My Life in Focus

by Gianni Bozzacchi,Joey Tayler

  In any case, I was still too insecure about myself and my talent to get caught up in self-celebration, or whatever the press said about me. The “new king of the camera” sounded good. But my father’s opinion was still the only one I trusted. And he didn’t seem the least bit impressed by my work, or the mountain of newspaper clippings about me. “You’re good,” he’d say, “but you’re still not there.” It was his way of keeping my ego from going overboard while at the same time pushing me to stay focused on my ambitions. I appreciated that way he had of spurring me on, more now than ever.

  My father only once came to watch me work in my studio. He just stood to one side and observed me. At one point, when I passed nearby, he leaned forward and said, “Have you gone homosexual?”

  “No, Dad!” I replied, laughing. “What on earth do you mean?”

  “You’re moving in such an effeminate way.”

  I’d developed a body language designed to stimulate my women subjects, a certain sensuality that allowed me to understand them in order to then portray them better. My father was seeing another Gianni for the first time, a Gianni he wasn’t so sure about.

  Elizabeth and Richard stayed two months in Puerto Vallarta. On their return, they invited Claudye and me to join them on a cruise. We met up in Villefranche-sur-Mer, where they were delighted to see us. When we boarded their yacht, Richard asked me if I’d like something to drink. “Thanks,” I said. “I’d love a glass . . .” “Oh!” he interrupted. “My, how your English has improved!” Actually it hadn’t—I just felt more at ease. But the moment he drew attention to my English, I got embarrassed again. “Mr. Barton,” I thought to myself. Elizabeth would never dream of saying something like that to anyone. It was much easier to live up to her expectations—dress well, be polite, look relaxed (even when you felt out of place). But with Richard, I still felt inferior and still wasn’t convinced he even liked me.

  We were docked in Monte Carlo when Harriet Annenberg Ames put her famous diamond up for public auction in New York, the pear-shaped sixty-nine-carat diamond that she’d acquired from Harry Winston. Jewelers’ representatives arrived from around the world, including one of Jackie Onassis’s assistants and Richard’s own auction agent, Al Yugler, who followed the bidding firsthand and kept in touch with Richard by radio. From a starting price of $200,000, bidding rose rapidly. Richard, a little tipsy, got irritated at the way the price seemed to spiral crazily out of control. When it got to $1 million, he decided to pull out, convinced it would just keep rising—to $1.5 million, $2 million, $3 million . . . When Richard then discovered the diamond had gone to Cartier owner Robert Kenmore for $1,050,000, he was furious. He couldn’t believe Kenmore would outbid him, given all the free publicity that Elizabeth gave Cartier. He promptly called Kenmore from the yacht to negotiate for the diamond directly, and ended up buying it for $1,100,000, on condition that the jewel be known as the “Taylor-Burton Cartier diamond.” This was the world’s first million-dollar diamond. Others may have previously changed hands for seven-figure sums, but this was the first to do so at a public auction, and it instantly made worldwide news.

  Now, with the initial excitement over, all that was left to do was deliver the thing. However, given the huge publicity that the auction had generated, Cartier feared someone might attempt to steal it in transit. Kenmore had two copies made and sent them separately: three people with three different diamonds, two fakes and one real. I got to the yacht shortly before they arrived: three identical Cartier boxes carried by three identical bull-shaped Cartier deliverymen. Richard was drunk, and Elizabeth no less so. Richard opened two of the boxes and just started laughing uncontrollably. “One million dollars for a piece of glass,” he kept saying, standing by one of the portholes juggling the two “diamonds” in his hands. Suddenly he slipped, and one of the diamonds flew out of the porthole, landed on the deck outside, and rolled into the sea. Claudye moved just in time to catch Elizabeth before she fainted. Everyone went crazy. Gaston, the chauffeur, slapped on a diving mask and threw himself into the pitch-black sea although it was the middle of the night. Elizabeth, Claudye, and Richard just kept staring at the two remaining diamonds, wondering whether either was the real one. But Richard and Elizabeth were too drunk and stunned to make any sense of the thing. They asked what I thought, which was laughable. It was the first time in my life I’d even seen a diamond close up. What would I know? Panic seemed to make them sober up. They made a string of telephone calls and eventually, with dawn breaking, decided to wake Pierre Arpels of Van Cleef & Arpels and get him to come on board and evaluate the remaining jewels. As the goddess of good luck would have it, it was finally confirmed that what Richard had tossed into the sea was merely a piece of glass. Not a $1,100,000 diamond.

