Furious Love (13 page)

Some weeks into the run, Hamlet invited Polonius to lunch. Cronyn and his wife, the acclaimed actress Jessica Tandy, joined the Burtons for a meal between the matinee and evening performances. Leaving
the theater alley and turning onto West 45th, they had to run a gauntlet of over two thousand people waiting to see the Burtons. When they appeared, “a great roar” went up, as Cronyn recalled. Traffic came to a complete stop, and police on horseback had to open a passage for the two couples, just to cross the alley and enter a waiting limousine. Hands snatched at them, as people in the crowd cheered and waved autograph books in the air. Some even jeered. “Liz is a bad, bad girl!” someone called out. Cronyn felt that if they had stopped to sign one autograph, they would have been trampled to death by the crowd. It was as bad as anything the Beatles had to endure when they arrived in New York for the first time, to tape
The Ed Sullivan Show
. But it didn't end there. Once in the limousine, with Elizabeth and Richard tucked safely into the backseat, Cronyn saw that a couple of teenage fans had thrown themselves onto the roof of the car and were hanging upside down, peering into the limousine's windows. With fans hanging off the roof, the limousine pulled out into the street and slowly made its way through the mob. “It was the only time in my life,” Cronyn recalled, “that I remember being frightened by a crowd.” As the limousine picked up speed, Elizabeth sweetly smiled and waved to the crowd like royalty—all the while silently mouthing the words “Fuck you—and you—and you, dear!” She'd simply had it—it was worse than Rome—and her usual patience had been tried beyond bearing. “There came a point,” Cronyn recalled, “when ‘Dickenliz' would have sold their souls for a couple of days of peace, quiet, and solitude.”

The production was widely praised by reviewers, though Walter Kerr groused in the
New York Herald Tribune
, “Mr. Burton is without feeling…” and
Time
magazine faulted Burton for being “more heroic than tragic.” But elsewhere, Burton's energy, irony, and mastery of the stage were praised. “Burton…leaps to action with a tigerish snarl,” wrote
Life
magazine's reviewer. “I do not recall a Hamlet of such tempestuous manliness…full of pride and wit and mettle,” wrote Howard Taubman in the
New York Times.
And the
New York Post
's
theater critic, Richard Watts, praised Burton as “a very fine Hamlet, indeed. His Prince of Denmark is forceful, direct, unpretentiously eloquent, more thoughtfully introspective than darkly melancholy, with the glint of ironic humor, and decidedly a man of action and feeling.” All words, indeed, that could have been written about Burton himself, in the thirty-ninth year of his life, at the peak of his powers, the world spread out before him like a glittering jewel.

And yet—despite the recognition of Burton's superb performance, he did not get nominated for a Tony Award. Cronyn would win his first and only Tony for Polonius, but Richard was, apparently, still being punished—deserved prizes withheld—for daring to snatch fire from the gods.

 

During one matinee performance, something unsettling happened. Sterne remembered, “We could tell something was wrong because Burton wasn't really concentrating on the words. He got into the third scene, and he left the stage. The curtain came down, and [the producer] Alexander Cohen was there for that performance. He came out and made an announcement that Richard was indisposed and couldn't go on, and that they were sending on his understudy, Robert Burr. Anybody who wanted a refund, he would gladly give it to them.” Burton would later blame it on arthritis, made worse by the attack he suffered at the hands of thugs in Paddington Station while filming
The V.I.P.s
.

In an interview the following year, Burton recalled, “I was tearing along, waving my arms and ripping out the lines when the arthritis struck me. I stopped absolutely rigid in mid-flight, one arm raised above my head. You can't imagine the pain…I shuffled off stage sideways like an old man.” He also blamed “the weak Jenkins bones,” but after being tended to by a doctor Elizabeth found for him, he forgot about the incident. He didn't know then that his affliction—little helped by his high intake of alcohol—would return to bedevil him.

