Bio - 199 - Elizabeth Taylor: There Is Nothing Like a Dame

by Darwin Porter

  “She was more a tigress than a Brigitte Bardot sex kitten,” Elizabeth said. “I think she was a very complicated woman—very ambitious, highly strung, fully aware that a great dynasty might end with her if she didn’t maneuver carefully between Julius Caesar and Marc Antony. I identify with her. To me, Mike Todd was my Julius Caesar.” She kissed Fisher on the lips. “Eddie is my Marc Antony.”

  Mankiewicz looked skeptically at Fisher.

  Harrison joined Burton back in his dressing room, where he rethought his earlier assessment of Elizabeth’s beauty. “This stuff about her being the most beautiful woman in the world is pure nonsense. She’s a pretty girl, of course, and she has wonderful eyes. But she has a double chin and an overdeveloped chest—and she’s rather short in the leg.”

  The following morning, she had to shoot her first scene with Burton. He arrived on the set battered from the previous night of carousing.

  She immediately saw what bad shape he was in. “He was kind of quivering from head to foot and there were grog blossoms [skin blemishes] all over his face.” Instead of turning her off to him, she became more sympathetic.

  As she remembered it, “He ordered a cup of coffee to sort of still his trembling hands. I had to help it to his mouth, and that brought out my motherly instincts. He was so vulnerable, so sweet, so shaky. In my heart, I cwtched him—that’s Welsh for ‘hug’”

  On location in Rome, the most famous woman of the modern world (Elizabeth Taylor) impersonates the most famous woman of the ancient world (Cleopatra) as she fine-tunes a doomed alliance with her future consort, Marc Antony (Richard Burton)

  Even so, he pulled himself together until she felt he “had the grandeur of a Roman emperor’s bust.” The problem was, he kept blowing his lines.

  In contrast, he found her “walking pornography.” Fisher was on the set that day, handling her make-up man and costume personnel. As he described in his memoirs, “When she had emerged dressed in Cleopatra’s golden gown, I was very, very sad. I had this premonition that I had lost her. She no longer needed me. I broke down and cried.”

  Earlier, when Elizabeth had been shown to her dressing room, she said, “It’s not a dressing room, it’s a god damn house. All five rooms of it, even a room just for my wigs and an office for Eddie. At least those cocksuckers at Fox are not being cheap with me.”

  Fortunately, Fisher was not at the studio on January 22, 1962 when Mankiewicz directed Marc Antony and Cleopatra in their first love scene.

  As Mankiewicz told producer Wanger, “Their succulent lips came together. He locked her into a deep, wet kiss. I ordered the scene reshot four times. I could feel their passion for each other. It was almost frightening, like an on-coming tornado. Finally, I had to say, ‘Would you two mind if I say ‘cut?’”

  The following afternoon, when the sun went behind clouds and it started to rain, Burton guided Elizabeth behind one of the faux sets. There, one of the grips spotted Burton masturbating Elizabeth.

  In about twenty minutes, when her hairdresser, Sidney Guilaroff, located her, she was adjusting her costume. The rain had stopped. She looked back at Burton and was heard to say, “You are a horrible, horrible wretch of a bloke.”

  “If I were twice as horrible, I’d be perfect for you,” he shot back, licking his fingers seductively.

  At Cineccittà one morning, after working with Elizabeth for five days, Burton appeared on the set. In front of Chris Mankiewicz and other members of the crew, he said, “Gents,” in his most impressive stentorian voice. “Last night I nailed Elizabeth in the back seat of my Cadillac.”

  The day following Burton’s seduction of her in the Cadillac, she stood nude before her dressing room mirror in front of Guilaroff and ordered him to get her a large bath towel. She then requested he pick up a blonde Marlene Dietrich type wig from wardrobe, which he did.

  Returning, he fitted the wig perfectly onto her head. She told him goodbye, as she headed toward Burton’s dressing room, where she found the door unlocked.

  Once inside, she heard him taking a shower. She came into the bathroom and pulled the plastic shower curtain back.

  At first, he didn’t recognize her. Then she dropped the towel, standing completely nude in front of him.

