Furious Love (57 page)

Cullum also found it difficult to rehearse with Elizabeth, mostly because she didn't really want to rehearse. As an actress, Cullum believes, “Elizabeth was a natural. She was one of the most skillful film actresses you'd ever met. She just didn't have very much stage experience. For instance, when I first met with her, I suggested we run through the lines; she didn't want to do that, because I think her attitude was, it would take the edge off the performance. That's okay for film, but if you have to get jacked up for every performance, it's gonna kill you.”

Cullum noticed, too, how Elizabeth couldn't handle certain lines during rehearsals. When she was having trouble with a reference to a hotel in Deauville on the French Riviera, “Richard started laughing, and Elizabeth just blew up and screamed, ‘What in the hell are you laughing about, you silly ass!' And he said, ‘Darling, we
stayed
at that hotel for over two months!' All the places in
Private Lives
—they had lived them.”

The play opened in Boston on April 13, 1983, to a sold-out run, standing ovations, and three curtain calls for Elizabeth. Burton gave Elizabeth a long kiss at the end of the evening, and the audience went wild. Their entry into Boston via Logan Airport had been a reprise of their
Hamlet
tour, with large crowds greeting them, many waving copies of Kitty Kelley's scathing biography of Elizabeth,
The Last Star
, for Elizabeth to autograph.

The opening in New York on May 9, 1983, “was a circus,” Brook Williams recalled. Crowds filled the streets around the theater, waiting for a sight of Elizabeth, who showed up with her pet parrot on her shoulder, which she kept in her dressing room and later took to bringing onstage with her in the final scene. The curtain of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre was raised thirty-five minutes late, and the first intermission lasted longer than the entire first act.

Burton seethed backstage—he was the most punctual of actors; he hated to be late; he was a Spartan about things like that no matter what condition he was in at the time. He fumed in his dressing room (where he'd hung the Welsh flag on one of its red felt walls). Elizabeth was sober—she never touched a drop before the show—as she got ready in her lavender dressing room, complete with shirred chintz curtains, lavender towels, silk flowers, and a hundred-gallon aquarium. (Their specially redesigned dressing rooms were so spectacular that they were featured in
Architectural Digest
.) “Elizabeth would be there, chatting away, getting her makeup on, five to ten minutes before curtain,” Cullum recalled, “and Richard would just be beside himself!” Brook Williams served Richard tea and made small talk, trying to calm him down.

“This just proves it,” Burton complained to Brook. “I can never get together with that woman again.” Elizabeth took so long to do her makeup, he started insisting that she be made up at her apartment before coming to the theater. (She often ended up doing it in the limousine on the way over.)

Despite first-night problems, the sold-out house rose to their feet and gave Elizabeth and Richard five curtain calls. Every opening night on the tour would be like that as the production headed west: Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles. But what became clear from that first night was that audiences were cheering “The Liz and Dick Show” more than Noël Coward's witty play.

“They had lived
Private Lives
,” Cullum realized, “and that's why it didn't work. It was a caricature.” It was supposed to be a drawing-room comedy, not a parody, but there were too many parallels, just as there had been in
Cleopatra, The V.I.P.s, The Sandpiper, The Taming of the Shrew, Boom!, Divorce His Divorce Hers.
But now the parallels weren't dramatic; they were comic. The audience knew the public life behind the drama of
Private Lives
, so their repartee had a triple-entendre effect.

First of all, Elyot's new wife is named Sibyl (played by Charlotte Moore, who replaced Kathryn Walker). Lines like Amanda's “Poor
Sibyl…. I suppose she loves you terribly” and Elyot's “Not as much as all that. She didn't have a chance to get really underway” announced that the play was really all about Elizabeth and Richard.

