Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Without even knowing what it was about, or seeing a script, Elizabeth said that she would like to be in the film with Burton, instead of Sophia Loren. Of course, no studio was going to resist, and it was ironic that Elizabeth ended up at MGM again, considering all the bad blood between her and the studio. Perhaps the Academy Award she won for her last film at Metro, Butterfield 8, had helped to ameliorate her bad memory of that experience. The V.I.P.s is an inconsequential trifle in which Elizabeth plays a wealthy and bored socialite who wants to leave her drunken husband, Richard, for a gigolo (played by Louis Jourdan). Chaos ensues when their lives and the lives of other characters intersect at Heathrow Airport, where everyone gets stranded during a heavy London fog. Despite the fact that the performances by Burton and Taylor weren’t exactly Oscar-worthy, the film is an interesting ensemble piece, with several overlapping stories. Some critics enjoyed the efficient yet lovestruck secretary Maggie Smith played opposite Rod Taylor, who portrayed her boss. Others enjoyed the Orson Welles–Elsa Martinelli duo, as a money-obsessed producer and a scatterbrained starlet; these two definitely had the best lines in the film. Some felt that Margaret Rutherford deserved her Oscar as the eccentric Duchess of Brighton. Also, it was surprising that the music didn’t get an Oscar nod too—it’s a wonderfully Her Destiny

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  evocative score. Still, while surrounded by excellence, Elizabeth and Richard could not have appeared less invested in this venture. So why would they make the film? Besides affording Elizabeth an opportunity to be with Richard, money was a motivating factor. Elizabeth got $500,000 for it, Richard about half that much. It speaks to the power of this couple as film stars that, when it was released in the next year, The V.I.P.s was a hit, even outgrossing Cleopatra. Its two stars received 20 percent of the gross receipts, which would come to about $14 million—giving them another $4 million—especially amazing since the movie cost barely $3 million to make.

  Financial considerations aside, it was obvious that Elizabeth really just wanted to be with Richard, and she said as much in her memoirs: “It was just an excuse for us to be together.”

  For Elizabeth, though, The V.I.P.s was a comedown. She hadn’t made a movie this bad since . . . well, it’s possible that she never made a movie this bad. British character actress Margaret Rutherford’s memory of the movie was quite likely very different. She won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in the film, its only nomination.

  In December 1962, Elizabeth and Richard checked into adjoining roof-garden suites at the Dorchester Hotel in London, where the movie was to be filmed. While making The V.I.P.s, the couple also spent a great deal of time at Richard’s favorite pubs in London. They would start the morning with Bloody Marys, continue with a few bottles of champagne, then their brandies . . . and by that time it was just noon. One day, a reporter accompanied them to a pub. It was clear that they felt no compunction about sharing their habits with him, and by extension the world.

  “Hey, you shit-faced bastard,” Elizabeth said to Richard, “give me a drink.”

  Burton spent weekends with Sybil and their daughters, while Elizabeth stayed back at the Dorchester counting the hours until his return. He told more than one reporter that he had no intention of leaving his wife and marrying Elizabeth. “You mustn’t use 228

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  sex alone as a lever, as a kind of moral, intellectual, psychic crutch to get away from your wife,” he told critic Kenneth Tynan. “You can’t say to her, ‘I’m terribly sorry but I can’t sleep in the same bed with you anymore because I simply have to run off with this infinitely fascinating girl.’ ”

  What’s more interesting than his comment is the fact that Richard would discuss such matters with a reporter for publication. It was as if he were using the press to pass on messages to Elizabeth. Or was he purposely fanning the flames of the publicity bonfire that had all but enveloped him and Elizabeth in recent months? Why Elizabeth would have tolerated such indiscretion from him is the real mystery, but tolerate it she did. After all, this was the new Elizabeth, and she wasn’t going to push Richard, or question him, or make demands of him. Though her hands would shake with anxiety when she would read such reports, she was determined to keep her promise to herself and try to be as selfless as possible where he was concerned. When he would return from visiting his family, Richard would be very upset, and often in tears.