  “How much do you charge, luv?” he asked.

  ***

  During the making of Cleopatra, Elizabeth adopted a little German girl. She had been born with a crippling hip defect.

  “I think Elizabeth would have left Fisher sooner, but with the arrival of those adoption papers, she stuck it out a little longer,” Roddy claimed.

  When Elizabeth was first shown the child, she remembered, “Her legs were so twisted that one was practically facing around the other way.”

  The nine-month-old girl, Petra Heisis, was renamed Maria in hour of actress Maria Schell, who had guided the Fishers to the deformed baby.

  The girl had large saucer-shaped eyes and lots of curls. But she required extremely expensive operations on her legs, which her Bavarian parents could ill afford.

  After seeing a specialist, Elizabeth was told that Maria had a malformation of the pelvis. If not surgically altered, she would be crippled for life.

  Although the recovery after surgery would require two years in a full body cast, Elizabeth ordered the surgery, which she insisted be performed in London.

  For two years, the baby girl was known as Maria Taylor before her last name was changed to Burton when she was adopted by him as well. As Elizabeth recalled, “I fell in love with Maria the first day she was shown to me. I knew how much she needed me to give her a proper, happy, and fulfilling life.”

  The adoption, which was legally finalized in Catholic Bavaria, would later enrage the Vatican. Pope John XXIII was said to have privately denounced Elizabeth as an unfit mother.

  ***

  Elizabeth got on reasonably well with Rex Harrison during her scenes with him. He was involved in his own romantic entanglements, and didn’t want to get embroiled in what he called “the onrushing affair that Richard is having with Elizabeth.”

  He was sensitive to his billing on Cleopatra and didn’t want her to have too many star advantages over him. As a special bonus, Harrison was offered ongoing access to a chauffeur-driven Cadillac to take him to the studio from his Roman house along Via Antigua. One morning, he emerged from his house to encounter a Mercedes-Benz.

  HOLLYWOOD ON THE TIBER (aka ROMAN HOLIDAY) Denouncing Elizabeth as an unfit mother: Pope John XXIII

  REDEFINING FAMILY

  Maria Heisig Taylor Burton (left figure in photo above); her adoptive mother (Elizabeth Taylor); and her stepsister Lisa Todd (right figure in photo above)

  At the studio, in front of Mankiewicz, he threw a fit, claiming that he’d been promised a Cadillac, not a Mercedes-Benz.

  He also learned that Elizabeth’s chauffeur was being paid more than his driver. He threatened to walk off the picture if his chauffeur wasn’t paid an equivalent wage. “Why the bloody hell should her driver get more than mine just because she’s got a bigger chest?”

  On March 22, 1962, Harrison in Genoa would marry Rachel Roberts, a friend of Sybil Burton’s since their days as novice actresses in Stratford-upon-Avon.

  On the set one afternoon, when Elizabeth and Burton weren’t needed in front of the camera, she sat talking to him. She wanted to know anything he cared to tell her about his life, because all she knew was that he had been born in Wales. He liked talking about himself and filled her in on his early life, perhaps exaggerating to make a better story.

  “Olivier, Noël Coward, John Gielgud, all the sods, criticized me in 1952 when I gave up my acting career on the London stage to go to Hollywood,” Burton said. “They said I sold out. But I have this driving need to blot out all my years of living in humiliating poverty as a kid.”

  “I was the twelfth of thirteen children. We lived in a broken-down shanty with no running water. I never knew my mother. She died giving birth to her last child. My father was a rotter, a coalm
iner who was too drunk to work. We had to borrow ten pounds to pay for my mother’s funeral.”

  Richard Burton’s original name was Richard Walter Jenkins, Jr., named after his father, of course. His coalminer dad was more widely known as “Dic Bach,” who took home the equivalent of $1.25 a week. Once, Elizabeth asked Burton why his father had such an unusual name. “I haven’t a bloody clue,” he told her.

  Young Burton later learned four languages, but spoke only Welsh until the age of ten.

  It was Philip Burton who took the seventeen-year-old into his home and taught him drama and literature, as well as details associated with homosexual sex. Burton always hated his biological father, Dic Bach, who died in 1957. Burton did not attend the funeral and proudly took the name of his mentor and older lover, Philip Burton.

