Furious Love (14 page)

Kara's massive sculpture, incidentally, was shipped to Paris in a temperature-controlled stateroom on the
Queen Mary
and insured for $100,000 with Lloyds of London. It was treated like a religious icon, made the subject of a film short and “a special unveiling” for the Parisian press corps when it arrived safely in France.

When the film opened in July of 1965, it was not well received. The
New Yorker
called it “soggy, woolly, maundering, bumbling” and “a very silly movie”
Life
magazine sneered—hooted—at the Burtons' second foray into showcasing their guilty passion onscreen. Some audiences reportedly laughed when Burton's tortured headmaster utters the words, “I've lost all my sense of sin.” The
Saturday Review
derided “the mess of windy platitudes and stale stereotypes.” Trumbo, years later, would complain that his “nice, taut little drama” was derailed by the opulence of the Burtons (“twenty-two smashing costume changes” for Elizabeth and “an $85,000 bungalow”). But the beautifully photo
graphed, lushly produced film does have its guilty pleasures, not least of which are Richard's and Elizabeth's presence onscreen, made more exciting by the whiff of scandal that still clung to them.

The film's main problem, despite its gorgeous scenery, high production values, and good performances by the entire cast, is a certain lack of authenticity. There was already a small but burgeoning counterculture in Big Sur, and
The Sandpiper
tried to make use of the social phenomenon that was stirring in America—the subculture of beatniks, hippies, free-love advocates, jazz enthusiasts, pagans, naturalists, and all-around free-thinkers that would take center stage as the decade marched on. The problem with the movie, under Minnelli's too-tasteful direction, is that he doesn't quite get it right. On paper, the role of Laura Reynolds, an artist who defies social proprieties by refusing to marry her son's father and by having affairs as she pleases, should have suited Elizabeth perfectly. But she seems miscast as an iconoclastic, proto-feminist artist: she is both too glamorous, too diva-like, and too angry, and her artist's “shack” is far too
Architectural Digest
for a struggling painter (one that “any poor soul could probably buy for forty or fifty thousand dollars” in 1965 currency, as one reviewer wrote). By 1965, Elizabeth Taylor was just too famous to disappear into another character, and her lush, glossy beauty and increasingly voluptuous figure made her unsuited to play the newly emerging American woman who came into being in the “swinging 1960s”—sexually adventurous, guilt-free, sometimes androgynous, and full of a kind of joyful innocence—a spirit then embodied by younger actresses such as Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jane Fonda. Elizabeth may have helped usher in that seismic shift in the sexual landscape, but by the age of thirty-two, with five marriages, four children, thirty-one films, and world infamy behind her, she simply had too much history to play a “new woman.” She was a queen, and there would be few queenly roles for women in the next three decades.

Burton fared much better. Unhappy with the screenplay, he tin
kered with lines, but it's hard to know how much he contributed to the final script. However, when Dr. Hewitt confesses, “It was my betrayal of myself that began years ago,” the line carries a remembrance of Marc Antony's “I from myself—the ultimate betrayal.” What Richard, perhaps, had not counted on was the psychic toll of reliving, onscreen, his abandonment of Sybil. He was awash with guilt—for turning his back on Sybil and his two girls, especially Jessica, the one who most needed him, and before that, for turning his back on his true father, and therefore the core of his Welsh identity. By now he was sending thousands of pounds to his brothers and sisters in Port Talbot and Pontrhydyfen, supporting their families with annual checks and Christmas bounty, as a kind of devotion, or reparation. He was rescuing his brothers from a life in the mines, but he was also assuaging his conscience for having been the one who had escaped. He had given work to his brother Graham as his movie stand-in; he had hired his worshipped elder brother Ifor as a kind of caretaker of his home in Céligny, which he retained after his divorce from Sybil. He would even take Brook Williams, the son of his early mentor, Emlyn Williams, into his entourage, but it wasn't enough. And now to relive that guilt onscreen was a further torment, one that sex and money and fame and alcohol could assuage, up to a point.

