Free The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice by M. G. Lord

Taylor-Reynolds skirmish heated up in Hollywood, producer Sam Spiegel miraculously appeared with a way out. He offered Taylor a lead in Suddenly, Last Summer , another Williams play, which he and screenwriter Gore Vidal would not allow to be gutted. He planned to shoot the film a long way from Los Angeles—in London, and on the coast of Spain. And he was brilliant at fending off the press. Shortly after shooting began, gossip columnist Louella Parsons published rumors of problems on the set of Suddenly, Last Summer —including an allegation that Taylor had become too fat for her part. Spiegel promptly fired off a telegram of rebuttal. It concluded: SORRY TO DISAPPOINT YOUR INFORMANT BUT NOBODY IS MAD AT ANYBODY AND IF ELIZABETH TAYLOR IS OVERWEIGHT I FOR ONE AM AT A LOSS TO SUGGEST WHAT THERE SHOULD BE LESS OF.

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    Suddenly, Last Summer , 1959
    Insane is such a meaningless word.
—Montgomery Clift as Dr. Cukrowicz to Elizabeth Taylor as Catherine Holly in Suddenly, Last Summer
    Lobotomy is a very specific one.
—Taylor, in reply
    SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER is lit with the stark black-and-white contrast of a monster movie or an episode of Rod Serling’s original Twilight Zone . It opens in the women’s ward of Lion’s View, a falling-down Louisiana state mental hospital. The inmates—a kaleidoscope of catatonic husks, toothless babblers, and twitchy paranoiacs—inhabit a cylindrical tank called “the drum.” The space is shadowy, menacing, and female viewers would do well to fear it. Lion’s View has hired a new male surgeon. His specialty is the prefrontal lobotomy, an operation in which the right brain hemisphere is severed from the left. An operation that, before it fell out of favor in the 1960s, was overwhelmingly performed on women.
    Tennessee Williams knew this operation well. In 1937—the year in which Suddenly, Last Summer is set—Williams’s own sister, Rose, age twenty-eight, was lobotomized at the state asylum in Farmington, Missouri, where his mother, Edwina, had incarcerated her. Some Williams biographers believe that Williams’s father, a violent drunk, had attempted to molest Rose, and the girl’s accusations so upset Edwina that she gave Farmington permission to cut them out. (Or, more precisely, to pierce Rose’s brain with an ice pick—the device preferred by many lobotomists, who drove it through the roof of a patient’s eye socket, then tapped it with a hammer.)
    Williams’s sister was not the only famous victim. In 1941, Rosemary Kennedy, age twenty-three, sister of future U.S. president John F. Kennedy, was lobotomized at the request of her parents, Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. The girl had been disruptive—exhibiting mood swings (who, at twenty-three, doesn’t?) and sneaking out of her convent school. The Kennedys hoped to excise her rebellion, which they did. The operation left her with infantile intelligence, urinary incontinence, and the inability to speak.
    Neuropathologist Walter Freeman and his medical partner, neurosurgeon James Watts, were not stripped of their medical licenses for disabling Kennedy. They gained prestige. In 1949, Freeman nominated António Egas Moniz, the Portuguese doctor who invented the lobotomy, for a Nobel Prize—which, astonishingly, Moniz won. A year later, Freeman broke with Watts when Watts criticized Freeman’s plan to streamline the procedure by substituting electric shock for traditional anesthesia. To demonstrate how well his new technique worked, Freeman barnstormed U.S. state hospitals in a van that came to be known as the “lobotomobile.”
    By 1959, however, when the film version of Suddenly, Last Summer came out, the press had exposed Kennedy’s ordeal, as well as that of other victims. Audiences knew that a lobotomy was not, as one character suggests, “like having your tonsils out.” But books such as Phyllis Chesler’s 1972 landmark, Women and Madness , were still decades in the future. Drawing upon exhaustive research, Chesler