Furious Love (10 page)

After filming was completed, Burton returned to Port Talbot and Pontrhydyfen, with Elizabeth by his side. It was an act of boldness: he knew that his entire family—including Philip Burton and Cis—had taken Sybil's side. Sybil was one of their own, and they loved her. But if they were baffled by Burton's taking up with this notorious Hollywood princess, this “third-rate chorus girl,” in Emlyn Williams's words, they were too proud to show it.
Let her speak for herself
seemed to have been the prevailing attitude. The couple arrived in mid-June, driving from London in a Rolls-Royce, and headed straight for a large, two-story house Burton had bought for Cis and Elfred James in the town of Aberavon. Cis kept a bedroom on the main floor available for Burton's rare return visits to Wales.

For the grand couple's arrival, Cis had prepared Burton's favorite meal of scrambled eggs, hot tea, and lava bread. They ate enthusiastically, then Burton left the two women together while he met his old cronies at a local pub. The two women, surprisingly, bonded immediately. For all their differences in upbringing and circumstance, Elizabeth had genuine warmth, and when she wanted to please, she dazzled. She got Cis to regale her with stories about Burton's childhood, his boyhood triumphs on the rugby field, his scholastic successes. When Burton returned, he whisked Elizabeth off to the pub to meet his pals, where she was even more of a success. The hard-bitten miners sitting in those dark pubs knew royalty when they saw it, but didn't she drink with the rest of them, and laugh at their stories, and fit right in! Later, Burton bought Elizabeth supper (beef and kidney pie), and treated her to a sixpence ride on a carousel. She was in heaven. For a woman who had been raised on a country estate surrounded by art and antiques, and who, since the age of ten, had never
experienced a normal life, this was the one thing her fame, her beauty, and her wealth could not provide. This was
real
.

 

Exhausted by
Cleopatra
and happy to stop working for a while to enjoy being with Burton, Taylor put her own career on hold for two years. She watched with immense pride as his film career began to soar. His next movie would provide him with another great role and another occasion for a powerful performance: Tennessee Williams's
The Night of the Iguana
, directed in Mexico by John Huston with a challenging cast that included a middle-aged and still beautiful Ava Gardner, the refined English actress Deborah Kerr, and a young Sue Lyon, following up her debut performance in Stanley Kubrick's
Lolita
the year before.

The movie business had noticeably changed in the five years since Elizabeth appeared as Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams's
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, when Production Code censors dogged the set. “It's hard to believe how strictly we were supervised in those days when it came to anything involving sex. It wasn't just homosexuality that was concealed; heterosexual behavior was subject to almost as many restrictions,” Elizabeth recalled about the experience. One day when she was on camera for a wardrobe test, the “inspectors” showed up. “When a BI (that's a Bust Inspector, if you can believe it) appeared, he took one look at me and called for a stepladder. He climbed up, peered down, and announced that I needed a higher-cut dress, too much breast was exposed.” The costume designer, Helen Rose, had to pin Elizabeth's bodice with a brooch, but as soon as the “BI” left, she pulled the pin off. She knew what looked good on camera—and off.

The Night of the Iguana
would be more sexually explicit than
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, involving a man-hungry hotelier cavorting with her cabana boys and an alcoholic priest being tempted by a seductive teenager. Burton plays the desolate, defrocked priest who sinks deeper and deeper into alcoholic disgrace, till he's redeemed by the ministrations of two women: one spiritual (Deborah Kerr) and the
other sensual (Ava Gardner). It's pure Tennessee Williams—intensely lyrical, sharply insightful, and full of bitch-wit, all brought to bloom under the Mexican sun and the canny direction of John Huston (who wickedly outfitted his volatile cast with gold-plated derringers and a handful of bullets that bore the name of each key member of the cast). Elizabeth had no role in the film, though she would have given Ava Gardner a good run for her money as the sex-starved, big-hearted earth goddess who runs the tourist hotel where most of the action unfolds. Nonetheless, she accompanied Burton to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Some speculated that it was to keep an eye on Burton, surrounded as he was by three kinds of female beauty: the nubile (Lyon), the refined (Kerr), and the lushly ripe (Gardner). Added to that was the sensuality of the place itself.

