Furious Love (11 page)

With or without Elizabeth's children in tow, Richard continued his dangerous dance with alcohol, drinking enough to cause even the hard-drinking John Huston to shake his head. Elizabeth continued to serve as his drinking companion. After one such five-hour bout of drinking, Elizabeth told a reporter, “Richard lives each of his roles. In this film, he's an alcoholic and an unshaven bum, so that explains his appearance and liquid intake.”

Budd Schulberg, the author of the Hollywood novel
What Makes Sammy Run?
and the screenplays
On the Waterfront
and
The Harder They Fall
, was also on the set, spending time with his good friend Ava Gardner. A steady stream of friends, former and current lovers, and personalities flocked to Mismaloya, including Deborah Kerr's new husband, the screenwriter Peter Viertel, who had once been involved with Gardner during the making of
The Sun Also Rises
and was the author of
White Hunter Black Heart
, a thinly disguised, unflattering portrait of John Huston. (Viertel had also been married to Budd Schulberg's ex-wife.) Tennessee Williams arrived with his lover of the moment, soon joined by his longtime companion Frank Merlo (whom the playwright affectionately called “The Little Horse”), and his poodle, Gigi. The randy but genteel Southern playwright spent much of his time donning a bathing cap and swimming with Burton and Taylor, bobbing like a wet seal in a cove just below the set that had been hastily constructed on a bluff overlooking the bay. It was an
extraordinary collection of actors, writers, filmmakers, hangers-on, and heavy drinkers.

“Everyone was drinking quite a bit,” Schulberg recalled. “Richard hit it very hard and Huston always did. And Ava—yes, she was pretty good, too. I stayed out with Richard Burton several nights. It would be past three in the morning, and he would be in his cups and want to talk about Dylan Thomas or—he was a big fight fan. We'd be yakking about the fights. And Elizabeth would come storming out in her bathrobe looking for him, giving him hell—‘What do you think you're doing, you've got to work in the morning!' They were all having a good time. It was a happy company. You couldn't believe they were making a movie.”

The veteran Hollywood reporter James Bacon was among the many journalists covering the movie shoot. Free to roam the set, Bacon spent time with Richard and Elizabeth, often accompanying them on their long afternoons of drinking. “She can outdrink any man I've known, including Burton,” Bacon reported about Elizabeth, with a certain respectful amazement. He recalled one night when, oddly, Burton remained sober until Taylor taunted him with, “Richard, take a drink. You are so goddamned dull when you're not drinking.” She had apparently touched a nerve—Burton lived in fear of “boring the piss out of everyone. Without alcohol, when I'm stone-cold sober, I feel I belong in a university town somewhere teaching literature and drama to grubby little boys.” Bacon remembered that that was the night he watched Burton down twenty-three straight shots of tequila, “with a few bottles of Carta Blanca beer as chasers.”

If the American press were mostly fawning, interested in every bit of minutia about the famous couple, the Mexican press expressed outrage. In an editorial, the
Siempre
called for the ousting of the whole
Iguana
cast and crew, complaining about the “sex, drinks, drugs, vice, and carnal bestiality by the garbage of the United States.” The local Catholic convent broke their vow of silence to protest Eliza
beth Taylor's presence in Puerto Vallarta, as she was “living in sin” with Richard Burton.

But by now the couple was impervious to the pronouncements of the press. Elizabeth fussed over Richard on the set, combing and recombing his hair. (At one point, exasperated with her constant ministrations, Burton poured a pitcher of beer over his head.) When she wasn't on set or bar-hopping with Burton, Elizabeth lolled on the beach, clad in a bikini, a green-and-white Mexican shift, and gold-and-turquoise-beaded sandals. On another occasion, she showed up in a bikini bottom and sheer top, wearing a stunning pearl-and-ruby ring given to her, she said, by the king of Indonesia. Burton was thoroughly delighted, taking the occasion to mischievously describe her as looking like “a French tart.” Her outrageous displays of bounty—gifts of nature and of men—only made her more desirable in his eyes, more extraordinary, more loved. No wonder he called her “Ocean,” to describe her deep, overpowering presence.

