Suddenly, Last Summer

When Hollywood came to Begur

Elizabeth Taylor in Begur, 1959

As my good friends on Substack know, we've been on holiday at our house in Begur in Catalunya for the last week or so. We've had the place for 22 years and during that time we've seen a lot of changes in our little paradise. It's such a perfect place so, for understandable reasons, everyone wants to come here. Comparisons are made to the Amalfi Coast, but, having been there, I can say with some authority that Begur is much nicer.

Back in the old days riffraff like me didn't go to Begur. In the 1970s, it was a playground reserved for the rich and famous. Hollywood stars like Kirk Douglas and Sophia Loren would rub shoulders with the European glitterati — F1 drivers, minor royalty and the mega-wealthy. Begur was super cool.

Near our house there's a mansion built by Johnny Weismiller, the original Tarzan. He then sold it to Jacques Cousteau, who then gave it to one of his dissolute sons. The son eventually abandoned it, for reasons I can't understand. The derelict house then attracted nosy people — like us. We had enormous fun looking in the windows, each of which told a story of decadent hijinks. There was an ancient Vespa in the living room and film cans scattered all around. The pool was empty but for a stagnant puddle at the bottom and there were marijuana plants growing in the garden. The house has now been bought and restored to its former glory, which is nice but also, for us, a bit disappointing.

Long before Begur became the playground for the cool, however, it was discovered by some Hollywood location scouts working on the film Suddenly, Last Summer. They were attracted to the beaches and the hill that dominates the village, on which an ancient castle is perched. Filming began in the summer of 1959.

Begur, with castle on top and beaches beyond

Two anachronisms collided in the tiny paradise of Begur. Back then, the town was like something out of the 17th century, frozen in time thanks in part to Franco’s contempt for Catalunya. It had once been a place of wealth and style due to its trading ties with Cuba, but had become dilapidated and dirt poor ever since the Civil War. Into this relic arrived another anachronism: for ten days the beautiful people of Tinseltown brought an exaggerated version of modernity to the impoverished village and then abruptly left.

The film starred Elizabeth Taylor, Katherine Hepburn and Montgomery Cliff, with the script adapted by Gore Vidal from a Tennessee Williams play. The actors were familiar to the villagers, though they'd probably never seen one of Taylor’s film, thanks to the strict Francoist censorship.

During breaks in filming, Taylor went swimming. And posing.

During their stay, the actors and crew became regulars at the Can Frigola bar in Plaça de la Vila, Begur's central square. From a distance, the locals watched them like goldfish in a bowl. Gossip was traded in a bullish market. The director, Joseph Mankiewicz, was a popular topic of conversation due to his notoriously bad temper, but most of the attention was focused on Taylor, due to her scandalous beach attire. She might have been the first person ever to wear a bikini in Begur.

Taylor wearing that bikini in Begur

Taylor provoked talk because she refused to use the toilet in the bar. Too many flies, apparently. Marià Frigola, the owner of the bar, obligingly let her use the bathroom in her home nearby. Since Begur had no suitable hotels to accommodate the cast and crew, at night everyone decamped to S’Agaró, about twenty miles away. The locals found Taylor rather aloof, but, to be fair, language must have been a problem. It would have been rare to find anyone in Begur capable of speaking English and Catalan was not a common language in Hollywood.

During the filming Taylor was followed around by Josep Carreras, the town photographer. We have this photo on our living room wall.

In the film, Begur became Cabeza de Lobo, a fictional island of unspecified location. The gray, backward character of the town suited the messages the film conveyed. Suddenly, Last Summer is one of the bleakest films I've ever watched. Homosexuality, infidelity, pederasty, mental illness and cannibalism are combined in a toxic soup of misery. A prominent issue is the insistence of Violet Venable (Hepburn) that her niece Catherine Holly (Taylor) should be lobotomized to help her forget about having witnessed her gay cousin being attacked and eaten by a group of local urchins, as revenge for having sexually exploited them. (Yes, you read that right.)

In the film’s most shocking scene, Sebastian, played by a Basque actor named Julián Ugarte, whose face we never see, is chased through the cobblestone streets of Begur. As he runs, the crowd of malevolent young boys chasing him steadily increases. This is shown on a split screen: the other half occupied by Sebastian's cousin, played by Taylor, who follows the crowd to the top of the castle hill. It's there that the crazed mob pounce on Sebastian, tearing him apart and eating him in front of his cousin.

Taylor filming the cannibalism scene

Suddenly, Last Summer was released in December 1959, but the people of Begur had to wait another twenty years to see it, thanks to Franco's censors. They would often fiddle with a film in order to render it more acceptable. In one case, for instance, they found the topic of infidelity in Mogambo intolerable, so the dubbing turned the main characters played by Grace Kelly and Donald Sinden into siblings, inadvertently adding a theme of incest to an otherwise pretty tame film.

Suddenly, Last Summer, on the other hand, was considered beyond the pale. The censors decided it was impossible to show it to the public because of its "immorality", its predilection for "homosexuality", "the Oedipus complex" and for a wide range of other "abnormalities” — including , I suppose, the cannibalism. In short, it couldn't be fixed with a bit of script tinkering, so it was banned outright.

It was not until 1979 that Spaniards and the people of Begur were allowed to see Suddenly, Last Summer. Nowadays the once isolated and backward town is super cool and cosmopolitan. Every year it hosts a film festival in October with some of the screenings much more scandalous than the one starring Elizabeth Taylor back in 1959. God, I love this place.

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