Furious Love (47 page)

The backers of the movie asked Dmytryk to introduce nudity into the film, to heighten its box office appeal, and he did so (trying to keep it “tasteful”). Many of the onscreen beauties bared their breasts, and even Richard was asked to disrobe, which he refused to do. For the first time since
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, Elizabeth became intensely jealous of two of Richard's costars—not the voluptuous Raquel Welch or the blond, gamine Joey Heatherton, but Sybil Danning, a
Playboy
model who played a half-naked prostitute in the movie. Elizabeth, who came to the set every day, was convinced that the former model played her love scene with Richard with too much enthusiasm. Elizabeth was so incensed that she reportedly reeled back and slapped Danning's face after one such performance. But her real jealousy would be reserved for Nathalie Delon, the ex-wife of heartthrob French actor Alain Delon.

As early as 1964, Elizabeth had recognized that she and Richard were “both mercurial, jealous people.” She admitted to being jealous of Richard's past conquests—and they were legion—and she realized that Richard may not always be faithful to her, that even “in happy marriages, during a sort of middle-aged change of life, men do flit around with young, pretty girls.” She felt then that if—
when—
Richard began to stray, she would “have the guts and compassion” to do whatever was necessary to hold their marriage together. “I would love him enough to love the hurt he might give me,” she wrote rather masochistically, adding, “I really, profoundly believe that no such thing will ever happen.” But now, for the first time in their marriage, it
was
about to happen.

Adding to Elizabeth's insecurity, she would turn forty on February 27. The great English fashion photographer Norman Parkinson came to photograph Elizabeth for the cataclysmic event: the hitting of the wall for Hollywood actresses, the point of no return, the beginning of middle age with menopause in sight. For the legions of Elizabeth's female fans, who had grown up with the beautiful child star, it meant a final farewell to youth. For Elizabeth, it meant a farewell to screen-
goddess roles. Elizabeth had once said that she welcomed the lines and gray hairs of middle age, but now that it was on the horizon, there had to be some qualms about keeping her notoriously attractive and flirtatious husband by her side.

When Richard pored through the photographic proofs, he was struck anew by Elizabeth's beauty, remembering how he “fell in love with her at once…like the pull of gravity.” But he disliked his own appearance. “He didn't make me look very fetching,” he wrote on Valentine's Day, noting with distaste his thinning hair. “I've never been—at least not for 20 yrs or so—and am never likely to be the pin-up type.” Norman Parkinson's photograph, published to commemorate Elizabeth's fortieth birthday, showed Elizabeth and Richard in a somber mood, in matching black furs, Elizabeth's Krupp diamond glinting dully on her finger, the ethereal lights of Budapest flickering behind them. It is indeed a wintry view of the couple, bundled against the cold, yet it's haunting, and it remains one of Elizabeth's favorite photographs, hanging in a glittering oval frame in her bedroom till this day.

Burton was struggling hard to maintain his sobriety throughout the shoot, despite the gloom of the city, the banality of the script, the temptations of his costars, and Elizabeth's vigilant jealousy on the set. He would be especially tested when he threw a lavish birthday party to celebrate Elizabeth's turning forty.

Like a repeat of the gala thrown in the Dorchester for the premiere of
The Taming of the Shrew
, Burton flew in the vast Jenkins clan from Wales. The invitation, sent out as a telegram under Elizabeth's name, stated:

It went out to two hundred guests in Monaco, London, Paris, and Los Angeles, including Princess Grace; Ringo Starr and his wife, Barbara Bach; Michael Caine and his fiancée, Shakira Baksh; Joseph and Patricia Losey; the Cartiers; the Bulgaris; and Alexandre de Paris. Elizabeth's ex-husband Michael Wilding and his new wife, actress Margaret Leighton, were invited, as was David Niven, and, to please Richard, the English poet Stephen Spender.

Ambassadors from seven countries arrived to celebrate Elizabeth. Elizabeth's mother, Sara, and brother, Howard, were flown in. Also present were Neville Coghill and Francis Warner, another Oxford don, who took the occasion to offer Richard an honorary fellowship to teach at St. Peter's, Oxford. (Burton was thrilled: “It cld be a step toward a D.Litt., which is the only honour I really covet.”) The children were there—Chris Wilding and Liza and Maria, of course, but Michael Wilding Jr., who still rejected his parents' conspicuous consumption, stayed away. As did six of the seven “Bluebeard broads,” whom Elizabeth disinvited when the guest list grew too long (Raquel Welch managed to show up anyway).

