by Sam Kashner
Burton, out of loyalty to Taylor, tried to get out of playing the role, but he was threatened with a lawsuit by Universal Pictures. (“I was never sued when I was poor,” he complained in his diary.) So before debarking to dreary London where the movie would be filmed, the Burtons returned to the paradise of Puerto Vallarta, a place where they had been enormously happy, a place that seemed to have the power to restore them to sanity and to health, and to remind them why they were still together.
Like everything else, Puerto Vallarta had changed since their discovery of the enchanting village five years earlier. It had grown from a sleepy seaside town of barely a thousand souls to a bustling city of over 25,000 and a tourist attraction, thanks to the Burtons, who became the town’s unofficial mayor and first lady whenever they were in residence. After settling into Casa Kimberly, they took a day off and toured the village by jeep, dropping in at the new resort hotels, favorite restaurants and bars. Wherever they went, crowds miraculously appeared, snapping their picture and angling to get a good look at them. Celebrities and writers, such as James Baldwin, visited.
Sometimes the attention became unbearable when photographers and television trucks, parked outside Casa Kimberly, made it nearly impossible for them to leave the house. Richard, trying to grow a beard worthy of Henry VIII, took to his bed and his books while Elizabeth busied herself in her corner of their spacious bedroom. On one such occasion, Richard called out in his best Hamlet voice, “What are you doing, Lumpy?”
“Playing with my jewels,” Elizabeth answered, pleased as a little girl.
Elizabeth—as she always had—flourished in Puerto Vallarta. She swam and she relaxed in the sun, reading Portnoy’s Complaint and The Godfather, so her skin was bronzed, her health improved, and Burton’s ardor was kindled anew. Their sexual energy cut through all the alcohol and dark moods and ill health, and he again marveled at her beauty, writing in his diary, “Elizabeth is now looking ravishingly suntanned though the lazy little bugger ought to lose a few pounds or so to look at her absolute best,” he wrote. “I could detect no sign of aging in her at all,” with the exception of quite a few gray hairs at her temples. “But the skin is as smooth and youthful and unwrinkled as ever it was.” After six and a half years together, he still took incredible delight in her body. With Elizabeth, he never had to pretend that she was someone else in the dark—he preferred to see her in the light so he could admire her skin, her breasts, her derriere, which he describes as “firm and round.” And later, Burton—who was never comfortable writing about sex as he was easily embarrassed—couldn’t help but describe Elizabeth as “an eternal one-night stand…and lascivious…E. is a receiver, a perpetual returner of the ball!”
During this hiatus from the rest of their lives, Richard’s need for Elizabeth was so great that it poured out of him not only in his diaries but in notes and letters to Elizabeth, sometimes written when she was sleeping in the next room, sometimes when she left him alone for an afternoon. On May 10, 1969, he wrote in Puerto Vallarta, “You will never, of course, because you are too young, understand the idea of loneliness. I love you better than buckets of brine poured over a boiling body, than ice cream laved on a parched mouth, than sanity smoothed over madness…What a strange thing it was to see you drive away.”
Like Henry VIII and his court sailing up the Thames toward Windsor Castle, in May 1969 the Burtons arrived in London on the Kalizma and dropped anchor just outside the Houses of Parliament. Members of Parliament and their secretaries filled the windows to gawk at the Burtons’ arrival in London. But it nearly didn’t happen. Back in Puerto Vallarta, Elizabeth had had to make Richard memorize his lines. It was the threat of another lawsuit rather than the script, which he considered “a lot of mediocre rubbish,” that forced Richard to don the royal robes of Henry VIII for Anne of the Thousand Days.
