by Sam Kashner
But their tempers continued to flare up out of this tranquil setting—Elizabeth’s jealousy of Bujold, Burton’s own unfounded jealousies and his unhappiness with himself, their drinking and the furies unleashed when the cork came out of the bottle. Columnist Liz Smith, who had visited the Burtons in Paris the previous year, knew that their fights had always been a big part of their relationship. “They fought right from the beginning,” Smith recalled. “I think Elizabeth associated it with what love and marriage were all about. Look, if you’re a movie star, there’s an element of exhibitionism, and I think that was there in her. And her man’s attentions—whether it was giving her presents or abuse—was proof of her being. Come in and see how much we’re connected—we’re fighting—look at this.”
After a week of their “running rows,” after he insulted Elizabeth and then mumbled a few apologies and started in on her again, it hit him like a bolt of lightning: “I am so much my father’s son that I give myself occasional creeps.” He remembered how his father had “the same gift for damaging with the tongue…the same tipping over into ‘violence’” the same fidelity to his mother that Richard had to Elizabeth, the same “smattering of scholarship,” the same tendency to attack the innocent when ridden by guilt. He wrote in his journal that if he was so much like his father while sober, he would simply return to the bottle until it killed him. But then, it was when he was drunk that he was most like Dic Jenkins, père. As Liz Smith observed, “the drinking fed the jealousy, the jealousy fed the drinking. I learned early on that if I was on a movie set with them, I’d better get what I wanted in the morning because after lunch, he, in particular, could just be so mean.”
With Anne of the Thousand Days nearly completed, Richard and Elizabeth took time off to visit Ifor, Richard clinging to the idea that his brother was improving, regaining some mobility in his limbs. They checked into The Bell Inn, near Aston Clinton, where Ifor was being looked after. Elizabeth bought dozens of the most expensive bedsheets and towels for Ifor’s room, but when they were delivered, Richard suddenly became enraged. Elizabeth leaped at Richard and started striking his head with her ringed fingers. He threw her off, stomped out of the hotel, and went for a long walk through some of the neighboring farms. “If any man had done that I would have killed him…” he wrote later. “I had sufficient sense to stop myself or I most surely would have put her in hospital for a long long time or even into the synagogue cemetery for an even longer time.” The tirade was probably brought on by his own sense of guilt at the sight of Ifor in a wheelchair, unable to move. After all, he had brought Ifor into his world, had brought him to Céligny. Just as Henry VIII described Queen Katharine’s stillborn sons as God’s punishment, was this Richard’s punishment for divorcing Sybil and seizing for himself “the most beautiful woman in the world”?
Whatever the cause, the pot had boiled over. Before, their fights were more like foreplay, the making-up afterward being the best part of it. But this didn’t feel like The Taming of the Shrew, this was starting to feel like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “We are fighting,” Richard wrote, “& have been fighting for a year now over everything and anything. I have always been a heavy drinker but during the last 15 months I’ve nearly killed myself with the stuff, and so has Elizabeth. Neither of us will give in and if one of us doesn’t something is going to snap.” He started blaming Elizabeth’s presence for making his hands shake, forgetting that it was she, that first day on the set of Cleopatra, who had brought the cup to his lips because his hands were shaking so badly. “At the moment I am in despair. If we cannot understand each other or, what is worst, not stand each other we’d go our separate ways pretty soon…”
Staircase was released that August, to mixed reviews. The movie had been adapted by Charles Dyer from his well-received 1966 play, but some critics complained that the subject matter had been “cleaned up a little for popular consumption.” Variety, however, praised both Rex Harrison and Richard Burton for having “dared risky roles and…triumphed.” Burton had cared about Staircase and Boom! He thought they were good. Audiences didn’t. The public apparently didn’t want to see two masculine actors portraying gay men, and the movie disappointed at the box office. Where Eagles Dare was always going to be more popular with mainstream audiences. It had stormed the box office and had overtaken every other film that year, earning more than $20 million. Now Burton waited for the verdict on Anne of the Thousand Days, a film he had not enjoyed making, but one that had the potential to be a critical as well as financial success, like The Taming of the Shrew. Secretly, Burton hoped for a blockbuster, because he had “rings and farthingales and things” to pay for.
