Furious Love (49 page)

“If you were summoned to one of their lunches, it was like royalty. One day the phone rang on the set and it was, ‘Waris, the Burtons
would like you to have lunch with them.' So I dropped everything and went to this area where there was a guard. I had to show my ID, then go upstairs. They're having this lunch at a very long table full of people, Elizabeth with her hair in a towel, looking ravishing.”

Hussein, who genuinely admired Richard, sat beside him and told the nearly forty-seven-year-old actor how he had seen his
Hamlet
at the Old Vic. Richard suddenly put down his wineglass and asked, “You saw me?”

“Yes, I did. And I walked around in a daze for a week because I thought you were so wonderful. I just hero-worshipped you.”

“That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.” Richard then started to tell a few familiar stories about acting at the Old Vic, about how he once drank so much before a performance that he had to relieve himself onstage, in his armor. But then he met Elizabeth's eye and he stopped.

“We shouldn't be talking about this,” he said. “After all, we're making a movie, and I'm indebted to that lady over there for what I am doing in the movies. This is my life. She's taught me everything I know.” All eyes went to Elizabeth.

“Oh, Richard, please, let's not get too emotional about this,” she said sarcastically. “We know what a wonderful actor you were on stage.”

“No, no,” said Richard. “We're talking about making films.”

“Yes, I know, but Waris just told you how wonderful you were as Hamlet. We don't want to hear how I've taught you what to do on film.”

From there, recalled Hussein, “It's George and Martha by now. Richard brought up the fact that they had adopted a child who'd been sick, the sickest child in the place. And how Elizabeth chose that child, nursed that child back to normality and health. And there were tears in his eyes. ‘She was the most wonderful person one could find,' Richard said, ‘our daughter Maria.' But it was clear he was talking
about them both, about Elizabeth
and
her daughter,” trying to stitch this whole thing together that was in danger of coming apart.

After the Nathalie Delon incident, Elizabeth seemed even more possessive of her husband. “I remember thinking,” Hussein said, “she just didn't let him relax.” Richard was “all man, I mean he was a hunk in every way. Handsome, charismatic. Every woman in the world wanted him. And she's got him. It had to have been difficult for her. I don't see her as unsympathetic.” In one particular scene meant to take place in an Italian hotel, Richard's character goes to the telephone, and right behind him is a group of women speaking English. Just before the scene could be shot, though, Hussein's assistant told him that the women in the scene would have to go. According to Hussein, one of the girls had been invited up to Richard's dressing room, where Elizabeth was hiding behind the sofa. She reportedly jumped up, brandished a broken vodka bottle, and chased the terrified girl out of the room. “There are going to be no more women on the set,” the director was told in no uncertain terms.

For Hussein, who hero-worshipped Richard Burton, Richard's drunkenness was nothing short of heartbreaking. Watching the dissolution of someone who was so charismatic, still in control of his gifts, had a deep effect on the director. Among other causes, Richard's drinking had become an endless wake for Ifor. Richard once came on the set of
Divorce His Divorce Hers
incapable of sitting upright in a chair, swaying so much the camera operator could not follow him. On another occasion, during a long dialogue—the kind of scene Richard could do in his sleep—Elizabeth sat patiently waiting for her shot. All of a sudden, Richard let out with “the loudest, screaming, guttural-sounding voice. The whole set shook. The entire crew froze.” Richard had to be practically carried home, and he was heard shouting, “I could have been King Lear. I could've played Lear!” A terrified Hussein escaped to his office and stayed there the rest of the day.

As Hussein later observed, the shoot was already fragmenting. But despite the deep troubles on the set, Hussein had compassion for both Elizabeth and Richard. He was aware of the physical pain she had experienced in her life, how often she was surrounded by death, and how her level of fame isolated her. Yet, despite their bickering and Richard's drinking, the sexual energy between them was still evident.

Richard seemed possessed of superhuman stamina. Their love life appeared to flourish in a pool of alcohol. A flash of Elizabeth's leg peeking out of the blanket in “that blue nightie he loved” while she read a book in bed would mean the door would be slammed shut and the two of them would make “lovely love,” as he called it. It made them feel like the forbidden lovers they had once been, when they'd lived that “wonderfully nourishing sense of defiance which had given them such outlaw energy in the 1960s.”

But they were no longer outlaws, no longer, as one writer described it, “pirates on the main taking booty from the great galleons of studios and governments.” Had Richard at last become tired of picking up after the dogs in his $1,000 suits, of being jealously watched, of being called “Mr. Elizabeth Taylor,” as Gianni Bozzacchi had once observed? Had Elizabeth finally had enough of Richard's Welsh hours, his alcoholic binges, and the meanness they sometimes unleashed?

And yet, they were still in erotic thrall to each other, as revealed by a handwritten letter from Burton to Taylor, thanking her for the Christmas gift of a fountain pen at the end of that year.

Divorce His Divorce Hers
was barely finished when John Heyman sold it to ABC Television without a single shot being seen. Even though reduced to the small screen, the Burtons still had it, and people still wanted to see them together, or so the executives at ABC-TV thought. But when Barry Diller, then at ABC, finally viewed the finished product, according to Waris Hussein, “he hated it.”

Meanwhile, Heyman also picked up the Burtons' hotel bill. The damages at the Four Seasons, recalled Heyman, were “astronomical…the damage to the carpets, the furniture, mirrors, the clean-up from the animal excrement. It was like a dog's house.” The Four Seasons staff celebrated after the Burtons left, toasting the couple's departure at a small party in the basement. “They were so happy when they left. It had been such a strain catering to their every whim,” Heyman said.

