Furious Love (4 page)

Protected by his marriage to Sybil, a sane, witty, and intelligent woman who kept him grounded in his Welsh life, Burton felt he could fall in and out of affairs with no possibility of becoming ensnared. His affair with Claire Bloom, begun while they were both still in their twenties and making their names as extraordinary Shakespearean actors at the Old Vic, had probably come closest to threatening his marriage. But Burton needed Sybil and the stability she provided. In his own way, he loved her, though Sybil's prematurely silver hair made her appear, at times, more like his mother than his wife. Burton adored their five-year-old daughter, Kate, and their toddler, Jessica, who seemed to need special care.

And there was this basic fact: Welsh men did not abandon their families.

But the heat and lightning of Burton's scenes with Elizabeth were beginning to be noticed. Burton would later claim that he was first smitten when he watched the scene of Elizabeth naked in her bath, lolling like a mermaid, tended by a bevy of handmaidens. In their first deep kiss, in Cleopatra's boudoir, just after confessing their mutual love, Burton found himself caught up, almost drugged, in her presence. They repeated the scene several times, their kiss lasting longer
with each take. Finally, Mankiewicz shouted, “Print it”—but the scene continued. “Would you two mind if I say cut?” he asked again. And then, “Does it interest you that it is time for lunch?”

Burton didn't have a chance.

It was not just Elizabeth Taylor who was casting her spell over him, it was Cleopatra herself, who ruled by divine right, descended from the Egyptian goddess Isis. “I am Isis,” she had revealed to Caesar in their first love scene. “I am the Nile. I am worshipped by millions who believe it.” Taylor already identified with Cleopatra. She felt that “Mike Todd…had been to her what Julius Caesar had been to Cleopatra.” Now Marc Antony—Burton—would take his place.

And there were those words of love Mankiewicz had written for Cleopatra and Antony to speak—Richard himself was especially vulnerable to the beauty of words: “From that first instant I saw you entering Rome on that fabulous beast, crowned in gold…I envied Caesar…I envied him
you
,” Antony confesses. And, later, when the destruction of their empire looms, Cleopatra cries to Antony, “To have waited so long, to know so suddenly. Without you, this is not a world I want to live in.” And Antony answers her: “Everything that I want to love or hold or have or be is here with me now.”

When their first love scene finally ended, Burton reportedly called for a beer and Elizabeth nonchalantly handed off her wig and walked away. In his dressing room, where he had resumed “Burton's Bar” for cast and crew, Burton lunched with a bevy of actors, writers, and adoring females. Suddenly, he called out across the empty soundstage for Elizabeth to join them.

She turned and smiled. She walked into his crowded dressing room, where he promptly ignored her, except to bend down low and whisper an off-color story into her ear, one which made her blush and laugh in delight. Later, when they returned to the soundstage, he dragged her director's chair next to his, where it would remain throughout the rest of the shoot.

Still, Burton kept his guard up—at first by keeping on hand a girlfriend, Pat Tunder, a Copacabana dancer Burton had met during the run of
Camelot
whom he'd brought with him to Rome. But Taylor had already discovered that Eddie, for all his ministrations and devotion, could not take Mike Todd's place. She had tamed him, and therefore he was now unchallenging. He couldn't match her increasingly brilliant star status. It didn't help Fisher's case that Burton looked like a younger, taller, and handsomer version of Todd: the squarish face, the broad shoulders, the roughness of skin, the working-class background, the sheer virility.

“Elizabeth was not used to assertive men,” observed Ron Berkeley, Elizabeth's makeup artist on many of her early films. “Oh, they might put on an act for a while, but they nearly all ended up showing love by deference, paying tribute to her beauty. Only one other man had taken her by sheer force of personality. When she encountered Richard Burton, it must have seemed to her that she had rediscovered Mike Todd.” The moment Burton had shown up, hungover, on the soundstage of
Cleopatra
, Fisher was history. He just didn't know it yet.

Fisher should, perhaps, have been on his guard. “Even if he hadn't destroyed my marriage,” he later wrote about Burton, “I would have disliked him.” He claimed that he and Elizabeth had at first made fun of Burton behind his back, put off by his roughness and lack of grooming. “I thought he was an arrogant slob. Elizabeth and I…compared him to the great producer of MGM musicals, Arthur Freed, about whom it was said he could grow orchids under his fingernails.”