That September, the Burtons returned to Gstaad. Elizabeth completed the acquisition of a remarkable gift for Richard: the entire one thousand volumes of the Everyman Library. Richard had begun reading those books, one by one, at the age of twelve, leaving them behind in houses in Pontrhydyfen and Port Talbot, in London, in Céligny, in Oxford when he was an RAF officer during the war and used to steal them from Foyle’s bookstore in Charing Cross Road. The thousand “numbered, gleaming” volumes, in Burton’s description, were carted to Gstaad and lovingly unpacked and shelved. “I shall browse in that place for the rest of my life. They will take up one wall of the room…a fantastic reference library with the index in my head,” he later wrote. For a man who worshipped the written word, it was the perfect gift.
Later that month, the Burtons looked into possibly moving Ifor out of the clinic and into their Swiss chalet for a long visit. They consulted with Dr. Rossier, who ran the paraplegic ward of the local hospital, about what kind of bed and other special equipment Ifor would require. Unbeknownst to Richard and Elizabeth, Ifor had suffered a stroke in his sleep. Gwen Jenkins had kept this new setback a secret from the Burtons. When the orderlies had come to check up on him in the morning, they discovered that Ifor had lost the one thing he had had left: his beautiful Welsh voice.
Ifor’s tragedy would haunt Richard for the rest of his life. “He’d have lived until he was 90 were it not for that trip in the dark at Céligny,” he wrote grimly in his notebook. Again, he took out his fury over Ifor’s condition on Elizabeth, the person he was closest to, the one who was there and the only one who could possibly absorb the terrible blow of Ifor’s paralysis, along with him.
After one of their visits to Dr. Rossier, the Burtons decided to dash into an Italian restaurant for an early dinner. Burton recalled the meal as one of “long silences and deadly insults,” with Elizabeth trying to break his mood. At one point, knowing that Richard was “in a state of nastiness,” she reached out to him across the table.
“Come on Richard, hold my hand.”
“I do not wish to touch your hands,” he answered cruelly. “They are large and ugly and red and masculine.” Elizabeth withdrew her bejeweled hand.
Richard himself was aghast, horrified by his own malignant remark. He wrote in his diary, as an act of contrition, “[W]hat the hell’s the matter with me? I love milady more than my life…one of these days it’s going to be too late.”
But Elizabeth, not one to wallow in her own or anyone else’s bitterness, quickly turned Richard’s nasty remark to her advantage, making her husband pay dearly for his thoughtless insult. She insisted that now he must really go after the diamond they had both been eyeing, the one owned by Mrs. Paul (Harriet) Ames, the sister of Walter Annenberg, the billionaire founder of TV Guide and former U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James. The 69.42-karat, 1½"-long stone was considered the largest and most expensive diamond in the world. It was set in a platinum ring between two smaller side diamonds. “It will make my ugly, big hands look smaller and less ugly!” Elizabeth teased. “That insult…” Burton would write in his diary the following day, “is going to cost me. Betcha!”
There was naturally a great deal of interest in the spectacular jewel. It was going to be auctioned on October 23, 1969 (identified as Lot 133), by the Parke-Bernet Galleries on New York’s Madi
son Avenue. Elizabeth had learned that Aristotle Onassis, the man who had brought out Richard’s competitive streak more than any other, had paid a visit to Parke-Bernet to view the diamond, igniting speculation that he intended to buy it for Jacqueline Kennedy. It was then that Richard and Elizabeth asked the jewel be sent to them in Gstaad for their inspection. As soon as she saw it, Elizabeth knew she had to have it. Richard gave Aaron Frosch, who would be bidding by phone from London, a ceiling price of $1 million.
But Cartier outbid Richard Burton, winning the jewel for $1,050,000, the highest amount ever paid for a diamond at that time.
