Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  Filming was done entirely at night, in keeping with the real-time experience of the movie, which begins at night and ends at sunrise. Even so, villagers stood around the movie set all night, held back by security guards, trying to get a glimpse of the famous couple. It was emotionally draining—working in the dark, unleashing Albee’s ravaging dialogue, dodging the inevitable press of fans lurking on the perimeter. One rainy night on a soggy Northampton lawn, as Burton rehearsed his lines, he reminisced about an early review he’d received for his professional debut stage role in The Druid’s Rest, twenty-two years earlier, when he was just eighteen. “In a wretched part,” the critic for the New Statesman had written, “Richard Burton showed exceptional ability.” Perhaps it was his role as George that brought about another round of regret for the life not lived, as Burton complained, “I would have become a preacher, a poet, a playwright, a scholar, a lawyer or something,” had it not been for that favorable review. “I would never have become this strange thing, an actor, sitting in a remote corner of the universe called Northampton, drinking a vodka and tonic and waiting to learn the next line. He’s got a bloody lot to answer for, that man.”

  But the rainy, difficult shoot brought the Burtons even closer together. “I never had a better time in my life,” Elizabeth later said about making Virginia Woolf. On September 23, the crew returned to Los Angeles to finish five months of filming.

  Back in California, Burton turned forty and was treated to a grand celebration on the Warner Bros. soundstage. The stage doors swung open, and there, wrapped in a huge red ribbon, was Elizabeth’s gift to her husband: a white Oldsmobile Toronado. He was less happy with his director’s playful gift of a puppy, yet another mewling mouth to feed among their growing menagerie. He retaliated by later giving Nichols four mice in a cage, representing George, Martha, Nick, and Honey.

  After filming at Studio 8 was finally completed on December 13, 1965, Nichols presented Taylor with a pair of ruby-and-diamond earrings. Extravagant gifts were exchanged all around: the Burtons gave their director a pair of gold David Webb cuff links, and they gave Lehman a 1633 first edition of Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning. Their greatest gift to their producer, however, was not charging him overages for the additional two weeks of shooting that had been required, which would have come to more than a million dollars. They knew, perhaps, that in making Virginia Woolf they had done something important, and, as Elizabeth had joked earlier, she would have done it for nothing.

  Earlier in the shoot—practically from day one—Elizabeth had let it be known that she’d already picked out an $80,000 brooch that she expected from Jack Warner, and a piece of David Webb jewelry that she expected from Lehman. But both men had demurred. Warner had groused, “I’m paying her a million, one hundred thousand, plus 10 percent of the gross. Let her buy her own brooch.” And Lehman—who tended to be a bit fussy and timorous in any case—let it be known that his wife would divorce him if he bought Elizabeth Taylor an expensive piece of jewelry. “I did tell her that I had thought of buying her a baby wolf. She squealed with delight,” Lehman wrote in his diary. But Burton was put out with him.

  “You son of a bitch. You’ll say anything to get out of giving Elizabeth a present,” he told his nervous producer. What followed was a not-too-subtle bid on Elizabeth’s part to remind Lehman what was expected of him. She showed up one day wearing a double rope of 91/2-millimeter pearls given to her by Martin Ransohoff, “because The Sandpiper was doing so well at the box office.” But Lehman would not budge.

  Meanwhile, not only Elizabeth had gained extra weight. Sandy Dennis had put on about twenty pounds, and finally revealed that she was pregnant. Lehman worried about how that would affect filming, but when he finally saw the dailies on December 1, 1965, all his fears vanished.

  …I finally know what it feels like to cry at the dailies. I saw the film alone toward the end of the day. It was the scene of Martha talking about her “beautiful, beautiful boy.” Honey was listening and slowly her eyes were filling with tears and pouring down her cheeks. Finally she cried, “I want a child! I want a child! I want a baby!” That did it for me.

  I went down on the set and saw Sandy Dennis and told her how beautiful her performance was. I then called Elizabeth and thanked her for making me weep.