Fisher must have been reassured by the fact that he and Elizabeth were in the process of adopting a nine-month-old German girl whose parents could not afford the series of operations needed to correct her crippling hip deformity. Elizabeth's heart had gone out to this needy infant, whom she and Fisher renamed Maria (after the actress Maria Schell, who had located the child for them). Unable or unwilling to
bear more children after her cesarean delivery of Liza Todd, in which she had almost lost her baby, Elizabeth had longed for a child to consecrate her marriage to Fisher. But by the time the adoption papers were signed, Fisher's days were numbered.

On a few occasions, Sybil accompanied Burton to Villa Pappa, the expansive Italian villa on the Appian Way rented by Fox studio for Elizabeth and her entourage. The pink marble mansion came complete with swimming pool, acres of pine forests, two butlers, and three maids. The entourage included the couple's two secretaries and Elizabeth's three children, ten dogs, and four cats. Dick Hanley, a former secretary to Louis B. Mayer and now Elizabeth's majordomo, was set up in a nearby flat with his companion. In Rome, Taylor lived in Cleopatra-like luxury, insisting that all the beds be made daily with fresh linen. For each meal, full place settings were provided by the maids—complete with a glass for white wine, one for red, one for champagne, and one for water. When she wasn't dining luxuriously, she made sure Hanley had her favorite chili flown in from Chasen's. For dinner parties, the table settings were color-coordinated with Elizabeth's outfit (no doubt to bring out the violet hues in her changeable, blue-violet eyes). Fisher watched his wife's drinking, instructing their servants to stop serving her after five drinks. But the first time Burton dined with them at the villa, the actor surreptitiously refilled her glass. “I adore this man,” Elizabeth thought at that moment; with or without Mankiewicz's dialogue, she knew she was falling for him.

At a New Year's Eve party at Villa Pappa to celebrate the impending adoption of Maria, Fisher was surprised to see Elizabeth sitting with Burton on a small couch, whispering and giggling. Feeling excluded, he sat down at the piano and started to sing, to attract her attention, but Elizabeth just glared at him and he left the room.

Elizabeth and Richard probably first made love in Burton's dressing room, and then found stolen afternoons in Dick Hanley's flat near Villa Pappa. What began as a thrilling conquest for Burton quickly
deepened into infatuation, then an inexplicable thirst for her. He was a celebrated cocksman with a string of women in his past—and a wife very much in his present—yet in Elizabeth he found a woman who matched him in sexual fire. Later, Burton would pour out his emotions in love letters to Elizabeth, describing how “I lust after your smell and your paps and your divine little money-box and your round belly and the exquisite softness of the inside of your thighs and your baby-bottom and your giving lips & the half hostile look in your eyes when you're deep in rut with your little Welsh stallion…” Rumors of the affair began to swirl around the set, finally reaching Fisher, who confronted her. “Tell me the truth,” he asked Elizabeth. “Is there something going on between you and Burton?”

“Yes.”

Elizabeth simply couldn't lie—not to herself, not to Eddie. The truth just smacked her in the face—she was in love with Richard Burton. Elizabeth had always been a truth-teller.

Fisher, like Burton, couldn't escape what was happening to him. At one point, he left Rome to nurse his wounds at the chalet Elizabeth had purchased in Gstaad. When he returned to Rome, he was severely depressed, wandering around Villa Pappa all day in his pajamas, drinking vodka and wondering what had happened to his career. At one miserable dinner at the villa in March of 1962, Burton, deep in his cups, had brutally demanded that Elizabeth declare, in front of Eddie Fisher, to name the one she loved.

“Elizabeth,” he'd growled in his best theatrical voice, “who do you love?
Whooo do you love?
”

She looked at both men and said to Burton, “You.”

Burton then picked up a silver-framed photograph of Mike Todd, Elizabeth, and their daughter, Liza, and he turned to Fisher. “He didn't know how to use her!” Burton shouted, pointing to the picture of Mike Todd. “You don't know how to use her, either! And what's that fucking picture here for?” He continued to rage—all of this remembered and recorded by Eddie Fisher in both of his memoirs—
until Elizabeth ran out of the villa in tears. The two men were left alone in the empty room, where they continued to fume over snifters of brandy. “Burton did most of the talking,” Fisher wrote, “flattering me, insulting me, laying little traps, charming and apologetic one moment, crude and abusive the next.”

