It was a huge frustration for Elizabeth that she’d spent so much time on this project, only to have it end the way it did—with her total dissatisfaction in it. She best summed up her feelings about it in her autobiography Elizabeth Taylor in 1965: “I was involved with Cleopatra for five years on and off and surely that film must be the most bizarre piece of entertainment ever to be perpetrated—the circumstances, the people involved, the money spent. Everything was such a nightmare that it is difficult to even know where to start. It had some curious effect on just about every person who worked on it.
“The final humiliation was to have to see it,” she concluded.
“The British Embassy trapped me into it. They requested me to take the Bolshoi Ballet as my guests to a screening of Cleopatra. I couldn’t very well say no. When it was over, I raced back to the Dorchester Hotel and just made it into the downstairs lavatory before I vomited.”
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A Turning Point in Gstaad
B y August 1962, Elizabeth Taylor and her new lover, Richard Burton, were at her home, Chalet Ariel, in Gstaad—Swiss playground for notables such as the Aga Khan and the Duchess of Luxembourg, Joan Crawford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Brigitte Bardot, and many others. Given its glittery reputation, it’s surprising when one goes there to find that Gstaad is basically just a lovely one-street village, a charming, attractively located place full of restored weathered-wood chalets. There are shops where a woman can purchase the finest designer wardrobe. Hairdressers have been trained in Paris and London. In the center of the village, which is free of traffic by law, there are expensive restaurants, shops, hotels, and bars. The surrounding ski areas and hiking trails are joined by three groups of mountain lifts. It feels like a magical place, especially in the winter months when the town is blanketed by rolling drifts of snow. Glossy magazines may advertise the town as a winter paradise, but St. Moritz steals its thunder in that regard. Gstaad is really more of a place to spend the odd ten grand renting a hillside chalet and sipping champagne than it is for skiing. In the summer, though, the weather is pleasant and hiking is the favorite pastime. The town’s four helicopters had seats covered in fur to take skiers up the slopes, lest their wealthy bums get cold. In one hotel the Queen of Holland usually stayed, and another was favored by the King and Queen of Thailand. Louis Armstrong would perform there one weekend, Ella Fitzgerald the next.
Elizabeth paid half a million dollars, sight unseen (Eddie found it), for her sumptuous sixteen-room chalet in Gstaad with its acres of unfussy land, its sandboxes and newly installed bright red slide for the children. Built mostly of deep and warm oak, Ariel sat on a crest overlooking the majestic scenery and, off in the distance, Céligny, where the Burtons lived. Elizabeth’s chalet was the only one in Gstaad with a fence around its property’s perimeter. But it Her Destiny
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wasn’t for security; it was a picket fence, decorative in intention. Elizabeth still owns the chalet today.
With the production of Cleopatra now over, she finally had time to consider the past few months of her life. However, in their first week there, she and Richard had one of their blazing rows, and it was only ten in the morning. It’s unknown exactly what the disagreement was about, but it must have been a big one because it caused Elizabeth to reconsider some of her recent choices where Richard was concerned. “I wrote Richard a letter which said that we were destroying too many lives,” she recalled. “We should part.” She left the note for him on his pillow. Hours later, without any kind of emotional display, he left. Before he left, he told her,
“I just wanted to take care of you.”
“I can take care of myself,” she said through her tears, only half believing it.
Despite her unhappiness, her mind was set and she would not contact him. As the days turned into weeks, she became morbidly sad. “I’d never seen her like that,” said a woman who knew Elizabeth very well in Gstaad at this time. The two had lunch at Elizabeth’s chalet the day after Burton left.
“The only thing I can do now is divorce Eddie and go on with my life,” said Elizabeth. She was sitting on the veranda overlooking the Swiss mountains, wearing—judging from photos taken that day—a diaphanous yellow-and-red-striped blouse with white slacks. Her hair cascaded to her shoulders, her eyes shielded by ever-present sunglasses. A maid served large plates of spaghetti to Elizabeth and her guest, glasses of red wine, and a pot of coffee. “I don’t know what I got from any of it,” she said, referring to the affair with Richard.
“I found her to be in a contemplative place,” said her friend. “I think she had made up her mind that Richard was out of her life. She said she doubted that she would ever see him again, and she said she knew it was for the best. But it had happened so fast—
without much warning, she said—she was left off kilter by it.”
When Richard Burton left Elizabeth’s chalet, he drove off to his 220
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own home, a much more modest one, in the quaint town of Céligny, eighty-five miles away. With a population of just 520, mostly farmers, Céligny was a far cry from anything that could be considered a cosmopolitan town like Gstaad, and the much simpler lifestyle there brought into clear focus the true differences between Burton and Taylor. Simply put, she could never live anywhere where they had one store for groceries and vegetables, another for cheese, a church, a small restaurant—and a police force of one. There, Burton would join Sybil and his daughters in an easygoing existence, one in which everyone knew them and no one bothered them. Their quaint chalet had just six rooms, three of them bedrooms. A line of tall spruces stood immediately behind the structure. Through its green could be seen the heavy mist of Lake Geneva, a few yards away. It was a lovely place to live. Meanwhile, just one mountain range away, Elizabeth was still just trying to get through the days. “I was dying inside and trying to hide it from the children with all kinds of frenzied activity—
games, picnics,” she recalled of the time after Burton left. “But they knew—not that I would unburden my problems on their small but steady shoulders. Michael wrote notes—‘I know it’s going to be all right, Mama.’ Christopher once said, ‘I prayed to God last night that you and Richard would be married.’ That made me cry.
