Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  recalled his good friend Joe Sirolla. “And had an affair with her. Sybil would come to the theater and Claire would say, ‘Oh, Sybil, I’m so desperately in love with your husband. Why, I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ And finally, after weeks and weeks of this, Sybil said, ‘Darling, you must find something to do, because for me to hear this every night, well, it’s not very pleasant.’ She was wonderful. Richard adored her. We never dreamed he would ever leave her. He would often say he was nothing without Sybil.”

  Sybil decided to accept Richard’s infidelity as part of their life together. Like a lot of women of her time, she looked the other way, though she wasn’t happy about it. Also, from a practical standpoint, Sybil had to consider the well-being of her two daughters, Kate and Jessica. Kate Burton would grow up to become a successful actress; she would appear with her father in the television miniseries Ellis Island in 1984. Sadly, Jessica was diagnosed as both autistic and schizophrenic. She would be institutionalized Her Destiny

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  on and off from the age of six, a heartbreaking situation and one that neither Sybil nor Richard would ever be able to fully reconcile. The real challenge that faced Richard, though, and one he was unable to resolve in his lifetime, was that he was an out-of-control alcoholic. When sober, he was a delight, kind and generous, a good and loyal friend to many. However, after a few drinks, he sometimes became belligerent and difficult, and also very guilty about his many indiscretions. During this time—the 1950s and 1960s—a dependency on alcohol wasn’t thought of as a disease but, rather, just an expedient way to get through the difficult day. It was also glamorized, not demonized.

  In 1952, Richard left London for Hollywood, signing a contract with 20th Century-Fox. He was immediately hailed as a force to be reckoned with following his star turn in 1952 for his first U.S. film, My Cousin Rachel, opposite Olivia de Havilland. The movie earned him a Golden Globe and his first Academy Award nomination. As a reward for his work in that film and as confirmation of his box-office appeal, Fox cast Burton in its most important film in years, The Robe, a biblical epic based on the Lloyd C. Douglas novel. It was the studio’s first film to be shot entirely in its new widescreen process, CinemaScope. The Robe turned out to be 1953’s top-grossing film and earned Richard his second Oscar nomination. More movies followed. By 1961, he was starring in the Broadway hit Camelot (for which he would win his first Tony). He would leave that show in order to make Cleopatra. To begin his work in Cleopatra, Richard arrived in Rome with his wife, Sybil, their daughter Kate, Roddy McDowall (who had also been in Camelot and would play Octavian in Cleopatra), and friend and actor John Valva. The contingent checked into a villa about two miles away from the Fishers. “I’m getting $250,000 for being in Cleopatra,” he said. “Of course, the girl who plays Cleopatra is getting quite a bit more,” he added with a wink. Actually, Elizabeth had first met Richard years earlier at the home of actor Stewart Granger in Los Angeles, when Granger and 172

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  his wife, Jean Simmons, hosted what has been described as “a Sunday cocktail brunch.” Richard was in attendance with Sybil. Elizabeth was there with her spouse Michael Wilding. Her first impression of Richard, as she has recalled it, was that he was an egotistical lout. She barely paid attention to him. Instead, she sat in a deck chair by the pool, reading a book and feeling very antisocial. Every now and then, she would notice Burton as he recited Shakespeare in a big booming voice, or gave a long oration about some political matter, commanding the attention of everyone present. She’s said that she had to give him “the cold fish eye,”

  meaning that she was taken aback by his self-involvement. The two would only have a couple of brief exchanges in the next few years, one at a cocktail party hosted by Tyrone Power at his Manhattan penthouse, another at a chance meeting in a restaurant in Los Angeles. Strangest of all her encounters with Burton, though, was in September 1959 when Elizabeth and Eddie Fisher attended a luncheon held on the set of the musical Can- Can, then in production at 20th Century-Fox, with hundreds of stars and executives invited to meet Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. After lunch, Spyros P. Skouras, president of Fox, engaged in a lively debate with Khrushchev over communism. Burton, also present, became so outraged by Khrushchev that he had to be held back from storming the stage. Elizabeth says she stood on her chair for a better look at the fracas.

