Another fight erupted. As it was later revealed, he beat her brutally, evocative of her fistfights with Mike Todd.
She suffered a black eye and facial contusions before he tossed her battered body into a Fiat and drove her back to Rome at the speed of one hundred miles an hour. One Italian patrolman pursued them, but Burton outran him as Elizabeth screamed for him to go faster.
She later confessed to Roddy, “I really wanted him to speed up and rush to our deaths. If he couldn’t be mine, I didn’t want Sybil to have him.”
***
Back at Villa Pappa, Fisher discovered a badly bruised Elizabeth recovering from her weekend getaway north of Rome with Burton. Nothing had changed. If anything, she was more withdrawn from him than ever, and he reported, “We often ate our meals without saying a word to each other.”
Fisher read in the tabloids the next day that he “looked as gaunt as a second-hand scarecrow.” The tension over losing his wife was destroying his health, and he had been unsuccessful in New York in securing any singing engagements worth his while.
In response to Elizabeth’s weekend getaway, Mankiewicz had to announce another costly delay in the filming of Cleopatra until her face healed.
It all became too much for Fox in Hollywood. “The heads rolled that weekend,” said Roddy. “Elizabeth and Richard had to put their personal problems aside and deal with a major shakeup at Fox.”
Millions were being spent on Cleopatra, and Fox was going bankrupt. Enraged stockholders fired Spyros Skouras as president. Walter Wanger was fired as Cleopatra’s producer, and Mankiewicz was fired as its director.
[Although Mankiewicz had been ousted, he was later re-hired because no one else could piece together the extraordinarily long film during post-production.]
The enormous cost of completing Cleopatra more or less brought an end to the “sword and sandals” epics that had flourished during the 1950s, one of which had been Burton’s own Alexander the Great (1956).
Mistress-collecting Darryl F. Zanuck, who had been ousted from the studio and had been temporarily living in Paris and planning a career as an independent producer, was reinstated as President of Fox. It was the company’s stockholders who asked him to come back, believing that he might be the only executive who could save Fox from bankruptcy.
Zanuck’s first move involved selling off Fox’s back lot to real estate developers, who transformed it into Century City, a sprawling commercial and residential complex on Los Angeles’ west side.
When Zanuck saw the rushes of Cleopatra, he was enraged, referring to it as “total chaos. The performers act like inmates in an asylum. The dialogue is overwrought.”
Later, when he viewed a preliminary version of the film, which had been cut to a running length of five hours, he delivered a malapropism more suited to Samuel Goldwyn, who was famous for uttering them. Zanuck claimed, “If any woman behaved toward me the way Cleopatra treated Antony, I would cut her balls off.”
A reporter asked him what were his regrets about his former role as the “chief honcho at Fox.”
“I’ve got only two regrets,” he said. “I didn’t fuck Shirley Temple, although I tried, and I never got around to Elizabeth Taylor. I guess I never will because Fox is now suing Burton and the spoiled viper.”
In Fox’s lawsuit, Elizabeth was cited “for suffering herself to be held up to scorn, ridicule, and unfavorable publicity as a result of her conduct and deportment.”
Zanuck was asking for fifty million dollars compensation from both Burton and Elizabeth, accusing them of “willfully and deliberately delaying production.”
In time, Elizabeth settled with Fox for $2 million. In the final tally, she made $4 million from the picture, not the original, much-touted $1 million that she had originally asked for.
The Battle for Burton was also raging. On April 23, 1962, Sybil returned to Rome to deal with her marital situation directly.
Every day, Wanger pressured an increasingly unstable Fisher to abandon Rome and to not return to the set, especially when it was learned that he carried a loaded pistol. Before his final departure from the scene, Fisher decided to visit Sybil at Burton’s villa, where she was in residence again. Roddy and Burton were at Cinecittà, but Roddy’s companion, John Valva, was in the villa with Sybil at the time.
Fisher confronted her and told her the truth: “Burton’s not coming back this time. Elizabeth is not like his other women. She’s got her claws in him. He might come back for a brief reconciliation here and there, but you’ve got to face facts—it’s over!”