  “He’s more miserable when he’s with them than he is when he’s with me,” Elizabeth reasoned to Roddy McDowall. “But this is what he wants, I suppose.”

  On some days, Sybil would show up on the set and act as if she and Richard were happy, helping to make decisions about wardrobe. On other days, Elizabeth would be the one making the decisions, and she would veto all of Sybil’s. It was a difficult and confusing time for everyone.

  Finally in the spring of 1963, Richard Burton came to a difficult decision. He would leave Sybil. Their marriage was over. Of course, Elizabeth was elated. He had made his choice, and it was to be with her. The question, as she now saw it, was whether or not the two of them could make their relationship work without the heartache and angst that had been its hallmark from the very beginning, almost a year and a half earlier. Of course, what she couldn’t have known at the time was that her drama with Richard Burton had only just begun . . .

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  True Love in Mexico

  T hrough the summer and into the fall of 1963, Elizabeth and Richard remained in London and busied themselves with a variety of projects while, as Elizabeth put it, “we got to know one another away from the constant anxiety of making a movie together.” Richard starred opposite Peter O’Toole in Becket, which was filmed at Shepperton Studios in Middlesex. Meanwhile, Elizabeth narrated and appeared in a TV special for CBS called Eliz- abeth Taylor in London (broadcast in October 1963), for which she was paid $250,000, the most anyone had ever received for doing a television program. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m not interested in making movies right now. I just want to help Richard, do what I can for Richard.”

  Then, in September 1963, Richard and Elizabeth arrived in Mexico, where Burton was scheduled to go before the cameras in John Huston’s film of Tennessee Williams’s play The Night of the Iguana. When they arrived at Mexico City’s airport, there was such a mad crush awaiting them that Elizabeth refused to get off the plane until security dispersed the crowd. “Don’t be bloody ridiculous,” Richard told her. “We will exit this plane and get through the crowd as best we can. This is our life, so get used to it.”

  “Get used to it?” Elizabeth said, her voice raised to a screech.

  “I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, buster!”

  In fact, Richard wanted to feel the adoration of the awaiting crowd. For him this was a new experience. The two exited the plane cursing and hollering at each other—followed by seventyfive pieces of luggage carried by airport personnel, most of which contained Elizabeth’s tropical outfits for her trip. It was the perfect scene for the paparazzi. The next day, “Liz and Dick” (as they were usually called by the media, but not by anyone who actually knew them, though Liz did sometimes call him “Dickie”) were on the front page of every newspaper, smiling, scowling, cursing, and pos-230 Elizabeth

  ing. “We always give the people exactly what they want, don’t we?” Elizabeth later joked with Burton. Then, to a writer, she said,

  “My best feature is my gray hairs. I have them all named. They’re all called Burton.”

  “They were both very funny, and I think this is something people really have missed about them,” said their friend the columnist Liz Smith. (Liz would later meet the Burtons on the set of their movie The Sandpiper.) “You didn’t have that kind of ribald humor coming from a Hollywood couple at that time, and I don’t think you’ve seen it since. I’ll never forget, I was with them in Rome or somewhere, and he was spouting off about Dylan Thomas, and just being Richard Burton, talking endlessly. And after he finished, she looked at
him and asked, very matter-of-factly, ‘Do you ever give yourself the creeps, luv?’ ”

  The Night of the Iguana would be filmed in Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta, and Mismaloya. It was a tough shoot; everyone was miserable from the heat and the awful, crawling creatures, though the cast was a good one that included three leading ladies for Richard: Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, and the then seventeen-year-old Sue Lyon, who had just recently appeared as the nubile temptress Lolita in Stanley Kubrick’s film version of the popular Vladimir Nabokov novel of the same name. While in Mexico, Elizabeth had six-year-old Liza with her. Maria was in a clinic in Europe at this time, recovering from surgery on her hip. The boys, Michael, eleven, and Christopher, nine, were with their father, Michael Wilding, in Los Angeles, where they were going to start school. Elizabeth was readily available to Richard to help him with his script, really abandoning at this time any career plans she may have had just to be at his side.

