Furious Love (20 page)

The press also made much of Elizabeth's plans to move permanently to England, the country of her birth. “Elizabeth Taylor Seeks to End U.S. Citizenship” wrote the
Los Angeles Times
; “Liz Can Slash Taxes as Briton” the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
proclaimed erroneously. The
New York Times
, however, got it right. Elizabeth had dual citizenship and would have had to forswear allegiance to the United States in order to divest herself of her American citizenship. This she declined to do, keeping her American passport (proudly made out in the name of Mrs. Richard Burton). “I love America,” she wrote in her memoir. “I want to do nothing that might seem ungrateful or might hinder my returning here. But I don't like living in Hollywood.” It's true that they could live a more private life in England, where they could go to pubs unimpeded, and be greeted by friends, not fans or scolds. More important, Elizabeth knew that Britain was Burton's home, and she wanted to be wherever Richard was happiest.

In 1964 and 1965, they continued to inspire a cottage industry of quickly written books about their lives and lifestyle: Ruth Waterbury, former editor of
Photoplay
and founder of
Silver Screen
, brought out two paperbacks—
Elizabeth Taylor
,
Her Life
,
Her Loves
,
Her Future
, followed quickly by
Richard Burton
,
His Intimate Story.
Taylor's own book helped to set the record straight on a number of things, and Burton was delighted to have his first short story published in 1964—the Dylan Thomas–inspired, highly autobiographical tale of his early childhood in Wales, called
A Christmas Story
. And his charming essay about meeting Elizabeth, “Meeting Mrs. Jenkins,” which first appeared in
Vogue
(“Burton Writes of Taylor”), was brought out in a hardcover edition in 1965.

The Taming of the Shrew
would be the Burtons' first coproduction, which was made for Columbia Pictures. Actually, perhaps, it was their second, according to Richard: “The marriage,” he told a
Life
magazine reporter, “was our first.” Also named as coproducer was
their film director Franco Zeffirelli, who had made his reputation as a designer of opulent opera sets, especially his lush, oversize productions of
La Bohème
and
La Traviata.
He would also have been known to Burton for directing two memorable Shakespearean productions at the Old Vic—one notable for its artistic achievement and popularity (
Romeo and Juliet
), the other notably misguided (
Othello
, with John Gielgud). Later in his film career, Zeffirelli would direct two more visually stunning, crowd-pleasing film adaptations of Shakespeare,
Romeo and Juliet
and
Hamlet
with Mel Gibson.

While in Dublin, where Richard was filming
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, the Burtons met with Zeffirelli, who had flown in to discuss the prospect of casting them as Petruchio and Katharina (Kate). Though he'd originally thought of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni for the leads, he had heard from an intermediary that Burton was eager to take on another Shakespearean role.

When the Italian director arrived at their hotel in Dublin, he found their household in a not-unusual state of near chaos. Elizabeth had taken in a new pet—a tiny, leaping African primate known as a “bush baby.” God knows where she'd picked it up, but it was wreaking havoc in the luxurious suite, ripping up cushions and curtains and overturning lamps. It had retreated to the bathroom, clinging to the hot-water pipes, while Elizabeth yelled at Richard to come immediately to rescue it. But Burton was deep in conversation with Zeffirelli on the proposed Shakespearean production.

“Will you please stop talking about your damned Shakespeare and give me a hand!” Elizabeth shrieked.

Burton, nursing a drink, yelled, “Will you please stop this bloody nonsense with that horrendous little monster and come and talk to this man? He's a superb Shakespearean director and you might be lucky enough to work with him one day. Can't you be more pleasant to him?”

“I don't care what he thinks of me,” Elizabeth retorted. “All I want is some help for my bush baby.”

Zeffirelli claims that the only reason he was able to get Elizabeth onboard to play Kate was that he was able to go into the bathroom and rescue the little bush baby, which by now was exhausted and allowed itself to be removed from the hot-water pipes and placed in Elizabeth's arms. That did the trick. Later, the Burtons flew Zeffirelli to Elizabeth's home in Gstaad, where they further discussed the film, and Burton suggested that the director contact his old mentor, his adopted father Philip Burton.