  Twelve days later, Lehman presented Elizabeth with a pendant. “She was absolutely thrilled with it,” Lehman recorded. But nineteen days later, Sandy Dennis suffered a miscarriage and lost her baby.

  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? premiered on June 22, 1966, in Hollywood and opened in New York’s Criterion theater with a performance benefiting two of the Burtons’ charities: the Richard Burton Fund of the National Hemophilia Foundation and Philip Burton’s American Musical and Dramatic Academy. At $7.5 million, it was the most expensive black-and-white film yet made in Hollywood, and its shocking, explicit language flew in the face of Hollywood’s decency code. Jack Warner struggled to find a way to open the film despite the complaints of the National Catholic Office of Motion Pictures over language and sexual content. He had come up with the policy that “no one under the age of eighteen will be admitted to a viewing unless accompanied by his parent. Adults also must be advised that the theme of Virginia Woolf may prove to be confusing and its language offensive to the casual filmgoer.” Exhibitors had to sign a contract agreeing to the policy, and it’s been noted that Warner’s solution dismantled the old, censorial Production Code and paved the way for the more flexible rating system put into effect soon after.

  The film opened to mostly glorious reviews, the Burtons nominated for British Film Academy Awards. Elizabeth also won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. Though it was widely noted that Elizabeth gave the best performance of her career, it was Richard who garnered the most praise from reviewers. Newsweek hailed Burton’s performance as “a marvel of disciplined compassion…With the self-contained authority of a great actor, he plays the part as if no one in the world had ever heard of Richard Burton.” The Village Voice described his work as possessing “heroic calm,” which other actors could use for a textbook. “Burton simply soars…with inscrutable ironies flickering across his beautifully ravaged face. Without Burton, the film would have been an intolerably cold experience.”

  Elizabeth, Richard, George Segal, and Sandy Dennis were all nominated for Academy Awards. Elizabeth’s performance scorches the paint off the walls and puts to rest any doubt about her as not just a “movie star” but a serious, first-class film actress. For once, Richard and Elizabeth seemed to have switched places in terms of their onscreen technique: Elizabeth is operatic as Martha, whereas Richard holds back, underplaying George. His reticence was a way of spotlighting Elizabeth and setting the pace for her. In short, it was his gift to his wife.

  The public continued its mad adoration of the Burtons. Crowds met them whenever they traveled, sometimes turning dangerous in their infatuation. Elizabeth, as usual, could handle it, but Richard was finding it increasingly intolerable. He was, at heart, a deeply private man who preferred hours spent reading, and now writing in his diary, which occupied him more and more, and trying his hand at a short story and a novel. He traveled with a trunk filled with the complete plays of Shakespeare. He couldn’t bear the sound of the telephone and rarely answered it. Elizabeth reminded him that it would be more troublesome if the crowds stopped coming, auguring the end of their popularity, but that didn’t make the experience any less uncomfortable for Richard.

  To fulfill (and continue to stoke) the public’s interest, Elizabeth was paid $250,000 for a memoir titled Elizabeth by Elizabeth, written with the biographer Richard Meryman, published by Harper & Row in November 1965, and generously excerpted in Ladies’ Home Journal magazine the same month. Bert Stern’s LHJ cover photograph of the Burtons, still in their first year of marriage and the third year of their grand passion, show a contentedly smiling Elizabeth in Cleopatra eye makeup with her arms protectively and possessively wrapped around Richard.
Her stunning engagement ring and diamond-studded wedding band—Burton’s gifts, of course—are also dazzlingly on display. Burton’s rugged face is impassive, unreadable.

  The book would be criticized as thin, but the LHJ excerpt is charming, breezy, self-deprecating, and immensely likeable. It showcases Elizabeth’s willingness to stand up for her unconventional choices and admit to her many youthful mistakes and misjudgments. It’s impossible not to like her, especially as it was written—or spoken, with Meryman committing her thoughts to print—during the heady months after her marriage to Burton and his triumphant conquering of Broadway in Hamlet. How could she not be sublimely happy? After all, she had won the publicity wars, had lived down public outrage at her marriage to Eddie Fisher, the negative reviews for Cleopatra, the condemnations from the Vatican and the House of Representatives, the invasive paparazzi, the “Liz and Dick” tabloid stories. With Burton at her side, she had prevailed. What she does reveal is her joie de vivre, her fighting spirit, and above all, her gratitude.