He insisted that Elizabeth be present with him on the set, and even appear as an extra in the film, which she was happy to do—in part to keep an eye on Richard and his brilliant little costar, the tiny, doll-like Bujold. (“The girl is very small in every way, in height, in weight, and vocally,” Burton described her. “I could out-project her with a whisper.”) Elizabeth always kept things lively on the set; she knew how to get the crew to fall in love with her. He remembered when she shoveled snow off the walk outside of Elstree Studios during the making of The V.I.P.s, and the makeup she applied to all the extras during The Taming of the Shrew. It was in his contract that she could visit the set whenever she felt like it, a canvas-backed chair with the initials “ETB” waiting for her when she chose to watch Richard in his beard and kingly robes breathe life into the film, which he tried valiantly to do through the long, hot English summer.
Burton complained in his diary about the obviousness of the dialogue: “I must have a son to rule England when I am dead! Find a way, Cromwell! Find a way. The pope. The cardinal. Orvieto, my lord bishops. Divorce Katharine. Divorce Anne. Marry Jane Seymour!” He uses every actor’s trick to vary the lines, but, he wrote, “it’s a losing battle.” He was impatient, much more so than Elizabeth, with dialogue that didn’t measure up to the writers he loved and admired. If he was going to play Henry, then why not Falstaff? If a spy, what could be better than one created by John Le Carré? If he wanted to be seen saying something clever, why not have Graham Greene or Edward Albee or Tennessee Williams write it for him? He didn’t understand the movies the way Elizabeth did—Elizabeth, who would have been a brilliant silent film star.
More to the point, perhaps, Burton was made uncomfortable by the content of the dialogue, not the quality (the lucid and eloquent screenplay, after all, was nominated for an Academy Award). Once again, he was forced to relive the central incident in his life: his abandonment of his much-admired wife, Sybil, to marry Elizabeth, the woman to whom he was hopelessly in thrall. When he speaks the words “I will have Anne if it split the earth in two like an apple and fling the two halves into the void!” how could he help but think of the time when he, himself, split the world in two, to divest himself of one wife in order to marry another? And in case he could forget, the script was full of reminders: Henry calls his first wife, Queen Katharine of Aragon, Kate—the name of his treasured elder daughter whom he had left to marry Elizabeth, and the role Elizabeth played to perfection in The Taming of the Shrew three years earlier. And there are two Elizabeths in the film: Anne Boleyn’s mother, and, of course, Boleyn’s child with Henry: Elizabeth I, England’s great queen. And there was his own Elizabeth, showing up as an extra, bedecked with La Peregrina and looking more splendid than any queen. He left Shepperton Studios each day for the two-hour drive back to London, to the Kalizma, feeling dispirited about the work.
At least Richard was back acting with the great pros of his past—Anthony Quayle appearing as Cardinal Wolsey and Michael Hordern as Anne Boleyn’s father (whom he described as “no rubbish and cunning as snakes”). He still had enough respect for acting to be knocked out by their tricks and cunning, the pieces of business that Quayle, with his measured precision, and Hordern, in his sly way, brought to their roles. “They have every shrug, nod, beck, sideways glance and shifting of eyes ever invented,” Burton observed. All Michael Hordern had to say was “Yes, Your Grace,” and those three words uttered in Hordern’s unmistakable way became “slightly longer than Hamlet,” Burton thought. But he was bored with his own performance. One day during filming he’d asked, “What’s the shot?” and was told it was just going to be a close-up. So he kept his street clothes on—his chinos and loafers—and just showed up with the top half of his costume. To the surprise of the director, cameraman, and the rest of the crew, he played Henry VIII in the clothes he had just worn in the pub across from Shepperton Studios earlier that day.
Unfortunately for Elizabeth, Geneviève Bujold—who is miraculous in the role—summoned up the green-eyed monster, the jealousy that occasionally took both Burtons by surprise. This was the first film since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in which Burton played
opposite a love interest other than Elizabeth—and there had been reason to be wary of Claire Bloom. When Richard playfully christened Geneviève with the nickname “Gin,” something that, back in his salad days, he did only with actresses he had bedded, Elizabeth suspected the worst. The British press got into the act, speculating that Burton and Bujold were indeed having an affair.
