Why do actors and actresses have sex with each other?

The answer seems obvious: because they can. Most actors and actresses are better-looking than average, with bodies they spend a lot of time starving and pounding into shape, so they’re not short of offers. And if you were kissing George Clooney/Scarlett Johansson/Ryan Gosling/[insert your personal favourite] on a film set all day, wouldn’t you get just a little bit frisky and keen to try some extracurricular practice?

Affairs between lead actors and actresses are the stuff of legend: Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Bogart and Bacall, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, Taylor and Burton, Melanie Griffiths and Antonio Banderas, Pitt and Jolie, Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz. … Many directors encourage it for that extra verisimilitude in the performance. Besides, no matter the cultural credentials we as audience may claim, we turn up at cinemas in droves to watch the actors we would like to sleep with – so it does no harm to box-office receipts if the gossip mags confirm they are indeed highly sexed.

Scientists at Newcastle University have researched the personality types of actors and compared them with the general population only to find that they are A/ more extravert than the rest of us (which figures); B/more open to new experiences (I guess they have to be); and C/are much more narcissistic and neurotic than the average (ah-hah!). Maybe it’s that mixture of narcissism (“How wonderful am I!”) and neuroticism (“Can’t you see how wonderful I am? Do you not love me? Does the public not love me?”) that explains the need for the ego-massage of an affair with someone equally as hot as yourself.

I imagine the problem lies in distinguishing ‘real life’ from scripted make-belief. Do they fall for the other person or for the role they are playing? If they want to stay together, how do they make the transition into domesticity? What do they make of each other’s morning breath and the stray pubic hair in the shower?

Cleopatra director Joe Mankiewicz described Burton and Taylor as not so much lovers as “two actors who didn’t know how to get off stage because there wasn’t a scriptwriter around to show them how”. And so they carried on with the performance through fourteen booze-fuelled, tempestuous years.

Burton had his feet slightly more on the ground with his Welsh valleys upbringing, but Taylor had been acting out the fantasy of ‘life as a Hollywood script’ from the age of ten. She hadn’t been exposed to anything else and it meant she would forever be choosing princes who couldn’t actually live up to the hype. She persevered through eight husbands and countless lovers but none could cut the mustard so she hankered after the ones she couldn’t have – Mike Todd, who died in a plane crash; and Burton, who got himself off the booze and found a flesh-and-blood intellectual equal for his final marriage.

Of course, actors and actresses are subject to all the usual complex reasons why any of us have sex with anyone else; but some of them make it much more tortuous – and a damn sight more public.

Always the last to know…

Robert Pattinson found out that Kristen Stewart was having an affair after photographs were taken of her canoodling in a car with Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders. Reese Witherspoon allegedly discovered incriminating text messages between husband Ryan Phillippe and Abbie Cornish. Tiger Woods tried to convince his wife he was completely faithful but the sheer number of women claiming to have had affairs with him meant he finally had to put his hands up.

It’s tough being a celebrity (or married to one). Not only do you have the shock and hurt of being cheated on, but there’s often the humiliation of the press or public finding out about it before you do.

Back in Rome in 1962, when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton got together on the set of Cleopatra, the cast and crew were in on the secret long before their spouses had a clue. When the script called for Anthony and Cleopatra to kiss, the pair lunged for each other and didn’t appear to hear the director, Joe Mankiewicz, calling “Cut!”. (“I feel as though I’m intruding,” he quipped.) Burton indiscreetly bragged in the men’s makeup trailer that he’d ‘nailed’ his co-star in the back of his Cadillac. They used her secretary’s apartment for secret trysts and were often seen sneaking to each other’s trailers for ‘cocktail hour’ with shawls thrown over their heads.

Elizabeth’s husband, the singer Eddie Fisher, heard the whispers but dismissed them: she was the most beautiful woman in the world and there had always been rumours but he trusted her not to cheat. Big mistake.

After a close friend phoned to tip him off, Eddie turned to Elizabeth as they lay in bed one night and asked her directly: “Tell me the truth: is there something going on between you and Burton?”

“Yes,” she replied quietly.

It all got a bit less dignified after that. Eddie went to tell Richard’s wife Sybil, who wasn’t greatly surprised because her husband had slept with pretty much every leading lady he’d ever worked with (apart from Julie Andrews). Sybil was prepared to put up with it so long as it ended when filming was over.