As for Elizabeth's psychic burden, she does have one speech in
The Sandpiper
that is revelatory, and she delivers it from the heart. When she tries to explain to Hewitt the source of her distrust of men, she confesses, “men have been staring at me and rubbing up against me since I was twelve…. I have been
had
by men,” she says, “but not loved.” No wonder she clung to Burton, as she had to Mike Todd, believing that of all the men she had known, only these two loved her in the way she wanted to be loved.

Despite the dismissive reviews (and some sniping about Elizabeth's exposed cleavage and her weight, which fluctuated throughout the film),
The Sandpiper
was enormously profitable, earning $14 million and beating out MGM's blockbuster for the year,
The Unsinkable
Molly Brown
, starring Elizabeth's former “rival” Debbie Reynolds and proving that sex trumps effervescence, at least at the box office. The public couldn't stop reliving the drama of the couple's world-shaking adultery.

While in Paris, the Burtons occupied two floors at the Lancaster, making room for their gypsy children—the wild Wilding boys, Michael and Christopher; Liza Todd; and four-year-old Maria Burton, still enduring hip operations. The tutor who had accompanied them in Puerto Vallarta, Paul Neshamkin, was also in residence, and he expressed concern that the children were being overlooked by their parents, relegated to the care of “an elderly governess.” When they did look in on the children, it was more like “a royal visit.” Burton felt that the boys would be better off in a boarding school than traipsing around the globe with their itinerant parents, but Elizabeth wanted her family around her.

According to Gianni Bozzacchi, who would become the Burtons' friend and in-house photographer throughout the next decade, Elizabeth wanted Burton to bring Jessica into their household, where she could be looked after by a hired nurse. After all, they were already surrounded by an entourage that now included Dick Hanley and his companion, John Lee; Burton's dresser, Bob Wilson, and his wife; Elizabeth's makeup man, Ron Berkeley; a bodyguard and ex-boxer named Bobby LaSalle; Gaston, the French chauffeur; and, of course, the tutor, the governess, and a live-in nurse for Maria. The Burtons could afford it. They set up two companies, which brought in an estimated $50 million a year in royalties and salaries—equivalent to approximately $350 million in today's dollars.

But Burton refused to let Elizabeth bring Jessica out of the institution on Long Island, where she was being kept. For one thing, Sybil would not have allowed it. Jessica's existence remained, possibly, the one hold she still had on Richard, Bozzacchi thought, and that may have been a reason why Sybil would not give her up. It may have been that Jessica was unable to live outside of an institution, but Elizabeth,
tough and shrewd as she was, always had a soft spot for wounded things. And she knew that Burton suffered over Jessica's fate and blamed himself for his inability to care for her, except financially.

So Burton acted, made money, brooded, drank, and suffered bouts of depression. “The Black Dog—that's very Welsh,” said the English actor Michael York, who is half-Welsh himself, recalling Burton when he knew him in the mid-1960s. (They would meet on the set of Franco Zeffirelli's
The Taming of the Shrew
in February 1966.) “He was of a generation of actors, like Peter O'Toole, who were famous for self-destruction—it was part of their aura. They seemed to be hanging by a thread.” Burton used the Welsh word
hiraeth
, which he translated as “a longing for unnamable things,” to describe his black moods. Bragg described it as “a melancholy that was impenetrable…the Celtic gloom of many a grounded drunken poet,” like Burton's hero, Dylan Thomas. Some of Burton's friends, Bragg suggests, suspected “a chemical imbalance,” noting that Burton, besides hemophilia, also suffered from mild epilepsy. So the alcohol was, among other things, a form of self-medication that only deepened his depression.

Perhaps as an effort to cheer him up, Elizabeth bought Burton thirty-seven tailored suits in Paris. It gave her pleasure to bestow gifts upon him.

In January 1965, the couple moved back to London and took up residence at their favorite hotel, the Dorchester on Park Lane. They were greeted by Marjorie Lee, the hotel's concierge, who became indispensable to the Burtons. She made the trains run on time, so to speak, while they were in London, getting them reservations at restaurants, helping to bring relatives in from Wales, making sure they had everything they wanted in their suites. She also made sure there were rooms available to the Burtons whenever they needed them, even if it meant kicking out royalty to accommodate the famous couple.

