"Night of the Iguana"

LEE SERVER: “A colonial creation at the foot of jungled mountains, one-time port for the silver dragged down from the Sierra Madre mines, Puerto Vallarta was an attractively tumble-down place of whitewashed adobe buildings and cobblestone streets, fronted by seaside promenade and golden beach, populated by an affable Spanish/mestizo community and a small complement of American expatriates (remittance men, retirees, gay divorcees), the better heeled among the latter residing in villas in the eastward section known as ‘gringo gulch.’ An aura of anarchy began to gather around the production, even before the actors had all checked into their hotel rooms. There were riots at the airport with the landing of the Hollywood movie stars, and the press laid siege to the hotel and the entrance to Churubusco Studios.”

MEARENE JORDAN: "The days were long and sunny, beginning with dawns revealing opalescent seas and pale pink skies and ending with blood-red sunsets. The Pacific Ocean was always the boundary for our western horizons, and at night the moon shimmered on its surface. There were rains and storms during which John Huston retreated to the bar with his film crew and played endless games of gin rummy while everyone enjoyed bottomless margaritas. This scenario brought serenity to our existence there—a timelessness in a peaceful Mexican lifestyle. We were all absorbed by the pace and progress of the film, and every day we counted the advancing of pages we had achieved. To me one thing was close to unbelievable. Miss Gardner was, for the first time in her film career, actually enjoying being on a set when she wasn’t working. She enjoyed watching other members of the cast doing their scenes.”

JOHN HUSTON: “I gave all my actors gold-plated derringers, the kind of little pistols that the card sharps used to wear up their sleeves. Then I also gave each one five bullets with the names of the other members of the cast on them... There were more reporters on the site than iguanas… waiting for the great day when the derringers were pulled out and the shooting started.”

LEE SERVER: “Proving something of a recurring disruption was Iguana’s indigenous ‘standby director,’ Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernandez. Huston’s choice for the mostly no-show job, Fernandez was an actor and filmmaker and a certified loco hombre who generally went around in a cowboy hat or sombrero and carried a pair of six-guns strapped to his belt. Fernandez was currently at loose ends, having been blacklisted in the Mexican film business for shooting a producer.”

BAYARD VEILLER: “Fernandez once told me he didn’t know how many people he had killed in his life, because he didn’t count Indians. He was really quite something. My father said the first time they went to see him at his place in Mexico City he was in the living room practicing the bullwhip on a cowering young girl. There always seemed to be fifteen-year-old girls nearby him wherever he was.”

LEE SERVER: “Fernandez had terrified Burton and Taylor at the airport during the press riot by stampeding onto their airplane with his guns drawn, an ostensible rescue attempt, grabbing Elizabeth and attempting to lead her away.”

LEE SERVER: “Almost immediately Liz became a presence on the Mismaloya set and thereafter came every day without fail. What’s more, she came dressed for battle: ripely armored in sultry outfits, a series of tiny custom-made bikinis or bikini bottoms with loose tops and no bra. Ava got the message, averted her eyes when the camera stopped. Besides, she like Liz well enough. They had too much in common to become enemies now, the two femmes fatales, survivors of the MGM trenches made equally unfit for normal life.”

MEARENE JORDAN: "Never before had I seen Miss Gardner go overboard about the sheer magnetism and talent of any actor as she did with Richard Burton. Oh yes, she recognized him as a sexpot all right with that shock of black hair, those electric blue eyes, that raddled complexion, that powerful muscular figure, and that resonant, lucid, evocative voice. Miss G adored every note.  Miss G knew Richard was not for her, though. She had her own inviolable set of rules and ethics about such things. Never steal a best friend’s husband or boyfriend. That was Rule One. Rule Two was that there were always more than enough males around anyway. Even so, after she had spent close to eighteen years in the movie business playing opposite a whole bunch of talented gentlemen, Richard blew in against her with the force and freshness of a Pacific Ocean hurricane. I think it also had something to do with John Huston’s original premise. You were there in Mexico in an old run-down hotel called Costa Verde. It was all real and believable, and certainly Richard Burton as the drunken old sot Reverend Shannon was both real and believable.”

MEARENE JORDAN: “‘He’s such an original,” Miss G exclaimed about Burton. ‘He is such a god-damned assertive, aggressive, certain-he-is-right male chauvinist Welshman. When he talks, the world listens, and the bugger never stops talking.’ Miss G’s voice was rising with excitement. ‘When we are rehearsing, he draws me out in a way I’ve never experienced before. He makes the dialogue sound so natural that I answer instinctively, and then discover that it is the dialogue. What about that then?’ Often Miss G was Richard’s friendly American target, but she could take care of herself. I think it had something to do with the love-hate conflict in their parts as Shannon and Maxine that they carried forward into their off-camera sessions.”

SAM KASHNER: “The day before Richard Burton turned thirty-eight, he started celebrating early by drinking with Ava Gardner, who had presented him with a fifth of bourbon. It was nine-thirty in the morning, and the heat in Mismaloya was already crushing. Burton held forth in his costar’s dressing room, reciting poetry and then reminiscing about his father. ‘My father could give bad verse a ring of great quality,’ he told Ava, then launched into several stanzas of verse to illustrate the point. ‘So do you,’ she replied. ‘Ah, love, but you should have heard my father do it.’ ‘I’m sure that I just did.’”

