Furious Love (34 page)

When he was sixteen, Richard had been taken by Emlyn Williams to a party where he quickly noticed that all the guests were gay men, some of whom made passes at him. “What could I say? What could I do? I mean, these were some of the greatest actors in the English theater. I wasn't gay, but it was hard to say no,” he wrote about the incident. Later, when he was receiving his six-month course of Royal Air Force (RAF) training at Exeter College, Oxford, he was the only RAF officer trainee who finagled a single room for himself, possibly arranged by Philip Burton (who, as commanding officer of Port Talbot Squadron 499, had gotten Burton the opportunity to begin with). One day, when the RAF trainees were parading in formation on the Oxford grounds, Richard was commanded to step forward. He was pulled out of line and reprimanded for “entertaining an officer in his room.” That he wasn't drummed out of the corps was probably due to the influence of his commanding officer—Philip Burton—but Richard recalled it as a particularly humiliating incident, especially for the son of a Welsh miner.

Elizabeth, though, had helped him overcome any shame he might have still harbored. Now, here was a chance to portray the pathos of a gay man living in England at a time when homosexuality was considered a crime. It also offered him a chance to confront his past, and Elizabeth gave him the courage to do so.

Burton announced to the press that he'd accepted the part because Rex Harrison had said, “I will if you will.” Elizabeth had urged him to take on the role, given her affection for her many gay friends—Roddy McDowall, Dick Hanley, John Lee, Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson, Vincente Minnelli, Franco Zeffirelli—and her belief in the film's affirmation of the healing power of love, no matter the orientation. With Elizabeth's help, Richard had become more able to accept his early sexual experiences, and appearing as a gay barber—although
sometimes slipping into parody—reflected that self-acceptance. One would have a hard time imagining other actors of his stature at the time—John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, George C. Scott—taking on an overtly gay role.

Even after a string of poorly performing films, the Burtons still had the clout to demand their highest salaries to date—$1.25 million each—for Burton to appear in
Staircase
and, for Elizabeth,
The Only Game in Town
, both for 20th Century-Fox. (“They must be out of their tiny Chinese minds,” Elizabeth had quipped when the producers agreed to their demands.) They also asked that they not be made to work more than an hour's distance apart when they weren't working together, which is why both films were shot in Paris, instead of on location in London's East End or in Las Vegas, where the stories were set. (They had had the same arrangement on their last two films,
Where Eagles Dare
and
Secret Ceremony
, both filmed at Elstree Studios.) Elaborate sets had to be constructed at the Boulogne-sur-Seine studio, but 20th Century-Fox was convinced that the Burton magic was still viable enough to recoup their huge salaries.

The Only Game in Town
came about because Frank Sinatra had wanted to know the name of a dog. Sinatra had called the Burtons to ask about the breed of O'Fie, because he wanted to buy a similar dog for his new wife, Mia Farrow. He got their agent, Hugh French, on the phone, and French was suddenly hit by the idea of pairing Elizabeth with Sinatra. They had, surprisingly, never appeared together in a movie. French found the screenplay for
The Only Game in Town
, set in Sinatra-friendly Las Vegas, and Elizabeth agreed to do it. The story is about a piano-playing compulsive gambler—Sinatra, of course—and his Las Vegas–dancer girlfriend, played by Elizabeth. Frank D. Gilroy (author of
The Subject Was Roses)
wrote the screenplay, adapted from his own Broadway play. Elizabeth's first great director, George Stevens, who had catapulted her to true movie stardom in
A Place in the Sun
and
Giant
, was signed to direct. Though working with Ste
vens, particularly in
Giant
, had been hard on Elizabeth, she had never looked more luminous than in those films, and she trusted that he would again work his magic.

