Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  The film was shot at the Dino De Laurentiis Studios just outside of Rome, where four enormous soundstages were transformed into sixteenth-century Padua. The Burtons would be driven each morning in the Rolls-Royce, past the Colosseum, to their suite of palatial dressing rooms, complete with kitchen, offices, and white carpeting throughout. There they would be ministered to by a small battalion of servants—“maids, secretaries, and butlers as well as hairdressers and makeup artists.” They often held court there for visiting journalists and columnists, like Sheilah Graham, and famous friends, like Rudolf Nureyev and Edward Albee.

  At first, Zeffirelli had to work around their different schedules—Burton showing up promptly at seven thirty a.m. and ready for his first take at nine twenty, but Elizabeth not turning up until nearly eleven a.m. (“[her] morning was given over to her famous face—skin massage, eyebrow-plucking or whatever,” the director supposed). Even worse, a long, festive lunch party was held most days in their dressing rooms, lasting from one to four in the afternoon. Impossible to work after that! Zeffirelli got them to agree to adhere to “French hours”—starting at noon and working straight through till eight p.m., with a break for tea. But that didn’t work either—it meant the whole crew had to stay on set all day—so they ended up working from eight in the morning till three in the afternoon, without a break, despite Elizabeth’s dislike of starting so early. For all the problems her habits initially caused, the director was impressed by how well she understood the camera. “She is not called ‘one-shot Liz’ for nothing,” he recalled. Of course, as the Burtons were producing the film, they had an added incentive to bring it in on time.

  There would be little late-night carousing: Richard rehearsed with Elizabeth every evening, helping her master Shakespearean verse. Despite the pressures on the Burtons, now responsible for the entire production, the set was surprisingly convivial, with everyone pitching in. There were spontaneous poetry readings (Burton reciting Dylan Thomas, of course), and Victor Spinetti, who played Hortensio in the film (and who was in the first flush of his movie fame after appearing in A Hard Day’s Night and Help!), recalled how Elizabeth pitched in where needed. When Zeffirelli realized that he required fifty extras onscreen for a scene to be shot the next day, the makeup department rebelled—“We’ll have to start at five thirty!” they wailed. Elizabeth immediately told her director, “Don’t worry. I’ll do it.” And she did, starting early the next morning, applying makeup to fifty extras, and doing Spinetti’s makeup, as well. “May I give you a beauty tip?” she’d asked the actor, who was Welsh despite his Italian name. “Always extend the eyebrows. They set your eyes farther apart…Oh, and don’t use an eyebrow pencil. Use an ordinary lead one.”

  Even though the frenzy had died down considerably since Cleopatra days, the Burtons still found themselves tailed by paparazzi on their occasional forays into Rome’s nightlife, or on rare jaunts outside the city. When they managed to get away to Positano on a short break from filming, Burton took their poodle, E’en So, for a walk outside their hotel. His very presence caused an enormous traffic jam. Somehow they had found him out. Burton, who was essentially solitary, even antisocial when sober, found the attention nightmarish. Hounded by the shouts of the public and the exploding flashcubes of paparazzi, Burton fled back to the hotel. He confided in his diary: “I never gaped at anybody in my life and much as I admire certain famed people, Churchill, and various writers…Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot…etc., etc., I have never asked them for an autograph. I actually feel as embarrassed seeing a public figure as being one.”

  After an evening in Rome when the Burtons had dined with Zeffirelli and a visiting Edward Albee, Burton recorded:

  Albee was very flattering, especially to E. about V. Woolf and, for him, was very talkative…we had a hair-raising drive, pursued by paparazzi all the way. I think Mario the driver takes too much notice of these butterflies of the gutter. They risk their lives, too…why don’t they go where there’s real risk. Like a war. Like Viet Nam. Like anywhere.

  So when Zeffirelli wanted to arrange an outing with the Burtons to see the famed Villa D’Este fountains, they had to plan a bus trip on a Sunday night, when the grounds were closed to tourists.

  “Wonderful! A bus trip,” Burton said, rather wistfully. “I haven’t been on one of those since I was a boy.”

