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

by Darwin Porter

  “In the end, Jose was very disappointed that Elizabeth did nothing for him in the film industry,” Dick said. “After Richard and Elizabeth left for Paris, she told me not to put through any more of his calls or answer any of his letters. I felt a little sorry for the kid, as he had lost both Marilyn, because she died, and then Elizabeth, because she dropped him.”

  When his involvement with the filming of The Sandpiper was concluded, in early October of 1966, Tirella returned to the East Coast and began a “creative collaboration” with Doris Duke. He moved with her into Rough Point, one of the largest mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, where he was commissioned as her interior decorator during some of its renovations. But after growing tired of being both companion and nursemaid to the notoriously imperious heiress within her gloomy white elephant of an estate, Tirella became argumentative and consequently met a much worse fate than Bolaños.

  In Big Sur, producer Martin Ransohoff had been so impressed with Tirella’s contribution to The Sandpiper that he made him an offer for work on the set of Don’t Make Waves, an ode to the go-go southern California beach culture of the 60s. Eventually released in 1967, with advertising slogans that included “It fills up the screen like she fills out a bikini,” it starred Tony Curtis and Sharon Tate, the actress who would confront her own grisly death at the murderous hands of Charles Manson’s gang.

  Confronted with the reality of Tirella’s upcoming abandonment, Duke argued violently, jockeying and maneuvering to convince him to stay by her side, but he remained firm in his resolve to depart from Rough Point.

  At around five o’clock on the afternoon of October 7, 1966, in an event that would horrify local residents for years, Duke asked Tirella to accompany her on an errand in her white station wagon. Before they could drive away from the gardens surrounding the Duke mansion, she ordered him to exit from the driver’s seat of the car and open the heavy iron gates separating her estate from the neighborhood that surrounded it.

  How to Get Away with Murder: Two views of Doris Duke upper photo: With Elizabeth Taylor in 1981 lower photo: with Eduardo Tirella in the mid-1960s

  As he was opening the gates, the station wagon roared forward at high speed, hit Tirella, and then crashed his body into the gate, breaking its heavy latch with its impact. The car then shot across the wide expanse of Bellevue Avenue, stopping only after it crashed into a tree on the avenue’s distant side. Trapped under the car, and dragged for many yards at high speed under its chassis, the body of Tirella lay in a tangled bloody mess of torn flesh and broken bones. His head had been smashed open like a melon.

  Duke was almost immediately sedated and confined to her room, with only invited visitors allowed, by her doctors as a bevy of attorneys debated how best to handle the legal implications of this disaster. When she became available, many hours later, for interviews from the Newport police, the press was advised that Duke had “accidentally gunned the accelerator” from her position in the front passenger’s seat. The police then ruled the incident as “an unfortunate accident,” and dropped all semblance of a prosecution.

  The resulting cries of foul play caused such a furor that the local police chief, Joseph Radice, was eventually forced to resign. Duke later settled out of court with Tirella’s family when they brought civil charges against her.

  When he heard about the accident, Burton told Elizabeth and Dick Hanley, “Doris Duke murdered Eduardo, and of that I have no doubt. When you have all the money in the world, you can get away with murder.”

  “Obviously, we can’t go to the funeral,” Elizabeth told Dick. “Send flowers.”

  Perhaps Elizabeth had many motives for not attending the funeral. First, she hardly knew Tirella, and resented his presence in Burton’s life. Had she gone to the funeral, it might have caused speculation about those wild weekends Burton had spent with Tirella in San Francisco. Also, the appearance of either Burton or Elizabeth in Newport would have alienated Duke and focused even more light on embarrassments that the heiress wanted buried in more ways than one.

  ***

  With the intention of filming the interior scenes of The Sandpiper in Paris, Elizabeth and Burton sailed aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2, booking all six first-class cabins except one. Ironically, that one was occupied by Debbie Reynolds, who had married Harry Karl, a shoe manufacturer.

  Elizabeth and Reynolds met onboard for a Dom Pérignon toast, both of them agreeing, “Who in the fuck cares about Eddie Fisher?”

