Furious Love (53 page)

So, barely four months after his divorce, Richard announced his engagement. When Elizabeth received the news, she immediately suffered severe back spasms and had to be put in traction. She insisted that it had nothing to do with Richard's engagement, but it was part of her pattern to react to stress and setbacks in her life by becoming injured or ill. A hospital bed was moved into her Bel Air mansion.

Richard and Princess Elizabeth celebrated their engagement by touring the casbahs of Morocco, where Burton was surprised to hear himself greeted by turbaned old men as “St. Becket” or “Major Smith,” his character from
Where Eagles Dare
, which, he discovered, had been a huge success in the cinemas of Tangier.

Due to her place in aristocracy, Princess Elizabeth introduced Burton to Lady Churchill, Sir Winston Churchill's widow. That October, he had begun filming a ninety-minute biopic, playing the great man in “A Walk with Destiny,” a
Hallmark Hall of Fame
coproduction
of the BBC and NBC (titled “The Gathering Storm” in the States). As he had for
Brief Encounter
, Burton was now only receiving $200,000 salary, plus salaries for two secretaries and the use of a Rolls-Royce during production. Still, it was a far cry from his former $1-million-plus-percentage salary, and he now realized how relatively broke he was, post-divorce.

By December of 1974, Richard's engagement to Princess Elizabeth had ended. While on location in the Riviera, filming
Jackpot
, a film that was never finished for lack of production funds, Richard had reunited with a beautiful African-American actress and model named Jean Bell. She was, in fact, the first black model to appear on the cover of
Playboy
magazine. Though she didn't have a part in the film, the actress had first met Richard on location for
The Klansman.
When Princess Elizabeth saw in an English newspaper a photograph of Richard and Jean Bell strolling arm-in-arm on the Riviera, all bets were off. Burton moved back into his house in Céligny, with Jean Bell beside him.

Elizabeth Taylor, meanwhile, was offered another film. In January 1975, she brought Wynberg with her to Leningrad, where she'd agreed to appear in the first Soviet-American coproduction,
The Blue Bird
, for a greatly diminished salary of $3,000 a week, plus a percentage of the gross. She ended up paying $8,000 of her own money to have her costumes redesigned. It was directed by seventy-six-year-old George Cukor, nearing the end of his long career (he immediately fell in love with a young Hungarian boy and lost interest in the movie), and it costarred another trio of beauties: Ava Gardner, Jane Fonda, and Cicely Tyson. Elizabeth played four different allegorical roles in the film: Mother, Light, Maternal Love, and Witch. Elizabeth and Wynberg (hired as a still photographer on the set) checked into the Leningrad Hotel, where Elizabeth promptly came down with amoebic dysentery from contaminated ice cubes and rapidly lost eighteen pounds. (“I never looked so good,” she told Rex Reed, “but what a hell of a way to diet…”) Wynberg nursed her and waited on her, and
the couple had rashers of bacon flown in from London's Fortnum & Mason. When she got the news of Richard's broken engagement, Elizabeth immediately called him. They spoke for hours on the phone, Henry discreetly stepping aside.

Richard and Elizabeth had spent the past fourteen months in their parallel universes, appearing in films that would go bankrupt or fail at the box office, traveling with their new consorts, and speaking frequently with each other on the telephone. Now they agreed to meet in Lausanne, in neutral Switzerland, a place where they'd reunited once before at the height of
Le Scandale.
She flew to Gstaad, with Wynberg, while Burton remained in Céligny, with Jean and her thirteen-year-old son, Troy, whom Burton had enrolled in an exclusive Swiss school. Jean tried to keep Burton from returning to alcohol. He was mostly abstaining, but his hands still trembled, and he still suffered from gout, arthritis, and sciatica.

By August of 1975, Elizabeth ended her romantic relationship with Wynberg, though, almost as a going-away present, she entered into a partnership with him, leasing rights to use her image to publicize and sell cosmetics (their business partnership was eventually dissolved). She and Richard arranged to meet at her Swiss lawyer's office in Lausanne, ostensibly to discuss their financial settlement. But when he saw Elizabeth, he was struck by how beautiful she looked, newly slimmed down. And Richard, no longer bloated by alcohol, looked wonderful to Elizabeth. They fell into each other's arms, tears streaming. On August 21, their publicist, John Springer, announced that they were again in love.