Roddy later found out that Fisher spent about an hour with Sybil, who chose not to reveal the exact nature of their talk.
When Roddy returned to the villa, he found Sybil in tears.
“Fisher made me face what I had not wanted to face, what I could not even admit to myself—and that was that Richard loves Elizabeth more than me.”
“He should not have done that,” Roddy said, “but no one ever accused Eddie of being a gentleman. How did you respond?”
“After he made his case, I gave him the hardest slap in the face I was capable of giving and ordered him out of the house.”
That same night, Fisher chose the moment to announce that he was driving north to Florence and Milan for no particular reason before returning to New York. “I’m leaving, perhaps for good,” he told Elizabeth.
She yelled at him, “No one walks out on me, faggot. I’m more famous than the Pope, and the Queen of England, who always walks around like she’s got a poker stuck up her ass. I’m even more famous than General Eisenhower.”
But in spite of her fame, Fisher drove north the next morning in one of the Rolls-Royces she’d given him. He would later leave the Rolls at the Milan airport and would never see it again. Thieves made off with it.
From Florence, Fisher called the Villa Pappa in Rome, where Burton picked up the receiver. “What in hell are you doing there with my wife?” he asked.
“What in the bloody hell do you think I’m doing?” Burton said. “Fucking your wife—that’s what! The only thing you’re good at, Fisher, is sucking cock or taking it up the ass. You’re not a man. I’m going to come to Florence and kill you.”
“Stay where you are,” Fisher ordered him. “I’m heading back to Rome to kill you, you mother-fucker.”
Of course, these turned out to be two idle threats from two ego-driven performers.
Although Burton was with Elizabeth and making love to her at the time of Fisher’s call from Florence, the next day found him with Sybil again.
Sybil convinced her husband, during a break in filming when he wasn’t needed, to leave Elizabeth and travel to meet her and their two daughters at their home in Céligny, Switzerland.
Burton left that afternoon to join Sybil and their daughters, taking a train north from Rome. He made a decision not to confront Elizabeth with the news of where he was going. “It’s all over,” he told Roddy before heading out. “Sorry, old pal, but I’m leaving it up to you to pass the word along to our Liz gal. God damn it! At times I feel every fucking bitch wants my dick and all the cock-suckers, too. That includes you, my friend.”
Both Dick and Roddy knew to be with Elizabeth when she comprehended the news that both her husband and her lover had deserted her.
“You can’t go on being tossed around like a ball by Richard,” Roddy said. “Let Sybil have him.”
Dick urged her to send him an urgent letter to his villa in Céligny. In a drunken state, she agreed to do that. “I want him to know that I’m the one dumping him. I was hopelessly in love with him, but the affair is over.”
Dick claimed that he mailed the letter, but he doesn’t know if it was ever received.
Both Dick and Roddy slept over at Villa Pappa that night. At three o’clock in the morning, Dick decided to enter Elizabeth’s room to check on her. He’d already removed all dangerous drugs, including her inventory of Seconal, from her suite. To his horror, he discovered a bottle, emptied of its content
s, labeled as a container for that potent and dangerous barbiturate and sedative. He immediately summoned Roddy, who called an ambulance.
Once again, she was rushed to Salvator Mundi Hospital, where her stomach was pumped. An informant at the hospital called the newspapers, and word of Elizabeth’s most recent suicide attempt was flashed around the world.
Her doctor told Roddy and Dick that, “Miss Taylor nearly died tonight. If she keeps doing this, she will succeed one night. That I predict.”
When Fisher heard the news of Elizabeth’s suicide attempt, he rushed back to Rome. She refused to allow him into her hospital room for an entire week. She only relented when he promised to bring her some cold beer.
Once inside her room, he made some attempt to kiss her, but she brushed him aside. “Open that beer can and get me a cigarette,” she ordered him.
Burton, meanwhile, was with Sybil and their daughters at Céligny when he heard the news of Elizabeth’s latest suicide attempt. He told he wife that he, too, was returning to Rome, even though she pleaded with him to stay.
