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

offers to donate a million dollars, he leaps, despite a large string attached to the gift. She demands that Cukrowicz lobotomize her niece, Catherine.
    The girl, Violet explains, has been in a Catholic sanitarium since she returned from Spain last summer, where she had traveled with Sebastian. Delusional, she now “babbles” obscene things about Sebastian and how he died.
    “I can’t guarantee that a lobotomy would stop her—babbling,” Cukrowicz tells Violet.
    “But after the operation,” Violet says with a twinkle, “who would believe her?”
    Eager to impress the surgeon, Violet shows him Sebastian’s art collection—sketches and paintings of erotic male nudes, including a toothsome Saint Sebastian penetrated by arrows. If Catherine’s babbling includes allegations of sodomy, the viewer will not be surprised.
    Cukrowicz next interviews Catherine, who is lucid and composed, to the annoyance of the nun who torments her by withholding cigarettes. After Cukrowicz offers to move Catherine to Lion’s View, she adds to the picture he is forming of Sebastian: “ ‘Famished for blondes. Tired of the dark ones.’ That’s the way he talked about people. As if they were items on a menu.”
    Catherine thrives at Lion’s View. Alarmed by her niece’s growing sanity, Violet offers Catherine’s family money—if they can force her to undergo the lobotomy. Catherine bolts from them, accidentally fleeing to a more harrowing place: a catwalk above the men’s section of the drum. When the male inmates see her, they lunge. Hooting, cawing, they clutch at her ankles. To me, this is the film’s scariest scene. It foreshadows the revelation of cannibalism; the men, drooling, hunger for Catherine.
    But it is also a metaphor for celebrity. Watching the scene, I understood how it must have felt to be Elizabeth Taylor—above the mob but still not safe from it, unable to turn off her beauty when it attracted undesired strangers.
    Tension mounts. Vexed by Cukrowicz’s dawdling, his boss threatens to replace him with a compliant lobotomist. In a last-ditch effort to unearth the truth, Cukrowicz gathers Violet, his boss, and Catherine’s family at Violet’s home. In front of them, he injects Catherine with Sodium Pentothal and interrogates her.
    As Catherine, Taylor commands the screen. Her words are incantatory, hypnotic. Her ordeal did not begin in Europe with Sebastian; she had been raped the previous winter. We see fragments of her horror—a montage of images, including the skeleton in Violet’s garden and the final minutes of Sebastian’s life. Then she blurts what Violet never wanted anyone to hear: for years, Sebastian had used Violet to procure men for him. But last summer, when Violet became too old, he recruited Catherine. Aghast, Catherine recalls the see-through bathing suit Sebastian made her wear in Spain: a magnet for rough youths—youths for purchase—some of whom later turned on him, ending his life and gouging hunks from his body.
    In the face of this truth, Violet succumbs to madness. Catherine survives. That is her triumph. She stood up to authority. She blocked a misuse of power. She forced the male doctors—including Cukrowicz’s boss—to think twice before lodging an ice pick in a sane woman’s head.
    Catherine’s triumph is almost identical to that of the filmmakers: producer Sam Spiegel, director Joseph Mankiewicz, and screenwriter Gore Vidal. They stood up to authority. They blocked a misuse of power. They prevented the Production Code Administration and the Catholic Legion of Decency from completely eviscerating Williams’s play.
    This was hard to do. Much of the credit goes to Spiegel, whose first smart move was securing Vidal to adapt the play. Not only was Vidal a friend of Williams, or “the Bird,” as he calls him; he was uniquely suited to address the concerns of the play’s Roman Catholic critics. After the censors office flat-out nixed a synopsis of Suddenly, Last Summer , Vidal