by Sam Kashner
Guinness was also somewhat alarmed. In Richard’s early years in the theater, back in 1949, he had occasionally dined with the Guinnesses at their house in St. Peter’s Square in London, where Richard had introduced Alec Guinness to the poetry of Dylan Thomas. (Guinness later portrayed the Welsh poet in a one-man show in London.) Now, eighteen years later, Alec wrote in a letter to his son about his reunion with Richard: “I hardly find him the same person. Although he’s a bit dour at the moment, he can be amusing and is highly intelligent and not uninteresting. But drink has taken a bit of a toll, I fear.”
And, in the usual way that the Burtons’ films so often reflected or commented upon their private lives, there’s a throwaway line delivered by Paul Ford, playing an eccentric American idealist who travels to Haiti with his wife (played by Lillian Gish), which could have been written for Burton himself. When Burton, as Mr. Brown, the proprietor of a hotel imperiled under the Duvalier regime, tells Mr. Smith (Paul Ford) that he’s putting him and his wife up in the John Barrymore Suite, Mrs. Smith asks if John Barrymore really stayed there.
“I can show you his liquor bills,” Mr. Brown answers.
“A great talent ruined,” Mr. Smith remarks.
Elizabeth blamed Richard’s excessive drinking on his “Welsh hours,” his recurring bouts of depression that seemed to require more and more alcohol. But both were drinking heavily. Once, as a result, they failed to show up for a state dinner in their honor, to which two hundred guests had been invited. But it was Richard who was usually the worse for wear. Sometimes he would disappear for hours. Elizabeth would call out his name in their air-conditioned presidential compound, but there would be no answer. She would have to leave the comfort of their villa and make the rounds of the back alleys and streets in Cotonou, searching the small hotels and African bars for him, where the most famous woman in the world had trouble making herself understood.
“Have you seen Richard Burton?” she’d ask in the local bars.
“Who?”
“Richard Burton!”
“Is he black or white, madame?”
Could he have been kidnapped? There were rumors of kidnapping by Duvalier’s henchmen swirling around the set, sometimes two or three threats a week. Eventually, she would find him having wandered off with a few members of the crew. Once, Alec Guinness stumbled onto Elizabeth in his dressing room; she had been weeping throughout the afternoon because Burton, in his cups, had been so nasty to her. But, as usual, they patched up their quarrel and things went on as before. When there wasn’t acting, there was drinking. When there wasn’t drinking, there was fighting. And when there wasn’t fighting, there was lovemaking.
Burton noticed how, despite it all, Elizabeth seemed to grow even more beautiful in Africa. “E. is looking gorgeous—she blooms in hot climates,” Burton wrote in his diary in January. And later, “I am madly in love with her at the moment, as distinct from always loving her, and want to make love to her every minute. But alas it is not possible for a couple of days.”
The more he drank on location in West Africa, the more he became a Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde figure, and it was Elizabeth who suffered most when Burton turned mean. Though she was playing another Martha in The Comedians, Elizabeth didn’t want to be turned into Albee’s Martha. He could be so loving toward her, so devoted, but with too much drink in him, he turned on her and on the world she had brought him into. Everyone was a “bore” or “a poor bastard.” He lashed out and she felt the lash. Cursing was a sport to Elizabeth, a release—it was fun to curse—but Richard’s profanity when he was drunk had a scorpion’s sting in it. And it pained her to hear it, and on those occasions when he’d reject her, she would be inconsolable when the teasing turned to taunting. It was their seventh film together, the fifth year of the floating island of this strange life they shared, a marriage with an international audience. The public, the “yellow journals” as Elizabeth called them, wanted to see “Liz and Dick,” nicknames they both hated. They wanted to be Elizabeth and Richard.
It was heartbreaking to see “Liz and Dick” win that fight. There were, in fact, two marriages: the public and private. She thought that having a top billing and a larger salary—that male obsession with being on top—would please Richard. But, at least in Africa, and under those hot movie lights, nothing seemed to please him. Drinking was what you did. What Richard did.
