Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  307

  will be a circus if you do, and this is a very serious moment in your life.’ He said he would do his best.”

  Richard left Switzerland for New York to begin rehearsals for Equus, and he asked the willowy Suzy Hunt to join him. Of course, she flew to be at his side. He told friends that, now that he was sober (for the time being), he couldn’t imagine what had gotten into him that he’d decided to remarry Elizabeth. “I don’t know,” he said, “don’t even ask me. It’s like a huge dream. I remember thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’ Odd place to be married, in the bush, by an African gentleman. It was very curious. An extraordinary adventure doomed from the start, of course.”

  Hurt by his remarks and by his assignation with Suzy Hunt, Elizabeth tried to exact revenge by seducing a thirty-seven-yearold Maltese named Peter Darmanin at a Swiss disco called the Cave. The two met on the dance floor, she the great movie goddess and he an advertising man with a regular nine-to-five, just blowing off some steam on a Friday night. She discovered him amid a swirl of colors and pounding noises, his agile limbs moving to the music, dancing alone. She sashayed over to him, swaying to the music, and apparently decided, “This one will do just fine.”

  Then, without interrupting her dance of seduction, she cradled his jaw and tipped his face downward so that her lips could settle on his. They kissed, right there on the dance floor. It was quite a scene; everyone around them stopped to applaud. He later would recall that his head was spinning, and not just from the champagne, though he did consume a lot of it. In fact, they both were too tipsy to consummate their meeting that night. However, the next morning, Elizabeth telephoned Peter straight away and invited him to her chalet. There, they made love. The next day, he moved into the house she and Burton had shared for many years.

  “It was just about seven weeks out of my life,” he now recalls,

  “but, really, it felt like seven years. She was obviously not over Richard Burton, on the phone with him constantly. She was trying to get him to take back that giant diamond ring he had given 308

  Elizabeth

  her. She was crying on the phone, saying, ‘Just take it back, Richard. I don’t want it. It means nothing to me now.’ ” (The jewel in question was the Burton-Taylor diamond, which had set Richard back more than a million dollars in 1969. He did not take it back.)

  In February, Elizabeth received a telephone call from Richard. He said that he needed to see her immediately. He was in New York and having a difficult time in rehearsals for Equus.

  “It was very painful for him, very difficult for him to learn the lines,” said Robert Lantz. “Anthony Perkins generously gave up his last Saturday matinee before the Monday on which Burton was to make his debut. Peter Shaffer [the writer of the show, whom Lantz also represented], and I went to the theater and sat in the last row. The lights went out and the announcement came over the loudspeakers. ‘At this performance Anthony Perkins will not appear.’ There was a big groan. ‘He will be replaced by Richard Burton.’ And the house exploded like at a big ball game. Then Richard came on and I can truthfully say gave the worst performance any actor has ever given on the stage. He couldn’t do the lines. He couldn’t do anything. I was mortified for him. After it was mercifully over, I turned to Peter and said, ‘What do we do? Do we go backstage? Or, what?’ And he said, ‘Of course we do . . . if only out of sympathy.’ So, we went backstage.

  “By the time we saw Richard he had already been given hell by the director, John Dexter. Now he was filled with new motivation. Nothing like failure to charge him up, I thought. He said, ‘Robbie, I’m going back to the hotel. I’m going to cancel every appointment. I’m going to rearrange the furniture in the suite so that it resembles the stage, and I’m going to rehearse by myself all day Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and I will appear Monday night as advertised.’ He even put up a notice on the board backstage for the company to read. It said, ‘I know I was terrible to all of you and to the public, on Saturday. I will never be like that again.’ So, Monday night came and, of course, it was a totally sold-out house and big crowds in the street, you know, to await Mr. Burton’s ar-Confusion Reigns 309

  rival.’ He then gave a much, much better performance. Brilliant. I knew then he could do it if he put his mind to it. But this was a tough time for him, a lot of distractions.”

  Indeed, and one more was on her way, at Richard’s behest.