MEARENE JORDAN: “Our friendship with Richard and Liz was of a different character. Liz and Miss G were old friends, but the addition of Richard to Liz’s life created a new dynamic. There was a serenity attached to Deborah and Peter but an air of conflict within the Liz and Richard household. Liz had been married three times before she met Richard, and he had been married only once to Sybil. One had to admire John Huston’s skill in casting people with real problems into counterparts in the movie with fictional problems. Miss G was in the clear, having arrived in Puerto Vallarta footloose and fancy free. As I’ve hinted before, the boat boys, provided by John, were always waiting for her slightest command or a little ‘flirt,’ as she called it, to embellish her characterization. Richard, however, had arrived loaded down with guilt and inner conflict, perfectly typecast to assume the Reverend Shannon’s fictional sins of flesh, drink and the devil. Indeed, he was able to enlarge his portrayal with his own virile Welshness, and a dark, brooding, melancholic quality the Welsh call “hiraeth.” Liz on the surface seemed quite untroubled by events and was, as usual, ravishingly beautiful. She was immensely attached to and protective of Richard, even when he talked belligerently about their private affairs in public—even making jokes about their chances of getting married. Elizabeth had brought her six-year-old daughter to Puerto Vallarta. She was a lovely little girl with incredibly turquoise blue eyes, dark lashes, and an air of innocence like her mother’s. Not that I am saying that Liz’s eyes in those days were all that innocent, and in the diminutive bikinis she wore (a different one every day, I swear), she was gloriously provocative.  

SAM KASHNER: “Elizabeth fussed over Richard on the set, combing and recombing his hair. (At one point, exasperated with her constant ministrations, Burton poured a pitcher of beer over his head.) When she wasn’t on set or bar-hopping with Burton, Elizabeth lolled on the beach, clad in a bikini, a green-and-white Mexican shift, and gold-and-turqoise beaded sandals. On another occasion, she showed up in a bikini bottom and sheer top, wearing a stunning pearl-and-ruby ring given to her, she said, by the King of Indonesia. Burton was thoroughly delighted, taking the occasion to mischievously describe her as looking like ‘a French tart.’ Her outrageous displays of bounty – gifts of nature and of men – only made her more desirable in his eyes, more extraordinary, more loved. No wonder he called her ‘Ocean,’ to describe her deep, overpowering presence.”

MEARENE JORDAN: “Without a part in the film, Liz was able to plan a leisurely routine. She caught the launch Taffy every day at noon and arrived in Mismaloya in time for lunch. She was quite happy to chat with any newsman about her present and future plans, and they were around for the entire two months. Even when Michael Wilding, her second husband and father of her first two children, turned up as an agent for the firm that represented Richard Burton, she was not the slightest bit fazed. Liz always managed to keep her previous husbands in perspective, knowing that earlier love affairs were not nearly as intriguing as present ones.”

TERRY MORSE: “If we got the actors into makeup and on the set without a drink, then we’d have them most of the day. If they started in the morning it was bad news. We just didn’t get a lot of work done after lunch. Huston just rolled with the action. He was wonderful that way. He could just roll along, and if someone was too drunk he’d go on and do another scene.”

TOM SHAW: “John Huston didn’t give a shit. He never bothered the cast. He’d never say anything about that. He might be as drunk as they were.”

ELOISE HARDT: “The set was like Never Never Land. Everyone was on edge from the heat and the sickness. Scorpions and iguanas hopping in your bed. You never knew if you were going to be bitten by something or stranded by a storm. There were all these emotions and egos… It got to be ridiculous. If you wanted to get in a sexy mood, just go to the Malecon and listen to the waves. Even if you didn’t want it, your body felt it, the atmosphere was so primeval.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Puerto Vallarta was far, far away from the world of furs and jewels. In the morning, standing in front of her mirror, Elizabeth tied her hair back and slipped into a plain white gauzy dress. The air was humid and the temperature was edging into the nineties. Packing some cold fried chicken and a bottle of tequila into a basket, she followed Burton down to the bay, where they stepped barefoot through the frothy surf to board the yacht that Elizabeth had insisted upon. Her former husband Michael Wilding, as Burton’s agent, had arranged for the yacht, though it may also have been a bit of a thank you to Elizabeth for her support in his battle against Hedda Hopper. Off through the blue waters the yacht sailed, slicing a path across the bay. Their destination was the isolated cove of Mismaloya, south of the village, a den of lizards and insects. There were no roads, no phones, no restaurants, no bars. That’s why Elizabeth had brought the chicken and tequila.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “An orange fingernail moon hung low over Banderas Bay, one of the deepest, widest, and bluest bays in the world. From the sprawling white-brick-and-stucco house perched amid the vine-hung foothills rising up from the bay, gas lamps cast a soft golden light onto the papaya trees and the creeping red bougainvillea. The cliff-hanging house with its six bedrooms, six baths, and gleaming white-tiled floors was named Casa Kimberley after a previous owner, but from October 1963 forward, it would be known as the place where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton lived when they were the most notorious unmarried lovers in the world.”