“Their sense of loss was almost as great as mine,” she said of her children. “It was wonderful that they felt that way, but at the time I didn’t know what to do about it. I tried to explain to them that Richard had little girls that he loved—that he loved my kids as well, but his obligation was to his family. They were very sweet about it, but couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t love us all.”
Matissa Hart, a Norwegian who lived in Gstaad at this time, was befriended by Elizabeth Taylor in an unusual way. She recalled, “There was a little tea house in Gstaad called Charley’s, down near the town’s tennis courts. I frequented it often, and one day I walked in and there was Elizabeth, sitting alone having a cup of tea and looking sad. I decided not to approach her. However, Her Destiny
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the next day, again, there she was, alone with her tea. I thought it so odd. I went to her and asked if I could join her, telling her I was lonely and could use a little chat. She looked up at me with those eyes, blue as two pools of water. I was taken aback by them, and by the moment. I thought, ‘My God, this is Elizabeth Taylor and I am standing here talking to her.’ However, in no time, she had just become another woman, a very sad woman, someone who needed a shoulder to cry on. We sat there for two hours and, much to my astonishment since I was a total stranger, she told me about her sadness.”
Elizabeth was wearing a simple paisley dress, rather commonlooking, with sensible shoes. She had her hair in curlers—a bit of a surprise—and covered with a checkered scarf. (“Checkers and paisley, I thought . . . so odd a combination for a fashion plate.”) Her hands trembled as she raised her cup of tea to her mouth, heavily lipsticked.
“I am famous the world over,” she to
ld Matissa, “yet I have so few friends.”
“Oh, I’m sure you have many, many wonderful friends,” Matissa told her.
Elizabeth sighed. “I do. But, really, how much can people take? People have their own problems, you know?”
“She said that other than her mother, she had no one to talk to. She said that her friend Roddy [McDowall] was visiting her,
‘but he is quite through hearing about my miseries.’ She added,
‘I’m afraid I’ve been rather the bad girl,’ and told me a little about the story of Eddie and Debbie. As for Debbie, she said, ‘I sit here sometimes and think of her and wish that she and I could be friends again.’ Then she laughed and said, ‘She’s such a Girl Scout, she could use someone like me in her life to shake things up.’ ”
Matissa Hart and Elizabeth Taylor met several more times before Matissa moved to New York with her new husband. “I have often thought of those times with her in Gstaad, and wondered how she 222
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was faring. When I would see her films, I would never be able to reconcile that she was the same woman I met at Charley’s.”
“Those months there in Switzerland were so full of pain and guilt that they zoom in and out and become all out of shape in my mind,” Elizabeth would later recall. “I can remember moments of such horror.”
Then, one day, the call came. It was Richard. He wondered how she was doing, he said. He missed her and wanted to have lunch with her. If she had only slammed the phone down with an indignant, “How dare you interrupt my solitude,” her life from this point onward would be a very different story. However, it wasn’t meant to be that way. “Yes,” she said, she would love to see him again. The two arranged to meet that afternoon at the stunning, thirteenth-century Château de Chillon, an impressive turreted medieval castle where lucky tourists dine while taking in the breathtaking view of Lake Geneva. Elizabeth and her parents, who had a small chalet nearby, sat in the backseat of the car as their driver took them to the lake. They arrived at exactly the same moment as Richard, who pulled up in a red sports car. He looked tanned and rested, sober but a bit nervous with a dashing short haircut. His blue eyes danced when he saw Elizabeth. One would have thought Elizabeth’s parents, Sara and Francis, would have been hesitant about the prospects of their daughter once again seeing a man who had been nothing but trouble for her. But by this time, they had both abandoned the notion that they would have any influence on her. Marshall Baldrige recalled,
“To be frank, those two poor people had been all but beaten down by bearing witness to Elizabeth’s very difficult and troubling world. They were both worn to the bone. Francis told me that Sara was a different person—just worn out by it all. In the end, they just wanted her to be happy—and she clearly was not happy alone. Though Francis was certainly no big fan of Richard’s—he felt that he would only end up hurting Elizabeth—he knew that Elizabeth wanted him, and only him.” The Taylor parents encouraged Elizabeth on her way, telling her to have a wonderful day with Her Destiny
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Richard. As Elizabeth and Richard stood with their arms around each other, Elizabeth’s parents were driven off. Elizabeth and Richard pulled away from one another, and then took each other in. In unison they chirped, “Well, you look marvelous,” before bursting into laughter. They then enjoyed a quiet, if sometimes awkward, luncheon. However, it was a meal that would not be easily forgotten by Elizabeth. With many people, the truth of how they feel comes forth when they have had too much alcohol. Not so Richard. With him, his greatest truth was revealed when he was sober, when he could think straight and dig deep within to bare his soul, as he did during his luncheon with Elizabeth. “I love you,” he told her, according to his later recollection.