Jim Benton, Richard’s secretary, called to give Richard the bad news. Richard and Elizabeth had returned to The Bell Inn, where they had gone to visit Ifor, and where Richard was now standing by a pay telephone in the pub, not ready to admit defeat. He shouted at Benton to get Aaron Frosch on the line, immediately! Elizabeth tried to mollify Richard, telling him that she didn’t really care if she had the diamond or not, that “there was much more to life than baubles,” adding that she was “completely capable of making do with what she had” (which included Mike Todd’s diamond tiara and 29.7-carat diamond ring; La Peregrina; the Bulgari emerald-and-diamond suite; the Krupp diamond, etc.). But this made Richard even more determined.
“I was going to get that diamond,” he resolved, “if it cost me my life or $2 million, whichever was greater.” After railing at poor Mr. Frosch, he instructed the lawyer to buy the diamond directly from Cartier, and to do so regardless of the price. Like Henry VIII in his pursuit of Anne Boleyn, he would have the jewel.
It would take another agonizing twenty-four hours of living by the telephone in the Inn’s small passageway. Richard kept reversing phone charges, as the Inn was running out of coins. Some of the locals sipping their pints at the bar eyed the actor as he paced nervously in the doorway of the pub, waiting for a call back from New York. Would Richard be able to snatch the diamond from Cartier, winning it back for Elizabeth? Some enterprising bookie in the village began taking bets.
The next day, Frosch called. The diamond was theirs.
For $1.1 million, Richard had carried the day. “Liz Gets That Peachy Pear,” trumpeted the New York Daily News. It gave Richard even greater satisfaction when he learned that two of his rivals for the diamond had been the Sultan of Brunei and—more importantly—Ari Onassis. The Greek tycoon had “chickened at 700,000” dollars.
But it was really all about Elizabeth, as it had always been. “I wanted that diamond because it is incomparably lovely,” Burton wrote. “And it should be on the loveliest woman in the world. I would have had a fit if it went to Jackie Kennedy or Sophia Loren or Mrs. Huntingdon Misfit of Dallas, Texas.” From then on, the briefly named “Cartier diamond” would be known as the “Taylor-Burton diamond,” and it would be placed on exhibit in Cartier’s main gallery in New York, and then brought to Chicago, where it was the star attraction at the opening of Cartier’s new store. As many as ten thousand people a day came to view it. The jeweler ran a large display ad in the New York Times:
CARTIER
cordially invites you to view
THE CARTIER DIAMOND
on display
today through Saturday, November first
from nine thirty a.m. to five thirty p.m.
in our Gallery, Main Floor
at Cartier, Fifth Avenue & Fifty-Second Street
The Cartier Diamond has now been acquired by
Elizabeth Taylor Burton.
The jewel even appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS, as a “guest.”
When Elizabeth finally received her prize, she found it too heavy and awkward to wear as a ring, so she spent an additional $80,000 to have a diamond necklace made, from which the heavy, pear-shaped jewel could be hung. A jeweler flew in from New York to measure her neck so that the diamond would hang just right, covering what remained of Elizabeth’s old tracheotomy scar.
It would take three couriers (two of them decoys) and three weeks for the diamond necklace to reach the Burtons, who were by then back on the Kalizma, anchored in Monaco. Three men carrying identical briefcases, only one of which contained the Taylor-Burton diamond, left New York by plane for Nice, escorted by an armed security guard. From Nice they crossed the frontier of Monaco, where the Kalizma was berthed in Monte Carlo Harbor. Once in Monte Carlo, another armed guard (complete with submachine gun) was hired to protect the jewel.
Once again, Elizabeth held her breath when the stunning, heavy-laden necklace was removed from its red leather case and placed around her neck for the first time. She then peeked into the briefcase that had brought the Taylor-Burton diamond to her, as if something was missing. She scooped a small package out of the case. Three 50-cent pairs of hose had been sent over from New York alongside the diamond, because they were stockings Elizabeth liked and couldn’t get anywhere else. Like Robert Browning’s Duchess Ferrara in “My Last Duchess,” Elizabeth’s heart was “too soon made glad/…she liked whate’er/She looked on,” and she was as delighted to receive the inexpensive stockings as she was the most expensive diamond in the world.
