Furious Love (15 page)

Despite her disappointment, Bloom saw that Burton was brilliant in the role of Jimmy Porter—born to it, in fact.

Which may have been one reason for his incessant womanizing, until he met Elizabeth.

They met for the fourth time in January 1965 to appear together in the screen adaptation of John Le Carré's first best-selling novel,
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, directed by the once blacklisted Martin Ritt. Filmed at the Shepperton Studios in London and on location in Dublin, it wasn't a happy experience. In Bloom's view, Burton was again transformed. By 1965, he was world-famous, at the top of his game, the highest-paid actor in the profession, and very much married to “one of the most beautiful women in the world.” But she felt that he had not fulfilled his earlier promise of greatness, and she
told gossip columnist Sheilah Graham that Burton “hadn't changed at all, except physically. He was still drinking, still boasting, he was still late, still reciting the same poems and telling the same stories as when he was twenty-three…it was obvious that he was going to be a huge star, which is not the same as being a great actor. He has confused them.” Her opinion, however, would change after seeing his performance as the raincoated, world-weary Alec Leamas in
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
—one she would call “brilliant.”

After a lunch with Martin Ritt and Claire Bloom in London, Burton confided in the leather-bound diary he had begun keeping that year that Claire was “nervous, but all right.” The real problem would come not from Bloom but from Elizabeth Taylor's jealousy. “Burton was in the ring with both of them and it was raw-knuckled stuff,” wrote Bragg. Bloom's character's name was even changed from “Liz” to “Nan” to avoid an unnecessary evocation of Burton's famous wife. Early on, when the idea of having Elizabeth play Claire's role came up, it was decided that she was just too grand a star to convincingly play a librarian—she would have thrown the whole production off-kilter.

“Taylor was extremely upset by my reappearance in Richard's life,” Bloom observed. “Subsequently, she was always on hand during our scenes together. Her commanding if unmusical call for ‘Richard!' sent him scurrying to her side.” Elizabeth took to yelling Richard's name throughout the shoot, and Claire took some delight in imitating that call for attention. She was, Bloom thought, “extremely uncomfortable having me around.” Elizabeth may have feared that the younger actress was still smitten with her one-time lover. Did she trust Burton?

Bloom also observed that Burton's drinking had begun to take its toll. “Like the spirit of the sturdy miner's son I had known and loved, the muscle tone had vanished.” She noticed a tremor in his hand that was only cured by his midday drinks. She thought that his once-prodigious memory for poetry was not quite what it used to be, and he required cue cards to be placed strategically throughout the set.
This last observation, however, was disputed by Frank Delaney, a writer who spent time with the Burtons during the making of
Spy.
He was impressed by Burton's memory for great literature—“not just Shakespeare and the Welsh poets, you'd expect that, but ‘Tintern Abbey,' I remember, reams of it, and Joyce, the opening of
Ulysses
, paragraph after paragraph, word-perfect.”

Delaney also noticed that Burton in particular seemed oppressed by melancholy. Perhaps it was the role of Alec Leamas itself that infected Burton's mood. The character is a disillusioned and joyless pawn in a Machiavellian game of espionage, a character written in stark contrast to the unrealistic glamour of James Bond. Or perhaps the tensions between Claire Bloom and Elizabeth were taking their toll. And there was always the crush of crowds and Richard's realization that no matter how brilliant he was onscreen, Elizabeth was more famous than he. At a pub lunch with Le Carré (David Cornwall's nom de plume), Burton was in a particularly self-pitying mood. He groused to the novelist, “I can't go to a pub anymore. Elizabeth is more famous than the queen. I wish none of it had ever happened.” Le Carré observed: “They were living out their marriage in public. There were shouting matches in restaurants.”

