Elizabeth Divorces Richard
A s far as Elizabeth Taylor was concerned, with Richard Burton back in her life, Henry Wynberg was a thing of the past. She told Burton that she’d just been using Henry to get over their broken marriage—not that he even required an explanation.
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time in the hospital after Richard showed up. “It was as if the Grand Maestro had placed a hand over my incision and healed me up.”
As soon as Elizabeth was released from the clinic, she and Burton took off for Naples, seeming happier than ever. “Richard and I are back together again,” said she, “and it will be the happiest Christmas of my life. I believe in Santa Claus again.” Michael Jr. joined them in Gstaad for the holiday and was struck by how well his mother and stepfather were getting along. Perhaps they had actually found some peace with each other.
Elizabeth’s recovery was, as always after any of her surgeries, difficult and longer than expected. Richard was at her side the entire time, showing great patience where perhaps there really wasn’t much.
When Richard finally finished his film for Carlo Ponti, the couple took off for Puerto Vallarta, where they celebrated Elizabeth’s forty-second birthday in February 1974. In front of photographers—of course—they had a “private” luncheon. After they ate their Mexican feast, he leaned across the table and took her lovely face in his large hands. He kissed her. She drew breath from him and kissed him back. The next day, the photos were in all of the papers.
After Puerto Vallarta, the two were off to Oroville, California, a small town about an hour’s drive north of Sacramento, where Richard was scheduled to begin filming The Klansman, a story of racial discord in the South that costarred Lee Marvin. Their marital bliss did not last long. The Burtons spent an unhappy tenth anniversary in Oroville, fighting and drinking. Unfortunately, whatever epiphany Richard had had when Elizabeth was in the hospital faded with the passing of a short time. Now he was looking at other women, giving them the “Welsh fish eye,” as Elizabeth called it.
“It was brutal,” veteran publicist Dale Olson, who worked on the set of The Klansman, recalled. “The final straw came when Burton presented an eighteen-year-old waitress with a ring and tried to act as if he was having an affair with her. I’m not sure he Confusion Reigns
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was, though. I think he was trying to be dramatic and make Elizabeth jealous.”
The girl in question was from Oroville; her name was Kim Dinucci. Beverly Wilcox was her best friend, also eighteen at the time. She recalls, “There was no romance with Kim. In fact, Richard gave us both rings. They were diamond-and-ruby rings worth only $450 each. He was this old guy—this movie star—
coming on to us, and we were flattered, but there was no sex. We met him in the diner Kim worked in at the time. He was with Elizabeth Taylor, but very flirtatious. She was beautiful and very quiet. You could see the fury in her eyes as he was coming on to us, two eighteen-year-olds. Finally, she said, ‘Richard, what are you trying to prove? You’re acting like an old fool.’ He said to me, ‘As you can see, I have a bad case of Elizabethitis, and it will not go away.’
“He asked to meet with us that night at the Prospectors Village Motel, where he was staying. How could we resist? When we got there, he said he just wanted us to help him with his southern accent for The Klansman, he was having trouble with it. So we sat up all night going over his script and working on his accent. The next day, he came back to the diner and that’s when he gave us the rings. He slipped them on our fingers and said, ‘Just a token to thank you for your help with the picture.’ I thought it was a strange but sweet gesture. When I asked about Elizabeth, he said,
‘ ’Tis she who is the repository for my heart.’
“That night, he asked us to join him for dinner. So there we were, at a restaurant, the two of us local girls with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Lola Falana [one of the stars of the movie]. Burton started flirting with the waitress. He said, ‘Now, there’s a woman I would like to sleep with.’ Elizabeth said, ‘Why can’t you stifle your little Welsh lusts until I’m out of the way? Do you have to parade it so openly?’ It got very tense. Lola got up and left. ‘I can’t handle this,’ she said. Then Elizabeth left. ‘You’ll not see the likes of me, again,” she told us. ‘I am leaving Orville’—
that’s how she pronounced it. Orville, instead of Oroville. After she was gone, Richard turned to the two of us and said, ‘ Orville. 300
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Can you even fathom it? Anyway, would you two like a go of it back at the motel?’ We said, no, absolutely not. It was pathetic and, really, very sad. I heard that Elizabeth left Oroville that very night. I remember thinking, these rich and famous movie stars are a lot more miserable than any of us living in the small town of Orville.”
