BUtterfield 8 was directed by Daniel Mann from a screenplay by Charles Schnee and John Michael Hayes based on a bestselling 1935 John O’Hara novel. The film version is set in the early 1960s.
The novel BUtterfield 8 was inspired by a 1931 news story of the discovery of the body of a beautiful young socialite Starr Faithfull washed up on a beach. Much of the novel is set in speakeasies, the “private” nightclubs and bars during the Prohibition era, which did not end until 1933. O’Hara dealt bluntly with matters of social class, sex, and ambition. Today, the novel is remembered for being mainly about sex. But, it’s more about money. Or sex and money. Or sex and money and liquor.
The opening credits begin: “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presents John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8.” O’Hara’s Gloria Wandrous is a professional call girl using the Butterfield Exchange for her answering service, while the film’s Gloria Wandrous was changed to an amateur call girl because she does not take money from the men she is with.
You kids might not know of answering services; before voice mail, even before answering machines, phone calls were patched through according to people’s names. When the first private answering services were established, clients were referred to as “numbers” and given their messages when they called in. From there, the evolution to switchboards within companies ended the need for personnel answering services as the main telephone companies became automated.
Anyway, back to the movie; Taylor didn’t want to play the role; but, she was still under contract at MGM, and the studio insisted that she star in the film as a condition for releasing her to Twentieth Century-Fox to play the lead in Cleopatra. Taylor finally agreed under the condition that popular singer Eddie Fisher be given a role. Recently widowed after her husband, producer Michael Todd, died in a plane crash in March 1958, Taylor began an affair with Fisher, who had been a family friend. They married in 1959 after Fisher divorced America’s sweetheart Debbie Reynolds. Fisher plays Gloria Wandrous’s platonic childhood friend, and it is a good thing it is platonic because Fisher and Taylor have no chemistry together onscreen.
After three Academy Award nominations, for Raintree County (1957), Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), in the spring of 1960, Taylor signed a contract to star in Cleopatra in summer 1960 for $1 million, the most ever for a female star. The January 1961 shooting on location in England had just began on Cleopatra when it was postponed until spring and moved to sunny Rome due to Taylor contracting viral pneumonia while shooting Butterfield 8 on location in and around New York City. Taylor was forced to have an emergency tracheotomy, which saved her life, but left her in a coma. For days the press reported that Taylor was near death.
Taylor and Fisher returned from Europe to Hollywood to attend the Academy Awards ceremony. She won the Oscar for her performance in BUtterfield 8, which she accepted in her weakened, shaky state. The award was perceived as a “sympathy” vote, not only for her recovery after almost kicking the bucket, but also for Taylor’s losses three years in a row. After shooting finally started again on Cleopatra, Taylor and co-star Richard Burton began an affair which ended her marriage with Fisher. Butterfield 8 was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography.
At the start of BUtterfield 8, Gloria Wandrous (Taylor) wakes up in wealthy executive Weston Liggett’s apartment and finds he has left her $250 dollars. Insulted by the money which she never takes from men, Gloria, whose dress is torn, takes Liggett’s mink coat to cover herself and scrawls “No Sale” in lipstick on a mirror, but then orders her telephone answering service, “BUtterfield 8”, to put Liggit through if he should call. Enigmatic bisexual Laurence Harvey plays Weston Liggett. Predictably, Gloria Wandrous falls for Liggett, who likes her in the bedroom, but not outdoors.
The cast also includes Mildred Dunnock, as Gloria’s mother, plus Betty Field, Kay Medford, Eddie Fisher, and Dina Merrill as Liggett’s wife.
Many of the early 1960’s preoccupations are included in the film: improbably tiny Italian sports cars, garish fur coats, engraved lighters, swanky nightclubs, and roadside motels with sassy proprietors named Happy. According to Hollywood, it was a time for wild parties, drunken, yet disease and pregnancy-free sex, unending shopping sprees, and Taylor’s blinding cleavage.
After leaving his wife with the appallingly self-serving news that he expects to be taken back after hunting down his lover one last time, Liggett finds himself at Happy’s by-the-hour motel, but he is left in the dust by the Boston-bound Gloria Wandrous in her tiny Italian sports car. Only she won’t reach Massachusetts. The film’s climax is a highway chase with cars that appear to be clocking in at just under the sound barrier because any vehicle driven by a slut seeking redemption will end up driving off a cliff.
Not her greatest performance, Taylor’s Gloria Wandrous is worth remembering. Fondly it so happens.
BUtterfield 8 is filled with Queer Quotes:
Tom, the Bartender:
”Without her this place is dead. She’s like catnip to every cat in town.”
Mrs. Jescott (Carmen Matthews):
”Vulgarity has its uses.”
Norma (Susan Oliver): ”By the way, for the record, what did happen to your dress? ”
Gloria Wandrous: ”Well, it’s a funny thing. One minute it was there and the next minute it wasn’t.”
Norma: ”Much like your virtue I presume.”
Liggett grieving to his wife about Taylor, after she dies in the car accident:
”I don’t suppose that anybody would think that Gloria was a good person. Strangely enough, she was. On the surface, she was all sex and devil-may-care, yet everything in her was struggling toward respectability. She never gave up trying.”
Reportedly, when Taylor saw the first screening of BUtterfield 8, she threw her high-heels at the screen, ran to the bathroom and threw up.