Only hours after he drove away, Sybil attempted suicide. Mike Nichols later visited her and confirmed the report. He said, “I saw the scars. Two red razor blade scars on her left wrist.”
When Burton arrived in Rome, she agreed to see him right away. She never told anyone what the two of them talked about, other than to say, “We have reached some understanding.”
When reporters crowded around Burton as he was leaving the hospital, he said, “I have nothing to say.”
When Roddy and Dick confronted Burton that night, each of them found him “wavering.”
“He still hasn’t made up his God damn mind yet,” Dick said.
“The next morning, Burton told Roddy, “Elizabeth and I will be on the French Riviera together. We’re also going to Gstaad. Our future is uncertain.”
“My God, if you cut Sybil loose, she might take John (a reference to John Valva) away from me. They spend a lot of time together and seem to adore each other.”
Roddy said that as a joke, but it eventually came true.
***
After her release from the hospital in the wake of her most recent suicide attempt, Elizabeth lived uneasily with Fisher at Villa Pappa. He tried to look after her, but mostly she attacked him, finding fault with almost anything he did, especially when he tried to control her drinking and pill-popping.
He knew that it was time to leave. But before going, he decided he would spend a final night with her. Even though she’d been hostile to him, she did not kick him out of her bed.
As he would partially relate in his memoirs, he planned to give her a “farewell fuck.” When he moved on top of her, she did not resist him, but didn’t reciprocate in his love-making. “I got off,” he later claimed, “but she didn’t. She was like a bored housewife having to endure an assault from her old spouse.”
The next morning, he rose nude from her bed and stood looking down at her when she slowly opened her eyes. “Her face was a total blank. I looked for some kind of love or recognition. But I found nothing registered on her face. I could have been some waiter she’d brought back from a Roman restaurant for the night. I knew it was over.”
“Just to let you know, I’m flying to New York this morning,” he told her.
“If you go, you’ll never see me again,” she said.
“I’m going.” He headed for the door.
Dick Hanley drove him to the airport at ten o’clock. Fisher told him, “My humiliation has been too great. I can’t take it any more.”
Fisher later recalled, “Before I got on that plane at the Rome airport, I downed three stiff vodkas with Seconals. I knew it was all over, except for the fight over money, which was likely to drag on for years.”
He left for New York on March 19, 1962, and wouldn’t see Elizabeth again for two whole years.
***
In June of 1962, after 225 days of filming at various locations in Italy, Spain, and Egypt, Cleopatra was wrapped. A mountain of film had been exposed, and the first rough cut ran for eight hours.
At the time of his departure from Rome, ten months after his arrival there, Burton said, “I never want to see this bloody place again—flashbulbs in the dead of night, lies in the press, Vespas racing after us, interference from the Vatican…To hell with it!”
At the time of Elizabeth’s departure from the Rome airport, she turned to Roddy, who recalled her words to him: “I’ve won!”
“You mean he’s promised to divorce Sybil and marry you?” Roddy asked.
“It’s not that simple,” she responded. “But I now hold the winning card. Dozens of offers for starring roles in films, as you know, are coming in. In the immediate future, I’m going to insist that Richard be my leading man in all of my upcoming films.”
“My God!” Roddy said, “Sybil can’t compete with that. Let me put it this way: You’re making Richard an offer he can’t refuse.”
“You got that right, sweetheart,” she said, before bidding him au revoir.
Aboard the jet plane, the captain came out to greet her personally and to tell her she was his favorite movie star and “the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“Of course I am,” she said to him, maybe only half in jest. “One question: Why do they call Rome ‘The Eternal City?’ There’s nothing eternal about it.”
POSTSCRIPTS TO CHAPTER 19
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO EDDIE FISHER?
Although the press was still on Fisher’s trail, he managed to slip in an affair after leaving Elizabeth that reporters didn’t discover. Checking into the Hotel Pierre in Manhattan, he occupied the room next to Audrey Hepburn’s.
