Furious Love (12 page)

Despite the production's mixed reception and the nightly strain of performing onstage, Burton was gracious to the entire cast and crew. (“The crew adore him,” Gielgud had observed.) Sterne, fresh from Philadelphia and embarking on his first major theatrical production, noted that Burton “treated everybody, from the producer down to the doorman, the same. We had this rather odd character named Peter Green, who was the stage doorman,” Sterne recalled. “He was a very old man, and he had a wooden leg…. Richard's dressing room was one floor up, so every message that came to the stage door, Peter Green had to get up those stairs with his wooden leg and hand it to him. Richard adored him; he was very, very kind. His dressing-room door was almost always open. Anybody could go by and say hello.”

As he had while appearing as King Arthur in
Camelot
, Burton held court in his dressing room, regaling cast and crew with his storehouse of anecdotes, jokes, and bawdy songs. Once the play opened and his dressing room was thronged with well-wishers, security guards, and Burton's growing entourage, Gielgud found it next to impossible to get in to see Burton to give him performance notes. He had to wait in line, like everybody else. “There was one performance in Boston where he couldn't even get backstage afterward,” Sterne remembered. “The police were posted at the door, and he went up and said, ‘I'm the director of this play!' and they told him to move along. So, Richard had to get the notes the next day before the matinee.”

The sheer enormity of Burton's fame greatly outshone Gielgud's, and seeing Philip Burton swoop in to add grace notes to his own direction must have created a strain between the two men. Added to that, Burton, of course, was intent on putting his own stamp on the role. In commenting on the difference between his 1953
Hamlet
performed at the Old Vic and his 1964
Hamlet
, Burton told Tynan, “The first time I played it as if I'd like to be John Gielgud. The second time…I played it absolutely as myself.”

Even so, Burton altered his performance vastly from show to show, Sterne recalled. “You never knew what he was going to do. He was always in character, and it was always fascinating and exciting to watch him. Maybe a few performances he was down and not completely into it, but for almost all of them, he was electrifying.” One night he recited the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in German, to acknowledge some important German-speaking people in the audience—social workers who had come to New York to decide if Burton and Taylor were fit parents to adopt Maria, whose adoption was not yet finalized. (Burton had easily picked up a smattering of languages, German, French, and Spanish.) He was even capable of reciting “To be or not to be,” backward. Despite the enormous amounts of alcohol Burton put away, his memory never seemed to fail him.

Offstage, Richard and Elizabeth “couldn't keep their hands off each other,” recalled Robert Misil (who played Horatio in the production). “She was captivated by his poetic brilliance and he was—to the extreme—inordinately proud that he, Richard Burton, the twelfth of thirteen children born to a barmaid and a Welsh coal miner, had married the most beautiful and most famous woman in the world.” John Cullum, the tall, rugged actor who played Laertes (and Sir Dinadan in
Camelot
) saw that “everybody wanted to be around them. They were so charismatic, so much in love, so generous to everyone in the production.” Sterne thought so, too. “Physically, Burton was magnetic. He had an aura about him.”

Sterne was also impressed by the enormous amounts of alcohol Burton was able to consume without affecting his performance. “Richard belonged to that school of British actors who were big drinkers. Richard and Peter O'Toole. I would say, just from my own observation, that he actually drank a fifth of scotch during the performance. It seemed to have no effect on him whatsoever.” Gielgud wrote to
Burton's longtime friend and supporter, the playwright Emlyn Williams, “Richard is at his most agreeable—full of charm and quick to take criticism and advice—but he does put away the drink, and looks terribly coarse and heavy—gets muddled and fluffy and then loses all his nimbleness and attack.”

It's mind-boggling that Burton was able to perform nightly while downing a fifth of scotch. Cullum, who was a drinking buddy of Burton's when they were in
Camelot
, couldn't keep up with him (Cullum no longer drinks). Though he did notice that while Burton's dresser, Bob Wilson, always had a full glass of scotch waiting for him just offstage, he didn't think Burton always finished each drink. Throughout the run of the play, Burton only missed two performances, and that was because he was beginning to have severe bursitis in one shoulder. His performances were consistently brilliant and physically energetic. “Richard was so energetic in his fencing,” Sterne recalled, “the foil broke three or four times during performances.” (When the pianist Oscar Levant saw the New York production, he commented to his wife, June, that Burton's Hamlet was so energetic he actually felt sorry for Claudius.)