However, before filming began in Paris, Sinatra backed out, to be replaced by Warren Beatty, fresh from his stunning success as both producer and star of
Bonnie and Clyde.
But it wasn't a good match. With his boyish good looks, Beatty seemed to belong to another generation, and the cinematic love affair between him and Taylor just wasn't believable. He wasn't convincing as a jaded Las Vegas denizen, and Elizabeth's womanly figure wasn't suited to the miniskirts and stretch pants of the era. Despite Beatty and Taylor's on-camera mismatch, Burton became jealous of the actor—already well known as catnip to women—whom he described in his diary as “her young & attractive man who obviously adores her.” He dealt with his jealousy in the usual way—drinking heavily by five p.m., martinis this time. “I felt desperate all day long…I was so drunk & tired that I fell asleep almost before I'd managed to get my clothes off,” he confided in his diary. Richard knew it was important for Elizabeth to appear in her own films, but, he admitted, “I don't like Elizabeth working without me.”

When Darryl Zanuck viewed the rushes for the two back-to-back films, he was convinced that the studio had two hits on their hands. But once again, both films would lose money. Buckets of it.
The Only Game in Town
lost $8 million, and
Staircase
lost $5.8 million. Zanuck, it appeared, was just as out of touch with what contemporary audiences wanted as the Burtons now appeared to be. The success of lower-budget films like
Easy Rider
and
The Graduate—
Mike Nichols's second movie—would usher in a change in Hollywood, in a world where the Burtons increasingly seemed throwbacks to another era. Elizabeth now had three flops in a row, and she wouldn't make another movie for two years.

The family business was in trouble.

To console himself, Burton found great comfort in tallying up their
combined assets, with a mind toward possible retirement. “I have worked out that with average luck, we should, at the end of 1969, be worth about $12 million between us. About $3 million of that is in diamonds, emeralds, property, paintings, so our annual income will be in the region of $1.2 million. That is, God willing, and no wars, and no '29.” Burton, however, was still bankable, because
Where Eagles Dare
would turn out to be the biggest money-maker of the year, earning $21 million domestically. But their next joint picture,
Anne of the Thousand Days
, would mark the beginning of the end of Elizabeth's career as a leading lady.

 

While in Paris, the Burtons continued their round of socializing with the aristocracy, spending time with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who visited Elizabeth on the set of
The Only Game in Town
, and Richard, a half mile away, on the set of
Staircase.
The Duke and Duchess were, in a way, the Burtons' only equivalents. Before
Le Scandale
, theirs had been the most notorious, damaging, and publicized marriage of the century, which ended King Edward VIII's reign so that he could marry the Baltimore divorcée Wallis Simpson. England wept at the king's abdication, and the press excoriated the couple—particularly the stylish, aloof American for whom he had thrown over his kingdom. “The beating
they
took by the press,” Elizabeth later noted, “made us look like chopped chicken liver.” The duke saw himself exiled to Jamaica and ostracized by the royal family, as he and his bride reigned over a diminished shadow empire of millionaires, fashion plates, social climbers, playboys, and movie people. Their story had special poignancy for Richard, as the duke was also the Prince of Wales. To honor the connection, the duchess often wore her stunning “Prince of Wales” brooch—three feathers and a crown, the insignia of Wales in white and yellow diamonds. Over dinner at the duke and duchess's house in Paris, the duchess told Elizabeth that it was one of the few pieces of jewelry that Lord Mountbatten had overlooked when he came to take back all of the
royal jewels upon the duke's abdication. (Elizabeth would end up owning the brooch after the duchess's death in 1986, when she bid on it at a Sotheby's auction the following year for an AIDS fund-raising event, paying $623,000. She had phoned in the bid sitting by her pool in Los Angeles. “All along I knew my friend the duchess wanted me to have it,” she believed.) Elizabeth loved spending time at their exquisite Paris house with its beautiful gardens that the duke had himself designed and had planted with his own hands.

Burton was less sanguine about spending time with “marred royalty.” He was bored at the duke and duchess's soirees. He described the couple as resembling “Two tiny figures like Toto and Nanette that you keep on the mantelpiece. Chipped around the edges. Something you keep in the front room for Sundays only.” At one such soiree, on November 13, 1968, he picked up the duchess and swung her around the room “like a dancing singing dervish.” Elizabeth was horrified. Of course, it didn't help that Richard was now, on occasion, capable of downing three bottles of vodka a day. Furious with him, Elizabeth locked him in the spare bedroom that night, at the Plaza Athénée. Richard tried to kick the door down, shattering the plaster, and had to spend the next morning picking up the pieces. He later expressed remorse in his diary when he wrote, “I'd better be off to work because I behaved with a fair amount of disgrace yesterday…it is not a good idea to drink so much. I shall miss all the marriages of all my various children…”

And, on November 15, they set off for a weekend getaway at the Château de Ferrières, the beautiful country house of Guy and Marie-Hélène Rothschild. Richard didn't want to go. “I'd like to be alone with E. for about two hundred years but can't even get two days,” he complained.

