For a few moments, Elizabeth and Richard took each other in with stunned silence, probably wondering how they—two of the most beautiful and sexy figures of the 1960s—had turned out as they had in the 1980s. They couldn’t even joke about it as might have been their inclination; it was just that bad. They ignored the obvious about one another and made small talk. Elizabeth then gave Richard a guest room and invited him to a $50,000 birthday party being tossed for her by Zev Bufman at a discotheque called Legends.
The birthday party for Elizabeth’s fiftieth was difficult. She wore a silver-and-purple harem pants outfit, in which, given her weight, she did not look her best. “I recently came across one picture taken at my fiftieth birthday party,” she once recalled. “It made me shiver. My eyes had disappeared into suet. I’m wearing stage makeup and I look for all the world like a drag queen. I did my best to deny the truth,” she said, “but my self-image suffered badly.”
Richard wore some sort of a mink jacket, with slacks. His shoulders were stooped, his posture that of a much older man. Guests at the party included Tony Bennett, Ringo Starr, and Elizabeth’s children, including the pregnant Maria. Speaking of 348
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her mother and Richard, Maria said, “It was they who taught us how precious love is.” In the background, the former lovers danced cheek to cheek, seeming lost in their own reverie. Richard did not drink much at first, but Elizabeth, no doubt feeling the pressure of the evening, did not know when to stop. She would later admit that during this time she could not leave the house without taking at least two Percodans mixed with Jack Daniel’s. She felt that the combination of the drug and alcohol made her somehow more talkative and social, more engaging. “It gave me false courage,” she would say. “Then, during the course of an evening—like every four hours—I’d take another two Percodans. And of course I had a hollow leg. I could drink anybody under the table. My capacity to consume was terrifying.”
One of Richard’s attorneys, Aaron Hill, was present at the party. He recalled that at one point in the evening, Elizabeth approached Richard, a glass of champagne in each hand. She handed one to him. “Here, darling, a toast,” she said. “To us.”
Richard took the glass. “Perhaps you shouldn’t, luv,” he said, taking her glass from her as well. She quickly took it back, as if she were somehow seizing power from him. “I said . . . a toast,” she insisted. Some of the party guests sheepishly gathered around her, seeming embarrassed. “To us,” she began in a loud voice. “The greatest goddamned couple of all time. Liz and Dick,” she continued, slurring her words, using the “Liz” appellation she so loathed.
“The toast of the whole goddamn world. Long may we live . . . to love and torture each other . . . until death do we part . . . and even then!”
“Hear! Hear!” someone said as people raised their glasses.
“That was quite a toast, my luv,” Richard remarked.
“You bet your ass it was,” Elizabeth said, clinking his glass. Then, with a loud cackle, she grabbed him by the arm and dragged him back out onto the dance floor. Kicking off her high heels, she danced in a seductive circle in her harem outfit all around Richard to the pounding disco rhythm of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.” Richard just stood frozen in the middle of the floor, Coming to Terms
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stiffly wagging nothing more than his head from left to right. It was an odd sight.
At 1:30 in the morning, Elizabeth took Richard back to her townhouse. They were both intoxicated. She put him to bed and lay next to him, running her fingers through his hair, as she would later recall it, until she knew he was asleep. She spent the night staring at his face, she would tell confidantes years later, trying to divine just what it was about him that had held her captive for so many years. He wasn’t much to look at any longer, but still . . . there was something about him. Was it just a matter of shared history? They had always been there for one another . . . or had they? She still loved him, that much she knew. She fell asleep with her head on his chest. In the morning she awakened with a pounding headache, her head now on a pillow. He was already gone. There was no sign that he had ever been in the bed. It was as if he’d never even been in the townhouse at all and she had dreamt the entire birthday evening with him.