  The following day, Elizabeth wore the jewel to Princess Grace Kelly’s fortieth birthday party. As you can see from the photo I took just before they left, Richard was now being a lot more careful with that diamond. In the end, I got a cut of its value too, given that I sold that photo worldwide.

  The day after the ball, we left Monaco for Portofino, where we dropped anchor outside the port and went for dinner. When dessert arrived, Richard started telling Claudye that she was like a daughter to him, that he cared for her deeply, and that I, too, was like a son. Still burning from his “My, how your English has improved” comment, I replied, “Stop talking bullshit, Richard. You don’t even like me. Don’t start saying . . .” Elizabeth kicked me under the table and simultaneously my wife elbowed me in the ribs. But I really was still convinced he didn’t like me, as a person or as an artist. “Elizabeth needs you” was all he’d said when he hired me, implying that he didn’t need me at all. The distance I felt between Richard and me came from that little phrase.

  Richard told Elizabeth to take Claudye home. He wanted a little time alone with me. And this time we finally had a real talk. And drank a lot, too. We must have stopped in pretty much every bar in Portofino. But we talked as we’d never talked before. Finally, I had the chance to confess all my fears about my new life as I poisoned a series of potted plants along the way, pouring vodka into them every time Richard offered me yet another glass. I discovered, to my great surprise, that he was afflicted by the same insecurities. We both feared getting lost in such a fabulous yet suffocating lifestyle. By the end of the evening Richard was stone drunk. But for once I didn’t care. We’d finally had a real conversation. We at last understood each other much better.

  We got back to the dock around 3 in the morning only to find that the dingy that was supposed to take us back to the Kalizma was gone. Suddenly Richard was in the water, roaring with laughter and swimming out toward the open sea. The combination of alcohol and cold water could kill him in a flash. I could see the banner headlines already: “Burton drowns before photographer’s stunned eyes.” What else could I do? I leapt in after him and dragged him to the yacht. Like I said, I’m no swimmer myself. What’s more, the plants hadn’t had all that vodka. When we got near the yacht, the crew spotted us and helped drag us on board. I went straight to my cabin, registering three things one after the other: fear, rage, and a terrible chill. I took a boiling-hot shower and went straight to bed.

  Elizabeth, Richard, and the Taylor-Burton Cartier diamond, which Richard came damn close to throwing into an ink-black ocean.

  The following morning, Richard came to my cabin and asked how we’d got back on board. I just started shouting: “You asshole Englishman, you son of a bitch! What do you mean, you don’t remember?! We could have died drowning!”

  To which he replied, “‘Welsh,’ please. ‘Son of a bitch,’ if you insist.”

  Then he hugged me. I believe that was when our friendship truly began. I’d given vent to my rage, I’d exposed myself, I’d been myself, and Richard respected me for that. From that evening on I knew that my best man was also a close friend.

  Elizabeth’s next movie was The Only Game in Town, which was shot mostly in the Bologna Studios outside Paris, with some ext
eriors in Las Vegas. Frank Sinatra was originally signed to play the other lead role. But he had to drop out and was replaced by the young star of Bonnie and Clyde, Warren Beatty. The director, George Stevens, had already worked with Elizabeth in two of her best movies, A Place in the Sun and Giant. Paris was chosen as a location because it cost less to rebuild Las Vegas in France than to shoot the whole movie in Nevada, and for tax reasons, Elizabeth had only a limited amount of time she could work in the United States. Elizabeth also wanted to be close to Richard, who was filming Staircase in Paris with Rex Harrison.

