Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  That’s when she fled. She gathered up her children and took them to Dick Hanley’s place and never went back.

  Their divorce was handled by the influential lawyer Louis Nizer, but it would take years to untangle their financial dealings—the chalet in Gstaad, their expensive cars and Elizabeth’s jewels, their business enterprises. Meanwhile, Fisher attempted to salvage his career by making a number of nightclub appearances, opening his new act with the song “Arrivederci, Roma.” He later appeared in New York’s Winter Garden Theater with the South African dancer Juliet Prowse, who slithered onstage as Cleopatra, singing “I’m Cleo, the Nympho of the Nile.” But his once-fabulous career, like his once-famous marriage, never recovered. The former singing sensation would be remembered by the public as Elizabeth Taylor’s fourth husband, the one between Todd and Burton. And yet, for a brief time, they had been happy together.

  In mid-June, 20th Century-Fox sent cast and crew to the southern Italian island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples, to film the Battle of Actium. Richard and Elizabeth arrived by helicopter, and once there, hired a yacht. They were, of course, surrounded by the paparazzi, who trained their telephoto lenses on the couple from a flotilla of small boats. A photographer, Pat Morin, shot a now-famous picture of the two kissing on the bow of their rented yacht, published in the Italian newspaper Oggi. It was the shot seen around the world: she’s in a striped one-piece bathing suit, her dark hair tumbled over the dazzling white of the yacht; he’s lying beside her, kissing her, their two packs of cigarettes (one of them Marlboro) resting near their naked feet. They are lost in each other, moored, hiding in plain sight.

  The grainy, black-and-white photograph ushered in a brave new world of invasive publicity, the forerunner and prototype of photographs of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed; Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, having her toes sucked by a boyfriend.

  “Le Scandale”—Burton’s term—was born.

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  VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE

  “I was damned helpless…”

  —RICHARD BURTON

  “Gstaad is a lonely place out of season.”

  —ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  Elizabeth and Richard’s grand passion launched a new industry: celebrity culture on a scale never before seen. Suddenly, their images—usually costumed as Cleopatra and Marc Antony—appeared on the covers of countless newspapers and magazines. The Burton-Taylor affair was so famous that even Jacqueline Kennedy asked the publicist Warren Cowan, “Warren, do you think Elizabeth Taylor will marry Richard Burton?” One chronicler wrote, “They had moved off the show biz pages and into the hard news. They were up there with Kennedy and Khrushchev and the Cuban missiles.” Louella Parsons wrote that the massive amount of publicity “ought to have killed them.”

  Quickly written paperback books were published, such as Cleopatra in Mink by entertainment writer Cy Rice and Richard Burton, His Intimate Story by Ruth Waterbury; even Walter Wanger got into the act by publishing his production diary, My Life with Cleopatra (“FOR THE FIRST TIME! The complete, true, behind-the-scenes story of the most talked-about movie of our time by the man who produced it!”). Wanger wrote in those pages: “Tried again to get Elizabeth to make some kind of statement to counteract the bad press she has been receiving. Paris Match, Life, News of the World, France Soir, and many other European papers are violently attacking her,” and noted how the “paparazzi, that raffish group of photographers so well portrayed in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, have been the bane of our existence since we came to Rome.”

  Il Tempo, the Los Angeles Times, the Herald Examiner, Hollywood Reporter, and Variety all weighed in, as did the Vatican, which published a reader’s letter in the Vatican weekly Osservatore della Domenica, denouncing Elizabeth Taylor’s “erotic vagrancy” and calling into question Elizabeth and “her fourth ex-husband’s” fitness to adopt Maria, the German infant. In America, a U.S. congresswoman from Georgia named Iris Faircloth Blitch called on Congress to make “Miss Taylor and Mr. Burton…ineligible for reentry into the United States on the grounds of undesirability.” Congressmen in New York and North Carolina joined the fray, blaming the nation’s “moral slide” on the Taylor-Burton affair.

  Wanger was afraid that the bad publicity would destroy Cleopatra, causing audiences to boycott the picture. He sent in nine plain-clothed policemen to keep the paparazzi from sneaking onto the set. But “Liz and Dick” had had enough. They told their producer that they were “sick of being chased by the paparazzi” and they were going to turn the tables. So, one night, Burton and Taylor—who was chicly dressed in a leopard-skin coat and cloche hat—strolled hand-in-hand down Via Veneto, while the paparazzi went wild. They kissed publicly, flaunting their affair and letting the frenzy go on around them. They met their friend Mike Nichols, then known for his satiric comedy routines with Elaine May, at a Via Veneto nightclub.

