Furious Love (46 page)

Liza persisted, saying, “But he's
your
dog.”

“Don't be bloody stupid,” he shot back. “He's no more my dog than you are my daughter.”

Liza was stunned, but bravely answered, “That was very nice.” Elizabeth, overhearing, was horrified. Richard reproached himself endlessly, afterward. “I wanted to cry or slit my jugular,” he later wrote, because he really did love his and Elizabeth's children, taking great delight in what a canny little charmer Liza could be. But the damage had been done, and he realized it.

The most frightening part of it, for Richard, was that those cruel, unthinking words had been uttered when he was sober. Adding a new terror to his struggle with alcohol was the fear that drink had already distorted his personality.

 

For a man who so often expressed contempt for his profession, Burton never stopped working. Elizabeth continued to glide through 1971, making two films (a small role in
Under Milk Wood
and her costarring role in
Hammersmith Is Out
) to Richard's three (
Milk Wood
,
Hammersmith
, and
The Battle of Sutjeska
). In October, he would appear in a fourth film, playing Leon Trotsky in
The Assassination of Trotsky
, another Joseph Losey–directed film, and another box office disappointment. In fact, the movie's reception was so bad (it was actually booed at the New York Film Festival in Alice Tully Hall when it was shown the following year) that it left sixty-three-year-old Losey a nervous wreck, pacing his suite at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street, asthmatically puffing on his inhaler and longing for a drink. Burton had actually been Losey's third choice, after Dirk Bogarde and Marlon Brando had both turned him down. Losey's blend
of Harold Pinteresque silences and stylized, arty set pieces sometimes tipped his films into unintentional parody, and the critics had a field day (
Monthly Film Bulletin
compared it to
Boom!
). Despite the bad reception of the Losey-Burton collaborations, the three remained good friends, and Richard always defended what he considered Losey's genius as a director.

A few scenes were shot on location in Mexico, but most were filmed in a replica of Trotsky's villa on a soundstage in Rome. After a difficult shoot, Burton would return to the
Kalizma
, where Michael, Beth, and Layla Wilding had joined Richard and Elizabeth for a visit. Both Burtons had stopped drinking for a brief time, and Richard remarked in his diary how beautiful Elizabeth looked—newly slim and healthy—and what a pleasure it was to have Michael and his family with them. “The virtual cessation of drink has made a terrific difference to E.,” he wrote. “She is more active, more spirited, and at the same time more relaxed. And she looks even more beautiful than before.” He and Elizabeth took great delight in Layla, a sweet and happy infant whom Elizabeth absolutely doted upon.

But by November 10, their sober idyll was over. To celebrate his forty-sixth birthday, Burton fixed himself and Elizabeth a couple of large martinis in the early afternoon. And a few days later, Richard wrote, “E. is trying to press me to having a martini before lunch because she wants one and doesn't like drinking alone…as I've explained to E. ad nauseam, I find one drink simply not enough. I guess two or three stiff ones are what I find satisfactory, but that means slowly reverting to being a drunkard again, and I simply will not tolerate returning to that….” As for Elizabeth, she didn't seem to show the ill effects of alcohol as much as Richard. She could brawl with Richard and shout obscenities, but she never turned cruel.

 

The Burtons returned to London in time to attend two great social events that would further test Richard's tenuous grasp on sobriety. The first was the Proust Ball, given on December 2 by the
Rothschilds at their splendid estate, the Château de Ferrières, Seineet-Marne, in which all the guests were asked to appear as characters from Marcel Proust's
A la recherche du temps perdu
. Touting it as “the Ball of the Century,” the engraved invitations requested that women wear jewels in their hair, as befitting
la Belle Époque
, so, of course, Elizabeth needed Alexandre de Paris to accompany her. She came as the Duchesse de Guermantes, one of the rulers of Parisian society in Proust's novel, wearing borrowed jewels from Van Cleef & Arpels in addition to her emerald-and-diamond brooch from Bulgari, which Alexandre had skillfully woven into her elaborate coif. Among the glittering guests were the former French president Georges Pompidou, Princess Grace of Monaco, the Duchess of Windsor, Audrey Hepburn, Andy Warhol, the late President Kennedy's press secretary Pierre Salinger, producer Sam Spiegel, and the celebrated photographer Cecil Beaton, who wandered the vast dining room taking photographs of the guests, including a stunning one of Elizabeth in costume, resplendent in diamonds and emeralds. There were so many jewels entwined in coiffures that dozens of French policemen stood guard outside the château.