In 1971, Burton recalled his Mexican hiatus in an article titled “Dauntless Travelers” for
Vogue
magazine, capturing the euphoria of that time. By then married to Elizabeth, he wrote in his typically lavish style,

He describes a day on which a traveling circus trailed in over the “Bridge of a Hundred Days,” led by a baby elephant. Burton first glimpsed it from Casa Kimberly's balcony, mistrusting his own eyes, till he heard “the thrilling still music blast[ing] out, and children
[weeping] with delight.” Though it was an unusually hot day even for Puerto Vallarta, Elizabeth wanted to go, and of course Burton couldn't deny her. Once they assembled in the dusty town square to watch the circus acts (all but the high-wire artist—Burton had a morbid dread of heights), the master of ceremonies noticed their presence among the villagers. He called out,
“Tenemous sta noche los muy famosas actors del mondo,”
Burton wrote in a kind of pidgin Spanish. “What can you do? My wife undulated exquisitely into the arena without any apparent qualm and addressed herself to the task of having scimitars thrown at her by a Mexican man she'd never met.” The daggers were thrown within a hair's breadth of Elizabeth's famous face. Like a brave soul staring down a firing squad, she barely blinked. By now, she was used to the spectacle of having daggers thrown at her in public. When it was Burton's turn to be pinned to the board, they turned him sideways and stuck a balloon in his mouth and in each hand. The “dagger man,” Alejandro Fuentes, successfully punctured the balloons, sparing Burton's profile, amid roars from the crowd. “I looked, in short, like an idiot,” Burton wrote, “as the daggers went true to their targets—three for the balloons and one each side of my head…”

Later that evening, Richard and Elizabeth sat on their balcony with their neighbors, the American actor Phil Ober and his wife, Jane, looking over their humble, resplendent town. “We must have been out of our minds,” Elizabeth said about the day's events, and, later, in bed before dousing the light, “Ah well, another day, another drama.” It had been a curious metaphor for their circus life together: on display, cheered by crowds, while a professional knife-thrower hurled stilettos at them, missing them by inches.

The day before Richard Burton turned thirty-eight, he started celebrating early by drinking with Ava Gardner, who had presented him with a fifth of bourbon. It was nine thirty in the morning, and the heat in Mismaloya was already crushing. Burton held forth in his costar's dressing room, reciting poetry and then reminiscing about
his father—his first father, the miner who sired him. Elizabeth had yet to arrive at the set.

“My father would never say he drank a lot,” Burton told the sultry actress and Joseph Roddy, a visiting journalist who later described the occasion. “He'd say he was a man of vast drinking habits.” He laughed. He described how his father would come up out of the coal mines on paydays—“days of decision,” he called them—trying to decide if he should first head for the dog track or the tavern. He would reappear days later to apologize to his eleven surviving offspring, saying, in Burton's spirited telling, “I…am…pro-foundahleeee…sawree…For one torn second a week before Friday last, I nearly came home directly.” Burton loved to tell that story, making a fine joke out of his father's fecklessness.

He then regaled his audience with another favorite tale about the night Dadi Ni, with dreams of making a killing on the dog races, came home leading an ancient, toothless, winded dog on the end of a leash. “Boys,” he said, pointing to the panting wreck, “our troubles are over!” But what was curiously revealed during Burton's raucous birthday celebration was another side of Dic Jenkins, and a hint of the high regard Burton still carried for his broken father, who had nonetheless managed to make it to the age of eighty-one. He had often joked that his father rarely saw his films because “there were too many pubs between the house and the cinema.” Yet he knew that his love of poetry—and of the English tongue itself—came to him through his father.

“My father could give bad verse a ring of great quality,” he told Ava Gardner, then launched into several stanzas of verse to illustrate the point.

“So do you,” she replied.

“Ah, love, but you should have heard my father do it.”

“I'm sure that I just did.”

For father and son, alcohol opened up the floodgates of poetry. Burton described how he would bring home books from school that
his father would ravenously pore over, memorizing the English poetry he found there. “He was never the man to use a short word when there was a long one that would do,” Burton recalled, explaining that the first time his father talked to him about the sun, it was to explain the “dichotomies between the Copernican and heliocentric cosmologies.” He related a conversation he'd had with his father over who was the most courageous poet of World War I, “after he had worked out the answer at the pub. ‘Not Alan Seeger. Not Rupert Brooke. Not Wilfred Owen. No, my boy, no one of them. The most courageous poet of that war was Mister Thomas Stearns Eliot in
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
. At the bloody height of the whole bloody battle, Mr. Eliot wrote that he had measured out his life in coffee spoons. Now that took what I call courage.'”

It had long been assumed that Richard's adoptive father, Philip Burton, had introduced Burton to poetry—English and Welsh—and had encouraged that talent. But it had been a paternal inheritance all along—poetry and storytelling and drinking, and as Burton grew older and his father's memory hardened into a series of tragicomic anecdotes, the residue of that original gift—or debt—survived.