The party was Richard's way of renewing his vows to Elizabeth, and perhaps of assuring her that rumors of infidelity brewing on the set were just rumors. Others thought the extravagant event was Elizabeth's way of reminding the world that she could still command international publicity, now that her film career had cooled. She took great delight in planning the gala, visiting private homes with the designer Larry Barcher, brought over from Paris, to get ideas on how to redecorate the InterContinental Hotel (The Duma), transforming it with borrowed paintings and silver into the kind of luxury dwelling in which her more distinguished guests would feel at home.

Journalists flocked to Budapest. They came from everywhere—Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Europe, the States. Burton found it necessary to appease them with a press conference, which he did, showing off his new gift to Taylor: the 50-carat, heart-shaped “Taj Mahal” diamond, on a gold-and-ruby chain, bought for £350,000.

Elizabeth knew what she was getting. She'd already fallen in love with the byzantine story behind the diamond necklace, which had been fashioned in 1627 and given as a gift to the Empress of the Mughal Empire, Nur Jahan, by her husband, Shah Jahangir, the Emperor of the Mughal Empire. She then gave it to his son, Shah Jahan, the emperor who built the Taj Mahal as a monument to Queen Mumtaz, his favorite wife. The yellow-tinted diamond bore an inscription in Parsi: “Love Is Everlasting.” Curiously, the jewel had been purchased in advance of Elizabeth's birthday, during a layover at Kennedy Airport. Cartier accommodated the Burtons by bringing a king's ransom of jewelry to the airport for them to consider while they waited for their next plane. The Taj Mahal necklace was among the selections. Richard further pleased Elizabeth by telling her that he would have bought her the Taj Mahal if there had been a way to transport it to Gstaad.

At the press conference, which he attended alone, Richard playfully draped the jeweled necklace on his forehead; he later hung it around the neck of a Hungarian boy who had wandered into the press conference.

The gala lasted two days. At the cocktail party the first night, Richard took great delight in introducing Maria, now a willowy eleven-year-old, to her Welsh aunts and uncles, all of whom were happily chattering away in Welsh. The relatives were struck by how much cherubic-faced Maria resembled Richard's daughter, Kate. Richard had brought them in on a chartered British Airways Trident. Some of Burton's relatives, like his brother Verdun, had never flown in an airplane before. They were bowled over by the flight, and by the view of the Danube from their hotel bedrooms, and by meeting Princess Grace.
(The second night, Her Serene Highness led a conga line around the ballroom.) The Jenkins brothers brought with them a 16-mm reel of highlights of the British Lions, the Welsh rugby team's victorious tour of New Zealand, which they all took turns watching and cheering, Burton among them (“by God, they're really good…”).

For the dinner-dance on the second night, Burton showed up in a dark jacket and white turtleneck, while Elizabeth—down to 128 pounds—was dressed in a white Grecian gown, her hair regally arranged with white cyclamen blossoms, the Taj Mahal diamond around her neck, and her Krupp diamond proudly on display on her left ring finger. At Richard's table were his sister Cis and Princess Grace, as well as Stephen Spender and the British envoy to Hungary. Thousands of gold, helium-filled balloons floated above the glittering crowd as they dined on Chicken Kiev, fruit salad, and a chocolate cake that had been brought in ablaze with forty candles. The ballroom was festooned with white lilacs and red tulips. Champagne everywhere, for everyone, but not for Richard, who still struggled to remain sober.

Seated between Michael Caine and the American ambassador to Hungary, across from Ringo and his wife, Elizabeth held court while guests lined up to see the ring. But it was the Taj Mahal necklace that drew the most admiring stares. To her credit, Elizabeth always considered herself a “custodian” of her fabulous jewels, to be looked after and cared for until their next owners claimed them, and she always took great delight in showing them off, even letting anyone who asked try them on. “One day somebody else will have them,” she later wrote, “and I hope that new person will love the jewelry and respect it as much as I do…I've never, never thought of my jewelry as trophies. I'm here to take care of them and to love them.”

