Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  I am convinced it would be a good and constructive idea if Richard and I separated for a while. Maybe we loved each other too much. I never believed such a thing was possible. But we have been in each other’s pockets constantly, never being apart but for matters of life and death, and I believe it has caused a temporary breakdown of communication. I believe with all my heart that the separation will ultimately bring us back to where we should be—and that’s together. I think in a few days’ time I shall return to California, because my mother is there, and I have old and true friends there too. Friends are there to help each other, aren’t they? Isn’t that what it’s all supposed to be about? If anybody reads anything lascivious in that last statement, all I can say is it must be in the eye of the reader, not in mine or my friends’ or my husband’s. Wish us well during this difficult time. Pray for us.

  With Elizabeth gone, for the first time Richard enlisted the help of a doctor to try to detoxify from alcohol. Insisting that he wasn’t an alcoholic but merely a “drunk,” like his father, who imbibed by choice, he must have known that this was his last chance to save his marriage, and, possibly, his life.

  15

  MASSACRE IN ROME

  “…[I]f you leave me, I shall have to kill myself. There is no life without you, I’m afraid. And I am afraid.”

  —RICHARD BURTON

  “I don’t want to be that much in love ever again.”

  —ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  Though he had provoked it, and perhaps had sought it, Richard was blindsided by Elizabeth’s public announcement of their separation. Three months earlier, in Rome, he had written a revealing letter to Elizabeth while she slept in the next room. In it, he’d addressed his own bad behavior (his “usage” and “jealousy”), his cynicism about the very concept of love, and how Elizabeth had somehow vanquished that cynicism.

  The last day of March

  My darling Sleeping Child,

  …

  …I am oddly shy about you. I still regard you as an…inviolate presence. You are as secret as the mysterious processes of the womb. I’m not being fancy…I have treated women, generally, very badly and used them as an exercise for my contempt except in your case. I have fought like a fool to treat you in the same way and failed. One of these days I will wake up—which I think I have done already—and realize to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer. But when people die…those who are taken away from us can never come back. Never, never, never, never, never (Lear about Cordelia). We are such doomed fools. Unfortunately, we know it.

  So I have decided that for a second or two, the precious potential of you in the next room is the only thing in the world worth living for. After your death there shall only be one other and that will be mine. Or I possibly think, vice versa.

  Ravaged love,

  And loving Rich

  There was no hiding from the press in the wake of Elizabeth’s July 4 announcement. Reporters made a beeline to Quogue, congregating on Frosch’s driveway, to get Burton’s response to the separation. Burton hid in a cottage on the property but was found out by London reporter Nigel Dempster of the Daily Mail. With a bottle of vodka in front of him (he had yet to start his detoxification regimen), Burton vented his complaints about marriage with Taylor, blaming everything but his own drinking—their volatile temperaments, her demands upon him. “Perhaps my indifference to Elizabeth’s personal problems triggered off this situation,” he mused. “I have only twenty-four hours a day. I read and write and film. Elizabeth is constantly seeking problems of one kind or another. She worries about her figure, about her family, about the color of her teeth,” he complained defensively. “She expects that I drop everything to devote myself to these problems.” He even tried to make light of the situation, describing himself as “amused” by it, but when asked if a divorce were imminent, he changed his tune, insisting that Elizabeth had not really left him.

  “There is no question of our love and devotion to each other,” he said solemnly.

  “I don’t even consider Elizabeth and [me] as separated…I even have Elizabeth’s passport in my possession. Does that look as if she has left me?” He had, a few days earlier, written a three-page letter to Elizabeth from Quogue, again declaring his need for her, though recognizing their intractable differences:

  I love you, lovely woman. If anybody hurts you, just send me a line saying something like “Need” or “Necessary” or just the one magic word “Elizabeth,” and I will be there somewhat faster than sound. You must know, of course, how much I love you. You must know, of course, how badly I treat you. But the fundamental and most vicious, swinish, murderous, and unchangeable fact is that we totally misunderstand each other…we operate on alien wavelengths. You are as distant as Venus—planet, I mean—and I am tone-deaf to the music of the spheres. But how-so-be-it nevertheless. (A cliché among Welsh politicians.) I love you and I always will…. Come back to me as soon as you can…