  Elizabeth and Richard were ensconced in a lovely tiled, fourstory compound called Casa Kimberly in Puerto Vallarta. Spread out over 22,000 square feet, it had ten bedrooms, eleven baths, three kitchens, and a huge swimming pool. Mexican architect Guillermo Wulff later built another house across the street—

  adding four more bedrooms to the home—and the two structures Her Destiny

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  were joined by a pink bridge that is an exact replica of Venice’s Bridge of Sighs. Richard eventually bought the estate for just

  $40,000, and it would remain one of the Burtons’ homes for the next decade.

  Today, Casa Kimberly is a bed-and-breakfast (address: 518 Calle Madera), a tourist attraction not to be missed when visiting Puerto Vallarta. One doesn’t even have to make an appointment. Simply ring the bell and, after a maid allows access, the tour begins, with guide Maurice Mintzer, who bought the estate from Elizabeth in 1990. “She took two paintings off the wall and left everything else to us,” he says. “Richard was dead. She couldn’t chase him anymore. It was the end of an era.” Mintzer tells all sorts of stories about Elizabeth, such as her locking Richard in certain rooms when he was being difficult and also having the bridge built so that she could banish him all the way to the other house when he was really being unmanageable. Who knows if these stories are true, but they’re fun tales for tourists to take home. The couple’s relationship only intensified during their time at Casa Kimberly. It was there that they first spent happy times together in a place that they considered their own. On November 10, 1963, Richard celebrated his thirty-eighth birthday. Elizabeth presented him with the complete Everyman Library of Classics—

  five hundred volumes, each bound in calfskin.

  Lucille Wellman was a close friend of Ava Gardner’s who, at Ava’s invitation, came to visit her in Puerto Vallarta. “My first night there, Ava and I went to dinner with [noted screenwriter]

  Meade Roberts, and Richard and Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth looked marvelous in a white, flowing caftan and matching turban, with the longest, dangling diamond earrings I had ever seen.

  ‘Careful, love,’ Richard told her as she ate, ‘your earrings are in your soup.’ Elizabeth laughed and said, ‘Jesus Christ, these goddamn earrings!’ and she took them off and handed them to the waiter and said, ‘Would you be a dear and keep these in the kitchen for me?’

  The waiter was absolutely floored. He took the earrings. Richard said, ‘Luv, those earrings are worth $300,000 and you just gave 232

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  them to the waiter?’ She said, ‘Only for safekeeping, dear. I’m sure he’ll take very good care of them.’ Of course, she could have just put them in her purse, but she had a flair for the dramatic, for just having a moment, or giving someone else—like the waiter—a moment.

  “After the meal, she went to the kitchen to retrieve her earrings, and when she came back she told us that they had put them in the freezer for safekeeping. She just thought that was hysterical.

  ‘Ice on ice,’ she said. ‘Here, try them on,’ she told me, handing them to me. ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t,’ I told her. ‘No, I insist,’ she said.

  ‘They become you,’ she told me when I finally put them on. ‘You are absolutely beautiful in them. And they’re freezing cold, too, aren’t they? See,’ she said with a laugh, ‘I told you so!’

  “Later during that trip, she showed me a beautiful diamond pin of an iguana, which Richard had given her in commemoration of the movie. It was designed by Schlumberger of Tiffany and Company, and Elizabeth loved it, as she did all of her jewels. She insisted that I try it on. She loved seeing her jewelry on other people. It gave her a chance, she said, to see what the pieces looked like from the vantage point of the admirer. Plus, she loved the expression on people’s faces when they got to try on these exquisite pieces.

  “I found her to be completely charming and guileless. She was well aware of the effect she had on people, I think, and she did whatever she could to dispense of it quickly. Richard was the same way. In public, they had a glow about them that said stardom. Privately, they were as ‘normal’ as they could be, I mean, given who they were. They seemed to get along well; they were very happy, at least that was my perception.”

