The Backstory to 'Broads'

These Old Broads is a 2001 TV movie written by Carrie Fisher (with Elaine Pope) and starring Debbie Reynolds, Shirley MacLaine, Joan Collins and Elizabeth Taylor. In it, Fisher set out to pen a campy romp that gay audiences would love, a valentine to lovers of Old Hollywood and the legendary ladies who twinkled in its firmanent. 

The premise is simple: A trio of has-been actresses who can’t stand each other team up for a tribute to the 60s beach movie that made them stars (think Where The Boys Are). But the plot of the movie is really beside the point. The real fun of These Old Broads is knowing the backstories of its superstar cast and connecting the dots.

Fisher found her movie title in an old Hollywood story that perfectly captured the attitude toward aging actresses in Hollywood.

In 1962, studio head Jack Warner told producer Robert Aldrich when he asked for financing on a picture starring aging divas Bette Davis and Joan Crawford: “No one’s going to give you a dime for these old broads.” (But Warner was wrong, of course, and Whatever Happened To Baby Jane went on to become the surprise hit of that year.)

Carrie Fisher with her mom Debbie Reynolds, circa 1970

Carrie Fisher herself was one complicated character. Space Princess. Hollywood Princess. And also Princess of Pain - obsessive, intense and bipolar, with a passionate and encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood folklore. We are fortunate that she was such a prolific writer and chronicler of the many things going on inside that brilliant beautiful mind.

If you’re not familiar with Fisher’s history and Hollywood pedigree, I highly recommend watching her hilarious one-woman show Wishful Drinking (available on HBO) before seeing These Old Broads. In it, she gives an enlightening synopsis of her life in a lecture replete with a flow chart of her famous family tree—aptly titled Hollywood Inbreeding 101. 

Bottom line: it’s all connected—and many of the details must be understood to fully appreciate Broads. 

Back in 1957, singer Eddie Fisher and girl next door MGM star Debbie Reynolds (parents to Carrie and brother Todd) were America’s sweethearts, and best friends to impresario Mike Todd and his new wife Elizabeth Taylor. (Debbie had even served as Elizabeth’s matron of honor.) Tragically, Mike Todd suddenly died in a plane crash, leaving Elizabeth devastated. Debbie sent Eddie to help her friend in any way he possibly could. 

The Other Woman: Elizabeth Taylor with Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds

Then, as Carrie tells it, “My father rushed to her side—and then made his way around to her front.” The despondent widowed Taylor needed comfort and consolation, and in Eddie’s daughter’s words, “She consoled herself with my father’s p****s.”

The scandal and feud that resulted played out in the tabloids for years to come. Elizabeth was branded an adulteress, and Eddie lost his lucrative TV show. Reynolds divorced Fisher. Fisher and Taylor would marry in 1959, but three years later Taylor would dump him as well for costar Richard Burton, igniting yet another Scandale.

In Broads, Debbie Reynolds plays a role very close to her real self, an unsinkable former movie star who owns a hotel and movie memorabilia museum.  

One key scene in These Old Broads capitalizes on the Debbie/Eddie/Liz scandal and is fascinating to watch, the square-off scene between Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds. It’s full of fun, affection and nostalgia as Debbie playfully chastises her former friend for being a nymphomaniac and Elizabeth defends herself by calling Debbie a boring born-again virgin. Debbie forgives Elizabeth and together they tear Eddie to shreds for coming between them. In real life, Debbie and Elizabeth had buried the hatchet years before, but for a classic movie lover it’s a real treat to see an onscreen version of their reconciliation. (It’s the raison d’etre for the whole film, in my opinion!)

Friends forever: Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds

With almost nothing to do or interesting to say, Shirley MacLaine fares less well than Debbie and Elizabeth in Broads. The character she plays would have benefited by a dash of the metaphysical/woowoo (some say kooky) spiritual persona that has helped make the name Shirley MacLaine iconic, but no one thought of that.

But of course, MacLaine has backstory that connects her directly to both Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor in the Hollywood tapestry of myth. In Postcards from the Edge, Carrie Fisher’s thinly veiled account of her recovery from a drug overdose, MacLaine famously played the role of the mother fashioned after Debbie, opposite Meryl Streep in the Carrie role. 

And Liz Taylor once “stole” the Oscar that MacLaine believed was hers, back in 1961! 