It was Richard who wanted Eddie out of the way. He turned up drunk at a dinner party Elizabeth and Eddie were throwing and insisted she had to choose between them.

“Who do you love?” he slurred. “Show me who you love.”

And in front of their friends, and Eddie, she walked over and gave Richard a deep passionate kiss.

Eddie finally took the hint but it would be another year and a lot more heartache on all sides before Richard decided to leave his wife and family to be with Elizabeth. And we all know how that ended…

Years later, Eddie Fisher developed a stage act in which he joked about his ex, calling her “Elizabeth, the nympho of the Nile”. Sybil Burton took all Richard’s money in the divorce settlement and maintained a dignified silence right up until her death on 7^th March this year at the age of eighty-three.

Le Scandale

When Kristen Stewart cheated on Robert Pattinson last year, the media worked themselves into a frenzy. It was just like the scandal back in 2005 after Brad Pitt left Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie, when Jolie was characterised as a heartless homewrecker. But this was nothing to the treatment meted out to Elizabeth Taylor fifty years ago when she dared to have an affair with Richard Burton on the set of the movie Cleopatra.

Burton was known for sleeping with his leading ladies while his wife Sybil turned a blind eye. No harm done. He was only doing what actors have been doing since time immemorial. But the public still hadn’t quite forgiven Elizabeth Taylor for stealing husband number three from American sweetheart Debbie Reynolds. She had form.

Elizabeth Taylor’s trailer on the set of Cleopatra.

Once news of the Burton-Taylor affair became public, paparazzi followed everywhere, leaping in front of them to explode flashbulbs in their faces and besieging them in their homes on location in Rome. Taylor was condemned by the Vatican cardinals, no less, who called her “an erotic vagrant” and an unfit mother. An American congresswoman, Iris Blitch, tried to pass a motion banning her from ever returning to the United States because her behaviour “lowered the prestige of American women abroad” and “damaged foreign relations with Italy”. And after filming was over, Twentieth Century Fox sued her and Burton for $50 million, claiming Cleopatra would earn less money because the public were so horrified by their antics.

All bets were that Burton would have his fun, while bumping up his price per picture through association with the most famous woman in the world, then he would return to Sybil as he always had in the past. They had the same Welsh roots. They had two daughters together, one of whom was autistic. All their friends and his extended family were on Sybil’s side.

But that’s not how it panned out. His affair with Taylor was tempestuous and dangerously addictive. He gave her a black eye; she made him buy her fabulous jewels. He turned up drunk at a dinner party at her villa and in front of guests made her choose between him and then husband, singer Eddie Fisher. She chose Burton, thus ending her fourth marriage when she was still only thirty years old. Over the next year, she gradually lured Richard away from Sybil with a combination of porn-star bedroom techniques, witty repartee, occasional suicide attempts, and a capacity for alcohol matched only by his own.

After much toing and froing, by Cleopatra’s premiere in June 1963, Richard had finally told Sybil their marriage was over. He lost everything in the divorce – his family, his money, his friends in the English theatrical world and, some said, his credibility as an actor. In return he got the woman he called his “wildly exciting lover-mistress”.

I couldn’t resist writing about events on the film set in my new novel, The Affair, which comes out in May. Of course, all shoots have their problems, but the Cleopatra one was exceptional: it had a budget that started out at $2million but ended up more than twenty times that (adjusted for inflation it’s still the third most expensive film ever made); a star who demanded bowls of chilli to be flown in from Chasen’s in Los Angeles and insisted she needed days off when she was menstruating (or had a hangover); and a huge cast hired for a ten-week shoot who ended up staying for ten months, most having the time of their lives.

Against the backdrop of ancient Rome, Burton and Taylor were creating their own mythology. It’s easy now to characterise them as ego-driven alcoholics who collided and hurt others in the collateral damage; they were original couple who were famous for being famous. But that would ignore the body of exceptional work they created both together and individually: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Under Milk Wood, Where Eagles Dare, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Burton’s theatre work was legendary. Taylor’s charity work, especially for AIDS, was hugely influential.

As the 50^th anniversary of the Cleopatra premiere approaches, and Richard Burton’s star has finally been laid next to Elizabeth Taylor’s in the Hollywood Walk of Fame, maybe it’s time to remember them as actors who achieved great things, as well as entertaining the world with what they themselves referred to as Le Scandale.