Huston's friend and assistant on the shoot, the actress Eloise Hardt, described it as being “like Never Never Land. Everyone was on edge from the heat and the sickness. Scorpions and iguanas hopping in your bed. You never knew if you were going to be bitten by something or stranded by a storm. There were all these emotions and egos…It got to be ridiculous. If you wanted to get in a sexy mood, just go to the Malecón and listen to the waves. Even if you didn't want it, your body felt it, the atmosphere was so primeval.”

It was Ava Gardner, in fact, with her bold, sensuous beauty, her strong sexuality, and her ability to drink like a man, who posed the greatest threat to Elizabeth. They were uniquely alike, Ava and Elizabeth: both hothouse flowers raised by Hollywood studios, both known for their many marriages and love affairs, both “made equally unfit for normal life,” as Gardner's latest biographer has noted, by their unreal upbringing. Indeed, the cast and crew noticed a certain mutual attraction between Richard and Ava, how Ava seemed to come alive in Richard's presence, how they seemed to exchange meaningful glances. The press were not just covering a congregation of some of the world's greatest talents and personalities in a remote Mexican village, they were waiting—hoping?—that Burton and Taylor's vaunted
love affair might founder on Ava Gardner's dangerous shoulders. So Elizabeth was especially present on the set during Richard's steamy scenes with Ava, standing just out of the camera's range, dressed to kill in clingy blouses, tight slacks, and—of course—dazzling jewels.

But Richard's brother Graham felt that Elizabeth went to Mexico for other reasons.

“She wanted to be with Rich,” Graham Jenkins recalled, “but also by showing that his career came first, she hoped to overcome his sense of inferiority. Elizabeth knew well enough how Rich smarted at the cheap jibes. In public he joked about his junior status in the partnership…but in private his anger at journalists who called him Mr. Cleopatra was terrible to behold.” Sometimes he'd turn his fury against Elizabeth, making fun of her “MGM education” and challenging her to give him any line from Shakespeare, so that he could roll out the rest of the speech it came from. Of course, she couldn't, beyond “To be or not to be.” Elizabeth usually enjoyed the spectacle of his rages, but not always. Jenkins describes one such scene that ended with Elizabeth getting up and leaving the room, pausing to warn Richard, “You should be more careful, love. One day you might harm more than yourself.”

“When she left the room,” Jenkins noticed, “Richard was close to tears.”

Their Mexican hiatus, despite their loudly escalating spats, would prove to be a golden time for Richard and Elizabeth, one in which their volatile love affair deepened into something far richer. As Jenkins observed,

Contributing to this deepening of their bond was, no doubt, the enchantment of the place itself. At the time Puerto Vallarta was a sleepy fishing village on the Banderas Bay, surrounded by steep, green mountains and long, empty beaches. It has since become a thriving tourist town—in no small part due to Elizabeth and Richard's presence—but if they expected the remoteness of the area to make it a safe haven from paparazzi and prying eyes, they were disappointed. When they first flew into Mexico City on September 22, 1963, they were met by a swarming crowd.

Having placed Elizabeth's two sons in a boarding school in California, and leaving Maria temporarily in London to undergo further operations on her malformed hip, they arrived with seven-year-old Liza Todd amid the usual chaos that continued to surround them wherever they traveled. Elizabeth panicked when she saw the mob awaiting her, and when a man in a sombrero with pistols on his hip attempted to corral them through the crowd, they both panicked. “Get this maniac off the plane or I'll kill him,” Richard reportedly yelled, before realizing the man, a volatile actor, filmmaker, and local character named Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, had been hired by John Huston to usher the famous couple to safety. In a Beatlemania-like frenzy, the crowd surged around them; they passed Liza over their heads to whisk her to safety. Elizabeth lost her shoes and her purse in the fracas before making it through the crowd. But the ordeal continued.

When they finally arrived in the overgrown jungle that would be the location for
The Night of the Iguana
, “there were more reporters on the site than iguanas,” recalled John Huston in his 1980 memoir. They came from all over the world, hanging around the sleepy fishing village, just waiting for “the great day when the derringers were pulled out and the shooting started.” Of course, they were really there
for the continuing drama of Burton and Taylor's romance. After all, they were infamously cohabiting, still technically married to other people. In 1963, that was still a shocking state of affairs, but the public couldn't get enough of it.