Once filming was over in Dahomey, the cast and crew were transported to soundstages in Nice and Paris to complete the shoot. In an elegant hotel in the Maritime Alps above Saint-Raphael, an hour from Nice, LOOK continued its interview. On their hotel balcony, where one could see the Mediterranean, and the sweet air was redolent of umbrella pines that grew in the scrubby hills, Burton was asked if the “American viewing public” had changed over the years. Burton thought that it had, given the popular success of such challenging productions as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Taming of the Shrew. As for the roles of Leamas and George, Richard admitted that they were quite different from his previous fare. “I would never have dreamed of myself portraying such seedy, famished men…it was immensely challenging, but it was such agony. Playing everything down, down, holding myself in all the time.” When asked why he made so many movies, he answered that, among other things, being with Elizabeth had given him much more respect for filmmaking. And again, that old bugaboo—did he feel he had forsaken the stage? It’s a good thing Elizabeth wasn’t sitting on the terrace with them. “Oh, no. I haven’t given it up by any means,” he answered. “I always have a great ache in me for the stage, a sort of duty, you might say.”
And finally, no interview could be complete until it touched on Le Scandale. “Well, I must say that everyone seems to have quieted down,” Richard said. “Good lord, the reputations we had! I mean, I was a bestial wife-stealer, and Elizabeth was a scheming home-breaker…We’ve been through a lot of fire together, Elizabeth and I. You’d think we were out to destroy Western Civilization or something.”
This time, Richard really wanted to win. On April 10, 1967, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its annual Oscar celebration. Word had already reached them at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in Nice that Elizabeth had won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Virginia Woolf, but that Richard had lost to Paul Scofield. As the NYFCCA was often an augur for how the Academy voted, Burton was somewhat shaken. He and Elizabeth had both been nominated for Oscars for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—Burton’s fifth nomination—and he deserved to win. But his competition was the Shakespearean actor Scofield in A Man for All Seasons. This was the Oscar that Richard really wanted to win, needed to win—his George had been a quiet triumph, perhaps his best performance in his long, celebrated career. But he had never felt accepted in Hollywood, particularly by the older crowd who tended to vote conservatively for Academy Award nominees. That crowd had not been comfortable with Albee’s graphic language, and had not liked the terrible headlines coming out of Rome only five years earlier, when Richard and Elizabeth had found themselves shunned by an industry waiting to see how the Cleopatra debacle would play out. If they both won their awards, it would be a sign of complete acceptance by the entertainment industry.
Elizabeth wanted to attend the awards ceremony, and Jack Warner, head of Warner Bros., wanted her there. He had even sent a telegram to her in Nice, begging, “Do not burn the bridges you have built.” Elizabeth, of course, had already won her Oscar for BUtterfield 8, but she held out hope that there would be a double win for husband and wife—a first in the history of the award.
Elizabeth was urged to attend, knowing it would be a great triumph for her. She was a sure bet to beat out her competition: Vanessa Redgrave in a small but scintillating role in Morgan, Lynn Redgrave in Georgy Girl, Anouk Aimée in the very adult A Man and a Woman, and the older Russian actress Ida Kaminska for The Shop on Main Street. Richard, some felt, couldn’t bear the fact that Elizabeth might win and he might lose. He decided not to attend
.
Perhaps in a bid to dissuade her from attending, Richard told Elizabeth that he had dreamed her plane had crashed returning to California, and that it was he who found her body. So Elizabeth stepped out of her hotel bedroom in Nice and announced to her entourage that she had decided to stay with Richard. Her official excuse was that Richard was still shooting The Comedians, so neither one of them could leave. Just the idea that Richard might lose—and lose in front of 150 million people—was more than either one of them could bear.
And, in fact, Richard did lose. Paul Scofield won, as did his director, Fred Zinnemann, as did A Man for All Seasons, taking the Oscar for Best Picture. To deepen the loss, Scofield—whom Burton liked and admired—was often pointed out to him as the Shakespearean actor who did not abandon the stage for movies. Scofield had made but a handful of films—A Man for All Seasons was only his fourth—but his performance had earned him a Golden Globe as well as the New York Film Critics Circle Award. Of the two roles—the sainted, historical figure, Sir Thomas More, versus Albee’s wounded and cuckolded history professor, George—there was no contest for sentimental favorite. It didn’t matter that Scofield had ably and nobly recreated his stage role for film, whereas Burton had created George wholly from his own psyche, a more emotionally challenging feat. If Shirley MacLaine had lost her Academy Award to a tracheotomy back in 1961, then Richard Burton had lost to a saint.