Jean Bell left Céligny; Henry Wynberg flew back to London. Neither could compete with the star power of those they had, temporarily, replaced. And it wasn't just star power: Elizabeth and Richard had lived such extraordinary lives that there was no one else who could match them in their experiences and memories. They were the only two people who could even begin to understand what they had lived through. Like the handful of men who had touched down on the
moon, they had no peers, and no one else with whom they could share the details of their mad, extravagant lives together.

Elizabeth had never stopped being in love with Richard. Maybe now, with “Liz and Dick” on the wane—their joint movie career was certainly over, and their separate careers were foundering—there would be a chance for Elizabeth and Richard. But, they soon discovered, “Liz and Dick” still caused near riots when they appeared in public. Elizabeth pressed Richard to remarry, but he was reluctant to go down that road again.

Nonetheless, the newly reunited couple flew to Israel on a grand tour to lend their somewhat tarnished glamour to a number of worthy causes. At a benefit concert in Israel, Elizabeth read the Story of Ruth, and Richard read the Twenty-third Psalm. Whenever they left the King David Hotel, they were mobbed by unruly crowds, mad to get a glimpse of the infamous couple. It was so bad that Henry Kissinger, then U.S. Secretary of State, who was staying at the hotel with his wife, Nancy, offered them use of his own security detail (seventy U.S. Marines and nearly a thousand Israeli troops). They declined, but the Kissingers were so starstruck that the Secretary of State threw a party for the couple.

After a week in Israel, they returned to Gstaad and made plans to attend a celebrity tennis tournament in Johannesburg, South Africa, another charity event to raise funds for a hospital. (Burton wrote to Kate the morning before leaving, “Tonight…we fly to Johannesburg…Everybody is terrified that superbly sober as I am, I may yet start sounding off on ‘Apartheid.'”) Throughout it all, Elizabeth kept leaving Richard little love notes, saying she would leave it up to him to decide what to do. She clearly wanted to remarry. Burton resisted, until Elizabeth went into the hospital to investigate an intestinal complaint. An X-ray revealed a spot on her lungs that her doctor thought might indicate cancer. For twenty-four hours, she was terrified. She would later write about the incident in a seventeen-page document, handwritten in ink in schoolgirl penmanship (and later published in
the
Ladies' Home Journal
), “I thought all through the night…it's funny when you think you don't have long to live how many things you want to do, and see, and smell, and touch. How really simple they are.” When she got the report that the shadow on her lung was caused by old scar tissue from having had a mild case of tuberculosis as a child, she was ecstatic. She wrote, “I gave him a Valium—he whispered poetry—we kissed…Happiness! I have my life back. I mean you, Richard.”

That's when Richard got down on one knee and proposed remarriage. “I think I brought it up and he shied away sweetly,” Elizabeth wrote. Richard gallantly asked, “Will you marry me?” Of course, she accepted. She later recalled, “[W]e sent everyone out of the room, including the children, and we got stoned.” All their old habits were waiting for them, which is what, perhaps, Richard had wanted to avoid.

He went out that night and got drunk.

 

On October 10, 1975, Elizabeth and Richard—or was it Liz and Dick?—celebrated their remarriage with a ceremony on the banks of the Chobe River in the Chobe Game Reserve in Botswana, South Africa. “That's where I would like to be mated again,” Elizabeth had written. “In the bush, around our kind.” It's interesting that they chose Botswana as the site of their reunion. Besides being a place where they could walk in public unmolested by gawkers and photographers, Africa is often the place, symbolically, as the psychiatrist and writer Kay Redfield Jamison has noted, where people go to revivify their lives—its vibrant beauty has the power to heal old wounds. The night before the wedding, Elizabeth found herself as sleepless and full of anticipation as a young girl.

