Show Business: The Long Way to Broadway

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There are more problems. Every time she has gained a pound, there has been a jokester somewhere to remind her, often savagely. ("This woman has more chins than a Chinese phone book," says Comedian Joan Rivers in a not at all funny pay cable television special.) Though she has turned the other way in public, the jokes have not gone unheard. "I don't think it's anybody's damn business how much I weigh," she says, her anger breaking through the shield she puts up between herself and anyone who plans to quote her. "But talking about it seems to be a national pastime. And that cheeses me off!"

But all that was before Bufman persuaded her to do Hellman's play about Regina and her greedy brothers. Sometime between last fall and the first of the year, 20 lbs. or so were lost through dieting and long walks at her 1,800-acre estate in the Virginia hunt country near Washington. "This person has extraordinary discipline," says her husband, Virginia's Republican Senator John Warner, who describes himself, in nautical terms, as her anchor to windward. "She very carefully monitored that situation. It was part diet, but nine-tenths determination."

Both Taylor and Bufman were concerned that her voice would not carry into the balcony. Lauren Bacall recommended a voice teacher to her, and Bufman told his sound man to be prepared to outfit her with a body mike. Neither was necessary, and her voice easily travels to the back rows. People who supposedly knew her in Hollywood warned the producer to expect trouble. Fearing the worst, he spent $125,000 for a six-month, all-protection insurance contract at Lloyd's of London. "I've learned my lesson," he now confesses. "She's always reliable." Director Austin Pendleton says that he had prepared himself to "teach her the mysteries of acting onstage. But I didn't have to. She has a stage presence, and I think she always has had."

The others in the cast and crew are no less enamored. "Everybody's crazy about her," says Maureen Stapleton, who plays Birdie, Regina's pathetic sister-in-law. Ah, Elizabeth," adds Tom Aldredge, who plays Horace, her husband. "I know actors who started on Broadway and then went into the movies who wouldn't dare step back on a stage. But here's a woman who has never been on a stage before and has so much to risk. Yet she's so quick that I can't believe she's not a stage actor. She gives back what you give to her—fire to fire—and that's very exciting."

At least three superb actresses have played Regina: Tallulah Bankhead in the 1939 original, Bette Davis in the 1941 movie and Anne Bancroft in the 1967 revival. Warm and womanly, Taylor may be the closest to the character that the author had in mind. "I rather like her approach," says Hellman. "Regina has frequently been played too much as a villainess." As Elizabeth plays her, Regina is as much victim as victimizer, a woman trapped into doing ugly things by her time, place and boundless aspiration. "There are people who can never go back, who must finish what they start," she says in the last scene. "I am one of those people."