Sterne was one of the actors who carried Burton off at the end of the play after Hamlet is slain by Laertes. “There were six of us carrying him out in a sort of funeral procession,” Sterne recalled. “Drums in the background. Hamlet gets a short break during the fourth act while Ophelia is doing the mad scene. Richard would go up and take a shower in his dressing room and put on a clean, fresh costume to do the last act. So, he always smelled very, very fresh, that he'd just come out of the shower. Maybe he sweated the alcohol out.”

Sterne was well aware of Burton's need for physical space around him onstage: “He didn't like to be touched…he let us know that, and people were very respectful. There were a few times when we had to touch him, pulling him out of the grave. I think it broke his concentration. Some of the old-time actors were like that, too. They would stand in the center of the stage, in the limelight, and everybody
else had to work from outside that circle. It could have been a fear too, because of the crowds who tried to grab at him.”

Once the play opened, Sterne recalled, “Elizabeth was always there with him. Every night, never missed one. I think she only saw it once in the audience, after that she saw it from the wings or heard it over the monitor.” That was because when she arrived on opening night, her very appearance caused such a ruckus it delayed the curtain by a half hour. Audience members actually climbed onto their seats to get a better look at her. Rather than upstage the actors, from that night on she either slipped in and sat at the rear or wings of the theater or watched the performance from backstage. But she was there every night.

Elizabeth celebrated her thirty-second birthday with the cast and crew of
Hamlet.
She showed up backstage, dressed in black, exactly like Richard, and everyone sang “Happy Birthday” and then broke into a chorus of “Danny Boy” for Burton. She then cut the birthday cake with a sword. It was one of the happiest moments of her life. “She couldn't have been lovelier,” Sterne recalls. “She was kind of a prisoner of the whole crowd because she couldn't go out in public without being molested,” but she was safe with Burton and the actors. And Burton gave her a stunning birthday present, an emerald-and-diamond necklace from Bulgari. It gave him, this miner's son, as much pleasure to buy her jewels as it pleased her to have them. He admired the way the jewels, brought up from the great mine of his fame and wealth, shone between her breasts. He felt as proud of bedecking Elizabeth in jewels as of anything else in his life.

 

On March 5, 1964, two years after falling in love with Richard, Elizabeth was finally granted her divorce from Eddie Fisher on the grounds of abandonment. Ten days later, Elizabeth and Richard chartered a Viscount turbo-prop airliner to Montreal, where they were met by three limousines. The couple and a few members of their entourage—including their publicist John Springer, their lawyer and
tax specialist Aaron Frosch, and Burton's dresser Robert Wilson and his wife—were then whisked to Montreal's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where Elizabeth and Richard registered under the name of “Smith.” That Sunday afternoon, they were married in a private ceremony.

Though Elizabeth now considered herself Jewish, they were married by a Unitarian minister who agreed to take on the much-divorced couple. It was a hurried ceremony. The bride wore a yellow chiffon dress designed by Irene Sharaff, who had fashioned her stunning costumes for
Cleopatra.
She wore hyacinths and lily of the valley in her coiled hair, and the $150,000 emerald-and-diamond necklace Burton had given her, and matching earrings as his wedding gift. Newsmen were barred from the hotel; the only official statement given was Richard's: “Elizabeth Burton and I are very happy.”

It was Richard's second marriage; it was Elizabeth's fifth.

They returned to Toronto the following day and Burton resumed his role as the Prince of Denmark. When the performance was over, after his curtain calls, Burton held his hand out as Elizabeth joined him onstage. In his thrilling Welsh voice, he reprised Hamlet's line to Ophelia: “I say, we will have no more marriages.” The audience cheered.

Their triumph was complete.