  An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May had run on Broadway next to Burton’s Camelot, and Nichols had befriended both Richard and Elizabeth. (Though he would appear with the model Suzy Parker in a series of Richard Avedon’s photographs spoofing Burton and Taylor’s newfound notoriety, in fact, Nichols was at the beginning of a long and fulfilling friendship with Elizabeth that would change the direction of his career.)

  Another close friend during the feeding frenzy was Roddy McDowall, who had had an important supporting role in Cleopatra as Octavian, the wily third member of the Roman triumvirate who outwits and ultimately defeats Antony. He had an important supporting role in Elizabeth’s life as well—one of the gay actors, like Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson, whom she would rely upon and count among her dearest friends. Elizabeth was well ahead of her time in her complete acceptance and love for her gay friends. When McDowall returned to New York at the end of that summer and regaled Monty Clift with stories of Le Scandale, Clift was amazed. “It’s lunatic. Bessie Mae [his pet name for her] is now the most famous woman in the world!” He believed that Burton was the driving force behind the scandalous headlines: “Richard wants to be famous at any cost,” he complained.

  But it was Elizabeth, more than Richard, who could handle the press and the paparazzi—she was practically born to it, and she’d learned from Todd the importance of always being in the public’s eye. It wasn’t so for Burton, who still had a bookish sense of privacy, and though he had often basked in the adulation of theater audiences, he wasn’t used to this kind of constant public attention. At first, it was intoxicating. “In a few weeks,” Fisher noted, “Burton had been transformed from a well-respected British actor to a world-renowned celebrity—and he loved it. Suddenly he couldn’t walk down the street without being recognized…. What he didn’t yet understand,” Fisher wrote years after the fact, “was that he couldn’t turn off this fame when it was convenient to him.”

  After her marriages to the “sullen, resentful, and ultimately violent” Nicky Hilton, and to “sweet Michael Wilding, to whom I was more a sister than anything,” and “to Mike [Todd] whom I adored but had only two marvelous years with,” being with Burton was like a revelation to Taylor. “Richard and I had an incredible chemistry together,” she later said. “We couldn’t get enough of each other.” She loved best of all when they would slip off to their hideaway outside of Rome. “Even with paparazzi hanging out of the trees and hearing them tramping over the rooftops above us, even with all that going on, we could make love, and play Scrabble, and spell out naughty words for each other, and the game would never be finished. When you get aroused playing Scrabble, that’s love, baby.”

  Through it all, Elizabeth prevailed. It had been a gamble. Thirteen years earlier, Ingrid Bergman had derailed her career by leaving her husband, Peter Lindstrom, and running off with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, with whom she had an illegitimate child. She was hounded by the Hollywood gossip mavens and denounced on the floor of the Senate. But Elizabeth had been through all this before, when the public had sided with Debbie Reynolds in the Fisher-Taylor-Reynolds scandal, a
mere two years earlier. If anything, that notoriety had continued to fuel the unstoppable engine of Elizabeth’s white-hot career. If the paparazzi were camping outside Villa Pappa and the Cinecittà studios, what did she care? She was already used to crowds—ten thousand fans had gawked at her at Mike Todd’s funeral, where she’d collapsed, weeping on his grave.

  Indeed, it was Mike Todd himself—the ultimate showman, who had taken Elizabeth along on an endless series of hyped premieres for Around the World in 80 Days—who had shown her the transformative power of publicity. She had learned from a master: there’s no such thing as bad publicity. The world’s disapproval was nothing more than its newest incarnation, and publicity she could handle. And if she had any doubt that the public would cease to love her, would turn away from her in moral outrage, she got her answer when shooting began on Cleopatra’s grand entrance into Rome.

