Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  “Elizabeth was not used to assertive men,” observed Ron Berkeley, Elizabeth’s makeup artist on many of her early films. “Oh, they might put on an act for a while, but they nearly all ended up showing love by deference, paying tribute to her beauty. Only one other man had taken her by sheer force of personality. When she encountered Richard Burton, it must have seemed to her that she had rediscovered Mike Todd.” The moment Burton had shown up, hungover, on the soundstage of Cleopatra, Fisher was history. He just didn’t know it yet.

  Fisher should, perhaps, have been on his guard. “Even if he hadn’t destroyed my marriage,” he later wrote about Burton, “I would have disliked him.” He claimed that he and Elizabeth had at first made fun of Burton behind his back, put off by his roughness and lack of grooming. “I thought he was an arrogant slob. Elizabeth and I…compared him to the great producer of MGM musicals, Arthur Freed, about whom it was said he could grow orchids under his fingernails.”

  Fisher must have been reassured by the fact that he and Elizabeth were in the process of adopting a nine-month-old German girl whose parents could not afford the series of operations needed to correct her crippling hip deformity. Elizabeth’s heart had gone out to this needy infant, whom she and Fisher renamed Maria (after the actress Maria Schell, who had located the child for them). Unable or unwilling to bear more children after her cesarean delivery of Liza Todd, in which she had almost lost her baby, Elizabeth had longed for a child to consecrate her marriage to Fisher. But by the time the adoption papers were signed, Fisher’s days were numbered.

  On a few occasions, Sybil accompanied Burton to Villa Pappa, the expansive Italian villa on the Appian Way rented by Fox studio for Elizabeth and her entourage. The pink marble mansion came complete with swimming pool, acres of pine forests, two butlers, and three maids. The entourage included the couple’s two secretaries and Elizabeth’s three children, ten dogs, and four cats. Dick Hanley, a former secretary to Louis B. Mayer and now Elizabeth’s majordomo, was set up in a nearby flat with his companion. In Rome, Taylor lived in Cleopatra-like luxury, insisting that all the beds be made daily with fresh linen. For each meal, full place settings were provided by the maids—complete with a glass for white wine, one for red, one for champagne, and one for water. When she wasn’t dining luxuriously, she made sure Hanley had her favorite chili flown in from Chasen’s. For dinner parties, the table settings were color-coordinated with Elizabeth’s outfit (no doubt to bring out the violet hues in her changeable, blue-violet eyes). Fisher watched his wife’s drinking, instructing their servants to stop serving her after five drinks. But the first time Burton dined with them at the villa, the actor surreptitiously refilled her glass. “I adore this man,” Elizabeth thought at that moment; with or without Mankiewicz’s dialogue, she knew she was falling for him.

  At a New Year’s Eve party at Villa Pappa to celebrate the impending adoption of Maria, Fisher was surprised to see Elizabeth sitting with Burton on a small couch, whispering and giggling. Feeling excluded, he sat down at the piano and started to sing, to attract her attention, but Elizabeth just glared at him and he left the room.

  Elizabeth and Richard probably first made love in Burton’s dressing room, and then found stolen afternoons in Dick Hanley’s flat near Villa Pappa. What began as a thrilling conquest for Burton quickly deepened into infatuation, then an inexplicable thirst for her. He was a celebrated cocksman with a string of women in his past—and a wife very much in his present—yet in Elizabeth he found a woman who matched him in sexual fire. Later, Burton would pour out his emotions in love letters to Elizabeth, describing how “I lust after your smell and your paps and your divine little money-box and your round belly and the exquisite softness of the inside of your thighs and your baby-bottom and your giving lips & the half hostile look in your eyes when you’re deep in rut with your little Welsh stallion…” Rumors of the affair began to swirl around the set, finally reaching Fisher, who confronted her. “Tell me the truth,” he asked Elizabeth. “Is there something going on between you and Burton?”

  “Yes.”

  Elizabeth simply couldn’t lie—not to herself, not to Eddie. The truth just smacked her in the face—she was in love with Richard Burton. Elizabeth had always been a truth-teller.