  Regrettably, Reynolds’ marriage to Karl ended in 1975 after she discovered him to be a serial adulterer who also gambled away all her money, forcing her at one point in her life to vacate her home and to live in her car.

  Elizabeth, Burton, staff, and children checked into the Hotel Lancaster on rue de Berri, off the Champs-Elysées in Paris, renting twenty-one rooms for a combined fee of $10,000 a week.

  From their digs at the Lancaster, Burton and Elizabeth were entertained by tout Paris, especially by the Baron Guy de Rothschild.

  All of the interior scenes of The Sandpiper were shot at the Boulogne-Billancourt Studios in Paris’s western suburbs. Wherever Burton and Elizabeth went, they were mobbed by thousands of fans.

  Burton claimed that he was thoroughly mauled by the paparazzi at The Lido night club. “They were trying to get pictures of my wife’s tits,” he complained to his fellow guests, Aristotle Onassis and his mistress, the operatic superstar, Maria Callas.

  A French reporter asked Elizabeth about her beauty and about Burton’s sex appeal. “I am not a great beauty. I’m too short of leg, too big in the arms, one too many chins, big feet, big hands, too fat. For Richard, it’s not about muscles. It is what he says and thinks.”

  Graham Jenkins, Burton’s brother, claimed, “The couple lived in luxury. Outside Paris, they had a dressing caravan the size of a small hotel, and they were hauled around in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce with a Welsh dragon engraved on it. The booze flowed from a ruptured brewery, and the parties were open-ended.”

  In Paris, Elizabeth shocked many of her most ardent fans by renouncing her American citizenship to become British. “It isn’t that all of a sudden, I love America less. It’s just that I love my husband more. Besides, I was born in England.”

  Most of the press viewed her statement as dishonest and self-serving. “It was done for tax reasons,” said Paris-Match. At the time, British subjects who lived abroad had a far better tax deal than American expatriates in similar situations.

  In Paris between takes, Elizabeth often entertained the crew. “She did the best Mae West and Marilyn Monroe impersonations known to mankind,” Minnelli said. “When Burton was away one afternoon, she did an impersonation of him. But suddenly, he walked onto the set and heard it. For her trouble, he slapped her face, really hard.”

  “My eardrum did not function properly for one entire month,” she said.

  As Elizabeth and Burton were already painfully aware, one of the dangers associated with being rich and famous is that ghosts from one’s past might suddenly appear.

  Their adopted Bavarian-born daughter, Maria, had been assigned her own full-time nurse and governess. Born with birth defects, she was able to walk only after a large fortune had been spent on various orthopedic surgeries. Elizabeth had paid handsomely for the privilege of adopting Maria.

  Unexpectedly, with fanfare, her biological parents, the Heisigs, flew in from Germany. Backed up with a lawyer in Paris, they claimed that Elizabeth owed them more money for the “sale” of Maria. Instead of defending the adoption in court, Elizabeth gave in to the extortion and settled more money on this German couple, the exact amount undisclosed.

  Elizabeth, in a memoir, denied that she transferred additional funds to the Heisigs. She blamed the incident on a French tabloid whose editors had organized the Heisigs’ visit to Paris. “The photographer wanted to take a picture of the mother standing near the opulence of my Rolls-Royce, her tattered coat contrasting with my fur coat—you know, a little woman standing out in the
cold, waiting for days on end to get a look at her child.”

  That experience with the parents of Maria blighted their stay in Paris, and both Elizabeth and Burton were anxious to move on.

  On the final day of filming, Burton completed his last scene and walked off the set. He said, “I’m bloody tired of playing fornicating clerics.”

  On viewing the lackluster The Sandpiper today, its best element is its theme song, “The Shadow of Your Smile,” which quickly became a standard in almost any Tony Bennett concert.

  The Sandpiper, because of the notoriety of its stars, made money, but garnered attack reviews. Elizabeth read one good review in a Los Angeles newspaper and threatened to sue for libel. “How dare this god damn writer falsely claim The Sandpiper is anything but total shit!”

