Furious Love (35 page)

I
n December 1968, Richard returned to London to complete filming on
Staircase
while Elizabeth stayed behind in Paris with her mother. Elizabeth grew even closer to Sara following her father's death, cherishing her remaining parent. Even though 20th Century-Fox had given Elizabeth some time off to rest, her health had never fully improved after her hysterectomy. Her constant back pain troubled her, and she had to wear a brace just to get through a day of shooting. Richard worried that she might end up in a wheelchair. He was angry that she didn't take better care of herself, and noted that the doctors had wanted her to remain in bed for at least a month. She didn't do it. Richard thought it was odd that her doctors didn't forbid her to drink while she was also taking powerful prescription painkillers. He had always distrusted doctors, blaming their “sheer neglect” for his mother's death while she was giving birth to her thirteenth child. But he wished that Elizabeth would heed their advice. “So I'll
have my two favorite people in the world, E. and Ifor, tottering about on crutches,” Richard wrote gloomily. But he was actually fooling himself when it came to Ifor: there would be a slight improvement in his condition, allowing him to stand up on a few occasions and even swim, but he would remain paralyzed from the waist down, reduced to living in a motorized wheelchair.

On the last day of the year, Burton wrote,

The prescription drugs, combined with the alcohol Elizabeth continued to imbibe, had a terrible effect on her. Some days she went to bed in a “stoned daze,” totally disoriented and incoherent. It frightened Richard so much that he stopped drinking temporarily, though he considered alcohol one of life's few pleasures in “a murderous world.” He saw his own behavior mirrored in Elizabeth, and he didn't like what he saw.

In January 1969, the Burtons managed to fly to Las Vegas for the final ten days of filming
The Only Game in Town.
To help distract Elizabeth from her pain—and because it also captured his imagination—Burton bid on another fabled jewel at Sotheby's. “La Peregrina” was an ex
traordinary, pear-shaped pearl that had been given to Mary Tudor, first daughter of Henry VIII, by King Philip of Spain in 1554. The pearl's provenance was so distinguished it came with its own biography, beginning with its discovery by a slave in the Gulf of Panama (which won him his freedom). It made an appearance in two paintings by Velàzquez, the great painter of the Spanish court: worn as a brooch by Queen Margarita (the wife of Philip III), and suspended from a long necklace around the throat of her daughter-in-law, Queen Isabel. The next famous owners of La Peregrina were the Bonapartes in the early 1800s. Burton won his $37,000 bid at Sotheby's, beating out Prince Alfonso de Bourbon Asturias, who had wanted to return the pearl to Spain, which many considered its rightful home. But La Peregrina continued to wander: Sotheby's had the pearl couriered to Las Vegas, to the top floor of Caesars Palace, where the Burtons were then in residence.

When Elizabeth lifted the pearl out of its case, she gasped. She lovingly put it around her neck. She couldn't stop touching it, “like a talisman,” and she walked through her hotel suite, “dreaming and glowing and wanting to scream with joy,” as she would later write. She wanted to share her joy with Richard, but she saw that he was in one of his Welsh moods. “Sometimes his joy was perverse and he would become dark.” She knew Richard, and she knew better than to throw herself at him and cover him with kisses, which was what she wanted to do. Incredibly, there was no one around to share her joy.

Suddenly, when she reached up to touch the pearl, she noticed it was gone. She was horrified—she ran into her bedroom and threw herself on the bed, where she screamed into the pillow. How could she have lost it? She got up and slowly retraced her steps, searching for the pearl before Richard learned that it was missing. Richard loved the pearl as much as she did, mostly for its unique, noble provenance—he loved anything historical. She even removed her shoes so she could feel it underfoot, and she got down on her hands and knees to search every inch of the carpet. It wasn't there.

So she went into the living room, tiptoeing around Burton, pretending nonchalance while she continued to hunt for the pearl. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed their two Pekingese puppies at their feeding bowls. One of them was apparently gnawing on a bone, which was odd, because they never gave the puppies bones to chew on. When she investigated, she nearly shrieked with delight when she opened the puppy's mouth to find La Peregrina—intact and unscratched. It would be at least a week before she could bring herself to tell Richard what had happened.