“That was it, as far as Elizabeth was concerned,” confirmed Dale Olson. “I had a press reception scheduled for the two of them the next evening, a hundred reporters coming into town to interview them, but she was already gone. I called the media together and said, ‘The bad news is that Elizabeth Taylor has left Richard Burton . . . again. The good news is that you now have a big scoop. And you also have Richard, who is still here and ready to talk to you.’ So Richard did the interviews, but he was so sick, so out of it . . . I’m not sure it was such a good idea.”
As soon as Elizabeth left town, Richard became deathly ill with a fever of 104, and was flat on his back at Saint John’s hospital in Santa Monica. He tried to phone Elizabeth from the hospital, but she would not take his calls.
On April 26, 1974, the Burtons announced that their reconciliation attempt had failed. They were getting a divorce. Two months later, on June 26, Elizabeth appeared in a courthouse in Saanen, near Gstaad, to finalize the divorce. Richard was not present, having sent a doctor’s certificate from the United States saying he was too ill to appear.
The judge granted Elizabeth a divorce. She kept $5 million in jewels, even though they had been a joint investment for the couple. Richard, beaten down by the years, said, “Just let her have them. Who cares?” She also got Casa Kimberly (“Who cares?”), their yacht, Kalizma (“Who cares?”), lots of money, and other goods, such as a priceless art collection. She also was awarded custody of Maria, whom they had formally adopted as a couple in 1964.
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Elizabeth Marries
Richard . . . Again!
I t wasn’t over, yet. Indeed, if any of her friends sensed that Elizabeth Taylor’s relationship with Richard Burton had not ended with their divorce, it was because they realized how attached she had become not only to him but also to the melodrama that had characterized their relationship for more than fifteen years. Also, despite her anger with him and disappointment with how their marriage had turned out, she was a determined woman who could not accept easily that she had invested so many years into a relationship only to have it fail. Indeed, within hours of the final decree, she was on the telephone with Richard asking him, “Do you think we did the right thing?” He was too ill to have an opinion. For the next year and a half, Elizabeth would have one foot planted firmly in the past—she and Richard spoke on the telephone at least three times a week, without fail—and the other in the future—she and Henry Wynberg rented a home in Bel Air and began the next phase of their relationship. In February 1975, Wynberg accompanied Elizabeth to Russia, where she would act in the first Soviet-American co-production, the third remake of the classic children’s story by the 1911 Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck, The Blue Bird, directed by George Cukor. It had received a silent film production in 1918, but it was the 1940 version with Shirley Temple that 20th Century-Fox had felt would compete head-to-head with MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, something that the movie failed to do, despite its lavish production values. The 1975 version would also star Jane Fonda, Ava Gardner, and Cicely Tyson.
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hortly after filming began, Elizabeth ended up in bed with the flu, which was followed by a bout of amoebic dysentery. Her poor health helped to ruin the experience of making The Blue Bird. 302
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Filming ended in August. In five months, she later noted, “I did about one week’s work.”
On August 11, the night of the movie’s wrap party, she received a telegram from Richard Burton in Switzerland. Thinking it was a congratulatory message, she tossed it aside. Henry took a look at it and said, “Elizabeth, Richard wants to see you.”
“What! You’re kidding! Give me that,” she said, grabbing it anxiously.
Three days later, on August 14, 1975, Elizabeth and Henry arrived in Switzerland. That night, Elizabeth met Richard at a friend’s villa for dinner. As soon as she saw him, she rushed into his arms, her face awash in tears. She’d missed him desperately, she said. He told her that he shared her heartache, and that he wanted them to return to their romance.
