by Sam Kashner
The next morning, Elizabeth showed up on the set. She stayed with him till well into the afternoon, which proved a tonic to the cast and crew. Everyone—from gruff Henry Hathaway to the lowliest crew member—was delighted she was there, and they all told Richard it had been their best day of shooting. Elizabeth had always shown tremendous warmth toward film crews—the people she relied upon to make her look good—but it was a genuine affection. The goodwill lasted all evening, and Richard and Elizabeth finally returned to the hotel to make love. All their old sexual fire returned, despite her recent surgery and the energy-sapping heat. Her presence and her body lifted his Welsh gloom, and it was as if they had just met, as Burton made love to her while completely sober, amazed that all his energy had returned. The desert heat had brought out Richard’s old cystic acne, the bane of his existence, but Elizabeth kissed his pustuled back and shoulders and thought nothing of it. Elizabeth always did flourish in hot climates, and now she positively glowed, the two of them devouring each other—hands, lips, tongues.
One hundred and forty days without drinking.
Elizabeth and the children returned to Los Angeles on July 13.
Nine days later, horribly missing Elizabeth, Burton typed a one-and-a-half-page letter to her, worrying that he’d get “another attack of gout” after kicking the jeep door while filming (“the foot is still sore but not gouted up…”). Elizabeth had just lost one of her tooth caps, and Burton commiserated with her. He closed his letter with “all my love. Never think of anything but you for very long. I fancy you a very lot, Shebes.—Rich.”
By now, Richard had decided to appear in a low-budget thriller, Villain, to be filmed in London. They planned to take the Super Chief to Chicago, then to New York, and then the QE2 to England. They were also considering making what would be their tenth film together, Hammersmith Is Out, a comedic retelling of the Faust myth, set partially in a mental hospital. Faust again! The producer, Alex Lucas, brought Burton the script, and they discussed the possibility of filming the movie entirely in Mexico, which Richard had come to love. He wrote to Elizabeth on July 25:
Dearest Toothache,
I may come up to see you today but won’t know until later…Jim tells me that we’re on the Super Chief on the 1st and the QE2 on the 6th, so what paperbacks are you going to take with you and will you have breakfast with me and watch Kansas roll by and then Illinois…
[Lucas] arrives with scripts. Discuss possibility of filming movie entirely in Mexico. It is very possible if you think about it…for the posh house we could use some great house in Acapulco. For the loony bin we could use any large room, fill it with beds and stick some bars on the windows and Gung Ho!
…
I love you ghastily and horribly and terribly. See you soon…
Four more days…
Rich
The next day, on Sunday, July 26, after a morning of frying bacon and then reading, he again wrote to Elizabeth, encouraging her to accept a film offer that had come her way and would be made in London at the same time he filmed Villain—an adaptation of Edna O’Brien’s novel Zee & Co., for Columbia Pictures. “Dear Long-way-away-one,” he wrote,
…Very antisocial I am when I don’t booze. And no fun when you’re not around…I hope that girl’s teeth are not hurting too much…are you going to do the film? Do you love me? Do you want to be a lazy Jane and never work again? Once I stopped boozing I have enjoyed not working. But we can’t do it though.
They had another reason to return to London: Elizabeth’s firstborn son, Michael Wilding Jr., was going to be married to his fiancée, Beth Clutter, in October at Caxton Hall, where Elizabeth had married Michael Wilding in 1952, a mere eighteen years ago.
On the Super Chief headed east, Elizabeth and Richard had a rare chance to be alone together, for the first time in over a year. It was idyllic, and they had the pleasure of making love in the swiftly moving train. Elizabeth giggled at what she called Richard’s “new technique,” which he insisted was simply the movement of the train swaying and rocking as it zoomed down the track. Though her doctor had not wanted Elizabeth to make the trip, she had made a remarkable recovery from her surgery, and they took advantage of it. But the seeds of displeasure were planted on that train—for the first time in four months, Richard took a drink.