On March 22, the production company flew to Boston for out-of-town tryouts at the Shubert Theater. “We thought there was going to be less commotion in Boston,” Sterne recalled about their landing at Logan Airport. “There's a picture of Richard and Elizabeth getting off the plane. They were the first ones to come out; someone had presented them with flowers, and then this huge crowd of several thousand people broke through the Cyclone fences. They broke them down and ran out onto the airfield, so the Burtons had to get back on the plane.” The plane had to be towed into a hangar, but the fans had overrun the police barriers and rushed the plane. Two limousines were quickly brought into the hangar to whisk the Burtons to their hotel (one was a decoy).

An even bigger mob of fans became unruly when Elizabeth and Richard checked into the Copley Plaza Hotel. If their adulterous affair had made the couple notorious, their marriage, announced in headlines around the world, had made them idols. A thousand “shouting, clawing admirers” poured into the hotel lobby. What had been mere hysteria was now frenzy, as fans grabbed at the couple's clothing and tore hair from Elizabeth's head. An eyewitness reported that Elizabeth “was being pulled in opposite directions at the same time. People were tugging at each arm and even crushed her face against the wall when she attempted to free herself.” Burton had to fight his way through the crowd to rescue Taylor and safely usher her into the hotel elevator. Near collapse, Elizabeth broke down in sobs. A doctor was summoned. Elizabeth was treated for back and arm injuries and given a sedative before being put to bed in the first-class suite that had formerly been used by Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower.

Burton was furious. “My wife was almost killed,” he roared, and he threatened to lodge a complaint with the Boston police commissioner. “I've never seen anything like this before. It's outrageous. We had crowds like this in Toronto, but the police gave us adequate protection,” he complained. Elizabeth, recovering from the crowd's attack, agreed that even she had “encountered mobs all over the world, but never anything to this extent.”

Burton sufficiently recovered to give a brilliant performance at the Shubert two days later. The production was hailed by drama critic Elliot Norton as “a theatrical experience of much power and excitement, frequently tender, sometimes deeply moving, often wildly and honestly passionate.” Norton wrote, “Richard Burton…has moments of greatness.” Elinor Hughes of the
Boston Herald
noted that Burton had “poetry and passion in his bones, and in his voice…he gave us the music, the meaning, and the passion of this extraordinary role.”

The Canadian-born character actor Hume Cronyn had been with Burton and Taylor in Rome, playing Cleopatra's tutor and prime minister, Sosigenes (“an Egyptian Polonius,” in Mankiewicz's phrase).
Cronyn played Polonius in Gielgud's
Hamlet
, where he saw more of Elizabeth and Richard, close-up, than he had on the set of
Cleopatra
. He remained impressed—even awed—by Burton's gifts as an actor. Cronyn had seen all of the great Hamlets of the first half of the twentieth century—John Barrymore's, Maurice Evans's, John Gielgud's, Laurence Olivier's—so he was in a unique position to judge Burton's performance. He was “one of the very few actors I've known,” Cronyn recalled later, “who was truly touched by the finger of God: his appearance, despite the pockmarked face; his quick intelligence, beautiful voice, and, above all, a Welsh lyricism of spirit that only money, notoriety, and an overweening ambition to be a film star could waste.” But he knew that audiences were not lined up to see
Hamlet
just to see Burton; the entire production “was enveloped in the mystique of the Burton-Taylor romance.” He had seen the hysteria play out two years earlier in Rome—the photographers hiding in the trees, the paparazzi on Vespas buzzing up and down Via Veneto. “Poor old Shakespeare didn't stand a chance” against the “Dickenliz” hoopla, a term first used by the Toronto newspapers when the production came to town.

On April 9, 1964, the play opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, where it would become the longest-running production of
Hamlet—
and the most profitable—ever staged in New York. Burton, who received six curtain calls on opening night, would perform the role 136 times. Taylor would attend 40 performances. The entire block surrounding the theater—46th Street from Eighth Avenue to Broadway—was thronged every night after the show with fans trying to get a glimpse of the famous couple. Barricades were set up, and policemen on horseback kept the crowds at bay. Sterne recalled having to wait until the Burtons left the theater before anyone else in the cast or crew could venture out.