  One day, curious to see how Richard would play a gay man, I went to visit him on the Staircase set. Richard and Rex were heading to the bathroom when I arrived, and since I needed to go too, I tagged along. I was the first one to finish and went to wash my hands. Rex said, “I’m sorry I’m taking so long. I’m only peeing now by virtue of gravity.” Then Richard finished and started to walk out. Rex shouted, “How dare you take a piss without washing your hands!” To which Richard replied, “Personally, I never piss on my own hands.”

  I tried to be friendly with Warren, but he was a solitary type. He didn’t like being photographed. I could sense his affectations when he knew he was in a shot. He was never relaxed, and always kept an eye on me when I was taking photos, especially if I was chatting with girls on the set. Warren was highly competitive when it came to women and hated it when someone else took center stage. But whenever Julie Christie visited the set, Warren glowed, like he’d won a prize. Word went around that he was having an affair with Elizabeth, but it was totally unfounded. Warren just loved playing the part of the alpha male. On set with Elizabeth, however, he was never given the opportunity.

  Everyone under the sun dropped by to visit Elizabeth and Richard. Here Elizabeth is chatting with (from left) Queen Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, the Duchess and Duke of Windsor, and Warren Beatty.

  Another alpha male who could never relax, Warren Beatty lays on a smile for a scene with Elizabeth in The Only Game in Town. Rumors that they had a fling were rubbish. Julie Christie, on the other hand, could melt him on sight.

  Elizabeth is the photographer as we ride to Portofino in a speedboat. Claudye and I were happier to have our pictures taken than Richard.

  The Olympus Elizabeth is using. (Photo by M&S Materiale fotografico.)

  One day I was hanging around in the corridor outside Elizabeth’s dressing room when suddenly I heard screams coming from inside. I threw open the door and rushed in. Her makeup artist, Frankie La Rue, was raving, waving his arms in the air and threatening Elizabeth with a pair of scissors. “Get out!” she shouted. “Get out, or he’ll stab you too.” I stepped forward anyway, at which Frankie whirled around and tried to do just that. But I dodged the blow and landed a punch. Frankie went down, struck his head on a corner of the dressing table, and lost consciousness. He’d gone out of his head, in the true sense of the expression. Elizabeth accused me of hitting him too hard, which wasn’t the case. He was a heavyweight and I, in those days, a lightweight. I was questioned at length by the French police. Frankie ended up in a clinic, and Elizabeth and Richard’s lawyers hushed the whole thing up.

  I never did manage to establish a rapport with George Stevens. He was very detached, rather cold. As a kid I’d been a huge fan of James Dean and knew that George had directed him as the wildcat Jett Rink in Giant, considered by many to have been Dean’s greatest performance. So I asked him what Dean had been like to work with. We were sitting on set and I was only trying to make conversation. “Was he really that good as an actor?” I asked. George just looked at me as if I’d posed the dumbest question in history, pointed at the set photographer, and replied, “Is he a good photographer?”

  Elizabeth had great respect for George. Sometimes she’d sit on his lap. He was something of a father figure to her. He’d helped make her the star she was, and she never forgot it, even though she was happier with directors she could talk to, who accepted her contribution. No one contradicted George Stevens on set. He was a very old-fashioned director. He had no interest in collaborating. He knew exactly how he was going to shoot a scene the moment he got on set, and that was that. He didn’t even discuss things with the director of photography or the cameraman. He’d place the cameras himself and tell the actors what to do. Then he’d do an establishing shot, a straight shot, a reverse shot, close-ups, and then cut. Next scene. He never moved the cameras, never did tracking shots. His technique contrasted sharply with, for example, that of Antonioni, who discussed every scene with his actors, asked their opinions, and followed them with the camera, never just putting them in front of it like robots.

  Elizabeth sits on director George Stevens’s lap during a break in the shooting of The Only Game in Town. Right now she’s furious with the photography director’s choice of exterior lighting.

  Before the production left Paris to continue shooting in Las Vegas, the Académie Française invited Stevens to give a talk, and he asked me to photograph the event. But I’d been so offended by his attitude toward me that I lied and said I was too busy.