When Elizabeth/Amanda tells Richard/Elyot, “Eight years all told, we've loved each other. Three married and five divorced,” it just ran too close to the truth. And when Richard tells Elizabeth that she has “No sense of glamour. No sense of glamour at all,” the audience guffawed. Elizabeth's line “I feel rather scared of marriage, really” brought another huge laugh and that weird feeling of being in a parallel universe. When Elizabeth asked, “How long will it last, this ludicrous, overbearing love of ours?…Shall we always want to bicker and fight?” Richard answered, “No, that desire will fade, along with our passion.”

More truths were told, in the guise of Amanda and Elyot. Elizabeth: “I believe it was just the fact of our being married, and clamped together publicly, that wrecked us before.”

Richard: “That, and not knowing how to manage each other.”

Elizabeth: “Do you think we know how to manage each other now?” The audience's heads were spinning. When Elizabeth said, “This week's been very successful,” looking out over the full house, “Liz and Dick” merged completely with Amanda and Elyot.

Though audiences lapped it up, paying $45 for the best seats, the reviews were the worst either had ever received in their long careers. The critics—not quite ready to embrace camp when they saw it—hooted and jeered. Frank Rich in the
New York Times
called it “a calculated business venture,” a “trashily amusing old-time burlesque stunt,” in which “Miss Taylor and Mr. Burton look whipped and depressed.” He noted that Burton seemed “robotic” (he could barely move his arms and shoulders without pain). At one point, Burton/Elyot tweaks Elizabeth/Amanda's breast (or honks it, as one playgoer recalled), but does so, Frank Rich thought, with “the clinical detachment of a physician who's examined too many patients in one day.”
James Brady compared Elizabeth's acting to “the Hitler Diaries—you don't believe it, but you gotta look.” The
Christian Science Monitor
lamented, “They have become one word: Liz'n'Dick…condemned to be Antony and Cleopatra in an endless sequel of daily life…Their flight to personal freedom two decades ago has turned them into a kind of public slavery. They have become our dancing bears with permanent iron collars on their necks.”
Variety
cruelly wrote, “
The Dance of Death
would have been a more appropriate choice.”
People
magazine noted the play by running a tongue-in-cheek dictionary entry for “Lizandick”:

Elizabeth tried to avoid reading the reviews, but it was impossible. The
Boston Globe
notice brought her to tears (“a caricature of a Coward heroine, inside a caricature of an actress, inside a caricature of [Elizabeth] Taylor”). Cullum saw that “she was hurt, and she didn't quite understand why they were so vicious. But she was a trouper. You had to admire her, because they said awful things, and the delight with which they attacked a person who was so famous and so wonderful! They were enjoying it.” The bad notices shortened the New York run of the play by several weeks, yet Elizabeth and Richard soldiered
on. The
New York Post
screamed, “Liz & Dick: Damn the critics, full speed ahead!” and “It's Liz & Dick vs. the Critics.”

In fact, the press had never had it so good. They were reliving their salad days as well, feasting on speculation over whether the couple would reunite, devoting whole columns to the phenomenon of “Liz and Dick.”
New York Times
columnist Russell Baker got into the act, as did the
Daily News'
s Jimmy Breslin, who met Burton at the Lombardy for an interview. They discussed the actor's well-known battles with alcohol. “I wouldn't have missed any of it for the world,” he said. “I have to think hard to name an interesting man who didn't drink.” Burton also mentioned how appalled he was with the trend he'd noticed in New York restaurants to order just a small glass of white wine in lieu of real drinking. “When the hell did that start?” he asked Breslin, himself a two-fisted drinker. “…[T]he other night I heard a man say, ‘I'll have a vodka martini straight up.' I turned to [him] and said, ‘Well done. You're having a proper drink.'”

One night, Elizabeth and Richard went to Sardi's after the show, and Richard proceeded to give her notes on her performance. They both started drinking heavily. “It didn't take much to get Richard off the wagon,” Cullum observed. “In any case, the next night, Elizabeth didn't show up, so he had to go on with the understudy. Richard was incensed. And she didn't show up on Thursday, and on the Friday and Saturday, he had to play two shows with the understudy. She was quite good, but he didn't contract to play with anybody else. And he knew that Elizabeth was ticked off because of the notes he'd given her. So he got more and more angry…And sure enough, Monday morning, which was our day off, he said he would not play anymore with the understudy. And he disappeared.”

