by Sam Kashner
Burton, his eye always on the prize and feeling he had botched his earlier attempt at conquering Hollywood (though he had acquitted himself rather well in The Robe and My Cousin Rachel, two prior Hollywood films), leaped at the chance. He was becoming bored after playing King Arthur, night after night, for nearly a year in Camelot’s long run, even though he reveled in the part and had kept libations flowing in his dressing room, which he’d dubbed “Burton’s Bar.” His final night in the role was September 16, 1961, and by then everyone knew the reason for his leaving the play. His last performance was triumphant, rewarded with a standing ovation. Julie Andrews (who played Queen Guinevere) left Burton alone onstage so he could bask in the waves of adulation that poured forth from the audience. There was the unspoken recognition that this boy from an unpronounceable Welsh mining town had made good, and the audience cherished their last night in his company, relishing each kingly gesture. This would be hard for Burton to give up: the seduction and acclaim of a live audience, fought for and won night after night.
When the houselights came on and the last theatergoer had left the Majestic Theater, Burton found himself in the midst of a farewell party. Among the celebrants was the playwright Moss Hart, who had directed the play, and who had suffered a heart attack ten days after opening. That last night, Hart, given to Polonius-like pronouncements, took Burton aside and cautioned him, “I beg you not to waste your wonderful gifts. You must know you have it in you to be one of the greatest stage actors of this century.” But for now, the movies once again beckoned. For Burton, that’s where real fame—and fortune—were to be made.
Burton generally disliked “tits and sand” epics, like The Robe and now Cleopatra, that required him to wear togas and tunics. He found prancing around barelegged or in tights decidedly unmanly, which is one reason his Broadway Hamlet two years later would be performed in street clothes. But in Cleopatra, Mankiewicz costumed Burton in the shortest soldier’s tunic of all—a pleated skirt that showcases his muscular thighs and barely covers his manhood. Mankiewicz was impressed with Burton, whose intelligence, wit, and soulful masculinity attracted men and women alike. Like Burton, the twice-married Mankiewicz was given to having affairs with the actresses he directed (and some that he didn’t, like a young Judy Garland), but he was dazzled by Burton, joking to the press later on that it was he, not Elizabeth, who was having the affair with him.
Burton exuded virility, but there was something in his past he was ashamed of. He had, reportedly, succumbed to advances by Sir John Gielgud and Sir Laurence Olivier as he made his stellar way through the hierarchical world of the English theater. He would later tell interview hosts like Dick Cavett and the BBC’s Michael Parkinson that he had “tried homosexuality” and “it didn’t take.” It came down to this: men from mining towns don’t have sex with other men. In the rugged world of coal miners, rugby players, and world-class drinkers, masculinity was something you earned, and you earned it in the eyes of other men. So the encounters of his youth troubled him; they may have fueled his relentless womanizing.
If Skouras and Wanger thought that Mankiewicz would stem the financial bleeding and put the production on an even keel, they were wrong. In Mankiewicz’s hands, the production continued to spiral out of control. First, he agreed with Elizabeth that the script needed a major rewrite, and he felt that he was the only one up to the task. So he set about directing by day and writing all night. In order to both direct and rewrite the script, he began relying on twice-daily injections of amphetamines to keep going, administered by the notorious Max Jacobson, aka “Dr. Feelgood.” His ambition was noble: to equal Shaw and Shakespeare in his sprawling, hybrid screenplay. Indeed, in the beauty of his language he sometimes comes close, but the thing was so gargantuan—a whopping 327 pages—and so impossible to wrestle into shape while simultaneously overseeing a vast cast and crew, that it seriously undermined his health. His eldest son, Chris Mankiewicz, who was hired to work on the production, feared his father might suffer a heart attack. The agitated state it left him in not only brought on a skin disorder that caused his fingertips to bleed, necessitating the wearing of white cotton film-cutter’s gloves, it also brought about a common result of amphetamine abuse: grandiosity.