Celebrities in Love

If you struggle to maintain a healthy relationship spare a thought for poor celebrities, who have the odds stacked against them when it comes to love.

First of all, there are four people in a celebrity relationship: him, her, his public image and hers. We all want someone who makes us feel better about ourselves, but celebs want someone who makes them feel good on a personal level and who enhances their public image at the same time. Agents and publicists often get involved in matchmaking celebrity clients, choosing partners who will generate the most favourable column inches. They don’t want their client to be with a man who makes her look needy or unloveable; if things go wrong, she has to be the one to leave because it’s not sexy to be left. It’s an arranged marriage based on the worst possible criteria.

Celebrities are narcissistic. Their egos are fed so much by the press and fans and their big bank balances that they genuinely believe they are better than the rest of us. But there’s a tiny part of them deep down that feels unworthy and this terrifies them, making them need more reassurance than most. It’s lonely at the top, and many celebrities have trouble finding people they can trust, when family members and old friends succumb to the lure of the tabloid chequebook. That means they have to put all their eggs in one basket and expect their celebrity partner to be all things to them: lover, parent, best friend… a pressure that would damage most relationships. Yet that very loneliness means that as soon as (or preferably before) one relationship breaks up, they are on a hunt for the next person to fall in love with. And that’s why they keep getting married again and again.

The more space a particular celeb takes up in the tabloid media, the more likely it is that their marriage will fail, according to John Tierney and Garth Sundem, who studied the subject for The New York Times. They even came up with a formula to predict the chances of a celebrity’s marriage succeeding http://nyti.ms/ZUbvfc.

Rule number one: if a woman is a sex symbol given to wearing skimpy clothing in public, the marriage is doomed. Sorry, Katie Price and Kieran Hayler…

Rule number two: there are bound to be problems if one partner is much more famous than the other, or much wealthier than the other, because it means there is an inherent imbalance of power. Sorry, Kate Winslet and Ned Rocknroll…

Celebrities don’t have time in their busy schedules for long courtships when they try out different things and get to know each other. They hook up, the press gets wind of it and starts asking “Will they wed?” and the pressure is on. But a whirlwind courtship is one of the clearest indicators that a marriage will fail. If there are less than six months before the big day, it’s likely they’ll be in the divorce courts within six years. They’re marrying because they have sexual chemistry instead of taking time to learn mutual respect, trust and affection.

It used to be said that selling coverage of the wedding to Hello! Magazine was a sure sign the marriage wouldn’t last, and this may well still be true. Other key signs include:

• Getting tattoos of each other’s names. When he broke up with Winona Ryder, Johnny Depp had the tattoo ‘Winona Forever’ turned into ‘Wino Forever’ but they can’t all be so neatly transformed.

• Having a lavish fairy-tale wedding lets them be prince and princess for the day but indicates they are living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

• Playing romantic roles in which they kiss other actors on screen is inevitably going to lead to infidelity sooner or later.  It’s an occupational hazard.

• If there have been several marriages before the current one, its chances are substantially lessened. Look at the previous relationships and you’ll see where the fatal flaws lie. (Will Tom Cruise ever stop trying to convert his wives to Scientology? Probably not…)

I’ve been writing about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in my latest novel The Affair (due out on 23^rd May). The odds were heavily stacked against their relationship working: she was much more famous and much wealthier than him; she was constantly photographed in low-cut gowns; she had already been married four times; she consumed her body weight in prescription drugs and both were at the start of a lifelong love affair with booze. The fact that their first marriage lasted ten years says something about their huge attraction to each other that clearly transcended the physical.

All her life she’d been praised for her beauty but Richard Burton was the first person to tell her she was intelligent, with opinions worth listening to. He even told her she was a good actress, which is pushing it some. On his side, he fell for her thoroughly modern outlook and her caustic, bawdy wit. She didn’t nag him not to drink; she let him be the dominant one and they had a lot of fun – while it lasted. Ten years first time round, then a quick remarriage of nine months duration.

He moved on to find happiness, peace and sobriety with wife number four, Sally Burton. Elizabeth Taylor remarried countless times but always looked back with nostalgia at the great love of her life, with the man who played Anthony to her Cleopatra.

The Titanic Museums in Belfast and Southampton

Titanic Belfast tells an important part of the Titanic story, bringing to life the building of the ship in the Harland and Wolff dockyards. I liked the first gallery you go into, which is about life in the city at the time, with shadows walking back and forth on the walls and a Marconi machine you can try; I especially liked the three-sided video projections that let you travel up inside the ship from boiler room to bridge; and the final gallery with the underwater footage of the wreck is eery and fascinating.