  How Green Was My Valley? Welsh schoolmaster Philip Burton (right) with his most brilliant pupil and adopted son, Richard Walter Jenkins, Jr. (aka, Richard Burton)

  Philip was a preparatory school drama teacher and an authority on Shakespeare. He was immediately attracted to Richard, who was a stunning male beauty in his late teens and early twenties.

  A homosexual, Philip invited the teenager to come and live with him in comfort, removing him from the poverty-ridden town of Pontrhydfen.

  “I always considered Philip as my true father. I met him in high school. He was the most wonderful schoolmaster. He taught me to speak English and lose my Welsh accent. He taught me drama, literature, Shakespeare. The sad thing is that he’s madly in love with me. I’m his entire life. Of course, as a young boy, I had only sex to offer him in exchange for all the wonderful things he was doing for me. Without Philip, I would probably be dead now after a brief life as a coal miner suffering from tuberculosis and malnutrition.”

  “I just pretend I attended Oxford,” he told Elizabeth. “I only got so far as high school. However, while based for six months in a Royal Air Force camp near the Oxford campus, I attended some lectures at the university.”

  “When I broke into the London theatre, there were so many established actors willing to give me a tumble on their casting couches—John Gielgud, Noël Coward, Larry Olivier, Emlyn Williams, you name him.”

  “My wife, Sybil Williams, gave up her acting career for me. She’s a great woman, and also a mother to me. She reads my scripts, studies my contracts, picks out my clothes, worries about my whoring around, warning me, ‘Don’t pick up something with these whores you can’t get rid of.’”

  By his own admission, Burton was not strictly a heterosexual, although this didn’t seem to bother Elizabeth a bit. She was used to bisexual men.

  When Dick asked her about “the size” of Burton, she deliberately misinterpreted his question. “Oh, he’s five feet, nine inches, the right size for me.” Because of his large on-screen appearance, people who met him were astonished by how short he was.

  One night, Elizabeth decided to invite the occupants of the “Villa Burton” to the Villa Pappa for dinner. Burton was living in the villa with Sybil, and also with Roddy McDowall and his lover, John Valva. As a favor to Roddy, Mankiewicz had cast Valva as “Valvus,” a Roman soldier.

  After dinner, Elizabeth and Burton got drunk on “Ivan the Terribles,” a mind-bending blend of Grappa, Ouzo, and Russian vodka.

  At one point over drinks, Fisher asked Burton, “Does a man really have to give a woman jewelry? Isn’t that like buying a piece of ass?”

  Burton lived up to his reputation as a marathon drinker. He gave a slob-bering Shakespearean monologue that lasted for nearly an hour until Sybil ordered him to sit down. Once seated, he asked for more liquor and became more provocative than ever. He turned to Fisher. “Noël Coward told me you have the most delectable ass. Remind me to sample it before I finish this bloody picture.”

  “Mr. Burton, my ass is only for shitting and sucking by a beautiful woman like Elizabeth here. You will never experience its pleasures. I am not a homosexual.”

  “Actually, I think all straight men should experience at least one good plugging up their arse so they’ll know what it’s like,” Elizabeth said.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Burton said.

  She turned to him and said, “I absolutely adore you in spite of that acne-pitted face of yours.”

  “And I think you’re ravishing in spite of all that whale blubber,” he countered.

  “With that voice of yours, you are a prince among men,” she said.

  “Actually, I’m more of a frog than a prince,” he told her.

  Sitting at the head of the table, Elizabeth would bark orders at her Italian waiters, who spoke no English. “Pass around the roast suckling pig, you moth-erfucker. We’re ready for the spaghetti, asshole.”

  The party ended disastrously when a bored Fisher, a major musical star in his own right, walked over and started playing the piano and singing. “Shut up!” Elizabeth shouted at him. “We’re trying to talk.”

  He slammed down the piano top and stormed out of the room.

  “Time I took my drunken old sod home,” Sybil said, rising and reaching for Burton’s arm. “Elizabeth, you’re a delight. The dinner was spectacular. What was that unusual appetizer, by the way?”