SAM KASHNER: “Delighted with the dazzling, white-hot sun and the turquoise-green of the sea, Burton and Taylor first rented and then bought a four-story white stucco villa called Casa Kimberly, with access to ten acres of beach. For the first time, perhaps, since her childhood in England, Elizabeth felt at home. She loved the heat, the verdant green of the jungle, the brightly colored macaws that flew across her balcony in the mornings. She bought a blue launch named ‘Taffy’ to cross the Banderas Bay to the film set, precariously built on a perch overlooking the bay. In order to keep for himself a shred of privacy so he could continue his habit of voracious reading, Burton bought a second villa and had a bridge built to connect them, modeled on the Venetian Bridge of Sighs.”

RICHARD BURTON: “I started to dream of Puerto Vallarta and the bedroom patio and sun-bathing and tacos and frijoles and tequila, and walks through the cobbled town at dusk and boating to deserted beaches with tuna sandwiches and ice-cold home-made lemon juice and fishing for Dorado and baby sharks.  And the memory of being salt-cleaned and clear-skinned and even slim.  We’ll go to Mismaloya and swim in the warm sea and plunge immediately afterwards into the cold, by comparison very cold, fresh water river.  I even look forward to the noise and it must surely be the noisiest town per head of population in the world, church bells and a gun instead of a bell for the poor church across the river, steel bands, donkeys braying, cocks crowing – the latter never seeming to know what time of day it is.  Serenaders staggering on marijuana coming to do homage to Elizabeth at four in the morning, children dancing in the street outside to the rhythm of a fiddle played by the man who runs the delicatessen next door.  But not of course at four in the morning, more like 8 to 10.  And jeeping towards the airport and then up into the hills where the rivers have to be forded in the jeep as there are no bridges.  Once E and I were temporarily stuck in the middle of such a river and only after waiting patiently for the engine to dry out were we able to proceed cautiously to the other bank.  Then back to Jack Keyward’s bar which is at sand level and only half a stone’s throw from the edge of the sea which is relatively tideless.  Lots of books to read and Spanish Grammars and perhaps the iguanas have come back to live on the roof.  You never know.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “Watching from a chaise lounge as Richard ran lines with John Huston, Elizabeth was aglow. She adored the peace and lush exotic beauty of Puerto Vallarta. ‘I can live here,’ she had told Burton soon after they’d arrived, and so Casa Kimberley had become a little love gift. From their terrace, Elizabeth could look down onto the village where men in wide sombreros rode burros over the cobblestone streets. Just past the house she could see the belfry of the village church, modeled after the crown of the Empress Carlota, and beyond that the moonlit bay, which was close enough that the fierce surf could be heard all through the night. Colorful moths fluttered in through the glassless windows while spirited little geckos ran across the beams overhead. Elizabeth was awakened in the morning by bright green macaws announcing the first rays of the sun reflecting against the red tiles of the roof. She was in heaven.”

BUDD SCHULBERG: “I stayed out with Richard Burton several nights. It would be past three in the morning, and he would be in his cups and want to talk about Dylan Thomas or – he was a big fight fan – we’d be yakking about the fights. And Elizabeth would come storming out in her bathrobe looking for him, giving him hell – ‘What do you think you’re doing, you’ve got to work in the morning!’ They were all having a good time. It was a happy company. You couldn’t believe they were making a movie.”

AVA GARDNER: “Some people say Liz and I are whores, but we are saints. We do not hide our loves hypocritically, and when in love, we are loyal and faithful to our men.”

WILLIAM J. MANN: “On a typical day, Burton quickly finished a case of beer, then started in on the tequila. So did everyone else, including Elizabeth. In addition, they discovered a ‘paralyzingly potent’ local agave liquor called raicilla that Richard said he could feel move into each individual intestine. ‘That’s because they left the cactus needles in it,’ Huston said.”

LEE SERVER: “Burton would often doze off for a few minutes while sitting in a camp chair waiting to do a scene. An assistant would wake him. His eyes would open, and he would look around uncertainly. ‘Where am I?’ he asked. ‘Mismaloya,’ said the assistant. ‘God, NO!’ Burton cried.”

AVA GARDNER: “Richard Burton was like someone I would’ve liked to have had for a brother, and his teasing manner made me feel at ease. He was also a ferocious drinker… But when we worked together, I went up on lines more often than he did. In one scene, when I was supposed to say, ‘In a pig’s eye you are,’ what came out was, ‘In a pig’s ass you are.’ Old habits die awfully hard.”

LEE SERVER: “At the premiere, Ava sat beside Tennessee Williams, whose guest was his beloved mother, Edwina. Soon after the lights went down, Tennessee – or it might have been his mom – produced a bottle of Wild Turkey, and the two of them and Ava passed it back and forth in the dark, sipping the Kentucky nectar till the movie’s end. They skipped the after-party – the buffet featured Beef Puerto Vallarta – and ventured to a club downtown to see Miles Davis.”