  According to Wellman, Elizabeth put her head on Richard’s shoulder and said, “I wonder if this man will one day be my husband.”

  “If we don’t kill each other first,” Richard said with a warm smile.

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  Elizabeth looked at him lovingly. “But what a way to go, darling,” she said. “What a way to go.”

  He kissed her on the lips.

  In December 1963, Elizabeth’s family came to visit for Christmas: her parents, Sara and Francis; her brother, Howard, and his wife, Mara, and their five children; the Wilding boys; and even Maria, who was now out of the clinic where she’d been recovering after surgery. She was now walking without crutches, so it was an even more joyous holiday for everyone. The occasion marked a turning point in Elizabeth’s relationship with Richard. She had never been more content. She also knew that Richard now felt as if he had a real place in her life, and his love for her seemed to grow with each passing day. Indeed, she had devoted herself to him, and he knew it. “He began to fall for her in a way that he hadn’t before, and she for him,” said his brother Graham Jenkins.

  “I think it was at Casa Kimberly that their true love was born. Before that, it was just a tumultuous romance. But in Mexico, I think she saw another side to him, and he of her. Now they were one.”

  Part Four

  =

  “LIZ AND DICK”

  Elizabeth and Richard:

  “We Will Have No

  More Marriages”

  B y the beginning of 1964, Sybil Burton had filed for divorce from Richard, citing abandonment and cruelty. When her attorney noted in the paperwork that Burton had “been in the constant company of another woman,” Newsweek called it “the throwaway line of the decade.” The million-dollar settlement Richard gave her nearly bankrupted him—and he had to give her another half a million after that over a period of years, as well as the home in Switzerland—but he agreed to it because he felt so guilty about leaving her. It would be five years before he would speak to her again, and then just briefly over the telephone. Sybil, though, went on with her life, and in a grand style. She opened Arthur, a disco in New York, which quickly became the hottest celebrity nightspot in the city. She took a young lover, just twenty-four. Elizabeth felt that Sybil’s decision to divorce Richard was the best way to start 1964. She was proud that she’d spent the entire last year taking care of him, proving to herself and to him that she could, if called upon to do so, put her career and her needs aside for his. Then she got her divorce from Eddie. “I wouldn’t stand in the way of this earth-shattering, world-shaking romance for anything in the world,” Eddie said sarcastically. By the time Elizabeth and Richard married on March 15, 1964, most of their friends and family were fairly exhausted by the 238

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specifics of their wild personal adventures and tempestuous romance. For those in the inner circle, it was almost anticlimactic when the couple decided to charter a plane and secretly marry in Montreal. For Elizabeth, though, this was a marriage she wanted more than anything else in her life. “I didn’t have butterflies for this one,” she said, “because I knew beyond all doubt that it was right.” Richard, though, was nervous enough for the two of them. Ronald DeMann, Elizabeth’s hairdresser at the time, recalled that Burton—who was by this time starring in Hamlet in Toronto en route to Broadway—was so nervous on the plane ride that “he drank himself silly.” Elizabeth begged DeMann to convince Richard to eat, saying, “He’s got to have some food in him. I don’t know why he’s so nervous. We’ve been sleeping together for two years.”

  Despite his nerves, it was clear that Richard truly loved Elizabeth. “I fell in love at once,” he had said. “She was like a mirage of beauty of the ages, irresistible, like the pull of gravity. She has everything I want in a woman. She is quite unlike any woman I have ever known. She makes me not want to know any other woman, believe me, sincerely. I think of her morning, noon, and night. I dream of her. She will be my greatest happiness—forever, of course.”

  At the time, Elizabeth recalled, “The two of us act like we’re seventeen-year-olds. My favorite time is when we’re alone at night and for hours we giggle, and talk—about, maybe books, world events, poetry, the children, when we first met, problems, daydreams and dreams. We love to watch old movies on TV to regenerate our souls. Sometimes I wake up in the morning with my eyes absolutely swollen shut from crying at some wonderfully old movie the night before.”