  Fisher, like Burton, couldn’t escape what was happening to him. At one point, he left Rome to nurse his wounds at the chalet Elizabeth had purchased in Gstaad. When he returned to Rome, he was severely depressed, wandering around Villa Pappa all day in his pajamas, drinking vodka and wondering what had happened to his career. At one miserable dinner at the villa in March of 1962, Burton, deep in his cups, had brutally demanded that Elizabeth declare, in front of Eddie Fisher, to name the one she loved.

  “Elizabeth,” he’d growled in his best theatrical voice, “who do you love? Whooo do you love?”

  She looked at both men and said to Burton, “You.”

  Burton then picked up a silver-framed photograph of Mike Todd, Elizabeth, and their daughter, Liza, and he turned to Fisher. “He didn’t know how to use her!” Burton shouted, pointing to the picture of Mike Todd. “You don’t know how to use her, either! And what’s that fucking picture here for?” He continued to rage—all of this remembered and recorded by Eddie Fisher in both of his memoirs—until Elizabeth ran out of the villa in tears. The two men were left alone in the empty room, where they continued to fume over snifters of brandy. “Burton did most of the talking,” Fisher wrote, “flattering me, insulting me, laying little traps, charming and apologetic one moment, crude and abusive the next.”

  Unnerved by his encounter with Burton, Fisher sought out Sybil at their rented villa and told her about his suspicions. “Eddie broke the cardinal rule as the cuckold in any affair,” Walter Wanger later confided in the producer and agent Edward Heyman. “He called the wife.” Sybil admitted that she had known about the affair for weeks. Fisher asked her how she managed to cope with the situation, and she answered, “Ever since Richard and I have been married, he’s had these affairs. But he always comes back to me. The thing with Elizabeth is over.”

  “It isn’t over, Sybil. They’re seeing each other constantly,” Fisher informed her. Sybil, however, refused to believe it. Fisher left, admiring Sybil’s powers of denial. But she wasn’t as sanguine as she’d appeared. Shortly after her encounter with Fisher, she reportedly stormed onto the soundstage and created a scene, which shut down production for an entire day, costing the studio another $100,000.

  Fisher tried to escape the madness by traveling to Florence, where he called Elizabeth at their villa. But it was Richard who answered the telephone.

  “What are you doing there?” Eddie Fisher asked Richard Burton. “What are you doing in my house?”

  “What do you think I’m doing?” Burton answered. “I’m fucking your wife.”

  Mankiewicz was also aware of what was happening and was leery of the new complication, confiding in Wanger, “Elizabeth and Burton are not just playing Antony and Cleopatra!” Studio publicists like Jack Brodsky tried to suppress rumors of the affair, but it was too late. Hordes of photographers camping out at Cinecittà got wind of it, adding to the general chaos of the production. They hounded the couple, snapping their photo outside Tre Scalini in Piazza Navona, even following them on a brief escape to Elizabeth’s chalet in Gstaad. Whenever the lovers escaped to the fashionable Via Veneto, they were followed by wildly snapping photographers, eager to sell their photos to newspapers and magazines. Their constant buzz inspired Federico Fellini, who was filming La Dolce Vita on the streets of Rome at the time; he named his intrusive reporter “Paparazzo,” which means “buzzing insect.” The name stuck.

  Wanger saw how “incredibly patient and well informed” the paparazzi were, these young Italian men on Vespas and in low-slung sports cars, their Rolleiflexes slung over their shoulders. They had found out even before the lease was signed just which magnificent villa would house the Taylor-Fisher household, and they climbed into the trees along one of Villa
Pappa’s two swimming pools. They seemed to be everywhere, one day disguising themselves as priests boldly knocking on the Burtons’ door, sometimes dropping from the trees to grab a photograph of a startled Richard or Elizabeth or Eddie Fisher, their eyes blinded by the sudden white light of the flashcubes. “It seemed like everybody who worked for Richard or me in Rome made a fortune selling their stories to the press,” Elizabeth believed. “A woman Richard hired for his children turned out to be a fake Italian countess, and she sold her story in America.”

  For a time, the two lovers did make an attempt to stay away from each other. Elizabeth couldn’t bear the idea of going through another highly publicized divorce and world disapprobation, so there were occasions when they showed up on the set and barely spoke to each other. But not for long. Their happiest moments were when they managed to escape for a few days, hiding out in a pink stucco villa they had secretly rented at Porto Santo Stefano. She always relished those rare occasions when she could pretend to be an ordinary woman: “We’d spend weekends there. I’d barbecue. There was a crummy old shower, and the sheets were always damp. We loved it—absolutely adored it.” On one occasion, their disappearance sent their beleaguered director into an amphetamine-fueled tizzy. He began searching the hospitals before Burton finally showed up, pretending ignorance. Then Elizabeth suddenly appeared, tapping Mankiewicz on the back. He was furious—but relieved—to welcome them back on the set.