For Elizabeth, her pleasure in La Peregrina was another expression of her almost mystical connection to jewels. It had arrived dangling on a lovely little pearl-and-platinum chain necklace, but, three years later, with the help of a designer from Cartier, Elizabeth created an exquisite design to showcase it, inspired by a sixteenth-century portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, wearing the pearl. The new setting was a stunning double-stranded pearl-and-ruby choker, made with fifty-six “exquisitely matched oriental pearls.” And Richard was so inspired by its history that he planned to write a historical novel based on the peregrinations of the luminous pearl.

Their pleasure in La Peregrina did not last long, however. They had been fighting so much that by March, Richard wondered if they would be able to stay together. “The last six or eight months have been a nightmare,” Burton wrote. “I created one half and Elizabeth the other. We grated on each other to the point of separation.” Burton even contemplated running off to live alone in a shack in a tropical forest, and Elizabeth thought about going to live with her brother in Hawaii. “It is, of course, quite impossible. We are bound together. Whither thou goest…”

How fitting, perhaps, that a few months after giving Elizabeth La Peregrina, Richard himself would become Henry VIII, father of Mary I of England, in Hal Wallis's film
Anne of the Thousand Days
. Elizabeth wanted desperately to play Anne Boleyn opposite Richard, but for once, the thing she most desired was denied her. Wallis informed
her that at thirty-seven, she was just too old to play twenty-two-year-old Anne Boleyn. It was a bitter pill for Elizabeth, who had to watch the fresh, beautiful French-Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold pursued on camera by Richard in a role she felt should have belonged to her. Three years shy of forty—the age Joe Mankiewicz had warned all actresses about—she was still beautiful, still idolized by the public, but she had to confront what so many actresses face: the beginning of the end of their careers as “leading ladies.” After all, in an industry dominated by men, it was still considered business as usual to pair leading men in their forties and fifties with actresses in their twenties (as in
Love in the Afternoon
, with fifty-six-year-old Gary Cooper romantically paired with twenty-eight-year-old Audrey Hepburn).

Burton, out of loyalty to Taylor, tried to get out of playing the role, but he was threatened with a lawsuit by Universal Pictures. (“I was never sued when I was poor,” he complained in his diary.) So before debarking to dreary London where the movie would be filmed, the Burtons returned to the paradise of Puerto Vallarta, a place where they had been enormously happy, a place that seemed to have the power to restore them to sanity and to health, and to remind them why they were still together.

 

Like everything else, Puerto Vallarta had changed since their discovery of the enchanting village five years earlier. It had grown from a sleepy seaside town of barely a thousand souls to a bustling city of over 25,000 and a tourist attraction, thanks to the Burtons, who became the town's unofficial mayor and first lady whenever they were in residence. After settling into Casa Kimberly, they took a day off and toured the village by jeep, dropping in at the new resort hotels, favorite restaurants and bars. Wherever they went, crowds miraculously appeared, snapping their picture and angling to get a good look at them. Celebrities and writers, such as James Baldwin, visited.

Sometimes the attention became unbearable when photographers and television trucks, parked outside Casa Kimberly, made it nearly
impossible for them to leave the house. Richard, trying to grow a beard worthy of Henry VIII, took to his bed and his books while Elizabeth busied herself in her corner of their spacious bedroom. On one such occasion, Richard called out in his best Hamlet voice, “What are you doing, Lumpy?”

“Playing with my jewels,” Elizabeth answered, pleased as a little girl.

Elizabeth—as she always had—flourished in Puerto Vallarta. She swam and she relaxed in the sun, reading
Portnoy's Complaint
and
The Godfather
, so her skin was bronzed, her health improved, and Burton's ardor was kindled anew. Their sexual energy cut through all the alcohol and dark moods and ill health, and he again marveled at her beauty, writing in his diary, “Elizabeth is now looking ravishingly suntanned though the lazy little bugger ought to lose a few pounds or so to look at her absolute best,” he wrote. “I could detect no sign of aging in her at all,” with the exception of quite a few gray hairs at her temples. “But the skin is as smooth and youthful and unwrinkled as ever it was.” After six and a half years together, he still took incredible delight in her body. With Elizabeth, he never had to pretend that she was someone else in the dark—he preferred to see her in the light so he could admire her skin, her breasts, her derriere, which he describes as “firm and round.” And later, Burton—who was never comfortable writing about sex as he was easily embarrassed—couldn't help but describe Elizabeth as “an eternal one-night stand…and lascivious…E. is a receiver, a perpetual returner of the ball!”

