Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  Now the rounds of post-Oscar parties would have to be endured, and the Burtons would have to put on their best game faces. Burton found that he could abstain from drinking if he could substitute Valium for alcohol. At one party, Elizabeth and Richard sat with the grown-ups—director George Cukor, the Gregory Pecks, and the Otis Chandlers, who owned the Los Angeles Times. Since he couldn’t wash away his disappointment with a stiff drink, Richard turned to Elizabeth and asked her for some of her “pink pills,” the Seconals she often took for back pain, which he tossed back at dinner. It seemed to do the trick, getting him through the toughest part of the evening. (Richard later wrote, “They certainly eased the boredom. I shall try them again instead of Valium when I’m surrounded by drunks.”)

  And then the atmosphere in the room changed. It lit up with flashbulbs as scores of photographers surrounded the Burtons, snapping them, and Elizabeth’s diamond, from every angle. Even Richard was impressed with the attention, secretly delighted with how the evening’s big winners were being virtually ignored. “Barbra Streisand who fancies herself a big star was completely eclipsed.” Hundreds of people made their way to the Burtons’ table to gawk at Elizabeth and commiserate with Richard that he had been “robbed.”

  Elizabeth whispered into Richard’s ear that with all these people coming by to say they voted for him, “Who the hell voted for Wayne?”

  When the night finally came to a close, it was nearly impossible for them to leave the room. They had to pay their respects to the winners and run a gauntlet of photographers who wanted one last image of the Burtons. Their stardom, their fame, their glamour, their fabled history seemed to wash away the taint of losing the Oscar race. The winners’ circle seemed to be wherever the Burtons were. Their movie stardom had won back the night for them.

  Nonetheless, losing the Oscar had been a bitter disappointment. “In some ways, Anne of the Thousand Days was the final blow,” columnist Liz Smith believed. “They both came to Hollywood, they worked the circuit, they attended the Golden Globes luncheon. Elizabeth has her new big ring. They did everything possible to campaign to get him that Award. They attended the Oscars. She agreed to be a presenter for Best Picture. Edith Head dresses her. But what happens? John Wayne is the winner. And she has to go up after that and give the Best Picture Award to Midnight Cowboy. You could just see that not only was she furious, God knows what waited for her back in the hotel suite.”

  At the Beverly Hills Hotel, their bungalow began filling up with friends and well-wishers. Brook Williams was there, of course, and Norma Heyman, who showed up in tears because she said everyone had left without her. Even John Wayne made an appearance at the Burtons’ bungalow, showing up drunk and offering an apology to Richard for besting him. “You son of a bitch, you should have this, not me,” he said, shoving the Oscar under Richard’s nose. Burton, who had fought the urge to drink all evening, gagged at the smell of alcohol on Wayne’s breath. They couldn’t wait for him to leave.

  “I lost again,” Burton later wrote in his notebook, “and am now the most nominated leading actor in the history of the Academy Awards who has never won.” Richard sourly wrote that he at least will be known for something, having carved his own niche in the history of the Academy Awards. As Liz Smith observed, “If he had won the Oscar that year, there would have been some parity in his mind, and hers. She would have been able to relax and say, ‘Okay, he’s got his Oscar now. I’ve done my duty.’ I’ve always felt that that night, she knew it was the end of her marriage.”

  The Burtons were now caught in the middle of a great generational shift. The older, more established citizens of the film community in Hollywood—the same people who had rewarded John Wayne—still resented the black eye that Elizabeth and Richard had given to Hollywood from as far away as Rome, during Cleopatra. Le Scandale had, in fact, scandalized Hollywood as well as the rest of the country. For Old Hollywood, Richard Burton was still tainted by that escapade in Rome, no matter that they had married and had made a go of it, and that between 1962 and 1966, the seven films they’d appeared in had grossed over $200 million. Nonetheless, Richard and Elizabeth had broken up two marriages, and their antics during the making of Cleopatra had nearly sunk 20th Century-Fox. These were unpardonable sins to the old guard. And to the younger members of the Academy, the Burtons just didn’t seem to matter that much. Their conspicuous consumption seemed suspect in the hippie era. The way the Burtons lived and dressed reminded them of their parents. Hadn’t Charlie Chaplin’s son Michael just written a book called I Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn? Old Hollywood was unforgiving, and new Hollywood didn’t seem to care. No wonder a newspaper headline would say, “The Million-Dollar Era for the Fabulous Burtons Is Over.”

