On the night of November 10, Burton’s birthday, Elizabeth presented him with a library of calfskin-bound classics, priced at $35,000.
He thanked her by kissing her profusely. But later he got so drunk, he denounced her as a “scurrilous low creature,” charging that she’d had sex on the beach with a lot of those Mexican beach boy hustlers. Actually, she had done nothing of the sort. From the fog of his intoxication, Burton blamed Elizabeth for what Gardner was doing.
The entire cast was shocked on November 22, 1963, when news reached them that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Elizabeth had known JFK intimately, and “she cried for two days,” according to Dick.
The next day, Gardner got drunk long before noon and entertained the crew with tales of “my brief but memorable fling with Jack.”
Burton was perhaps the first to connect the slain president to Camelot, wherein he’d interpreted the role of King Arthur. “Camelot symbolized for President Kennedy where America wanted to be. In a Kingdom of Grace and Righteousness, surrounded by monsters and dark enemies, but triumphing over them all, the Democracy of Good over the Empire of Evil, with a big sword and song.”
In one of the most bizarre show-biz stories to emerge from the immediate aftermath of JFK’s assassination, the following day, Kirk Douglas and his publicist visited Jackie Kennedy at the White House to express their sympathies. “Kirk,” she asked. “Do you think Elizabeth Taylor will marry Richard Burton?”
Gardner learned that Burton had celebrated a birthday, and she’d been unaware of it. When she first heard of it around November 30, she presented him with a fifth of bourbon, a delayed birthday present.
“That’s not all Ava gave him!” Huston told his cronies. “I couldn’t get either of my two stars to emerge from her dressing room until the sun was high in the sky, and the heat was crushing. When they did emerge, they weren’t really in condition to appear on camera that day.”
As author Nancy Schoenberger wrote: “Ava seemed to come alive in Richard’s presence. The press were not just covering a congregation of some of the world’s greatest talents and$personalities in a remote Mexican village, they were waiting—hoping?—that Burton and Taylor’s vaunted love affair might founder on Ava Gardner’s dangerous shoulders.”
The coming together of the drunken, poetry-spouting, lust-filled Welsh actor and the Tarheel femme fatale and sex symbol had sparked “meaningful eye contact,” as Huston described it.
One day before noon, both Gardner and Burton got drunk on a local moonshine known as raicilla. It was made from the agave plant. Gardner called it “cactus piss.”
Huston defined it as “a cactus brandy stronger than tequila.” Burton said the way to drink raicilla was straight down. That way you can feel it going into each individual intestine.” When Elizabeth tried it, she said, “I hear it’s made from cactus. Tell the fuckers who brewed it that they left the god damn needles in it.”
One evening when Elizabeth was suffering from “turista,” Dick Hanley drove Burton to the Casablanca Bar. To Dick’s surprise, a sultry Ava Gardner was waiting there for him. Burton turned to Dick, “I can always count on you for being discreet around Her Ladyship.”
Actually, Burton was wrong about that.
“After Ava and Richard consumed enough alcohol to resink the Titanic, they retired to one of the hot-bed shanties out back, where they disappeared,” Dick said. “I wondered if Richard could get it up in his condition. I sat in the bar with this beach boy hustler waiting for their return. They were gone for about three hours. Both of them came back into the bar hardly able to stand up. I literally had to toss them into the back of our car.”
The next day, Elizabeth suspected that something had happened. Since Dick was loyal to her and not necessarily to Burton, she cornered him and pressed him for details about Burton’s dalliance with Gardner.
She told Dick, “I won’t say a god damn thing to the whoremonger. But when my first chance comes along, I’m going to get even. Be on the lookout for a handsome, well-hung charmer who’d like to fuck Elizabeth Taylor.”
That day on the beach, her feet were attacked by chigoes, tropical fleas that burrow into the skin. If left untreated, they can invade a host’s bloodstream. She had to have them removed with a surgical knife.
Knives were certainly not on her mind when she went with her two sons and daughter to the town square to watch a performance of the circus which had come to town. When one of the entertainers, Alejandro Fuentes, nicknamed “The Dagger Man,” called for volunteers from the audience, Elizabeth, who had already consumed three Bloody Marys, cheerfully volunteered.