Burton was to begin filming
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
with his former costar and inamorata Claire Bloom, a situation Elizabeth was not at all happy about. She knew of their one-time affair; she
must have known that he had been in love with the actress, and that this was the only relationship, pre-Elizabeth, that had threatened his marriage to Sybil.

Like Elizabeth, Claire Bloom is a dark-haired beauty and a fine actress, but unlike Elizabeth, she made her reputation on the London stage. She first met Burton in 1949 at the audition for
The Lady's Not for Burning
, which was conducted by John Gielgud on the stage of the Globe Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue in the heart of London's West End. A young Burton auditioned with her, and he made a powerful impression just by sitting down. Bloom remembered her first sight of him forty-six years later, when she wrote her 1995 memoir,
Leaving a Doll's House
: “…even today I can remember the way he sat in his chair,” she recalled, “his rather pockmarked skin, his green eyes. He was an extraordinarily beautiful man.” And, at twenty-three, a soon-to-be-married one. The play went on an eleven-week tour, and the two actors knew they were smitten, even after Burton's brand-new marriage to Sybil, who occasionally showed up on the tour. “Long after the curtain had come down,” Bloom wrote,

Throughout the run of the play, they continued their chaste affair, and Burton stayed faithful to Sybil. A few years later, at the Old Vic on Waterloo Road, Bloom appeared in four Shakespearean productions with Burton, beginning with playing Ophelia to Burton's Hamlet (he also played Philip the Bastard, Sir Toby Belch, Henry IV, Caliban, Othello, and Iago in a series of roles that by the age of twenty-seven
established him as the preeminent actor of his generation). This time, their old feelings overwhelmed them, and they began their affair.

By then, Richard had had his first stint in Hollywood and had returned with the reputation of a ladies' man. They would meet in her mother's home, with Burton sneaking in at night and leaving before dawn, or they would sometimes make love in their dressing rooms at the Old Vic between the matinee and evening performances. When Burton and Sybil left again for Hollywood, where Burton was to film
My Cousin Rachel
with Olivia de Havilland, they exchanged love letters, with Burton writing twice a day on some occasions. In one letter, he wrote, “I haven't looked at another woman. This has never happened to me before. You have changed me so radically. I have almost grown up.” Bloom eventually burned most of his letters on the eve of her marriage to the actor Rod Steiger, another brilliant, rough-hewn actor given, like Burton, to bouts of depression.

As a lover, “Richard was tender and considerate,” Bloom wrote, and their off-again, on-again romance lasted five years. Eventually, it was clear that Burton would never leave Sybil, and the necessary secrecy became too much for the young actress, still in her twenties, to bear. The affair ended, but Bloom later wrote that Burton was “the only man to whom I have fervently given all of myself. To feel so much pleasure from the body, mind, voice, mere presence of another is a gift I am profoundly grateful to have received.”

However, her feelings would change when she and Burton were again cast opposite each other, this time in Tony Richardson's film adaptation of John Osborne's blistering, kitchen-sink drama
Look Back in Anger
, which ushered in a new kind of theater protesting the genteel drawing-room comedies and dramas that dominated the West End. Burton was cast as the quintessential “angry young man,” Jimmy Porter, and Bloom as his lover Helena. She thought she would resume her affair with Burton, only to walk in on him in the arms of a young Susan Strasberg, with whom he had had a brief affair when they ap
peared together in
Time Remembered
in New York in 1957. That finally ended it, as Bloom wrote that she castigated herself for being drawn in again by the still-married, and still-womanizing, Burton. They parted rather bitterly. (In her own autobiography, titled
Time Remembered
, after the play that launched her stage career, Susan Strasberg remembered hiding in that dressing room bathroom and watching Bloom and Burton embracing, a scene that sent the nineteen-year-old actress back to her hotel, shattered and humiliated.)