  Indeed, whenever Elizabeth happened upon Richard Burton, he was always at peak emotion, as she would put it, “giving a lecture about something, or singing a bawdy song that was completely inappropriate for the evening, or just going on and on and on about something or the other. I thought, my goodness, does the man ever shut up?”

  Elizabeth was well aware of Richard’s reputation as a lothario. However, that didn’t matter to her because she was sure he would never have her. “I didn’t want to be another notch on his belt, I knew that much going in,” she has recalled. “I wasn’t going to let him have that kind of power on me.”

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  Given as much, if Elizabeth knew what Richard had said about her earlier in the week, she would not have been pleased. At the party organized to bid him farewell from Camelot in New York, in which he had been appearing on Broadway, he predicted to friends that in just two days’ time he would have Elizabeth in his bed. “I just need two days with her,” he said. “It’s guaranteed.”

  Publicly, Richard’s Burton’s view of Elizabeth Taylor was not exactly flattering. “All this stuff about her being the most beautiful woman in the world is absolute nonsense,” he said after first meeting her. “She’s a pretty girl, of course, and she has wonderful eyes. But she has a double chin and an overdeveloped chest and she’s rather short in the leg.”

  Everyone knew, though, that what Richard said publicly was often part of his act of bravado. Privately, he would say that, in the first seconds he laid eyes upon her on the set of Cleopatra, he was, this time, really taken by her. She was shorter than he remembered, but also slimmer and more curvaceous. More than anything, he loved her laugh. It was genuine and irresistible. “I will never forget that first laugh,” he’d say.

  Though she had a low opinion of the way he conducted his personal life, Elizabeth couldn’t help but be impressed, if not also intimidated, by Richard Burton’s well-earned standing as a brilliant Shakespearean actor. When it came to his craft, he was studied and deliberate and—at least usually—disciplined, despite his problems with alcohol. She would later recall how astonished she was that he would not only know his lines, but everybody else’s as well . . . and he would have them all memorized the day before they even began working on camera. Friends such as Roddy McDowall had told Elizabeth Taylor that she was fortunate to have Richard Burton in her film . . . and from a creative standpoint, it was true. The question would be whether or not she would be equally fortunate to have him in her life.

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  Elizabeth Adopts a Baby

  A t the time that she was preparing to make Cleopatra, Elizabeth decided that she wanted to adopt a child with Eddie. Because she’d had a tubal ligation after her third baby, she was no longer able to bear children. Elizabeth and Eddie agreed that their marriage was in trouble, and they thought that adopting a baby might help to salvage it. Eddie had greater confidence in that scenario than did Elizabeth, though. While she did begin to investigate her options where adoption was concerned, she never had complete faith that a new baby would save her marriage. But it was worth a try, she decided.

  Prior to the start of filming on Cleopatra, she and Eddie had asked a friend of theirs, Maria Schell (sister of Maximilian Schell) to assist them in adopting a baby of Swiss, German, or Viennese descent. They explained that they hoped to bring into their family a child who was ill, or in some other way disadvantaged, so that they might share with him or her their good fortune. Well-meaning friends had a litany of concerns about Elizabeth’s possibly adopting a child. After all, how much time had she spent in
hospitals in recent years, practically at death’s door? How much time had she spent on movie sets? Traveling? At awards shows and other banquets? From a purely practical standpoint, it did seem that she was not available, nor was she emotionally equipped, to be a mother—as much as she may have wanted to do so, as much as she yearned for it. Just wanting something badly doesn’t mean one should have it. After all, even at her best, Elizabeth seemed never far from her worst. Though she spent as much time with her children as possible, her three natural offspring were for the most part being raised by nursemaids and other capable functionaries. The desire to nurse and care for a sick baby was not a matter of noblesse oblige. Elizabeth was genuine in her desire to share her love and wealth with a child from unfortunate circumstances. It became her great wish, and she was determined to see it Her Destiny

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  through—no matter what anyone thought of it. She told people that she had a strong and nagging feeling that there was a child

  “out there, somewhere” who needed her. She said that she didn’t feel it fair to deprive that child of what she might be able to give it. “Why should a small child somewhere suffer just because I can’t make my marriage work?” she asked.