She stood before a wooden backdrop as the Mexican circus performer prepared to throw scimitars at her. The audience screamed when the first scimitar came within two inches of her face. Fuentes hurled three more, narrowly missing her. She stood almost fearless against the onslaught, later telling the press, “I’ve had daggers thrown at me before.”
Fuentes later said, “Mother of God! I’m so grateful I didn’t miss, because I’d had a little too much tequila that morning.”
***
Elizabeth already had confirmation of Burton’s brief fling with Gardner. But she also suspected that something might be going on between Burton and Sue Lyon, who played the rigidly chaperoned blonde nymphet in Iguana. In some ways, her selection as the actress in that role had been influenced by her involvement, in 1962, of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, an adaptation of the novel by Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita) about a middle-aged man’s sexual obsession with a young adolescent girl.
Burton, incidentally, had seen Lyon’s film interpretation of Lolita three times, exhibiting a keen interest of which Elizabeth was emphatically aware.
In Iguana, Burton was cast as an alcoholic and defrocked priest tempted by the seductive teenager, as portrayed by Lyon, whose persona was in distinct contrast to Ava Gardner’s portrayal of a fully mature, man-hungry whore cavorting with her agile and shirtless Mexican cabaña boys
In reference to the script, Elizabeth had said, “My God, how times have changed. It was only yesterday that Paul Newman and I had to face all those restrictions from censors troubled by Tennessee’s script of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. If this trend continues, Hollywood will be turning out homosexual love stories.”
Elizabeth wasn’t the only person struggling to keep Burton away from Lyon. She’d arrived in Puerto Vallarta with her boy friend, Hampton Fancher III. Huston’s biographer, Lawrence Grobel, described the boy as “a tall, pale youth ravaged by love.” Soon after his arrival, Fancher warned Burton, “I tend to be murderously inclined.”
The circumstances which led to Burton finally being left alone with Lyon involved the fact that her boyfriend, as it turned out, was married. His young wife arrived unexpectedly on the set one day. Fancher would marry Lyon before the year ended, after his divorce became final.
As Lyon remembered it, “Richard drank so much at night that the alcohol literally oozed out of his pores the next day. It gave off a terrible odor.”
Elizabeth did not learn about Burton’s affair with Lyon until 1981, almost 18 years after it ended, when Eddie Fisher’s first volume of memoirs was published.
Two views of Sue Lyon
Heating up Iguana with Burton as her tour guide and (inset) as Lolita in 1962.
In them, Fisher wrote: “I was surprised to discover that being dumped by Elizabeth had made me an extremely desirable man. I had gained a reputation for being an incredible lover— which is not a terrible reputation to have. There were many women like Sue Lyon, the very beautiful little girl who had starred in Lolita, who wanted to know if I was a better lover than Burton, so she slept with both of us. She was very upfront about her motives: This wasn’t love, this was an experiment. Naturally, I rose to the challenge. “
Although the Burton/Lyon affair had burned out long before Elizabeth discovered that it had even happened, she flew into a rage when she learned, through Eddie’s memoirs, about its existence.
&n
bsp; “Michael Wilding was on the scene. Why didn’t she fuck him, too?” If Mike Todd’s corpse hadn’t been incinerated, perhaps she could have dug him up, too. And I’m sure that when she returned to Hollywood, Nicky Hilton would have fucked her, too.”
***
On December 5, 1963, Burton’s divorce from Sybil was finalized, based on his “abandonment and cruel and inhumane treatment.”
“At last Richard is free to marry me,” Elizabeth told Dick Hanley. “This is the best Christmas present I’ve ever had in my life.”
Simultaneous with that news, Elizabeth and Fisher were still fighting over money and possessions. He may have wanted all his jewelry back, but she wanted the second emerald green Rolls-Royce she’d given him. [The first vehicle had been stolen in Milan.] She also asked to keep the chalet in Gstaad and wanted all the profits from their jointly owned MCL Films.