  ***

  After finishing The Sandpiper in that studio outside Paris, Elizabeth and Burton flew to Naples where a long limousine took them south to the coastal resort of Amalfi, perched on a cliff hundreds of feet above the sea.

  Here, according to a story that appeared in The New York Post, Burton and Elizabeth staged one of their epic battles. Guests seated on the main terrace of their hotel heard Elizabeth’s screams of rage, and witnessed a most unusual sight.

  In Paris, she had purchased thirty-seven exquisite tailor-made suits for Burton. While still on their hangers, each of them was thrown from her cliff-hanging terrace into the sea. She also tossed a box of his jewelry, including two very valuable watches, some rings, and other items. The loss of the jewelry alone was estimated at $75,000.

  What had sparked her rage was a report that Burton had been seen leaving the hotel bar shortly before noon with a big-busted Neapolitan girl who was, at least according to the manager, “a dead-ringer for Sophia Loren.”

  That night, when Burton returned to Elizabeth in her suite, she physically attacked him. According to Dick Hanley, “Burton fought back. There were cuts and bruises. The hotel doctor had to be summoned from his bed at around two o’clock in the morning.”

  “Believe it or not, when I was overseeing their breakfast service the following morning, I heard the sounds of their love-making through the bedroom door,” Dick claimed.

  ***

  After Amalfi, Elizabeth and Burton returned to Naples, where they caught a flight to Dublin. For $750,000, he’d been assigned the role of Alec Leamas,

  John Le Carré’s disillusioned and joyless pawn in a Machiavellian game of Cold War espionage as laid out in Le Carré’s bestselling 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

  Cold War Espionage and the Comforts of the Damned

  top photo: Richard Burton middle photo: Claire Bloom bottom photos: left Rod Steiger right: Elizabeth Taylor

  Burton got Le Carré on the phone, claiming that the screenplay’s dialogue “lacked balls.” Consequently, the British novelist flew into Dublin to “punch up” the script.

  Elizabeth had met with the director, Martin Ritt, and urged him to cast her in the female lead, that of an innocuous and bureaucratic communist librarian. “I had to turn her down,” Ritt said. “A star of Elizabeth’s magnitude and brilliant glare would have totally unbalanced the stark tone of this film noir.”

  The role went instead to Claire Bloom, with whom Burton had had a torrid affair as recently as when he’d filmed Look Back in Anger with her in 1959. Their love had first blossomed when she had been Burton’s Ophelia during his portrayal of Hamlet at the Old Vic in London.

  Elizabeth was on the set every day to ensure that those old flames of passion weren’t ignited again. “It was obvious that she was very uncomfortable in my presence,” Bloom said.

  Actually, Elizabeth need not have bothered, as those flames had been smothered years ago. Bloom was married at the time to actor Rod Steiger.

  The columnist Sheilah Graham visited the set and interviewed Bloom, who was quite frank. “These days I find Burton boring,” Bloom said. “A man is often boring when he’s got what he wants—a beautiful wife, money, a great career. Burton is still drinking, still boasting, still reciting the same old poems and telling the same old stories.”

  When a written version of Bloom’s comment was shown to Burton, he said, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. I dumped the wench, you know.”

  Burton clashed several times with director Martin Ritt over his heavy drinking. “I can play any role with a big bottle of Irish whiskey in me,” Burton boasted.

  Ritt said, “I wasn’t sympathetic to Burton’s lifestyle. Nor to that of Elizabeth. She was there much of the time as an onlooker, constantly drinking from a champagne bottle which she’d open at eleven in the morning. Richard was fine until lunchtime, and then he’d join her in drinking. By the time he was back on the job, he had a buzz on.”

  When not consuming alcohol, the Burtons dined on such Irish game birds as widgeon, quail, and green-winged teal. On a few occasions, at Peter Parry’s Soup Bowl Restaurant, Elizabeth dined with either Frank Sinatra or Laurence Harvey during their visits to Dublin.

  Once, a fight broke out there between Harvey and Burton until the manager asked Harvey to leave.

  top photo: Director Martin Ritt lower photo: Richard Burton

  The following week, Burton himself became persona non grata when he got completely intoxicated and tried to insert his index finger up a comely waitress’s dress “to plug” her vagina.