A few days later, the headlines read, “Richard Burton Marries.”

Richard had flown to Las Vegas with his young assistant, Sally Hay, checking into the $1,000-a-night bridal suite of the Frontier Hotel. On July 3, 1983, he married Sally—a thirty-four-year-old Australian woman he'd met in Vienna on the set of
Wagner.
She had
been the continuity girl on the production, and the two had become close during the seven-month shoot. She was slim, light-haired, intelligent, and gentle in manner—more like Sybil than Elizabeth. She even bore a noticeable physical resemblance to Sybil and to Kate. She was able to provide for Richard what he most needed at the time—companionship and attention to his health and comfort. She even traveled with a spoonlike instrument in her handbag that could be slipped into Richard's mouth to prevent him from biting his tongue during the epileptic seizures that occasionally recurred.

“She can do everything,” Richard confided in Brook Williams, who was now with him constantly. “She can cook, type, do shorthand, there's nothing she can't do. She looks after me so well. Thank God I found her, Brookie.” In his diaries, though, he would refer to her as “lovely Sally” or “sexy Sally” or “undo-without-able Sally,” so the relationship wasn't merely one of care and comfort.

So Sally had stayed on after
Wagner
, and had moved in with Richard, and had accompanied him to New York. Elizabeth was not happy about it, but when he disappeared for three days and came back married to Sally, she was incensed.

“I think Richard really tried to get out of that contract then,” Cullum recalled. “He just didn't like to be in a show that wasn't working.” Cullum, too, tried to get out of his contract. In one scene with Elizabeth, Cullum realized that nobody in the audience was watching him. “I would look at the audience, and I could see they were just
riveted
to her. They couldn't believe that they were really up there—icons who had become alive. Richard was so powerful onstage, he could hold the stage with anyone. But he didn't really care—it bothered him that he had to work for her and she was the boss. At least that's the impression I got.”

Elizabeth put on a brave face and even hosted a party, in Philadelphia, for the newly married couple. But after Burton's marriage to Sally, Elizabeth didn't seem to care anymore. “I began to crack,” she later admitted. “My worst habits surfaced. I began overeating,
drinking, and taking pills. The minute the curtain went down, Jack Daniel's was waiting for me in the wings.”

Her weight gain was noticeable and many critics gleefully pointed it out. It was painful for Kathryn Walker, playing Sibyl, to see Elizabeth looking at herself in the mirror before going on and asking, “Do I really look fat?” She was “hurt, very hurt,” Kathryn recalled, “and now they're throwing her to the lions, the way she's being directed. I don't know why she can't stand up to them.”

But she did stand up to their director, Milton Katselas, who was brought in from Los Angeles, where he was an acting teacher and something of a guru. Cullum, who had worked with him years earlier, remembered that the director “came in almost professorial, talking about ‘the humor and the comedy of Noël Coward.' It didn't take long for even me to figure out that he had just discovered him, and he was talking to Richard and Elizabeth, who
knew
Noël Coward and had spent a lot of time with him.” Katselas was sent packing and was replaced with another director.

In private moments during rehearsals, Elizabeth had whispered to Richard how lonely she was, despite the attentions of her coproducer Zev Bufman, and Victor Gonzales Luna, a courtly, divorced Mexican lawyer and father of four, whom Elizabeth had met the previous year. Stung by Burton's defection after all the speculations in the press about a reunion, Elizabeth announced her sudden engagement to Luna. A photograph ran in the
Post
of the two couples at a party at the Café Royal in Philadelphia: Richard and Sally, Victor and Elizabeth, who gamely showed off her 16.5-carat engagement ring from Luna.