Elizabeth was still suffering back pain and still feeling weak after her hysterectomy. In October, she complained to Burton that she sometimes had no feeling in her feet and that she feared she might one day become crippled. “She asked if I would stop loving her if
she had to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. I told her that I didn't care if her legs, bum, and bosoms fell off, and her teeth turned yellow and she went bald. I love that woman so much sometimes that I cannot believe my luck. She has given me so much.” And then, in late November, Elizabeth again received sad news.

As it had with the death of Montgomery Clift, it fell to Richard to break the news of Elizabeth's father's passing away on November 20, 1968, a month shy of his seventy-first birthday. After Francis Taylor's stroke three years earlier, his death wasn't unexpected, but Elizabeth was devastated, in part, perhaps, because there had always been some distance between her and her father, unlike her extremely close relationship with her mother, Sara. She would never be close to him now.

Elizabeth was inconsolable in her grief; “like a wild animal,” Burton recorded. Though Francis Taylor had disliked his daughter's childhood acting career, and Sara's devotion to it had caused a rift in their marriage, he was, in some ways, responsible for bringing it about. First, he had made his wife abandon her successful stage career (though they were both from Arkansas City, Kansas, he had courted her when she was appearing in a play in London's West End), so Sara had poured all of her frustrated theatrical impulses into Elizabeth. And when he was an air-raid warden in Los Angeles during World War II, he had crossed paths with fellow air-raid warden Sam Marx. Then a story editor at MGM, Marx had told Elizabeth's father that the studio was desperately looking for a little English girl to appear in a movie then in production,
Lassie Come Home
. Francis casually mentioned it to Sara that evening. The rest is history, and Francis didn't like how it turned out. Elizabeth recalled, “He had made my mother quit the stage when she was twenty-nine, and she lived her life vicariously and very strongly through me, and of course, my dad resented that.” When Elizabeth started earning more money than her father, their idyllic family life ended. “That's when it fell apart,” Elizabeth believed.

The Burtons flew back to Los Angeles to attend the funeral and to
console Sara Taylor. Six days later, they were back in Paris, and Elizabeth, ever the trouper, returned to work.

In December 1968,
Candy
was released. As a favor to Marlon Brando, Burton had taken a small novelty role as a Dylan Thomas–like poet making the rounds of college campuses and seducing girls, so it couldn't have been pleasant to read the lousy reviews.
Variety
was alone in lauding Burton for succeeding “by lampooning his own style. He gives an outstanding comedy performance.” Practically everywhere else, he was accused of having no gift for comedy. Despite its trainload of fascinating stars and personalities—Brando, John Huston, James Coburn, Walter Matthau, the French singer Charles Aznavour, Ringo Starr, even boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson and ex–Rolling Stone girlfriend Anita Pallenberg—the spoof was dismissed by most critics as a “frenzied, formless, and almost entirely witless adaptation.” That's what you get for hanging out with Marlon Brando and agreeing, while drunk, to appear in movies made by your friends.

In many respects, 1968 had been a terrible year. Though it had begun with filming
Where Eagles Dare
, giving Richard's film career a needed jolt and changing its direction (from dramatic actor to action star), and it brought Elizabeth the fabulous and fabled Krupp diamond, it had ended with the death of Francis Taylor and had seen the paralyzing accident of Burton's beloved brother Ifor.

Through it all, however, their grand passion continued. Burton wrote at the end of the year, “She is a wildly exciting love-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody's fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and willful, she is clement and loving…she tolerates my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when I am away from her,
and she loves me!
…And I'll love her till I die.”