  Perhaps as a way to connect with the new crop of Hollywood players, Elizabeth shrewdly decided to throw a party for the Oscar losers. After all, she told Richard, there were “more of them than us.” He always liked her sense of humor, how it cut through so much of the bullshit—the reverence of the press, and the nastiness of the press. So they would all come—no winners allowed. It was a gala night, and everyone but Richard was drinking. Jane Fonda arrived and made a beeline for the Burtons, talking to them for over an hour about Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and the Black Panthers and coming away with a donation of $6,000. It was close to eleven in the evening when Richard and Elizabeth finally made it back to their pink-and-yellow bungalow beneath the giant palmettos bowing in the early spring air. But the quiet would not last for long.

  Elizabeth had been drinking since the party began. She had also been feuding with her mother over the telephone and was not in the mood to be told what to do by Richard, who discouraged her from speaking with her mother after the party. Through the bungalow’s walls, Richard could hear Elizabeth arguing with Sara Taylor, and then the usual follow-up phone call, which meant reconciliation was not far off.

  Suddenly, Elizabeth began bleeding again. She insisted that Dr. Kenemer come to the hotel, and so the good doctor came shuffling into the Burtons’ bungalow in the middle of the night, but by then most of the bleeding had subsided. Nonetheless, Kenemer “put a bandage around her arse, stayed for half an hour,” wrote Burton in his journal. But Richard’s tender concern for Elizabeth was missing that night. Something had indeed changed. Elizabeth’s medical crises, which were very real and often very serious, were garnering less sympathy from her husband. Richard was upset with himself that Elizabeth’s cries for his attention seemed to leave him by turns either frightened or frustrated. They were entering dangerous territory as a couple. And because Elizabeth’s many illnesses and injuries had become so public, Richard became concerned that she would become unemployable.

  Richard was in another kind of pain, the pain of seeing in Elizabeth a kind of mirror image of himself while drunk. He was still on the wagon, but Elizabeth did not join him in his sobriety. For now, he was there all by himself. They couldn’t wait to get back to Puerto Vallarta, where they could have a semblance of a normal life. Richard and Elizabeth were still paying the price for being “Liz and Dick,” and that legend was burying them. Nothing would make the point more obvious than their next public venture, on an episode of Here’s Lucy.

  On May 10, 1970, the Burtons flew back to Los Angeles to rehearse Lucille Ball’s television show. The episode’s premise was to take advantage of the flurry of eye-popping purchases that had made recent headlines—the Krupp and Taylor-Burton diamonds. Burton was actually excited about appearing on the comedy show, turning over in his mind the idea that doing episodic television might be a safe and good way to make a living, now that they weren’t being offered million-dollar salaries to make movies anymore. And if it meant lampooning their “Liz and Dick” image, so be it. Richard was, however, apprehensive about working with the driven, monomaniacal comedienne. By now, Burton had been sober for ten weeks, and this would be the first time he’d worked without a drink since the age of sixteen. Smoking furiously—as much as a hundred cigarettes
a day—Richard had dropped down to 160 pounds. He was so thin that Elizabeth jokingly called him “Mia,” saying that sleeping with him was like sleeping with Mia Farrow.

  Elizabeth went along with the plan, though she was still in pain and had scheduled surgery on her hemorrhoids for May 18.

  The simple plot was to have Richard escape a crush of fans by posing as a plumber. Lucy, unaware of the disguise, gets him to fix her faucet. When she finds him out after he’s left his plumbing coverall behind, she discovers the Krupp diamond in a pocket. Lucy tries on the ring, but because she is Lucy, the ring gets stuck on her finger and she can’t remove it. Burton returns and discovers her plight, just before Elizabeth is supposed to show off the ring at a press conference that evening. When the ring can’t be removed, Elizabeth ends up making her appearance with Lucy standing behind her, behind a curtain, thrusting her hand out to the admiring journalists. Taking advantage of the Burtons’ star power, the press conference was stocked with real members of the Hollywood press corps, including veterans Army Archerd, James Bacon (who had visited them on location in Puerto Vallarta), and Joyce Haber.

