The Long Way to Broadway

By Gerald Clarke/Fort Lauderdale

Her film career becalmed, Liz Taylor soars onstage

Ordinarily, conversation stops when a curtain goes up. But there is nothing ordinary about the current revival of The Little Foxes, and when the lights dim, audiences begin to buzz, like crickets waiting for dusk. "Where is she? How does she look? Has she lost weight?" Only when she has been onstage for five or ten minutes, do the whispers stop and the answers become clear: in her first stage role, Elizabeth Taylor looks beautiful, gorgeous, radiant. In a word, sensational. "I'm on a high," she admits. "I have a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of doing something useful in my life." Raising her shoulders in a kind of happy shiver, she adds: "And the applause is wonderful!"

Like a monarch, that earlier Elizabeth perhaps, she has been making her triumphal progress up the East Coast, with waves of that wonderful applause echoing in her ears. Fort Lauderdale's Parker Playhouse, where the production began Feb. 27, was sold out for three weeks. Washington's Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center has been booked for six weeks, and when the play opened there last Thursday, much of the Government, including President Reagan and Vice President Bush, were out front. There were three curtain calls, and Reagan and his wife Nancy went backstage to congratulate the cast and the star.*

The same happy scenario seems likely to be followed on Broadway, where the opening is May 7. The night after an ad appeared in the New York Times, a line began forming outside the Martin Beck Theater; before the week was out nearly $1 million worth of tickets had been sold. Producer Zev Bufman was already making plans to extend the New York run through Labor Day, nine weeks past the previously scheduled July 4 closing date, then take the production to New Orleans, Los Angeles and possibly London as well. "She's the hottest draw I've ever seen!" he exulted. "The tension is building. It's as if every night is an opening." Even Playwright Lillian Hellman, who had refused to allow her Foxes to come to Broadway with other stars, has joined the Taylor fan club. "I've turned down a great many offers before this one," she says. "But Elizabeth is the right person at the right age at the right time."

For Taylor, 49, the character of Regina Giddens, the turn-of-the-century Southern beauty, is also the right role at the right age at the right time. Foxes may be a turning point in her career, propelling her toward the stage rather than the screen. After 58 movies in 39 years, her film career seems to be becalmed, if not begone. In the past ten years many of her pictures, from X Y & Zee to The Mirror Crack 'd, have sunk from sight with little more than a gurgle of wasted dollars.

There are more problems. Every time she has gained a pound, there has been a jokester somewhere to remind her, often savagely. ("This woman has more chins than a Chinese phone book," says Comedian Joan Rivers in a not at all funny pay cable television special.) Though she has turned the other way in public, the jokes have not gone unheard. "I don't think it's anybody's damn business how much I weigh," she says, her anger breaking through the shield she puts up between herself and anyone who plans to quote her. "But talking about it seems to be a national pastime. And that cheeses me off!"

But all that was before Bufman persuaded her to do Hellman's play about Regina and her greedy brothers. Sometime between last fall and the first of the year, 20 lbs. or so were lost through dieting and long walks at her 1,800-acre estate in the Virginia hunt country near Washington. "This person has extraordinary discipline," says her husband, Virginia's Republican Senator John Warner, who describes himself, in nautical terms, as her anchor to windward. "She very carefully monitored that situation. It was part diet, but nine-tenths determination."

Both Taylor and Bufman were concerned that her voice would not carry into the balcony. Lauren Bacall recommended a voice teacher to her, and Bufman told his sound man to be prepared to outfit her with a body mike. Neither was necessary, and her voice easily travels to the back rows. People who supposedly knew her in Hollywood warned the producer to expect trouble. Fearing the worst, he spent $125,000 for a six-month, all-protection insurance contract at Lloyd's of London. "I've learned my lesson," he now confesses. "She's always reliable." Director Austin Pendleton says that he had prepared himself to "teach her the mysteries of acting onstage. But I didn't have to. She has a stage presence, and I think she always has had."

The others in the cast and crew are no less enamored. "Everybody's crazy about her," says Maureen Stapleton, who plays Birdie, Regina's pathetic sister-in-law. Ah, Elizabeth," adds Tom Aldredge, who plays Horace, her husband. "I know actors who started on Broadway and then went into the movies who wouldn't dare step back on a stage. But here's a woman who has never been on a stage before and has so much to risk. Yet she's so quick that I can't believe she's not a stage actor. She gives back what you give to her--fire to fire--and that's very exciting."

At least three superb actresses have played Regina: Tallulah Bankhead in the 1939 original, Bette Davis in the 1941 movie and Anne Bancroft in the 1967 revival. Warm and womanly, Taylor may be the closest to the character that the author had in mind. "I rather like her approach," says Hellman. "Regina has frequently been played too much as a villainess." As Elizabeth plays her, Regina is as much victim as victimizer, a woman trapped into doing ugly things by her time, place and boundless aspiration. "There are people who can never go back, who must finish what they start," she says in the last scene. "I am one of those people."

So is Taylor. "A lot of people thought that I wouldn't actually go through with this play," she says. "But once I make up my mind to do something, I do it. I go in the direction that I point myself toward. I don't let circumstances do it for me."

There is pride and an odd kind of defiance in her voice, and at such moments those famous violet eyes look as blue and forbidding as arctic ice. Much has been written about those eyes, but it has not been noted how quickly they can move up and down the Fahrenheit scale, from a sultry 85 or so to a frigid ten below zero. Some of the chill is shyness. When she was younger she used to go to parties and hide in the shadow of her second husband, Michael Wilding. One night Humphrey Bogart told her to sit by herself and make people come to her. She did--and people now hover around her--but a trace of that early reticence remains nonetheless. Part of her reserve is a learned, animal response to prying reporters. "I have a great respect for my privacy," she says, "and the only way I can keep myself private is by not being too open. I once opened up to Hedda Hopper, and she stuck a knife in my ribs. That taught me."

But when the eyes are flashing violet --which in her case means go--she could melt an igloo. During the three weeks in Fort Lauderdale, the loud, rollicking laughter from her dressing room backstage almost brought down the roof. "I know," she says, somewhat abashed when it is mentioned to her. "Noel Coward told me once that my laugh is like a drunken sailor's on leave. But when I get to know somebody and can let my hair down, I am a boisterous, raucous, down-to-earth, no-nonsense lady. I live life with a zest. It has never been dull for me, and I don't anticipate that it ever will be." --By Gerald Clarke/Fort Lauderdale

*Reagan had the theater on his mind last week. He called Dan Sullivan, drama critic of the Los Angeles Times, to say he hoped that a new musical, produced by his old friend Buddy Ebsen, would be playing until the President had a chance to see it. The title may have accounted for some of his interest. It is: Turn to the Right.

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