Despite the torrid heat, the abundance of reporters and scorpions, the chiggers that left painful bites all over Elizabeth's feet because she went everywhere in her gold-strapped sandals, their time in Puerto Vallarta had been deeply happy. A pattern had emerged. Elizabeth would use her star power to help Richard achieve the world acclaim she knew he deserved. And she would be sure that he appeared only in the best vehicles:
Becket
,
The Night of the Iguana
—because it was by Tennessee Williams, America's greatest living playwright—and then a Broadway production of
Hamlet.
They would show the world that they were not tarnished celluloid adulterers, but artists of the highest order, and they belonged in a realm where ordinary codes of behavior no longer applied. They were beyond bourgeois morality now.

They would no longer let each other out of their sight, if they could help it. They'd both suffered too much to let their embattled love slip
away, and their passion for each other showed no signs of abating. Elizabeth knew that Richard “loved my shape—my body appealed to him. He teased me, but I knew he loved my body. I loved being admired by Richard. It was the kind of admiration that mattered to me. I felt adored, worshipped.”

And her power over Burton made him tremble. “Bewitched” is how he would describe it, “bewitched by her cunt and her cunning.” He would be drunk when he said it, but as his closest friends knew, he only lied when he was sober. In letters home, Burton wrote to his brother Graham about his happiness and the close bond he felt with Elizabeth.

“Where I was wrong,” Jenkins recalled in his memoir, “was in believing it would last.”

E
lizabeth was supremely happy to step back and let Richard take center stage. It wouldn't be the first time she'd announced her plans to be a wife first, an actress second. She'd resented being the principal breadwinner in her marriage to Michael Wilding. With Todd, she'd informed her public, “Mike and I hope to have many children. I think it's much more important for a woman to be a mother than an actress.” She had wanted to consecrate her marriage to Eddie Fisher by adopting a child. Now, above all, she wanted to make Richard happy. She could see that he chafed at being occasionally referred to as “Mr. Taylor,” or even worse, “Mr. Cleopatra.” There were still critics who loudly lamented Burton's defection from legitimate theater, where Olivier and Gielgud's laurels waited to be permanently attached to Burton's brow, and she knew there were critics who blamed her. They had to be silenced.

Plans to produce a new
Hamlet
with Burton in the title role and
Gielgud directing had been discussed as early as 1963, when Burton had appeared with Sir John in
Becket.
Burton had played Hamlet before, in Edinburgh and at the Old Vic Company in 1953–1954, among some complaints that he had rushed his lines and thrown away the poetry of the Bard—surprising, for one as devoted to poetry as Burton. Gielgud's own Hamlet, performed in London's Old Vic, had been, in Burton's eyes, the greatest in his lifetime, and to be directed by Gielgud in the quintessential actor's role was truly a passing of the baton. After all, it was Gielgud who had helped launch Burton's stage career, casting and directing him in three plays by Christopher Fry—
The Lady's Not for Burning
,
The Boy with a Cart
, and
A Phoenix Too Frequent
—which garnered Burton early enthusiastic reviews. Gielgud himself said about Burton's performance in
The Boy with a Cart
, “He was simply splendid…It was a wonderful
succés d'estime
.” In a 1967 interview with Kenneth Tynan, Burton remarked, “I can never repay him for the debt of casting me in
The Lady's Not for Burning
and
The Boy with a Cart
. He made me into what is casually known as a leading man.”

The only problem was, Burton didn't particularly want to go back onstage. It helped that both he and Gielgud agreed that the play would be mounted with minimal sets and in modern dress, “so the beauty of the language and imagery may shine through unencumbered,” as Gielgud explained in a program note. The idea was that the performance take the form of a last rehearsal, before the actors donned their costumes and sets were rolled into place. Burton would wear black trousers and a black sweater for the role. Nonetheless, he was reluctant. He was, in fact, terrified.

It had only been two years since he'd walked away from playing King Arthur to don Roman general Marc Antony's breastplate, but he feared the public would be waiting to judge him, eager to see him fail. Behind that was the sheer terror of live performance, which he had never completely overcome, made more intense, perhaps, by a dislike of being touched while performing onstage. When the London drama
critic Tynan said that Burton seemed “isolated, apart, in a world of [his] own” onstage, Burton confided, “I do feel that on the stage it's quite literally every man for himself. I don't think anyone wants to help you particularly…you have to look after yourself. And I think that particular loneliness, solitude, that idea of carrying on in your own private room is not…unique to actors…I have it perhaps more than most. When I go out there, onstage, I'm battling the world—I have to beat the world. I have to be the best, as far as I can make it.”