  It’s fascinating, in retrospect, that Elizabeth would have such a strong sense of destiny where the adoption of a child was concerned, because, as it would happen, there actually was a baby being raised in a far-off land, a little girl who would end up the very needy beneficiary not only of her love, but her largesse as well. In the small village of Mering, Germany, thirty miles north of Munich, an impoverished family was barely scraping by, living an existence that was in stark contrast to anything Elizabeth had ever known.

  In Mering, a hardworking couple was raising two young daughters—six and two years old—in a one-room apartment with a tiny stove, a small sink, and one bed. Though the father was employed at the local feed store, delivering sacks to farmers for their livestock, money was in short supply. The cost of raising their two children had become such a strain on his salary that his young wife also began working at the same store as a cashier. When she discovered she was pregnant in 1961, it was, she recalled, “a great shock to us. There was certainly no more space in our one room for another child, and we wondered where the extra money for food and clothes would come from. It was probably because of my anguish and worry that [the baby] was born prematurely,” she said.

  “For the first few months of her life, this tiny baby struggled for her life in a special hospital for premature children in Augsburg. It was with mixed feelings of intense elation and anguish that we learned the crisis had passed: She would live.” (Note: The mother did not speak English; her words here are translated.) The young couple was torn about their new daughter’s fate. They were told that she would have to spend months in the hospital, but they simply did not have the money to pay for her care. 176

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  After four months of hospitalization, they became desperate. The baby would have to be discharged because they could not pay the bills. “Then, one day in August 1961,” the child’s mother said, “I saw an ad in Heim und Welt ( Home and World) that seemed to leap right out of the magazine and hit me in my heart. It said: ‘I seek for my acquaintance to adopt a very young boy or girl.’ ” After a week of indecision about it, the couple decided to answer the ad. The mother recalled, “We were then contacted by Maria Konigsbauer, the private secretary to famous actress Maria Schell, who told us that she was acting for none other than Elizabeth Taylor. She asked if the baby could be brought to Munich. It was arranged.”

  The couple took their daughter, whom they had named Petra, to a hospital in Munich, and left her there with the understanding that Elizabeth would soon visit her. They then went back to Mering and waited to see what would happen next. However, in a few days, they received more devastating news. Doctors in Munich had discovered that the baby had a congenital hip injury, one that had gone undetected by the medical staff in Augsburg. The injury would take a great time and lots of money to treat. “My heart was breaking as I realized that certainly there was no hope for Petra’s adoption now,” recalled her mother, “and I contemplated the future life of my baby. But then word reached us from Rome, like a ray of hope in the darkness of our misery: Miss Taylor had seen the baby, and though she had been warned not to adopt her because of the nature of her injury, she thought better of it. Elizabeth saw Petra and loved her and told Maria Schell that she wanted her not in spite of her injury, but because of it. More than anything this convinced us that we were doing the right thing and had made the right choice.”

  That night the couple decided that they would give their baby to Elizabeth Taylor. “It was as if it was prearranged by some power greater than us,” said the child’s mother. “How, in a million years, could we ever have imagined that Elizabeth Taylor, of all people in the world, would come into our lives? We felt that it was meant Her Destiny

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  to be because it was just so . . . amazing. We had to do it. We had to let the baby go.”

  They knew they had made the right decision when, three days later, they received a letter from Elizabeth. Elizabeth wrote that if money was needed for the child, “I have plenty of it to give.” She had been told, she said, by doctors that she could not have any more children, and she “longed for another,” she wrote. “Not only do I have the money,” she added, “I also have the love to give, and I so want to give it.”