During this hiatus from the rest of their lives, Richard's need for Elizabeth was so great that it poured out of him not only in his diaries but in notes and letters to Elizabeth, sometimes written when she was sleeping in the next room, sometimes when she left him alone for an afternoon. On May 10, 1969, he wrote in Puerto Vallarta, “You will never, of course, because you are too young, understand the idea of loneliness. I love you better than buckets of brine poured over a boiling body, than ice cream laved on a parched mouth, than sanity
smoothed over madness…What a strange thing it was to see you drive away.”

Like Henry VIII and his court sailing up the Thames toward Windsor Castle, in May 1969 the Burtons arrived in London on the
Kalizma
and dropped anchor just outside the Houses of Parliament. Members of Parliament and their secretaries filled the windows to gawk at the Burtons' arrival in London. But it nearly didn't happen. Back in Puerto Vallarta, Elizabeth had had to make Richard memorize his lines. It was the threat of another lawsuit rather than the script, which he considered “a lot of mediocre rubbish,” that forced Richard to don the royal robes of Henry VIII for
Anne of the Thousand Days.

He insisted that Elizabeth be present with him on the set, and even appear as an extra in the film, which she was happy to do—in part to keep an eye on Richard and his brilliant little costar, the tiny, doll-like Bujold. (“The girl is very small in every way, in height, in weight, and vocally,” Burton described her. “I could out-project her with a whisper.”) Elizabeth always kept things lively on the set; she knew how to get the crew to fall in love with her. He remembered when she shoveled snow off the walk outside of Elstree Studios during the making of
The V.I.P.s
, and the makeup she applied to all the extras during
The Taming of the Shrew
. It was in his contract that she could visit the set whenever she felt like it, a canvas-backed chair with the initials “ETB” waiting for her when she chose to watch Richard in his beard and kingly robes breathe life into the film, which he tried valiantly to do through the long, hot English summer.

Burton complained in his diary about the obviousness of the dialogue: “I must have a son to rule England when I am dead! Find a way, Cromwell! Find a way. The pope. The cardinal. Orvieto, my lord bishops. Divorce Katharine. Divorce Anne. Marry Jane Seymour!” He uses every actor's trick to vary the lines, but, he wrote, “it's a losing battle.” He was impatient, much more so than Elizabeth, with dialogue that didn't measure up to the writers he loved and admired. If he was going to play Henry, then why not Falstaff? If a spy, what could
be better than one created by John Le Carré? If he wanted to be seen saying something clever, why not have Graham Greene or Edward Albee or Tennessee Williams write it for him? He didn't understand the movies the way Elizabeth did—Elizabeth, who would have been a brilliant silent film star.

More to the point, perhaps, Burton was made uncomfortable by the content of the dialogue, not the quality (the lucid and eloquent screenplay, after all, was nominated for an Academy Award). Once again, he was forced to relive the central incident in his life: his abandonment of his much-admired wife, Sybil, to marry Elizabeth, the woman to whom he was hopelessly in thrall. When he speaks the words “I will have Anne if it split the earth in two like an apple and fling the two halves into the void!” how could he help but think of the time when he, himself, split the world in two, to divest himself of one wife in order to marry another? And in case he could forget, the script was full of reminders: Henry calls his first wife, Queen Katharine of Aragon, Kate—the name of his treasured elder daughter whom he had left to marry Elizabeth, and the role Elizabeth played to perfection in
The Taming of the Shrew
three years earlier. And there are two Elizabeths in the film: Anne Boleyn's mother, and, of course, Boleyn's child with Henry: Elizabeth I, England's great queen. And there was his own Elizabeth, showing up as an extra, bedecked with La Peregrina and looking more splendid than any queen. He left Shepperton Studios each day for the two-hour drive back to London, to the
Kalizma
, feeling dispirited about the work.