Furious Love (19 page)

She takes delight in disparaging her own impressive beauty, especially when quoting Burton as “a perverse tease! He will describe me to a reporter as ‘my comfy, nice little girl,' and then throw in something about a double chin and stumpy legs, ending with ‘she has breakfast like any normal person. There are times when she is so normal I am tempted to leave her.'” Elizabeth always thought Ava Gardner, Lena Horne, and her own daughter Liza Todd far more beautiful. She'd never stopped considering Jacqueline Kennedy exquisite, her great dignity enhancing her beauty. “I am pretty enough,” she writes. “My best feature is my gray hairs. I have them all named; they're all called Burton.”

Perhaps most surprisingly to her fans, she offers the possibility that she and Burton will “go into semiretirement in a few years. I think Richard will eventually give up acting to become a serious writer.” What follows is a joyful description of her private moments with Burton:

Scandalous love can be forgiven, even by Americans, if, after all, it results in a genuine marriage—intimacy and companionship—which the Burtons seem to have found, so far, four months shy of their first wedding anniversary. Elizabeth goes on to describe a mystical tie she shares with Burton, recalling two Chagall-like, out-of-body experiences:

B
etween filming
The Sandpiper
and
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, Elizabeth had talked often with Montgomery Clift over the telephone, trying to keep up Clift's interest in working together, trying to keep up his spirits. By the time Burton was treading the boards in
Hamlet
, Clift's career was nearly over. His struggle with alcohol and barbiturates had made him virtually unemployable. When he'd acted with Marilyn Monroe in
The Misfits
in 1961, Monroe had commented, “Monty has even more problems than I do.” In 1964, he was emaciated, down to a hundred pounds, and Elizabeth had been shocked at his appearance.

Clift was one of Elizabeth's dearest friends. Their bond had been forged when the actor had partnered Elizabeth so sublimely in
A Place in the Sun
. MGM had loaned Elizabeth to Paramount to appear in the film, George Stevens's adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's
An American Tragedy.
She believed that it was Monty Clift who had first introduced method acting to the movies, not Marlon Brando or James Dean.
“Though we were linked romantically by the media,” she recalled, “I sensed from the beginning that Monty was torn between what he thought he should be and what he actually was.” During the shoot, they developed a loving and lasting friendship, which only deepened when the troubled young actor crashed his car into a telephone pole after leaving Elizabeth and Michael Wilding's Benedict Canyon home.

Elizabeth had virtually saved Clift's life that night in 1956, crawling into the crushed vehicle and pulling out two teeth that had lodged in his throat, cradling his head before the ambulance arrived. He survived, but the broodingly handsome actor had suffered devastating facial injuries that left his face stiff and slightly disfigured. By the time he appeared in
Suddenly, Last Summer
with Elizabeth in 1959, he seemed a haunted man.

During the run of
Hamlet
, the Burtons had occasionally dined with Clift at his East 61st Street brownstone, or at Dinty Moore's in the theater district, where an unacknowledged rivalry for Elizabeth's affection often played out. At one such occasion, Richard had turned to Elizabeth and said, “Monty, Elizabeth likes me, but she loves you.” Clift never told Elizabeth what he thought of Richard, that he jealously dismissed him as “a phony actor.”

Nonetheless, Richard got into the act, suggesting that the three of them costar in a remake of Ernest Hemingway's
The Macomber Affair
, but Clift wasn't too keen on the idea. Elizabeth thought of other projects that she and her friend might do together, such as starring in the film version of
The Owl and the Pussycat
. They could always make each other laugh, and both had longed to do a comedy together.

Robert Lantz, Clift's Austrian-born agent, suggested they consider starring in a film adaptation of a novel written by another one of his clients—Carson McCullers's
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, a Southern gothic tale about desire and sexual repression. Clift would play Major Weldon Penderton, a latent homosexual army officer obsessed with a young private, who, in turn, is obsessed with the major's beautiful wife, Leonora, played by Elizabeth.

Elizabeth had already agreed to play the part of Leonora, but Ray Stark, who was going to produce the film for Seven Arts, was nervous about insuring Clift and insisted that he put up his cherished brownstone as collateral. Desperate for work, he considered doing so, but Elizabeth wouldn't let him. After time spent with Clift in New York, however, Elizabeth had confided to one of her press agents, “If Monty doesn't work soon, he'll die.”