  A drunken Burton was just one of many problems Elizabeth had to confront in Ireland, even though she was not in the film. “Richard drank heavily, but Elizabeth was also sloshing around on brandy and champagne,” Dick said.

  During her time in Dublin, Elizabeth received a call from her mother. Sara told her that father, Francis, had suffered a stroke. “He may hang on for a week, or even a month or so, but I think it is the end.”

  Although she’d never been that close to her father, she flew all the way back to Los Angeles for a farewell visit.

  When she returned to Dublin, she found that Burton had seemingly developed a sexual interest in Marya Mannes, a tall, statuesque beauty who had flown over from the United States to interview him for McCall’s magazine. She also learned that Mannes and Burton had headed off together into the Irish countryside on a pub crawl…or whatever.

  Shortly after her return from the deathbed of her father, as Elizabeth was being driven in a Rolls-Royce by Burton’s French chauffeur, Gaston Sanz, a pedestrian ran in front of the car and was struck, dying in four days.

  Another tragedy followed soon after that. In St.-Jean-de-Luz on the Atlantic coast of southwestern France, Sanz’s son had died in a shooting accident at a rifle range. Elizabeth flew with Sanz to Biarritz, where she was taken to the funeral parlor to identify the body. A grief-stricken Sanz could not bear to look at his son because half of his head had been blown off.

  When Elizabeth returned to Ireland, she learned that a bandit had broken into her hotel suite and made off with $50,000 of her jewelry.

  When The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was released, it was a big success at the box office, and critics hailed it as “the best Burton film ever.” That critical acclaim manifested itself at Oscar time, when he received a nomination for Best Actor.

  Although he didn’t expect to win, he was still very disappointed when the Oscar went to Lee Marvin for his role in Cat Ballou.

  Burton had chosen not to fly into Hollywood to attend the Academy Award presentations. In a hotel suite in Paris, he became drunk and belligerent waiting for an announcement of the winner. When he learned that he’d lost, he attacked Elizabeth, as if blaming her for his defeat. “The bloody fucking prize went to one of your lovers, Lee Marvin.” He’d apparently heard about Elizabeth’s brief fling with Marvin during their filming together of Raintree County.

  “Did you also fuck my three other competitors?” Burton asked her, referring to Laurence Olivier, nominated for Othello; Rod Steiger for The Pawn-broker; and Oskar Werner for Ship of Fools.

  “Did I fuck one of the nominees?” Elizabeth asked sarcas
tically. “Ask the same question of yourself.” She was no doubt referring to Burton’s long-ago affair with Olivier.

  ***

  Before returning to America, Elizabeth wanted a vacation, and Burton booked her a luxurious villa at Cap d’Antibes on the French Riviera. They arrived together in Nice, where they were greeted by the paparazzi and reporters.

  While in their villa, Ernest Lehmen sent them a film script. The Burtons had met Lehman during their filming of The Sandpiper. Previously, he’d written the screenplays for some excellent films, including Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), and North By Northwest (1959). At the time he contacted the Burtons, he’d just completed the screenplay for The Sound of Music (1965).

  Burton was out on the beach that day, drinking far too much beer in the hot sun, and Elizabeth was suffering from a cold, and wanted to stay in bed.

  Dick brought her Lehman’s screenplay.

  “I have to tell you,” he said. “You’re far too young and beautiful to play the lead in this.”

  “That’s a switch,” she said. “An actress is usually told she’s too old.” She took the script from him. “I need a refill on that champagne.”

  She picked up the manuscript and was surprised to see that it was a screen adaptation of Edward Albee’s gritty three-hour award-winning play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which had played to sold-out crowds on Broadway beginning in October of 1962.

  “They’re offering this to me?” she asked in astonishment. “I read two days ago that Albee said the parts are going to Bette Davis and James Mason.”

  “Perhaps not,” Dick said. “Why not Elizabeth Taylor and her consort, Richard Burton?”

  ***