During a break in filming, Burton whisked Taylor off to Wales to reconnect with his roots, which usually lifted his spirits. They checked into the Queens Hotel, and at Cardiff Arms Park, Elizabeth donned the traditional Welsh color by wearing a red bowler. They cheered as the Welsh rugby team trounced England, then joined in a rousing chorus of the Welsh anthem,
“Cwm Rhondda.”
It was a glorious afternoon, until they returned to their hotel, where they were nearly trampled by an overly enthusiastic crowd of fans celebrating the Welsh victory. Graham Jenkins, who accompanied the couple, recalled, “It was without doubt one of the worst experiences of lack of crowd control that I have ever known. The crowd just wouldn't let us get out.” The Burtons were used to mobs, but this was like a repeat of what had met them in Boston or outside the stage door during their
Hamlet
year. They were saved by a legendary Welsh rugby star, the tackler Haydn Mainwaring, who barreled into the hotel kitchen and cleared a path for the Burtons.

In Port Talbot, Burton took special pride in showing off his voluptuous wife, parading her in front of the stalwart Welsh miners who thronged the pubs. One of them reached out and pinched Elizabeth's derrière; she turned around and thwacked him on the jaw, which completely delighted Burton. It was all in good fun. She loved the Welsh people and felt at home among them. For someone as stateless as Elizabeth, this, and being in Puerto Vallarta, was as close as she would come to feeling at home.

As usual, trips to Burton's sisters were accompanied by lavish gifts. Elizabeth had gotten into the habit of sending them armfuls of her cast-off clothes—silk and sequined movie star gowns with labels from shops on Rodeo Drive, which they would wear to the market in Pontrhydyfen and Port Talbot. Burton's sister Hilda Owens recalled, however, that it was often hard on them, and the village itself, when the Burtons came into town unannounced. “It was like a fair here” whenever the Burtons arrived in their Daimler. Aside from the press and the BBC, there were “busloads coming to see them,” she recalled, and “they were so hospitable they would invite many of them in. Even the chauffeur…. Even the press came in. That's how we are in the village, we couldn't keep them out.” Once at home, Burton relished playing hymns on the piano and speaking to his brothers and sisters only in Welsh. His sisters would make the traditional Welsh dishes that Burton so loved, lava bread and gooseberry tart.

The trip so lifted his spirits that Burton even considered resettling in Britain, even if it meant paying the dreaded British taxes. He'd had it with living out of suitcases, traipsing from one hotel to another. But instead, he and Elizabeth flew to Dublin and immediately checked into the penthouse suite of the Gresham Hotel, to resume location shooting for
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Once again, they were thronged by crowds, stirred up in part by the fact that
Cleopatra
was being shown at a theater across the street from the Burtons' hotel (they could see the giant marquee through their window).

It was not a happy time for them. The weather was bleak, the theme and tone and look of the movie Burton was making was grim. Maria Burton came down with the measles. Bad things started to happen. Their faithful, stalwart chauffeur, Gaston Sanz, lost his sixteen-year-old son, killed in a shooting accident. Sanz, who had been with Elizabeth for twelve years, was a decorated war hero of the Free French Commandos, but it was Elizabeth who bolstered him, accompanying him to Paris for the inquest and funeral. (“I wouldn't be here now if it wasn't for her,” he later admitted.) In Paris, $50,000 worth of Elizabeth's jewels were stolen from her hotel room. It got worse. Back in Dublin, Elizabeth was with Sanz when the chauffeur accidentally hit and killed a pedestrian. And then, on March 12, in Los Angeles, her father, Francis Taylor, suffered a stroke at the age of sixty-seven. Elizabeth flew to California and rushed to his bedside, staying a week to comfort her mother before returning to Dublin. Her father survived, though he would never fully recover. Elizabeth always rose to the occasion when disaster struck; it was when she was bored and feeling neglected that tensions arose.

Burton resumed his heavy drinking on the set. “He had a bottle of scotch in his raincoat pocket,” observed John Le Carré, “possibly another in the other pocket.” Once, during a nighttime shoot in a Dublin street, dreary enough to substitute for a Berlin location, Elizabeth suddenly turned up on the set. “It was the biggest free show in Dublin—the fire brigade, the police, crowds,” Le Carré remembered, “but it was under control. When all of a sudden—the white Rolls-Royce appeared with Gaston…and Elizabeth, looking like a million dollars. She drove onto the set! The crowd was out of control and surged up to her.” Burton was upstaged and his concentration broken. He yelled at the crowd, “My God, there's my little girl!” and then scrambled toward the car, insisting that Elizabeth leave the set. She did so, and Burton finished the night's shooting. Still, she had made her
point. “No one makes an entrance like Elizabeth Taylor,” Sammy Davis Jr. once said, and she would prove that time and again.