And then, one night, during a performance, a man in the audience stood up and booed Richard Burton. He had never been booed before, and it shook him to the core. He reportedly stopped the play, stepped out of character, and announced to the audience, “We have been playing this production in public for over eighty performances. Some have liked it, some have not. But I can assure you, we have never before been booed!” After the performance ended and Richard returned to their suite in the Regency, he vented his anger on Elizabeth, who was coolly watching television. In his fury, Burton kicked in the television screen, slicing his toe to the bone. It set off an enormous row between the newly married couple—not the first, and decidedly not the last.

Sterne was present on one of those occasions, when he had dropped by their hotel to interview Burton for a book he was writing about the production. “I had been asking him to do it ever since the opening of the show. He always said yes. He promised he would do it, but he couldn't come up with a time. Finally, the last week, he told me to come up to the Regency Hotel where they were staying. I arrived there with my tape recorder. Richard and Elizabeth were having the most tremendous row you could imagine; they were yelling and screaming at each other. Their lawyer was there, Aaron Frosch and his secretary, and Bob Wilson. Finally, he said, ‘Well, look, we're going to have to go off into another room here if we're going to do this interview.'”

When the interview was half-over, Bob Wilson stuck his head in the door and said, “Richard, we've got to leave; we've got to get to the theater. It's almost time to do the show.” So they finished the interview in the back of a limousine on their way to the theater.

“As we were pulling around 46th Street,” Sterne recalled, “these small street children—three or four little boys, rather ragamuffin and dirty—ran up to the car window. One of them held up a nickel and I said, ‘Hey, Rich.'” Burton became morose and told the boy, “I don't have any money; I never carry any money.” In that moment, Burton looked into the face of his past—the kind of boy he had once been,
rough and dirty and scrambling for money. What had happened to that boy, Rich Jenkins, now that he had become Richard Burton, the most famous actor in the world?

By the end of his long run in
Hamlet
, Burton had apparently grown bored with the role. He'd try out different interpretations—not just reciting a speech in German but playing Hamlet as a homosexual one night, or substituting lines from Christopher Marlowe to entertain himself and to see if anyone noticed. As Melvyn Bragg observed, “It was always hard for him to sustain an interest once he had cracked a problem. He went out to conquer, did so, and was then often indifferent. Elizabeth and money and writing—they were the infinitely interesting matters.” So when Philip Burton confessed that his American Music and Dramatic Academy was facing a financial setback, Burton agreed to give a special performance to raise money for the school. But not of
Hamlet
—this would be a poetry reading, and Elizabeth Taylor would join in, making her theatrical debut alongside him.

 

It was an extraordinary event, and the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre glittered with boldfaced names—Mayor Lindsay, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Montgomery Clift, Carol Channing. Elizabeth had made an effort to bring Burton's Welsh friend and mentor Emlyn Williams back into the fold, and he, too, was there. Nervous about appearing live onstage, Elizabeth had asked Philip to coach her through a handful of canonical poems by Robert Frost and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as her favorite poem, Thomas Hardy's “The Ruined Maid.” Burton answered her with Andrew Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress” and D. H. Lawrence's “The Snake.” They traded lines in English and Welsh. Elizabeth dazzled in a Grecian gown and diamonds, and her readings were convincing enough that one wag in the audience quipped, “If she doesn't get bad pretty soon, people are going to start leaving.” In act two, appearing in another splendid gown, Elizabeth muffed the first line of the Twenty-third Psalm, then blurted out, “Sorry. Let me begin
again. I sure screwed that one up.” She knew they were gunning for her. But when the evening ended, the couple were rewarded with a standing ovation. She had done it. She had entered Burton's world and had held her own. They could be equals now. Within a week of the event, Richard and Elizabeth received more than half a millon dollars' worth of offers to give poetry readings. Poetry!

Afterward, Elizabeth and Richard got magnificently drunk and retired to their suite at the Regency, where they reverted to their favorite pastimes, fighting and having sex. Or having sex and fighting.