  In the spectacular scene, Cleopatra enters the city in a $6,500 gown of pure gold, perched atop an enormous, golden sphinx pulled through the Roman gates by scores of Nubian slaves, preceded by a legion of writhing snake dancers, splendid archers, horses, elephants, and fire-eaters. Elizabeth later confessed that the scene terrified her. Given the frenzy of bad press over the affair, she confided in Mankiewicz, “Being pulled through that mob—alone up there—who knows? They’ll jeer at me and they’ll throw rocks at me.” The director had received anonymous bomb threats and had taken them seriously enough to place toga-clad detectives among the extras on the set. It’s a testament to Elizabeth’s courage that she endured the scene.

  And then something amazing happened. The crowd of six thousand extras—Romans playing Romans—were meant to yell in jubilation, “Cleopatra! Cleopatra!” as she entered Rome.

  Instead, they yelled, “Leez, Leez! Baci, baci! [Kisses!]”

  Tears sprang to her eyes. When the scene was completed, she thanked the crowd of extras—standing in for all of Rome—for their love and approval.

  By the end of July 1962, the ten months of filming Cleopatra were over.

  “After my last shot,” Elizabeth recalled, “there was a curiously sad sort of aching, empty feeling—but such astronomical relief. It was finally over. It was like a disease, shooting that film—an illness one had a very difficult time recuperating from.” The Roman sets were taken down at Cinecittà. In September, Elizabeth decamped to her Swiss villa with her four children, having installed her parents at a nearby hotel. Richard returned with his family to Le Pays de Galles, the villa he and Sybil had bought in Céligny, on the west side of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, to avoid Britain’s high taxes.

  Conveniently, perhaps, Elizabeth’s Chalet Ariel in Gstaad was on the other side of the lake, an hour’s drive away over hairpin turns. For four months, the lovers tried to let the fires that had burned so intensely in Rome die down. “We tried to stay away from each other,” Elizabeth later explained. “We were too aware of the pain we were causing others to stay together. But it is a hard thing to do, to run away from your fate. When you are in love and lust like that, you just grab it with both hands and ride out the storm.”

  Unable to tell him in person, Elizabeth wrote an agonizing letter to Richard, admitting that their affair was causing too much suffering, “making too many people unhappy” and that they should separate. She also decided to start divorce proceedings to dissolve her marriage to Eddie Fisher.

  On her thirtieth birthday, which Elizabeth remembered as “the most miserable day of my life,” she had already known it was over when Eddie gave her a pair of yellow-diamond pendant earrings, a brooch, and a matching ring. “It came as a total surprise,” she’d recalled, “but you know something? The whole time I was just looking for something from Richard. I felt miserable, I thanked Eddie, but all I wanted was some sign from Richard. There wasn’t even a bouquet of flowers.” Later, a few months after their separation, Fisher sent her a bill for the jewelry. “I probably paid it,” Elizabeth remembered. Now she was trying to stay away from Richard.

  Burton was just as unhappy. He missed Elizabeth and he, perhaps, equally missed the attention of the world. He finally broke their enforced silence and telephoned, admitting that he was concerned about her and arranging a meeting at the Château de Chillon, a twelfth-century castle on Lake Geneva. She agreed.

  Even though she was with her children in Gstaad, her parents, Francis and Sara, staying in a nearby villa, Elizabeth had not lived without a man in her life since her first, ill-advised marriage to Nicky Hilton. She was lonely. She later wrote in her autobiography: “I was dying inside and trying to hide it from the children with all kinds of frenzied activity.” Her children seemed to miss Burton almost as much as she did, whereas, Elizabeth later noted, “When Eddie left, the children didn’t even ask where he’d gone.” She credits her younger son, Christopher, with helping her make up her mind when he confided, “I prayed to God last night that you and Richard would be married.”

  So Burton drove eastward from his villa, alone, while Elizabeth was driven by her parents. It’s surprising that Sara Taylor went along with this plan; as the prime mover of Elizabeth’s rise at MGM, she had sanctioned her daughter’s earlier marriages as good for her career. But the terrible publicity over Le Scandale, she feared, would ruin all those years of hard maneuvering. It shows that Elizabeth was standing up for her own desires, no matter the cost, and finally taking the reins of her career—and her life—away from her mother.

  “Richard and I arrived at exactly the same moment,” recalled Elizabeth. “The top of his car was down, he was terribly suntanned and his hair was cut very short. I hadn’t seen him since Cleopatra. He looked nervous, not happy, but so marvelous.” Suddenly shy, Elizabeth had a hard time getting out of the car. Sara leaned over and whispered to her, “Have a lovely day, baby,” and her father, Francis, kissed her on the cheek.