  “After Elizabeth got the call from Burton, her heart jumped into her throat,” recalled Peter Darmanin. “She made plans to jump on a plane for New York. That was the last I saw of her.”

  Richard Asks for

  Another Divorce

  P atrick McMahon, who worked for Richard Burton at this time as an assistant, recalled, “Richard came to the theater [the Plymouth] in a good mood one morning, which was rare in those days because he was nervous about the show and feeling inadequate in the role. But this particular morning he was ebullient. ‘Guess what?’ he said. ‘Elizabeth is coming today for lunch.’

  “Alarm bells went off in my head. Suzy [Hunt] had worked so hard to keep him off the bottle, and even though she hadn’t been totally successful at it, he was drinking far less. We just wanted to get him through the Broadway run, that’s all. It was always one day at a time with Richard, and he could afford no setbacks. The one thing, I felt, that could really throw him for a loop would be Elizabeth Taylor. He had already met her up at the airport the day before, and that was a huge mess with photographers and chaos, a big distraction. No one in the show really wanted her there, because they were afraid it would throw the star for a loop, but really, 310

  Elizabeth

  how could you keep her away—especially after he had apparently summoned her.”

  Morning came and went with no Elizabeth. Richard seemed disappointed, often peering out into the empty theater as if in anticipation of her imminent arrival. Later in the afternoon, there was a bustling noise in the back of the Plymouth, a familiar female voice arguing with someone about something. After a moment of silence, the back door opened. From the stage, Richard looked into the empty expanse to see Elizabeth walking down the center aisle very carefully, both feet gingerly touching each and every step on her way down as if she was an old woman. She was wearing jeans with a lavender blouse that was dotted with beads and sequins and fake jewels and real gems mixed together, her hair in a big bouffant style. Patrick McMahon remembered thinking that she looked like “celebrated chaos in action.”

  “Oh, dah-ling,” she said in a voice loud enough for Richard to hear on the stage. She stopped in the middle of the theater and threw her arms out toward him with a theatrical flourish. “I’ve arrived!” she exclaimed. “Have you missed me? Why, it’s been hours!” She then continued down the steps, one at a time, with great deliberation. “But goddamn it,” she said as she walked toward the orchestra section of the theater, “I don’t have any money for the cab and no one in the lobby has a cent, not even in the bloody box office. How is that possible? Does anyone have any money in this goddamn place?”

  Patrick McMahon ran out to the seating area and met Elizabeth halfway with a twenty-dollar bill. He handed it to her.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked him.

  “For the cab?” he offered.

  “Well, I’m certainly not going to walk all the way back up those goddamn stairs and into the lobby and back outside to pay the cabbie,” she said. “Be a dear and run up there, won’t you?”

  McMahon ran up to pay the cabbie as Elizabeth took a seat just outside the orchestra section, with all eyes of technicians and ac-Confusion Reigns 311

  tors upon her. “Oh, don’t mind me,” she said with a dismissive hand wave. “Richard will tell you. I’m as quiet as a little lamb when I want to be. Just go on with your rehearsal.”

  After the cast completed the act it had been working on, Elizabeth applauded loudly. “Bravo!” she exclaimed. “Oh, yes!

  Bravo!”

  “Good Lord!
I think the old girl’s had a bit too much to drink,”

  Richard said. He still hadn’t even come down from the stage to greet her.

  “I heard that, buster,” she said good-naturedly. “And I’m not. Not yet, anyway. But the day is still young.”

  At that, Richard walked down the steps of the stage and to her seat. She rose, seeming unsteady, and the two embraced. Patrick McMahon, who had by now returned from his duty with the cabbie, recalled, “The sight of them together, ‘The Liz and Dick Show,’ well, it was something to see. The rest of the rehearsal was filled with her comments back up to the stage—all complimentary and exuberant, such as ‘Oh, my! Yes!’ or ‘ Mah- velous!’ or ‘Perfection! Sheer perfection!’ and Richard trying to hush her up from the stage the whole time. After they finished for the day, Richard walked off the stage and straight to her. He took her by the hand and the two walked up the steps, very gingerly—

  I mean, you would have thought they were in their nineties—and then out of the theater, talking to one another in an animated fashion and seeming as happy as they could be.”