Soon after, in the middle of an argument, Eddie Fisher turned up. He later described, with some bitterness, what he saw there: “Her makeup smeared, her voice loud and shrill, Elizabeth was furious about something, and I thought, I was married to that woman, that wild thing. Burton was trying to soothe her and as I watched him walk around her suite, apologizing, straightening up, retrieving things she had dropped, I saw myself…. He was doing the same things I had done, the same things Mike [Todd] had done. The battle was over and they both got what they wanted. Burton was a superstar. And Elizabeth had someone else to pick up after her.”

Two years later, when Sterne saw the Burtons in
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, he “was reminded of that time up in the hotel room when they were having their row. It seemed like the film was a replay of what I had seen over in the hotel.” And yet, Sterne believed, “I had this feeling that they really, deeply loved each other.”

I
f part of Richard's job description was to pick up after Elizabeth, it was worth it, at least in the passionate weeks and months and early years of their marriage. Their life together was shaping into one lived in constant travel, the fate of “professional itinerants”—in Burton's phrase—spent in five-star hotels, fawned over by their own expanding entourage and by hoteliers, wine stewards, and porters. For Elizabeth, it was only her due: a continuation of the life she had lived since the age of ten, fussed over by MGM publicists, hairdressers, makeup people, and various handlers. She knew no other way to be. Hotel security also afforded them a measure of protection from the crowds of fans (and not all fans) that still dogged their every move.

In
Vogue
magazine, Burton recalled what it was like to travel with Elizabeth (“Travelling with Elizabeth, by Her Husband Who Loves
Her in Spite of It”). He opens and closes his article with the mock
cri de coeur,
“Gawd 'elp me!”

Burton goes on to describe how he was born to the class of those who “watched the train go by and lusted for London…I finally caught that train and never went back and never will.” Had he remained that “original boy,” he imagines that he'd be one of the baggage handlers that Elizabeth might have honored with a tip or a pat on the head. (“Let's face it,” he writes. “She wouldn't have tipped me. She would have arranged for one of her minions to do so.”) Instead, he has the privilege of sharing, with Elizabeth, the spoils of the world, even if it means being “doomed nomads,” unable to stay in any one place for more than three months at a time, shuttling among New York, London, Paris, Rome, San Francisco, Puerto Vallarta, Gstaad, Ireland, and that “rough country of my heart, Wales…”

The advantages of constant travel? The service (“porters and stewards and even stewardesses reward her with enormous over-attention and therefore I get a little on the side”). And the food! “We separate countries into foods,” Burton writes, in a comic discourse on how the national diet of various countries reflects the physiognomy of their
citizens. At night, alone at last in their hotel bedroom—the Lancaster, the Dorchester, the Regency—they dream of the cuisines in countries left behind: hamburgers and egg-topped corned-beef hash from American delicatessens, dreamed of in Paris; or, in New York, memories of that Swiss bistro or Italian trattoria with “a turbulent red wine and salami and fava and a cheese that crumbles in the hand falling down its own face like a landslide.” He writes,

The drawbacks? Besides waiting eternally for Elizabeth to show up at the last minute, they are, nearly three years past
Le Scandale
, still stalked by paparazzi and hordes of fans. Richard recalls when a shoe was stolen off of Elizabeth's foot at an airport (in Puerto Vallarta), and another time when a photographer punched Elizabeth in the stomach. “How would you like to pass your small daughter,” he writes, “over the heads of the madding crowd to a friend, all of us shouting in a language we didn't know?”

By now, Elizabeth was essentially stateless, a citizen of the world, who lived almost entirely in hotels; she had even considered renouncing her American citizenship after her rough treatment following the
scandal. She had left her childhood home at the age of nine, had lived in Los Angeles, virtually residing at MGM until her first marriage, but you can't put MGM on a passport. She owned a chalet in Gstaad and a villa in Puerto Vallarta, but while in the States or in England, she lived in hotels (mostly the Regency and the Dorchester). Not surprisingly, she was drawn to Burton's deep connection to Wales and to his large, sprawling family. For Burton, the life of the world traveler was thrilling, but also exhausting. He, too, would soon miss the sense of belonging to a place, a permanent home.

