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| Billie Silvey |
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| CLEOPATRA |
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| When Elizabeth Taylor died in March, it took me back to a spring night in 1963. I was crying as we hurried out of the theater in downtown Abilene into the rain and darkness. Frank opened the big, black umbrella and drew me close as we walked down a sidewalk that glittered with specks of mica, looking like diamonds. We were in love. Before the summer ended, we would be married.
We had been to see Cleopatra—the epic account of an epic romance starring Taylor and her offscreen lover, Richard Burton. It was our generation’s Titanic. Their relationship sparked the screen. The next year, they would marry. They were portraying a much older romance, that between the first-century Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII and the Roman general Mark Antony. Their story was first told by the Roman biographer Plutarch and then by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra. At the time, Rome was rising to ascendancy over much of the ancient world, while Egypt--a far older, more mysterious kingdom--was declining. The Egyptian throne depended on support from Rome, while Rome depended on Egypt for grain and minerals. After the assassination of Julius Caesar, Rome fell into anarchy and civil war. Three years later, Mark Antony and Octavian shared leadership, with Octavian ruling the west, including Spain and Gaul, and Antony taking the east, including Greece and the Middle East. Needing money to consolidate his power, Antony looked to the Egyptian queen to supply it. He summoned her to Tarsus in modern-day Turkey. |
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| At first, Cleopatra delayed the journey, but eventually she appeared, reclining on the deck of a magnicent barge described by Plutarch as having a "gilded stern and outspread sails of purple, while oars of silver beat time to the music of flutes and harps. She herself lay all alone, under a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed as Venus in a picture, and beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood on each side to fan her. Her maids were dressed like Sea Nymphs and Graces, some steering at the rudder, some working at the ropes. . . . "Perfumes diffused themselves from the vessel to the shore, which was covered with multitudes, part following the galley up the river on either bank, part running out of the city to see the sight. The market place was quite emptied, and Anthony at last was left alone sitting upon the tribunal; while the word went through all the multitude that Venus was come to feast with Bacchus for the common good of Asia." |
| Antony was an outstanding general, beloved by his men, but eleven years later, Octavian declared war on Antony and his Egyptian allies. Blockaded in the harbor at Actium, Cleopatra's fleet escaped. Antony pursued her. After the flight of their commander, Antony's navy was demoralized. His large, heavy galleys were no match for the lighter, more maneuverable Roman ships. Octavian defeated Antony in the watershed Battle of Actium in 31 B.C.. Octavian pursued the lovers to Egypt, where he laid siege to Alexandria. Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide, and Octavian ruled Rome as the Emperor Augustus. |
| The relationship between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, which began in 1961 during the filming of Cleopatra, received a lot of attention in the tabloid press as both were married at the time. They divorced their spouses and married each other in 1964. Burton grew up as a Presbyterian in a poor Welsh-speaking household. He had a number of brothers and sisters. Taylor was the only child in a well-to-do Catholic family. As a child, Burton excelled in school productions. He became one of the great actors of the "British New Wave" after World War II, appearing in Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Longest Day (1962). A libertine, he drank and smoked heavily. Taylor became a movie star at the age of 12 and went on to win two Academy Awards. Their romance was evident in the six other films they made together, including The V.I.P.s (1963), The Sandpipers (1965) and The Taming of the Shrew (1967). By that year, their films had earned $200 million. The studios were alarmed when they considered taking a three-month break from film-making, because nearly half the income of the U.S. film industry at the time came from movies starring one or both of them. Taylor and Burton divorced in 1974, remarried and divorced again. Burton died in 1984 of a cerebral hemorrage. "In my heart, I will always believe we would have been married a third and final time, " she wrote. "From those first moments in Rome, we were always madly and powerfully in love. We had more time . . . .but not enough." Frank and I will have been married 48 years in August. |
| May 2011 |
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