Mike Nichols—who lost his Best Director nomination to Fred Zinnemann—understood how Burton felt. “He was always very aware of what the other guys were doing that he wasn’t,” he later said. “The plays of Olivier, the plays of Scofield—what he felt he should be doing, and what he feared he was doing instead.”
Although Burton sent Scofield a congratulatory telegram (and Scofield sent an appeasing cable to Burton), Richard wrote in his diary, “…we heard that E. had won the Oscar and I hadn’t! Bloody cheek. But P. Scofield won, so that’s alright.” Indeed, he was proud of Elizabeth’s much-deserved win, and he was gentlemanly and almost cavalier about his loss, but it hurt him. As for Elizabeth, it probably hurt her in Hollywood that she’d chosen not to show up for their most important ceremony. She had been their darling, and this was her fourth nomination and her second win, and the Hollywood community was really behind her this time—this wasn’t a sympathy win. She had earned the award. It wasn’t a good thing that she’d stayed away.
Sammy Davis Jr. had known Elizabeth since her National Velvet days and was often Elizabeth’s guest when Richard was onstage in Hamlet, seeing it fifteen times “and never tiring of it.” Davis had even been in Rome with his then-wife May Britt when Le Scandale broke. He knew that “Richard’s name was mud with 20th Century-Fox” in 1963, because the studio saw the love affair as a threat to their multimillion-dollar investment in Elizabeth Taylor. “Richard has to be accepted back in the fold,” Sammy Davis Jr. would later write; “he needs the respect of his peers. He needs that Oscar.”
Burton handled his disappointments by continuing to drink, and he confided in his diary the ill effects that alcohol was having on him. “I drank steadily all day long yesterday,” he wrote on May 10, 1967. “Today I shall not drink at all while working. I don’t know why I drink so much. I’m not unhappy and I really don’t like it very much—I mean the booze itself.” Elizabeth tried valiantly to bring him out of his dark mood. “Elizabeth joined us for lunch,” he wrote on May 30. “She was gay and sweet but nothing could drag me out of my tantrum.”
In June of that year, Burton had taken part in a race at Maria’s grade school. They were concerned that Maria, after numerous operations, might feel vulnerable competing with her schoolmates in physical contests, such as beanbag throwing, sack races, and obstacle races. Burton signed up for “the father’s race,” but after having consumed three Bloody Marys, he came in twentieth. It bothered him enough that he described it in his diary, vowing to go into training for it the next time. Richard loved his and Elizabeth’s children. They were truly a family now, and when Eddie Fisher made one last-ditch effort to win custody of Liza Todd later that year, Burton threw down the gauntlet. “Over my dead body,” he roared, and Fisher backed off.
Four months later, Richard went on the wagon for a while, but Elizabeth continued to drink, making it more difficult for him to remain sober. By November, a few days before his forty-first birthday, Burton went on a two-day bender. He insulted Bob Wilson, and made a pass at Maria’s nurse, Karen. He immediately felt guilty and apologized profusely to Elizabeth the next morning. She laughed it off, more concerned that it had embarrassed the nurse than that it was a sign that Burton’s eye was beginning to wander.
Despite these gathering clouds, the Burtons had had a spectacular five years that saw the release of six money-making films, four Academy Award nominations, and Elizabeth’s win for Virginia Woolf. When Richard had told the LOOK reporter that he thought American tastes were changing in their acceptance of more difficult, challenging films, he could take credit for helping to bring about that change. But the tide was beginning to turn on the Burton-Taylor juggernaut, just as Richard was losing control of his deadly dance with alcohol. Doctor Faustus, The Comedians, and now Reflections in a Golden Eye—three ambitious and grown-up films—would be sent packing by the critics and the general public. Little did they know what lay in store for them: a roadside bomb called Boom!, which would dramatically alter the landscape.
9
BOOM!
“[We are] a lovely charming decadent hopeless couple.”
—RICHARD BURTON
“People don’t like sustained success.”