Along with Elizabeth, he had entertained her and her husband, Mel Ferrer, in Rome.
At the Pierre, they had rooms with connecting doors. Ferrer was out of town on business.
One night over dinner, Fisher admitted to Hepburn that Elizabeth had urged him to try to get the Eliza Doolittle role for her in My Fair Lady. “Audrey burst into tears and clung to me,” Fisher later confessed to Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and others. “She felt terribly betrayed by Elizabeth. When you’ve got the delicate, lovely Audrey in your arms, something happens,” Fisher said.
“I didn’t feel all that sorry for him,” Martin later said. “Here he was, shacked up with the most beautiful woman in the world, Elizabeth Taylor. He goes to New York and bangs Audrey, who some consider even more beautiful than Elizabeth. I’ll shed no crocodile tears for Eddie.”
In his memoirs, Fisher confessed, “There was never anything physical between Audrey and me, but I was in love with her.” He was obviously sparing her reputation, since she was a married woman. At the time, he was still married, too.
Roddy McDowall, who later hooked up with Fisher in New York to talk about Elizabeth, later claimed he knew about his brief fling with Hepburn. “It was love on the rebound, a common occurrence.”
Back in New York, Fisher was seen dating Maria Schell and getting endless shots of speed from Dr. Feelgood (Max Jacobson).
The gangster, Frank Costello, called him with an offer to have his henchmen in Rome break Burton’s legs. “They’ll even cut off his dick if you want that done, too,” Costello said. Fisher declined this offer.
Fisher’s sudden notoriety led to a series of nightclub appearances. He opened his act singing “Arrivederci, Roma.”
At the Winter Garden in Manhattan, he was both appearing with and “fucking Frankie’s girl friend,” Fisher claimed. He was referring to Juliet Prowse, the French chanteuse, who had been engaged for a brief, dysfunctional period to Sinatra. She appeared at the Winter Garden with Fisher, singing, “I’m Cleo, the Nympho of the Nile.”
From the law firm of Louis Nizer in New York, a terse, coolly worded memo was released to the press on April 2, 1962: “Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher announced that they have mutually agreed to part. Divorce proceedings will be instituted soon.”
After his divorce from Elizabeth, Fishe
r for a while dated voice coach Angela Sweeney. To author C. David Heymann, she praised the size of his penis, and also his ability to “have sex as often as a dozen times a night. It was unreal. He would reach climax and immediately he would have another erection. I attributed his sexual prowess to his speed addiction.”
After his divorce from Elizabeth, he admitted in his memoirs to “taking Meth and drinking straight vodka all day. Life became blurred….Elizabeth was the one great love of my life,” Fisher recalled. “but she treated me like a slave, and I spent most of my time attending to her various illnesses and ailments— that is, when not cleaning up dog poop.”
Fisher blamed Elizabeth for destroying his career. In 1970, he filed for bankruptcy in Puerto Rico, listing debts of $916,000 and assets of $40,000. Actually, he could have blamed Elvis Presley. Fisher’s style of crooning went out of fashion with the end of the Eisenhower administration.
As the years deepened, Elizabeth’s contact with Fisher faded, except for an occasional call of desperation:
FISHER: “The boys in Vegas are after me. If I don’t come up with $225,000 by tomorrow night, it’s all over for me.”
ELIZABETH: “I’ll wire you the money in the morning.”
After Elizabeth dumped him, Fisher would marry three more times.
In 1969, he wed the singer, Connie Stevens, and fathered two children with her, Joely and Tricia.
In 1976, he married beauty queen Terry Richard but the marriage lasted only ten months.
In 1993, he hit the jackpot, wedding a rich San Francisco night club owner, Betty Lin, who left him millions when she died of lung cancer in 2001.
Fisher himself died at the age of 82, based on complications associated with a broken hip, in September of 2010.
Three views of Eddie Fisher that prove that there was, indeed, life after Elizabeth: Left photo, with singer Connie Stevens; middle photo: with Terry Richard (Miss Louisiana, 1973); and right photo: with millionaire Betty Lin
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