  Alas, their postmarital bliss did not last long, as expected. They returned two hours later in the midst of an argument.

  “You know that I hate to drink alone,” Elizabeth said, now seeming in a fury.

  “Well, you know better than to encourage me to drink,” he said.

  “What the hell has happened to you?” she said. “You are no fun anymore, Richard.”

  “The fight was loud but also comical, and everyone present enjoyed their banter,” says Patrick McMahon. “It was almost as if 312

  Elizabeth

  they were performing for the technicians and other actors. But by this time, I was very nervous, though. I wanted her out of there. If Suzy showed up and heard that Elizabeth had been trying to get Richard to drink with her in the middle of a rehearsal day, it would have been a horrible scene. As it was, the rest of the day was shot. Richard was no good. It was over. He was disturbed and distracted. I just prayed she would not be back the next day.”

  The next day, rather than meet him at the theater, Elizabeth met Richard at the Lombardy Hotel on East 56th Street. When she showed up, he was waiting for her, with Suzy Hunt at his side, at the hotel’s bar. He seemed nervous and not as well as he had been the day before, as if he’d had a setback. The truth was that he knew he could not do the show, already tough on him, until he took care of some unfinished business with Elizabeth. It was draining enough, and he couldn’t have loose ends with her. “What’s wrong with you, luv?” Elizabeth asked, now concerned.

  “I want a divorce, luv,” he said meekly. One hand rose to touch Elizabeth’s face. She backed away from it, staring at him for a moment and seeming at a loss for words. Of course, that condition did not last long. “Why, you sonofabitch,” she finally said, her temper rising from zero to one hundred in no time. “You dragged me all the way from Switzerland to tell me that?”

  “I’m sorry, luv,” he said. Then he and Suzy walked away from her, leaving her standing alone in the bar.

  She was upset, but not so much that she didn’t go to one of his preview performances anyway. She loved him, and she was used to being disappointed by him . . . and she wasn’t going to miss his show, no matter what. After the performance, it was chilly backstage between them, as one might expect. The next day, when Richard got back to the theater, he went to his dressing room and, in a scene right out of Butterfield 8, saw a message from Elizabeth written in lipstick on the mirror. It said, simply, “You are fantastic, Luv.” Richard didn’t erase it for the entire run of the play. On July 29, 1976, less than ten months after they were wed for a second time, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were granted Confusion Reigns

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  their second divorce. Finally, she said, she wanted some jurisdiction over her own life, and the only way to obtain it was to let Richard go. “I love Richard with every fiber of my soul,” she said before delivering what had to have been one of the greatest understatements of her life. “But we can’t be together. We’re too mutually self-destructive.”

  Part Six

  =

  COMING TO TERMS

  John Warner

  I n the summer of 1976, as the paperwork was being finalized for Elizabeth Taylor’s second divorce from Richard Burton, she was invited to a Washington bicentennial reception commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the United States, and honoring Queen Elizabeth II of England. The invitation came about because Henry Kissinger had met Elizabeth Taylor and Richard a year earlier in Israel and was enchanted by them. When he heard how terribly unhappy she was at her separation from Burton, he invited her to Washington, where she began attending social and political functions on almost a daily basis. “She swept into Washington like Cleopatra into Rome,” wrote one reporter at the time. Her escort to most of the functions was Halston, her fashion designer. When she began to consider her appearance at the bicentennial reception honoring the President and the Queen, Elizabeth had thought she’d attend with either Halston or her hairdresser. She didn’t want to go to the gala alone, she said, that much was certain. British ambassador Sir Peter Ramsbotham suggested that she go to the party with the chairman of the Bicentennial Commission, John Warner. Though she’d met him casually on several occasions, Elizabeth didn’t remember him. However, after her date with him at the reception, she’d never forget him. On the surface, it seemed that the Republican politician John William Warner Jr. was a different kind of man for Elizabeth, a complete contrast to anyone she’d ever dated before, let alone married. Six feet tall and silver-haired, Warner was born on Feb-318 Elizabeth