But not everyone celebrated.

Emlyn Williams's son Alan (Brook's brother) attended the “cellar dance” on the first night. It was held in the wine cellar of the old part of Hotel Duma, and Richard had brought in
Bluebeard
's set designer
to add cobwebs and musty bottles and crates (Cis, at one point, tried to clean them up). But Alan Williams was appalled by the lavish display of wealth for the two-day extravaganza, especially in a Communist country. A novelist and student of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he drove Elizabeth to tears by his condemnation of the Burtons' lack of sensitivity to being in a proletarian country. He made himself so unpleasant that Gaston Sanz, their black-belt-holding chauffeur and bodyguard, gave him the heave-ho.

There was considerable grumbling in the Hungarian press as well, beginning with their amazement when the Burtons first arrived in Budapest and it took over an hour to unload all of their luggage and caseloads of vodka and bourbon off the plane. What they didn't realize was that the money, and how it was spent, almost didn't matter to Burton anymore. As he grew increasingly jaded about
acting
, he grew increasingly cavalier about the wealth it brought him. Nonetheless, after the two-day party, Richard shrewdly neutralized the criticism of the press by pledging to donate the cost of the gala, $45,000, to UNICEF.

Elizabeth loved every minute of it. She adored parties, she adored gifts, she was used to being the center of attention, and she needed to take the focus off Burton's “bevy of international beauties” and the rumors of his possible infidelity. Privately, she often said she'd be just as happy living in a shack with Richard and her children, but the world demanded “Liz and Dick,” and Liz and Dick they got.

 

Finally, the long-dreaded news came a few weeks after Elizabeth's gala: Ifor Jenkins died on March 21, 1972.

Richard was devastated. The last time he'd visited his worshipped brother, the sight of his diminished life had made Richard wish for Ifor's death. Richard had written in his diary in July of the previous year, “Ifor is very near the end. Death is written all over his face. He did not know me when I saw him yesterday. He can barely speak. He
is already dead. I wish he were.” Elizabeth had sobbed all the way back to the Dorchester that day after visiting Ifor. Now his wish had come true, and Burton was again awash with guilt. After recording his brother's death, Burton put away his diary and did not take it down again for eight years.

They flew back to England and then Wales, to bury his brother and attend the funeral. Ifor had been the one to hold the Jenkins clan together; “he was the nearest to a father to me,” Richard often told his brother Graham.

With Ifor gone, Burton's hard-won sobriety was over. Back in Budapest to finish his work on
Bluebeard
, he began drinking again, with renewed abandon, bent finally on destroying himself, his life with Elizabeth, his deteriorating health, and the gifts the gods had given him: his voice, his talent, his fire.

W
hen Richard returned to Budapest after a three-day leave to bury his brother, Dmytryk thought him a changed man. Burton's day would now begin with a large vodka-and-orange-juice, and by the time he showed up on the set, Bob Wilson and Gaston Sanz would have to carry him upright between them, from the Rolls-Royce to his dressing room. He could only manage to work for a few hours; then he'd return to the hotel and drink for the rest of the day. Dmytryk, who was genuinely fond of both Burtons, lamented the effect it had on Richard. He noticed that he now went everywhere in the company of Wilson and Sanz. “Richard needed their protection,” he said, “because when drunk he became nasty, and in the wrong places might have been killed without them.”

Richard's dissolution became especially apparent at an official dinner given by the British ambassador. The evening began well enough, with Richard reciting Dylan Thomas to the ambassador's teenage sons. But by the time the Burtons sat down to dinner, how
ever, Richard became eerily quiet, refusing to touch his food. He continued to drink throughout the evening. At one point, he looked over at his dinner companion, the wife of the Swiss ambassador, and blurted out, “You remind me quite distinctly of a hungry vulture.” When the ambassador tried to smooth things over, Burton turned on him, saying, “You Swiss are a very bad lot.”

“Richard!” Elizabeth said sharply, having had enough of this. Burton allowed Gaston to drive him back to their hotel, while Elizabeth gamely stayed on, trying to save the evening with gracious small talk. The next morning, she sent around flowers and apologies.