  “Oh, doesn’t he look wonderful!” Elizabeth said. “I don’t know what to do! I’m scared.”

  Richard ambled over to their car and sheepishly said hello. The Taylors practically pushed Elizabeth out of the car—as she remembers it—and she and Richard blurted out simultaneously, “You look marvelous!” Then a peck on the cheek, then a quiet lunch at a lakeside restaurant.

  Sitting at an outdoor table without the attendant fussing of publicists and the blinding flashbulbs of the paparazzi, Elizabeth and Richard found themselves in an awkward silence. Suddenly alone, they discovered they didn’t really know each other all that well—the mad attention had distracted them, perhaps, from true intimacy. Even the loquacious Burton, who could recite reams of verse at the drop of a hat, found himself surprisingly without words. But eventually, they began to find things to talk about—their children, the now-completed movie, the beauty of Lake Geneva. Her parents having by now departed, Burton drove Elizabeth home. They parted without a kiss, but agreed to see each other again. If Elizabeth had indeed intended to reconcile with Fisher—not likely—she changed her mind. She knew now that she still wanted Richard. The flame still burned, though Burton would continue to publicly say that he had no intention of leaving his wife.

  And he had good reason to stay with Sybil. There were reports that she had tried to commit suicide while Burton was in Gstaad with Elizabeth—surprising for one as grounded and sane as Sybil. But her entire world had been shaken. Besides Burton’s betrayal, their youngest daughter, Jessica, was alternately identified as “severely retarded” or possibly autistic and faced the possibility of lifelong institutionalization. It was too much to bear. Burton would learn of Jessica’s condition later that summer, and it would add another layer of guilt to his already wounded psyche. He would stay in Céligny, with his family, though he still longed for Elizabeth.

  They would continue to see each other for chaste lunches every few weeks. Elizabeth finally came to the conclusion that she would be with Burton any way he would have her—she wouldn’t insist on marriage, she wouldn’t insist that he leave Sybil. “I loved Richard so much that for the first time it was an unselfish l
ove,” she’d later write. “I didn’t want to marry Richard because I didn’t want him to be unhappy. I didn’t want Sybil to be unhappy. I would have been perfectly content to just talk to him on the phone every once in a while.”

  They would, however, soon have their chance to be together again, in London, where they would resume their passionate affair while filming their second movie together, The V.I.P.s.

  If Wanger, Skouras, and Zanuck had worried about the box office effects of Le Scandale, there was another producer who knew instantly that a new era had dawned since Ingrid Bergman was chased out of Hollywood, and he set out to capitalize on the biggest sex scandal of the day. Anatole “Tolly” de Grunwald, a Russian-born producer, had produced Emlyn Williams’s Last Days of Dolwyn fourteen years earlier, which had showcased the youthful Richard Burton. De Grunwald, like Williams before him, knew a good thing when he saw it.

  Working with a screenplay by the eminent English playwright Terence Rattigan (Separate Tables, The Winslow Boy) about a number of VIPs stranded at Heathrow Airport during heavy fog, de Grunwald cast Burton and Taylor in the leading roles and began shooting even before Cleopatra was completed.

  Richard, for one, was relieved. He, too, was worried that his affair with Elizabeth, arguably intended to elevate his stature in Hollywood, had instead made him unemployable—he had gone several months without a job offer. De Grunwald had originally wanted Sophia Loren to play opposite Burton, but Elizabeth would have none of it. Though they were still working out the ramifications of their living arrangements—Eddie Fisher was now permanently out of the picture, but Burton still clung to his marriage, and Sybil still seemed convinced that he would tire of Elizabeth and return to her—it dawned on Elizabeth that the two stars might create a new, powerful alliance in filmdom, along the lines of Mary Pickford–Douglas Fairbanks in silent films and the Barrymores and Lunts in the theater. “Let Sophia stay in Rome!” she magisterially proclaimed, so, despite the fact that she was now uninsurable due to her calamitous health (her tracheotomy was the coup de grâce), de Grunwald signed her. As the producer was making the movie for MGM, with the stroke of a pen, Taylor was returned to the studio that had virtually owned her for most of her film career. But that was about to change.