“Forgot the momentous news,” he confessed in his diary on August 2. “I had a Jack Daniel’s and soda and two glasses of Napa Valley red wine last night with dinner. Felt immensely daring and all it did was make me feel very sleepy and not elated or anything like that.” A few days later, he polished off a bottle of Burgundy with liver and bacon, and by the time they crossed the Atlantic to England and reclaimed the Kalizma and were heading toward Portofino, Burton had slid back into heavy drinking.
Burton’s drinking had many sources: it was, apparently, genetic, given his father’s alcoholism, but it also represented the model of virility Burton had wholeheartedly embraced. It was like being in the ring with a boxer, as his friend, the columnist Jimmy Breslin, once told him: “Don’t forget you’re always fighting. The other fellow is booze. You’re evading, always evading, but one of these days, unless you’re careful, he’s going to nail you.” It was familial: by several accounts, he was introduced to drink by the age of twelve, and in Elizabeth he found a willing partner. He needed no excuse to start drinking again—“I get a bad notice,” Burton wrote, “I’ll take a drink. A good notice, I’ll take a drink.” A period of depression or a period of happiness, a defeat or a triumph, boredom, travel, availability—it didn’t matter. Its siren call was always there, waiting for his return.
“Missed yesterday,” he wrote in his diary, “as I was more or less stupefied with drink all day long.” Along with the alcohol came the awful quarreling—disagreements on every point, constant needling on both sides, surrounded by the Kalizma’s crew of eight.
Watching their heavenly train trip turn so quickly into hell, the Burtons realized that they were happiest when they were alone together, out in the world without their staggering entourage. Liz and Dick needed the entourage to survive, but it was suffocating Richard and Elizabeth. Yet being alone together was a difficult feat to pull off—just getting back to Geneva from the Kalizma was like a military operation. They had to find a port, and the jet had to be ordered. Once they landed in Gstaad, a helicopter was waiting to take them to a small hotel nestled in a Swiss valley, where they were greeted warmly and fawned over by the chef, who kissed Elizabeth’s hand and always knew what they wanted for dinner. After traveling on boat and plane and helicopter to find their refuge, they entered the dining room and all the other guests applauded them. They just couldn’t escape who and what they were: the most famous couple in the world.
Back in London at the Dorchester, the Burtons prepared for their seventeen-year-old son’s wedding on October 6. Michael was very much a child of his times, and his dark, straight hair hung loose past his shoulders. Looking like hippie royalty, he wore a maroon velvet tunic, bell-bottom trousers, and sandals for the ceremony. Beth Clutter, the daughter of an oceanographer whom Michael had met while staying with his uncle Howard in Hawaii, wore a white muslin dress. As usual, Elizabeth outshone the bride—all eyes were on the star in a white knitted trouser suit and maxi coat, with a very dignified-looking Burton, his hair beginning to gray at the temples, walking beside her through a gauntlet of photographers.
Most parents would object to a seventeen-year-old marrying. As with other parents of their generation, at the end of the turbulent 1960s, there were differences of opinion between Richard and Elizabeth about what was best for the children. Elizabeth was tolerant to the point of indulgence. “They’re remarkable,” she said, “because God knows, according to all the rules, my life should have been murder for them. Their lives have been up and down. We’ve lived like gypsies.” She indulged them, but she admired them for having come through her public scrutiny and the itinerant lives they had led. The Burtons presented the couple with a Jaguar, a £35,
000 check, and a house purchased for £43,700 in Hampstead, next to Squire’s Mount, the Georgian house that Burton still owned but rarely used.