Liz "stole" Shirley's Oscar in 1961, but Shirley got one too in 1984

Nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role of Miss Kubelik in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment,  MacLaine was the odds-on favorite to win. That is, until fellow nominee Elizabeth Taylor fell ill with pneumonia in London and was at death’s door. Only emergency surgery saved Elizabeth from drowning in her own lung fluids, along with the prayers of filmgoers worldwide who forgave her sinful past transgressions (specifically, stealing Debbie’s husband Eddie). “I prayed right along with them for Elizabeth’s recovery,” a saintly Debbie Reynolds was quoted as saying.

The Academy voters took pity on her as well and Taylor won, for her performance as a trampy call girl in the sleazy yet slick soap opera Butterfield 8, prompting Shirley MacLaine to retort cynically, “I lost to a tracheotomy.” (MacLaine would finally win the coveted gold statuette for Best Actress in 1984, for Terms of Endearment.)

Connecting the dots to…Joan Collins. When Elizabeth had fallen ill, it had been none other than Joan Collins who was tapped to replace Taylor as the Queen of the Nile in the big screen Fox epic Cleopatra. (But Taylor, of course, recovered!)

Joan Collins almost took over the role of Cleopatra from an ailing Taylor - but she recovered!

Collins, considered to be the poor man’s Elizabeth Taylor, had been a Hollywood glamour girl for half a decade but had never achieved the A-List status of a Taylor or a Monroe. The British beauty did some high profile parts (taking over the role Joan Crawford played in The Women for the color remake The Opposite Sex, for example) but her filmography also contained numerous lesser efforts such as the sword-and-sandal epic Land of the Pharoahs.

Married to flamboyant songwriter and performer Anthony “What Kind of Fool Am I” Newley in the 1960s, Collins became more well known as an international jetsetter than as an actress, though she did take time out to raise a family. A ubiquitous presence on International Best Dressed Lists and in the tabloids, Collins was seen frugging at posh nightclubs in seqinned minidresses, glittering with diamonds, sporting her trademark false lashes and kohl-black eyeliner, high bouffant wigs and falls. Fabulous!

Building an icon: From 1950s glamour girl to 1960s fashionista to TV's top femme fatale

In the 1970s, Collins worked steadily, often in horror films (like Tales That Witness Madness and The Empire of the Ants) and titillating semi-sexploitation ugh films like The Bitch (based on a book by her equally famous sister Jackie Collins, who exposed the seamier side of fame and fortune with her racy contemporary romance novels, most notably The Hollywood Wives.)

Then came the TV series Dynasty, in which her tour de force performance as the beautiful, villainous and flawlessly fashionable Alexis Morell Carrington Colby Dexter Dexter Rowan revitalized her career and propelled her to a richly deserved icon status of her own. 

In Broads, Joan looks spectacular - she was 67 at the time - but she seems miscast in her role of a gangster’s moll (shades of Lana Turner and Johnny Stompananato) and her American accent leaves something to be desired. 

Perhaps Elizabeth had been offered the Collins role first and turned it down (though it wouldn’t have been a good fit for her either) and then bade Fisher to create a role in which she could relax in bed most of the time. Taylor suffered from constant agonizing pain from back trouble and had difficulty walking, and indeed for the rest of her life conducted most of her business from her bedroom! 

Like Mae West, Elizabeth did some of her best work in bed

(For all her beauty, talent, fame and and money, Taylor’s life was indeed beset by crisis after crisis, tragedy after tragedy, dozens of health scares, operations and close calls. A long-running soap opera. But she still found the energy and time to create a billion-dollar perfume business and to establish, organize and promote the AIDS charity AMFAR.)

In her small role as a high-powered Hollywood agent, Elizabeth steals the film from her famous costars, a zoftig earth mother lounging in her caftan and barking orders in a thick New York accent.  (Taylor had converted to Judaism when she married Mike Todd and ever since, always referred to herself as a Jewish American Princess and a Jewish Mother, and she plays it to the hilt here.)

If only the movie itself were as interesting as the stories behind it and the stars in it!  It’s a mess in many respects (a mix of slapstick farce and bitchy comedy of manners) but its heart is in the right place. Any movie that gives work to mature, powerful, accomplished women is all right in my book. When it’s on again, you can be sure I’ll be watching it! 