“I wondered if I was going to find myself arguing with some sort of dusty Welsh bookworm with petty notions of how the Bard should be preserved,” Zeffirelli recalled. Luckily, the director found Philip Burton “a charming, well-informed gentleman, only too happy to listen to my ideas and quite entranced by everything we were planning to do.” Plans went ahead despite an apparent lack of interest on Elizabeth's part, fueling more squabbles. Zeffirelli remembered one such spat when Richard referred to Elizabeth as “a Hollywood baby.”

“A golden baby,” she shot back.

“Well, you certainly like gold and you're as plump as a baby.”

“There are countries where they like women with a little meat on them,” Elizabeth retorted. “If they hadn't banned my films because I'm pro-Israel, those Arabs would be drooling over me. Just take care I don't meet a rich sheik.”

But they decided to take on the film, and coproduce it, waiving their own salaries. (“We had invested $2 million in this venture and I didn't want another
Cleopatra
,” Burton confided in his notebooks.) Once the Burton-Zeffirelli production got underway, filmed entirely on created sets in Rome, the Burtons' star magnitude did much to elevate Zeffirelli's status.

The Burtons flew to the Eternal City to begin work on
The Taming of the Shrew
, where, on March 15, 1966, they would celebrate their second wedding anniversary. After the harrowing debacle of filming
Cleopatra
, they had sworn off Rome. Nonetheless, they moved into another luxurious villa, on Via Appia Antica, the Old Appian Way,
with full entourage (Dick Hanley and John Lee, Bob and Sally Wilson, Elizabeth's makeup expert Ron Berkeley, their chauffeur Gaston Sanz, their usual bodyguard Bobby LaSalle, plus a tutor, a governess, and a nurse for Maria—all paid for by Burton). They settled in with their family (“four children, dogs, cats, goldfish, tortoises, a rabbit, and a bird”), and, according to one source, eight additional bodyguards. They were living like royalty, and royalty were now their only peers. They socialized with Princess Grace (formerly Grace Kelly, now a
real
princess) and her husband, Prince Rainier of Monaco; Baron and Baroness Guy de Rothschild; the fetching Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia; and that other scandalously married couple, now safely past middle-age and beyond scandal—the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

The Burtons still felt the taste of ashes from
Le Scandale
in their mouths, but the atmosphere had changed. Where once they had been hounded by the paparazzi, the fire had died down—somewhat—now that they were respectably married. They were still followed by photographers, but it was less frenzied. The press still managed to get under Burton's skin by baiting him as “Mr. Taylor No. 5.”

A visual genius, the charming, blue-eyed Zeffirelli knew exactly how he wanted his production of
Shrew
to look, down to the opulently dressed extras (many of whom, incidentally, were Zeffirelli's own cousins, uncles, and aunts). In 1958, he had traveled to England to direct Joan Sutherland in
Lucia di Lammermoor
at Covent Garden. When he met the diva, bundled up against the English cold, the first words out of his mouth were, “Where are the bosoms?” And that's how he wanted his actresses—especially Elizabeth—to look: overflowing décolletage in fabulous costumes. And to emphasize Petruchio's manliness and mastery, he wanted his costumes to be outsized, larger than life. But in this he ran into trouble with Irene Sharaff, Elizabeth's friend and preferred costume designer whom she'd hired for the production. Sharaff had something more modest in mind for Burton. Noting Richard's rather large head and narrow shoulders (Claire Bloom had once described him as looking like Caliban), Zeffirelli in
sisted on doing it his way. Elizabeth wouldn't have Irene fired (she was nothing if not loyal to her friends and employees), so they compromised: Sharaff designed Elizabeth's costumes and Danilo Donati designed Richard's.

As for Burton, he told the director that he “didn't give a damn” about the costume as long as “it's light to wear,” but when he showed up on set in Donati's magnificent, capaciously sleeved costume, he roared, “Good! I feel like a lion.” Shearing off nearly half of the play's dialogue, Zeffirelli set about to make this the most rollicking, comic, opulent, and enjoyable
Shrew
ever filmed. “It was all very Douglas Fairbanks, with lots of athletic action, yet [we] never lost sight of its classical origins,” Zeffirelli wrote in his autobiography. Purists, however, like the veteran stage actor Cyril Cusack, who played Petruchio's servant, Grumio, in the film, would mock the production as “Shakespeare-elli.”

