Furious Love (45 page)

 

If
Under Milk Wood
was a labor of love, the black comedy
Hammersmith Is Out
was another miscalculation that had seemed like a good idea. After all, it was a comedic variation of the Faust legend; it was directed by that most literate and amusing of men, Peter Ustinov; and they were able to film it in Mexico, in Cuernavaca, not far from Puerto Vallarta. Once again, it was strictly a small-budget movie, financed by a manufacturer of mobile homes. A young Beau Bridges played Billy Breedlove, a male nurse in a mental hospital, tempted by Hammersmith, a criminally insane patient who transforms Breedlove into a rich, powerful man. Elizabeth Taylor plays a blond waitress, Jimmie Jean Jackson, a parody of her Helen of Troy role in Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus.
Peter Ustinov plays the institution's head doctor.

Before signing Bridges, the producer had considered Robert Redford, but after watching him in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, Burton was unimpressed. “The man Redford that I'd heard so much about is disappointingly ordinary,” he wrote in his diary. “It is just as well that he turned down Hammersmith, as he has a quality of dullness. And I can see quite easily why he has taken so long to become a star.”

Redford, who didn't turn out so badly, was wise to have refused the role: the film was a disaster. The reviews noted Burton's unblinking stare and unhealthy appearance. One associate of Richard's thought that he was not only drinking heavily, but was also snorting cocaine, which he'd been introduced to while filming
Villain
. That seems unlikely, however, given Burton's fear of taking drugs, as he admitted to Bernard Weintraub. He hadn't particularly liked the Valium and occasional Seconals he took to try to stay sober, and he would always prefer alcohol to prescription—or nonprescription—drugs.

Elizabeth, approaching her fortieth birthday, often appeared bored and put out with Richard. She didn't show up to watch his scenes, though he always made a point of watching hers. They seemed to be saving their compliments to each other for the press. Melvyn Bragg described them as looking like “two heavyweight champions who had fought each other to exhaustion but cannot quit.” This would be their tenth film together and their fifth flop in a row, and—given the nervous state of the movie business—it was questionable that any Hollywood producer would take another chance on the Burtons.

In truth, the Burtons were running an endless marathon. Richard's twenty-one days in the desert without alcohol, during the shoot of
Raid on Rommel
, was followed by drinking with such a vengeance it was taking its toll on everyone around him. But the Burtons were still praising each other, and their marriage, to the press (“The quivering awareness of everyday in my relationship with Richard makes it seem that we're not even married yet,” Elizabeth told the
Ladies' Home Journal
), but they weren't speaking those words of love to each other. If anything, Richard was beginning to fear that Elizabeth might leave him.

In May,
Villain
was released, to mostly poor reviews. Vincent Canby in the
New York Times
inquired, “Whatever Became of Richard Burton?”

Calling the film “his latest and least interesting bad movie,” Canby dismisses Burton's performance as “drab,” then goes on to give a
postmortem of Burton's twenty-year career, beginning with the old notion that he had peaked as a Shakespearean actor on the London stage even before coming to America to make movies. It was the tired complaint, to which he added a new charge: that Burton was nothing but an old-fashioned movie star, belonging, with Elizabeth, “more to Walter Winchell's day than to ours.” He goes on to dismiss the idea that Burton is a great talent corrupted by wealth and fame, and that a film like
Villain
“is all that Burton ever could have been, that no one has been corrupted, only remarkably lucky, and remarkably lucky for a lot longer than anyone in his right mind could reasonably hope for.”

It was a harsh assessment, but, ironically, one with which Burton, on a dark day, would have agreed. One day, after having walked in on Elizabeth and their children all gathered together on the
Kalizma
to watch a print of
Cleopatra
, Richard quickly exited. He still could not stand to watch himself onscreen. “My lack of interest in my own career, past, present, or future, is almost total,” he then confided in his diary.