  “The tongues of flamingos,” she said.

  “That was the creamiest custard I’ve ever tasted,” Burton said.

  “I asked all members of my male staff to whack off in a bowl,” Elizabeth said. “Their combined semen was whipped into the egg custard mix and also used to make the whipped cream extra thick.”

  “Oh, I think I’m going to be sick,” Sybil said.

  “Male semen,” Dick Hanley said. “No wonder it tasted so good. I’ve now discovered my favorite new dessert.”

  ***

  Word reached Hollywood that the filming of Cleopatra was costing millions every week with little to show for it. Walter Wanger and Joseph Mankiewicz were said to have lost control of the budget.

  Armed with a “flotilla” of accountants, Spyros Skouras himself made the long journey to Rome to find out what was going on.

  Costs mounted, as Mankiewicz made outrageously bad decisions, including shooting scenes that would not be used and ordering sets constructed at exorbitant overtime costs that would sit idle for months—or else not be used at all.

  Mankiewicz hovered on the verge of a nervous breakdown, as he took amphetamine shots to keep working on his uncompleted script, getting by on three hours of sleep most nights.

  Everything from outraged Fox stockholders and rampaging elephants plagued him, as did the “epic” battles between the Italian and American crews. He constantly gnawed his knuckles and finally came down with a nervous skin disease on his hands, forcing him to wear gloves.

  In Rome to confront the mounting problems of filming Cleopatra, Skouras met first with Wanger. “I told you Burton was trash. Remember I didn’t want to hire him. It’s your god damn fault.”

  “Actually, all this worldwide publicity about Cleopatra will make Burton a bigger star than ever, and Elizabeth a living legend,” Wanger said.

  “OK, I grant that about Miss Taylor, our resident whore, but Burton will never be a star,” Skouras said. “Mark my words.”

  The next day, after watching the rushes of Cleopatra, Skouras changed his mind. He invited Burton for lunch and offered him contracts for two more pictures. “Make-up can fill in these hideous pockmarks,” he told the actor.

  Back in Hollywood, someone had tipped off Skouras about some romantic entanglement between Burton and Elizabeth.

  It had been a peaceful luncheon. Actually, Elizabeth’s name never came up. That’s why Burton was shocked when he received a hot-tempered memo which was delivered to him in his dressing room later that day. The letter to Burton instructed him to “clean up your act.”

  On receiving it, the Welshman flew into a rage. He had learned that an equivalent letter was on its way to Elizabeth’s villa. He called her and warned her to expect it.

  She then flew into her own rage
, calling Skouras’ office and threatening to walk off the picture if such a letter arrived at her villa. Skouras was able to contact the delivery boy just in time to intercept and retrieve the accusatory memo he’d sent.

  Cleopatra

  An Über-Diva checks her make-up.

  Still saddled with unhappy memories about his star role in Alexander the Great (1956), which had been panned by critics, and now faced with studio disapproval about his involvement in Cleopatra, Burton ripped his copy of Skouras’ memo into shreds.

  Soonafter, he accidentally ran into a reporter from Variety who had been sent to Rome. He answered no personal questions about his private life, but he apologized for appearing in another “sex and scandal” epic. He announced to the reporter that his next picture would be a screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew opposite Marilyn Monroe. When he’d had an affair with Monroe in Hollywood, she’d told him that her great dream involved appearing in a Shakespeare drama, although she had not yet read one of his plays or seen one performed on the stage.

  Ironically, he would film The Taming of the Shrew (1967), but with Elizabeth as his co-star, as Monroe had been murdered in 1962.

  Over dinner that night, Roddy discovered that Burton had never seen one of Elizabeth’s movies. “I really can’t judge her as an actress,” he said. “All I know about her is she gets sick and she gets married.”

  When the first rushes of Cleopatra came in, Roddy invited Burton to come and look at them.

  As he witnessed the magic relationship she had with the camera, he began to change his mind about her as an actress. “She surprised the devil out of me. She seemed to sleepwalk through our rehearsals. She doesn’t come alive until the camera focuses on her. She sure knows how to turn it on then.”