Throughout the shoot, the Burtons were having a rough time of it. About to make love one afternoon, Elizabeth began bleeding profusely, from a recurrence of the unglamorous affliction of hemorrhoids. Richard tried reassuring her, but their afternoon idyll was ruined, and it made the presence of the petite young “Anne” more of a thorn in their side than she might otherwise have been. Elizabeth was already angry that Richard had compared Bujold to Vivien Leigh, an actress that Elizabeth had often been compared to, and whom she had replaced in Elephant Walk over a decade earlier because of their physical resemblance. Was she going to be replaced by a younger version of herself, as so many women approaching middle age had been, by straying husbands?
Burton seemed oblivious to Elizabeth’s fears. He spent his long drives back to London trying to make the role interesting to himself. He decided to play Henry as “a demonic charmer…capable of stupendous outbursts of rage all co–mixed up with a brilliant cynical intelligence.” He does so—compellingly—but there’s a lot of Richard in the part as well, at least the Richard who bedded every woman he could, before meeting Elizabeth. “When I’ve wanted them, I’ve had them. When I’ve had them, I’ve been cured of them,” Henry barks to a courtier in the film. And later, while listening to one of his poems set to music, Henry declares, “true verse and music grow from suffering,” a variation of an idea Burton had once expressed to Ernie Lehman on the set of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? As art continues to imitate life, we watch the great king, the philanderer, wounded and bested—at least temporarily—by a woman he cannot help but love. Through it all, Henry suffers magnificently, because he knows he has transgressed. Though at times monstrous, he manages to inspire our pity.
Although Bujold more than holds her own against the bullying Henry, Richard can’t stop thinking of “how marvelous E. would be and how much better.” Richard suffered from insomnia while filming Anne of the Thousand Days. Concerns about Elizabeth’s health kept him up late, and when he did finally sleep, he had nightmares about her, about the blood, about her well-being. Though it deeply troubled him, according to many around the Burtons, Elizabeth’s health crises usually brought out the best in Richard. That’s when they were often closest—when their fights cooled, when the world went away, when he could nurse her back to health in the intimate privacy of her bedroom.
For his part, Burton nursed a kind of generalized jealousy of Elizabeth, as if their mutual jealousy was a sign of their love for each other. “I am very jealous of E.,” Burton confessed in his diary. “I’m even jealous of her affection for Dick Hanley, a sixty-year-old homosexual, and anybody she has lunch with. Girls, dogs—I’m even jealous of her kitten because her adoration of it is so paramount. They’ll all die before me, though, so I’ll win in the end.”
With Elizabeth left out of Anne of the Thousand Days, both Burtons were unhappy about the state of their careers. Elizabeth’s last two films had been torture to complete, given her hysterectomy and ongoing back pain. They had both been beaten up by negative—even scornful—reviews. Calling in their lawyer, Aaron Frosch, they discussed whether they could afford to retire from the movies. By 1969, Frosch was struggling with the onset of multiple sclerosis, but nonetheless he flew to their side to advise them. He told Richard that he had nearly $5 million, and Elizabeth a little less than that, in ready cash, not including their homes in Mexico and Switzerland and the paintings and jewelry and the Kalizma, which came to another $4 million. If they stopped acting and kept their assets invested, Frosch told them they would have at least a half a million dollars a year, in interest, to live on. But they would have to “make do” with half that amount, after continuing to pay the salaries of Dick Hanley, Bob Wilson, Richard’s secretary Jim Benton, plus supporting “all the godsons, goddaughters, nephews, nieces,” as well as Sara Taylor, and gifts to Elizabeth’s brother, Howard. But, Frosch reassured them, because they paid next to no taxes due to their peripatetic lives, they actually had a greater annual gross income than their friends the Rothschilds.
Again, Burton warmed to the idea of retiring, as he often expressed boredom with acting. “There is no question,” he writes in his notebook, “but that I must stop acting…It is all so perfectly boring. Anybody can play Henry the 8th.” He felt that he and Elizabeth were at the zenith of their careers, and that before the critics “start tearing us apart again” (which had already begun), perhaps they should take their final bows. “If E. and I have the strength of mind to give up being famous,” he later wrote, “we can at least live in more than lavish comfort. I might even be able to buy her the odd jewel or two.”