Richard, who was seated at dinner next to the sultry Anne-Marie Deschodt, ex-wife of French film director Louis Malle, and across the table from Andy Warhol, would attempt to get through the entire affair sober. Elizabeth, seated at the first table with Guy de Rothschild, Grace Kelly (Her Serene Highness Princess of Monaco), and the Duchess of Windsor (already “slightly gaga”), would have a grand time.

The Burtons had traveled by car from Paris to the French countryside with Grace Kelly, and took possession of two guest bedrooms at the sumptuous estate. The two-hour drive, delayed by traffic and the inconvenience of having to pick up Grace at 32 Avenue Foch, was spent listening to Her Serene Highness extolling the virtues of the Shah of Iran. Richard, miner's son by birth and aristocrat by talent, usually felt awkward around Princess Grace, whom he described as
rather dull and in the class of people who are “in a somewhat false position and know it,” having ditched her Hollywood career to marry royalty.

They were to descend from their guest rooms at nine ten for a nine thirty dinner, and Richard, ever punctual, found himself waiting for “my girls” to join him—“the Duchess of Windsor and the Princess of Monaco and of course my very own ‘girl,'” Elizabeth. But Elizabeth was, as usual, late (problems with Alexandre de Paris), so they didn't descend until ten thirty p.m. As they were guests of honor, dinner was delayed for them.

Once seated, Burton described “an hour or more of absolute agony” as he passed all the wines poured for him to his dinner partner, Mme. Malle, including champagne, a Lafite white wine, and a second white wine (Château d'Yquem). He found himself fascinated by the “cadaverous” man across the table from him, with snow-white hair but no visible eyelashes or eyebrows. The odd-looking man leaned across the table to Richard and asked, “Where's my Elizabeth?” Richard nodded toward Guy de Rothschild's table. The man sighed, clearly disappointed to be stuck with Richard and not Elizabeth. After all, the guest was Andy Warhol, who had burnished Elizabeth's icon status with his stunning silk-screen portraits, who would one day declare that he would like to be reincarnated as a diamond on the hand of Elizabeth Taylor.

Seated across the room, Elizabeth tried to stifle her hilarity at the Duchess of Windsor, who wore an outsized feather in her hair that kept dipping into the soup, the wine, the ice cream, and smacking her host in the face. The duke was apparently not well enough to attend the grand ball, but the duchess invited Elizabeth and Richard to come see him before they left for Gstaad.

After the dinner, Guy de Rothschild asked Elizabeth to help him remove his glued-on mustache, which had become bothersome. They ducked into one of the many bathrooms near the dining hall, with a
Rothschild servant standing guard, while guests wondered if Guy and Elizabeth were, in fact, “making out” in the powder room.

Richard took great pride in noticing how the high-born and fabulously rich guests, as they reveled throughout the night, sneaked glances at Elizabeth and Princess Grace, surreptitiously gawking at their beauty. Curiously, Elizabeth didn't consider herself—nor Grace Kelly, for that matter—truly beautiful. She felt that being too impeccable, too groomed, too studied—“so that you can feel the vanity behind it”—made beauty boring. Her ideals of feminine beauty were women like Lena Horne and Ava Gardner, earthier women ablaze with life and heart.

The music finally stopped at seven in the morning, when the costumed revelers, many of them hungover, drifted to their cars and faced the morning traffic back to Paris.

Four days later, the Burtons visited the Duke and Duchess of Windsor for a dinner party “with half a dozen of the most consummate bores in Paris,” as Burton later described them. He found the Windsors quite faded, the duke in ill health and walking with a cane, and the duchess's memory flickering in and out. The most touching part of the evening was when the duke and duchess kept reminiscing how Edward had once been the king of England. The aging lovers who had risked all, had become world-famous, and had lost so much, were now seeing their shadow empire fade.

