The Oosterdam, pride of the Holland America cruise line, docked on the shore of Puerto Vallarta and I disembarked. Puerto Vallarta is a town with a peculiar and unusual history. No, I don’t mean that town itself has been at the root of wagging tongues, or do I?
First, let me tell you a bit about PV as it’s called by the many who love it. It’s a town of 350,000 on the west coast of Mexico. It’s not far from Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city, and just less than 200 miles south of Mazatlan. It sits squarely behind the Bahia de Banderas, which edges its way into the shore beside the Pacific Ocean. The bay is a breeding ground for dolphins and whales and provides a deep-water port for cruise ships from many nations.
The first Europeans who arrived here were the Spaniards in the early 16th century. Not Cortez, himself, but one of his men, Don Pedro de Alvarado, paid a visit to the bay in 1641 and wasn’t impressed. Why is not exactly clear but the Spaniards didn’t develop the shore of the Pacific here. In fact, not much happened until the middle of the last century. It remained a small fishing village with a small town atmosphere beyond 1918, when the town was incorporated and named after a famous jurist and governor of the state of Jalisco, Ignacio Vallarta.
Puerto Vallarta continued with the uneventful life as a small trading port until 1963. There are very few towns which owe their prominence to a movie but Puerto Vallarta is an exception. In 1963, John Huston, the celebrated director of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “The Maltese Falcon” was looking for a location for a film he was about to make based on a play written by Tennessee Williams. Known as “The Night of the Iguana,” the movie altered the little local trading post permanently. Few people beyond PV recall much about that film today. But in Puerto Vallarta, it lives. Once “The Night of the Iguana” came to the village nothing was the same.
The idea to film “The Night of the Iguana” in Puerto Vallarta was born in the bar of a Beverly Hills Hotel. John Houston was looking for a location for principal photography for his film and he met Guillermo Wulf, a Mexican architect and engineer. Wulf proposed Mismaloya, an isolated cove south of PV. He proposed that on leased land Wulf would build the sets for the movie and accommodations for staff housing. Later Houston and Ray Stark, the film’s producer, would sell the accommodations for a profit.
Houston fell in love with Mismaloya and with Puerto Vallarta and decided to move forward with the plan. He was to say, later, “To me, “Night of the Iguana” was a picnic, a gathering of friends, a real vacation.”
The story of the film required most of the cast to play dissolute or mentally ill characters and the casting had actors who simply played aspects of their own personalities in real life. Burton played an alcoholic minister paying court to Gardner as a hard drinking hotel owner.
Ava Gardner became the toast of Puerto Vallarta and, according to locals, had a local Mexican lover. Burton brought Liz Taylor, a woman not in the film itself but central to his life and perhaps the most celebrated movie star of that time. Tennessee Williams, perhaps the most prominent American playwright of the 20th century, descended upon this small Mexican town along with Houston, who was certainly an American master film-maker. These powerful personalities turned the town upside down and inside out.
With these celebrities followed schools of paparazzi and swarms of journalists. Once they descended upon the sleepy Mexican village, Puerto Vallarta, after a short time, became a destination of consequence. Everything was changed.
One of the big news items of the 1960s was the affair of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. They had just scandalized the planet in the 1962 film “Cleopatra”, a motion picture which had taken almost a year to film and which had cost just about all the capital and most of the credit which 20th Century Fox had. It had contained scenes and emotions deemed almost too private and intense for public consumption. The film had brought about the end of two marriages, the first marriage of Richard Burton to his then wife, Sybill, and had put the concluding strokes to the marriage of Liz Taylor and Eddie Fisher, a famous singer of that period. What made the affair such news was that it had taken place in the context and in the whirl of publicity of “Cleopatra”, a major motion picture’s production.
As a way to create the necessary-for-the-divorce-laws-of-California, appearance of separate lives, Burton and Taylor couldn’t live in the same house. In a “kinda sorta” way they got around it. Burton bought a house across the street from Taylor in PV and built a second-story bridge across the street. Today, long after the filming has ended the bridge still stands, a visible symbol to the passion of Burton for Taylor.
It’s a pink edifice to yesterday’s sexual excitement. I wonder how Liz, now 74, the only person still breathing from that former romance would feel if she were to be confronted by this monument to her grand amour. It’s a monument that doesn’t seem likely now, but still stands and seems a little peculiar. Apparently Burton and Taylor maintained these joined residences for something like ten years after the filming was over. A few blocks away is a statue to Burton and Taylor in the front of a restaurant called Le Bistro on Calle Insurgentes.
Near Le Bistro, in Plaza John Houston, is a beguiling statue to Houston, the director of “Night of the Iguana.” There he sits, in his director’s chair, surveying the scene. Could he have imagined what he had brought about here?
“Night of the Iguana” made a huge difference in this town. It now has cruise ships docking in the Bay of Banderas four days a week. The population is in excess of 300,000 and it’s a town, which never has forgotten the fact that the film put it on the map.
As much as the film it was the fact of the torrid affair between Burton and Taylor, a neighborhood called "Gringo Gulch" is home to the small, select expatriate community in Puerto Vallarta. The town began to grow and what was good enough for Liz and Dick became a location ripe for curiosity.
John Houston bought an island near PV called "Las Colletas," which is now a site of day trips and shopping. It’s where he spent that last 10 years of his life and where his family has become interested enough to sponsor an annual film festival.
PV has also been the site of other locations for filming, Schwarzenegger’s “Predator”, “Kill Bill,” and Ringo Starr’s “Caveman” have all been filmed in part in PV. So, the movies have been very good to Puerto Vallarta.
There also a small, river there known as the "Cuale," and a small cathedral dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint. But this is a town with an economy devoted to tourism and to providing itself as a backdrop for movies.
So, before you get on that cruise ship and steam out of shore you may want to drift up to Zaragossa, 446 to see Casa Kimberly, once alit with the passion which filled the newspapers and the hearts of two people called Liz and Richard and see the beauties of the location of a major love affair of days past. Rarely has a destination had such a direct relationship to the glamour of the movies
Join the Conversation