Furious Love (52 page)

On November 28, 1973, Elizabeth entered the University of California Medical Center for yet another operation, this time to remove an ovarian cyst. Henry Wynberg arranged to spend the night in a room adjacent to hers while she recovered. But his presence wasn't enough. When she got word of Laurence Harvey's death while recuperating from her three-hour operation, Elizabeth felt such a profound sense of loss that she did the only thing she could do to make the pain go away. She called Richard and told him that she couldn't bear the idea of living and dying alone. Burton had once written to her, “If anybody hurts you, just send me a line saying something like ‘Need' or ‘Necessary' or just the one magic word ‘Elizabeth,' and I will be there somewhat faster than sound.”

The words Elizabeth uttered were, “Can I come back home?”

This time he took her call. Taking three days off from filming (and paying Ponti $45,000 for each day he missed), Richard flew from location shooting in Sicily to Los Angeles, an exhausting trip that took him by way of the North Pole. He walked into Elizabeth's hospital suite in Los Angeles and the first words out of his mouth were, “Hello, Lumpy, how are you feeling?”

Elizabeth, giddy with delight, answered, “Hi, Pockface.”

“The next thing I knew,” Elizabeth later recalled, “he was by my bedside and we were squeezing the air out of each other and kissing each other and crying. ‘Please come back with me,' he asked. You've never seen anybody heal so fast. It was as if the Grand Maestro had placed a hand over my incision and healed me up.”

Turning to one of Elizabeth's nurses, in his best Henry VIII voice, Burton declared, “I'm the husband. I want my bed.”

Henry Wynberg discreetly left the hospital and drove himself home.

The next day, Richard wheeled Elizabeth out of the hospital. He was beyond caring what effect the sight of him pushing her in a wheelchair would have on their film careers. It was enough that she was all right, enough that they were leaving the hospital together. They flew back to Italy so Burton could resume filming.

Their reunion made news around the world. On NBC, news anchor John Chancellor wryly announced, “Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are reconciling permanently—as opposed to temporarily.” In London, workers at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum dragged the Burtons' figures closer together, though not quite as close as they had been before.

 

The couple spent that Christmas at Casa Kimberly in Puerto Vallarta, where they had perhaps always been happiest, and Burton gave Taylor a 38-carat diamond. But until, and unless, Richard was able to finally confront his demons and stop drinking altogether, they were, in his words, “doomed fools.”

Three months later, the Burtons flew to Oroville in northern California, where Richard began work on
The Klansman
, a movie for Paramount about racial violence in a small Southern town before the Civil Rights era, written by the well-regarded Southern chronicler William Bradford Huie. After a long hiatus, Burton was finally making a movie in the United States. His costar was Lee Marvin, the “better class of drunk” to whom he had lost his Academy Award for
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
eight years earlier. Indeed, Marvin would prove a better class of drunk, staying relatively sober as he barely kept up with Burton's three bottles of vodka a day. Taylor was also drinking, but no one could touch Burton.

Despite being reunited with Elizabeth, Richard drank continuously, suicidally, from morning till night, by now unable to control the
shaking in his hands. By now, he was in the final stage of alcoholism, a condition he still—amazingly—denied that he had. Nothing but a medical intervention could save him now.

In
The Klansman
, Burton played a Southern landowner gone to seed, complete with a limp and Southern accent, but the limp was real, due to Richard's recurrent gout. Lee Marvin saw how much Richard was suffering, once nearly bursting into tears when he couldn't get a line right. He was also in pain from acute sciatica and old injuries, which caused severe pain in his left arm and a constant hunching of the shoulders. “It was a wonder he could move at all,” Lee Marvin later commented. “He had guts, and I admired that. He never complained of being in pain. I'd say, ‘Rich, are you okay?' and he'd say, ‘Just a little discomfort.'
Discomfort!
Jesus, the guy was in fucking agony!”

And, with his out-of-control imbibing, Richard began womanizing again. He started flirting with bit players in the production, and when word got out, young women began hanging around the set, hoping to be picked up by the famous actor. He met an eighteen-year-old waitress in front of the local jail, invited her into his trailer, and the next day bought her a $450 ring. The waitress, a former “Miss Pepsi of Butte County,” made the front page of the local newspapers. He also briefly became involved with a thirty-three-year-old married woman with three children, until her husband showed up on the set, threatening to shoot Richard.