  Elizabeth was just as keen on the idea. “We’ll make an evening of it,” she said, according to Spinetti. “Everybody come up to the villa first. I’ll order in hamburgers and hot dogs from Nathan’s and we’ll eat them before we set off.” And so she did—grilling all afternoon and serving them with lots of yellow mustard and cold beer. The trip to the Villa D’Este, however, was canceled when Cyril Cusack suffered a mild heart attack, ending their plans and postponing the shoot for two days. Still, the night of grilling hamburgers and hot dogs was just the kind of simple pleasure that Elizabeth loved—the camaraderie, playing mama to a crew of actors, the homey, unbeatable American food.

  There were other simple pleasures. Between takes on the set, Richard would finish the crossword puzzles from the London newspapers, and Elizabeth would playfully spill her drinks over his pages. Burton also enjoyed taking Liza and Maria to school in the morning, while their two brothers, Michael and Christopher, appeared as extras in crowd scenes in the movie. Richard also loved buying books—twenty or thirty paperbacks in one haul—at a favorite bookshop on Via Veneto. In the evenings, he dined alone with Elizabeth; they often read favorite passages to each other during their meals. And then—to bed, where Richard worshipped at “the exquisite softness of the inside of your thighs…the half hostile look in your eyes when you’re deep in rut with your little Welsh stallion,” as he would later write in a heartsick letter to his beloved.

  Michael York, who made his film debut as a greatly appealing Lucentio, has remained forever grateful to the Burtons for signing off on him for the role and thus launching his long, distinguished career in film. He shared Burton’s love of antiquarian books. “I would sometimes find books in marketplaces,” he recalled, “and show them to Richard. I would pick up these old rare books, and we would talk about them on the set.” Actually, the young actor would show Burton his finds, and Burton would just assume they were gifts. “They were like gods to be showered with offerings, they strode the world like two Colossi,” according to York. When he found a book of bawdy lyrics that he showed to Richard, Burton said, “Thank you,” and greedily pocketed it. The same thing happened to the photographer David Bailey when he appeared on the set and demonstrated a new camera—within minutes, it belonged to the Burtons. And, as usual, Elizabeth expected her tribute from her director, letting Zeffirelli know about a little shop on Via Condotti that held a bauble she wanted. That shop was Bulgari’s, and Zeffirelli bought it for her: a gold bracelet that had once belonged to Napoleon’s sister.

  York was impressed with how good Elizabeth was, tackling Shakespeare for the first time, noticing that even her biggest liability—her thin, sometimes shrill voice—“was well suited” for the role of Katharina the shrew. He also took great pleasure in watching Burton’s Petruchio evolve, and indeed it’s a pleasure to witness Burton’s masculine swagger and braggadocio, as he goes from lion-tamer to the one being tamed.

  York also noticed how each brought something to the relationship that the other lacked, “Richard bringing Elizabeth culture with a capital K,” and Elizabeth “revving up his courage, making him realize his potential. That was her gift to him.” When he saw Virginia Woolf a few months later (it was released in June of that year), he was deeply impressed by their performances. “I loved it,” he recalled. “I thought about them a lot after having seen the movie, because there’s that undertow of sadness. But they were wonderful to me, and I owe them a great deal. They gave me my chance.”

  If their evenings were becoming more bookish, by day the set was something of a moveable feast, with old and new friends stopping by to visit the Burtons. In early April, Mike Nichols visited, with
Mia Farrow on his arm. (“That M. Nichols really gets the girls,” Burton recorded in his diary on April 5. “I wish Farrow would put on 15 pounds and grow her hair.”) The Burtons always enjoyed being around Nichols, though he had put them through their paces in Virginia Woolf. Elizabeth considered him “one of the most brilliant and nicest people I’ve ever known.” They had also been impressed that of all the many directors they’d worked with, together and separately, he was the only one who had memorized Lehman’s entire script (which was virtually Albee’s play, with one additional location and only two words changed).

  Nichols, a German Jew who had emigrated to America as a boy on the eve of World War II, had a wry, self-deprecating manner that appealed to Burton far more than the florid personality of their Italian director. After Nichols left, Burton wrote in his diary,

  I’m not sure I like Zeffirelli. As a mind and a personality, he’s not a patch on M. Nichols. But he has flair, shall we say. He has a sense of the spectacular. He will succeed. Yesterday he was worried again about his billing. I told him for the umpty-ninth time to fix it with Columbia, and that whatever was mutually agreeable to them was also so to us.