Another obstacle to their peace of mind was Burton's attention to their box-office rankings. Burton was well aware that Elizabeth still outdrew him and outearned him, and as any proud Welshman would, he dedicated himself to balancing the equation. It was beginning to happen. When the reviews came out for
The Night of the Iguana
in June of 1964, Burton's performance as the louche Reverend Shannon was generally lauded, making him “the new Mr. Box Office.” Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the mixed reviews of
Cleopatra
and The
V.I.P.s
, and the two years she spent away from the camera, Elizabeth Taylor dropped from first place to seventh in box-office ratings. She didn't care much. She was tired of being a movie star and was increasingly interested in just being with Richard. Let her coast for a while—she'd earned it.

Elizabeth's surprisingly good performance reciting poetry onstage with Burton had been a glorious welcome home from the country she had come close to renouncing. As early as May of 1964, Burton was planning a stage production of Christopher Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus
in Oxford, with Elizabeth to make a brief appearance as Helen of Troy. But, finally, Elizabeth knew how fickle movie audiences could be: it was time to make another film, in America.

In 1964, her image was changing and hardening into a new incarnation: no longer the pampered ingénue or the world-conquering beauty, she was now the vixen, the vamp, the sexually dangerous woman of the world, the ultimate femme fatale. The role she'd hated, the good-time
girl Gloria Wandrous in
BUtterfield 8,
had been a harbinger of things to come.

The Burtons plowed through legions of scripts and considered a number of projects: Elizabeth as Anne Boleyn and Richard as Henry VIII in Maxwell Anderson's
Anne of the Thousand Days
(not to be, for Elizabeth); a film adaptation of
This Property Is Condemned
by Elizabeth's favorite playwright, Tennessee Williams; and, among other possible productions, Carson McCullers's novella
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, which she planned to star in with her dear, damaged friend, Montgomery Clift. Elizabeth even contemplated a Broadway run with Clift in
The Owl and the Pussycat.
She would, of course, play the prostitute.

Instead, they settled on making a picture titled
The Flight of the Sandpiper
for MGM-Filmways Studio, based on a story by the highly successful producer Martin Ransohoff, with a screenplay by Michael Wilson and the formerly blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. (The film would be released as
The Sandpiper.
) Ransohoff had conceived of the story as a vehicle for Kim Novak, for whom he created the lead role of a free-spirited artist living in Big Sur. At the time, Novak was known in Hollywood for her bohemian ways and love of painting. She was also living in Big Sur, but when the relationship she'd had with Ransohoff soured, he offered the role to Elizabeth.

As usual, the Burtons made a shrewd bargain: Elizabeth received her $1 million salary, Richard was offered $500,000, and the couple's production company would earn 20 percent of the gross, which would net them additional millions of dollars. Burton hated the script but reportedly said, “For the money, we will dance.”

Though
The V.I.P.s
had inspired a certain degree of critical scoffing, it had begun to enrich Burton at a level he had only dreamed of. With his wealth increasing exponentially, his brilliant reviews in New York for the most successful run of
Hamlet
in theater history—136 performances—Burton now set his cap for directing. He planned, among other films, to direct Elizabeth in a forthcoming production
of
Macbeth
, and he'd hoped to make his directorial debut on
The Sandpiper
, but in the end—after turning down William Wyler—Elizabeth asked for and got Vincente Minnelli, who had directed her years earlier at MGM in
Father of the Bride
and
Father's Little Dividend
. Now she would be back at her former studio, but not as chattel, but as a free agent loaned to the studio by the Burtons' production company. Burton already planned to co-direct a stage production of
Doctor Faustus
as a kind of favor to his early Oxford mentor, Sir Nevill Coghill, who presided over the Oxford University Drama Society and who had given Burton his first Shakespearean role. (Coghill had deemed Burton one of only two “geniuses” he'd had the privilege to teach; the other was poet W. H. Auden.)