When
Divorce His Divorce Hers
was finally aired in America on February 6 and 7, 1973, “the critics were waiting with their knives out.” The reviews, said Hussein, “were the worst you have ever read in your life.”
Time
magazine called the two-part drama “a matched pair of thudding disasters” the
Hollywood Reporter
described it as “a boring, tedious study of the crumbling marriage of two shallow people” and
Variety
, usually kind to the Burtons, wrote that viewing the drama “holds all the joy of standing by at an autopsy.”

It's hard to assess the drama today, because the available prints suffer from low sound quality, as if
Divorce His Divorce Hers
were a foreign film poorly dubbed. It seems as if the writer, Hopkins, like so
many before him, had set out to incorporate facts of the Burtons' lives into his screenplay. Taylor's character, Jane Reynolds, complains of their gypsy life, and how Burton (Martin Reynolds) travels so much “he's never more than ten minutes in the same place.” And he complains, “One of my daughters doesn't want to see me.” At one point, he says, “Of course, I travel with an enormous entourage.” This parallel universe had once been a recipe for box office success; now it was coming dangerously close to parody.

Oddly, given Hussein's admiration of Burton and his difficulties with Taylor, their performances are the opposite of what one would expect. Burton, his voice thickened by drink, walks through the film like a zombie, his back now so stiffened from his old afflictions that he again seems like an automaton. But Elizabeth is the emotional center of the film, making sense out of her melodramatic lines, evoking sympathy for the beautiful, though ordinary, woman she portrays. Through the horrible ordeals of that year, she managed to not only be professional, but genuinely moving as well. And she is still beautiful—as is La Peregrina, resting on her sloping décolletage.

As for Waris Hussein, who had fled to Los Angeles to hide out with friends, his career “just went down the tubes. I couldn't get a job if I'd gone and stood on Sunset Boulevard with my hat out.
Divorce His Divorce Hers
was like a bomb going off, and I was the one who got killed; no one else did.” In actuality, Hussein recovered and would go on to a successful career directing movies for television, including the mini-series
Edward and Mrs. Simpson
in 1978;
Little Gloria
…
Happy at Last
in 1982;
Princess Daisy
in 1983;
Onassis, the Richest Man in the World
in 1988, and, in 1998,
Life of the Party
:
The Pamela Harriman Story.
But working with the Burtons had been an ordeal.

“Years later,” he remembered, “I met with Roddy McDowall. He said, ‘You mustn't hold this against them.' I said, ‘But she never liked me.' And Roddy said, ‘No, no, you're wrong. If you were to see her again, it would all be different. You were just caught in the middle of two people who were falling apart.'”

Divorce His Divorce Hers
had been the Burtons' eleventh film made as a couple. It was also their last. “If there is one thing for a movie actor worse than failing at the box office, it is failing on television,” wrote Brenda Maddox. Failure on TV doomed the Burtons as a couple on the big screen. They would continue to get offers to star alone in mostly European productions—especially Richard—but “The Liz and Dick Show” would now take a backseat to Elizabeth and Richard's struggling marriage.

 

In January 1973, before the release of
Divorce His Divorce Hers
, the Burtons were in the Eternal City, with Richard signed to play a German SS officer in
Massacre in Rome
, a film produced by Carlo Ponti. Richard was superstitious about Rome, feeling that bad things often happened there—yet it's where he had fallen in love with Elizabeth, and the couple had reclaimed their affection for the city while making
The Taming of the Shrew.

Playing a Nazi officer, Burton was challenged to humanize his character, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, as Marlon Brando had done with his 1958 role of a German officer in
The Young Lions.
His portrayal would later garner good reviews—increasingly rare—but not for two more years, as the film's release was delayed until 1975.

In May, Elizabeth took on the role of Barbara Sawyer in
Ash Wednesday
, a wealthy, fiftyish woman who undergoes plastic surgery to keep her husband, played by Henry Fonda, from divorcing her. An actual face-lift performed on an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike is shown in the film. Having turned forty-one that year, Elizabeth was still too beautiful to play a woman in need of a face-lift, but to make her dilemma believable, heavy makeup was applied to her face to age her, in a process that took two hours to apply and, later, two hours to remove. The makeup was so masklike that she felt compelled to take out a $1 million insurance policy against damage to her famous face.

Produced by Dominick Dunne,
Ash Wednesday
was filmed in Cortina d'Ampezzo, a ski resort in the Italian Alps, and the Burtons
were given a spacious ten rooms in the Miramonti Hotel. Dunne recalled later that he had been “spellbound by the couple, even when I was being driven crazy by them.” Elizabeth and Richard continued to draw huge, cheering crowds whenever they appeared in public. Dunne, staying on a different floor of the Miramonti, saw Elizabeth every day during the shoot and felt that she was “at the peak of her great beauty.” When he met her for the first time on New Year's Eve, he did what he'd promised himself he would not do: he gasped. “Her beauty was even more breathtaking in person than on the screen,” he would later write.

But since Burton was not working, he was, as usual, miserable, and he hung around the hotel, reading and drinking. In Dunne's words, he “seethed on the sidelines.” At their first meeting at the Burtons' New Year's Eve party, Dunne noticed Burton, dressed in a green velvet dinner jacket, on his hands and knees, picking up with a Kleenex dog droppings left by one of the un-housebroken shih tzus that scampered freely throughout the ten-room suite. He also couldn't help but notice that the Burtons were still surrounded by an enormous entourage, chief among them Elizabeth's Swiss-born secretary Raymond Vignale, who appeared on New Year's Eve in a white mink coat with jeweled buttons and Cartier watch. It was like having Oscar Wilde as a personal secretary. Vignale, who could be charming and campy in five languages, made the trains run on time as the Burtons traveled from hotel to hotel, managing their thirty trunks, Elizabeth's jewels, and even, when necessary, hiding her pills.