  Realizing that his drinking was out of control, Richard finally sought treatment with a New York internist. Perhaps if he really sobered up, Elizabeth would return to him. And he needed to get in shape for his next film for Carlo Ponti, The Voyage, in which he would costar with Sophia Loren, Ponti’s wife and an actress whose iconic beauty and sensuality rivaled Elizabeth’s. The great Italian Neorealist Vittorio De Sica would direct what would turn out to be his last film. Burton asked if he could stay in the Pontis’ guesthouse at their home in Marino, outside of Rome, afraid he would be overrun by the press were he to check into a hotel. They graciously agreed. So on July 12, 1973, Burton traveled to the Ponti estate, a fifty-room, sixteenth-century villa in the Alban Hills outside of Rome, where he would nurse his wounds. He brought with him a reduced entourage: his new doctor and nurse, a secretary, and two bodyguards.

  Elizabeth flew to Los Angeles, in part to be near her widowed mother, Sara, but really to put distance between herself and Richard’s endless drinking and their endless quarreling. She managed to hide from the press at the 1600 Coldwater Canyon home of her friend, Edith Head, and her husband, Bill. She loved their Spanish-style home, complete with swimming pool and tennis court, and she found it “a haven, where I could get away from everyone and work out my problems on my own.” An added attraction to Edith’s safe harbor was the fact that both women loved Jack Daniel’s. Whenever Edith returned home from her work, they would have “a nice, big glass of Jack Daniel’s together,” Elizabeth remembered. They were so close that the famous costume designer had a plaque placed on the stairs going up to the guest room that read, ELIZABETH TAYLOR SLEEPS HERE, which completely delighted Elizabeth. So much of her life had been devoted to recreating a sense of home and family, and Edith Head’s was yet another of Elizabeth’s surrogate homes, even more important now that her true home, with Richard, had foundered.

  And so, Elizabeth reentered Hollywood, where she had spent her youthful years and her too-brief marriage to Mike Todd. She began going around town with Peter Lawford, her long-ago costar in Julia Misbehaves, filmed when Elizabeth was just an ingénue but had also had a woman-sized crush on the debonair English actor. (He gave Elizabeth her first screen kiss, but had been reluctant to romantically take on the sixteen-year-old.) By now divorced from Pat Kennedy, the late president’s sister, Lawford was on a downward slide, indulging in Quaaludes, cocaine, and vodka. Elizabeth also saw Dominick Dunne in Hollywood, and her longtime friend and confidant, Roddy McDowall. She found herself doing things she would never have done with Richard, such as a wild daytime trip, by helicopter, to Disneyland with Dunne and his daughter, Dominique; Lawford and his son, Christopher; and Roddy McDowall. Fo
r the first time in its history, a helicopter, which had picked them up at the top of Mulholland Drive, was allowed to land inside Walt Disney’s massive amusement park. Once they were inside Disneyland, crowds began to surround Elizabeth and her coterie, and they retreated to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, where the grownups passed among themselves a flask filled with Jack Daniel’s. It was a desperate kind of fun.

  But when Roddy McDowall and eighteen-year-old Christopher Lawford brought Elizabeth to meet Mae West in the Ravenswood Apartments, Elizabeth was uncomfortable. The plump eighty-one-year-old former sex goddess greeted them wearing a silver gown that fitted her like a second skin. Her long, platinum-blond hair framed her frozen face like cotton candy. Two muscle-bound bodyguards stood by her side. After fifteen minutes of strained conversation, Elizabeth leaned over to Roddy and whispered, “Can we get the hell out of here?” Elizabeth had been asked to appear in Myra Breckinridge a few years earlier—the Gore Vidal satire in which Mae West had made a gloriously bizarre screen appearance (her first in twenty-seven years). Elizabeth had turned it down, but the sight of the tiny, preserved-in-aspic diva made Elizabeth wonder if this was her future. Was she on the edge of camp, and would she be unable to come back from that edge, without Richard? Of the many costs of fame, the preservation of endless copies of herself, each one less authentic—like Warhol’s brilliant repeating images of her—threatened to trap her in unreality. Were she and Richard becoming like the stiff effigies in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London, which were placed on opposite sides of the room when the Burtons’ separation was announced? She beat a hasty retreat.