  By February, Brodsky and Mankiewicz took Burton aside and pleaded with him to come to his senses, but the real pressure was from Sybil, who was packing her bags for New York. Unable to face the loss of his family, Burton—wracked with guilt and terrified over the intensity of his feelings for Elizabeth—informed her that he would never leave Sybil (nor would he give up his girlfriend, Pat Tunder, for that matter). Elizabeth, not used to being denied anything, was devastated. On February 17, 1962, she took an overdose of sleeping pills and had to be rushed to Salvator Mundi International Hospital to be resuscitated.

  Wanger and Mankiewicz had come for lunch to Villa Pappa and found Elizabeth being tended to by a physician, Dr. Coen. She seemed unusually pale, Wanger thought, and after lunch she confided how terrible she felt about hurting Sybil. “I feel dreadful,” she’d said. “Sybil is such a wonderful woman.” Wanger had tried to comfort her by talking about how difficult it was to swim against the tides of life. “How funny you should say that,” Elizabeth said. “Richard calls me ‘Ocean.’” She then retired to her bedroom and slipped into a pale gray Christian Dior nightgown, claiming exhaustion. A few minutes later, when he checked on her, he was told that she took some sleeping pills. That’s when one of her entourage called an ambulance, and word got out to the press that Elizabeth had attempted suicide.

  Wanger tried to make light of the event, asking Brodsky and Weiss to make up a story of food poisoning to avert the bad publicity already dogging the star-crossed production. Wanger had put the blame on “a tin of bully beef” they had shared for lunch at the villa, then on a handful of Seconals Elizabeth had taken to help her sleep. Their cover-up seemed to have worked, but it really didn’t matter: a few days later, the Burton-Taylor affair resumed.

  In April, Sybil flew back to Rome from New York, once again forcing the issue. When Richard received word of his wife’s imminent arrival in the Eternal City, he and Elizabeth drove from Rome to their beach hideaway in a small, two-seater Fiat, leaving early in the morning to escape the paparazzi. It was the Easter weekend, and their beachside town was half-deserted. They enjoyed caffe lattes and cognac in a small bar-café, but their idyllic weekend quickly turned into a nightmare when they wandered into the small café, deserted except for a sleeping dog, a bored waiter, and a few idle customers. It seemed the perfect haven for a couple hounded by the world, but as it happened, one of the idle customers was, in fact, a local newspaper reporter, there to cover the arrival of a minor member of the Dutch royal family. He quickly recognized the two most famous people in the world. They finished their cognacs and drove to their isolated, half-finished villa with its glorious view of the Mediterranean. There they played in the surf, made love, clambered over the rocks as if they were any pair of lovers delighting in each other’s company.

  Suddenly, they looked around and discovered that the paparazzi had found them out and were hiding in the bushes and among the rocks. The newspaperman had notified the press of Richard and Elizabeth’s whereabouts. They escaped back to their small villa, trapped in their guilty paradise, where there was nothing to do but drink, play gin rummy, and wait for the paparazzi to go away.

  Burton later recalled that weekend in his notebooks:

  We drank to the point of stupefaction and idiocy. We couldn’t go outside. We were not married…. We tried to read. We failed. We couldn’t go out. We made a desperate kind of love. We played gin rummy. E. kept on winning and oddly enough out of this silly game came the crisis. For some reason—who knows or remembers the conversation that led up to it?—E. said that she was prepared to kill herself for me. Easy to say, I said, but no woman would kill herself for me, etc. with oodlings of self pity…out of it all came E. standing over me with a bottle or box of sleeping pills in her hand, saying that she could do it. Go ahead, I said, or words along those lines, whereupon she took a handful and swallowed with gusto and no dramatics.

