Furious Love (28 page)

Another gifted photographer was Elizabeth's close friend Roddy McDowall, who photographed her over the decades of their friendship. McDowall remembered that he had been so struck by her beauty when they were child stars appearing together in
Lassie Come Home
that at his first sight of her, he burst out laughing. (That had been Burton's response when he first saw her at Stewart Granger's house, reading a book by the pool.) He thought she was “perfect, an exquisite little doll…the most perfectly beautiful creature I ever saw.” Throughout their friendship, McDowall was always on hand to prop up her ego when she needed it. He believed that “being beautiful” was an art form in itself—great beauties were great artists, in their way. He told Elizabeth, “Some beautiful people don't know how to carry it, and so they shrug away from it. Others”—like Elizabeth—“wear their beauty with enormous ease.” McDowall long marveled at Elizabeth's composure, which he considered a necessary element of true beauty. As someone who photographed her often, and had acted with her in front of the camera, McDowall saw her ability to be absolutely still as the secret to her iconic image.

 

They began filming
The Comedians
, their seventh movie together, in January 1967, soon after completing
The Taming of the Shrew
and
Doctor Faustus
in Rome. MGM and Peter Glenville had planned to make the film in Haiti before the book was even released, before Duvalier and his murderous enforcers known as the Tonton Macoutes could take their revenge, but they feared word would leak out before the film was completed. Instead, the entire cast and 115-member
crew were flown into Dahomey (now Benin), on the West African coast, which would stand in for Haiti, the capital city of Cotonou, a close fit for Port-au-Prince. Dahomey had a historical, cultural, and geographical resemblance to Haiti—the newly independent country had been colonized by the French and had a history of slavery. In fact, the Dahomeans were the descendants of Africans who were enslaved and sent to the Caribbean, and many of the cultural elements had remained the same, including ritual voodoo. When a voodoo priest was brought in from Haiti for a scene in which voodoo rites were shown for the first time on camera, the Dahomean locals, hired as extras in the film, didn't need to be instructed in the rituals.

There were rumors that Duvalier had voodoo witch doctors place a hex on the entire production. Indeed, accidents plagued the shoot—several near drownings, various illnesses that required leaving the country for treatment, and, incredibly, a mysterious rash in the shape of Africa that appeared on Alec Guinness's chest for four days. (“I was glad to leave Dahomey,” Guinness wrote from Africa to a friend when filming was over. “I couldn't help feeling it was sinister…ideas of voodoo are never absent from one's mind there. Peter Glenville, an intimate friend, very nearly drowned under my eyes.”)

The Burtons arrived in Africa with their entourage, including Alexandre de Paris; the ever-faithful Bob Wilson, Burton's right-hand man; and Dick Hanley and John Lee. Three hundred people greeted the Burtons when they arrived in Cotonou. Actors are often well-received when they arrive on location to make a film, but the Burtons were met by President Soglo and given use of the presidential compound at Cotonou. Richard and Elizabeth were led through the presidential palace by the former general, who had helped win his country's independence from the French ten years earlier. The palace could barely hold a candle, however, to the luxurious hotels the Burtons were used to. When “Mon Général” showed them his wife's clothes closet with great fanfare, Elizabeth was touched to see “a perfectly ordinary rack of shoes.” When Elizabeth was invited to
step onto a mat that automatically switched on a couple of lights, she feigned delight. Outside the sprawling palace, the Burtons noticed washing hanging on lines strung up in the presidential courtyards. It was not lost on them that their considerable assets were in excess of many African countries' annual gross national product, certainly including Dahomey's.

The Burtons were enchanted with the country and with the Dahomeans, especially the children who flocked to the sets. For the first time since
Cleopatra
, they were able to walk into a restaurant without being gawked at. One local journalist popped up to interview Richard, but didn't recognize Elizabeth, mistaking her for Burton's assistant. That delighted her. Another local newspaperman mistook Burton for a cameraman, further endearing the Dahomeans to the couple. That they were treated more as curiosities than as royalty was a needed change. Glenville noticed that the lack of outside stress helped them relax in front of the camera, and Burton particularly gives a believable and affecting performance in the role of a troubled hotel proprietor who tries to stay politically neutral, a kind of Rick in
Casablanca
who finds his conscience at the end of the film, deciding to lead an insurgence against the corrupt regime.