The Burtons' reign as Hollywood's royalty was beginning to fade, as well. But there was always Europe.

In January of the new year, 1972, Richard and Elizabeth flew to Budapest in their private jet and checked into the Presidential Suite of the Inter-Continental Hotel. Richard would begin work on his fortieth movie,
Bluebeard
, a black comedy-melodrama about a mythical Baron von Sepper, a serial murderer of seven women. As before, he waived his salary for a percentage of the profits (if any), but received $80,000 in living expenses. Elizabeth had fallen to the last place on
the top ten box office list in 1968, and appeared neither on the list for 1969 nor on the one for 1970. Burton had begun accepting movie roles without even reading the scripts beforehand.
Bluebeard
fell into that category.

Whenever the Burtons took up residence for a new film, they would rev up their bedtime exercises, to help get into shape for the work ahead and to establish a routine. For Richard, it was hard to keep a straight face watching Elizabeth solemnly go through her exercises, holding her breasts in each hand while she ran in place. (“[F]irm as they are,” Richard recorded, “really like a 30 yr old's more than a nearly 40 year old's, they are pretty big and the resultant wiggle-waggle would be pretty odd as well as bad for her. It's a very fetching sight.”)

Like his previous three films,
Bluebeard
was a cobbled-together affair, a European coproduction from four different countries, and it was directed by Edward Dmytryk, one of the “Hollywood Ten,” who had been blacklisted, had served six months in prison, and had been forced to recant in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The director once had a long, respectable career in Hollywood, having made song-and-dance man Dick Powell into hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe in
Murder
,
My Sweet
; directed Humphrey Bogart in
The Caine Mutiny;
and Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift in
The Young Lions.
He had directed Elizabeth and Clift in
Raintree County
in 1957, when he had been forced to shoot around the actor after the devastating accident that nearly destroyed his face. But after almost fifty years in the movie business, he was reduced to what would have been deemed B-pictures under the old studio system. Burton felt pity for the downward trajectory of Dmytryk's career, but the director was in awe of Richard and Elizabeth.

Bluebeard
would have its own set of problems. First of all, Budapest in winter did not have the romantic, gypsy atmosphere the Burtons had expected; it was a grim, dark, cold, proletarian city. They were used to the warmth and light of the Mediterranean. Secondly—and more im
portantly—Burton played opposite a “cast of international beauties” appearing as his wives and mistresses, including the new sex symbol Raquel Welch, as well as Virna Lisi, Nathalie Delon, and even the kittenish Joey Heatherton, an unlikely Burton costar. Elizabeth was on her guard. She was sure Richard had been faithful to her throughout the nine years of their relationship, and, in fact, he had. And not only because they were glued to each other's sides, as they made sure to spend time on the sets and locations of each other's movies when they weren't acting in the same film. Elizabeth was possessive, and she accompanied Richard to his movie sets for the last two years because she didn't want to lose him. She knew his effect on women (she sometimes sarcastically called him “Charlie Charm”). Philip Burton had noted that even as young as fifteen, Richard had been surrounded by girls, who hung around him “like cats after cream.” The stage actress Tammy Grimes, who had been smitten with Richard before the “Elizabethan era,” had described him as “a genius” who “makes women feel beautiful. His acting has such a tragic quality…he is a vodka man with a quicksilver mind and a violent temper. He's moody, completely unpredictable, always fascinating, very frugal, extremely shrewd, a tremendous snob, and a beautiful man.”

Burton's lady-killer reputation made him particularly well suited to playing Baron von Sepper, literally a lady-killer. It was a campy role in a campy movie: the baron murders each of his wives in imaginative ways when they discover he's impotent, and he keeps their frozen bodies in a secret refrigerated chamber of his villa. Burton knew the role had “to be done with immense tongue-in-cheek. I tried to remember how the master—whassisname—Vincent Price plays that kind of thing. Must be funny serious.” In the mock-gothic atmosphere of the movie, Burton “plays the organ, a falcon flies around, a kitten will be killed” (which upset Elizabeth). Vincent Price would have been quite at home. But no matter how bad the script was, Burton was always professional. “If he sold himself, he gave full money's worth,” observed Dmytryk.