all the space the large studio had to offer. Dad had tried to avoid taking over the screenplay, but after several false starts, he finally did so. Whether or not he was kidding himself, he’d become convinced that if George Bernard Shaw could write Caesar and Cleopatra and Shakespeare could write Antony and Cleopatra, there was real buried treasure in the project waiting to be unearthed. He planned on making two separate films, one to be released directly after the other. It was a laudable ambition he could never achieve. When Elizabeth was ready to shoot again, he’d barely scratched the surface of the films he wanted to make. But they had to shoot, and shoot they did, endlessly. Dad stayed up nights writing, trying to keep far enough ahead of what he was directing during the day. There wasn’t anything like a final completed draft until the film had been in production for many months. Dad wanted the family with him. Chris had just graduated from Columbia. Dad gave him a job as a second assistant director on the film. I was still at Yale and could come over only on vacations. Fortunately for me, the film shot so interminably this meant two summer breaks and...

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