I was less impressed by the ride round the shipyard, partly because half the projections weren’t working when we were there, but also because it just felt like a cheesy fairground ride. Also, the sinking of the ship is handled weirdly with an animated graphic showing how the water flooded in and caused the ship to upend and break in half, but I was distracted by the fact that in the graphic all the lifeboats are still in place as she sank – which is, of course, wrong.

It’s inevitable that there will be early teething troubles in a project as ambitious as this. It would be good to get more of a transport and coffeehouse/restaurant infrastructure out there in the docks. When we arrived at 4 in the afternoon the museum coffee shop was shut and there was nowhere else to get a drink. The only other quibble is from local people, who complained about the fact that the signage is only in English, not Irish. Perhaps they’ll fix that in future.

One of my books on display in Southampton’s SeaCity Museum.

Southampton’s SeaCity Museum existed before 2012 but they’ve just spent £15 million on a permanent Titanic gallery upstairs and a temporary one downstairs – and they are fabulous! It has a very different purpose from the Belfast one, which becomes apparent as soon as you walk in to find a wall of cards, each commemorating a crew member from the city of Southampton or the surrounding area. The card tells you the individual’s name, post on the ship, age – and whether or not they survived. Some have pictures but not many, and I’m told this is because the museum can’t afford the fees charged by photo copyright holders. You’ll find far more crew pictures in John Eaton and Charles Haas’s book Titanic: Triumph and Tragedy. It’s there that I came across the photo of the young man who became the inspiration for Reg in my novel.

There are some fantastic interactive items for children and an interesting plan of the ship showing how different areas were linked. The sinking is covered in a separate room where you can sit and listen to three local survivors describing their experiences, while looking at visuals of flowing ocean. The next section is the most moving of all, though. The floor has a street map of Southampton with a red dot on each house that lost someone on the Titanic – and there’s barely a row of three houses without a dot. You can listen to recordings of local people queuing up to read the lists of survivors, hoping against hope that their relative is safe, as well as local news reports from the time, and it’s incredibly sad. I had a huge lump in my throat.

And then you come into a courtroom where the British Inquiry is re-enacted, with a recording of actors reading different sections of the testimonies. Although I’d read it all before, this was strangely compelling and we found ourselves sitting listening for ages.

The downstairs gallery is all about the impact the sinking of the Titanic has had on the world since then: the films, books, games (yes, there’s a Titanic Monopoly!) and other merchandise, and it looks at some of the controversies (such as whether the rivets were to blame).

Both museums were absorbing in their own ways, and if I’m slightly biased towards the Southampton one you can blame the fact that my book is on display in their downstairs gallery! In an era when museum funding is at risk, it was great to see truly imaginative and thought-provoking displays that would engage adults and even the most computer-game-addicted child. Do visit when you can.

Are those with Titanic-themed products coming out for the centenary simply jumping on a bandwagon?

A cartoon in today’s Sunday Times books section shows a bookseller drowning under an avalanche of Titanic books. In fact, there are 78 books about the Titanic scheduled for publication in the UK this year, up from 68 last year and just 10 the year before. This ‘avalanche’ extends to virtually every other form of media, with James Cameron’s 3D feature film, Julian Fellowes’ TV mini-series, loads of TV documentaries, operas, theatre productions, concerts, new museums … see Greg Ward’s calendar of events at http://blogtanic.wordpress.com/events-calendar-2/.

Cartoon from the New York Herald, 17 April 1912.

I have written two Titanic books myself, one published last year and one coming out in 10 days. Have I jumped on a bandwagon, along with all these other writers, musicians and artists? The term has an implication of opportunism, a hint that we might not have chosen this topic were we not pretty sure that it would be popular – and I can’t speak for anyone else but personally but I would have to hold my hands up to this. I earn a living from writing and have to choose subjects people want to read about or my income will dry up. Publishers are on a regular look-out for anniversaries in order to hitch their wagon to publicity generated by other media, and my non-fiction Titanic book was the result of a commission from a far-sighted publisher back in 2009.