The Burtons were in Monaco to celebrate Princess Grace’s fortieth birthday at the Scorpio Ball, to be held at the Hermitage Hotel in Monte Carlo. It was a lavish affair by any standard. Elizabeth chose the party to debut the Taylor-Burton diamond, accidentally (or not) upstaging the event. With the dazzling necklace, wearing a stunning, black velvet cape with two glittering scorpions brocaded across the front, and accompanied by Richard and a pair of security guards carrying machine guns (as stipulated by the $1 million insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London), how could she not?
As a little joke between the Burtons, Elizabeth wore her largest diamonds—the Taylor-Burton and the Krupp—alongside one of her smallest, the “Ping-Pong” diamond, to the gala affair. She had won the Ping-Pong diamond—1/8 of a carat costing a mere $14—from Richard after he bet her a perfect diamond if she beat him by ten points at Ping-Pong one day at their chalet in Gstaad. “Well, that’s not the sort of thing a woman walks away from,” Elizabeth recalled. “He lost. I won. Time to go shopping!” At the Scorpio Ball, whenever anyone said, “Oh, my God, what a magnificent diamond!” Elizabeth would raise her right hand and wiggle her little finger with the tiny Ping-Pong diamond. “Isn’t it beautiful! The setting is lovely and the diamond is absolutely perfect.” Only the Burtons could afford to joke about jewelry.
But along with its dazzling beauty, the Taylor-Burton diamond came with a heavy responsibility—it further restricted Elizabeth’s freedom of movement. Lloyd’s of London insisted that the diamond be kept in a vault, that it be worn in public for only thirty days in any given year, and that armed guards must be in attendance whenever Elizabeth appeared in public wearing it. “It was more of a millstone around her neck than an ornament,” one British writer observed. Eventually, Elizabeth had to have a replica made at a cost of $2,800, and was often suspected of wearing the fake jewel in public.
There was another negative effect of owning the jewel. The long lines outside Cartier had caught the attention of the New York Times, inspiring an editorial excoriating the Burtons for what the Times felt were their extravagant indulgences in an age of want. The editorial held up the Burtons as exemplars of “the Age of Vulgarity”:
The peasants have been lining up outside Cartier’s this week to gawk at a diamond as big as the Ritz that costs well over a million dollars. It is destined to hang around the neck of Mrs. Richard Burton…. It won’t seem out of place on the yacht parked in the Bahamas or the Mediterranean where the Beautiful People spend much time, not to mention money, impressing each other.
In this Age of Vulgarity marked by such minor matters as war and poverty, it gets harder every day to scale the heights of true vulgarity. But given some loose millions, it can be done—and worse, admired.
As Brenda Maddox wittily remarked in her biography of Elizabeth Taylor, “How many women have been criticized by both the Times and the V
atican?”
Besides giving them both enormous pleasure, the Taylor-Burton diamond would prove to be a wise investment. Even careful Aaron Frosch, and Richard’s secretary Jim Benton, saw that the wealthy everywhere were protecting their fortunes in the late 1960s by investing in “durables.” Maddox, writing in 1977, noted, “The Cartier diamond alone has increased in value to $2.5 million since Burton bought it.” She also hypothesized that Elizabeth was attracted to large, fabled jewels because they “ensured that just as through her entire life, all eyes instantly and instinctively turned to her when she entered a room.” At this point in their careers, the jewels were a way to continue to shine brilliantly on the world stage.
Though the year had virtually begun and ended with the acquisition of two fabulous jewels, and it had brought Richard his beloved, completed Everyman Library, it had been a grim year in many respects. So, the December 10, 1969, release of Anne of the Thousand Days must have warmed Richard’s heart, with critics praising his performance as Henry VIII as superior to Scofield’s turn as Thomas More in that other costume drama, A Man for All Seasons, two years earlier. (That was high praise indeed, as Scofield had sitting on his mantelpiece the Oscar that might have gone to Richard for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) Richard’s Welsh mood lifted—for a moment, anyway—when he received a cable from Hollywood that he had just received his sixth Academy Award nomination, for appearing in that “mediocre piece of rubbish” during those sleepless summer months. No one was happier for him than Elizabeth, and no one wanted him to win more than she did. Unlike Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth had kept her head.