The next day, the fifteenth, Henry was on a plane back to the United States, alone. In front of Richard, Elizabeth had told him earlier in the day that it was over between them. She gave him
$50,000 and a gold watch, as if he’d been forced into retirement. Richard would later recall, “Then for two days (16th and 17th), we [he and Elizabeth] circled each other—very wary, very polite.
“On the third day, we had a fight (18th). Then we knew we were ourselves, again.”
Two days later, on August 20th, they announced their plans to remarry.
“I was upset,” said Diane Stevens, who was an associate of their press agent, John Springer. “I called Elizabeth in Switzerland.
‘What in the world are you doing?’ I asked. ‘I’m very worried about you, Elizabeth.’ ”
“ ‘I know, I know,’ she told me with a tone of resignation. ‘But I love him and he loves me. Won’t you please be happy for us?’
“What could I say? ‘Of course, I am happy for you,’ I told her.
‘I just hope you know what you are doing.’
“She said, ‘Honestly, he’s changed. He’s so different, so loving. He’s not drinking as much. I think, this time, it can work.’ ”
Off Elizabeth went with Richard Burton—again—traveling Confusion Reigns
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about the world in a dizzy haze, from Switzerland to Italy to Israel and then South Africa, battling each other every step along the way, and loving one another as was their way. Somehow, the conflicted lovers ended up in Botswana . . . and that’s where, on October 10, 1975, they were again married. It would be Elizabeth’s sixth marriage, to her fifth husband. They exchanged forty-dollar wedding bands. “Sturm has remarried Drang and all is right with the world,” reported the Boston Globe.
Elizabeth loved this time in her life, even though it was so difficult. A lifelong animal lover, she was fascinated by African wildlife and had trained a team of monkeys to come into their camp every day by coaxing them with small bowls of fruit, which she handpicked from the trees.
In Johannesburg, she and Richard found a jewelry store in their hotel—naturally!—and discovered a pink diamond of ten carats,
“very large for a pink diamond,” Elizabeth notes. Burton bought it for her. However, after thinking about it for a few days, she decided that they should sell the diamond and use the proceeds to build three small hospitals in Botswana. “That pink diamond was huge,” she says. “I think it was the biggest one I had ever seen in my life. You know how I am about jewelry, so for me to give it up . . . well, I really wanted those hospitals.” The hospitals were built, she says, but then months later, “the jungles reclaimed them, and that still breaks my heart.”
Ruining their time in Africa, Richard came down with malaria. The Burtons heard about an Italian-Egyptian pharmacist named Chenina Samin—always called Chen Sam—and asked her to fly to Johannesburg to care for Richard. She did such a good job with him that Elizabeth then hired her as—what else?—her publicist!
And she remained in that position for twenty years. To anyone watching these events unfold, it seemed like sheer lunacy. In Elizabeth Taylor’s world, however, it somehow made perfect sense. In November 1975, Richard celebrated his fiftieth birthday. He was sober at that time but now truly looked as if he were dying. His skin was a terrible shade of off-yellow, and it seemed as if he 304
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were suffering from tuberculosis. Elizabeth was drinking enough for the two of them; not only was she was unhappy about Burton’s failing health, she was already beginning to think that she had made a mistake in remarrying him. He wasn’t the man she had married in 1964, eleven years earlier, that’s for sure. But she also was not the same woman. “Can you ever go back . . . I mean, really?” she asked.
“I’m sorry. I am not a perfect person,” she told Chen Sam, according to a later recollection. “I love him so much, I don’t want to lose him. He’s the best thing that has ever happened to me, the only man who had the power to change me for the better.”
“I didn’t think then that their second marriage would last ten minutes,” recalled their personal bodyguard Brian Haynes. “But I could also see that they seemed to need each other. When he was there, she seemed to hate him. When he was away, she couldn’t bear to be without him. They were often at each other’s throats and there was plenty of hard-core swearing on both sides.”