At one point, Richard tried to take himself in hand, aware that Elizabeth was fed up with his behavior, on and off the set. He often left little notes and letters for Elizabeth, even when they were together, and on April 18, 1972, he wrote:

But his attempts at sobriety didn't last long, and soon he was at it again. Dmytryk had worked with other alcoholics in his long career, certainly Monty Clift on
Raintree County
. “[Spencer] Tracy's drunks were periodic,” he recalled, “sometimes months of abstinence fol
lowed by a week or two in which he'd get mean and wild. [Clark] Gable didn't start his drinking until five thirty in the afternoon, so you could get a day's work in.” As for Burton, his director “could see him getting older week by week. We covered it up with the usual lighting tricks.”

One day, Burton's two fourteen-year-old daughters, Liza and Kate, showed up at his dressing room and confronted their father about his drinking. They pleaded with him to stop, and Kate later complained to members of her father's entourage. They had always been there, it seemed, waiting backstage and on movie sets with Bloody Marys or vodka martinis at the ready. “You're so tough on your father,” she was told by one of the entourage. But she had to be. She told her father that if he didn't stop drinking, she never wanted to see him again.

And still, he could not stop.

In retrospect, Dmytryk thought that Elizabeth drank as much or almost as much as Richard at the time, but it didn't seem to affect her as it affected him. “She was stronger than Richard in every way,” he felt. They both, however, seemed well under the influence when David Frost came to Budapest to interview the Burtons for
The David Frost Show
. The interview was set up on the
Bluebeard
soundstage, and it lasted for two hours. Richard talked about his adopted father, Philip Burton, and recited passages from the Old Testament—amazingly, his memory wasn't affected by the amount of alcohol he was consuming. Elizabeth wore her stunning Taylor-Burton diamond and her tiny Ping-Pong diamond as well, and talked about both jewels.

Frost aired the interview in its entirety on two successive nights, March 20 and 21, 1972, showcasing clearly inebriated Richard and Elizabeth. Frost had been someone they'd trusted, having appeared with him in
The V.I.P.s
, where the boyish television host had played himself, but he didn't bother to edit out Elizabeth's long silences and slowed speech, as she drank off-camera from a constantly refilled glass of Jack Daniel's throughout the interview. Elizabeth later admitted that she had made a fool of herself. But Burton didn't care.

It was just too much. The grief and guilt over Ifor's death were unbearable, and he knew only one way to handle it—by dissolving his torment in alcohol. Ifor had come to represent the true father, the only one he'd really known, the one who embodied all the masculine and native virtues Burton hoped to possess. He felt that he, Richard, had carelessly contributed to Ifor's paralysis and death. Unlike Elizabeth, he had never learned how to be private in public, and he wore his private grief on his sleeve. It was the one thing she couldn't teach him about this business of fame. She had already explained in her 1965 autobiography,
Elizabeth Taylor
, “I owe the public who pays to see me on the screen the best performance I can give. As to how I live my personal life, my responsibility is to the people directly involved with me.” But Burton was unable to separate his private life from his public life, and he finally cracked from the pressure.

And, for him, the presence of seven stunning, half-naked women making love to him throughout the schedule of
Bluebeard
was an almost comic temptation. When the film was released in August of that year, Richard looked like an automaton onscreen, stoically resisting their writhing charms. But off-camera, he flirted with his costars, and Taylor had already delivered a resounding smack to Sybil Danning for putting too much of herself into her sex scene with Burton.

To assuage her suspicions of a possible affair, Richard wrote her a soul-rending letter with, perhaps, an eerie presentiment of his death:

But during a night shoot, Richard and Nathalie Delon slipped away while rehearsing a scene in which they walk down a street and turn a corner. Once out of sight, they didn't return. Instead, they'd slipped into Burton's idling Rolls-Royce, while Dmytryk and the crew waited interminably for them to reappear. The shoot had to be canceled for the night. The next day, Richard wrote an apology to Dmytryk: “Dear Eddie, please believe that the Richard you saw last night is not the real Richard Burton.” But the damage was done.