That night, Elizabeth felt that she had to see Richard. She knew that he was performing Under Milk Wood at the Duke of York Theatre and decided that she would attend the performance. While Richard was onstage working, Elizabeth, in jeans and a sweater, suddenly walked out from the curtain behind him. The audience erupted into applause, but Burton didn’t know why until he turned around and saw his ex-wife standing there. It was a very strange thing for her to do, to interrupt his performance as she had, and he didn’t quite know what to make of it. Had she intended to sabotage his performance? Had she been drinking? On some level, he later decided, that’s exactly what she had in mind, and exactly what she’d been doing. He looked startled and upset. As the crowd cheered wildly, Elizabeth took a deep bow. “Oh, thank you all, so very much,” she said, as if finishing a performance. She then blew kisses at the audience with wide, dramatic arm gestures. After the crowd simmered down, she turned to Richard and, in Welsh, said very sweetly, “I love you.”
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“Say it again, my petal,” Richard said, now having collected himself. “And say it louder.”
“I love you!” she exclaimed, again in Welsh. Again, the audience cheered, this time on its feet. Before she walked offstage, Richard kissed her on the cheek. He then tried to resume his performance, but he had lost his place in the script. “I’ve got the wrong page,” he said, apologizing. “Excuse me. I’m a tad distracted.”
After the performance, Elizabeth and Richard left the theater together and went back to her townhouse. He stayed for a couple of hours, during which they had a few drinks and a few laughs, and then he went home. Elizabeth felt happier than she’d been in some time and, as she would later tell it, went to bed and slept soundly for the first time in months.
The next morning, though, she woke up to a huge disappointment. Apparently, when Richard showed up at his hotel the morning after he’d spent the night at her home, after her birthday party, the press was lying in wait for him. The reporters pounced on him for clarification of his relationship with Elizabeth. Now those comments were all over the papers. His version of what happened the night of her birthday was not truthful: “When Elizabeth and I went back to her house after her party, they were all there—
the homos and the hangers on. I ordered them all out of the room. I just said ‘Get out!’ and they all melted away. Then Elizabeth looked at me and said, ‘Hey buster, aren’t you going to kiss me?’ I took her in my arms and kissed her. After we kissed, I pulled her down on the couch . . . just like that. For old times’ sake.”
After that comment, which suggested that he and Elizabeth had made love, Richard was on a roll. His appearance with Elizabeth had generated interest in him and in Under Milk Wood, and he obviously liked the attention. He told the reporters that he had once met John Warner and the first thing he noticed was that
“he’s smaller than me. He took me to the side and said, ‘Well, I’ve got your Liz now. You were a fool to let her go, weren’t you?’ What a remarkably objectionable thing to say.” He further stated that Coming to Terms
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Elizabeth had to sell the Burton-Taylor diamond “to support him.”
He seemed miffed that she got $3 million for it, and asked, “Why didn’t the little bitch sell it back to me?” He said that Elizabeth wanted nothing more than to marry him again, but that he refused to do so. “She’s an erotic legend—a black-haired dwarf with a big stomach and overflowing breasts. I love her. She’s a dear, sweet wonderful legend, and a little bitch.” As for her try on the London stage in The Little Foxes, he took the opportunity to interfere with her chances with the critics, saying, “I firmly believe she cannot act onstage. In fact, wh
en it comes to the stage, I always tell Elizabeth that she is a divine joke. She normally hits me on the head when I say this.”
When Elizabeth read Richard’s account of the evening and then his subsequent comments about her, she was truly crushed. She called his brother, Graham, and asked how Richard could have said such things about her. They most certainly did not make love on the night of her birthday party, she said. Her publicist, Chen Sam, as well as her bodyguard, her hairdresser, and dresser were all staying at the townhouse, she explained, and she would never have felt comfortable making love to Richard with so many people in the home. How could he take an evening that had been so sweet in so many ways, at least in her memory of it, and turn it into a sordid one-night stand? And furthermore, she had no memory of his ever meeting John Warner, or so she said. In fact, everything Richard had told the press was full of lies. Graham didn’t know who to believe, and, no doubt, after so many years of drama between his brother and ex-wife, he didn’t much care. To the hounding press, Elizabeth said of Richard’s commentary about her, “I simply don’t believe any of it was ever said. Yellow journalism, that’s all. I know Richard and I also know he has more class than to say things like this.”