“But what scares me about you is that I think you are too selfish to be in a real marriage.”
Elizabeth was stung by his observation. For once, Richard didn’t mean to hurt her, he was simply being honest. He explained that he’d been so reliant on Sybil for so many years, she’d become his rock. She put aside her career for him and their children. She would do anything for him, he explained. “She put up with bloody hell from me,” he said.
At last, the truth of why Richard was so reluctant to leave Sybil had come forth, and it actually made sense. He’d never had support and affirmation in his youth at home, and had turned to his mentor, Philip Burton, for it. Philip had been his greatest teacher, giving him the confidence to become an actor, to walk onto a stage and take a chance on failing—and instead prove himself a marvel at his craft. Then he had turned to Sybil. She had been his greatest salvation, the woman upon whom he could most depend. She’d always been there for him, even when he didn’t deserve it. He couldn’t bear to lose her because, in doing so, he would sacrifice one of his most beloved supporters. Actually, though, Richard was just as selfish as he had accused Elizabeth of being, since, in truth, the primary reason he was with Sybil was because he needed her. He never gave much thought to what she needed; if he had, he wouldn’t have repeatedly betrayed her over the years. The 224
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irony of it all didn’t escape Richard. “I know you, Elizabeth, because I am you,” he told her. “I’m a selfish bastard. I have always been my own greatest concern, and I have never been able to abandon that notion, and neither can you, dear. Neither can you.”
“But I would do it for you, Richard,” Elizabeth said, according to her later recollection.
Would she, though? It was a stretch, she would later admit, to think that she could put aside her own best interests for another person. Had she ever done so in the past? Perhaps when she adopted Maria, but was that comparable to being a giving person in a marriage?
“I’m not certain you could do it for me, luv,” Richard told her.
“Tolstoy put it best: ‘Everyone wants to change humanity, but no one is willing to change themselves.’ ”
“I would do it for you, Richard,” she repeated. The subject was changed. However, Elizabeth would not be able to forget Richard’s summation of her. Was he correct? Was she so selfish that she couldn’t survive in a loving marriage? On one hand, it bothered her that he felt this way about her. No one wants to be thought of as being a selfish person, after all. But on the other, she had to be realistic. She had to admit that his assessment of her was probably accurate. Of course she was selfish. She was accustomed to having the world spin around her desires. However, she truly felt that she had tried with her marriages to be a good wife. But then, upon closer reflection, she had to know that after the first one, the rest were arranged to fill a void in her life, a vacuum of loneliness. There was something about Richard, though, that made her want to . . . dare she? . . . change. “I felt that, yes, I could be more for Richard,” she would later recall. “I suddenly realized that I wanted to be more. I wanted to change.”
After their meal, he drove her home. They didn’t even kiss. They would see each other a couple of times a week for the next few weeks before Elizabeth made what she would recall as “the most alone, mature, and unpopular decision of my life.” She would be there for Richard, whenever he called, and for whatever reason. Her Destiny
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If he wanted to talk in person, she would be there. If he just wanted to speak on the telephone, that was fine, too. If he wanted to have sex with her, she would be there for that as well. In return, she would require nothing from him—absolutely nothing. “If that’s the way it’s going to be,” she decided, “that is the role I will accept.”
Elizabeth believed that her decision was a mature one born out of what she felt was “an unselfish love for Richard.” She just wanted him to be happy, she said, and if that happiness was with her, fine. If it was with Sybil? She would live with that as well—
or so she said.
She was trying to prove that she would change, that she could be there for him. In her view, allowing him to not have any requirements of her was a first step in her quest to at least try to b
e a giving partner. It was obviously a misguided effort, or as one Taylor observer put it, “a big load of crap. Richard would never have allowed it, and she probably knew it. He was in too deep with Elizabeth to think of her as one of his floozies. She was too famous, too volatile, too . . . Elizabeth . . . to be the kind of woman he could just hide away and have sex with when he felt the time was right for it. It was a manipulation, no doubt about it.” Elizabeth didn’t see it that way at all. “By making myself so readily available, I lowered my stature in everybody’s eyes,” she would later conclude, “but mine—and, as it turned out, Richard’s.”
Richard Chooses
I t was no surprise that, as a nod to the public spectacle of their lives together, Elizabeth Taylor would be paired with Richard Burton for another film. While 20th Century-Fox may have thought 226
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that the publicity that surrounded their personal shenanigans was to the detriment of Cleopatra (more likely, the movie’s script and its editing could reasonably be considered, at least partially, to blame), MGM held no such reservations. Richard Burton was scheduled to make a film for the studio with Sophia Loren called The V.I.P.s. What’s more interesting than the resulting movie, perhaps, is the fact that it was inspired by the true story of what happened when Vivien Leigh tried to leave her husband, Laurence Olivier, for her lover, Peter Finch. She and Finch intended to run off together and ended up in the VIP lounge at Heathrow Airport in London waiting for their flight, which was delayed because of the fog. After the two sat together for hours, she changed her mind about ending her marriage for him.
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