Unnerved by his encounter with Burton, Fisher sought out Sybil at their rented villa and told her about his suspicions. “Eddie broke the cardinal rule as the cuckold in any affair,” Walter Wanger later confided in the producer and agent Edward Heyman. “He called the wife.” Sybil admitted that she had known about the affair for weeks. Fisher asked her how she managed to cope with the situation, and she answered, “Ever since Richard and I have been married, he's had these affairs. But he always comes back to me. The thing with Elizabeth is over.”

“It isn't over, Sybil. They're seeing each other constantly,” Fisher informed her. Sybil, however, refused to believe it. Fisher left, admiring Sybil's powers of denial. But she wasn't as sanguine as she'd appeared. Shortly after her encounter with Fisher, she reportedly stormed onto the soundstage and created a scene, which shut down production for an entire day, costing the studio another $100,000.

Fisher tried to escape the madness by traveling to Florence, where he called Elizabeth at their villa. But it was Richard who answered the telephone.

“What are you doing there?” Eddie Fisher asked Richard Burton. “What are you doing in my house?”

“What do you think I'm doing?” Burton answered. “I'm fucking your wife.”

Mankiewicz was also aware of what was happening and was leery of the new complication, confiding in Wanger, “Elizabeth and Burton are not just
playing
Antony and Cleopatra!” Studio publicists like Jack Brodsky tried to suppress rumors of the affair, but it was too late. Hordes of photographers camping out at Cinecittà got wind of it, adding to the general chaos of the production. They hounded the
couple, snapping their photo outside Tre Scalini in Piazza Navona, even following them on a brief escape to Elizabeth's chalet in Gstaad. Whenever the lovers escaped to the fashionable Via Veneto, they were followed by wildly snapping photographers, eager to sell their photos to newspapers and magazines. Their constant buzz inspired Federico Fellini, who was filming
La Dolce Vita
on the streets of Rome at the time; he named his intrusive reporter “Paparazzo,” which means “buzzing insect.” The name stuck.

Wanger saw how “incredibly patient and well informed” the paparazzi were, these young Italian men on Vespas and in low-slung sports cars, their Rolleiflexes slung over their shoulders. They had found out even before the lease was signed just which magnificent villa would house the Taylor-Fisher household, and they climbed into the trees along one of Villa Pappa's two swimming pools. They seemed to be everywhere, one day disguising themselves as priests boldly knocking on the Burtons' door, sometimes dropping from the trees to grab a photograph of a startled Richard or Elizabeth or Eddie Fisher, their eyes blinded by the sudden white light of the flashcubes. “It seemed like everybody who worked for Richard or me in Rome made a fortune selling their stories to the press,” Elizabeth believed. “A woman Richard hired for his children turned out to be a fake Italian countess, and she sold her story in America.”

For a time, the two lovers did make an attempt to stay away from each other. Elizabeth couldn't bear the idea of going through another highly publicized divorce and world disapprobation, so there were occasions when they showed up on the set and barely spoke to each other. But not for long. Their happiest moments were when they managed to escape for a few days, hiding out in a pink stucco villa they had secretly rented at Porto Santo Stefano. She always relished those rare occasions when she could pretend to be an ordinary woman: “We'd spend weekends there. I'd barbecue. There was a crummy old shower, and the sheets were always damp. We loved it—absolutely adored it.” On one occasion, their disappearance sent their beleaguered director
into an amphetamine-fueled tizzy. He began searching the hospitals before Burton finally showed up, pretending ignorance. Then Elizabeth suddenly appeared, tapping Mankiewicz on the back. He was furious—but relieved—to welcome them back on the set.

By February, Brodsky and Mankiewicz took Burton aside and pleaded with him to come to his senses, but the real pressure was from Sybil, who was packing her bags for New York. Unable to face the loss of his family, Burton—wracked with guilt and terrified over the intensity of his feelings for Elizabeth—informed her that he would never leave Sybil (nor would he give up his girlfriend, Pat Tunder, for that matter). Elizabeth, not used to being denied anything, was devastated. On February 17, 1962, she took an overdose of sleeping pills and had to be rushed to Salvator Mundi International Hospital to be resuscitated.