Even Burton knew he was out of control. Gianni Bozzacchi saw that Richard was tortured by his own cheating on Elizabeth, “which was only at the end, when the drinking became terrible,” Bozzacchi recalled. “I remember Richard, with tears in his eyes, saying to me, ‘Gianni, why do I do it? I love this woman so.' He wasn't just destroying himself with drink, he was destroying himself with guilt.”

The journalists smelled blood in the water and flocked to the set. In the mid-1970s, alcoholics were still considered objects of scorn and the butt of jokes. The idea of alcoholism as a genetic disease, like diabetes, had not yet taken root in the public imagination.
Even the public relations liaison for the movie took advantage of the situation, realizing that any publicity for the film was better than none, and he invited the press to watch Burton's public disintegration. Reporters took delight in baiting the actor, yelling out, “Tell us about Dylan Thomas! Tell us something about Wales!” They then described Burton as a human wreck, scribbling down and printing his anguished, liquor-inspired words, which he tossed out like worthless coin: “My father was a drinker, and I'm a drinker, and Lee Marvin is a drinker. The place I like best to be in the whole world is back in my village in Wales, down at the pub, standing with the miners, drinking pints and telling stories. One drinks because life is big and it blinds you,” he declaimed. “Poetry and drink are the greatest things on earth. Besides women. There's something to death, and something to truth, and we're after them, all our beautiful lives on earth. Liquor helps.”

Elizabeth was horrified to see what was happening to Richard. She left for Los Angeles as soon as the news story of the $450 ring appeared in the press, after spending only a week on location. Ironically, Richard later credited Lee Marvin with saving his life. “I wouldn't have survived without Marvin,” he told the actor and writer Michael Munn. “I would have drunk a hell of a lot more a whole lot quicker and wound up dead a whole lot sooner.” Lee Marvin saw that Richard “was drinking not for the pleasure of it but because he had a great need, and I doubt he knew what that was himself. Maybe it was for Elizabeth. But whatever it was, he was in pain, and he drank to kill that pain. I used to do it, too.”

The director, Terence Young, was also appalled to see what was happening to Burton. Young had directed two James Bond movies, and at one point Burton had been under consideration to play the secret agent, but now he had days when he couldn't “get a single line right. He tried again and again,” Young remembered, “but it just wouldn't come out right. He was so desperate. It was painful to see this great actor disintegrating before all our eyes.” Toward the end of
filming, Young had one more scene to shoot with Richard: his character's death scene. When the director saw him lying on the set, he turned to Ron Berkeley, Richard's makeup man, and told him, “You've done a great job with Richard.”

“I haven't touched him,” the makeup artist answered.

That did it. The director finally shut down the production and brought in a doctor to examine Burton. His verdict: “This man is dying.”

Burton was rushed to St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica. Richard's doctors told him he would be dead in two weeks if he didn't detoxify. He had a temperature of 104 degrees, his kidneys were on the point of collapse, and he was suffering from influenza and tracheo-bronchitis. He was given emergency blood transfusions to cleanse his body of alcohol. Richard would remain there for six weeks, hallucinating and near death for the first several days. He often dreamed of his brother Ifor, standing whole and upright before him, challenging him to make up his mind:
live or die
. Later, as he slowly began to recover, he ran into Susan Strasberg on the hospital grounds, the dark-haired young actress with whom he had had an affair seventeen years earlier. She barely recognized him. His hands shook violently, his face was ashen, his body was frail. He was not yet fifty.

Elizabeth stayed in touch by phone, but she couldn't stand it anymore. She flew to Gstaad, where she quietly filed for divorce. On April 25, 1974, they publicly announced their plans to divorce, and Richard let it be known he would give Elizabeth everything she wanted—possession of the
Kalizma
, Casa Kimberly in Puerto Vallarta, $7 million worth of jewelry, all the priceless art they had acquired over the years. She was also awarded custody of Maria, the much-loved daughter they had adopted in 1964, who bore his name. He seemed to want to divest himself of his entire life, though he made sure that his immediate family in Wales—his twenty-nine sisters, brothers, in-laws, nieces, and nephews—would continue to be provided for. He wanted Elizabeth and all their children to be safe and well looked-after. That
was his role now, to provide for the extended family, which had grown huge, to be the father he had never had—because Dic Jenkins had provided for no one.