 

The Sandpiper
was the perfect vehicle for the juggernaut that was now Burton-Taylor. One of the movie's tag lines was: “From the Beginning, They Knew It Was Wrong. Nothing Could Keep Them Apart.” Whether it was pure exploitation of
Le Scandale
or Elizabeth's canny understanding of what the public wanted—or both—
The Sandpiper
capitalized on the now-married lovers' scandalous history, telling the tale of an adulterous headmaster (the Reverend Dr. Edward Hewitt, played by Burton), who falls madly in love with a beautiful bohemian artist named Laura Reynolds (Taylor). Her nine-year-old illegitimate son was played by Morgan Mason, the son of actor James Mason and his wife, Pamela. In a curious footnote, Sammy Davis Jr. was under consideration to appear as “Cos,” a “beatnik artist” and former lover of Laura's. Deciding, no doubt, that a mixed-race love affair was too much even for Elizabeth Taylor in 1964, the part went to a sinewy, rough-hewn Charles Bronson. Eva Marie Saint is poignant (and soignée) as Claire, Hewitt's abandoned wife; in her respectable, blonde suitability, she might as well have been a stand-in for Sybil Burton. Burton played, yet again, a tortured man torn between duty and passion: his duty to his wife and children and to his calling as the headmster of an Episcopal school, and his passion
for Laura/Elizabeth. It was the second, but not the last time, he would portray a defrocked man of the cloth.

Also featured prominently in the film is a nude sculpture of Elizabeth, carved out of a 2,200-pound redwood log by a sculptor named Edmund Kara. In the movie, it's the work of the bohemian sculptor played by Bronson, and it's the flashpoint for Dr. Hewitt's (Burton's) jealousy and passion. In real life, it was the closest the moviegoing public would ever get to seeing Elizabeth onscreen in glorious nudity, beyond the generous glimpses of thigh and cleavage in her bathing scene in
Cleopatra
and a nanosecond of Elizabeth's partial nudity as her character, Laura, poses for the sculpture in
The Sandpiper.
Though Elizabeth crashed through the puritanical strictures of her day, becoming a vanguard of the sexual revolution in spite of herself, she was still a product of MGM's morals code, at least onscreen. In 1965, other, younger actresses were beginning to bare their breasts on camera in mainstream films, but Edmund Kara's rather demure nude sculpture would have to do, mostly, for Elizabeth. The sculpture serves the additional purpose of being fondled, disrobed, manhandled, and gawked at by the various ex-and would-be lovers that enter her seaside abode.

Shot in the spectacularly beautiful Carmel Highlands near Big Sur, MGM spent $35,000 constructing Laura's glass-and-driftwood house overlooking the sea, a perfect setting to show off nature's—and Elizabeth's—spectacular scenery. (The entire production costs to MGM were reported at $5 million.) Mr. and Mrs. Burton (as she now preferred to be called) arrived in Carmel Heights with their usual large entourage—their four children (Michael, Christopher, Liza, and Maria), Burton's trusted dresser, Bob Wilson, and his wife, a cook, and a staff of lawyers and secretaries.

The film writer Peter Bart visited the location and noticed that, unlike the frenzy their appearances created in Puerto Vallarta, Toronto, New York, and Boston, their impact on Carmel and Big Sur was rather negligible. Perhaps it was because the Monterey Jazz Festival
was in full swing at the time, absorbing the attentions of a decidedly more mellow citizenry. The Burtons rented “one of the biggest homes in the area,” wrote Bart, and were able to visit the local shops, bars, and restaurants without incident.

On October 5, the
Hollywood Reporter
noted that MGM-Filmways prepared to leave for six weeks, to shoot the interiors for
The Sandpiper
in Paris. Two months later, they reported that the move overseas was made to protect Richard Burton's growing fortune, as he “would have ended with less money than he began with if all of the film were made in its natural locale.” So the Burtons left on the
Queen Elizabeth
and checked into the Lancaster Hotel in Paris; they had by now truly become tax exiles, unable to stay in America or Britain for more than a few months at a time without becoming liable for whopping tax bills. Burton was taxed at the highest rate in Britain, but he could keep his British passport and considerably reduce his taxes as a “nonresident” if he didn't stay in Britain more than ninety days a year. Taylor, with dual citizenship in England and America, had similar tax advantages if she kept moving.