Elizabeth, after forty-two films and the insult of being passed over for Anne of the Thousand Days, seemed eager to “pack it in.” Perhaps she feared a future in which Richard continued to work while she became increasingly marginalized—the wife of the internationally sought-after actor. So they imagined a different kind of life together, dividing their time among their homes in Gstaad and Puerto Vallarta, and the Kalizma. Burton mused in his diary, “We’ll nip over to Paris occasionally and give a party for the Rothschilds. We’ll take the Trans-Siberian Express across Russia from Moscow to Vladivostok. We’ll go to the hill stations in Kashmir. We’ll muck around the Greek islands…. We’ll revisit Dahomey again,” where they could walk down the dusty lanes unrecognized and unmolested, “and look at the washing on the line at the [presidential] palace.” Now he warmed to the idea of a life of continuous travel, a future in which he would finally become the full-time writer he wanted to be:
We can slide down the coast there, in the Kalizma. And Spain. And the West Indies. And Ecuador. And Paraguay. And Patagonia. And go up the Amazon. We’ll take a month and do a Michelin guide to France. There are many worlds elsewhere, Coriolanus. I can write pretty books with photos by E.
After all, what would they lose by retiring from movie-making altogether, giving up “Dick and Liz” for “Richard and Elizabeth”? The point was brought home by Liza Todd, who was curious, perhaps for the first time, about her parents’ profession. She had recently watched Becket and now asked them about their other movies. Were they all as good? Elizabeth was never a movie star to her children. They never begrudged their parents the status of the most famous couple in the world and the fact that they made movies for a living. They forgave them for it. But Liza’s question—“were they all as good?”—made the grown-ups think about their long list of films, made together and apart.
Richard told his stepdaughter that most of their movies were “rubbish and not even worth seeing,” and that Liza was better off reading a book. But Elizabeth said some of them she was damned proud of. And so it was Elizabeth’s idea for her and Richard to sit down, like children taking a test, and write down what they thought their best work in the movies had been. It was overdue, this taking stock, and with Aaron Frosch having just been there to tell them how they might live without working constantly, it made them take a deep breath and evaluate what they’d been doing these last six years of nearly constant work, on top of the decades of films made before they’d even set eyes on each other.
When finished, Elizabeth handed her paper to Professor Burton: the list began with National Velvet, followed by A Place in the Sun, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, BUtterfield 8 (which she had hated while filming and for a long time after), Suddenly, Last Summer, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Boom!, Secret Ceremony, The Taming of the Shrew, and Doctor Faustus. Burton’s list led with Becket, followed by Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Taming of the Shrew, Boom!, The Night of the Iguana, Doctor Faustus, and the yet-to-be-released Staircase.
It d
awned on them how their best films were made outside the studios to which they had belonged—MGM for Elizabeth, and 20th Century-Fox and Warner Bros. for Richard. He typed up their lists and pasted them into his diary, commenting, “not a bad record for two people who happen to be in love, and compete with each other…I think we should revert to being splendid amateurs.”
The list they made opened their eyes to something—the fun and daring of it all had gone out of the work. Somehow it had been better when they were out to prove themselves, when they wanted to show the world that their artistry would sanctify the scandal of their love affair. Elizabeth and Richard were the artists, and “Liz and Dick” the movie stars, and their best films were made when Elizabeth and Richard made them. The sad truth was that they would not be given too many more chances to act together onscreen. After her brief appearance as an extra in Anne of the Thousand Days, Elizabeth would not work again for two years.
Their only true pleasure, it seemed, was on the Kalizma, after filming was done for the day. Burton described the river “imitating a blue-gray ghost” in the evenings, with all the houses along the Thames looking as if they were asleep. Watching over Elizabeth, he wrote, “No woman sleeps with such childish beauty as my adorable difficult fractious intolerant wife.”