  Elizabeth also reunited with the novelist Truman Capote, whom she had known since Cleopatra days. He had been witness to Elizabeth and Richard’s “affectionate rows” throughout their nine-year marriage. “They really riled each other up,” Capote thought, “and I always felt that they did it on purpose so that they could have a big makeup in bed.” But Capote had remained skeptical about Burton’s motives from the start. He’d always felt that Burton had only married Taylor to boost his career prospects. “She loved him,” he believed, “but he didn’t love her.” In the wake of their separation, people in Hollywood were beginning to tear down Richard—it was really Elizabeth’s town, as Hollywood had never embraced Burton—but Elizabeth knew better than anyone that Capote was flat-out wrong. The proof was not just in their lovemaking, his devotion to their children, their thousands of nights together, the magnificent, storied jewels he gave her, but in letter after letter in which he had poured out his love and his need for her. Ten days after she’d announced their separation, she received a telegram from Richard, in Rome:

  BELOVED IDIOT. MISS YOU TERRIBLY…I AM NOW ONE UP ON YOU HAVING WON THE DONATELLO AWARD FOR MASSACRO IN ROMA SO I SHALL BE GOING.

  Like much of Old Hollywood, Lawford had no real fondness for Richard Burton, and he introduced Elizabeth to another man-about-town, the Dutch businessman, photographer, and used-car dealer Henry Wynberg, a swinging bachelor who was cutting a swath among Hollywood women of all ages. Tall, attractive, and divorced, Wynberg spoke in a charming, Dutch-accented English. He was five years younger than Elizabeth, and he seemed to be living out a Hugh Hefner fantasy, with a plush couch and wall-sized aquarium in his apartment where he did his wooing. He was also half-Jewish, and Burton himself had noted in his diary how much Elizabeth was attracted to Jewish men, like Mike Todd, Eddie Fisher, Max Lerner, even the potbellied, out-of-shape writer Wolf Mankowitz, and Joe Mankiewicz as well. (And himself, perhaps, if Burton’s claims to a Jewish heritage were true.) “Elizabeth has always fancied Jews,” Burton wrote. “She seems to have a rapport with them, which she doesn’t have with the ordinary Anglo-Saxon.” For now, Wynberg consoled Elizabeth, taking her dancing, squiring her around town, hanging out in nightclubs—all things in which Richard had long ago lost interest (if indeed he ever enjoyed them). “Going out was life for Elizabeth then,” said Vignale. But that was all Wynberg was to her at the time—an attractive escort—as Elizabeth made plans to return to Rome, where she would begin work on another film, The Driver’s Seat, her forty-ninth. And to see Richard.

  Richard had written Elizabeth again, from Rome, two letters in particular that showed the depth of his despair without her, suggesting that he might kill himself if she did not return:

  Well, first of all, you must realize that I worship you. Second of all, at the expense of seeming repetitive, I love you. Thirdly, and here I go again with my enormous command of language, I can’t live without you. Thirdly, I mean fourthly, you have an enormous responsibility because if you leave me I shall have to kill myself. There is no life without you, I’m afraid. And I am afraid. Afeared. In terms of my life, scared. Lost. Alone. Dull. Dumb. (That will be the day.) And fifthly, and I hope I will never repeat myself, I fancy you. I bet that you would be alright if you loved me and stuff like that. Sixthly, I bet if you could persuade me to stop acting, which is a practice I’ve always deplored, I could work out a way whereby I could stay alive until I’m fifty-five. That rhymes…

  Curiously, Elizabeth did not seem to answer any of Richard’s letters, though she would treasure them for the rest of her life, keeping them private for four decades. “Richard had so much passion for life through words,” she later said, whereas she was more invested in living for the moment. And there was that other problem: she had been trained since childhood to control whatever might turn up in the press, which meant being careful about what she wrote, and to whom. A letter from Elizabeth Taylor could easily go astray. It wasn’t until she entered the Betty Ford Clinic for the first time, on December 5, 1983, that she realized the price she’d paid for that careful secrecy: she had suppressed some of her deepest emotions.

  Meanwhile, letters of condolence and telegrams from old friends and colleagues poured in from around the world, to both sides. Joe Losey, reading about the separation, wrote to Richard from London, “I will not talk about the present situation with Elizabeth…I will only say, tragically sad and mistaken.”