Michael, like his younger brother, Christopher, had their mother’s arresting eyes and dramatic coloring. As a boy, he’d had a flair for acting, and could recite Puck’s speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Elizabeth thought that of all her children, he would be the most likely to go into the family business. He had attended several exclusive boarding schools, but had ended up living with Howard Taylor’s family in Hawaii. Michael had no special plans for his future and seemed to spend a lot of his time smoking cigarettes and reading comic books, all of which concerned Burton, who was baffled that Michael had no desire to further his education. (Later, when Kate Burton attended Brown University to study Russian literature and language, Burton was exceedingly proud, writing to her, “Dearest Ivy League.”) To his mind, seventeen was too young to marry, but as Elizabeth was pleased, he would go along with it. Michael Wilding Sr. remained publicly silent on the subject.
A few weeks after the wedding, Beth and Michael Wilding announced that she was pregnant. At the age of thirty-eight, Elizabeth faced the prospect—quite happily, in fact—of becoming a grandmother.
On November 10, 1970, Richard’s forty-fifth birthday, Queen Elizabeth honored Burton by making him a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (“CBE”), in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. He couldn’t have been more disappointed. Elizabeth, in fact, had wanted him to turn it down, because they were both holding out for a knighthood. Richard’s beloved sister, Cis, attended the ceremony, so Richard had to pretend to be happier about it than he was. After all, the two men whose footsteps Richard had supposedly followed in—Gielgud and Olivier—were already knighted. Their good friend Noël Coward was made both a CBE and, later on, a knight, despite the fact that the playwright had squirreled away his fortune in Swiss banking accounts, as Burton later groused in his diary. He thought the snub was because he, unlike Gielgud and Olivier, had lived outside of England for so long. He did recognize, however, that the CBE was a hell of an honor for one who had not gone after it, and he was “pleased that it means we are no longer notorious but officially posh.” He also comforted himself that perhaps a knighthood was not so out of reach, after all.
In early December, the New York Times writer Bernard Weintraub visited Richard on location in Bracknell, a suburb thirty miles west of London, where Burton was filming Villain, the low-budget gangster movie for which he had waived his usual $1 million salary to work for a percentage of the gross. Elizabeth remained in London, nestled in at the Dorchester, where she planned to meet the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, author of Zee & Co.
When Weintraub met Burton at the pub of the Foresters Hotel in Bracknell, Burton was nursing a cold, and a martini. The journalist noticed that at forty-five, Burton was still a powerful presence, with “an unmistakable aura of stardom.” He told Weintraub that the role of a sentimental, sadistic underworld figure in Villain was the first “heavy” he had played onscreen, and a far cry from the kings and princes he had played in his earlier years. He noted, too, that the character was homosexual.
Drinking again, Burton was uncensored in his comments to the press, going public with his continual disdain for acting. “It seems fairly ridiculous for someone forty-five or fifty to be learning words written by other people, most of which are bad, to make a few dollars. I’m not dedicated. I never was,” he confessed. “I’ve got to keep acting, though…It’s compulsive. There are few challenges left, I suppose. I’m forced by ego to play Lear. Macbeth? Yes, I want to do Macbeth.”
Later, interviewing Burton in his dressing-room trailer, Weintraub noticed that Burton’s hands were shaking as he lit his cigarette, which made the actor seem frail and vulnerable. He continued to rail against acting as a profession, noting, “There aren’t that many scripts for people like us,” as he sipped another martini.
“It’s all so bloody pernicious,” he told Weintraub. “Fame is pernicious. So is money. Of course, don’t misunderstand—I don’t want to be poor. I don’t want to repeat that performance. Never.”
The interview was interrupted by a phone call from Elizabeth, announced by Jim Benton, Burton’s trusted secretary. After speaking with her, Burton returned to his interview, sighing loudly.
“She wants me to come back to the Dorchester early because she’s meeting Edna O’Brien about a script she’s going to do and she’s terrified,” he told Weintraub. “Bloody terrified. She’s always terrified of meeting new people.” He added that Elizabeth wanted to go to a Blood, Sweat & Tears concert at the Royal Albert Hall, but he was afraid for her safety.