Elizabeth and Claire met only once during the three months of filming, when the Burtons invited the actress and Le Carré to a dinner at their Gresham Hotel suite. It was a bit of a gunfight between two great raconteurs—Le Carré and Burton—taking turns topping each other's stories. In the middle of dinner, Elizabeth rose from the table and went to her room. Shortly thereafter, her voice could be heard through an intercom, making loud and frequent summonses for Richard to come to bed. She finally appeared, furious at being ignored, and a shouting match ensued.

It wasn't the only time guests were treated to the sight of the Burtons in full battle armor. Earlier on, Le Carré had been summoned to the Burtons' penthouse suite at an early hour because Elizabeth wanted to meet the author of the popular spy novel. He arrived to find Burton alone in a vast sitting room, a pile of books by his chair. As he entered the room, he heard the intercom crackling with Elizabeth's voice.

“Richard?”

“Yes, darling?”

“Who's all here?”

“The writer.”

Burton disappeared into the bedroom to fetch Elizabeth and “they had a mother and a father of a row,” Le Carré recalled. “Sounds of slapping. All of that. And all coming through on this intercom! Eventually she arrived in this sort of fluffy wraparound dressing gown you send away for, barefooted, rather broad-arsed, but extremely cuddly, extraordinarily attractive—those beautiful eyes, far more beautiful off-screen than on. And she gave me one of those little-girl handshakes.”

As far as Le Carré was concerned, some of the wind had gone out of Richard Burton's sails. “I had the impression that it wasn't much fun anymore—it had been fun—fighting and fucking his way up,
but now it just wasn't anymore.” Burton had been Ritt's choice for Alec Leamas all along, but Le Carré had hoped that James Mason or Trevor Howard might fit the bill, because, in his view, they looked more world-weary. But when Le Carré saw Burton a few months later on the beach at Scheveningen in Holland, he was stunned to see how “deteriorated” Burton looked. The case can be made that Burton's dissipated appearance reflected how much he had taken on the role of the beaten-down Alec Leamas. Intended or not, it served him well. And it would serve him even better for his next role, arguably his greatest: the henpecked, eternally disappointed George in Edward Albee's
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

In March, near the end of filming, Elizabeth was back in the hospital. Her delicate health and frequent injuries often brought them closer together. He loved taking care of her, being depended upon, and she luxuriated in his attentions. She was grateful, in fact, knowing how much the sickroom terrified Richard. He wrote in his leather-bound journal, his notebooks, “nervous all day worrying about her,” and confided how much he wanted to have a child with Elizabeth. A spinal injury that required the fusing of two discs when she was first married to Mike Todd, and complications with her earlier pregnancies, made it inadvisable for her to bear another child, but they apparently hoped another surgery would make a full-term pregnancy possible.

Filming finally behind them, they took their leave of the chronic tensions of the shoot and decamped to the Riviera with their four children. Away from the public and the rigors of filmmaking, it was a blissful time for all of them, as Burton recorded in his notebooks: “Went tramping with Michael, Christopher, Liza, after having watched them at the riding school. Liza and Mike splendid but Christopher started to show panic, and with my usual hatred of watching others humiliated, I left with Maria for a stroll to the river.” Elizabeth joined Richard and Maria outside the riding school, not wanting to make Christopher self-conscious. Richard seemed to find genuine solace and pleasure in the company of the children, playing board games for
hours, going on long walks. He was delighted to have adopted Maria, to have given her his name, and he felt a special bond with both Maria and Liza. For once, he didn't have to be the brilliant raconteur, the endless entertainer, dazzling with his erudition and wit. He could be himself. Richard, the former rugby player, was equally at home roughhousing with the children and acting out scenes from Shakespearean plays, which they loved.