Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  she said. “Well, what is it?” Elizabeth wondered. “You have to open it to find out,” said the little girl, now beaming. When Elizabeth opened it, she found a beautiful ruby-and-diamond ring from Van Cleef & Arpels. Richard had promised that he would one day find her the most perfectly cut ruby in the world—his favorite gem because of its red color and its connection to Wales—

  and he had come through once again. Elizabeth scooped up her

  “Liz and Dick”

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  daughter and ran to Richard, whom she smothered with hugs and kisses.

  Elizabeth’s adopted daughter, Maria, still had a number of physical problems, with good days and bad days. Elizabeth, as always, took time to give special attention to her, as did Richard. Both were concerned at her timidity and hoped she would grow out of it. Richard remained emotionally close to his daughter Kate—

  though at a distance due to the divorce from her mother. Because his other daughter, Jessica, was still in a mental hospital, it pained him to even think about her. “But you can’t just exclude her from our lives,” Elizabeth told him on more than one occasion. Still, whenever he thought of her, he couldn’t deal with the anguish it brought him. All he could do, he reasoned, was to make enough money that she would never have financial worries. Anything else was more than he could handle.

  Part Five

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  CONFUSION REIGNS

  “What Makes Us Women”

  P ray for us,” Elizabeth had said in her statement to the press about her separation from Richard Burton. Rarely, if ever, had a star of Elizabeth’s stature released a statement so personal about matters so private. Today, it happens all the time. Celebrities are anxious to talk about their personal lives if the venue feels safe, and they even find it cathartic to let the public in on their private anxieties. However, by 1973 Elizabeth had been such a constant fixture of the American culture—more than thirty years—that relationship she had with her public, her fans and foes alike, was real, not imagined, and she felt it should be cultivated. She loved being a star, rarely complained about it as do many celebrities—and felt compelled to explain her decision where Richard Burton was concerned. Of course, her surprising missive generated international headlines, right alongside President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. After she released the statement, she did as she said she would and flew to California. Meanwhile, Richard held a press conference in New York, while drinking from a bottle of vodka.

  “It was jolly well bound to happen,” he said, seeming in perfectly good nature. “You know, when two very volatile people keep hacking constantly at each other with fierce oratory, and then occasionally engage in a go of it with physical force, well, it’s like I said: It’s bound to happen.”

  Determined to get into shape both emotionally and physically for a new movie he was about to do with Sophia Loren called The Voyage (produced by her husband, Carlo Ponti), Burton saw a doctor and decided to stop drinking. On July 13, after about a 290

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  week on the wagon, he left for Rome. So that he would not have to deal with the probing paparazzi constantly on his tail, Sophia and Carlo offered to put Richard up in the guesthouse of their sixteenth-century villa in the Alban Hills, about thirty minutes outside of Rome. Meanwhile, Burton told the couple’s attorney, Aaron Frosch, to work out a divorce settlement with Elizabeth. A couple of days later, Elizabeth, still in Los Angeles, got a telephone call from Richard. They had earlier organized their schedules so that they would both be making movies in Rome at the same time, and she was about to leave L.A to begin work on Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat there. Richard felt that a faraway romantic setting might help diminish the tension between them.

  “We may as well be together here at the Pontis’, luv,” he told her.

  “It makes no sense for us to be apart.”

  Elizabeth was conflicted as to how to proceed, but since she did have to be in Italy for a film, she decided to take him up on his offer. On July 20, she arrived at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. She was met there by Richard in a Rolls-Royce. Wearing jeans, an orange T-shirt, and a huge diamond ring, she looked young and radiant as she worked her way through the mob of photographers to her husband. When the two finally met, they kissed passionately and embraced, gladly giving the gathered paparazzi an opportunity to snap pictures of their passionate reunion. Some of the reporters and photographers even applauded. It was as if they wanted the Burtons to be together again—and when one thinks of the great copy the couple had generated over the years, it’s easy to understand why the media was so invested in their continued “happiness.” Clinging to her man, Elizabeth made her way through the throng at the airport, and she and Burton then slipped into the waiting Rolls for the trip to the Ponti villa.