  One of Elizabeth Taylor’s biographers, Brenda Maddox, made the rather surprising discovery that Sigmund Freud’s Welsh biographer, Ernest Jones, had referred to the Welsh as “the Jews of Britain,” a comment on their self-identity as the underdogs and outsiders of the United Kingdom. In that light, Maddox rather playfully remarked, “Burton was [Taylor’s] third Jewish husband.”

  Elizabeth had completely embraced Judaism after her conversion to marry Mike Todd, an identity that had roots in her childhood. “During the war, as a kid,” she wrote, “I had Walter Mitty dreams about being Jewish and wishing I was…after Mike and I were married, I had told him that I wanted to be a Jewess.” When Todd died so suddenly, she’d found true comfort in Judaism. “I am absolutely Jewish now in my beliefs and feelings,” she later wrote, taking as her Jewish name Elisheba Rachel. For Elizabeth, increasingly a citizen of the world, it gave her an identity beyond that of actress, adulterer, wife, and mother. It was as necessary to her as Burton’s Welshness, as a way to stay rooted in their gypsy life.

  But her Jewishness was one of the things Burton loved to tease her about, and sometimes they’d have real fights over it. “My great-grandfather,” Burton told a reporter, “was a Polish Jew named Jan Ysar, and that was the family name until they changed it to Jenkins. It’s true. I’m one-eighth Jewish. Elizabeth hasn’t a drop of Jewish blood. I’ve told her so. It makes her furious.” Earlier, during the making of The Night of the Iguana, in a thatched roof bar in Puerto Vallarta, a drunken Burton had announced, “I was born a Jew. I am perhaps the very oldest of the really ancient Jews.”

  “You’re not Jewish at all,” he told Elizabeth in one of their very public fights—which members of their staff had taken to timing. “If there’s any Jew in this family, it’s me!”

  “I am Jewish,” she answered. “And you can fuck off!”

  But in a few years he would begin to pour out his heart to her in a series of intimate letters, sometimes addressing her as “Dear Sheba,” a version of her Jewish name, or, playfully, “Shebes,” as in an undated letter: “All my love. Never think of anything but you for very long. I fancy you a very lot, Shebes.—Rich.”

  In June, the Burtons and Zeffirelli were invited to Princess Pignatelli’s home, where they saw Robert and Ethel Kennedy, whom they’d met during their Hamlet year. They dined out and ended up at a nightclub, and on the way back to the Hotel Eden, where the Kennedys were staying, Burton and Bobby Kennedy got into a poetry competition, each trying to outdo the other in reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets from memory. In the hotel lobby, Richard won the contest by throwing back his head and roaring out Shakespeare’s 15th Sonnet (“When I Consider Everything That Grows”) backward, without missing a syllable. Elizabeth, beaming with pride, said, “Isn’t it awful to have to tolerate this monster?”

  The Burtons adored Robert Kennedy. It’s interesting to note that two years later, in June 1968, when the senator was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, just after winning the California primary for the Democratic presidential nomination, Elizabeth spent $50,000 on a full-page advertisement in the New York Times pleading for gun control.

  The Burtons’ five months in Rome—unlike their first experience there—were idyllic, alternately sacred and profane, like the city itself. There were more visits to Bulgari’s “money room,” resplendent with antiques and silver-and-gold samovars, where the Burtons would examine the “crème de la crème pieces” that were reserved for special patrons.

  One evening after sharing a peasant meal of cheese, kidney beans, and vin du pays in a trattoria near the Church of the Madonna of Divine Love, they heard the celestial strains of a boy’s choir emanating from the church. Burton wrote tenderly in his diary: “It was one of those moments which are nostalgia before they’re over.” Again, the familiar refrain about wanting to stop making films—“Both Eliz. and I agreed solemnly that we never want to work again, but simply loll our lives away in a sort of eternal Sunday. Quite right, too. We are both bone-lazy and enjoy it.”

  But the truth about idylls is that idylls must end. Elizabeth’s contentment was shattered by the sudden death on July 22 of Montgomery Clift, and it fell to Richard to give her the grim news.

