Decades before Big Sur became a favorite destination for celebrity weddings and Jennifer Aniston’s reported secret rendezvous with her new wellness-guru boyfriend, this rugged, gorgeous stretch of the California coast became the setting for one of the 11 movies that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Turner made together, while they carried on their own epic Hollywood romance.
In 1965, Taylor and Burton co-starred in The Sandpiper,” a fun but sudsy melodrama about an extramarital affair between a beautiful proto-hippie artist and a married Christian minister in the leadup to the sexual revolution. Also enjoying a starring role is the breathtaking scenery. Many of exteriors were filmed in and around Big Sur, including at Pfeiffer Beach, Garrapata State Park and along Highway 1.
A pivotal scene also was filmed on a sound-stage replica of Nepenthe, the legendary, cliffside restaurant on Big Sur’s South Coast that once served as a remote getaway for Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth in the 1940s. Around the time “The Sandpiper” was shot, Nepenthe had become a favorite hang-out for Steve McQueen, Kim Novak and, of course, future Carmel Mayor Clint Eastwood, SFGate reported.
THE SANDPIPER, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, 1965, part of the tcm burton/taylor collection
So Hollywood already knew about Big Sur. But it’s arguable that Taylor and Burton, the world’s first celebrity super couple, elevated the region’s profile even more with their big-screen treatment in “The Sandpiper.”
This past weekend, Turner Classic Movies aired “The Sandpiper” during a mini-marathon of Elizabeth Taylor movies. The film, which turned 60 this year, was a commercial success in its time, reportedly earning what would be around $140 million in today’s dollars at the box office. The film also made a hit out of the theme song, “The Shadow of Your Smile,” which won an Academy Award for best original song and made into a Grammy-winning cover by Tony Bennett.
(The film is available for renting or viewing, for a fee, on a wide array of streaming services)
Taylor plays a free-spirited painter, Laura Reynolds, who makes art in her glass-and-wood shack perched along a cliff above the Pacific Ocean. Surprisingly, for a movie released before second-wave feminism really took hold in American culture, Taylor’s Laura gets to be a proud single mother — never married — who is determined to raise her 9-year-old son to be an independent thinker like her.
Local authorities, though, don’t approve of Laura home-schooling her son and letting him “free-range” in the nearby redwood forest, so they arrange for the boy to go to an elite private Episcopal school down the coast, in the movie’s version of San Simeon. Here’s where Burton comes in. The Welsh actor plays Edward Hewitt, the school’s headmaster. Laura and Edward initially clash until he lets it slip that he’s not as closed off to progressive ideas as his position would suggest. In fact, he begins to show admiration for Laura’s independence, allowing the two to overcome their initial wariness and hostility. They soon find common ground emotionally and intellectually, as well as undeniable sexual attraction.
There’s something to be said about art imitating life in this plot line. The Liz and Dick legend also began with an extramarital affair. They met while starring together as lovers Cleopatra and Marc Anthony in the epic 1963 film “Cleopatra.” The affair became a global scandal that outraged the Vatican and ended both their marriages to other people, including Taylor’s to Carrie Fisher’s dad Eddie Fisher. They married in 1964 and continued to make headlines by indulging in an extravagant, jet-setting lifestyle. They also made movies together. The pinnacle of their professional partnership was Mike Nichols’ acclaimed 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee’s stark marital drama, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” The film won Taylor her second Academy Award.
Two years before “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” Taylor and Burton took a break from their global gallivanting to touch down in Monterey County to make “The Sandpiper.” Of course, they weren’t the first creative types to discover the region’s remote beauty. Going back to the 1880s, the entire Monterey County coast, including Carmel and Monterey, had become a draw for writers and artists, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, John Steinbeck and poet Robinson Jeffers.
Writer Henry Miller settled in Big Sur in 1944 after publishing “Tropic of Cancer” and “Tropic of Capricorn” the previous decade, according to the Nepenthe website. He lived on the Nepenthe property when it consisted of a three-story cabin, owned by a local trail club, according to Nepenthe’s website. That year, the club also sold the cabin to Welles and Hayworth, who used it for a private retreat during their three-year marriage. They then sold it to Bill and Lolly Bassett, who worked with a student of Frank Lloyd Wright to build an open-air pavilion and “gathering place,” made of redwood and adobe bricks, that overlooked the ocean.
“And people came, not just from the ridge-tops and canyons, but from all over the world: vagabonds, poets, artist, lovers,” the Nepenthe website says.
For a scene in “The Sandpiper,” director Vincente Minnelli portrayed Nepenthe as a place of “wild abandon,” according to The Central Coast Traveler. Minnelli, of course, is an interesting choice to direct a movie about the early counterculture. He’s best known as the ex-husband of Judy Garland, the father of Liza Minnelli and the director of such glossy, old-school Hollywood musicals as “Meet Me in St. Louis” and “Gigi.” He also directed a teenage Taylor in “Father of the Bride” in 1949.
By the time of “The Sandpiper,” Taylor had come a long way from playing a virginal bride. She filmed one scene topless, though her naked breasts aren’t seen in the film’s final cut. However, her topless form is showcased in a sculpture that a fellow beatnik/hippie artist, played by Charles Bronson, is working on in her beach shack, when Burton’s Edward comes to call.
Actors Richard Burton (1925 – 1984) and Elizabeth Taylor (1932 – 2011) arrive at London Airport (later Heathrow) after a flight from Paris, France, 18th March 1963. They have just attended the gala premiere of the film ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ in Paris. (Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Speaking of the shack, it was reportedly built just for the production and propped up on a cliff above Garrapata Beach for exterior shots, according to a Monterey Peninsula travel site. However, other scenes are set at the beach that’s supposed to be right below Laura’s beach house were filmed at Pfeiffer State Park, according to the Central Coast Traveler site.
During the production, Taylor and Burton didn’t stay in Big Sur but up the coast at a private home in Monterey, which now houses the La Mirada branch of the Monterey Museum of Art.
In the half century since “The Sandpiper” was made, Big Sur’s beauty and bohemian bonhomie continues to be a draw for celebrity vacations and weddings. Natalie Portman married her ex-husband Benjamin Millepied in a private home in Big Sur in August 2012. Eleven years later, Jon Hamm exchanged vows with actor Anna Osceola on a cliff near Anderson Canyon at sunset. Hamm filmed the 2015 series finale of “Mad Men” on that same cliff. In the final scene, Hamm’s advertising executive character Don Draper comes up with the idea for 1970’s iconic “Hilltop” Coca-Cola TV ad while meditating on the cliff.