This would be Zeffirelli's first film, and Elizabeth's first Shakespearean role, about which she had considerable misgivings. Just as she had been the only actress in
Virginia Woolf
without stage training, she would be taking on the Bard in a company of mostly veteran Shakespearean actors—Burton, of course; Cyril Cusack; Victor Spinetti; young Michael York; and Michael Hordern (who had appeared with them in
The V.I.P.s
and with Burton in
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
). “Why can't we take on one death-defying risk at a time?” she'd complained, mock-seriously, to Burton.

“Elizabeth was very shy to play Shakespeare to begin with,” remembered Zeffirelli, “but she brought a marvelous devotion. On the first day, I remember, she was like a girl coming to her marriage too young; she had extreme concern and humility. That day, she was really enchanting…I consider that Elizabeth, with no Shakespearean background, gave the more interesting performance because she invented the part from scratch.”

The film was shot at the Dino De Laurentiis Studios just outside of Rome, where four enormous soundstages were transformed into
sixteenth-century Padua. The Burtons would be driven each morning in the Rolls-Royce, past the Colosseum, to their suite of palatial dressing rooms, complete with kitchen, offices, and white carpeting throughout. There they would be ministered to by a small battalion of servants—“maids, secretaries, and butlers as well as hairdressers and makeup artists.” They often held court there for visiting journalists and columnists, like Sheilah Graham, and famous friends, like Rudolf Nureyev and Edward Albee.

At first, Zeffirelli had to work around their different schedules—Burton showing up promptly at seven thirty a.m. and ready for his first take at nine twenty, but Elizabeth not turning up until nearly eleven a.m. (“[her] morning was given over to her famous face—skin massage, eyebrow-plucking or whatever,” the director supposed). Even worse, a long, festive lunch party was held most days in their dressing rooms, lasting from one to four in the afternoon. Impossible to work after that! Zeffirelli got them to agree to adhere to “French hours”—starting at noon and working straight through till eight p.m., with a break for tea. But that didn't work either—it meant the whole crew had to stay on set all day—so they ended up working from eight in the morning till three in the afternoon, without a break, despite Elizabeth's dislike of starting so early. For all the problems her habits initially caused, the director was impressed by how well she understood the camera. “She is not called ‘one-shot Liz' for nothing,” he recalled. Of course, as the Burtons were producing the film, they had an added incentive to bring it in on time.

There would be little late-night carousing: Richard rehearsed with Elizabeth every evening, helping her master Shakespearean verse. Despite the pressures on the Burtons, now responsible for the entire production, the set was surprisingly convivial, with everyone pitching in. There were spontaneous poetry readings (Burton reciting Dylan Thomas, of course), and Victor Spinetti, who played Hortensio in the film (and who was in the first flush of his movie fame after appearing in
A Hard Day's Night
and
Help!
), recalled how
Elizabeth pitched in where needed. When Zeffirelli realized that he required fifty extras onscreen for a scene to be shot the next day, the makeup department rebelled—“We'll have to start at five thirty!” they wailed. Elizabeth immediately told her director, “Don't worry. I'll do it.” And she did, starting early the next morning, applying makeup to fifty extras, and doing Spinetti's makeup, as well. “May I give you a beauty tip?” she'd asked the actor, who was Welsh despite his Italian name. “Always extend the eyebrows. They set your eyes farther apart…Oh, and don't use an eyebrow pencil. Use an ordinary lead one.”

Even though the frenzy had died down considerably since
Cleopatra
days, the Burtons still found themselves tailed by paparazzi on their occasional forays into Rome's nightlife, or on rare jaunts outside the city. When they managed to get away to Positano on a short break from filming, Burton took their poodle, E'en So, for a walk outside their hotel. His very presence caused an enormous traffic jam. Somehow they had found him out. Burton, who was essentially solitary, even antisocial when sober, found the attention nightmarish. Hounded by the shouts of the public and the exploding flashcubes of paparazzi, Burton fled back to the hotel. He confided in his diary: “I never gaped at anybody in my life and much as I admire certain famed people, Churchill, and various writers…Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot…etc., etc., I have never asked them for an autograph. I actually feel as embarrassed seeing a public figure as being one.”