Thanks for the opportunity to add this entry to the Joan Collins Blogathon hosted by RealWeegieMidget Reviews and Taking Up Room! I look forward to exploring the glittering career of Dame Joan with my fellow bloggers! 

Liz: Oscar #1

Clad in a form-fitting white slip, she rises from bed, her hair a Sydney Guilaroff–designed fright wig. Out of cigs, she digs in the ashtray for a spurned butt and lights it, inhaling greedily. She picks up a discarded bottle of champagne and guzzles the flat dregs. Beginning to relax, she patrols the elegant Fifth Avenue apartment she is obviously only a guest in. But when she finds a wad of cash on the nighttable next to the bed, she glares in cold fury. She drops the money on the vanity table, picks up a lipstick and scrawls the words “No Sale” on the mirror in a defiant shade of hot pink. Her dress on the floor in tatters, she grabs a fur from the closet, throws it on and slams out the door. Meet Gloria Wandrous, the role that won Elizabeth Taylor her very first Oscar. 

Elizabeth hated making BUtterfield 8 (1960), but she’s damn good in it as the conflicted call girl in love with cold fish Laurence Harvey. It’s a sordid soap opera, served up in glossy Metro-Goldwyn Mayer style, a perfect Sunday afternoon, on-the-couch-eating-a-pint-or-two-of-Haagen Dazs movie.

Taylor had been nominated as Best Actress the preceding three years, for her turn as doomed Southern belle Susannah in Raintree County (1957), her tour de force as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and her complex role as amnesiac trauma survivor Catherine Holly in Suddenly Last Summer (1959). Elizabeth would have deserved the prize for any one of those performances.

No one thought she would win for Gloria Wandrous, least of all Taylor herself, but when the actress contracted a virus and almost died of pneumonia during the Academy voting process, she won the sympathy vote. She barely survived her illness, having to undergo a tracheotomy to do so, and she was frail and vulnerable the night she accepted her Oscar, then-husband (and Butterfield costar)  Eddie Fisher by her side. 

Deserved or not, this would only be the first Oscar win for a legendary actress who possessed at least as much talent and spirit as she did alluring beauty.

Cleo-Patois

Cleopatra (1963) will go down in history as one of Hollywood’s most resounding flops. It was the most expensive movie ever made at the time of its release—the first whose budget exceeded the $40 million mark when the average film cost less than a million to produce. Having been the subject of three years of hype and scandal, this epic was ultimately swamped by its own publicity, all of it bad, and movie audiences stayed home after a series of scathing reviews.

Highlights of the bad press the making of Cleopatra generated included Elizabeth Taylor’s then-gargantuan salary of $1 million (the very first actor to command that sum); Taylor’s near-fatal illness which caused the London production to be shut down and later rebuilt in Rome, with new actors hired to accommodate La Liz’s schedule; and tales of extravagant on-set demands, including chili from Chasen’s in Beverly Hills being flown into Rome to appease the royal appetite of the voluptuous star.  

But the worst was yet to come. Miss Taylor’s voracious appetites were apparently not restricted to food alone. Having been dragged through the publicity mud several years earlier when she “stole” Eddie Fisher from her friend Debbie Reynolds, Liz had partially repaired her image by almost dying of pneumonia and winning the Academy Award. Now, in 1962, she seemed ready to kick husband number four Eddie to the curb, as she embarked on a hot-and-heavy affair with her (also married) Cleopatra costar Richard Burton, who was playing Marc Antony. The new scandale sold countless papers, but killed the box office potential of the big-budget behemoth. 

The tragedy is, it was a movie worth seeing, featuring an outstanding cast including Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar, Roddy McDowall in a brilliantly underrated performance as Caesarion, Hume Cronyn, Martin Landau and the electric first-time screen chemistry of Taylor and Burton. Filmed in Todd-AO (a process developed by Elizabeth’s late third husband), it is a lush, crisp, colorful and eye-filling production. Written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (creator of classics including All About Eve and A Letter to Three Wives), Cleopatra is both literate and spectacular—and basically historically accurate, based on ancient seminal texts. At four hours and five minutes, it runs about 20 minutes longer than Gone With the Wind.

Considered a failure and a disappointment at the time, the years have been kind to this film, which has enjoyed a resurgence on DVD and is a staple for movie houses that run big-screen revivals of the classics.

Cleopatra deserves a fresh look—it’s a witty, incisive and engrossing history lesson featuring some of the most charismatic actors in film.