It was Elizabeth who urged him to face up to his fear of live performance. In this, and in other aspects of their life together, she was his courage-teacher. For example, she noticed that in interviews he tended to speak with his hand close to his mouth, to shield his pockmarked right cheek from the intrusive camera. She would have none of that. It was her philosophy to drag secrets and fears into the pitiless light, and she called him out on it, teasing him with seemingly cruel endearments like “my pockmarked Welshman.”

Burton, in fact, like many stage actors, had a number of phobias and conditions he hid from the public. One was that acute fear of heights, which he only began to reveal under Elizabeth's influence. The other secret he'd nurtured was the fact that he was a hemophiliac, though to a mild degree, remarkable in one so athletic and so physically engaged with the world. In fact, his sword fights each night in
Hamlet
put him at risk, because he never held back. John Cullum, the actor who played Laertes, recalled that sometimes the fight was so intense that he would get quite banged up, eventually losing a thumbnail as a result. “I bleed more than Laertes,” Burton said. “Of course, I'm a wilder duelist. But he stops bleeding within twenty-four hours. It takes me five days.”

In spite of it, there wasn't a pub brawl he ducked from if it came his way; he'd had dreams of being a rugby player for Wales long before he'd hoped to become an actor. It was Elizabeth who urged him to stop hiding his hemophilia, which Richard felt was unmanly. She urged him to go public with the inherited condition, and later he
would take it on as a cause, touting the benefits of vitamin K in treating the blood disorder. (Elizabeth would later say that taking up this cause with Richard was a precursor to her AIDS charitable work, long before the AIDS-related death of her friend and costar in
Giant
, Rock Hudson.) In a press release announcing the establishment of the Richard Burton Hemophilia Fund, Burton told the press, “I've been a bleeder all my life,” though his own case was relatively slight. Two of his brothers, however, had the condition in a more severe form, and had almost died undergoing tonsillectomies in their youth.

Another condition that haunted Richard was epilepsy. He had suffered a mild seizure when he was a young actor in London and was reportedly set to rights by a couple of brandies. Since then, he feared its recurrence and felt that alcohol kept the seizures at bay—as if he needed another reason to drink. He would be free of attacks for some time, but they would recur toward the end of his career, during a period when he was not drinking, sending him twice to the hospital.

Elizabeth gave him the courage to face the abominable crowds that now pushed against them whenever they ventured out in public. Though he would later admit to liking the perks of fame—“the best seat at the restaurant, the best seat on the plane; you're treated like a kind of demigod”—Burton disliked the hurly-burly of fandom, with its prying journalists and relentless paparazzi. He would never quite learn how to manage the crush of fame, unlike Elizabeth, who, as he later marveled in a BBC interview, “had a kind of private veil she put on in public, where she didn't seem to notice photographers or journalists. She walked through them as if through a vacuum. [Her] public persona was aloof and enormously difficult to break.” Elizabeth would have to teach Burton how to be private in public, now that she had brought him into her world.

Elizabeth would need her “private veil” when the couple flew to Toronto on January 28, 1964, to rehearse
Hamlet
at the O'Keefe Theater. When they checked into a five-room suite on the eighth floor of the King Edward–Sheraton Hotel, they were met by huge crowds, not
all of them fans. One hostile picketer carried a sign that read, “Drink not the wine of adultery.” Except for rehearsals at the O'Keefe, Taylor and Burton were virtual prisoners of the eighth floor, afraid to go out and be overwhelmed by adoring or hostile crowds. An armed guard was placed outside the door of their suite, for their own protection, and Elizabeth, who had arrived with two poodles, had to walk her dogs on the roof of the hotel.

John Gielgud was appalled at this American form of worship. He wrote in a letter to his partner, Paul Anstee, “Ghastly crowds of morons besiege the hotel where Burton and Taylor are staying—every drink and conversation they have is paragraphed and reported. It really must be hell for them, and now some Ohio congressman has demanded that his American visa be rescinded for moral turpitude…!”

Elizabeth came to only two of the Toronto rehearsals, recalls the actor Richard L. Sterne (who appeared as “A Gentleman” in
Hamlet
), during the entire three-city run of the production. “Mostly, she stayed in the hotel. It was dangerous for them to go out. I've never seen anything quite like that. I suppose some of the rock musicians get that treatment, but it's exceptional for theater people. There was always a crowd outside the theater trying to just see them, to get a glimpse of the two of them.”

