Hollywood: The Cast Menagerie

To understand the situation at Puerto Vallarta, you need a slide rule, a T-square, a French curve, and a basic introduction to metaphysics. In this hot little cove on the west coast of Mexico (TIME, Nov. 1), a film company is making Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana. The screenplay is somewhat adulterated, since it was pecked into existence by someone else. But the off-screen play, unnervingly, is something straight out of Tennessee Williams. The shadow and the substance fuse.

Richard Burton is there with Elizabeth Taylor. He is playing the role of an Episcopal priest who has been thrown out of his church for moral turpitude. Taylor, who has no part in the film, is playing it safe. Although she is still married to Eddie Fisher, she is already well along into the waiting-up-nervously phase with Burton. If she gets too nervous, she can always consult one of Burton’s friendly agents, Michael Wilding, who in his acting days was her second husband.

Irrepressible Passions. Ava Gardner plays Iguana’s voluptuary middle-aged innkeeper—who sets her desperate cap for Father Richard. She seems to be working at it, off and on camera. If there is a bit of dust on her slacks before a take, Richard helps her remove it. When he has a drink with her after hours, Ava blossoms with animation.

Wherever Ava goes, however, sparklers burn in many hands. The Mexican press last week printed the fanciful rumor that she was going to marry the assistant director, Emilio Fernandez, known as El Indio. Some seven years ago the Indian was one of the top directors in Mexico; but he shot a producer and was ostracized. “Emilio’s only weakness,” says Director John Huston, “is his tendency to shoot people he doesn’t like.”

Novelist-Screenwriter Peter Viertel, who was once Ava’s constant companion in Paris and Mexico during the filming of The Sun Also Rises some years ago, is also in Puerto Vallarta, since he is now the husband of Deborah Kerr, who is playing a Nantucket spinster in the film. Viertel is understandably wary of Ava, but he is also a little skittish with Director John Huston. He worked on the screenplay of Huston’s African Queen and followed up with a novel called White Hunter, Black Heart, which was a thinly disguised, malicious portrait of Huston.

Two Others. Meanwhile, Sue Lyon (Lolita, ’62) is there, too, playing a young tourist; and U.S. newspapers have been cropping pictures madly—cutting out everyone but Sue and Burton—to suggest irrepressible tropical passions drawing the two together. Actually, Sue is 17 and old enough to have brought along her own outrider, like everyone else. His name is Hampton Fancher III. “You mean there are two others?” cracked one of the company. Fancher, a 25-year-old would-be actor, takes advantage of his position as consort to boss everybody around.

Huston, of course, is a show in himself, as always. He wears black leather suits, white hunter’s outfits and long striped muu muus. He has a tawny Anglo-Iranian girl named Zoë: with him. He has also made the happy discovery of raicilla, a 180-proof distillate of the maguey plant that is far more potent than tequila. “If you drink it straight down, you can feel it going into each individual intestine,” says Burton.

Huston is full of praise for his stars. “Ava,” he says, “can belt it out as well as belt it down.” He knows that by bringing them all together in such a remote tropic, he has in effect manufactured a human grenade. “I plunked these people down together, and they have to live their parts 24 hours a day,” he smiles. So far he is managing them well. The film is five days ahead of schedule. Last week he gave derringers to Richard, Elizabeth, Ava, Deborah, Sue and Producer Ray Stark. Each pistol contained five bullets in its chambers. All bullets were engraved, with the names of the other five recipients.

Smoldering Group. Iguana is being filmed on a small peninsula about eight miles by water from Puerto Vallarta. Daily at noon, Taylor arrives by launch, often dressed in a pink bikini, bringing a picnic lunch for Richard from the kitchen of their four-story villa. Ashore, she and Richard go around in a Jeep with a red and white striped canvas top. Burton is the company champion at flinging frisbees. He has learned Spanish, using records and written grammar. He is working well, too. With Williams and Huston behind him, it is conceivable that this movie could win him an Academy Award. “I can tell when I’m in a good picture,” he says. “If by eleven in the morning I haven’t had a drink, I know it’s a good picture.”

Tennessee Williams has his doubts. He hustled down to Puerto Vallarta last month to try to talk Huston out of using a Happy Ending. But Huston is obstinate, so Williams grew a beard and tried to keep cool by going swimming in the luke waters with Taylor and Burton. Tennessee wears a bathing cap and Elizabeth does not.

All these interknotted emotional geometries are really unusual for a mere movie set, where one or two rabid love affairs are about all that ever happen. Puerto Vallarta seems more like a New Jersey suburb.