It was inevitable, perhaps, that Elizabeth would end up on the losing end of any bargain she had made with Richard to be happy
“until death do we part.” In Gstaad, during the Burtons’ Christmas sojourn there, Richard met a tall blonde divorcee, Suzy Hunt, from England. She was only twenty-seven. He was drawn to her immediately, much to Elizabeth’s dismay, and claimed that he could not help himself. He would pursue this younger woman, and he informed his wife of his plan.
Richard later said, “From the very beginning, she [Elizabeth]
sensed a worthy adversary. Elizabeth is, by nature, a jealous woman, and like a good many women, she believes that where there is no jealousy there is no love. She didn’t very much mind about the other women who popped up now and again when we were separated and divorced and all that. She didn’t think they were any real competition. But now the chips were down.” Would it have been any surprise to learn that, in fact, Richard liked the idea of making Elizabeth miserable by flaunting her new “adversary”? Such was the nature of their often poisonous relationship. Confusion Reigns
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Hunt’s involvement with Richard grew, though, beyond what Elizabeth had suspected, or at least hoped. Suzy wasn’t merely a device to enrage her, thereby enlivening their humdrum marriage. Richard actually had feelings for this woman, or “girl,” as Elizabeth described her. One evening, when an argument over her husband’s new assignation had reached its crescendo, Elizabeth pointed toward the front door and said, “That’s it—I want you out!”
Richard, having expected the demand, said, “My bag has been packed since breakfast.”
As he started off to gather his things, Elizabeth continued,
“Out of our room. You’ll stay in this house.” Richard moved into a guest suite. Elizabeth knew that if he went out that front door, he might never come back. If their marriage had any chance of continuing, she decided, they would have to endure the awkward living situation until Richard’s infatuation ended. Elizabeth’s plan to keep her husband close created at least one extremely uncomfortable moment, however. Whether orchestrated to irritate Elizabeth or not, Richard invited Suzy to his and Elizabeth’s home. She was to pick him up to go to a dinner party, which would leave Taylor alone that night.
Elizabeth watched from the terrace outside the front door of their chalet as Hunt’s limousine ground to a halt. Suzy emerged in a floor-length black gown and glided up the stairs, not noticing Taylor.
“Stunning,” Elizabeth said, startling her. “I always loved that dress. I’m so glad it found a good home.”
Suzy was speechless, seemingly
awed by Elizabeth’s presence.
“You know, I’m sorry about this whole business,” she told her, according to what she later recalled. “I never wanted to hurt you, of all people.”
Elizabeth had heard this speech before, but in the past she hadn’t been on the receiving end of it. She put up her hand to stop Suzy from continuing. “My dear,” she said, in a world-weary tone, “you’ll last only six months with Richard. That, I can guar-306 Elizabeth
antee.” It wasn’t so much a threat as a prediction, and one based on years of experience. She wasn’t even particularly angry, as she would later tell it. She was too exhausted to be mad at a girl, all of twenty-seven, who didn’t have a clue as to what she was getting herself into with a man old enough to be her father.
“Well, perhaps you are right,” replied Suzy, “but my,” she continued, “what a six months it shall be.”
Elizabeth forced a smile. “Oh, certainly, dear,” she responded,
“for all of us.”
A Diversion before Divorce
I n January 1976, Robert Lantz, the agent representing Richard and Elizabeth, met with Burton in Switzerland to discuss future projects. After a year of doing Equus on Broadway, Anthony Hopkins had left the show, and Tony Perkins had taken the role. Now Perkins’s involvement was coming to an end and Lantz went to London to see if he could motivate Richard into essaying the part. It would have been his first time on the stage since 1964 when he starred in Hamlet. “He was in terrible shape,” said Lantz. “Tired, hungover, not well. He needed a project, something to get him back in the swing. He had a script already, and said he would read it over. The next morning, he came down the stairs and I could see immediately that he had not touched a drop of alcohol. He said, ‘I’ll do it. I think it’s a wonderful idea. I love the play and I promise you, I will be all right.’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, it can change your life, if you can pull this off. You need this on every count.’ And I said, ‘Do me a favor? Don’t let Elizabeth come. It Confusion Reigns
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