Elizabeth was incensed when she learned about the incident. She flew to Rome, where she was being fitted for her next film,
Night Watch.
Her first evening there, on May 6, she had an intimate dinner with Richard's old competitor for the Cartier diamond, Aristotle Onassis. Jacqueline was not present. Nearly thirty paparazzi got wind of it and ambushed the couple, turning their dinner à deux into a brawl. Elizabeth escaped to her suite—alone—at the Grand Hotel, but she couldn't sleep. She knew something was up—not only from her own intuition, but from what members of her entourage were reporting back to her. At five a.m., she placed a call to the InterContinental Hotel and demanded of Richard, “Get that woman out of my bed!”

Over the phone, Elizabeth wrested a confession from Richard that he had, for the first time in their eight-year relationship, broken their marriage vows. Richard had always promised himself that the only way to sanctify this marriage born of scandal, betrayal, and adultery, was to be utterly faithful to Elizabeth. And for eight years, he had been. Until now.

Elizabeth returned to London, where filming would soon begin on
Night Watch
, a thriller in which she played a wealthy woman dressed in Valentino and dripping with jewels, being driven mad by her husband, played by Laurence Harvey, her old friend and costar from
BUtterfield 8.
It would be a difficult time for her, not only because of Burton's infidelity and alcoholism, but because Laurence Harvey was visibly ill.

Richard entreated Elizabeth to let him come home. She finally relented, and Burton returned to the Dorchester, where he continued to battle his alcoholism, hoping, as one of his letters suggests, to bring her into a pact to curtail her drinking and overuse of prescription pills, as well. On Hotel Duma stationery, he wrote to Elizabeth,

Elizabeth managed to nurse her wounds with the help of a large sapphire ring given to her by Richard (“This is for Nathalie,” she reportedly said when showing it off to a friend). Richard also persuaded Elizabeth to join him for a weekend trip to Vienna, in an attempt to erase the lingering damage of his night with Delon. There they checked into the resplendent Hotel Imperial on the Ring, near the Vienna Opera House. When they learned that the Imperial had been one of Hitler's favorite hotels, Richarad asked for the suite where
der Führer
had stayed. Just as Elizabeth had been tickled that a “Jewish girl” ended up owning the Krupp diamond, Richard kicked off his shoes and leaped into bed, shouting, “It's a triumph of life over death!” With the stern statue of Prince Karl looking in on them from the nearby square, they made, in Richard's phrase, their “lovely love.”

When they returned to London, Burton announced his intention to take up the offer to teach literature courses at Oxford, commuting from London while Elizabeth worked on
Night Watch
. For Richard, it was the path he might have taken had not the theater and movies claimed him. It gave him special pleasure to be teaching at Oxford without an advanced degree.

They borrowed a house in Oxfordshire, and Burton taught for a term at St. Peter's College, where he was, not surprisingly, a popular professor. Earlier, in 1968, when Francis Warner had first approached him with the offer, he had written in his diary, “I'm as thrilled by the English language as I am by a lovely woman…” He promised himself that he would lecture his students “until iambic pentameter came out of their nostrils. Little do they know how privileged they are to speak and read and think in the greatest language invented by man. I'll learn them.” Being in Oxford also gave Richard a chance to try to live without their entourage—Elizabeth's more extensive than Richard's. But
Bob Wilson, Gaston Sanz, and Ron Berkeley had become more like family. Gianni and Claudye Bozzacchi were certainly family, and Dick Hanley had been a father figure for Elizabeth. And Richard needed Jim Benton, who helped with the mountains of correspondence. Their agent, Hugh French, their attorney, Aaron Frosch, their brilliant public relations man, John Springer, were all necessary to have nearby, as long as Elizabeth and Richard were still making movies. So it was harder to give up the entourage than he'd anticipated. Elizabeth, after all, was used to adoring attention her entire life, and she thrived on the bustling activity of a large household. And Burton found that he loved and needed the presence of protective brothers, even more so now that Ifor was gone. Wilson and Sanz filled that role.

 

In November 1972, the Burtons agreed to appear in another drama that would again resonate with their private lives:
Divorce His Divorce Hers
, a movie in two parts about the dissolution of a marriage. It would premiere on Harlech TV, produced by John Heyman and directed by a thirty-four-year-old Anglo-Indian director, Waris Hussein. Despite his relative youth, Hussein was among the top tier of British television directors at the time (he'd begun his career directing episodes of the popular science-fiction series
Dr. Who
). Being chosen to direct the Burtons was a coup, and he was thrilled to have the opportunity.