  Burton at first didn’t believe she had swallowed sleeping pills—he thought Elizabeth had probably just taken a handful of vitamin C. But when she went to sleep, Burton couldn’t wake her. That’s when he realized she had not been acting. He managed to drag her into the car and sped back to Rome, where, for a second time, she had her stomach pumped at Salvator Mundi. Burton then slunk back to his villa, ironically named “Beautiful Solitude,” and then on to Paris, where he was shooting a scene for Darryl Zanuck’s World War II epic, The Longest Day.

  Still hoping to deflect rumors of the affair, Wanger warned Burton to stay away. “I think Burton had finally begun to understand the consequence of being with Elizabeth,” Wanger later wrote about the incident. “He had complained when the reporters hounded him in Paris, ‘It’s like fucking Khrushchev. I’ve had affairs before—how did I know the woman was so fucking famous?’”

  When Elizabeth was again released from the hospital, her face was bruised and she couldn’t appear on camera for several days. Other accounts suggest that Elizabeth was hospitalized for a bloody nose, caused by being thrown forward in the Fiat when the car suddenly stopped short. Given that Wanger was putting out cover stories, Burton’s diary entry is probably the most reliable account. Years later, Elizabeth would ruefully admit to the suicide attempt, saying that at the time, “I was a very sick girl,” in agony over what to do, unwilling to relive the kind of public shaming she had received over her breakup of Eddie Fisher’s marriage, and equally unwilling—and unable—to give up Richard. “Everyone’s unhappiness,” she later said, “had reached a point of no return.”

  Meanwhile, Fisher was deep in denial. It took a column by Louella Parsons, one of the two leading gossip columnists in Hollywood, and headlines such as the Los Angeles Examiner’s “Row Over Actor Ends Liz, Eddie Marriage,” to force Fisher to finally act, though by now he must have known his marriage was over.

  “I knew it before she did,” he later confessed. “Elizabeth desperately needed excitement, and our relationship had settled into a marriage. Comfort wasn’t enough for her. She was addicted to drama, to the fights and making up, to breaking down doors. There was no possible way she could have given up what she’d found in Burton.”

  Nonetheless, Fisher and Taylor continued to deny the rumors (“LIZ, EDDY DENY SPLIT”). He left for New York, heartbroken and humiliated, and landed in the arms of Dr. Jacobson, who kept him supplied with drugs. In one attempt to put the swirling rumors to rest, he agreed to appear as a mystery guest on the popular quiz show What’s My Line?, ostensibly to publicize Cleopatra-inspired cosmetics that the studio was marketing. It didn’t help. The gossip columnist Dorothy Kilg
allen, a regular panel member on the show, had already written a damning story about the affair. To add to his humiliation, Fisher wound up predicting that “Elizabeth Taylor Fisher” would win an Academy Award for her role in Cleopatra. “I was lost,” he later wrote, devastated by Elizabeth’s betrayal. He wound up in a small private hospital in New York, having overdosed on vodka and amphetamines. The rumor mill went overboard, announcing that he was locked up in a psychiatric ward, so when he was released, he held a press conference to show that he wasn’t confined to a padded cell.

  Fortified with a shot of methamphetamine, he strolled into a feeding frenzy at the Sapphire Room of the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue, where reporters were practically hanging from the rafters. The press conference was his last-ditch ploy to persuade the public that his marriage was still intact. He’d even asked Elizabeth to speak to the press by telephone from Rome, believing that she still wanted to deny the rumors of their breakup. But that was not to be.

  Fisher was called into the hotel manager’s office, where Elizabeth delivered the news—with reporters listening in on the call—that she would no longer participate in the fiction of their marriage. It was over. Instead of a reconciliation, he was treated to a headline: “Eddie Fisher Dumped.”

  Deep down, Fisher had known all along that Burton had what Elizabeth wanted: “[t]hat marvelous voice, his knowledge of acting, and his ability to teach her. I also believed she mistook his weaknesses, his alcoholism, his bitterness, and the anger that led to violence, for independence and self-confidence. She thought he was a hero.” In his desperation, Fisher at one point bought a gun, ostensibly to protect the family because of a deluge of threatening letters they were receiving. Years later, Elizabeth would reveal things she had left out of her memoir because she felt they were too hurtful. One of them was that she had awoken in the villa one night to find Eddie watching over her, pointing the gun at her head. “Don’t worry, Elizabeth,” she heard him say. “I’m not going to kill you. You’re too beautiful.”