  Shooting in Las Vegas didn’t last long on account of the cost. But it was plenty long enough for me. After flying for ages over desert, it was a real shock to suddenly see that insomniac city all lit up below. I’m a Roman. Aqueducts were among the marvels of ancient Rome. Looking down on Vegas from the air, I wondered where it got all its water. Once we’d landed, I continued to marvel—but not in a good way. Walking through the enormous halls of Caesar’s Palace, I was unpleasantly struck by the ostentation, the soullessness: the inveterate gamblers, the waiters with lifeless eyes, the dealers who cashed their paychecks and then went to gamble in another casino, the total lack of any real history and any real culture in this extraordinary ordinary place. I was stunned by the huge size of everything. It reminded me of a joke about an Italian who goes to America, and when he comes home his family asks him what it was like: “Everything was enormous,” he replies. “My room was enormous. The portions were enormous. My hotel gave me a toothbrush you could scratch your back with. Then I got an enormous cold, so I went to the hospital where an enormous doctor came and said, ‘You’ve got an enormous cold. I’m going to give you a suppository.’ To which I replied, ‘Fuck you, man!’ and left.” That was Las Vegas. Enormous. Too much. Except I did adore the buffet breakfasts—everything you could imagine was available.

  The highlight of the trip was seeing Elvis Presley live. What an exceptional artist, what a voice, what a face, even at a time in his career when he was becoming somewhat ridiculous. After the show, Elizabeth and Richard took Claudye and I backstage to meet Elvis and Colonel Parker. Elvis was dripping with sweat. It would have made a great photo, all that sweat and the strange light in his dressing room. In my terrible English, I tried to tell him that I’d love to photograph him. I said I’d like to spend twenty-four hours with him and photograph everything he did, much as I’d done with Picasso. But Elvis and his staff didn’t know me, so they politely brushed me off and started chatting with Elizabeth and Richard. They thought I was just one of the crowd and didn’t take me seriously. Someone must have learned better later because after we got back to Europe, Elvis’s people called me to organize a shoot. Unfortunately, we were both very busy and weren’t able to find a date. We decided to postpone the deal, and sadly our time ran out when Elvis died.

  Shooting Elvis would have been like photographing a woman—he oozed sensuality. He was very masculine, but his face and his rosy flesh had a feminine beauty. I never understood why he hid inside those ridiculous costumes. It would have been a wonderful challenge to get beyond the sequins and rediscover the young truck driver who, all those years earlier, had sparked the sexual revolution on Ed Sullivan. Naturally I didn’t say all that right then. But if I’d only had time to explain my ideas, I think Elvis would have welcomed my proposal. The shift of viewpoint might even have helped him recover his lost image. Who knows? “What might have been” is an abstraction.

  T
he Only Game in Town turned out to be an entirely different movie from the one planned. It was supposed to be the story of an affair between a dancer (Elizabeth) and a pianist (Warren). But in the absence of a real dancer and a real pianist, it became a story about two failed artists, neither very brilliant in their art, whose story never seems to go anywhere in particular. Elizabeth was too old for the part, and Warren too young. But if Elizabeth wanted to do a movie and George Stevens wanted to direct it, nobody got in their way. Nobody even dreamed of saying no. A lot of bad movies get made that way, even today.

  I’d been traveling with Elizabeth and Richard for almost three years by then, and had noticed something rather strange. Often, when we got to a hotel, three dozen red roses would be there waiting for Elizabeth. At first I thought Richard was sending them. Then I learned that her admirer was Howard Hughes. So I asked Elizabeth about the roses, and she explained that Hughes’s lawyer, Greg Bautzer, had once called her with a marriage proposal from Hughes. Elizabeth thought it was a joke, but Bautzer insisted that Hughes was serious. He wanted to marry her—he was in love with her and would do anything to prove it. So Elizabeth replied, “I won’t say yes or no. Tell Howard that if he wants to prove his intentions are serious, he must send me $2 million, in cash.”