Elizabeth was driving this train. And when she took it upon herself to announce to the press that she and Monty were going to costar in another film—their first since
Suddenly, Last Summer
in 1959—she was, in effect, forcing Stark and Seven Arts to accept Clift as her costar. When Stark pleaded with her to reconsider, Elizabeth shot back that “she would pay the bloody insurance,” offering to give up her million-dollar fee.

Elizabeth had not just come to the rescue of another close friend; she was trying to give Clift back his career, his reason for living. And unlike Richard, Elizabeth was unfazed by McCullers's subject. It was part of her fearlessness—or, if she did have such fears, they were quickly conquered by her devotion to her gay friends and fellow actors. It is what allowed her, decades later, to step onto the world stage as the first prominent advocate for AIDS research and the compassionate care of HIV and AIDS patients. It is what made her so convincing when she begged Richard to renounce his shame over his hemophilia and epilepsy. (She also reminded him of the great princes of Europe with whom Richard shared these afflictions). None of the books in Richard's vast library had given him the courage with which to embrace those conditions, accept them, and deal with them, the way Elizabeth did. He was grateful to her for it. In fact, his gratitude went so deep that, when he was in his cups, he might even resent her for it. And then the imprecations would begin. And it drove her to tears when he came after her with that beautiful voice saying such ugly things.

Clift read the script of
Reflections in a Golden Eye
and was eager to do it, but when Elizabeth told him that Richard wanted not only
to costar but to direct the movie, Clift became upset. He had never cared for Richard's acting (he called it “reciting”), and the macho Welshman made him feel uneasy. He and Roddy McDowall had often discussed “poor Richard,” as they called him behind his back. He kept it a secret from Elizabeth—“Bessie Mae”—what he really thought of Richard. It was Elizabeth he loved, not “Liz and Dick,” though it must have pained him that Richard's career had surged alongside Elizabeth's, while his own had languished.

When Monty and Elizabeth were together, or had long phone conversations, they would compare injuries and illnesses. Clift thought that was funny, and he would come up with a catalog of Elizabeth's ailments: ruptured spinal disc, bronchitis, phlebitis, ulcerated eye, tracheotomy…They could laugh at themselves. It was a trait Elizabeth shared with Richard, but one that Clift was unwilling to share with Elizabeth's husband.

But the two men shared something else: their love of Bessie Mae. Both men took her seriously, appreciated her intelligence. Her emotional life meant something to them, and they cared about her as a person. Clift was, according to his biographer Patricia Bosworth, “the first person to take her seriously as a thinking, feeling human being.” Richard was devoted to her in that way as well. But having Elizabeth/Bessie Mae in common did not bring the two men any closer. According to Bosworth, Clift even tried putting his thoughts about Richard into a letter, explaining why it would be impossible for the two men to ever work together. Thanks to Clift's thoughtful secretary, however, the letter was never sent.

In any case, Richard backed away from
Reflections
, deciding not to do it, after all. With Elizabeth's help, he had come a very long way in accepting the homosexual dalliances of his youth. “The world is round, get over it,” she had told him. “You chose me, didn't you? It's a choice, and you made yours. I'm the luckier for it.” But perhaps McCullers's dark tale made Richard feel uncomfortable in the role. Anyway, hadn't he just torn his heart out as George? Also, in his
unacknowledged, maybe even unrecognized, contest for Elizabeth's affections, Richard didn't like the role of Major Penderton, that of “a third banana,” as one agent who had read the script described it. So plans were made to film McCullers's novel—which would be the first time a homosexual character would appear in a major motion picture—with Monty Clift slated to play Elizabeth's husband.

 

The Taming of the Shrew
, which would put a positive, sexy spin on their new image as “the Battling Burtons,” was filmed in March and April of 1966, in Rome, the city that had first turned them into “Liz and Dick.” As they were often influenced by the roles they were playing, it was a blessing—or a stroke of genius—that they were now able to turn their famous fights into near-slapstick in Shakespeare's comedy.
The public likes to see us fight? We'll show them! And show them what marriage really means.