  Unfortunately, Burton’s apprehensions about working with Lucille Ball proved true. For an actor who was bored doing Hamlet night after night, he couldn’t fathom Lucy’s lockstep approach, week after week, for nineteen years. After one rehearsal, Burton was appalled when Lucy tapped him and two fellow actors on the forehead, summoning them to her dressing room where she instructed them on how they should play the scene. Burton warned the director that if Lucy attempted to direct his wife in that way, she “would see, in person, what a thousand-megaton hydrogen bomb does when the warhead is attached and exploded.” But Elizabeth managed to keep her serenity and was, as usual, a complete pro. Again, Burton marveled at Elizabeth’s powerful stage presence. The audience adored her, and her every move, every gesture, found its mark. He’d witnessed her effect on a live audience twice before—when they did Doctor Faustus together at Oxford, “she held the audience like a vice,” and when she’d read poetry alongside Richard six years earlier, on Broadway, she had dazzled.

  Despite the horrors of rehearsal and Richard’s resentment of working with Lucille Ball, the episode was something of a triumph, showing that both Burtons had genuine comedy chops. The episode’s ratings were the highest in Here’s Lucy’s long run, proving that the public was still fascinated by the Burtons. Elizabeth and Richard even considered a return to live theater—possibly Macbeth, which had long been on Richard’s mind.

  On May 18, 1970, Elizabeth entered Cedars-Sinai hospital for what would be her twenty-eighth operation in her relatively young life. Dr. Kenemer and her surgeon, Dr. Swerdlow, were concerned about the number of Seconals Elizabeth was already taking for continual back pain. They were all hoping that this surgery would be the last one she would need. The operation was actually a success, but her recovery would prove a problem, as her doctors tried to cure her of her painkiller habit. She would have to suffer her postoperative pain without the help of strong narcotics, scaling back from 21/2 cc’s of Demerol to a fraction of that amount. They quickly moved her from Demerol to a mild tranquilizer, hoping to wean her off painkillers. It was distressing for Burton to learn from Taylor’s doctors that they weren’t managing her pain so much as treating her for the side effects of withdrawal.

  Adding to the surreal discomfort of being in the hospital—which Richard could barely stand under any conditions—Elizabeth’s privacy was constantly being invaded by strangers. Given a lack of tight security at the time, people would wander into her room, sometimes just to gawk at her. A woman who claimed to represent “The Ministry of Love” was apprehended as she approached Elizabeth’s bed. When a “hippie” entered her room, saying that he just wanted “to have a look” at Elizabeth, Richard threw him out. Later, when Richard was napping on a couch in Elizabeth’s room, two other characters walked in with a bird’s nest, and hung it on the wall as a tribute to Elizabeth. This was all unnerving, as the Charles Manson Family murders had just taken place in Los Angeles the year before and were still very much on people’s minds. Dr. Kenemer added to the Grand Guignol atmosphere by joking that rapes were not uncommon in the hospital’s vast corridors. Since Elizabeth was no longer being given injections, Burton convinced the doctors to let her recover at home, and plans were made to sneak her out of the hospital, away from prying eyes, and particularly photographers. With the film industry undergoing a sea change and production money drying up, a front-page photograph of Elizabeth in a wheelchair would have had a chilling effect on any future projects.

  They recovered from the ordeal at Frank Sinatra’s home in Palm Springs, which Burton described as “a kind of super motel, in shape and idea.” Elizabeth adored the rakish singer, and there had always been speculation—never proved—that the two had had an affair years earlier. She had been disappointed when he’d pulled out of The Only Game in Town, and, in fact, they would never appear together in a film. The last time they were all in one room, back in March, Richard became jealous when Elizabeth had made “sheep’s eyes” at Sinatra. He was equally mad at Sinatra for not making a pass at his wife. He noted, with a slight sense of superiority, that Sinatra’s library consisted of books that had been chosen by the restaurateur “Prince” Mike Romanov.

  Three weeks later, in 120-degree heat, one of Elizabeth’s stitches broke and blood soon covered the bathroom floor. Burton rushed her to Desert Hospital, and Dr. Swerdlow drove in from Los Angeles. “I aged another ten years,” Burton wrote in his diary. As she was being wheeled down the hospital corridor for yet another surgery, she called out to him, “I love you, Richard.”