LOOK
magazine covered the shoot, putting the Burtons on the cover of their June 27, 1967 issue. “On Location with Richard and Liz: Why They're Never Dull.” The public still could not get enough of the Burtons, and they're beautifully photographed in color by Otto Storch, looking vibrant and relaxed, strolling along the beach or surrounded by African children. “Elizabeth and I love children,” Burton told
LOOK.
“We would adore having some together, but the doctor said Elizabeth can't have any more.” Clearly the idea of having a child of their own was still very much with them after Elizabeth's hospitalization in Rome. They look genuinely happy surrounded by a half dozen children, Richard kissing a small boy he's holding in his arms. Children, at least, did not know or care who the Burtons were, and they did not fawn over them or judge them.

They spent their evenings reading, Taylor discovering a genuine interest in poetry under Burton's influence, and Burton absorbed in Alex Haley's
The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
But the relentless African heat, and both Richard's and Elizabeth's prodigious alcohol intake, soon took their toll. On some days, the temperature reached as high as 110 degrees. “You took your life in your hands if you went out in the midday sun,” Burton said, evoking Noël Coward's song “Only Mad Dogs and Englishmen (go out in the midday sun).” Richard discovered that under the movie lights, the temperature reached 138 degrees. So everyone did what they could to reduce the number of takes required—never a problem for “Quicktake” Elizabeth, or Lillian Gish, then seventy-four years old, who was particularly bothered by the heat.

Despite the heat—or because of it—Burton's drinking seemed to increase exponentially. Graham Greene, also known for his high capacity for alcohol, noticed, “[W]hen they are both off, they knock it down in their little trailer—he beer and she pastis. How can [they], in this heat…”

Guinness was also somewhat alarmed. In Richard's early years in the theater, back in 1949, he had occasionally dined with the Guinnesses at their house in St. Peter's Square in London, where Richard had introduced Alec Guinness to the poetry of Dylan Thomas. (Guinness later portrayed the Welsh poet in a one-man show in London.) Now, eighteen years later, Alec wrote in a letter to his son about his reunion with Richard: “I hardly find him the same person. Although he's a bit dour at the moment, he can be amusing and is highly intelligent and not uninteresting. But drink has taken a bit of a toll, I fear.”

And, in the usual way that the Burtons' films so often reflected or commented upon their private lives, there's a throwaway line delivered by Paul Ford, playing an eccentric American idealist who travels to Haiti with his wife (played by Lillian Gish), which could have been written for Burton himself. When Burton, as Mr. Brown, the proprietor of a hotel imperiled under the Duvalier regime, tells Mr. Smith
(Paul Ford) that he's putting him and his wife up in the John Barrymore Suite, Mrs. Smith asks if John Barrymore really stayed there.

“I can show you his liquor bills,” Mr. Brown answers.

“A great talent ruined,” Mr. Smith remarks.

Elizabeth blamed Richard's excessive drinking on his “Welsh hours,” his recurring bouts of depression that seemed to require more and more alcohol. But both were drinking heavily. Once, as a result, they failed to show up for a state dinner in their honor, to which two hundred guests had been invited. But it was Richard who was usually the worse for wear. Sometimes he would disappear for hours. Elizabeth would call out his name in their air-conditioned presidential compound, but there would be no answer. She would have to leave the comfort of their villa and make the rounds of the back alleys and streets in Cotonou, searching the small hotels and African bars for him, where the most famous woman in the world had trouble making herself understood.

“Have you seen Richard Burton?” she'd ask in the local bars.

“Who?”

“Richard Burton!”

“Is he black or white, madame?”

Could he have been kidnapped? There were rumors of kidnapping by Duvalier's henchmen swirling around the set, sometimes two or three threats a week. Eventually, she would find him having wandered off with a few members of the crew. Once, Alec Guinness stumbled onto Elizabeth in his dressing room; she had been weeping throughout the afternoon because Burton, in his cups, had been so nasty to her. But, as usual, they patched up their quarrel and things went on as before. When there wasn't acting, there was drinking. When there wasn't drinking, there was fighting. And when there wasn't fighting, there was lovemaking.