Perhaps that's why, when Burton received a letter from Sir Laurence Olivier offering him the chance to take over the running of England's National Theater, he wrote a long letter turning down the offer. “The old Etonians would drive me mad in five months” was his excuse.

Elizabeth had always been more resilient and more realistic about her films and her career. At breakfast the next morning, she said to
Richard about having watched
Cleopatra
for the first time since its premiere in 1963, “You know, it's really not so bad after all.”

If drinking, bickering, and making lackluster movies had taken over the Burtons' lives, the only thing that seemed to bring them pleasure was their family. So when Michael and Beth Clutter Wilding brought their first child, Layla, into the world on August 26, 1971, making Elizabeth “the world's most glamorous grandmother,” things were—at least temporarily—set right.

The Burtons had escaped the disappointing reception of
Under Milk Wood
and
Villain
by cruising the Mediterranean on the
Kalizma
. When news of the birth reached them in Monte Carlo, they rushed back to London. Elizabeth showed up at Heathrow in an ungrandmotherly outfit of white-lace hot pants and white knee-high boots. She told the handful of reporters how happy she was. “This is the baby Richard and I could never have,” she beamed. They took possession of Richard's house in Hampstead next door to the home they'd bought for Michael and Beth, so Elizabeth could lavish gifts and attention on the newborn. She adored Layla and bought the infant Dior baby clothes. She had always been generous and welcoming to Beth as well, but all too soon, there was trouble in paradise.

Not surprisingly, her teenage son was not happy living on his mother's and stepfather's largesse. Elizabeth had already gotten Michael a job as Bozzacchi's assistant on the set of
Zee and Co.
, and she and Richard helped support the young family, but the Burtons—like any set of parents in the early 1970s—were not pleased when Michael turned his London house into something of a crash pad for visiting hippies. The Burtons were spending a fortune on security for their home, but right next door, all kinds of street people were wandering in and out. Soon, Michael ducked out of his life of privilege and headed for the hills, taking Beth and Layla with him. They left London to join a commune in, of all places, Ponterwyd, a small mountain town in Wales not far from Pontrhydyfen. If Richard was touched by his stepson's odd tribute of following in his footsteps—in reverse!—he didn't show
it. Instead, it angered him. “I made it
up
and the boy's trying to make it down,” he said, utterly bewildered. “I try not to interfere, but I still get goddamned mad. When I think what it took to climb out!”

Burton was hard on Michael, feeling that he didn't quite realize what a gifted actress his mother was, that her success was based only on her beauty. To add to his crankiness, Burton, at forty-five, was beginning to have more health problems—painful recurrences of gout, a tremor, and his old shoulder and neck injuries were starting to affect the use of his arms. In July 1971, he had written: “My left hand and wrist are now completely useless…I was so uncomfortable last night that in bed the slightest movement made me groan as if demented.” Soon after, a doctor came to attend Elizabeth, and Richard waylaid him to examine his arm. The doctor overcame Burton's fear of taking drugs and prescribed Endocin, a painkiller, which helped for a while, but Burton soon found there were few things he could grasp and pick up with his left hand.

 

In September, the Burtons traveled to Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, where Burton would play Marshal Tito in
The Battle of Sutjeska
, a state-sponsored film paid for by the Yugoslav government. One of many fans of Richard's World War II action film
Where Eagles Dare
was the war hero Tito himself, who flattered himself that Richard resembled him when he was a young man fighting the Fascists in World War II.

Again, Richard was warned not to do it. The script was 250 pages long, written entirely in Serbo-Croatian, but Burton was an admirer of the real-life war hero and he wanted to take on the role. He may also have sensed that he would only continue to have a great career—any career—if he played great men of history. But Hollywood was no longer paying.