Everything about the production—the sets, the dressing rooms, the props, the number of extras, the script itself—took on gargantuan proportions. The entire production suffered from gigantism. The film would eventually take three years to complete, at a staggering cost of $44 million, close to $300 million in today’s dollars; it’s considered the third most expensive movie ever made. And because Mankiewicz was literally writing the screenplay as they were shooting, he was virtually directing his first draft—there was no time for streamlining and honing, and no shooting script was prepared, so they were forced to shoot everything in sequence, a costly process that kept all the actors on salary all the time. Just about everything that could go wrong went wrong. Reflecting back on the Herculean effort to get this story on film, Elizabeth described it in her 1964 memoir as “a nightmare.” But what redeemed the experience, at least for her, was falling in love with Richard Burton.
When Elizabeth had first encountered Burton at Stewart Granger’s Hollywood party in 1953, she’d disliked him—he talked too much, he was “rather full of himself,” and she gave him “the cold fish eye.” So she was prepared to treat him coolly on the set of Cleopatra, vowing that she would not be another notch on his gun belt.
So they met, for the second time, on the set on January 22, 1962, costumed and in full makeup. Elizabeth was already on her guard, even before meeting the notorious Welshman. She was well aware of his theatrical reputation for having all his lines and even his costars’ lines memorized on the first day. She thought of him as not just “a movie star but a genuine actor.” Taylor was well aware of her own technical limitations; the one thing MGM had failed to do was to provide her with acting lessons. She was what is known as “a natural,” and her greatest talent was that unknown quality that leaps through the camera and goes directly into the audience’s heart.
Elizabeth also knew of Burton’s legendary conquests—he had bedded many of his leading ladies, including dark-haired beauties like Claire Bloom, and Susan Strasberg (a mere seventeen at the time), all the while married to his plucky and stalwart Welsh wife, Sybil Burton, whom he claimed he would never abandon. Legendary, too, was the Welshman’s golden-throated voice, his bonhomie, his love of poetry and language and Shakespeare and liquor. His vibrant sexuality could heat up a room. His face was pockmarked from the testosterone-fueled boils that had plagued him during his hardscrabble youth in the Welsh coal town of Pontrhydyfen, but he had, nonetheless, a soulful and haunted beauty. Earth and air were mingled in him; he looked like “a boxing poet,” according to his countryman Emlyn Williams, the playwright and actor whose early interest in Burton had helped launch his theatrical career in The Druid’s Rest and his film career as the young swain in The Last Days of Dolwyn.
So when they first clapped eyes on each other on the oversized set of Cleopatra, Richard in his too-short tunic and Elizabeth in her dark Egyptian eye makeup and stunning Irene Sharaff gown, “there was a lot of hemming and hawing.” Burton, the great seducer, tried to ignore her at first, then he edged over to Elizabeth and said fatuously, “Has anybody ever told you that you’re a very pretty girl?” As recounted in her autobiography, Elizabeth couldn’t believe the lameness of that gambit. She “couldn’t wait to go back to the dressing room where all the girls were and tell them, ‘Oy gevalt’” (delighted to use the Yid-dishisms she’d learned from Todd and Fisher), “here’s the great lover, the great wit, the great intellectual of Wales, and he comes out with a line like that.” It was actually a brilliant gambit—in a world in which everyone catered to Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton showed he was willing to make fun of her.
In another account, Burton also took one look at her overripe beauty and let slip the words “You’re too fat.” In actuality, he was so shaken by th
e sight of her looking “so bloody marvelous” that he’d wanted to knock her down a peg. Besides her overwhelming physical presence, Burton was impressed by the fact that she was earning four times his own considerable salary, and that she already possessed the thing that had so far eluded him—movie star status. He was also contemptuous of the hovering presence of Eddie Fisher on the set. A friend had joked with Burton that Fisher only came in third in Elizabeth’s entourage, after her hairdresser, Alexandre de Paris, and her agent, Kurt Frings. Burton had taken in the absurdity of this overpaid, ripe beauty and her doting husband, and had meant to show that he was unfazed.