  While their trip may have begun with seemingly enthusiastic adoration, the ride to their friends’ home ended quite differently. Elizabeth bolted from the car and marched up a long stairway carved into the Italian hillside, leaving her husband to manage the luggage with their driver. Sophia, enjoying a book on a ter-Confusion Reigns 291

  race, greeted Elizabeth as she approached her. “Amazing,” Sophia declared. “Hours in an aeroplane and she still looks gorgeous.”

  Ellen Pallola, who was Loren’s personal assistant at that time, recalled, “The Burtons started arguing the very day Elizabeth showed up at the villa. I heard her say, ‘You are flirting with Sophia, and I won’t have it. And you’re doing it in Italian, so I can’t understand a word! How dare you?’

  “Burton took off with Mr. Ponti, enraged. I recall him saying,

  ‘That woman came all the way from the United States just to make my life a living hell. And I’m the fool who invited her here.’

  “Over the course of a week, the two of them caused so much turmoil at the villa that Mrs. Ponti finally pulled Mrs. Burton aside. She told her, ‘Elizabeth, you must know that I do not have designs on Richard. Don’t be ridiculous.’

  “Miss Taylor said, ‘Of course I know that. But he is such a flirt, and I’m sick of it. It’s not just you, it’s Annabella, too.’ [She was referring to the twenty-nine-year-old Milanese actress Annabella Incontrera, who played Richard’s mistress in The Voyage.]

  “ ‘Oh, please,’ Mrs. Ponti said. “He’s not having an affair with her, either. She’s a friend of mine. I know her well.’

  “ ‘But they went to a musical together in Palermo,’ Mrs. Burton protested.

  “ ‘I know,’ said Mrs. Ponti. ‘ I was with them. But, now that I see what your life is like, as much as I adore Richard, he is not the man for you. There is much too much suspicion. A marriage cannot survive suspicion. You must end this misery,’ Mrs. Ponti told her.

  “ ‘I am,’ said Mrs. Burton. ‘It’s over. Thank you for caring. It’s over.’ ”

  The next morning, Elizabeth left the Ponti villa, leaving Richard behind. Ellen Pallola recalled, “I helped carry her bags to the car. Before she got into the car, Mrs. Ponti grabbed her and embraced her tightly. ‘I promise to stay in touch,’ Elizabeth told her, ‘and let you know how things go, though I’m sure you will read about it in the papers.’ Before she let her go, Mrs. Ponti said,

  ‘You know what makes us women, don’t you? That we believe love 292

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  comes before anything else, and that we would willingly give up everything for love. You must find your love.’ Mrs. Burton, who was in tears by this time, got into the car and was driven off. I stood there with Mrs Ponti, waving good-bye to her. Mrs. Ponti then turned to me and said, ‘Such a sad woman. So much love to give. But how she will ever trust any man enough to give it to him is the question. I’m afraid this marriage will be the one to ruin her for all time.’ I was convinced that the two women had genuine affection for each other. It was obvious.”

  After leaving Sophia, Elizabeth checked into a seven-room suite at the Grand Hotel. Then she went to the studio. She had to begin work on the film, though she wasn’t sure how sh
e would ever be able to do it. The plot of The Driver’s Seat, also known as Identikit, was so twisted, she didn’t know how to relate to it. It had something to do with her character, a schizophrenic, looking for a suitor who would love her and then murder her. “How I ever get myself into these movies, I’ll never know,” she said at the time. Elizabeth did not have a good night. Room service records are kept in strict confidence at the Grand, but many orders were delivered to Taylor’s suite that evening. There’s no telling what she was doing in that room alone, but a reasonable guess would be that she was drinking heavily. The next morning, she couldn’t function. She was expected on the set that morning, yet didn’t show up until 5 p.m.

  “We waited all day for her,” said the film’s director, Giuseppe Patroni-Griffi. “When she arrived, she was in terrible shape. She said to me, ‘I never thought I would ever have as bad a day as I am having today. I thought that when Mike Todd died, that would have been the worst day of my life. But, no, this is it. This is the worst day of my life.’ I didn’t even know how to respond. I suggested we put work off a few days. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I must work. I must take my mind off of things.’