Approaching their second wedding anniversary, they were well aware that their private lives were going to be lived in public, no matter what. “The truth is,” Burton told the
Daily Mirror
, “we live out, for the benefit of the mob, the sort of idiocies they've come to expect. We will often pitch a battle purely for the exercise. I will accuse her of being ugly, she will accuse me of being a talentless son of a bitch, and this sort of frightens people…. I love arguing with Elizabeth, except when she is in the nude…” They loudly traded all sorts of silly and insulting endearments, like “Mabel” or “Mabes,” “Lumpy,” “Twit Twaddle,” “Snapshot,” and “One Take” for Elizabeth; and “Fred,” “Charlie Charm,” “Old Shoot,” “Boozed-up, Burned-out Welshman,” and “Pockmarked Welshman” for Richard. And they did it all in public. Elizabeth learned about a couple staying at the Regency Hotel, who took the suite below theirs just so they could eavesdrop on the Burtons'
battles royale
. They reportedly climbed up on chairs, placed empty glasses against the ceiling, and listened in. “Well, they got an earful,” said Elizabeth, “but what the poor schmoes didn't know was that it was a vocal exercise.”

The Burtons knew each other's vulnerabilities: Richard's sensitivity over Elizabeth's higher earning power and top billing, for example. Elizabeth's sensitivity over her fluctuating weight and her increasing frustration with Richard's drinking. “I think you should go and take a nap, Old Shoot,” she'd tell him. “You're drunk again. I mean—the hair of the dog was the whole dog this time!” Often their quarrels were a kind of teasing foreplay, or sheer theatrics meant to entertain themselves and anyone within earshot. But their squabbles could take a darker turn. In the first few months of filming
Virginia Woolf
, Elizabeth had occasionally found it difficult to shake off the iron grip of Martha. At times, “Martha completely took me over,” she admitted. Though their off-screen life was less tempestuous during the making of
Virginia Woolf
, there were times when, as Elizabeth recalled, “Richard and I would be out with friends and I'd hear myself saying to him, ‘For Chrissakes, shut up. I'm not finished talking.' And then the next morning, I would think, ‘That wasn't me, it was Martha.' I had to fight to regain myself.”

By the mid-1960s, the institution of marriage was under siege in America, as reflected in movies like
Sweet November
, in which Sandy Dennis played a “liberated” woman who prefers to spend each month living with a different man rather than look for a life mate, and
Guide for the Married Man
, a comedy that exploited the phenomenon of “swinging” (i.e., adulterous) married couples in the suburbs.

But—ever ahead of the curve—the Burtons were making
married
love glamorous and sexy. They had been such notorious, dangerous people in the two years following
Cleopatra
that they had found themselves shunned by longtime friends, like Rex Harrison and Emlyn Williams. But after
Hamlet
, Elizabeth noticed, everything changed. “There is no deodorant like success,” she said at the time. She sensed a change in how she and Burton were being regarded. “Richard and I are going through a period now, I feel, in which a lot of people are beginning to realize that we're not monsters. Some may even like us
for being honest. Some may even have an inkling of what bloody hell it was…”

But the tabloid press remained “more interested in illicit love, rather than married love,” she quickly came to realize. With the insatiable hunger for scandal, an addiction that had to be fed, the tabloids and even mainstream publications came out with stories like “Is Liz Legally Wed? (When Richard Touches Me, Nothing Else Matters: Her Own Story).” And when they couldn't find a sexy angle, the press covered their fights (“Liz Confesses: Burton's Ruining Me with Liquor” announced
Photoplay
, and “Richard Burton to Liz: I Love Thee Not” claimed the
Saturday Evening Post
). The press descended to a new low when, in the lounge of the Lancaster Hotel in Paris, the Burtons were bushwhacked by a photographer and two women. While the photographer snapped pictures, the two women exchanged words in German. It immediately dawned on the Burtons what was going on.

“Is that Maria's mother?” Elizabeth and Richard both asked, alarmed that the birth mother of their adopted child had been brought in to confront them.

“Yes. I'm a great friend of hers and I'm going to interpret for her,” the younger of the two women said.

“You're no friend of hers!” Elizabeth shouted. “You're a journalist. Get out of here before I kill you!” When Richard's anger boiled over, the woman fled. The Burtons took Maria's mother aside and tried to comfort her, but she spoke only German. Luckily, the Burtons' lawyer, Aaron Frosch, who spoke Yiddish and a little German, came by and interpreted for them. They found out that one of the tabloid newspapers had tricked Maria's mother into coming to Paris, supposedly at the Burtons' invitation, so she could visit her daughter and come away with some money. They'd been in Paris for a week, waiting to ambush the Burtons. The photographer had also tried to take a picture of Maria in the Burtons' Rolls-Royce, with Maria's mother in a tattered coat looking longingly at the daughter she had given up for
adoption. “How cruel to use those poor people in that way,” Elizabeth said about the ugly incident.