Liz as Cleo

When elizabeth taylor applied a six-inch Egyptian asp to her snowy bosom in Rome last summer, and thereby brought to a close the celluloid life of Cleopatra, the gesture was fraught with symbolic irony: While she dispatched the Nile Queen, Liz was also writing finis to the costliest movie opus in history, 20th Century-Fox's nearly calamitous Cleopatra. Bedeviled by Elizabeth's illnesses, hamstrung by pyramiding production costs and plagued by the offscreen antics of its principals, the epic will start its run this spring a hefty $37,000,000 in the red, with the future of Fox's fortunes riding squarely on its box-office take. When the first flack-happy press releases appeared announcing that Queen Liz had been signed to play Queen Cleo, the role-call struck most observers as an auspicious, even inevitable, choice. Soon after she had made it into Hollywood's big kleigs in National Velvet, Liz began garnering praise for her near-flawless feature attractions and her voluptuous body; with maturity and experience her thesping expertise developed apace, and in such films as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8 (for which she won an Oscar) she gained wide respect. It seemed logical that the lovely and talented Miss Taylor should want to essay a role traditionally coveted by other gifted actresses (some past Cleos of stage and screen: Helen Hayes in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, Vivian Leigh in the film version, Tallulah Bankhead in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Claudette Colbert in DeMille's Cleopatra). Too, there seemed an uncanny parallel between the historical Cleo and the new pretender on her throne: Both were renowned as young beauties, both flopped in their first two marriages (Cleo couldn't make a go of it with either of her two kid brothers; Liz shucked Nicky Hilton, then Michael Wilding), both were then snowed by an older Caesar-type who was fated to die violently (Cleo had the real McCoy, Liz the imperial impresario, Mike Todd), both then snared new regents and were accused of swiping them from sweet, defenseless wives (Cleo got Antony from Octavia, Liz got Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds). Despite the happy omen of such carbon copy typecasting, Cleopatra came a cropper soon after filming began in London in 1960; Liz first contracted meningitis, then a near-fatal case of double pneumonia, and the entire production had to be halted while she recuperated. This ill-starred beginning drained Fox coffers of $5,000,000, and resulted in the ash-canning of hundreds of thousands of feet of film. With Liz again back in shape in the fall of 1961, cameras once more began to roll -- this time in sunny Italy, where Liz and husband Eddie were housed in a 14-room villa off the Appian Way. Cleopatra then lurched forward on its costly hegira (decorative touches like the reconstructions of the Roman Forum and Cleopatra's Alexandrine palace near Anzio added to the general fee-for-all), only to run into a new kind of trouble when Welsh actor Richard Burton was welcomed to the pyramid club to In the much discussed but hitherto unseen nude scene from Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor reclines regally beneath the ministering play Mark Antony. Eddie, Liz and Richard started their triangle in friendly enough fashion, even making the night-club scene in Rome on New Year's Eve as a threesome. Soon, however, it was rumored that Richard and Liz were pursuing their two-on-the-Nile duet off-camera, a suspicion strikingly confirmed by Liz and Richard during late-hour dancing and nuzzling in the Eternal City's publican pubs. (Pestered by the flash cameras of the predatory paperazzi, the two turned elsewhere for privacy, found that where there's a villa, there's a way.) This revelation set off a Roman scandal whose repercussions were gleefully reported by the world's press. The comedy of eros unfolded with memorable confusion: Eddie flew to Manhattan for a checkup in a private psychiatric hospital, where he called reports of a marital crack-up "ridiculous and absolutely false"; hands of a masseuse and in one memorable moment of Egyptian mummery proves that she is indeed a dish fit for the gods.

Liz returned from a two-day expedition with Richard at a Tyrrhenian fishing village sporting an unexplained black eye; blonde Mrs. Sybil Burton swept into Rome with her four-year-old daughter to squelch rumors of a Sybil war. Adding to the brouhaha of mixed-up ids was the arresting rumor that the Tiber Tigress was burning bright for yet a third party, Cleopatra's writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz. While all of this made entertaining reading, it also aroused an outraged chorus of protest from affronted moralists: Rome's Il Tempo intemperately branded Liz a destroyer of families and suggested that she be evicted from Italy as an "undesirable," an appellation clearly open to debate. Liz was not given the boot from the boot, however, and eventually the most expensive flick of the ages became histrionic history. (As we go to press, the great Burton-Burton-who's-got-the-Burton game has yet to reach final resolution, though rumors of a Liz-Eddie reconciliation are heard again in the land.) The sight of Liz fiddling while Eddie burned caused fresh waves of panic to sweep through Fox's mogul hordes: Would the finished film, like Cleo, pass on to greater rewards, or would a shocked and indignant public express its disapprobation by a box-office boycott? Some observers, like Producer Walter Wanger, feel that the picture has gained five dollars in publicity for every dollar it has cost. Others remember a bit of filmflammery called Stromboli and point out that leading lady Ingrid Bergman's much publicized, production-stalling bearing of an illegitimate child did not prevent the movie from being a horrendous financial dud. Whatever the outcome, one sure financial winner is richly rewarded Liz: Her original salary of a cool million was augmented by a hefty spell of overtime at $50,000 a week, and further nest-feathering is in the offing when she starts collecting her 10 percent of the gross. As Fox president Darryl F. Zanuck and company creditors nervously await the public's COD verdict, Playboy herewith pauses to contemplate the beautiful focus of the global furor: Queen Elizabeth, filmdom's unrivaled goddess of love.

These three exclusive photographs of Elizabeth Taylor were shot for Playboy by actor Roddy McDowell a co-star with Liz in Cleopatra and a friend of hers since her film debut in National Velvet. Reportedly among her favorite pictures of herself, these memorably sensitive and seductive portraits show Hollywood's premier love goddess clad in a gossamer-thin nightgown prior to the filming of the bedroom scene in Cleopatra, and contain cause enough for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire along with Antony. Perfectly cast in the role of the Egyptian sorceress, Liz skillfully evokes the infinite variety that spiced the life of Caesar and Antony, succeeds in confirming W. Shakespeare's rhapsodic appraisal of the original Cleo: "Other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies." Cleopatra was penned by director Mankiewicz, who based his story on Plutarch's biographical tomes. Like most male writers, Plutarch waxed eloquent on the mystery of Cleo; among his reflections on the barging beauty is this pleasant notation: "Were Antony serious or disposed to mirth, she had at any moment some new delight to meet his wishes; at every turn she was upon him, and let him escape her neither by day nor by night." Mankiewicz himself offers this thoughtful comment on the immortal Queen of the Nile: "Cleopatra was not a 'Vamp.' She was a highly complicated, intelligent woman who was carried to great heights in her ambition. Elizabeth Taylor," he adds, "has an understanding of this."