  She is surprisingly candid about a number of things—how after the birth of her two children with Michael Wilding, her “career had become only a way of making money. It was very hard to take any great interest in a career of playing the perennial ingénue.” A few revelations were omitted from the published book—Eddie Fisher standing over her with a gun at the height of the Cleopatra madness, for example, and Burton telling her when they first began their affair that he was tired of acting onstage, that all the excitement of live performance had left him. Elizabeth omitted that because she felt it was an indictment of Sybil’s failure to inspire him, and she wanted to spare Sybil. And she edited out of the published book what she’d written about Debbie Reynolds going along with the MGM publicity machine, playing up her role as the wronged wife, when all three had known that the Fisher-Reynolds marriage was, for the most part, a studio-arranged mirage.

  Elizabeth does air her misgivings about the gypsy life she and Burton were living. (“We’ve got to stop moving around so the kids can have one school, one set of friends, a pony and all their dogs and cats. I’m dying to unpack so I can hang all my paintings, so Richard can put out all his books—so I can have a house to take care of.”) She also admits to worrying that her movie-star status has been detrimental to her children (“No, we’re terribly proud of you” is their answer, Elizabeth tells us).

  She takes delight in disparaging her own impressive beauty, especially when quoting Burton as “a perverse tease! He will describe me to a reporter as ‘my comfy, nice little girl,’ and then throw in something about a double chin and stumpy legs, ending with ‘she has breakfast like any normal person. There are times when she is so normal I am tempted to leave her.’” Elizabeth always thought Ava Gardner, Lena Horne, and her own daughter Liza Todd far more beautiful. She’d never stopped considering Jacqueline Kennedy exquisite, her great dignity enhancing her beauty. “I am pretty enough,” she writes. “My best feature is my gray hairs. I have them all named; they’re all called Burton.”

  Perhaps most surprisingly to her fans, she offers the possibility that she and Burton will “go into semiretirement in a few years. I think Richard will eventually give up acting to become a serious writer.” What follows is a joyful description of her private moments with Burton:

  My favorite time is when we’re alone at night, giggling and talking about books, world events, poetry, the children, when we first met, problems, daydreams, real dreams. Even our fights are fun. Richard loses his temper with such enjoyment that it’s beautiful to watch—he goes off like a bomb—sparks fly, walls shake, floors reverberate…. Above all I want very much to please Richard, not to be pleased.

  Scandalous love can be forgiven, even by Americans, if, after all, it results in a genuine marriage—intimacy and companionship—which the Burtons seem to have found, so far, four months shy of their first wedding anniversary. Elizabeth goes on to describe a mystical tie she shares with Burton, recalling two Chagall-like, out-of-body experiences:

  …once, for instance, on shipboard, when he was walking through the dining room toward me; again during a party when he was mesmerizing a bunch of people. I sort of detached myself, as though I were floating upward and looking down with great clarity on the two of us—like in a Chagall painting. Then a shock, a thrill, goes through my entire body…. It’s almost as if I were seeing him for the first time, falling in love with him again.

  7

  MARRIED LOVE

  “I can’t say it in words like that, but my heart is there.”

  —ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  “We live in a blaze of floodlights all day long.”

  —RICHARD BURTON

  Between filming The Sandpiper and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Elizabeth had talked often with Montgomery Clift over the telephone, trying to keep up Clift’s interest in working together, trying to keep up his spirits. By the time Burton was treading the boards in Hamlet, Clift’s career was nearly over. His struggle with alcohol and barbiturates had made him virtually unemployable. When he’d acted with Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits in 1961, Monroe had commented, “Monty has even more problems than I do.” In 1964, he was emaciated, down to a hundred pounds, and Elizabeth had been shocked at his appearance.