Aaron Hill, Richard’s attorney (not Aaron Frosch, another of his attorneys) recalled, “Elizabeth called me in tears at about eight in the morning. She said that she couldn’t believe the things com-352 Elizabeth
ing out of Richard’s mouth. She didn’t even want to speak to him about it, she said, she was too bereft about it.
“I told her, ‘Elizabeth, look, he’s obviously trying to push you away. Can’t you see that? He loves you but he knows that you are poison together. You know how he is. He didn’t mean those things.’ I didn’t want to tell her that he’d met someone else in Vienna [Sally Hay, thirty-four years old and the production assistant of director Tony Palmer on the movie he was working on at the time, Wagner]. I wasn’t sure if she knew or not. [She apparently didn’t. Not yet, anyway.] But I knew that Richard had become serious about this other woman very quickly.
“ ‘But if he would just give us a chance,’ she said. ‘We’re older and wiser now.’ I told her, I begged her, in fact, to leave him alone. I told her that he would continue to torture her with his words and actions until she was either gone from him forever or she hated him. She said that they had been beating each other up for so long, she didn’t know what to think about any of it. She then asked me to meet her in person at her home. I tried to get out of it, but she was persistent and adamant. ‘We must discuss this matter in person,’ she insisted. So I agreed to meet her that morning, though very reluctantly.”
When Aaron Hill showed up at Elizabeth’s door, she greeted him in a flowing white caftan, her hair wrapped in a silk matching scarf. She wore no makeup, her eyes red from crying. He sat down in the parlor, she across from him.
“So, have you talked to Richard about me?” Elizabeth asked, according to Aaron’s memory. Her voice was flat and devoid of expression, as if she were exhausted. She fixed him a drink, Jack Daniel’s with six cubes of ice. “My lucky number,” she said as she dropped each cube in the glass after having poured the liquor, thereby splashing it messily all over the bar.
“Yes, I have,” Aaron said, lying. He took the drink but discreetly put it down. It was only 10 a.m. “Elizabeth, he’s so very sorry he hurt you with the press. He said that the reporters just wouldn’t leave him alone and he only wanted to give them good Coming to Terms
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copy. He didn’t mean a single word of it. He’s surprised you are hurt, says you know better than to take him seriously.”
“But you told me earlier that he was trying to push me away,”
Elizabeth said, her tone accusatory. “Which is it? Is he sorry, or is he trying to get rid of me?”
“It’s both, Elizabeth. You have to protect yourself. You have to leave him alone.”
“But he looks so sick,” Elizabeth said. She reached out and took the attorney’s hands in her own. “Please. You must help me so that I can help him,” she said. “He needs me now more than ever. As you well know, I have always been there for him,” she said, “and I’ll be damned if I am going to stop now.”
Aaron had no comment. He would later say he was struck by her devotion, especially in light of Richard’s very cruel public comments about her.
“So, listen, I have an idea,” Elizabeth continued, suddenly speaking with confidence. It was about to become clear why she had asked to see the attorney in person. “Zev [Bufman] and I were talking and we thought it would be just fabulous if Richard and I were to do a show together, a play . . . so, look, we’re thinking of Noël Coward’s Private Lives.” She seemed elated. “Just think of the money we could make. Liz and Dick onstage, for all of their fans to see, up close and personal. And throughout it all, I would have a chance to keep an eye on him,” she continued. “And we would be together, and . . . who knows what can happen? Maybe a third marriage,” she said with a laugh, but probably not kidding. “Isn’t this a just a grand idea? Tell me you will help me,” she said, pushing. “Tell me you will talk to Richard and convince him that this is a good idea. Promise me.”
Aaron Hill promised to talk to Richard about Elizabeth’s proposition.