However, I don’t think anyone who has a Titanic product coming out around this time has created it without caring deeply about what happened in the north Atlantic on the night of the 14^th/15^th of April. You can’t immerse yourself in the subject without becoming emotionally involved. I also think most of us were already Titanoraks and the centenary just brought an opportunity to get our work out there. I’ve been passionate about the Titanic story since I was a teenager. Both my grandfathers worked in shipbuilding on the River Clyde and I grew up knowing about the great luxury liner that sank on its maiden voyage. The story really got under my skin when I saw the film A Night to Remember, and I think I’ve been waiting for a chance to write about it since then.

Of course, it’s important to remember that this is the centenary of a tragedy in which 1,500 people died, and many of them are still remembered by living relatives. There is a line that shouldn’t be crossed, so that we are commemorating events but without being disrespectful to the dead. None of the books and other media I’ve come across so far have been in bad taste, although there are forums where some argue that the costume cruises to the site of the sinking are a step too far.

The Titanic is part of our cultural memory. Before April 1912, the word “titanic” meant “colossal, strong, all-powerful”, after the Greek gods called Titans. Now it has become synonymous with catastrophic disaster, one that could so easily have been avoided. It is a subject that still creates controversy and makes us analyse our own moral values and, as such, a prime arena for artists working in all media. I welcome the diversity of artistic interpretations that is emerging and personally am going to take in as many of them
as I can.

Unequal in life, unequal in death

It’s well known that first-class passengers were much better served by the Titanic’s crew than those in third class. After the collision with an iceberg, first-class ladies and gents were led by their room stewards up to the boat deck, while most of third class had to fend for themselves. What’s less well known is that this discrimination continued a week later when bodies were hauled from the ocean onto the Mackay-Bennett, the vessel commissioned by White Star Lines to go out and search for the dead.

The Mackay-Bennett sailed out of Halifax, Novia Scotia on the 17^th April, two days after the sinking, and when it reached the area five days later the crew found bodies scattered all over the surface, buoyed up by their cork lifejackets. The men had been braced for it to be unpleasant work but were distressed to find a two-year-old boy and some women among the very first bodies they hauled up on deck. Once on board, victims were stripped and all details of clothes, personal possessions and distinguishing features were carefully noted to aid identification.

Relatives in New York wait to find out if their loved ones have survived.

However, it soon became evident that the 100 coffins they had brought with them would not be nearly enough, so the ship’s captain made a decision: only those who were obviously upper-class would be given the coffins. If someone was well-dressed, had expensive jewellery or a gold watch, they would be treated by an embalmer and laid in one of the coffins on deck. Second-class passengers and ship’s officers were embalmed then sewn into canvas bags and stacked on deck. Third-class passengers and crew members were put on ice in the ship’s hold. And within a day of this grisly work beginning, it was decided that many of the bodies would have to be given sea burials because the Mackay-Bennett simply didn’t have enough embalming fluid and canvas or enough room to take them all back to Halifax.

Multi-millionaire John Jacob Astor had a gold watch, fancy gentleman’s clothes and $4000 in his pocket, so he was carefully placed in a coffin and when they got back to port, his body was one of the first released to his relatives for burial. However, nineteen-year-old Eileen McNamee from Salisbury had just one shilling and eleven pennies in her purse and her clothes weren’t deemed sufficiently grand so she was sewn into a weighted canvas bag and tipped back over the side. Bodies with tattoos or wearing stewards’ jackets were more likely to be dumped overboard, as split-second decisions were made about an individual’s class. Of the 306 bodies recovered by the Mackay-Bennett, 116 were buried at sea.

Back in Halifax, relatives congregated, hoping at least to have a body to take home and bury, and there was great distress to hear of all the sea burials. Word was released to the press that it was only those who were in an advanced state of decomposition who had been sent to the deep, but that simply wasn’t true. There was very little decomposition because of the salt water and freezing temperatures. One crewman said “I expected to see the poor creatures very disfigured but they looked as calm as if they were asleep.”

For those relatives who did manage to identify a body in the Halifax ice rink that had been turned into a temporary morgue, there was further insult to come: White Star Lines would charge full fare to transport a coffin back to Europe for burial at home. Less well-off families couldn’t raise the cash so their loved ones were laid to rest in cemeteries in Halifax, while John Jacob Astor’s was transported by the family’s private train to his estate on Rhode Island.

Death is often said to be the great equaliser for humanity. Regardless of age, sex, income and position in life, we will all die. But in 1912, after the Titanic sank, there was no equality of treatment for the victims.