  ruary 18, 1927, to a family that was well-off, though not affluent. A Navy man, he served during the last two years of World War II and was then with the Marines in Korea. He got his law degree from the University of Virginia in 1956. A year later, he became an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington. That same year, 1957, he married heiress Catherine Mellon of the Pittsburgh Mellons, whose wealth of more than a billion dollars was derived from oil and banking. (Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Washington’s Andrew Mellon National Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian complex are but two of the institutions that have benefited from the family’s largesse.)

  In 1972, Warner became Richard M. Nixon’s Secretary of the Navy. Shortly thereafter, in 1973, his marriage ended, he says, over the couple’s disagreement about the Vietnam War—he for it, she against. With his divorce from Mellon netting him a settlement of almost $8 million, he was living quite comfortably at Atoka Farms, a 2,200-acre estate in Middleburg, Virginia, when he met Elizabeth.

  Three years later, in 1976, he took his position with the Bicentennial Commission. He was a distinguished man at the age of fifty, thought of as one of the most eligible bachelors in Washington. He was also a tad . . . dull. “You never thought of him as being funny or charismatic,” said one person who knew him and his family well at the time. “He wasn’t particularly witty, either. He was just a very nice, even-tempered man with simple tastes. A nice way of putting it? He was earthy.”

  In some ways, John seemed perfect for Elizabeth, a woman who needed a break in her life from the fast-paced, excessive lifestyle she’d lived as Richard Burton’s wife for more than a decade. She was, at forty-four, no longer getting offers for plum roles, which didn’t bother her. She felt that she needed time away from Hollywood anyway. Simply put, she was tired. Being half of “Liz and Dick” had nearly killed her—many times over, actually. Diane Stevens no longer worked for John Springer but had stayed in touch with Elizabeth over the years. She says, “The ro-Coming to Terms 319

  mance with John happened very quickly. She went to his estate in Virginia, took a breath of fresh country air and absolutely loved it. There were farm animals and tractors, and horses and motorcycles which she and John rode. He has three children and they were teenagers, but not like her own in the sense that they were completely unselfish, not spoiled in the least. They were a del
ight to be around. ‘You would not believe the life John has,’ she told me on the phone that August. ‘It’s so tranquil, so beautiful with the most lovely rolling hills and the smells of healthy living. If I never make another movie again and could live here forever with no stress, I would be very happy.’ As she spoke to me, she cursed and dropped the phone. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked when she returned.

  ‘Oh, I was cooking hot dogs on the grill for the kids and the damn little things slipped into the charcoal. Now I have to start all over.’ This was a switch: Elizabeth Taylor grilling hot dogs! I told her that I thought she would miss the pace of not only Hollywood, but her jet-setting life. ‘How will you exist without Rome, Paris, New York?’ ‘Oh, please,’ she said. ‘I’ve been all over the world and, frankly, I’m exhausted. I am absolutely sick of being Elizabeth Taylor. I’m sick of being the main attraction in a three-ring circus. Is that so wrong?’ Then she had to go, she said, because she had to feed the chickens. So, I completely understood the connection she had with John Warner’s life. It was as if Velvet Brown had grown up and was having a good life on the farm, riding her horse and feeding the farm animals.

  “But I was concerned about Warner himself. When I finally met him a couple months later, I thought he was quite nice but not very challenging. Elizabeth needs a good challenge in romance to keep it interesting for her. Look at her husbands before him: Todd and Burton, the loves of her life, were very unpredictable and she loved that about them. I felt John was a little staid. But she seemed happy, so what could I do but be happy for her? It happened too quickly, though. The ink wasn’t even dry on her divorce papers from Burton.”