  “I love you too, baby,” he answered. It dawned on him that she would have to remain in Palm Springs, recovering from her two surgeries, while he embarked on his next film, already set up to begin shooting that summer in the Mexican desert.

  He had now been sober for three months.

  Richard had decided to take on another macho, historical adventure story, the war epic Raid on Rommel for Universal Pictures. If those were going to be the only movies that made money, and if he were to continue to be snubbed by the Academy, why take on risky, artistic properties, why take on Shakespeare or Marlowe or even Tennessee Williams? So he agreed to appear in the Harry Tatelman production, which was originally intended for television, using footage left over from an earlier film, Arthur Hiller’s Tobruk, released four years earlier. Veteran director Henry Hathaway added clout to the movie, which otherwise boasted no other stars even close to Burton’s stature. (Ironically, the tough, take-no-prisoners director had just steered John Wayne through his Oscar-winning performance in True Grit.) Because he could, Burton got his protégé Brook Williams a small part in the film (after securing him a part in the Here’s Lucy episode they had taped the previous month, before a live audience). With Where Eagles Dare and Raid on Rommel, Burton was becoming more of an action star, but, given his worsening arthritis and neck pain, an action star who sometimes had trouble moving.

  Raid on Rommel was filmed in San Felipe in the Mexican desert, over a twenty-one-day schedule. It was the longest time that Elizabeth and Richard had been separated and the longest that Richard had gone without alcohol. After her two harrowing surgeries, Richard missed Elizabeth dreadfully, and he poured out his longing for her in a series of sometimes playful, sometimes mournful letters.

  On June 30, he wrote to Elizabeth, describing the desert’s rocky outcrops and mentioning the fact that their good friend Mike Nichols was nearby, filming Catch-22, his third film since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in the same stretch of desert. As both movies were about war, he noted that some of the local Mexicans were stealing guns and prop ammunition and shooting them off. “Dearest Scrupelshrumpilstilskin,” he typed in a three-page, double-space letter on Beverly Crest Hotel stationery, using one of his many doting nicknames for her. He urges her to visit him in Mexico, where “the air is like wine.”

  …I love you and miss you more
than you can believe…we are, after all, only about 100 miles from Palm Springs…. The motel I’m staying in is completely roped off and has police on permanent guard. Once the few tourists have begged off you should be left entirely alone…

  It is 7:00 in the morn and I have had 2 cups of Nescafé and I love your bruised bumsy…

  I wouldn’t mind building a house on one or the other [rocky outcrops] and living here—that’s how startlingly beautiful it is. A climate like Palm Springs but with the sea to boot…so why don’t you come down and visit me? I’ll show you a good time…. I love you. Very very very odd curious strange bizarre unattractive without you.

  Millions of kisses and hug. The bed is huge!

  What he doesn’t tell her is that the town of San Felipe, comprising eight hundred souls, had a mean temperature of 113 degrees, only two decent restaurants, not more than two or three dozen beds for visitors in the entire town, and shark-infested waters. And it was hurricane season. After talking on one of the few telephones available in the desert, Richard was thrilled to hear that Elizabeth felt well enough to visit him and that she’d missed him so terribly that she mooned over the sight of a pair of his socks.

  On July 9, Elizabeth flew to San Felipe. She arrived while Burton was still shooting, lying in the desert while sand blew into his mouth, looking up at the sky. He opened his squinting eyes and saw Elizabeth’s plane flying overhead, buzzing the set. The plane carried not just Elizabeth but Norma Heyman and Liza, Maria, and Kate as well. Later, at their hotel suite, Richard was disappointed by Kate’s nonchalant greeting, and by finding the hotel rooms blazingly hot, as no one had turned on the air conditioner. He stood there, dusty and filthy and covered in grease and greasepaint, when Elizabeth danced into the room and fell into his arms. That night, they all went out to dinner at Ruben’s, one of the small town’s two restaurants. But instead of enjoying a festive reunion, Burton sulked in silence. He had found himself becoming jealous when Elizabeth mentioned earlier that she’d called Marlon Brando and had talked to him on the telephone for an hour. He was angry when she told him that Brando was “keeping tabs” on him.