But fazed he was. And at their next meeting, everything changed.
Their first day of working together, Burton had showed up completely hungover from a night of carousing. “He was kind of quivering from head to foot and there were grog blossoms—you know, from booze—all over his face,” Elizabeth remembered. “He ordered a cup of coffee to sort of still his trembling fists and I had to help it to his mouth, and that just endeared him to me. I thought, ‘Well, he really is human…. so vulnerable and sweet and shaky and terribly giggly that with my heart I ‘cwtched’ him—that’s Welsh for ‘hug.’” He then further disarmed Elizabeth when he blew a line. “If it had been a planned strategic campaign, Caesar couldn’t have planned it better,” she recalled.
But their early on-camera scenes together, in Eddie Fisher’s understandably jaundiced view, were underwhelming. Fisher showed up on the set for Elizabeth’s nude bathing scene. (Only a generous glimpse of thigh is actually visible onscreen. Elizabeth was too Old Hollywood to show more.) Elizabeth showed up three hours late, trailing a phalanx of makeup specialists and hairdressers. Fisher took a sip of the bottle of Coke Elizabeth was nursing, only to discover that it was brandy. He sat down next to Mankiewicz.
“Joe,” he said, “what’s going on here?”
“Eddie, she hasn’t the faintest idea what she’s doing.”
After watching the early rushes, Fisher was struck by the difference between Burton’s and Elizabeth’s acting styles; he felt that, “with his big, sonorous voice and her little, squeaky one, their scenes together were ludicrous.”
Burton himself was at first perplexed by Elizabeth’s apparent lack of technique. “She’s just not doing anything,” he complained to Mankiewicz, until the pipe-smoking director took him aside and showed him Taylor’s impact onscreen. It took his breath away. Burton—trained to move, to speak, to act—was struck by Elizabeth’s absolute stillness, and he would later say that he learned an important film technique from Elizabeth: how to tone down his theatrical performances for the camera’s cool eye. From that moment, Burton learned how the visual/spectacle element of film could trump the written/spoken element of theater. Under the influence of Elizabeth, Burton made the transition from stage acting to screen acting on the soundstage of Cleopatra. Later, when their relationship began to stagger under the weight of their fame and their excesses, Elizabeth would remind him of that fact.
If it was Burton’s vulnerability that first attracted Elizabeth, there was a deeper siren call as well. Truth was, Elizabeth was having her own romance with alcohol, though not quite on Burton’s level. At their sumptuous Villa Pappa on the Appian Way, Fisher watched as she took her first drink in the morning, followed by several glasses of wine at lunch, and “who knows how much for the remainder of the day? And as I discovered, she wasn’t just drinking at home.” She loved Bloody Marys and was in the habit of taking with her to the studio a case of vodka, tonic water, and tomato juice. Their liquor bill could reach as much as $700 a week (roughly $4,900 today). Fisher had been a heavy drinker once, but he wasn’t drinking in those days, and he tried to curtail Elizabeth’s alcohol intake, watering down her drinks as he anxiously watched over her. He had nursed her through her near-fatal pneumonia at the Dorchester Hotel, and her recovery from a tracheotomy, never leaving her bedside. Now he tried to monitor her alcohol intake. But that’s not what Elizabeth had signed up for.
“At some point after working with Burton,” Fisher later recalled, “I think she began to see me as a jailer. I was spoiling her fun. She didn’t need me to monitor her medication and drinks and put her to bed at night.” And now, suddenly, Elizabeth would be playing love scenes with this devastating Welshman, made vulnerable by drink, a god brought down to earth, whose need for alcohol translated into a ravishing thirst for life. In this, and in other areas, Burton left Elizabeth’s anxious caretaker—whom he would later dismiss as “the busboy”—in the dust.