On June 26, 1974, citing irreconcilable differences, Elizabeth was granted her divorce in a small, wooden-frame courtroom in the Swiss town of Saarinen. Richard was still too ill to attend the proceedings, and was represented by a doctor's certificate. The judge asked the inevitable question he was required to ask: “Is it true that to live with your husband became intolerable?”

“Yes, life with Richard became intolerable,” Elizabeth answered softly, dressed in a brown silk suit and wearing dark sunglasses. It had been so much more complicated than that—in fact, it had been the greatest adventure of their lives, but their ten-year marriage was now reduced to a line of stock dialogue. She told the judge that she had tried everything to keep their marriage together, but now it was over. Not her love for Richard, but their life together.

Twenty minutes later, she called Richard and asked, “Do you think we've done the right thing?” But for Richard, who couldn't imagine living without Elizabeth but who couldn't seem to stay sober when they were together, “the adventure of a lifetime” was over. Or so he thought. On June 27, Richard, now recovered and in recovery, sailed for Europe on the SS
France
.

Henry Wynberg joined Elizabeth on the
Kalizma
to cruise the Mediterranean, and Elizabeth, ever the survivor, attempted to recreate the life she had led with Burton, dining in Monaco with Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, spending time at her chalet in Gstaad. Wynberg tried to fill Richard's shoes, taking Elizabeth to soccer matches in Munich (instead of rugby matches in Wales), and bringing her home to meet his parents in Amsterdam (a replacement for Burton's sprawling family in the hilly dales of Pontrhydyfen and Port Talbot). And then there were the jewels: the $2,400 coral necklace (not quite the $1.1 million Cartier diamond that now bore Elizabeth's name). Wynberg had pleaded with the Beverly Hills jeweler to “make it bigger.”

In August, Richard went back to work. Sophia Loren, ever solicitous of her troubled friend, got him hired to replace the actor Robert Shaw in a television adaptation of Noël Coward's
Brief Encounter
. Shaw had been released from the Carlo Ponti production to play the salty shark-hunter on Steven Spielberg's
Jaws (
a role, incidentally, that would have well suited Richard, and would have rejuvenated his film career, bringing him to the attention of a new generation of moviegoers). But Richard no longer had the stamina for such a role, had he even been considered for it. Instead, he played the romantic lead in a slightly creaky production of a World War II–era romantic drama. Burton looked frail and thin in the television film, and Sophia Loren was too beautiful to play the ordinary middle-class housewife the role called for, so the production was not particularly well received. Still recovering from his medical ordeal, Burton now found himself in a phase where he could only act with his sonorous voice: hence the historical figures he would continue to play, where he could stand still and declaim great speeches.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, returned to Los Angeles, where she tried living with a smaller entourage. “She was down to a secretary, a chauffeur, a butler, and Henry,” noticed her old friend, the journalist and liberal columnist Max Lerner. She leased an Italianate villa in Bel Air, where she and Wynberg decided to launch a number of business ventures—a diamond-selling enterprise and a cosmetics company. It was an exciting new prospect for Elizabeth—a world she had yet to conquer—and many around her thought that Wynberg (though a prodigious lover in his own right) had become more of a business partner than a paramour. Liz Smith later noticed, when she visited them, that Elizabeth didn't have any pet names for him, such as “darling,” or “sweetnose,” or “dearest,” or “fuckface,” all endearments she'd used with Richard Burton. And she made no attempt to hide her frequent phone calls to Richard.

 

If Elizabeth tried to replace Burton with Henry Wynberg in a road-show version of their fabled life, Richard quickly became engaged to another Elizabeth—the thirty-eight-year-old Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, recently separated from her merchant banker husband, Neil Balfour. A celebrated beauty, she was rumored to have been romantically linked to President Kennedy. Six years earlier, Princess Elizabeth had visited the Burtons on their movie sets in Paris. Burton had described her then as “pretty but impertinent,” too quick to laugh when Rex Harrison blew a line, too pleased to go out with Warren Beatty when he asked her. But if you were going to follow up the most famous movie star in the world, a Yugoslav princess wasn't a bad place to land. And Richard wanted—needed—to be married, to have a sense of family around him, to even consider fathering children again. He was still depressed enough about losing Elizabeth that there were attempts to keep newspapers from him while he was filming
Brief Encounter
, because the tabloids were rife with stories about Elizabeth and Henry and the possibility that they might marry.