The producer, Nikola Popovic, wanted to find a cameo role for Elizabeth, but this time she declined. They stopped in Dubrovnik to
shop for books for the yacht, and, as usual, Elizabeth's appearance on the streets of the city attracted crowds. They had cruised in on the
Kalizma
, mooring in Cavtat, a harbor town south of Dubrovnik, and each day Burton would be flown by military helicopter to the movie's location in the mountains of Yugoslavia, at the site of the original World War II battle in which Tito and twenty thousand partisans had broken through the German siege.

Marshal Tito invited the Burtons to spend weekends in his palatial home, driving them around his estate in his Lincoln Continental (presented to him by the city of Zagreb). Though Burton admired Tito, he quickly became bored both with the whole production and with Tito's company, and not only because everything had to be filtered through interpreters. They had to listen to Tito's and his wife's long stories before the interpreters could even begin. Perhaps being with a great man was less interesting than playing one. “Were it not, actually, for E.'s delight in the power and the glory of it all, I would do my best to cut and run—so great is the strain of boredom,” he wrote in his diary. The production itself was plagued by endless delays, money shortages, and the constant hiring and firing of screenwriters and directors. He spent most of his time sitting around in Tito's hut, drinking Nescafé and trying to get through a Neil Simon script,
The Gingerbread Lady
, which Elizabeth was considering. He wanted out, but it was impossible. To make matters worse, the daily helicopter rides were sometimes harrowing, and at one point he feared he would be killed on his way back to the
Kalizma
. He flashed on an image of Elizabeth lying in her bed on the yacht, reading a book, and he suddenly remembered the words from a poem by the Welsh poet Alun Lewis: “If I should go away,/beloved/do not say,/he has forgotten me./Forever you abide./A singing rib within my dreaming side.”

Oddly enough, Elizabeth had her own premonition about Richard. One day she accompanied him to the helicopter pad and watched her husband, his makeup man Ron Berkeley, and another assistant
climb on board. “Suddenly, something came over me,” she later wrote about the incident.

“Guys, get out of there,” she called out.

They looked at her quizzically.

“Richard, get out of there, just get out!”

He didn't argue with her. They climbed into another helicopter. Later, Burton and his makeup man returned, “visibly shaken,” Elizabeth recalled. The helicopter they were supposed to have taken had crashed in the mountains, killing everyone onboard.

It wasn't the first time Elizabeth had had premonitions. She
knew
, even before Dick Hanley and Dr. Kemener had walked into her bedroom many years ago with the grim news, that Mike Todd had been killed when the
Liz
crashed into the Zuni Mountains of New Mexico. And the night before the death of her good friend, the actor Gary Cooper, she'd dreamed of his death from cancer, waking up to write down the time on a Kleenex box beside her bed: 12:25 a.m., which was indeed the exact time of his death the following night.

Throughout the shoot, the Burtons, Bozzacchi and his wife, Claudye, and Elizabeth's secretary, Raymond Vignale, stayed at Marshal Tito's house, though Burton usually preferred to hole up on the
Kalizma
, with Maria and Liza. Among the five adults, Richard noted, only Elizabeth was drinking. He had once again attempted to go on the wagon, drinking Nescafé and tea by the gallon. But ever the frugal Welshman, Richard noticed how huge their liquor bills were, amazed that it was even possible when they brought most of their alcohol from the yacht—Smirnoff and Jack Daniel's, which weren't even available in Yugoslavia. Of the five of them, “only Elizabeth drinks, but she drinks
only
booze brought from the boat,” he recorded. “I have in my time and at my best put away I'm sure the occasional three bottles of vodka a day…but not for two or three days in a row. And not for a week or a fortnight. Otherwise, it would be Dead Dad.”

Trying to stay away from drinking was difficult around Elizabeth. He was feeling the strain of sobriety, the boredom of the shoot, and
noticing with concern how Elizabeth seemed to give in to a deep lassitude now that she wasn't working. One day, he just snapped when fourteen-year-old Liza asked him if they could keep the dog they were using in the film. Burton said no, because it would whine for its owner all through the night.