As for Burton, he reportedly set his cap for Taylor as just one of his usual conquests. He expected to bed all of his leading ladies (with the apparent exception of Julie Andrews, Guinevere to his Arthur in Camelot, who remained beyond his reach). At least that’s what Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss, 20th Century-Fox publicity agents attached to the first incarnation of Cleopatra, wrote in their chronicle of the production, The Cleopatra Papers. They suggest that her star power was what impressed him most—her million-dollar salary, her fourteen-room villa, the shipments of her favorite food, Chasen’s chili, flown in from Los Angeles. He thought an affair might elevate his own status in the industry—and he was nothing if not ambitious—but Burton had no intention of falling in love. “I must don my armor once more,” Brodsky and Weiss report him as saying, “to play against Miss Tits.” That bit of bravado suggests that Burton had no idea what was about to engulf him.
Protected by his marriage to Sybil, a sane, witty, and intelligent woman who kept him grounded in his Welsh life, Burton felt he could fall in and out of affairs with no possibility of becoming ensnared. His affair with Claire Bloom, begun while they were both still in their twenties and making their names as extraordinary Shakespearean actors at the Old Vic, had probably come closest to threatening his marriage. But Burton needed Sybil and the stability she provided. In his own way, he loved her, though Sybil’s prematurely silver hair made her appear, at times, more like his mother than his wife. Burton adored their five-year-old daughter, Kate, and their toddler, Jessica, who seemed to need special care.
And there was this basic fact: Welsh men did not abandon their families.
But the heat and lightning of Burton’s scenes with Elizabeth were beginning to be noticed. Burton would later claim that he was first smitten when he watched the scene of Elizabeth naked in her bath, lolling like a mermaid, tended by a bevy of handmaidens. In their first deep kiss, in Cleopatra’s boudoir, just after confessing their mutual love, Burton found himself caught up, almost drugged, in her presence. They repeated the scene several times, their kiss lasting longer with each take. Finally, Mankiewicz shouted, “Print it”—but the scene continued. “Would you two mind if I say cut?” he asked again. And then, “Does it interest you that it is time for lunch?”
Burton didn’t have a chance.
It was not just Elizabeth Taylor who was casting her spell over him, it was Cleopatra herself, who ruled by divine right, descended from the Egyptian goddess Isis. “I am Isis,” she had revealed to Caesar in their first love scene. “I am the Nile. I am worshipped by millions who believe it.” Taylor already identified with Cleopatra. She felt that “Mike Todd…had been to her what Julius Caesar had been to Cleopatra.” Now Marc Antony—Burton—would take his place.
And there were those words of love Mankiewicz had written for Cleopatra and Antony to speak—Richard himself was especially vulnerable to the beauty of words: “From that first instant I saw you entering Rome on that fabulous beast, crowned in gold…I envied Caesar…I envied him you,” Antony confesses. And, later, when the destruction of their empire looms, Cleopatra cries to Antony, “To have waited so long, to know so suddenly. Without you, this is not a world I want to live in.” And Antony answers her: “Everything that I want to love or hold or have or be is here with me now.”
When their first love scene finally ended, Burton reportedly called for a beer and Elizabeth nonchalantly handed off her wig and walked away. In his dressi
ng room, where he had resumed “Burton’s Bar” for cast and crew, Burton lunched with a bevy of actors, writers, and adoring females. Suddenly, he called out across the empty soundstage for Elizabeth to join them.
She turned and smiled. She walked into his crowded dressing room, where he promptly ignored her, except to bend down low and whisper an off-color story into her ear, one which made her blush and laugh in delight. Later, when they returned to the soundstage, he dragged her director’s chair next to his, where it would remain throughout the rest of the shoot.
Still, Burton kept his guard up—at first by keeping on hand a girlfriend, Pat Tunder, a Copacabana dancer Burton had met during the run of Camelot whom he’d brought with him to Rome. But Taylor had already discovered that Eddie, for all his ministrations and devotion, could not take Mike Todd’s place. She had tamed him, and therefore he was now unchallenging. He couldn’t match her increasingly brilliant star status. It didn’t help Fisher’s case that Burton looked like a younger, taller, and handsomer version of Todd: the squarish face, the broad shoulders, the roughness of skin, the working-class background, the sheer virility.