  The necessary paperwork was quickly signed for Elizabeth and Eddie’s adoption of the nine-month-old baby, and it was finalized in January 1962.

  Elizabeth later recalled, “She was covered with abscesses, suffering from malnutrition, had a crippled hip that was going to cripple her for life—and I just loved her. She didn’t cry and she didn’t laugh. She was in a laundry basket with two pillows stuffed in the bottom. She had very dark eyes. She watched everything and I held her and I bathed her and I changed her for three days and finally she started giggling, and finally she would cry when she wanted her bottle. This funny little introverted person that was just sort of half asleep responded so much to love—the warmth, I think, of two arms. I was hooked by the end of a few days. The German officials wanted me to have a ‘perfect baby.’ I had to fight like a tiger to get her. To me, she was perfect. Her first word was

  ‘Mama.’ I guess that’s universal, but when it happens you just die.”

  The child would be renamed Maria, in honor of Maria Schell. In an ironic foreshadowing of the future of Elizabeth’s union with Eddie, considering that one of the reasons the baby was being adopted was to save the marriage, the infant was referred to in adoption paperwork as “Maria Taylor.”

  In years to come, Elizabeth would spend a small fortune on corrective surgeries for Maria. Though the child would spend agonizing years in body casts, she would grow to be healthy and happy, thanks to Elizabeth’s largesse, as well as her devotion. 178

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  “Love, in All of Its Mystery,

  Unfolds”

  E lizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton began their celebrated affair in much the same way they would conduct their relationship for the next twenty-some years: fearlessly, carelessly, passionately . . . and publicly. Yes, Richard was a married man. However, as she had proved in the past, Elizabeth was not willing to turn down the opportunity for love just because the circumstances surrounding it were inconvenient. She longed for love in her life—always had—and not just a poor imitation of it, which is how she viewed what she had with Eddie. Or, as she told Helen Gurley Brown many years later,

  “Eddie and I resurrected Mike, and that’s sick. Boy, did I realize how sick it was. And then along came Richard, and I realized it wasn’t gone, it hadn’t dried up, that Mike’s legacy to me had been love.”

  From the outset, Taylor and Burton had one thing in common at their core: They were two people who had grown accustomed to living their lives on their own terms—working hard to achieve their goals in their own time,
in their own way. No doubt, as they would both insist, they didn’t mean to hurt their loved ones in the process of fulfilling their hearts’ desires, but if feelings had to be hurt and hearts had to be broken, they eventually decided, so be it. They would just have to work twice as hard, Elizabeth would say, to make sure their relationship was a success so that all of the pain they had caused others would not be in vain. “I knew what I was doing, loving Richard, was wrong,” she wrote in her autobiography. “But I couldn’t help loving Richard. I don’t think that was without honor. I don’t think that was dishonest. It was a fact I could not evade.”

  Between September 1961 and January 1962, Elizabeth filmed her scenes in Cleopatra as Richard concentrated on his. They Her Destiny

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  weren’t scheduled to appear on camera together until the third week in January, but by that time they had gotten so close—with daily luncheons and nightly dinners together, and then late-night partying—that many on the set had begun to speculate that something was going on between them. Since Sybil Burton had been dividing her time between Rome and London, and Eddie between Rome, New York, and California, they were not around to prevent their spouses from spending plenty of time together. In just a matter of days, Richard began to have a better understanding of Elizabeth and what she was going through at this time in her life. He gently brought to her attention certain things she hadn’t really thought much about, such as the impropriety of having so many photographs of Mike Todd around the villa she shared with Eddie Fisher, the fact that she was still wearing Mike’s wedding band (and, often, not Eddie’s), and that she would sometimes talk incessantly about Mike, to the exclusion of Eddie. She said that she began to realize how “selfish” it had been for her to live in the past, and that it was Richard who had finally brought it all to clarity for her. He began to represent to her, as she put it,

  “Prince Charming kissing the sleeping princess.”