Back in New York where Sybil had relocated, she at last gave up any hope of reconciliation when Richard declined to visit her and his two children before decamping to Mexico. He had already consulted Aaron Frosch, Elizabeth's attorney, about possible settlements, including $1 million to be deposited in Sybil's Swiss bank account, plus an annual $500,000 for ten years. Burton's divorce from Sybil was finally announced on December 5, 1963, on the grounds of “abandonment and cruel and inhumane treatment.” Burton was at last free to marry Elizabeth, who considered his divorce from Sybil “the best Christmas present” she had ever received. But Elizabeth was still not free.

Eddie Fisher was dragging his feet over signing the final divorce papers, holding out for a better settlement. She wanted to keep the chalet in Gstaad, which Fisher had actually bought for her for $350,000, and she wanted to keep all the jewelry he had given her, as well as a dark green Rolls-Royce she had given him as a birthday present. To complicate their financial matters, Elizabeth and Fisher had formed a production company, MCL Films, for the purpose of freeing her from MGM servitude by lending her services to 20th Century-Fox for
Cleopatra
. She had insisted on keeping all the profits from MCL Films.

Elizabeth finally agreed to release some of the profits in exchange for an agreement with Fisher to refrain from “embarrassing her publicly” (she had been incensed by his “Cleo, the Nympho of the Nile” specialty number developed for his nightclub act). He agreed, and that was one reason he didn't publish his first memoir until 1981. There was also the issue of Fisher's name on Maria's adoption papers. Taylor hoped to replace his name with Burton's, and Fisher agreed only after insisting that he maintain legal ties to Liza Todd, as his only remaining connection to his lost friend and mentor, Mike Todd.
Elizabeth got her way: she managed to convince the German authorities that Eddie had never been Maria's adoptive father in the first place (though he had signed the adoption papers), and that she had always been the sole adoptive parent. But then, who could deny Elizabeth anything?

Michael Wilding, Taylor's second husband and father of her two sons, accompanied her to Puerto Vallarta as Richard's agent. It was perhaps a tribute to Wilding's geniality and their amicable divorce that he was able to work for his ex-wife's current paramour.

Delighted with the dazzling, white-hot sun and the turquoise-green of the sea, they first rented and then bought a four-story white stucco villa called Casa Kimberly, with access to ten acres of beach. “There is no more delectable place on the face of the earth, but don't come because you'll spoil it,” is how Burton described their newly discovered paradise. For the first time, perhaps, since her early childhood in England, Elizabeth felt at home. She loved the heat, the verdant green of the jungle, the brightly colored macaws that flew across her balcony in the mornings. She bought a blue launch named
Taffy
to cross the Banderas Bay to the film set, precariously built on a perch overlooking the bay. She also flew in her secretary, her chauffeur, and her cook, and hired two maids from the village and a retired slot-machine repairman to serve as Burton's masseur. She was so happily ensconced in Puerto Vallarta, and so ubiquitous on the set, she was practically part of the crew. In order to keep for himself a shred of privacy so he could continue his habit of voracious reading, Burton bought a second villa and had a bridge built to connect them, modeled on the Venetian Bridge of Sighs.

In addition to Liza Todd, Maria soon joined the family in Puerto Vallarta. Liza—an extraordinarily beautiful child—had been virtually raised without formal education, and at seven was still unable to read. Elizabeth tried to teach her with the use of primers she had bought, but without much success, given her devotion to Richard and the amount of time she spent with him on the set and in various bars. So they hired
a live-in tutor, a twenty-two-year-old named Paul Neshamkin. “I used to spend all day with the kids, and then I would spend the evening entertaining the Burtons…I drank with them every night, until about four in the morning,” Neshamkin told Kitty Kelley for her 1981 biography
Elizabeth Taylor
:
The Last Star.
“We'd start drinking and talking and reciting poetry,” he recalled, “and, of course, debating Jews versus Protestants.” On school holidays, Michael and Christopher joined the family, and Richard and Elizabeth could be seen dining
en famille
in a village restaurant.