  “So, we were ready to begin. Before we started, though, she asked that she be allowed to address the cast and crew. She stood before everyone and said, ‘I am sorry I was late today. That is not Confusion Reigns

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  like me at all. However, I am having a dreadful day, and I just hope that you will forgive me.’ Everyone had been aware of the strain her roller-coaster marriage put on her personally. They had expected an aloof, yet professional actress that first day of shooting, but she revealed herself as something few of them expected. A human being. After her plea for forgiveness, the studio filled with applause. They gave her an ovation that must have lasted about three minutes. Some came up to her and hugged her. She returned their embraces fully and without hesitation. All of the barriers between star and the rest of the cast were, at that moment, completely brought down. We loved her and wanted the best for her. She was, at that moment and from then on, our Elizabeth.

  “And we went to work.”

  Henry Wynberg

  E arlier, in the summer of 1973, when Elizabeth Taylor was in a Los Angeles nightclub socializing with Peter and Chris Lawford, the elder Lawford introduced her to a tall, handsome man named Henry Wynberg. He was three years her junior, born in Holland to working-class parents. He was divorced and the father of a son (who was later killed in a car accident). He’d found work in California as a used car salesman and would later be indicted and fined $1,000 for setting back the odometers on cars he’d sold. (He would end up getting three years’ probation on that charge.) Of the woman he refers to as “Elizabett,” he recalls that the first thing he noticed about her was her great beauty, her silken yellow dress, and the fact that, indeed, she did wear real diamonds. The two barely spoke to one another, though, while at the club. Eliza-294 Elizabeth

  beth was apparently enchanted by him. A half hour after he left, Henry got a telephone call from Peter Lawford asking if it would be all right with him if he brought Elizabeth over for a visit. It was an odd request, but how could he turn it down? If she wanted to see him, he certainly wanted to see her as well. Lawford brought her over to his home. “We looked at each other then, and we looked for quite a while,” he recalled. “It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was infatuation. There was only one place to go [he is, presumably, talking about his bedroom and, also presumably, Peter had left them alone]. We began dating openly. She started calling me at all hours, day and night, confiding in me about her marriage problems with Burton. Before I knew where I was, I was in deep.”

  He was an interesting guy, or at least that’s how Elizabeth viewed him. He had nothing to do with show business, and perhaps it was precisely for that reason that she seemed fascinated by him. He was about as far removed from Richard Burton, in terms of life experience and temperament, as one could imagine. He had simpler tastes, was not abusive—at least not as far as she could tell, so far—and just seemed to be an easier personality. The two had an innocent flirtation, nothing more. But then, much to her surprise, Wynberg showed up in Rome when he heard she was having trouble with Burton, and checked in at the Grand Hotel. He called her room to see how she was faring, and she invited him up to her suite for a drink. The next thing everyone in her life knew, Elizabeth was romantically involved with Henry Wynberg. Her secretary, Raymond Vignale, said, “Henry was more exciting, more fun, than Richard Burton. Richard had become a loner, he wanted to be at home, reading and writing. Elizabeth wanted to go out and dance. Henry loved dancing, loved socializing. It worked well with him.”

  As she filmed The Driver’s Seat, the couple was photographed all over Rome—at dinners, while dancing. It was a very public romance, and that was the way Elizabeth wanted it. She did nothing to hide it. They were photographed on a cliff in Italy, the two of them embracing. Fully aware of the photographers with their Confusion Reigns

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  long black lenses poking out from behind bushes and trees, she lifted her face to the breeze so that it would blow her jet-black hair back in serene undulation. She always knew how to be the perfect subject for a photo essay, even when she was supposed to be caught unaware. In the company of photographers, though, Elizabeth Taylor was never unaware. Elizabeth took Henry with her to London to visit Laurence Harvey, who was dying of cancer and thus was reluctant to see her. She was such a drain on him, he had said, with her long and dramatic telephone calls over the years concerning her rocky relationships and many physical agonies, that he just didn’t feel he could handle her in his weakened state. (The actress and Harvey had worked together in Butterfield 8.)