At the first company meeting in Toronto, Sterne recalled the cast sitting down at a large table to read through the script. Burton “read with such enormous energy. Usually, at first readings, you're just studying the words. Richard was giving an all-out, rip-roaring reading that amazed everybody.”

The young actor was particularly taken with Burton's voice: “He had an amazing projection. The timbre of it was quite penetrating and carried all the way to the last row of the theater. We weren't microphoned then. One of the reviewers said he had a voice that could outshout Times Square traffic.” Years later, when asked by British TV interviewer Michael Parkinson, “Is there such a thing as a ‘Welsh
voice'?” Burton had said, partly tongue-in-cheek, “It's the deep, dark answer from the valleys, to everybody.” But he also said, “I can't help the voice…. It was given to me. I'm very lucky to possess it, I suppose. It's not a gift I would wish on anybody else.”

Sterne remembered that Elizabeth “was very quiet during rehearsals.” This was her first up-close exposure to classical theater, and she wanted to learn. “She steeped herself in the play and its various interpretations.” Sterne was also struck by how “awesomely beautiful” she was. “I can still see her coming into the rehearsal hall for the first time. It was maybe a week or so after we'd started rehearsing; she was dressed in a purple pantsuit. You couldn't miss those violet-colored eyes. She sat very quietly; she barely moved, and she watched very attentively. Then we didn't see her again until we were in performance.”

Gielgud was immensely pleased with the advanced booking for the play (“We shall be sold out for the entire engagement,” he wrote to his friend), and equally pleased with his assembled cast: “Rehearsals have begun unbelievably well…Richard looks pretty gross and red, but he is so beguiling and gifted that one succumbs the moment he begins to act, and he is utterly amenable to every suggestion and extremely skilled in adapting any idea one gives him. I really think he will be wonderfully moving and affecting.”

Sterne knew that “Richard adored Sir John and thought he was the greatest Shakespearean actor of all time, the best Hamlet he'd ever seen; he was in awe of him, as we all were in that cast.” Nonetheless, Burton seemed to have mixed feelings about Gielgud's direction, explaining to Tynan that in theater, which is essentially a writer's medium, “directors are relatively unimportant. They're not much more than jumped-up stage managers [who] should show you the place on the stage where you will be best seen. Then, assuredly leave the rest up to you.” Nonetheless, he praised Gielgud to Tynan as “the best director I've ever worked with on the stage…He was as dominating as a director could be, with somebody like myself” because he under
stood, Burton felt, that he needed to be left alone onstage. “I do think he thinks I'm an undisciplined actor…. I wouldn't want to be that kind of disciplined actor who goes onstage every night and gives the same cadence to every speech, every night for days and days and days on end. I would prefer to be free so that I'm invited to be bad some nights…”

However, Elizabeth noticed that Richard was not completely at ease with Gielgud's direction, nor with the physical and mental demands of the role. Perhaps he'd just been away too long, and though he'd played the part many times before, he couldn't find his footing. Just before the play was to open, Elizabeth took it upon herself to call Richard's “father”—his second father, the one who had plucked him from obscurity and set him on the path to fame—Philip Burton—to come to Richard's aid.

It was a bold thing to do. Philip was now living in New York City, where he had launched an acting school, the American Music and Dramatic Academy, and he had sided with Sybil over the scandalous affair and subsequent divorce. It had been two years since Philip, now fifty-nine, had even spoken to his protégé. Whether Sybil graciously encouraged him to fly to Toronto, or he just wanted another chance to instruct and influence his brilliant ward, Philip agreed to step in. According to Sterne, Philip took over from Gielgud, taking an active role in shaping Burton's performance. Gielgud was not happy about it, but, if nothing else, Philip's presence seemed to calm Burton and give him confidence, and he stayed on for a few days as an unofficial, and unpaid, adjunct to the production.

Philip Burton arrived a few days after the play opened on February 26, 1964, to mixed reviews, though Burton fared much better than the production itself. Though the
Toronto Daily Star
called the pre-Broadway opening “an unmitigated disaster,” the
Toronto Telegram
lauded Burton as “magnificent” and described him as “the only thing of consequence” in Gielgud's production. “We've seen in Toronto only two other such brilliant displays. Sir Laurence Olivier's
Becket
in 1961
and Sir Alec Guinness's
Dylan
two months ago.” The pared-down, minimalist approach came in for the biggest criticism—audiences apparently wanted the trappings of Denmark, not modern-day dress. Luckily, two days after opening in Toronto, Burton's
Becket
was released in New York, to strong reviews.