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“God Has Kept an Eye
on My Children”
A s 1982 came to a close, for Elizabeth Taylor the happiest memories of the year probably involved her children. Earlier in the year, in February, she had married off her adopted daughter, Maria—now twenty-one—to entertainment agent Steve Carson. Maria had grown into a beautiful woman, and with her bluish green eyes, dark hair, and full face, she actually looked as if she could be Elizabeth’s natural daughter. Now she was working as a model and her previous handicaps were all but forgotten; she had no limp whatsoever. Brian O’Neal, a good friend of Steve’s and Maria’s (he worked in the same talent agency as Steve, the Fifi Oscard Agency), recalled that Steve nearly got off on the wrong foot with Elizabeth when the announcement of their marriage was made in the press before she’d had an opportunity to make it herself. “He had not yet met Elizabeth, and definitely didn’t want her to have the wrong impression of him,” says O’Neal. “He got her on the phone as soon as he could. They had a tense conversation, during which he asked her, ‘Are you going to be mad at us forever?’ His face softened at her answer. When he hung up, I asked what she had said. She told him, ‘Steve, know this about me. I’m never mad at anyone forever.’ ”
Maria would introduce her friend Brian to Elizabeth at the rehearsal dinner, which took place at the Tavern on the Green.
“She looked terrific in a dark blue satin dress, diamonds on her ears that were the size of golf balls, a jeweled necklace, and gold slingback shoes. I was nervous. ‘What should I call her?’ I asked Maria. ‘Well, there’s no need to call her Miss Taylor. And definitely do not call her Liz. Just call her Elizabeth.’ When we met, she was perfectly charming. The next day was the wedding ceremony in a suite at the Helmsley Palace Hotel. My position was directly next to Princess Grace of Monaco.” In the middle of the Coming to Terms
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ceremony, during a quiet moment between the newlyweds, a clock radio went off somewhere in the suite with loud, blaring music. Princess Grace looked at Brian, a horrified expression playing on her face. She then started searching for the source of the intrusion, trying to be discreet as she looked under pillows and behind couches. Finally, Elizabeth’s trusty publicist, Chen Sam, appeared, holding the offending radio in one hand and the plug in the other; she had saved the day. Elizabeth mouthed her thanks to Chen, seeming quite relieved. The rest of the wedding went off without a hitch. (Maria would have a baby in November 1983, naming the child after her beloved mother.)
Later in the year, Michael would marry Brooke Palance, daughter of the actor Jack Palance. His relationship with Elizabeth had gotten so much better with the passing of time. An actor himself, thou
gh one for whom commercial success had always been elusive, he was heartened by his mother’s unwavering support of his career, with always trying her best to make his opening nights in theater productions. He’d turned out to be a levelheaded, respectable person, getting past his hippie phase with apparent ease. A year earlier, in 1981, his brother, Christopher, had married Aileen Getty, an oil heiress and one of fifteen grandchildren of billionaire John Paul Getty. They would have two children, Caleb and Andrew, and move to Pebble Beach, Florida, where Christopher would become a stained-glass artist. Then, in 1984, Liza would marry artist Hap Tivey. Over the years, Elizabeth had done the best she could with her children, despite her own problems and complications, and apparently it was enough, because her children did seem to turn out quite well. As she put it at Maria’s wedding, “God has kept an eye on my children, I think, even during the times when I wasn’t able to do so.”
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Elizabeth Gets Her Way
A fter having seen Richard Burton in London, Elizabeth Taylor couldn’t help but spend the rest of the year obsessing over him. Earlier, in July and at the end of the run of The Little Foxes in London, he’d had the audacity to show up backstage with his new girlfriend, Sally Hay. Elizabeth tried to be cordial, but it was difficult. She was heartsick. Richard had, obviously, moved on . . . again. She would not give up hope, though, that maybe they would be together again, somehow. The good news for her was that he had agreed to star with her in Private Lives, which would begin its run on Broadway in the spring of 1983, and that entry in her calendar definitely made her feel optimistic about the future. It would be produced by her newly formed Elizabeth Taylor Theater Company, a venture in which she partnered with Zev Bufman. She would tell anyone who asked that she had no designs on Richard whatsoever, that she had come up with the idea for Private Lives strictly as a business venture for the company . . . but even people who didn’t know her well knew better, including Sally Hay. “It all seemed accidental but now I’m inclined to think it was very clever on Elizabeth’s part, unconsciously perhaps,” she says. “The original idea had just been to tape it. And then it was decided to stage it first. Then it was suggested that it be the lead play in Elizabeth’s instant new theater company. Had the deal been, ‘Do you want seven months on tour with Private Lives,’ Richard would have fled. But it only came to that when he was too far in.”
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