  The visit was difficult. Elizabeth crawled into bed with the dying man and said she wished she could go with him to the great beyond, because that’s how miserable she was in this world. She put her head to his chest and listened to his heartbeat. It was faint, she would later recall, with the spaces between the beats so far apart that she would hold her breath waiting for the next one. He was slipping away.

  In November 1973, Laurence Harvey died of stomach cancer. He was just forty-five. Elizabeth was bereft at the funeral service, lamenting, “It should have been me. I have so little to live for, and he had so much.”

  “You have to stop thinking like that,” Henry Wynberg told her, in response to her obvious grief over the loss of a good friend.

  “Something terrible is going to happen to you if you don’t,” he warned her.

  “What else terrible can happen to me?” Elizabeth said sadly.

  “Every terrible thing in the world has happened to me already.”

  Then she began to cry so hard that she couldn’t breathe. It took her more than half an hour to compose herself.

  Sure enough, the same month Harvey died, Elizabeth Taylor ended up hospitalized at the University of California complaining of severe stomach pains. With her Christian Science background at 296

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  work, but in a twisted way, it was as if she could actually will herself to be sick, and with any ailment she chose, if she focused on the malady hard enough. It turned out she had an ovarian cyst. Her doctors didn’t know whether it was malignant or not, and would have to operate. She was sure she had cancer, and had already begun accepting her fate. Henry Wynberg took a bed right next to Elizabeth’s in her room and stayed with her. However, he wasn’t long for that room, because as soon as Richard Burton, who was still in Italy filming The Voyage with Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti, heard about the situation, he was on the telephone to Elizabeth. At first, Elizabeth was determined not to return his call. That lasted for about a day. Soon she was on the phone begging him to visit her. She was sure she had cancer, she said, and she was scared.

  “I don’t want to die alone,” she said, crying. “Please, can I come home?” The time away from her had been, as Burton recalled in his diary, “six months of torture, agony.” He told her that he had sto
pped drinking. He was a different man and he wanted—no, he needed—to see her as well. He knew about Wynberg but didn’t care, he wrote, because he too had had what he called “cathartic infidelities.” If she had heard any stories about him and Sophia, he said, she should ignore them because they weren’t accurate. The next day, Elizabeth had her surgery. The cyst was not malignant. There was great relief all around. Sophia and Carlo sent her a huge flower arrangement with a card that read (in Italian),

  “Tutti scaturiscono che le estremità scaturiscono.” (“All’s well that ends well.”)

  Elizabeth checked out of the hospital and into the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla to recover. Wynberg got his extra bed in her room, and started tending to his girlfriend’s recovery. “Three months from now, we may no longer be such good friends,” he told the press at the time. “Or, perhaps we’ll be something much more than that. Only God and Elizabeth knows.”

  The next weekend, though, Henry Wynberg was no longer in the picture. Richard Burton had taken his place in the extra bed in Elizabeth’s room. He had flown in from Italy to claim his wife, Confusion Reigns

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  and had no intention of leaving the States without her. “The next thing I knew,” Elizabeth recalls, “he was by my bedside and we were squeezing the air out of each other and kissing each other and crying. ‘Please come back with me,’ he asked.”

  “It can all be over without warning,” he said at the time, “and I can’t bear the thought of losing the old girl.” He was determined, he said, to live each day to the fullest with her and never let another petty squabble come between them. Of course, he had come bearing an impressive gift for her: He’d gone to Van Cleef & Arpels in Beverly Hills and bought her a thirty-eight-carat diamond heart-shaped pendant necklace. Richard had made quite a fortune on his movies with Elizabeth, even though most were not commercial successes. He had also invested well. Therefore, there was never a shortage of funds with which to buy his wife expensive gifts, and, it must be noted, some of his friends insist that he was using his and Elizabeth’s joint funds for some of the more costly purchases. Of course, Elizabeth loved receiving the baubles, even if she had paid for a few of them out of her own account, either realizing as much or not. Her eyes lit up when she saw this latest one. As she admired the way it caught all of the light in the room, she quipped, “You sure know how to win over a sick woman.”