His lawyers, however, finally forced her to make concessions with the understanding that Fisher would “refrain from embarrassing her publicly.” Consequently Fisher’s first memoir wasn’t published until 1981, a delay based partly on his fear of lawsuits from both Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth.
Regarding his feud with Elizabeth, Fisher told the press, “Elizabeth deserves the Oscar for sheer gall. Perhaps she’s being advised by Richard the Lion-Hearted, who is hustling her, trying to jump-start a film career for himself, if he can stay sober long enough.”
In Puerto Vallarta, Elizabeth constantly referred to Fisher as “that fucking schmuck!” She told both Burton and Dick that, “I’ll never speak to the prick again.”
At a dinner party at Casa Kimberly, she denounced him in front of her guests. “I never loved him. Marrying that schmuck was the biggest mistake of my life. I was trying to keep Mike Todd’s memory alive. Mike once told me that if anything happened to him, I should marry Eddie and let him take care of me. I was in a state of shock. When I married the schmuck, I thought I did it because Mike wanted me to.”
Elizabeth’s petition for divorce from Fisher was filed in Mexico on grounds of abandonment. Its legalities were finalized on March 6, 1964, when she was in Toronto “chaperoning” Burton, who was starring in a stage production of Hamlet. “The schmuck,” she said, “is gone from life forever.”
Fisher, in contrast, celebrated his divorce in New York by seducing a series of beautiful girls—“eighteen in a row for eighteen nights. On the nineteenth day, I rested.”
He told the press, “Elizabeth will marry Burton, but will eventually dump him. Then she’ll marry someone else, and dump him, and the pattern will go on until she’s old and fat. What Elizabeth wants, she gets. She is beautiful, the queen. But she uses up men.”
***
Before his departure from Mexico for New York, Tennessee Williams hosted a party at his rented villa near Elizabeth and Burton in Gringo Gulch. He’d invited both of them to attend, but only Elizabeth had shown up.
There, she met Jose Bolaños, a Mexican screen writer who was enjoying a certain vogue. After the murder of Marilyn Monroe on August 4, 1962, he was getting a lot of press attention and being hailed as her last and final boyfriend.
Bolaños claimed that he and Monroe had mutually committed themselves to get married, although some of her friends said that Monroe had promised to remarry Joe DiMaggio.
Bolaños was working on a TV commercial twenty-five miles to the south, but had come to Puerto Vallarta with the hope of meeting and ingratiating himself with Elizabeth as he had with Monroe.
Jose Bolaños with Marilyn Monroe only weeks before her murder
Tennessee had been charmed by the charismatic young Mexican and had set up the meeting with Elizabeth, presumably without Burton.
She defined him as a Latin lover archetype, evocative of both Fernando Lamas and Ricardo Montalban. Bolaños was dark and handsome, with a magnetic personality. The night of their meeting, Bolaños told her that his dream involved coming to Hollywood and putting both Lamas and Montalban “out of business.” Secretly, he hoped that by attaching himself to Elizabeth, she could use her influence to help him break into the American film industry.
Elizabeth might have paid scant attention to Bolaños except for two reasons: He was the only man she’d met in Puerto Vallarta who qualified for that “revenge fuck” she’d planned as a means of getting even with Burton for seducing Ava Gardner. Also, she was tempted by the idea of learning intimate secrets about Monroe’s last lover, especially if the fallen star had considered Bolaños as marriage material.
At Tennessee’s party, Bolaños exuded masculinity, and as Elizabeth would tell Dick Hanley, “He stood so close to me he was practically rubbing that big package up against me.”
Dick didn’t need to be told about that, as he, too, was at the party and could see what was obviously going on. “Bolaños was flirting with her, and Elizabeth was flirting right back.”
On his own turf within Mexico’s film community, Bolaños was known as a “star fucker,” having previously seduced such aging screen divas as Merle Oberon and Dolores Del Rio.
On the patio of Tennessee’s rented villa, lit by colored lights, Bolaños danced both the rumba and the samba with Elizabeth. Tennessee had hired a six-member band, each of the members appearing in tight white pants and shirtless, as per the playwright’s request.