“How the hell can she go to Royal Albert Hall? She’d need protection. She still hasn’t learned,” Burton said, shaking his head in dismay. “We used to think maybe some of it would stop, maybe after the marriage was legitimized all the nonsense would end. But it gets worse. And London’s not bad. London’s probably the best city for us. New York’s not bad, either. But Rome. And Boston—Boston, of all places, is the worst for mobs.”
Burton washed down a cold tablet and lit another cigarette, confiding in his interviewer how much he feared and dreaded drugs of all kind. “Have you ever smoked marijuana?” he asked. “I think I tried it once. It scared the hell out of me. I keep saying it, but it’s true. Elizabeth and I are getting to be an old middle-aged married couple.”
They talked about how the motion picture business was changing, a fact of which Burton was well aware, and he mused over his now-and-again plans to quit the business. But one thing kept him going—actually, two things. He needed to keep making money to support the entourage and his extended family, and the yacht, and the jet, and his and Elizabeth’s extravagant life. And maybe, just maybe, as he told Weintraub, “Perhaps I’m approaching my prime.”
Photographic Insert 2
Richard became close to Elizabeth’s children, and they adopted Maria Burton in 1964. Left to right: Liza Todd, Michael Wilding, Jr., Christopher Wilding, and Maria Burton. [Bob Penn/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.]
A scene from Graham Greene’s The Comedians, again playing illicit lovers. For the first time, Richard was paid more than Elizabeth to appear in a film. [Collection Pele/Stills/Gamma-Rapho]
The Burtons and children at the Nice Airport in 1967. “We’ve lived like gypsies,” Elizabeth later said. They would soon invest in their own plane. [Globe Photos Inc.]
Elizabeth and Richard in Doctor Faustus, 1966, staged for his beloved Oxford University Drama Society (OUDS). The poor reviews of the filmed play scuttled his plans to direct himself and Elizabeth in Macbeth. [Terrance Spencer/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images]
At the Save Venice Costume Ball in 1967. Elizabeth’s elaborate headdress was created by Alexandre of Paris. It would inspire her fabulous costume in the Burtons’ next film, Joseph Losey’s Boom! [SSPL/Getty Images]
Relaxing in Sardinia on the set of Boom!, based on Tennessee Williams’s play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. [© Henry Grossman]
Richard’s drinking increased after the death of his beloved brother Ifor. Elizabeth would be one of the first celebrities to seek treatment at the Betty Ford Clinic. Pictured here in 1967. [A.P. Images]
Richard and Elizabeth at the Paris Opera House, September 29, 1967. [Keystone/ Gamma-Rapho]
Richard, Elizabeth, and eleven-year-old Kate Burton braving the crowds outside the Winter Garden Theater in New York, to attend a matinee performance of Mame on November 11, 1967. This was their first visit to America in nearly two years. [Corbis]
Richard and Elizabeth on a yacht on the Thames, rented to house their Pekinese and Yorkshire terriers to avoid British quarantine. The British roundly criticized their extravagance. February 1968. [Bob Aylott/Keystone/Getty Images]
Elizabeth showing off the 33.19-carat Krupp Diamond, a gift from Richard, May 20, 1968. “I thought, how perfect it would be if a nice Jewish girl like me were to own it,” she later sa
id. [Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images]
Richard with the French-Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold, in Anne of the Thousand Days. Elizabeth was deemed too old to play the young Anne Boleyn, but she dazzled as an extra. Richard was nominated for another Oscar for his role as Henry VIII. May 1969. [© Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy]
If Elizabeth was jealous of Bujold in Anne of the Thousand Days, Richard kept a sharp eye on Warren Beatty, her co-star in The Only Game in Town. [20th Century Fox/ mptvimages.com]
“She is like the tide, she comes and she goes, she runs to me/as in this stupendous photographic image./In my poor and tormented youth, I had always dreamed of this/woman. And now, when this dream occasionally returns, I extend/ my arm, and she is here…by my side. If you have not met or known her, you have lost much in life,” Richard wrote on this photograph of Elizabeth, c. 1970. [Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Press]