An African district commissioner from the Tswana tribe performed the twenty-minute ceremony, in which they were asked if they “understood the consequence of marriage.” There was perhaps no other couple on earth who better understood the consequences of marriage.
The ceremony was “witnessed by two hippos” who emerged from the Chobe River, Elizabeth recalled. Richard wore a red silk turtleneck sweater and white slacks. The bride wore a long green dress ribbed with beads and bird feathers, which had been a gift from Ifor and Gwen Jenkins just four Christmases ago. This was the first time she had worn it, and she did so for Richard, to commemorate Ifor's memory, though it was not a memory Richard wished to revisit.

The only fly in the ointment was Richard's condition. He had woken up pink-eyed and slightly hung over the morning of their wedding. She made light of it in her
Ladies' Home Journal
article about the wedding, but what she failed to realize was that Richard could not stay sober and still be with her. Alcohol was the fuel that propelled their life together, and unless Elizabeth stopped drinking, Richard could not stay sober. The difference was, Elizabeth could handle alcohol, but it was killing Richard.

Elizabeth was not happy about finding her newly minted husband in this condition, but she wrote that, despite his flaws, “I love him, deeply and truly and forever,” adding: “he has the most remarkable recuperative powers I've ever seen, which is probably why he is still alive. Thank God!”

The ceremony over, they piled into a waiting Range Rover and began their safari honeymoon. Elizabeth was ecstatic. She wrote a little note to Richard:

But the honeymoon was called off when Richard fell ill, diagnosed with malaria. A pharmacist named Chenina Samin (later shortened to Chen Sam), an extremely competent Egyptian woman in her early forties, was helicoptered in, and she nursed Richard back to health. Elizabeth was so impressed with her that she invited the striking, capable woman to join her entourage. She did so, becoming Elizabeth's secretary, publicist, and indispensable friend for the next three decades, replacing—if possible—Dick Hanley's loving but firm hand in Elizabeth's life. And Richard was restored to good health—for a while.

The press had a field day covering the wedding—Elizabeth's sixth, Richard's third. Ellen Goodman wrote in the
Boston Globe
, “Sturm has remarried Drang and all is right with the world…In an era of friendly divorces and meaningful relationships, they stand for a marriage that is an all-consuming affair, not a partnership. None of this respecting each other's freedom, but instead, saying, ‘I can't live without you.' Wow.”

On November 10, Elizabeth threw Richard a fiftieth birthday party in the Orchid Room of the Dorchester Hotel, back in London. Burton was still fighting for sobriety, and some felt that he did not look well—“like a man who wasn't really there,” wrote one British writer who attended the party. Burton was the only one sipping mineral water among the 250 guests, but within weeks of their marriage, he would begin drinking again. He and Elizabeth went back to their old pattern of fighting and making up. One of their bodyguards, Brian Haynes, thought the marriage was doomed from the start. “But I could see that they seemed to need each other…. When he was away, she couldn't bear to be without him. They were often at each other's throats, and there was plenty of hard-core swearing on both sides.”

When Elizabeth went back into the hospital for recurrent back and neck pain, she insisted that Burton stay with her. This time, he didn't want to. He felt pressured and harangued, and, given his at
tempts to stay sober, the pressure was becoming unbearable. Smoking a cigarette, he wheeled her into the hospital, and when the inevitable photographer asked for the couple to kiss for the camera, Burton refused.

In December, they returned to Elizabeth's Chalet Ariel in Gstaad for the Christmas holidays. As in Goforth's villa in
Boom!
, Elizabeth had an intercom system put in that connected her to her secretary's room and to the kitchen—but not to Richard's bedroom, located at the other end of the chalet. By now, Richard was back to drinking, prowling the house at night, chafing under Elizabeth's possessiveness. He managed to slip away to the nearby ski slopes with the ever-present Brook Williams, for a rare outing.

On the slopes, Richard happened to notice a tall, stunning woman who simply took his breath away. She was a green-eyed, twenty-seven-year-old former model named Suzy Hunt, in the process of divorcing the celebrated Formula One race-car driver, James Hunt. She was totally different from all the doe-eyed, raven-haired women he had been smitten with in the past—Susan Strasberg, Claire Bloom, Elizabeth Taylor.