  Later that month, The Battle of Sutjeska would win the “Best Anti-Fascist” movie award at the Moscow International Film Festival, a good omen for the “great men” roles Richard would continue to take on—after Tito, Winston Churchill; after Churchill, Richard Wagner. Yet Burton continued to rail against his profession, writing again to Elizabeth,

  I have never quite got over the fact that I thought and I’m afraid I still do think, that “acting” for a man—a really proper man—is sissified and faintly ridiculous. I will do this film with Ponti and Loren out of sheer cupidity—desire for money. I will unquestionably do many more. But my heart, unlike yours, is not in it. The French have a word for what I am and it’s called “manqué,” meaning a failure of desire…I am everything “manqué.” An actor manqué, a philosopher manqué, a writer manqué, and consequently an intolerable bore. (Not manqué, I’m afraid.)

  Within two weeks of their separation announcement, Richard was able to cable Joe Losey, “You are too old a hand to believe what you read in the papers. Elizabeth returns here to Rome next Friday…it was simply a burst of disillusioned inebriation. Am sober, slim and beautiful.”

  On July 20, 1973, dressed in a red blazer and white cotton pullover, Richard was chauffeured in his Rolls-Royce to the Fiumicino Airport in Rome to meet Elizabeth’s plane. Nearly four hundred members of the press surrounded the airport, held back by two hundred policemen. It was Le Scandale all over again, or Cleopatra’s entry into Rome, or was it a scene out of The V.I.P.s?—the limousine idling on the tarmac—as if “Liz and Dick” were condemned to endlessly live out their lives on film. They watched Richard slouched in the back of the Rolls, waiting for Elizabeth to arrive.

  So many of the important things in Elizabeth’s life seemed to happen in Rome. She had flown over from Los Angeles in a leased jet, with two dogs, a cat, and nine cases of luggage. As she deplaned, dressed in blue jeans, an oversize orange T-shirt, and the Taylor-Burton diamond, Burton still wai
ted in the back of his car, unmoving. Many in the press assumed it was a game they were playing—neither wanted to make the first move.

  Elizabeth disappeared into customs.

  Burton sat, patiently waiting, in the Rolls.

  She finally left the terminal, and policemen made a passageway for Elizabeth through the throng of reporters and paparazzi, as flashbulbs exploded all around her.

  Still, Richard sat, unmoving, until the door opened and Elizabeth was practically propelled into the waiting car by a surge of photographers. That’s when they finally had the satisfaction of seeing Richard, through the darkened windows of the Rolls, kiss her face and bury his head in her breasts, taking in the smell of her. The Rolls inched through the crush of reporters and made its way to the Pontis’ villa thirteen miles away, chased by paparazzi the entire distance.

  The Pontis’ villa was—thankfully for the Burtons—guarded like Flora Goforth’s island in Boom! The Rolls passed through electronic gates and armed guards, complete with snarling German shepherds on leashes, till it finally reached the magnificent villa, where Sophia and Carlo greeted the couple with drinks in hand. There, they dined on a splendid lunch of “risotto, roasted Palumbo fish, fruit, and white wine.”

  Elizabeth had always been wary of Sophia Loren. When the tall, voluptuous Italian movie queen was proposed to star with Richard years ago in The V.I.P.s, Elizabeth had commanded, “Let Sophia stay in Rome!” and had taken the role for herself. Sophia was a taller, darker, Mediterranean version of Elizabeth, admired as an actress, worshipped as a sex goddess, loved for her earthiness and warmth. She was tall and regal where Elizabeth was short and flamboyant. Elizabeth had shown up in a cotton T-shirt and jeans that day (after traveling all night), whereas Sophia had greeted them in “a Dior suit, matching handbag, and shoes.” They shared, however, a love of and appreciation for jewels. Earlier, Sophia had responded to Elizabeth and Richard’s purchase of the Taylor-Burton diamond by telling Photoplay, “The stone had been offered to Carlo,” but “he appraised it and decided that it was not worth the price. And I assure you, Carlo knows the value of jewelry.” Battling divas often slugged it out in the pages of movie magazines, but Elizabeth had too much dignity to catfight in print.