According to his reputation, Bolaños specialized in making a woman feel like she was the only female on earth.
The screenwriter mesmerized Elizabeth with his tales of working in the film industry in Mexico. He had been an intimate friend of the late, great modernist painter, Diego Rivera, and was also close to the Spain-born director Luís Buñuel, a towering figure in experimental cinema.
Bolaños also invited Elizabeth to see the Mexican historical epic, La Cucaracha (aka The Soldiers of Pancho Villa; 1959), whose screenplay he had written.
She pumped Bolaños for any details he could supply about Monroe’s final weeks alive. Dick came over to join them. “Bolaños was very clever,” he said. “He did not speak unkindly of Marilyn, but he placed Elizabeth on a higher pedestal. About three times, he told her that ‘you are, of course, a far greater star than Marilyn, who possessed neither your talent nor your beauty.”
“Your beauty is a natural beauty,” Bolaños told Elizabeth in front of Dick. “Marilyn had to become Marilyn Monroe by acting the part, dressing up, and painting her face. With no make-up on, I’m sure you’d look stunning. Surely no one on the planet has eyes as beautiful as yours.”
She was won over. Dick agreed to drive them from Tennessee’s party back to his apartment, where he waited outside, in his car, for two hours.
When she finally came downstairs, she said, “Thanks for the use of your apartment. I hope you don’t mind, but Jose wanted to stay over and not drive back to his motel along these impossible unlit roads at night.”
“I don’t mind at all,” he said.
“All I will tell you is this: Marilyn died too soon. I understand completely why she wanted to marry Bolaños. He is God’s gift to women, a great lover. Jose can be added to the list of many men Marilyn and I have shared. Richard Burton, John F. Kennedy, and Frank Sinatra come to mind. There were others.”
“Peter Lawford, perhaps?” Dick asked.
“That goes without saying,” she said. “Now take me home in case lover boy has straggled in.”
She was, of course, referring to Burton, who had gone out that night drinking with Peter Viertel and Huston.
Back at his own apartment, Dick came into his bedroom. A nude Bolaños was asleep on his bed. Very gently, Dick slipped a sheet over him. “Lucky Marilyn, lucky Elizabeth,” he later told Roddy McDowall.
“The next morning, I made breakfast for Jose,” Dick said. “He also let me make love to him, but only in exchange for a big favor.”
“I know you’re her secretary,” Bolaños said, “and you can arrange for me to have a rendezvous with her in Hollywood. I want to be in her life. She’ll tire of Burton. He’s an old man of failing p
owers, I heard. I want to be nearby when she replaces Burton.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal, but I’ll expect my pound of flesh.”
He sighed. “All of you mariposas want that. So if you deliver Elizabeth Taylor to me, you can have me on occasion. After all, I’m the most sought after male in all of Mexico.”
***
In Becket (1964), John Gielgud had played Louis VII, the effete King of France, beside Burton, who played a 12th-century archbishop in conflict with the English king. Over drinks together in a pub, both actors agreed that each of them should participate in some way to bring “the Bard to the masses.”
Burton suggested that he’d like to perform Hamlet again if Gielgud would direct him. The project almost didn’t get off the ground during its early stages when Gielgud informed him that, “Your first venture as Hamlet at the Old Vic offended my poetic sensitivity.”
During the 1953-54 season at London’s Old Vic, Burton had appeared under Michael Benthall’s direction as Hamlet. Claire Bloom had been his Ophelia in more ways than one. She and Burton had one of the most torrid affairs of his career as a seducer when they starred together. His performance was viewed as successful, and even Winston Churchill came backstage to congratulate Burton as “My Lord Hamlet.”
Burton had become the hottest male celebrity in the world. After his success in Becket, when he announced that he wanted to return to the stage as Hamlet, money was raised for the production in twenty-four hours.
One of Broadway’s most successful producers, 43-year-old Alexander Cohen seemed only too eager to put up the cash. He didn’t faint when presented with Burton’s demand of $10,000 a week, plus 15 percent of every ticket sold. That was to become the richest deal for any actor in the history of Broadway.
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