To understand the situation at Puerto Vallarta, you need a slide rule, a T-square, a French curve, and a basic introduction to metaphysics. In this hot little cove on the west coast of Mexico (TIME, Nov. 1), a film company is making Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana. The screenplay is somewhat adulterated, since it was pecked into existence by someone else. But the off-screen play, unnervingly, is something straight out of Tennessee Williams. The shadow and the substance fuse.
Richard Burton is there with Elizabeth Taylor. He is playing the role of an Episcopal priest who has been thrown out of his church for moral turpitude. Taylor, who has no part in the film, is playing it safe. Although she is still married to Eddie Fisher, she is already well along into the waiting-up-nervously phase with Burton. If she gets too nervous, she can always consult one of Burton's friendly agents, Michael Wilding, who in his acting days was her second husband.
Irrepressible Passions. Ava Gardner plays Iguana's voluptuary middle-aged innkeeper—who sets her desperate cap for Father Richard. She seems to be working at it, off and on camera. If there is a bit of dust on her slacks before a take, Richard helps her remove it. When he has a drink with her after hours, Ava blossoms with animation.
Wherever Ava goes, however, sparklers burn in many hands. The Mexican press last week printed the fanciful rumor that she was going to marry the assistant director, Emilio Fernandez, known as El Indio. Some seven years ago the Indian was one of the top directors in Mexico; but he shot a producer and was ostracized. "Emilio's only weakness," says Director John Huston, "is his tendency to shoot people he doesn't like."
Novelist-Screenwriter Peter Viertel, who was once Ava's constant companion in Paris and Mexico during the filming of The Sun Also Rises some years ago, is also in Puerto Vallarta, since he is now the husband of Deborah Kerr, who is playing a Nantucket spinster in the film. Viertel is understandably wary of Ava, but he is also a little skittish with Director John Huston. He worked on the screenplay of Huston's African Queen and followed up with a novel called White Hunter, Black Heart, which was a thinly disguised, malicious portrait of Huston.
Two Others. Meanwhile, Sue Lyon (Lolita, '62) is there, too, playing a young tourist; and U.S. newspapers have been cropping pictures madly—cutting out everyone but Sue and Burton—to suggest irrepressible tropical passions drawing the two together. Actually, Sue is 17 and old enough to have brought along her own outrider, like everyone else. His name is Hampton Fancher III. "You mean there are two others?" cracked one of the company. Fancher, a 25-year-old would-be actor, takes advantage of his position as consort to boss everybody around.
Huston, of course, is a show in himself, as always. He wears black leather suits, white hunter's outfits and long striped muu muus. He has a tawny Anglo-Iranian girl named Zoë: with him. He has also made the happy discovery of raicilla, a 180-proof distillate of the maguey plant that is far more potent than tequila. "If you drink it straight down, you can feel it going into each individual intestine," says Burton.