  Clift had died in his New York City brownstone. His secretary, Lorenzo James, had discovered him sprawled across his bed, having apparently suffered a heart attack after years of alcohol abuse.

  Richard took Elizabeth’s loss very seriously. He later recorded in his diary:

  Sept. 24. [Monty’s] companion, nurse, and major domo very kindly sent E. his (Monty’s) handkerchiefs, which he had only recently bought in Paris, and which he loved, delicate white on white. And to me—Monty’s favorite soap! Should I use it or keep it? E. was very upset and still cannot believe he’s dead. A little Monty Clift cult has started since his death. It would have been more useful when he was alive. He couldn’t get a decent job for the last 5 yrs of his life. Poor sod. I didn’t know him very well, but he seemed a good man. E. has received a couple of lovely letters from his mother.

  Elizabeth was devastated. Unwilling to stop production for a few days, however, she did not attend Monty’s funeral, instead sending two huge bouquets of white chrysanthemums, which were placed near the casket. Her accompanying card read, “Rest, perturbed spirit—Elizabeth and Richard.” But she broke down and wept on the set. Then, pulling herself together, she gave one of her best, and funniest, performances on the day of her friend’s funeral.

  Now she would have to find another actor to replace Clift in Reflections in a Golden Eye, which would be filmed that year, also in Rome, at the De Laurentiis Studios.

  Four months earlier, in April, Burton received another slight from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He’d been nominated for Best Actor for his work in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold—his fourth nomination—but it was Lee Marvin who won, for his comic portrayal of a sloshed gunfighter in Cat Ballou. “What do you think they’re trying to tell me? That Lee Marvin is a better class of drunk?” Burton quipped, but as his nominations and his losses piled up, it was beginning to trouble him. (He was in good company, though, as Lee Marvin’s hilarious but lightweight performance beat out Laurence Olivier’s Othello, Rod Steiger’s star role in The Pawnbroker, and Oskar Werner—who had also appeared in Spy with Burton—in Ship of Fools.) Though Burton was often cavalier about acting, dismissing it as an unmanly profession, it bothered him that Taylor had her Oscar for BUtterfield 8, and despite four nominations now, the prize continued to elude him.

  Two months later, on June 29, 1966, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was released in New York to mostly ecstatic reviews, later garnering thirteen Academy Award nominations. Both Richard and Elizabeth were nominated for Best Actor and Best Actress awards. Maybe this time he would win.

  In Oc
tober 1966, LOOK magazine, in yet another opulently illustrated cover story on the Burtons, asked the question: “Does Burton Tame the Shrew, as Shakespeare Intended?” The press was still infatuated with the couple, blurring the lines between the actors and the roles they embodied. LOOK even asked, in describing the Zeffirelli movie, “What other young couple would go to such lengths to make home movies for their fans?” In a flattering preview of the film, Elizabeth vividly graces the cover of the magazine in full Elizabethan dress, her black hair tumbling down her shoulders and décolletage. “Between scenes,” the magazine enthused, “he spouted sonnets while she poured champagne and fed him quail eggs—just the way Liz & Dick fans would have wanted it.”

  On February 28, 1967, The Taming of the Shrew premiered in London, selected for the Royal Command Performance for a screening at the Odeon, in Leicester Square. The Burtons checked into the Dorchester on Park Lane for the premiere, and Richard reserved fourteen suites for the weekend, to house his entire Welsh clan, whom he brought in by train from Port Talbot, South Wales. They all came—Burton’s six brothers and his three surviving sisters. It was the first time they had come together since the death of Edith “Edie” Jenkins, who had died a few months earlier, at the age of forty-three, the first of Burton’s grown siblings to pass away. She had been the youngest, and the most playful, of all of Burton’s sisters. The rest of the Jenkins clan arrived with spouses and children, plus a handful of aunts and uncles, many of the women going to the premiere in gowns from the trunkfuls of cast-off clothes Elizabeth had sent to them. (Hilda Owen wore a fuchsia-and-yellow caftan from Robinson’s of Beverly Hills.) Rolls-Royces picked them up at Paddington Station and drove them to the Dorchester. The luxury was far beyond anything the Jenkinses could imagine—sumptuous flowers in every room, room service at their disposal.