—ELIZABETH TAYLOR
Soaring high on the accolades heaped upon them for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the Burtons next took on another artistic, and therefore risky, project—Boom!, based on Tennessee Williams’s play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. It would be directed by Joseph Losey and filmed on a craggy mountaintop set in Sardinia, surrounded by the sparkling Mediterranean, from a screenplay adaptation written by Tennessee himself. It was to the Burtons’ credit that they used their star power to make literary, not especially commercial, films—The Taming of the Shrew, Doctor Faustus, Reflections in a Golden Eye—and now a somewhat cryptic, highly eccentric movie based on a Broadway play that had flopped twice—first with Hermione Baddeley, then with Tallulah Bankhead in the lead role. But given Elizabeth’s unforgettable performances in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer, and Richard’s in The Night of the Iguana, the Burtons had always had great luck with Tennessee Williams.
However, it took a little persuasion on all sides. Tennessee had wanted Simone Signoret to play Flora “Cissy” Goforth, the ailing, seventy-three-year-old reclusive millionaire who’s buried six husbands and who rules an island in the Mediterranean, and Sean Connery to play Chris Flanders, the poetry-spouting “Angelo del Morte” (played previously by Tab Hunter on Broadway), known to seduce and dispatch elderly ladies.
Losey wanted to pair Ingrid Bergman with the English actor James Fox, but Bergman had turned down the role as too vulgar (“I can’t say the word ‘bugger’ without blushing,” she’d told the director). Losey needed the Burtons because he needed the money.
An American expatriate living abroad after being blacklisted in the States in the 1950s, Losey had refashioned a career in Europe as the auteur of psychologically brooding films. Losey had directed several well-regarded movies, such as The Boy with Green Hair in 1948, The Servant in 1963, and the pop-art, spy parody Modesty Blaise in 1966, but he was having trouble raising the $1.4 million he needed to make Boom!
The Burtons were already spending the summer in the Mediterranean aboard a chartered luxury yacht, the Odysseia. In port, they visited frequently with Rex Harrison and his Welsh wife, Rachel Roberts, at the Harrisons’ home in Portofino, where Richard and Elizabeth had once hidden away during the height of Le Scandale. The Burtons’ involvement in Boom! was born at the Harrisons’ home, and later, over drinks and dinner at La Gritta Bar
in Santa Margherita Ligure with their agent Hugh French and producer John Heyman. Heyman also advised the Burtons on tax shelters; and his wife, Norma, would become one of Elizabeth’s closest friends.
Losey flew to Portofino to meet with the Burtons, but, to his chagrin, he was sitting on his hotel balcony having breakfast when he saw the Odysseia leave port. He finally caught up with them aboard their yacht, where Losey was immediately ushered to the bar. Richard showed off a check he’d received for $1.25 million, the Burtons’ firstquarter profit from The Taming of the Shrew, which he’d plucked out of a script. He was using it as a bookmark.
Losey next showed up at the Harrisons’ villa, bemoaning the fact that he was unable to raise the funds to make The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, as it was still being called at the time. Later, at dinner portside, Tennessee Williams arrived with his companion Billy Barnes, very drunk and fresh from a recent suicide attempt, his words an angry blur. Elizabeth begged Tennessee to lower his voice, as people were beginning to stare. “Call me Tom,” he insisted, suddenly requiring everyone to call him by his given name, which he had abandoned decades ago.
The next night they moved their traveling feast to the yacht’s bar, where Rachel Roberts became “stupendously drunk” and “uncontrollable.” It would turn out to be an evening that even Tennessee Williams would have had a hard time imagining. When she began abusing her husband, Rex Harrison—“sexually, morally, physically, and in every other way,” Burton recorded—Tennessee, certainly no prude, asked to leave.
Suddenly, Rachel dropped to the floor of the bar and started barking like a dog, exciting the real dogs—Elizabeth’s Pekingese and Rachel’s basset hound. Thoroughly drunk, Rachel began masturbating her dog, “a lovely, sloppy old dog called Omar,” Burton wrote. (Every living thing seemed to be in a high state of arousal that summer in Sardinia, as Burton noted in his diary that their two dogs “have been making love now since last Sunday, at least three times a day. Who would have thought that dogs in heat went on so long?…O’Fie’s penis is beginning to look the worse for wear.”) Elizabeth and Richard tried talking sense to the intoxicated woman; she answered them by again turning on her husband and cursing his three former wives.