  Clift was one of Elizabeth’s dearest friends. Their bond had been forged when the actor had partnered Elizabeth so sublimely in A Place in the Sun. MGM had loaned Elizabeth to Paramount to appear in the film, George Stevens’s adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. She believed that it was Monty Clift who had first introduced method acting to the movies, not Marlon Brando or James Dean. “Though we were linked romantically by the media,” she recalled, “I sensed from the beginning that Monty was torn between what he thought he should be and what he actually was.” During the shoot, they developed a loving and lasting friendship, which only deepened when the troubled young actor crashed his car into a telephone pole after leaving Elizabeth and Michael Wilding’s Benedict Canyon home.

  Elizabeth had virtually saved Clift’s life that night in 1956, crawling into the crushed vehicle and pulling out two teeth that had lodged in his throat, cradling his head before the ambulance arrived. He survived, but the broodingly handsome actor had suffered devastating facial injuries that left his face stiff and slightly disfigured. By the time he appeared in Suddenly, Last Summer with Elizabeth in 1959, he seemed a haunted man.

  During the run of Hamlet, the Burtons had occasionally dined with Clift at his East 61st Street brownstone, or at Dinty Moore’s in the theater district, where an unacknowledged rivalry for Elizabeth’s affection often played out. At one such occasion, Richard had turned to Elizabeth and said, “Monty, Elizabeth likes me, but she loves you.” Clift never told Elizabeth what he thought of Richard, that he jealously dismissed him as “a phony actor.”

  Nonetheless, Richard got into the act, suggesting that the three of them costar in a remake of Ernest Hemingway’s The Macomber Affair, but Clift wasn’t too keen on the idea. Elizabeth thought of other projects that she and her friend might do together, such as starring in the film version of The Owl and the Pussycat. They could always make each other laugh, and both had longed to do a comedy together.

  Robert Lantz, Clift’s Austrian-born agent, suggested they consider starring in a film adaptation of a novel written by another one of his clients—Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, a Southern gothic tale about desire and sexual repression. Clift would play Major Weldon Penderton, a latent homosexual army officer obsessed with a young private, who, in turn, is obsessed with the major’s beautiful wife, Leonora, played by Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth had already agreed to play the part of Leonora, but Ray Stark, who was going to produce the film for Seven Arts, was nervous about insuring Clift and insisted that he put up his cherished brownstone as collateral. Desperate for work, he considered doing so, but Elizabeth wouldn’t let him. After time spent with Clift in New York, however, Elizabeth had confided to one of her press age
nts, “If Monty doesn’t work soon, he’ll die.”

  Elizabeth was driving this train. And when she took it upon herself to announce to the press that she and Monty were going to costar in another film—their first since Suddenly, Last Summer in 1959—she was, in effect, forcing Stark and Seven Arts to accept Clift as her costar. When Stark pleaded with her to reconsider, Elizabeth shot back that “she would pay the bloody insurance,” offering to give up her million-dollar fee.

  Elizabeth had not just come to the rescue of another close friend; she was trying to give Clift back his career, his reason for living. And unlike Richard, Elizabeth was unfazed by McCullers’s subject. It was part of her fearlessness—or, if she did have such fears, they were quickly conquered by her devotion to her gay friends and fellow actors. It is what allowed her, decades later, to step onto the world stage as the first prominent advocate for AIDS research and the compassionate care of HIV and AIDS patients. It is what made her so convincing when she begged Richard to renounce his shame over his hemophilia and epilepsy. (She also reminded him of the great princes of Europe with whom Richard shared these afflictions). None of the books in Richard’s vast library had given him the courage with which to embrace those conditions, accept them, and deal with them, the way Elizabeth did. He was grateful to her for it. In fact, his gratitude went so deep that, when he was in his cups, he might even resent her for it. And then the imprecations would begin. And it drove her to tears when he came after her with that beautiful voice saying such ugly things.