Burton noticed how, despite it all, Elizabeth seemed to grow even more beautiful in Africa. “E. is looking gorgeous—she blooms in hot climates,” Burton wrote in his diary in January. And later, “I am
madly in love with her at the moment, as distinct from always loving her, and want to make love to her every minute. But alas it is not possible for a couple of days.”

The more he drank on location in West Africa, the more he became a Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde figure, and it was Elizabeth who suffered most when Burton turned mean. Though she was playing another Martha in
The Comedians
, Elizabeth didn't want to be turned into Albee's Martha. He could be so loving toward her, so devoted, but with too much drink in him, he turned on her and on the world she had brought him into. Everyone was a “bore” or “a poor bastard.” He lashed out and she felt the lash. Cursing was a sport to Elizabeth, a release—it was fun to curse—but Richard's profanity when he was drunk had a scorpion's sting in it. And it pained her to hear it, and on those occasions when he'd reject her, she would be inconsolable when the teasing turned to taunting. It was their seventh film together, the fifth year of the floating island of this strange life they shared, a marriage with an international audience. The public, the “yellow journals” as Elizabeth called them, wanted to see “Liz and Dick,” nicknames they both hated. They wanted to be Elizabeth and Richard.

It was heartbreaking to see “Liz and Dick” win that fight. There were, in fact, two marriages: the public and private. She thought that having a top billing and a larger salary—that male obsession with being on top—would please Richard. But, at least in Africa, and under those hot movie lights, nothing seemed to please him. Drinking was what you did. What Richard did.

Once filming was over in Dahomey, the cast and crew were transported to soundstages in Nice and Paris to complete the shoot. In an elegant hotel in the Maritime Alps above Saint-Raphael, an hour from Nice,
LOOK
continued its interview. On their hotel balcony, where one could see the Mediterranean, and the sweet air was redolent of umbrella pines that grew in the scrubby hills, Burton was asked if the “American viewing public” had changed over the years. Burton thought that it had, given the popular success of such challenging
productions as
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
,
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, and
The Taming of the Shrew.
As for the roles of Leamas and George, Richard admitted that they were quite different from his previous fare. “I would never have dreamed of myself portraying such seedy, famished men…it was immensely challenging, but it was such agony. Playing everything down, down, holding myself in all the time.” When asked why he made so many movies, he answered that, among other things, being with Elizabeth had given him much more respect for filmmaking. And again, that old bugaboo—did he feel he had forsaken the stage? It's a good thing Elizabeth wasn't sitting on the terrace with them. “Oh, no. I haven't given it up by any means,” he answered. “I always have a great ache in me for the stage, a sort of duty, you might say.”

And finally, no interview could be complete until it touched on
Le Scandale
. “Well, I must say that everyone seems to have quieted down,” Richard said. “Good lord, the reputations we had! I mean, I was a bestial wife-stealer, and Elizabeth was a scheming home-breaker…We've been through a lot of fire together, Elizabeth and I. You'd think we were out to destroy Western Civilization or something.”

 

This time, Richard really wanted to win. On April 10, 1967, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its annual Oscar celebration. Word had already reached them at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in Nice that Elizabeth had won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for
Virginia Woolf
, but that Richard had lost to Paul Scofield. As the NYFCCA was often an augur for how the Academy voted, Burton was somewhat shaken. He and Elizabeth had both been nominated for Oscars for
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
—Burton's fifth nomination—and he deserved to win. But his competition was the Shakespearean actor Scofield in
A Man for All Seasons.
This was the Oscar that Richard really wanted to win,
needed
to win—his George had been a quiet triumph, perhaps his best performance in his long, celebrated career. But he had never felt accepted in Hollywood, par
ticularly by the older crowd who tended to vote conservatively for Academy Award nominees. That crowd had not been comfortable with Albee's graphic language, and had not liked the terrible headlines coming out of Rome only five years earlier, when Richard and Elizabeth had found themselves shunned by an industry waiting to see how the
Cleopatra
debacle would play out. If they both won their awards, it would be a sign of complete acceptance by the entertainment industry.